#the health national system is in shambles

[ashtonsunshine]

My country is going to shit and I'm scared of the results of the next election. 🙃

[itsrattysworld]

Without Prejudice Mervelee Myers Reveals MISOGNY Of 32 Years Against Children Young People Elderly Whom I Have Worked With In My Capacity As An EYFS Coordinator SENCO And Multigenerational Working Approach Facilitator Carer Mental Health SEND Advocate Turn Activist Based On The Systemic Discrimination Of The Judiciary Of England And Wales Crown Prosecution Service Criminal Justice System Miscarriages Of Justice In Breach Of Equality Act Protected Characteristics How Can The Face Of Windrush 70 Composer Of Brixton Market Be Gag To Cover Up Tokenism Of Sir Mark Rowley Who Dedicated In Honour Of Strong Women Everywhere To A Strong Jamaican Woman MI5 Invitation To Join Is Trick To Harvest Intellectual Property Copyright Images CPPDP For GCHQ SIS To Work In Partnership Counter Terrorism Policing Terror Cells To Target Me Mistake They Made When The 2 Females Visited 9/8/2024 Twitter Posts Is They Were Recorded I Have Seen And Heard Enough To Trust My Instincts By Changing The Narratives In Reporting So The World Is Aware Why Met Police Failed 7 Of 8 Standards The National Protective Security Authority (NPSA) Must Be In Shambles If Anything Like A New Met For London Seb Adjei-Addoh 1st Black Commander Lambeth Southwark Nigel Pearce Does Nothing But Feed Off Hard Work Of Others If They Don't Think Am Credible Witness Check YouTube Trying To Trick Me To Take My Channels l Videoed The Threats

Refer to Good afternoon, Rebecca  Thanks for your prompt response to my enquiry. I am addressing this as the voice for the women who are experiencing discrimination and the fact that as a writer of therapy, I must make the most of MISOGNY that is trending online. The Criminal Justice System is just another of the Legal Authorities not fit for purpose.  I understand how CWJ works and all I am…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Nobody does class solidarity like the rich. In May 2020, Baroness Dido Harding, a Conservative peer and wife of Conservative MP John Penrose, was appointed to lead the UK’s privatised Coronavirus Test and Trace system, a programme later described by doctors as ‘an utter shambles’. Four months later, she was made interim chief of the National Institute for Health Protection, a body designed by management consulting firm McKinsey to replace Public Health England. The National Institute for Health Protection is overseen by a board including executives from the likes of Waitrose, Jaguar and TalkTalk – the latter of which Harding was previously chief executive, overseeing a period in which over 150,000 customers found their personal data stolen in a data breach.

Harding had never been through a standard recruitment process when she was appointed by the government. Nor had Topshop boss Sir Philip Green when he was selected as David Cameron’s efficiency tsar in 2010, or venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft when he was commissioned in 2012 to provide a review of employment law, in which he suggested that workers might like to trade in their rights for business shares. Nor, for that matter, had Matthew Taylor (CBE) of the Taylor Review. Property developer Richard Desmond also faced no such inconvenience in 2020 when he was allegedly able to influence planning decisions by being rich enough to make a £12,000 donation to the Tory party. No amount of incompetence or negligence is a match for solidarity within the upper echelons of power. Money and influence speak louder than science, evidence, compassion or common sense.

Eve Livingston, Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions

[gatheringbones]

["When reporters ask to tour prisons they are often told they have no right of access or that they can see the visitor's room or the shop where inmates make furniture but not the solitary confinement unit. Unlike hospitals, which are inspected by the board of health, schools, which report to departments of education, and airports, which are regulated by the federal government, prison systems answer only to themselves. What happens in the system all too often stays there. "Correctional facilities... are walled off from external monitoring and public scrutiny to a degree inconsistent with the responsibility of public institutions," reported the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons in 2006 after national hearings.

There is a reason that transparency is not a hallmark of prisons, and there is a price to be paid for it.

(...) My reporting often focused on solitary confinement because it was a sort of ground zero. Here, in these tomblike cells, the problem of America's mentally ill could be seen in the most unvarnished, extreme form. Some of the people in these units had broken the law when they were too sick to know the difference. Others had climbed a ladder of petty, illness-driven crimes into prison, racking up so many disorderly conduct charges that they drew hard time for simple drug possession. All had lived in a society in which their mental illness was managed by a system described in a 2002 presidential report as "in shambles." They could not be controlled in the general prison population and hence had ended up in solitary confinement, a place where people screamed day and night, spread feces on the walls, threw bodily fluids at officers, and mutilated themselves in ingenious ways.

America fell back on solitary confinement in the 1990s as a way to control too many idle inmates. More than thirty states built units to house what was often called "the worst of the worst." It was that kind of time— when convicts were one-dimensional evildoers (not my phrase, but apt) who got just what they deserved. The country was on its way to a four-fold increase in its prison population in a twenty-year period. It was an astronomical and ill-advised increase in capacity that, moreover, continued for more than a decade after crime rates began to fall.

Politicians found that instilling fear was an easy sell that got them votes. Prison sentences were lengthened. New offenses against the social order, such as selling drugs near a school, were legislated, which served only to heap on more punishment. Parole as an incentive for inmates to behave was rolled back. Rehabilitation programs were cut.

America now was 2.2 million people in its jails and prisons. Of these, an estimates 330,000 are mentally ill, and evidence is building that this is a conservative figure. Police and mentally ill people tangle every day in unfortunate and sometimes tragic ways. This nation has gone from one bad system to another— from housing people with mental illness in large, impersonal, often abusive institutions called mental hospitals to housing people with mental illness in large, impersonal, often abusive institutions called prisons. The difference is that people who are mentally ill have even fewer rights in prison and often emerge sicker and more damaged than when they went in. The least fortunate die there, some by their own hand. In the hospitals of yesterday, people with mental illness were patients; in the prisons of today, they are inmates. This is a key distinction."]

Crazy In America: The Hidden Tragedy Of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill, by Mary Beth Pfeiffer, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007

[anarchopuppy]

My new neighbors – artists, musicians, shop owners, builders, gallerists, restaurateurs – treated me like family. Our community was diverse in age, but we all had our independent creative pursuits in a place with scant economic opportunity otherwise. Thus, many of us shared the same problem: a lack of access to healthcare. America’s healthcare system has long been in shambles: then and still today, where single-payer care was available, premiums and deductibles were astronomical. Luckily, among our friends were doctors and dentists who valued the work we did as equal to their own. So, we came up with a plan. Drawing on the age-old system of barter, we figured out a way to trade – the art of medicine for the medicine of art.

In October 2010, we launched our first weekend-long festival of street art, live music and health-related events. We called it O+, like the blood type. The general public attended by donation. Licensed health professionals volunteered to staff our on-site pop-up clinic. Over the years, thousands of participating artists, like Lucius, Spiritualized, and locals who played with the B-52’s and David Bowie, have received medical, dental and wellness services worth hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of dollars. Some artists say the care they received even saved them.

“The way you change a system nationally is you do thousands of local things, and eventually the system evolves,” says O+ executive director Joe Concra, whose building I lived in when we first got O+ off the ground, and who volunteered full-time for years until grants and donors made it possible to pay modest salaries to three full-time and seven part-time employees. “Every time I walk into the clinic, I think: ‘Oh yeah, it is possible to build a new system.’ I refuse to believe we can’t. So, we keep doing it.”

O+ may have brought the carnival. Now, it’s far from alone in the revolution: Kingston’s anti-capitalist, anti-establishment healthcare network is just one example of a model that could supplant corporate America. Locals have launched a non-commercial radio station, Radio Kingston WKNY, with widely representative, hyper-local programming that broadcasts via power generators if the grid goes dark. A regional micro-currency called the Hudson Valley Current now exists to, according to co-founder David McCarthy, “create an ecosystem that includes everyone”.

Agricultural initiatives like Farm Hub work toward equitable, resilient food systems. A network of bike trails quietly connects local towns to local farms (for the day when there is no more gas for our cars). And organizations like RiseUp Kingston, Kingston Citizens, Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, and the Kingston Tenants Union facilitate civic engagement, combat displacement, and advocate for policies to address an increasingly dire housing shortage.

From my vantage in the deep south, it looks as though, one mission at a time, Kingston is piecing together the infrastructure for a self-sufficient community – one that wants to survive the possibly impending systemic collapse we nervously joke about over beers at Rough Draft.

[mariacallous]

One part of the reason for these heightened concerns is the fact that Bosnia’s crisis has never been so serious, with its administrative, political, electoral, educational and health systems steadily failing.

The Bosniak- and Croat-dominated Federation has been administered by a caretaker government since 2014, since the ruling Bosniak and Bosnian Croat parties have been unable to agree on how to implement the results of the 2018 elections.

Throughout this period, the other entity, Republika Srpska, has steadily become more autonomous thanks to the autocratic leadership of Dodik’s SNSD.

Torn between the conflicting radical policies of the Bosniak, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb parties, joint institutions were effectively deadlocked a long time before Republika Srpska’s politicians – ruling and opposition alike – abandoned the state presidency, government and parliament in July. They did it in protest against a controversial law banning the denial of genocide, which was imposed by the international overseer of Bosnia’s peace agreement, outgoing High Representative Valentin Inzko, a few days before his final departure.

Another reason for the growing fears is the fact that the West, which has been the enabler, protector and guarantor of the Dayton peace agreement, is also in an unprecedented shambles.

The US and EU’s engagement and influence in the Balkans have been declining for years, a result their growing disinterest in the region, caused by internal problems, as well as mutual disagreements and divisions within and between Washington and EU capitals.

This has damaged hopes of further EU enlargement in the region, a policy that has been considered the key to the stability and long-term prosperity of the Balkans.

A further wave of criticism of the EU was triggered by a recent story published by Reuters news agency, which revealed the bloc’s disagreement over its continued commitment to membership for Balkan states. European Commission officials tried to deny or correct the news agency, but to no avail.

A senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, has confirmed to BIRN that EU officials indeed had problems agreeing on a text of a joint statement on the guarantee of future membership to six countries, which they were drafting for the upcoming Western Balkans Summit on October 6 in Slovenia.

Without the perspective of EU membership and Western oversight, Balkan politicians have halted reforms and slipped towards radical rhetoric, populism, nationalism and corruption, as well as looking more towards Russia, China, Turkey and other powers rather towards than the European bloc.

Aside from the deepening crisis in Bosnia, all the other countries in the region have witnessed growing problems in recent times, from corruption and democratic backsliding in Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia to growing political and ethnic tensions in Kosovo and Montenegro.

Radical Rhetoric in Bosnia Revives Fears of New Conflict

[mainline-remnant]

9/11 and Charging the Cockpit

So here we are at the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Afghanistan is in shambles and ‘they’ want to change our way of life and eliminate our freedoms here in the US. They are not radical Islamic terrorist, though radical Islamic terrorist have been empowered by them. They are globalist biofascist. They have stolen an election, developed a bioweapon, collaborated with the CCP, and are threatening our God-given rights to work to provide for our families and coercing people to take an injection against their expressed desire. What’s next? A continued electronic surveillance, continued coerced injections, oligarchy, and a social credit apartheid.

On 9/11 , a few Americans were brave to the end. They rushed into buildings and rubble to save their fellow citizens and rushed cockpits and plunged planes into the ground to save people that they didn’t even know in the terrorists targets.

The plane of state has been hijacked and it has been weaponized against our citizens. We need our elected leaders to defend us. If they won’t, we need to recall them, protest them, call them the traitors that they are in public… loudly… and use all available forums to give voice to our complaints… flood the system. As the vice tightens and they become more desperate, we may need to follow the ‘Benedict Option’, the ‘Atlas Shrugged Option, and, if it comes to it, the 1776 Option.

This vaccine mandate is a line in the sand. If we want our children and grandchildren to live free in the nation that our ancestors and forebears founded and sacrificed to make better, then we must act. So be decisive, if you are unjabbed or chose to receive the shot, you can uphold the freedom of conscience of your fellow citizens. For the unjabbed, we will need to be compassionate to those who took the shot if the long term health effects are bad (we just don’t have any good scientific research to know what these will be). The first thing to do is pray for our nation and the world to step back from the brink.

[disillusioned41]

It is widely agreed that President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic—his conscious and non-stop lies, his blundering incompetence, and his open disdain for science—has helped lead the U.S. to where it is today: Record-shattering Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths and an economy in shambles.

But placing the blame for the disastrous current state of affairs entirely at the feet of Trump risks letting off the hook a more fundamental culprit, namely the conservative anti-government ideology and "free market"-worship at the core of much of the administration's response to the deadly pandemic.

"Conservative leaders refused to marshal the resources of government to actually combat the spread of the disease. Instead, in keeping with their ideology, they wanted to leave it to individuals and the 'free market.'" —Michael Linden, Groundwork Collaborative

That's the argument advanced in a recent essay for Talking Points Memo by Michael Linden and Sammi Aibinder of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy shop.

Unsatisfied with explanations of the current crisis that posit Trump as the principal cause—a position which suggests that simply removing Trump, as U.S. voters decided to do last month, is the solution—Linden and Aibinder write that "though Donald Trump lost reelection, the ideology and belief system underpinning so many of the debacles of his presidency prevails, and was always doomed to fail the country in the face of a disaster like this one."

"At base, conservative ideology itself was just as responsible for the failure to appropriately and effectively respond to this crisis as Trump's personal failings were," the two argue. "And that ideology will still be present—rife, in fact—in our government long after Trump is gone."

While acknowledging that conservatism is "not homogenous," Linden and Aibinder argue that at the heart of the reactionary ideology is the view that "government itself tends to cause more problems than it solves, and that free markets—unencumbered by government intervention—are always best positioned to allocate resources and improve society."

Adherence to those two positions, according to Linden and Aibinder, is incompatible with an effective response to a pandemic that necessitates coordinated state action to control the spread of the virus, which has now killed more than 273,000 people in the U.S.—the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world.

In contrast with countries like New Zealand and South Korea, where decisive government action helped prevent Covid-19 from running rampant, Linden and Aibinder noted that the U.S. response was plagued by "the conservative belief that government is more often the problem than the solution," which "made it practically inevitable that Republicans would render their own government ineffective."

"Instead of coordinating a national strategy to address the acute shortage of personal protective equipment and vital medical supplies across the country, this administration encouraged state leaders to essentially compete with one another to save their own people," write Linden and Aibinder. "When pressed by state leaders to help solve the PPE shortage, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner replied, 'The free market will solve it.' When asked about the federal government's role in assuring schools are able to resume in-person instruction safely, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos contended that was not her department's job."

The devastating consequences of conservative ideology are also evident in the nation's response, or lack thereof, to the economic crisis that the coronavirus pandemic spawned.

Since Congress in March passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act—a measure whose most successful elements, such as the federal boost to unemployment insurance and direct cash payments, drew loud GOP backlash—Republican lawmakers have actively opposed efforts to provide any additional stimulus even as the economy remains in deep recession, a predictable and totally preventable outcome of inaction.

As Linden and Aibinder write:

By May, the S&P 500 had recovered 30 percent of its losses, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared that additional measures were no longer urgent, despite the fact that the unemployment rate was still almost 15 percent and the economy was still over 20 million jobs in the hole. Months passed, and the stock market continued to recover, while the broader economic recovery stalled. Emergency aid lapsed, job gains have slowed, hunger and precariousness has risen. But so long as the stock market continues to thrive, it is unlikely that conservatives will be moved to address these underlying problems.

Capital primacy not only leads conservatives to disregard real economic challenges, it also leaves them with very few tools to use when they do decide to act. Conservatives tend to rely on tax cuts — especially for the wealthy and corporations—as their primary economic policy lever, and disdain public investments, as well as more direct aid or targeted aid to anyone who is not a "job creator."

Ultimately, Linden and Aibinder argue that while "there is no doubt that as president, Donald Trump stamped his own personal brand of ineptitude on this crisis," the coronavirus pandemic "was the test that conservatism was built to fail."

"A public health crisis that demands a coordinated, powerful public response, leveraging all the power and reach of the federal government, meets an ideology that cannot accept a robust role for the public sector and believes the free market will solve all," the two write. "An incredibly unequal economic crisis driven by a collapse in customers, in which the wealthy are mostly doing fine while everyday people teeter on the brink of generational ruin, meets an ideology that cares only for the prospects of those at the top and sees tax cuts as the only useful economic answer."

In the wake of his victory last month, President-elect Joe Biden promised a more coordinated federal response to the coronavirus crisis and appointed economic advisers who appear willing to buck the conservative deficit dogma embraced—often selectively and hypocritically—by Republicans and Biden's former boss, Barack Obama.

But if Democrats fail to retake control of the Senate by winning the pair of Georgia runoffs set for January 5, Biden's vow to tackle the twin public health and economic crises with bold action could be dramatically hindered by McConnell, who appears hellbent on ensuring that the economic meltdown continues no matter the cost to the increasingly hungry and desperate population.

"So long as the stock market continues to thrive," write Linden and Aibinder, "it is unlikely that conservatives will be moved to address these underlying problems."

[restless-soulz]

Okay, I’ve made a plan to fix the US society.

First- I’m gonna need someone who has or will go to medical school and I will go to law school. I endorse the med student until they reach a new position of power

Second- After they reach it, I will argue with the US government to let me see all of legal documentation to revise things.

Third- I revise the constitution with help from polls around the US by citizens and the rest of the houses and stuff. Then I look at United Nations contract thingy, and bring up idea for global things that should be done. Since it was an American who suggested it, and I already have influence over a lot of political stuff, it looks like I know what I’m doing. And everyone agrees that there still needs to be stuff added.

Fourth- The meeting commences and I lock everyone in the room and propose regulated health care plans for everyone, along with rights for lgbtq+, better legal systems for women and other stuff that my fingers can’t type out cause my brains running too fast.

Fifth- No one wants to look like a dick for trying to back out of this since most of them sound good, but they fight me for changing a lot of things, like who would be in charge of the health care thing? And I pull the med student from step one, one of the best and well known health figure around the world. They are now in charge of that. The other nations try to fight for everything else, but until i see substantial facts and evidence and cases on why they absolutely cannot have that I won’t hear it.

Sixth- I am posting on tumblr and twitter and what ever else the entire time with recordings, informing the masses about what exactly is going on and let them form their own opinions.

Seventh- Politicians across the world are in shambles from people roasting them and their poor decisions and outright bigot opinions on others. They realize they have no other choice than to listen to me and they sign the document.

Eighth- The world is better, but there is still some things that aren’t being carried out like we agreed, and of course global warming and power plants are an issue. I become an activist and find friends with engineering degrees and use my own power to influence them into political positions and start taking down the power plants and using alternative energy sources. It takes a while, but the Earth is finally getting clean again and a lot of problems are solved but new ones are arising.

Ninth- I go back home to relax a bit, still an activist but willing to let the new generations finish what I started.

Ten- the effects of my efforts are numerous. With regulated health care, it cheap, and not at all what it cost before in America. with hospital prices coming down, people are more willing to come in for help, where they can get directed to specialized centers for various problems. costs of living go down as well, the rich are taxed the the poor only get taxed like, 2 bucks minimum since I don’t know how to completely reverse capitalism yet. Schools are better and becomes less rigorous, students learn what they want to learn and get paid for it. Debt levels sink back down, more people are getting taken care of around the world.

This is all I want and this is how I’ll get it.

[deadpresidents]

The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.

But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.

He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.

[napoleoninrags]

From The Atlantic:

There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump. And his spiritual poverty, like an overdrawn checking account that keeps imposing new penalties on a customer already in difficult straits, is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most.

I do not mean that Trump is the least religious among our presidents, though I have no doubt that he is; as the scholar Stephen Knott pointed out, Trump has shown “a complete lack of religious sensibility” unique among American presidents. (Just recently he wished Americans a “Happy Good Friday,” which suggests that he is unaware of the meaning of that day.) Nor do I mean that Trump is the least-moral president we’ve ever had, although again, I am certain that he is. John F. Kennedy was, in theory, a practicing Catholic, but he swam in a pool of barely concealed adultery in the White House. Richard Nixon was a Quaker, but one who attempted to subvert the Constitution. Andrew Johnson showed up pig-drunk to his inauguration. Trump’s manifest and immense moral failures—and the shameless pride he takes in them—make these men seem like amateurs by comparison.

And finally, I do not mean that Trump is the most unstable person ever to occupy the Oval Office, although he is almost certain to win that honor as well. As Peter Wehner has eloquently put it, Trump has an utterly disordered personality. Psychiatrists can’t help but diagnose Trump, even if it’s in defiance of the old Goldwater Rule against such practices. I know mental-health professionals who agree with George Conway and others that Trump is a malignant narcissist.

What I mean instead is that Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival.

Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.

The humorist Alexandra Petri once likened Trump to a goldfish, a purely reactive animal lost in a “pastless, futureless, contextless void.” This is an apt comparison, with one major flaw: Goldfish are not malevolent, and do not corrode the will and decency of those who gaze on them.

In his daily coronavirus briefings, Trump lumbers to the podium and pulls us into his world: detached from reality, unable to feel any emotions but anger and paranoia. Each time we watch, Trump’s spiritual poverty increases our own, because for the duration of these performances, we are forced to live in the same agitated, immediate state that envelops him. (This also happens during Trump’s soul-destroying rallies, but at least those are directed toward his fans, not an entire nation in peril.)

Most leaders would at least have the sense not to relitigate every vendetta in their personal Burn Book at such moments. That’s what rallies and sycophantic interviews with Fox News are for, after all. Indeed, polls now suggest that even the president’s base might be tiring of this exhibitionism. But that is irrelevant to Trump. With cable news constantly covering the pandemic, he seems to be going through withdrawal. He needs an outlet for his political glossolalia, or his constantly replenishing reservoir of grievance and insecurity will burst its seams.

Even Trump’s staff—itself a collection of morally compromised enablers—cannot cajole him or train him to sound like a normal human being. Trump begins every one of these disastrous briefings by hypnotically reading high-minded phrases to which he shows no connection. These texts are exercises in futility, but they at least show some sense of what a typical person with friends and a family might want to sound like during a national crisis. Once he finishes stumbling through these robotic recitations, he’s back to his grievances.

Each of these presidential therapy sessions corrodes us until the moment when the president finally shambles away in a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments. In a time of crisis, we should be finding what is best in ourselves. Trump, instead, invites us to join a daily ritual, to hear lines from a scared and mean little boy’s heroic play-acting about how he bravely defeated the enemies and scapegoats who told him to do things that would hurt us. He insists that he has never been wrong and that he isn’t responsible for anything ever.

Daily, Trump’s opponents are enraged by yet another assault on the truth and basic human decency. His followers are delighted by yet more vulgar attacks on the media and the Democrats. And all of us, angry or pleased, become more like Trump, because just like the president, we end up thinking about only Trump, instead of our families, our fellow citizens, our health-care workers, or the future of our country. We are all forced to take sides every day, and those two sides are always “Trump” and “everyone else.”

Perhaps to call this daily abomination “therapy” is unfair, because therapy has a healing goal. As Jennifer Melfi, the psychotherapist for HBO’s fictional mob boss Tony Soprano, realized at the end of the series, when she finally threw him out of her office, counseling someone incapable of reflection or remorse is pointless; it makes the counselor into a worse person for enduring such long exposure to the patient.

Likewise, Trump’s spiritual poverty is making all of us into worse people. We are all living with him in the moment and neglecting the thing that makes us human beings instead of mindless fish swimming in circles. We must recover this in ourselves, and become more decent, more reflective, and more stoic—before Trump sends us into a hole from which we might never emerge. — Tom Nichols, Contributing Writer, The Atlantic, April 11, 2020

[skuthus]

Notes on Capitalism

It seems that our democratic institutions are failing us - increasingly it appears that corporate issues and donations are taking precedence over citizens basic needs. Our infrastructure is in shambles, teachers must strike to obtain basic raises, and the largest piece of legislation passed in the last two years was a tax bill that overwhelmingly favored the top 10% of our economic society. To add insult to injury, the polls show that the electorate, especially the lower 30%, continue to support antithetical economic and political policies, working against their own interests in order to serve a higher order of talk show hosts, pundits, and self-professed iconoclasts who have swindled the populations into believing the choice is between the betterment of the rich or assured national destruction.

Furthermore, since long before the civil rights movement (and, importantly, long after), economic segregation based on race (and class) has reinforced a financial divide between rich and poor, with cities, counties, and states working together to ensure near-permanent economic segregation through design - from our streets to our affordable housing to our health clinic locations, we have been edging marginalized groups away from economic opportunities since this countries inception.

How then is someone who has not been a beneficiary of state-controlled design, legislation, opportunity, or education supposed to trust or understand that our accompanying capitalist system is working in their favor at all? From their perspective, capitalism is at the minimum amoral, and at its worst, evil and corrupt. It is, after all, the catalyst through which our economic policies are enacted. It is the shield behind which our politicians hide when confronted with the revelation of class inequity. It is the reason they cannot afford medicine, food, education, and housing.

The question then is this: Is capitalism itself responsible? Or is it the continued reinforcement of national policies that allow lobbyists, corporations, and the ultra-rich to buy influence and out-bid the American People? This, in turn, creates systems through which capitalist ideology is discarded, allowing for price gauging, monopolies, and market stagnancy that would never exist were it not for cancerous economic policies enacted in the name of free market conservatism.

It could be argued that capitalism is what allowed for the corporations to become powerful enough to influence legislation in the first place. This has an obvious counterpoint: That mega-corporations are supposed to be the bane of a healthy capitalist economy, so the conditions by which they were created were likely a consequence of a mistake in democratic economic policy rather than raw capital output. Every barrier to capitalism's success is usually made up of conservative economic policy.

Therefore, the proposed solution to economic inequity is to simply strip away conservative economic policy until the ship rights itself. Systems theory tells us that doing this will likely take the same amount of time that implementing it did - which is to say, about 150 years. It would be smart to also implement some kind of corrective legislation that would help right the ship faster, and would quickly redistribute the capital power back to the working class people it originated from.

Capitalism, after all, has three powerful players: Those who own the means of production, those who operate within the production, and those who consume the output of the production. Producers, Workers, and Consumers exist in a symbiotic nexus that, if unperturbed, should end up in the favor of workers and consumers more often than owners/producers. If we eliminate the economic abuse allowed in government to the Producers, then Consumers and Workers will both be empowered in ways we have not yet seen, without disturbing the core positive products of Capitalism.

[bountyofbeads]

Trump Focuses on Economy at Davos, Seeking a Counter to Impeachment https://nyti.ms/36cm7JC

Trump is with his “people” at Davos-the wealthy one per cent who are responsible for crippling recessions and the group who will not put their ample resources to work to make a difference in the huge challenge of climate change. They represent money but not wisdom and responsibility. Davos is a “ see and be seen “ opportunity not a forum for serious solutions to the world’s problems.

Also, what's not to love about Trumpnomics? More subsidies to big industries, less taxes for the rest of us and to social welfare programsw; shifts the federal tax burden from business to their employees and customers; rebalances regulations to favor business over employees, customers and the environment. Never mind that the National Debt grows more than the economy (GDP), even as infrastructure decays and more people are disconnected from the benefits of economic growth. Never mind the cost to society and the planet...

TRUMP TAKES A VICTORY LAP AT DAVOS, CROWING ABOUT THE U.S. ECONOMY AND IGNORING IMPEACHMENT

By Anne Gearan and Toluse Olorunnipa | Published Jan 21 at 7:46 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted Jan 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — President Trump trumpeted what he called "America's extraordinary prosperity" on his watch, taking credit for a soaring stock market, a low unemployment rate, and a "blue-collar boom" in jobs and income, in a presidential turn on the world stage also meant to make impeachment proceedings against him in Washington look small.

Trump ran through economic statistics with a salesman's delivery, crowing about growth during his three years in office that he said bested his predecessors and defied his skeptics.

“America is thriving; America is flourishing, and, yes, America is winning again like never before,” he told an audience of billionaires, world leaders and figures from academia, media, and the kind of international organizations and think tanks for whom his “America First” nationalism is anathema.

Trump is making his second visit to the World Economic Forum, which for its 50th anniversary this year is focusing on climate change and sustainability. A sign at the entrance to the press center notes that paint for this year’s installation was made from seaweed, and carpets from recycled fishing nets.

Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, did not directly address the theme during his 30-minute address here, although he did call for rejecting “the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse” and later said he is a big believer in the environment.

He also made no mention of impeachment or U.S. politics, although he took a swipe at “radical socialism,” his term for Democratic ideas about health care, education and other issues. The Senate impeachment trial was set to open hours after he spoke.

In response to questions from reporters after his speech, Trump called the impeachment trial a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” that has been “going on for years.”

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the forum, thanked Trump “for injecting optimism” into the discussion.

“We have many problems in the world, but we need dreams,” he said.

Trump received a polite but not enthusiastic reception in the hall. A few in the audience slipped out well before he wrapped up.

Even as Trump faces impeachment, his trip to Davos offers him an opportunity focus on his economic message. The U.S. economy has continued to notch solid growth and maintain a low unemployment rate, and the stock market has reached record highs in recent days. Trump signed a partial trade deal with China last week, easing global tensions over his use of tariffs.

But the president faces continued questions about his approach to foreign affairs. His decision to order a strike that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani earlier this month — and his threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on European cars over a foreign policy dispute — have created more tumult in the Middle East and in the transatlantic relationship between the United States and its closest allies. 

Trump was billed as the keynote speaker for the annual business-themed confab in this Alpine ski town, but the main attraction was Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 17, who has sparred with Trump on Twitter.

Last year, Thunberg blamed world leaders at the forum for not doing more to combat climate change. She has since echoed that message while rallying teenagers worldwide to skip school and pressure global leaders to take stronger action to address the existential threat. 

In December, Trump insulted the teenager and Time magazine “Person of the Year” as “so ridiculous” and suggested that she “work on her anger management problem.”

Thunberg was quick to respond, updating her Twitter biography to describe herself as “A teenager working on her anger management problem.”

Trump had not yet arrived in Davos when Thunberg gave her first address Tuesday morning, saying that “without treating this as a real crisis, then we cannot solve it.” He was expected to skip her main speech later in the day.

Trump is an outlier at the forum for his views on climate change. The president has publicly criticized global efforts to combat warming temperatures and has made ridiculing energy-efficient products a key part of his reelection stump speech.

Ahead of Trump’s address, Schwab told the gathering that “the world is in a state of emergency” and that the window to address climate change is closing. Speaking ahead of Trump, he also reminded the audience that “every voice” heard at the forum deserved respect.

Trump was accompanied here by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, and a delegation including his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Also present is adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller, whose hard-line stance on limiting immigration and denunciations of “globalism” infused Trump’s address to the United Nations in September.

“This is the wreckage I was elected to clean up,” Trump said of the “bleak” economic landscape he inherited.

He praised himself repeatedly, saying that his actions saved the global economy from the brink of recession, rescued the American manufacturing industry and reshaped the rules of international trade to reflect a fairer system.

He occasionally strayed from the facts as he tried to paint a picture of an economy in a shambles before he took office.

He described the 4.7 percent unemployment rate before he took office as “reasonably high,” even though it was well below the average unemployment rate in the United States over the past 70 years. He also took credit for additional funding that has been approved for historically black colleges and universities, saying inaccurately that the funding “saved” the schools from ruin.

He took a swipe at the Federal Reserve for its interest rate policies, saying his economic achievements came despite the rate-setting body. Although his attacks on the Fed have become common, the once-taboo practice seemed to startle some in the audience here.

Trump is using his day-and-a-half visit to lobby corporate chieftains for greater U.S. investment and to meet with leaders including Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Iraqi President Barham Salih and Kurdish leader Nechirvan Barzani. 

Although climate change and environmental stewardship lead the agenda here, a survey of chief executives released Monday shows that they do not count climate change as among the top 10 threats to business growth.

The financial services group PwC said climate change and environmental issues are ranked as the 11th-biggest threat to their companies’ growth prospects, the Associated Press reported. Trade conflicts and lack of skilled workers ranked higher.

The survey also found that 53 percent of CEOs predict a decline in the rate of growth this year, nearly double the percentage who said the same last year and a mark of how the trade conflict between the United States and China has soured business confidence.

Trump, however, painted a sunny picture Tuesday and invited global investment in the United States. He suggested that other nations would benefit from his approach to deregulation, but said, “You have to run your countries the way you want.”

He said he had confronted “predatory” Chinese trade practices and asserted that his tariffs, denounced by many of the CEOs and economists in the audience, have worked exactly as intended.

“No one did anything about it except allowing it to keep getting worse and worse and worse” before he took office, Trump said.

He said that the U.S. relationship with China has never been better, and that his personal bond with Chinese President Xi Jinping is a big reason.

“He’s for China, I’m for the U.S., but other than that we love each other,” Trump said to chuckles.

He received louder applause when he announced that the United States will join an initiative begun here to add 1 trillion trees worldwide.

Trump’s 2018 visit to the World Economic Forum came just days after he signed a bill lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent — a move that will save businesses billions of dollars.

He largely steered clear of discussing domestic political issues during his speech to the forum in 2018, instead using his remarks to tout his accomplishments and encourage business leaders to invest in the United States. He did take a brief swipe at “the opposing party,” pointing out that “some of the people in the room” supported Democrats over him in 2016. He also drew a smattering of boos when he attacked the news media as “fake.”

This year, two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), have sparked growing alarm among the global elite with calls for a major restructuring of the economic system that they say has been skewed to benefit the wealthy.

Trump, who has made attacking “socialism” part of his reelection message, could find a receptive audience as he seeks to defend capitalism and tout his economic record to a group of business leaders. The president has regularly credited his administration with boosting the bottom lines of the country’s largest companies, occasionally bragging to top executives that he had made them very rich. More than 100 billionaires are on the official attendee list for the World Economic Forum, and Trump plans to meet with the heads of several multinational companies during his brief stay in Davos.

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Heather Long contributed to this report.

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Climate Change Takes Center Stage in Davos

With businesses under pressure to act, solutions are emerging, but not fast enough, some participants fear.

By Stanley Reed | Published Jan. 20, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 21, 2020 |

Even before catastrophic fires broke out in Australia in late fall, climate change was at the top of the list of priorities at the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

But those fires — preceded by others in California — along with rising sea levels, flooding and supercharged storms, are putting more pressure on the politicians, business executives, financiers, thought leaders and others who attend to show they are part of the solution to one of the world’s most pressing challenges.

In a nod to a younger generation most at risk and demanding action on climate change, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has become a prominent environmental activist, is scheduled to appear. In a column this month in The Guardian that she wrote with other environmental activists, they demanded an end to investments in fossil fuels.

“Anything less than immediately ceasing these investments in the fossil fuel industry would be a betrayal of life itself,” they said. “Today’s business as usual is turning into a crime against humanity. We demand that leaders play their part in putting an end to this madness.”

Daniel Yergin, the oil historian and a regular attendee at the Davos forum, agreed that “climate is going to loom larger than ever before.” And Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the political risk firm Eurasia Group, said: “These issues are becoming more real, more salient every day, whether you are talking about Venice or California or Australia or Jakarta. These are real events with enormous direct human and economic costs.”

But an overriding question as the Davos gathering gets underway is: Will all the talk matter?

Mr. Bremmer, who plans to attend, said the forum could help force change because it brings together big players, like chief executives of banks, money management firms and hedge funds, who are rethinking their investments. Gradually — some say too gradually — financial firms are directing money away from oil companies and others associated with carbon-dioxide emissions blamed for environmental damage.

Financial institutions “see the future coming, and they are changing the way they invest,” Mr. Bremmer said. “That is going to require multinational corporations to act differently; it will lead to new corporations that will do better.”

While thinking on climate change may be shifting, by some metrics the corporate elite that always makes up a large contingent at Davos still has a lot of work to do. According to a study published in December by the Davos organizers, only a quarter of a group of 7,000 businesses are setting a specific emissions reduction target and only an eighth are actually reducing their emissions each year.

If so, they are making a major strategic error, according to Mark Carney, the departing governor of the Bank of England who planned to be in Davos. Companies that work to bring their emissions to zero “will be rewarded handsomely,” Mr. Carney said in a recent speech. “Those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.”

Some people in the financial industry said that environmental issues were being given greater weight in investment decisions despite setbacks like President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change. The president, who shunned the gathering in Davos last year, said he would go this time.

The number of people who are talking about fossil fuels as a real concern “has increased dramatically over the last 12 to 24 months,” said Jeff McDermott, chief executive of Greentech Capital, an investment bank focused on low-carbon technologies. “They are both looking at the risks of high-carbon companies and industries as well as the returns available from low-carbon alternatives.”

Mr. McDermott said that Davos was a good venue for sifting through such ideas. The conference organizers are also pushing an environmental agenda that supports an ecologist’s notion of persuading the world to plant a trillion trees to soak up carbon dioxide and prodding companies to announce ambitious targets for lowering their emissions.

Potentially, enormous sums could be used to influence corporate behavior. For instance, Climate Action 100+ said investors with around $35 trillion in assets had signed on to its program for pushing companies toward greater disclosure and action on emissions.

“I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,”  wrote Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, which has nearly $7 trillion under management, in a letter vowing to put sustainability at the core of the firm’s investment approach.

Many likely targets of investor and environmental initiatives may be available at the gathering at the Swiss resort. Among them are the chiefs of the world’s major oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron and Saudi Aramco, who are expected to attend.

In recent months, some of these companies, especially those based in Europe, have been responding to the concerns of investors and other constituents with commitments to reduce their emissions or make investments in other environmentally friendly technology.

Repsol, the Spanish oil company,  pledged last month to cut its emissions to zero by 2050 through a combination of actions, including more investments in renewable electricity like wind and solar and, possibly, reforestation. And BP, the London-based oil company, said it was forming a business with other companies for recycling a type of plastic known as PET that is used in soft drink bottles and packaging. In the latest of these pledges, Equinor, the Norwegian company, said it would reduce emissions from its oil and gas fields and plants in its home country to near zero by 2050 by using electricity in its operations and other measures.

Mr. Yergin, who is also vice chairman of IHS Markit, a research firm, said that “energy transition” would be the “two most spoken words at Davos” about the sector.

Marco Alverà, chief executive of Snam,  an Italian natural gas company, plans to talk about recent experiments in mixing hydrogen, a fuel that does not produce carbon emissions, with the natural gas that the company delivers to users, potentially lowering their climate impact. Mr. Alverà said he was going to Davos because he thought it would be a “powerful forum” to make his points.

“I don’t think we will solve the climate challenge with taxes or a radical change in consumer behavior,” he said. “I think we can only solve it with business ideas that make business sense.”

The chemical industry, another sector that is integral to modern economies and a target for environmentalists, also plans to make its case at Davos.

A group of about 20 large chemical companies is working on low-carbon technologies, like making chemicals from carbon dioxide and biomass, said Martin Brudermuller, chief executive of the German chemical company BASF.

Mr. Brudermuller also said another large coalition in the sector was working on the plastic waste problem, with BASF turning discarded plastic into raw materials for its plants. Mr. Brudermuller cautioned that such problems, which involve not only new technologies but also organizing the collection and sorting of waste, are so complex and globe-spanning that only an effort of similar scope will succeed in solving them.

“A collaborative effort of companies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations as well as civil society is necessary to address the global challenge of mismanaged waste,” Mr. Brudermuller wrote in an email.

Awareness of these issue may be growing, but with global emissions continuing to rise governments are falling short on tackling them, according to a pre-conference report issued by the World Economic Forum. Many businesses, too, are failing to set effective targets, the report said. In 2006, Nicholas Stern was the chief author of a seminal study for the British government that set out the case for acting on climate change. More than a decade later, as he prepared to attend the 50th gathering in Davos, Lord Stern, chairman of the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, said there were reasons to be encouraged and to worry.

He said that the costs of wind and solar technology had fallen much more rapidly than anticipated. Electric vehicles, he said, were also making more rapid progress than expected, with most automakers talking about the end of the era of the internal combustion engine.

Such advances, he said, are opening attractive opportunities for investors and creating jobs.

He also said the growing activism of young people was crucial in pushing their elders to enact change. “Business people really feel that,” including those who attend Davos, he said, adding that he hoped such pressures would push companies into making commitments on emissions reduction at the meeting.

On the other hand, he said that the world had been slow to act and each report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations agency that tracks emissions, was more worrying than the last.

“I am really optimistic about what it is possible to do,” he said. “But I worry deeply about whether we will.”

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IN DAVOS, A SEARCH FOR MEANING WITH CAPITALISM IN CRISIS

By Ishaan Tharoor | Published January 20 at 9:35 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — The World Economic Forum, the most concentrated gathering of wealth and power on the planet, will begin once again amid a natural fortress of snow and ice in the Swiss Alps. President Trump is jetting in for a scheduled address Tuesday. Dozens of other world leaders are in attendance; a who’s who list of CEOs, fund managers, oligarchs and a smattering of celebrities will join the throngs cramming the pop-up pavilions and swanky hotel parties of the otherwise sleepy mountain town.

This year’s conclave will be the 50th since it began in 1971, marking a fitful half century of political turmoil and economic boom and bust. For years, Davos — that is, the conference of global leaders for which it has become synonymous — has represented the apotheosis of a particular world view: an almost Promethean belief in the virtues of liberalism and globalization, anchored in a conviction that heads of companies can become capable and even moral custodians of the common good.

The disruptions and traumas of the past decade have sorely tested Davos’s faith in itself. The archetypal Davos Man — the well-heeled, jet-setting “globalist” — has become an object of derision and distrust for both the political left and right. Financial crises, surging nationalist populism in the West, China’s intensifying authoritarianism and the steady toll of climate change have convinced many that there’s nothing inexorable about liberal progress. A new global opinion poll of tens of thousands of people found that more than 50 percent of those surveyed now think capitalism does "more harm than good."

Each year, the forum is accompanied by an unsurprising airing of cynicism in the media. “It is [a] family reunion for the people who, in my view, broke the modern world,” Anand Giradharadas, an author and outspoken critic of billionaire philanthropy, said in a TV interview last year. Can Davos “keep its mojo?” the Economist asked over the weekend. “Once a beacon of international cooperation, Davos has become a punchline,” the New York Times noted.

Klaus Schwab, the forum’s octogenarian founder and executive chairman, is convinced that the current moment needs more Davos, not less. In the run-up to this week’s meetings, he announced a new “Davos manifesto,” calling on companies to “pay their fair share of taxes, show zero tolerance for corruption, uphold human rights throughout their global supply chains, and advocate for a competitive level playing field.” Such an ethos, Schwab contends, will go a long way to redressing the world’s inequities and may help governments meet the climate targets set by the 2015 Paris agreement.

“Business leaders now have an incredible opportunity,” Schwab wrote in a column published last month. “By giving stakeholder capitalism concrete meaning, they can move beyond their legal obligations and uphold their duty to society.”

Schwab’s extolling of “stakeholder” capitalism — a riposte to the profit-maximizing Western orthodoxy of “shareholder” capitalism — is supposed to be a call to action. Activists, though, may argue that it’s not enough.

In a study timed in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, Oxfam found the world’s billionaires control more wealth than 4.6 billion people, or 60 percent of humanity. “Another year, another indication that the inequality crisis is spiraling out of control. And despite repeated warnings about inequality, governments have not reversed its course,” said Paul O’Brien of Oxfam America in an emailed statement. “Some governments, especially the U.S., are actually exacerbating inequality by cutting taxes for the richest and for corporations while slashing public services and safety nets — such as health care and education — that actually fight inequality.”

And some Davos attendees concur. “The economic pie is bigger than it’s ever been before in history, which means we could make everyone better off, but we’ve chosen as a society to leave a lot of people behind,” Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, told my colleague Heather Long. “That’s not just inexcusable morally but is also really bad tactically.”

Reading from a totally different script, President Trump is expected to wax lyrical about the success of his economic and trade policies. In the past, his bullying measures and fondness for tariffs have ruffled the Davos set.

“Although the president has been inconsistent in how he has carried out his worldview, he has made clear that he has no plans to back away from his strong-arm tactics even as they have increasingly antagonized American friends and foes alike, leaving the United States potentially more isolated on the world stage,” wrote my colleagues Anne Gearan and John Hudson.

Trump is also likely to be challenged in Davos by a growing cohort of climate activists and policymakers. On the same day of his speech, Swedish teen campaigner Greta Thunberg is expected to berate politicians and finance executives who still invest in fossil fuels. Although Trump almost certainly will not heed Thunberg’s call, representatives of major companies attending the forum are desperate to show how they are adapting their business models to accommodate climate concerns.

Two years ago, Schwab drew criticism for what was viewed as an awkwardly ingratiating speech to welcome Trump to the forum. Now, he’s more at odds with the U.S. president, not least on the urgency of the climate crisis.

“We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change,” Schwab told reporters last week. “We do not want the next generations to inherit a world which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable.”

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Trump Focuses on Economy at Davos, Seeking a Counter to Impeachment

President Trump made his first appearance on the international stage since the House sent impeachment articles to the Senate, on the day his trial is set to begin in earnest.

By Annie Karni | Published Jan. 21, 2020 Updated 7:01 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — Before the Senate impeachment trial began in earnest on Tuesday, President Trump was more than 4,000 miles away from Washington, in this glitzy Alpine village, driving a competing narrative — one that had nothing to do with pressure on Ukraine, abuse of power or obstruction of Congress.

In his first appearance on the international stage since Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent articles of impeachment to the Senate, before the senators who will decide his fate even arrive at the Capitol building, Mr. Trump addressed the World Economic Forum, focusing on the success of the global economy — and taking credit for it.

“America’s economy was in a rather dismal state,” Mr. Trump said. “Before my presidency began, the outlook for many economies was bleak.” In fact, the economy’s recovery after its plummet was central to President Barack Obama’s legacy.

But Mr. Trump called the growth under his leadership a “roaring geyser of opportunity,” and proclaimed that “the American dream is back bigger better and stronger than ever before.”

In his 30-minute address in front of a global audience, Mr. Trump did not mention the impeachment trial back home. But he delivered what amounted to a version of his campaign speech minus the red meat to his base, speaking little of international alliances other than touting America’s supremacy in the world.

Mr. Trump highlighted the first phase of his trade deal with China and another with Mexico and Canada, accomplishments he thinks are being overshadowed by a focus on an impeachment trial he is trying to dismiss as a “hoax.” And the audience appeared receptive — to his face, at least — having warmed to him over the past two years because they have benefited from his policies.

“Lev Parnas is not a topic of conversation at Davos,” said Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political research and consulting firm.

Mr. Parnas, an associate of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been on a nonstop media tour over the past week, asserting that Mr. Trump was fully aware of the pressure campaign to force Ukraine to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals. Democrats have not ruled out trying to call him as a witness.

The open question, as always with Mr. Trump, was how much he would stray from his script and the escape offered by the world stage, and vent his grievances about his legal and political predicament at home. But in his morning address, he stuck largely to his prepared remarks, claiming that his approach was “centered entirely on the well-being of the American worker.”

The president also took a swipe at people demanding action on climate change, the lead agenda item at this year’s conference. Mr. Trump announced that the United States would join the 1 trillion trees initiative launched at the World Economic Forum. But he also declared that “we must reject the perennial prophets of doom.”

Former Vice President Al Gore, who attended Mr. Trump’s speech, declined to comment on his remarks.

It was not clear whether Mr. Trump would try to stage a surprise meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who is also attending the international forum, even though officials said the optics of such a meeting would be unhelpful to Mr. Trump.

In Davos, however, Mr. Trump may find the right audience for support if he sticks with efforts to counter the impeachment narrative at home. There was less anxiety rippling through the one percent set about him on Tuesday than there had been when he first arrived at the annual forum two years ago, fresh off an “America First” campaign filled with promises to rip up international agreements and alliances.

This time, there’s more concern about some of the progressive Democrats running to replace him. Through regulatory rollbacks, tax cuts and the success of the global economy, the president who ran as a populist has benefited many of the chief executives gathered here, even those who have taken public positions against some of his policies.

“There are lot of masters of the universe who think he may not be their cup of tea, but he’s been a godsend,” Mr. Bremmer added. “It’s interesting to hear Mike Bloomberg saying he would fund Bernie Sanders’s campaign if he won the nomination. Very few people here would say that.”

Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, who is himself running for president, has said he is open to spending $1 billion to defeat Mr. Trump, whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee.

During Mr. Trump’s colorful career in New York real estate, entertainment and business, he never cracked the Davos set, whose Fortune 500 chief executives dismissed him as something of a gaudy sideshow.

But the balance of power has shifted. And with progressives like Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts emerging as top-tier candidates in the Democratic primary, a crowd that once rejected Mr. Trump is now more willing to consider him one of their own.

Mr. Trump has happily embraced them back. When he signed an agreement at the White House for the United States-China trade deal, for instance, Mr. Trump credited himself with helping big banks and business.

“I made a lot of bankers look very good,” he said, and told attendees to send his regards to Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.

There are however, still major points of contention ahead during the love-to-hate-it conference for Mr. Trump, who plans to spend almost two days here in bilateral meetings with leaders of Iraq, Pakistan and the Kurdish regional government, as well as sitdowns with corporate chieftains. (The forum is also Mr. Trump’s first trip abroad since the drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most important military official.)

Global warming and climate change top the agenda items for the conference. A star speaker on Tuesday, alongside Mr. Trump, is the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has said she wouldn’t “waste her time” speaking to Mr. Trump about climate change.

Mr. Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, and his administration has expanded the use of coal, downplayed concerns about climate change and rolled back environmental protections.

The president mocked Ms. Thunberg, who has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum, after she was chosen as Time magazines  Person of the Year. “So ridiculous,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Greta must work on her anger management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”

Attendees at the conference said they fully expected Mr. Trump to take another whack at her while she was here.

In 2018, Mr. Trump was the first sitting president to attend the forum since President Bill Clinton did so in 2000. Last year, he abruptly canceled his plans to attend, citing a partial government shutdown.

This year, the administration delegation includes Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, as well as Robert Lighthizer, the trade representative. Other members of the administration who were expected to attend the forum were Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary; Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, and Eugene Scalia, the labor secretary.

Mr. Trump was also expected to be joined in Davos by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump, both senior White House advisers.

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Ms. Thunberg is the only adult in the room speaking truth to power. Greta is not an extremist, although her demands will be portrayed as extreme. Unfortunately for all of us, she’s a realist. It’s past time to pay lip service to the problem of climate change and global warming, because, as Greta so often says, our house is indeed on fire.

Greta Thunberg’s Message at Davos Forum: ‘Our House Is Still on Fire’

By Somini Sengupta, Reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos | Published Jan. 21, 2020 Updated 9:45 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — Greta Thunberg on Tuesday punched a hole in the promises emerging from a forum of the global political and business elite and offered instead an ultimatum: Stop investing in fossil fuels immediately, or explain to your children why you did not protect them from the “climate chaos” you created.

“I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?” Ms. Thunberg, 17, said at the annual gathering of the world’s rich and powerful in Davos, a village on the icy reaches of the Swiss Alps.

Her remarks opened a panel discussion hosted by The New York Times and the World Economic Forum. The full transcript is available here.

“Our house is still on fire,” she added, reprising her most famous line from an address last year at the forum. “Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour.”

Her remarks came at a time when climate change and environmental sustainability rose to the top of the talking points of many of the executives and government leaders assembled at Davos.

Ms. Thunberg, a climate activist known for speaking bluntly to power, rebuked the crowd for promises that she said would do too little: reducing planet-warming gases to net zero by 2050, offsetting emissions by planting one trillion trees, transitioning to a low-carbon economy.

“Let’s be clear. We don’t need a ‘low carbon economy.’ We don’t need to ‘lower emissions,’” she said. “Our emissions have to stop.”

Only that, she said, would enable the world to keep temperatures from rising past 1.5 degrees from preindustrial levels, which scientists say is necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change. She and a group of young climate activists have called on private investors and governments to immediately halt exploration for fossil fuels, to stop funding their production, to end taxpayer subsidies for the industry and to fully divest their existing stakes in the sector.

Scientists have said emissions must be reduced by half in the next decade to reach the 1.5-degree target. The opposite is happening. Global emissions continued to rise, hitting a record high in 2019, according to research published in December.

Her address began barely an hour after President Trump’s speech at the forum, which barely mentioned climate change, except to implicitly describe climate activists as “heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers.” Ms. Thunberg did not address him directly, except to remind the audience that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement by the end of this year.

Ms. Thunberg took pains to distance herself from politics. “This is not about right or left. We couldn’t care less about your party politics,” she said. “From a sustainability perspective, the right, the left as well as the center have all failed. No political ideology or economic structure has been able to tackle the climate and environmental emergency.”

*********

[huntertarot]

Day of Rain - An Apocalyptic Tabletop Adventure - Log 1

 (Warning! It’s a bit of a long read! I apologize!)

For a little background information, Day of Rain is an original tabletop system and lore that a friend of mine came up with for a campaign revolving around a Zombie infestation and testing how long we can survive for in a ball-busting, hardcore style of difficulty. The DM wanted us to create characters that were meant to be fitting representations of us, and he checked each to make sure they were fitting to each of our actual strengths and weaknesses. The party consisted of me (Hunter), Harley, and Trenton. Our rolling was based on d100 rolls, where we had to either roll lower or exactly the same as our stat or skill in something, sort of like Warhammer 40k.

The story began in our little town in Tennessee. We were all sitting around, enjoying a fine, Saturday evening when the TV changed over to an emergency broadcast. The infestation of an unusual virus had recently been found in several animal species, namely deer, but had been covered up till the announcement to prevent mass panic. The government had tried hunting down all the infected animals to the point of complete extermination and burning the corpses, but the plan seemed to backfire. What would later strike us as odd is the fact the newscaster would claim that the hunters burning the animal carcasses and a cult were the causes of what would come next. Apparently, whether due to said burnings or cult, the virus had somehow mixed with nearby water sources and, most importantly, made its way into the clouds around the same time as a large storm system was making its way across the nation. We began to question how exactly either of those explanations made sense, questioning if their information was wrong, if another cover-up was happening, or this was some kind of gigantic prank. The emergency broadcast was interrupted by an announcement by the US military, stating that any infected, no matter how far gone from the virus they were, were going to be eradicated with deadly force. Anyone so much as wandering around in the rain, whether covered or not, was going to be shot on sight. At that point, the storm system was passing over us, and we could actually hear a commotion coming from outside. Guessing this must have actually been for real, we each began to move around, trying to grab as much stuff as we could before the shit hit the fan. Harley managed to come across backpacks for him and Trenton, and I managed to dig up an old duffel bag of mine, with each of us tossing some spare clothes, food, and water inside. Mr. Jesse, the father of a friend of ours who owned the house we were in, contained a number of goodies for us, including a pistol for each of us, ammo, a police flashlight, and a large medical kit. Before we could try to find anything more, Harley remembered that we needed to lock and barricade the doors so no one could get in. He ran to the front door and locked it, and I ran to the back door. Unfortunately for me, the back door was in a laundry room that had a small step down, so I tripped and clocked my head on the washer. Harley came to check on me after he heard me yell, and also tripped and landed on me. Trenton, who had been trying to stack stuff in front of the windows, came to figure out was going on and also tripped and fell on top of us. For the record, I’m 5′8″ and about 160 lbs, while Harley is 6′3″ and about 280, and Trenton is 6′4″ and 400 lbs. I took about half of my health from hitting my head and getting squashed by those two, while they only took a small amount.

Harley managed to untangle himself from the pile and locked the door, but not before we all heard some screaming and followed by the sound of something smashing against the backyard fence. Just as Trenton and I were standing up, someone began pounding on the back door and begging for us to ‘save me and my daughter’. It was then that the DM introduced a ‘quick time’ system to the campaign, by giving us about 30 seconds on a stopwatch to discuss and figure out what we were going to do. I mentioned that saving them wasn’t exactly our problem, but that I was all for letting them in if the other two wanted to, which they did. Harley, as he has children, is a bit more of a sentimental person when it comes to kids, so he pretty much had the door flung open before we could discuss much more. Once the woman and her kid were in, he slammed the door shut and locked it back, followed shortly by the sound of something slamming into the door. In a state of panic and adrenaline, Trenton and I wheeled a large, chest-height toolbox/cabinet in front of the door.

At that point, we could hear something similar happening at the front door, with loud pounding sounds coming from that direction. Since our options were pretty limited, while the other two were arguing how to get to one of our cars, I suggested hiding in the attic. The only entrance to the attic was in my room, which was essentially a refurbished garage that was attached to the living room. They came around to my way of thinking, and I helped the woman and her daughter (which we would later find out were called Allison and Emma) get up into the attic while the other two threw some last minute things in front of the doors and windows. Once we were all up in the attic, we tossed an old, cobweb-covered couch over the door and moved stuff around in a quick attempt to make space for ourselves. After we cleared out a corner for ourselves to huddle up in, we all sat in silence and waited for the inevitable. Each of us were aiming at the door to the attic, ready to blow away anything that potentially figured out we were here. We had no idea how these zombies worked, and we were all hoping they were slow and dumb or something along those lines.

Eventually, both the doors collapsed at about the same time, and we could hear the sounds of a small horde moving around below us. It didn’t sound exactly like they were running around, more so like they were moving at the pace of a tired jog, but it was hard to guesstimate their individual speeds with how many there were moving around at once. After a while, we heard a raspy voice say, “Here!” somewhere underneath us. Out of character and in character we are all freaking out because it seemed that the zombies could speak somehow. Despite the shout from the zombie, it seemed like the undead couldn’t actually figure out where we were. Like they could smell we were near, but they couldn’t find us no matter how close they actually got to the smell.

By the time that night came around, most of the zombies had seemingly wandered off, probably more than a little annoyed that they couldn’t find us. The only reason we got that impression was that the zombie who had spoken before, shouted, “We’ll be back!” before seemingly shambling off elsewhere. At that point, the population downstairs had seemingly become only one or two moving around in other parts of the house. Trenton, being the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever known, decided to go on a scouting mission. We thought he was just going to see what was going on in the house, but he actually was headed towards his car. He managed to get out of the attic and out of the house without making any noise and avoiding any zombies, but his luck sorta ended when he got outside and there was a zombie just staring at the house that suddenly jerked its head in his direction. Moving at a speed we normally didn’t expect out of him, Trenton made it into his car and managed to back out of the driveway at terribly illegal speeds. He cruised around most of the town, looking for a gas station that wasn’t filled to the brim with infected, nearly walking into a Speedway that he couldn’t see immediately into that had about 40 zombies in it. He managed to come across one that was across the street from the police station, filling up his backpack with random bits of food, water, and tobacco that he came across, and turning on the pump for the gas. He accidentally set off the alarm when he pried open the cash register, so he ran out and filled his tank up as quick as he could before driving off. At this point, he receives a text from Harley asking him where he went. We were all still able to get cell service (granted my phone was on 5%, so I turned it off to conserve it for later), so Trenton was able to report what was going on to us in the attic. Trenton then drove around more and scoped out what places and areas were crawling with infected, before turning around to come back home. On his way back, the street lights cut on fully, and the zombies that were following his car began to slow down heavily, information that was shared as he drove on.

Back at the ranch (and by that, I mean the house), Harley and I were concocting a plan of our own. Harley wanted to see if he could get out of the attic and get Allison and Emma to my car and let them get out of here before anything happened to them. Like I said, Harley gets incredibly sentimental about stuff like this, whereas I was making worst-case scenario plans of using the mother and daughter as bait or trading them off to no-doubt coming about raiders that were going to form in this new apocalyptic society. I didn’t want to upset one of the members of the party and messing up our teamwork and dynamic, so I went with Harley’s plan and moved to the other end of the attic and stomped as hard as I could, attracting the zombies over to the area I was standing above. There was a flurry of movement towards the area I stomped over, and I even heard a voice under me say, “Stop running.”. Harley moved the couch off of the door to the attic, and attempted to creak open the door just a smidge, only for the door to fall open completely. The sound of the hatch swinging, combined with the ladder smacking the floor attracted the attention of a zombie that was just walking in the house. All Harley heard before he saw the zombie was a loud, “You!”, before the infected tried climbing the ladder. Since the zombie was too heavy, he couldn’t just knock it off the ladder, so he pulled out his .357 Magnum and blew it’s brains out before essentially yanking the ladder back up and slamming the attic door shut. I managed to sneak back over to the corner we here hunkered down in as fast as I could and asked Harley ‘what the hell happened’.

It was at this point when Trenton texted us and told us he was close to the house. Our relief was cut short by the sound of crying that suddenly became present somewhere below us, followed by the sound of a young girl’s voice asking, “Mommy?” At this point, Harley and I were staring at Allison and Emma, and they looked just as scared as we did. For a moment, we panicked because we desperately did not want to have to deal with whatever little demon was skulking around below us and looking for whatever it considered it’s ‘mommy’. From the small window in the attic, we could see Trenton’s headlights as he was pulling back in. Since we were pressed for time and couldn’t tell Trenton about the little girl zombie in the house, we came up with a plan in the thirty seconds allowed to us from the ‘quick time’ event. We tried to squash the zombie by trying to combine our weights and jumping up and down on the couch and have it go through the attic floor, but that only resulted in the couch leg getting stuck in the attic door. At that point, we went with plan B. We were going to bumrush out of the attic and move as fast as we could towards Trenton’s car, not caring about any noise we made along the way. Harley essentially slammed the attic door open again after we tossed the couch aside, rushing down the ladder, police flashlight out and on its strobe setting, with me coming behind him and protecting Allison while Emma was sat on Harley’s shoulders. The problem we hadn’t considered was that my eyes hadn’t completely adjusted to the dark, but Harley’s had. Harley was blinded to the point he could barely see a foot in front of him. When his charge all but halted, so that our momentum and element of surprise weren’t completely lost, I reached into my bag and put a bayonet in Allison’s hands and pushed Harley in the direction we needed to go, also helping to guide his arm to shoot at anything that got too close. We didn’t spot the little girl zombie on our sprint to the car, but, with my help, Harley was able to empty five bullets into the zombies that were still milling around from when I stomped around earlier. He was down to one bullet when we climbed in, whereas me and Trenton hadn’t fired a shot yet. 

Just as Harley was sliding Emma off of his shoulders and put her into his lap, I was yelling that we needed to get out of there. Trenton started to back up while asking us what was going on, but his attention was quickly stolen by something landing on the hood of his car. It was a little girl, dressed in ratty clothing, unhealthily pale skin, bright red eyes, and had nails that were about a foot long in length. “Where is my, Mommy!?” She screamed at us, which caused us all to start panicking. Trenton drove as fast as he could away from the house, hoping to shake her off by driving like a maniac. Harley was trying to keep Emma safe, taking rather audible note of the fact that the zombie (which we were OOC referring to as the Little Witch, cause we started comparing her to some combination of a Little Sister from Bioshock and the Witch from L4D) was looking at him and Emma. I told Harley and Emma to cover their ears and I took aim with my Smith & Wesson Model 15. I fired twice, the first shot embedding itself in the Little Witch’s stomach, and the other missing entirely. The infected girl didn’t seem very bothered by the bullet lodged in her sternum and began cutting through the windshield with her nails. Harley took aim with his last bullet and missed as well, and spent the rest of his turn trying to find his bullets so he could reload. Trenton was too busy trying not to hit zombies in the road and trying to shake the Little Witch off of us to reach for his Glock. Before I could get another shot off, the Little Witch finished cutting through the windshield and proceeded to strike at Harley. “There you are, Mommy!” was what she yelled as she thrust her clawed hands at him. Luckily, only one of her nails struck him, piercing through his side and missing all of his organs. The other nine nails went through the seat and were just a few inches short of hitting me as well, and, while I was trying to readjust myself to get a better shot, Harley took a reaction and snatched my gun away from me. He put the barrel of the revolver under the Little Witch’s chin and pulled the trigger, killing her instantly.

After that, we drove around while trying to find a place to sleep for the night after patching up Harley. While we were driving, a broadcast came over the radio from the military, stating that those within a large radius of the Arnold Air Force Base were going to be detained. Trenton eventually came across an abandoned Taco Bell, and, after we cleared it out, we all slept in the freezer after making sure it wasn’t on. Harley, Trenton, and I set up a rotating schedule where one of us would keep watch for two hours before switching out with one of the other two. Harley took the first watch, which went by without incident. Trenton took the second watch and learned quite a bit. He watched as a zombie managed to figure out how to open the door to a pick-up truck, which had the corpse of someone who had shot themselves inside of it. Then, after eating what was left of the brain of the corpse, the zombie began fiddling with the keys to the truck, eventually turning it on. It then pushed the body out and began experimenting with reversing and driving back and forth for about 10 minutes. Trenton had a bright idea, and tore off one of the seat cushions from inside the Taco Bell and drew the zombie over by stepping out of the restaurant. The zombie got out of the truck and actually had a small conversation with him. “I can sense your life.” “And you’re a lot more intelligent than I thought you would be.” “That’s understandable. My intelligence is fueled by the Hunger, and it grows stronger with time and meals.” “Ah. I suddenly feel very dead inside with that knowledge.” “You certainly don’t smell dead.” At that point, the zombie rushed Trenton, but he managed to kick the infected in the knee, knocking it down to the ground. Trenton then took the cushion, put it up to the zombie’s head, then put the barrel of his Glock up against it and fired, the seat silencing the bullet. When it was time for my shift, I came out of the freezer and Trenton explained to me what happened. Nothing happened on my shift (besides seeing that zombie’s in sunlight are a lot slower than they are at night), so I got everyone awake and we started thinking of what the plan for the day was. There were plenty of gas stations and liquor stores in the area, so we made some plans to hit those up after a while. The three of us eventually managed to jury-rig a way to hitch Trenton’s car to the truck, making plans to start a small convoy/train of cars. 

When we were in the middle of that conversation, the sound of treads coming over the bridge caught our attention. This Taco Bell was technically on one of the main roads in town and was right before a bridge that went over the interstate and connected to the part of town where the Wal-Mart and Home Depot were. Harley, Trenton, Allison, and Emma made it back inside and proceeded to hide in the freezer, whereas I tripped and landed on my face instead of making it inside. Since there was no way I’d be able to make it inside before whatever was coming across the bridge could spot me, I climbed into the truck and tried to hide. A cursory peek allowed me to see that it was, in fact, a tank rolling up that was causing the noise, followed by several jeeps and men on foot. The men began to fan out and search the area, two of which were coming towards me. I had fifteen minutes to figure out what I was going to do, and, since I couldn’t think of any obvious ideas to hide or disguise myself, I just held my hands in the air and yelled, “Wait! Please don’t shoot!” They aimed at me but quickly became very uninterested in me. I told them that I was not infected and what had happened to me since yesterday, taking care not to mention the others in my group and implying I was by myself. The military personnel informed me that I was free to continue surviving if I wanted and told me to not bother them again unless I was actually infected in some way shape or form. When I brought up the announcement about the detainment, they explained they were only on the lookout for those who were infected but hadn’t turned yet. They couldn’t give two shits about me or anyone that wasn’t infected, and they weren’t going to help or harm me as long as I stayed out of their way.

I went inside and informed the others on what happened, and we were more than a little perturbed about what the military personnel had told me. We decided to go check out the nearest gas station to clear our heads and get some more supplies. We left Allison and Emma behind in the freezer, Harley leaving them his gun and bag, only taking a large knife with him. As we got up to the gas station (a Circle K that was across the street from the Taco Bell), Trenton moved in first, noting that there was about five zombies inside the building. After alerting them to his presence, he moved back towards the pumps to draw them out of the building and make them easier to deal with. Harley was still by the door and I was keeping a lookout further back, essentially hiding behind a car that was parked by the air pump. Before the zombies that Trenton had spotted could file out and attack us, a loud grunting sound began to come out of the Circle K. I, believing this could be some special kind of infected like the Little Witch from last night, moved pretty much across the street and kept my gun aimed at the door. Trenton held his position, and Harley tried his best to get as far as he could away from the gas station.

 What came out of the building was what we would later call a Tanker. It could best be described as an infected riot cop, that stood at about 7′9″, weighed about 800 lbs, had a reach of about 5 feet, and its riot armor had melded with its skin and grown alongside it to become a monster of muscle and armor. Harley barely managed to dodge out of the way of the Tanker’s first strike, which broke the asphalt where he had just been standing like it was nothing. Trenton and I shared a similar idea about luring the Tanker over to the pumps and finding some way to blow them and it up. I fired a shot and it bounced right off of its arm didn’t take its attention off of Harley. Trenton spent his turn actually prying off one of the pipe covers that connected the pumps to the tank of gasoline that was under them. Harley continued moving back and trying to dodge the Tanker’s attacks, but eventually fell down and had no choice but to block an overhand strike from the infected. The blow broke both of Harley’s arms, the pure force of the attack fracturing the bones in several spots, and sent him rolling for a few seconds before he came to a rest near Trenton. Since he didn’t have the luxury of carrying the med-kit or time, Trenton, realizing he didn’t have anything to start a fire with, stabbed his pocket knife into his phone, causing the lithium battery to spark and oxidize, and dropped it into the pipe. As the tank of gasoline was halfway between the gas station and pumps, the Tanker was actually in the perfect position for the plan, as, when the explosion went off, not only was the Tanker caught up in the ensuing fireball, a large portion of asphalt was launched at it and tore off several of its armor plates, revealing it’s flesh underneath. Harley and Trenton managed to essentially brace for impact and got as far as they could from the suffering Tanker. A few bullets from me and Trenton managed to put the mutated creature out of its misery.

And... that’s where we’ve left off for the moment. I hope that entertained or intrigued you in some way shape form or fashion.

[travelonlinetipsofficial]

Travel news live: 24 red-list countries could turn green

New Post has been published on https://www.travelonlinetips.com/travel-news-live-24-red-list-countries-could-turn-green/

Travel news live: 24 red-list countries could turn green

The UK’s traffic light travel system could be simplified to just two lists – a ‘go’ and a ‘no go’, similar to the current green and red lists, say sources.

In the wake of reports by the BBC and The Telegraph last week, The Telegraphis now reporting that double-jabbed travellers will be able to take cheaper lateral flow tests before and after travel to the UK from abroad.

Paul Charles, CEO of the PC Agency, has told the paper that up to 24 countries could move straight from the former red list to a new green list, with the red list expected to be “significantly shrunk”.

The government last week declined to comment on any big changes, saying: “Our international travel policy is guided by one overwhelming priority – protecting public health.

“The next formal checkpoint review will take place by 1 October 2021.”

In other news, more than 300,000 people are estimated to have broken quarantine rules between March and May.

Follow the latest travel news below:

Key points

New traffic system could be narrowed down to two lists: safe and unsafe

More than 300,000 suspected of breaking quarantine rules March-May

Fail to simplify travel rules and UK will ‘fall behind’, warns Heathrow boss

Show latest update

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Dominican Republic, Indonesia and the Maldives ‘should come off red list’, says expert

A dozen high-profile countries – all with either a big population or very popular with British travellers, or both – should be removed from the UK’s red list, a data analyst and travel expert has said.

Tim White, who tweets as @TWMCLtd, has given his expertise to The Independent.

These are: Argentina, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Kenya, Maldives, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

He notes, though: “If cautious, Mexico may need to stay a while longer, and Dominican Republic needs help to conduct genomic sequencing.

“Some scientists will say it’s a risk taking South American countries [including Argentina and Peru] off the red list with Gamma, Lambda and the latest “Mu” variant all in circulation to some degree.

“But most scientists believe most of the variants circulating in South America are not more likely to evade vaccines so there is an argument to allow them all off red.”

Simon Calder13 September 2021 16:23

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Argentina, Egypt, Oman and South Africa could come off red list, says expert

South Africa, Argentina and Pakistan are among the countries that should be removed from the UK’s red list, travel industry expert Paul Charles has said.

“There have been no new Covid variants of concern since 11th May,” he tweeted this morning.

“Our analysis shows 24 countries should come off the UK red list immediately, including Argentina, Egypt, Kenya, Namibia, Oman, Pakistan, SouthAfrica, Uruguay, Zambia.”

Charles’s company The PC Agency has researched the red list countries with low enough cases and no variants of concern, to determine possible candidates for a move from the current 62-strong red list to a new “safe” list, that would replace the current green and amber lists.

“With no new variants of concern since early May, and with the UK having higher levels of delta infection than most other countries, there is no reason to keep so many countries on the red list. It can be sharply reduced in size to help global Britain, as well as the travel sector, recover strongly,” Charles told The Telegraph.

“There is no scientific basis anymore on which to prevent travel and enforce hotel quarantine from a vast swathe of the existing list.”

Lucy Thackray13 September 2021 15:41

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Honolulu’s council votes to destroy Hawaiian island’s ‘stairway to heaven’ hiking trail

The Hawaiian island of Oahu is set to destroy its popular ‘Stairway to heaven’ hiking trail, arguing that it is too dangerous and that the influx of tourists climbing it are damaging the natural landscape.

Honolulu’s Haiku Stairs

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Honolulu City Council voted unanimously last Wednesday to remove the ascending mountain trail, also known as the Haiku Stairs, in a move that will need to be approved by the mayor to go ahead.

The “Stairway to Heaven” path draws around 4,000 hikers every year for its “Instagram-worthy” vistas – even though climbing them is already against the law. Honolulu officials have set aside $1m for their demolition.

Lucy Thackray13 September 2021 15:08

1631540428

School trips to the UK hit by Brexit rule change

After The Independent revealed how a Brexit promise will damage inbound tourism still further, reader Jackie Clare has tweeted: “Sad and ill-informed.”

From 1 October, EU citizens will no longer be able to travel to the UK without a full passport.

The move, fulfilling a government Brexit pledge, is expected to reduce inbound tourism – currently 86 per cent down on 2019 levels – still further. It will especially deter school groups from travelling to the UK.

Ms Clare wrote: “The end of an era. The secondary school trip to the UK was a rite of passage for many schools in the EU.

“This requirement, affecting school children on a short trip, is threatening to weaken the link between English language-learning and visiting the UK.”

Simon Calder13 September 2021 14:40

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Anyone with ‘a kids’ chemistry set from Argos’ could pose as PCR tester, says industry boss

“Anyone could buy a kids’ chemistry set from Argos and set themselves up as a PCR testing company,” a senior travel industry figure has claimed.

With government leaks indicating that mandatory PCR testing for vaccinated travellers may soon be scrapped, Danny Callaghan, chief executive of the Latin American Travel Association, said: “Sajid Javid said that he wants to remove the PCR testing requirement ‘as soon as I possibly can’, but let’s not forget that this is really only an effort to scrap a scheme that has been a government shambles from day one.

“With testing completely unregulated it seems almost as though anyone could buy a kids’ chemistry set from Argos and set themselves up as a PCR testing company, listed on the government website, charging exorbitant fees and not actually delivering any meaningful tests. Or often not actually delivering the test kits at all.”

Simon Calder13 September 2021 13:57

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Pakistan, South Africa and Turkey among most asked-about red list nations

More than one billion people live in the 62 nations on the UK’s current red list of high-risk countries.

At present, arrivals to the UK from these locations must quarantine in a hotel for 11 nights.

The Independent has compiled a list of the 25 nations most frequently named by readers requesting information: Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, the Maldives, Mexico, Montenegro, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Seychelles, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and Turkey.

The paper reported that as many as 24 countries could fall off the red list if the beta variant is a key influence on the new “unsafe” list of countries – and said that two government sources had suggested Turkey could be removed from the red list at the next update.

Here is the current status of the UK’s red list, and the rules attached:

Simon Calder13 September 2021 13:22

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Law firm brings action against UK government over hotel quarantine

London-based PGMBM has previously sought a judicial review of the regulations which require travellers coming from a red list country to spend 11 nights in a quarantine hotel at a cost of £2,285.

This rule is applicable for everyone, even if they are fully vaccinated and test negative for Covid.

PGMBM said a blanket approach was an “unlawful deprivation of liberty” for those who were inoculated against Covid-19 and a violation of their human rights.

Lucy Thackray13 September 2021 11:39

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Testing adds around £100 to cost of trips

Testing is typically adding £100 to the cost of trips abroad, a Business Travel Association (BTA) survey claims.

For passengers going from the UK to destinations for which a PCR test is required, the typical test cost between £50 and £75.

One in 50 travellers also reported that their results did not come back before their flight.

Two-thirds paid less than £50 for their “test to fly” on returning to the UK, while most respondents paid between £31 and £75 for the “day two” PCR test.

Only 24 per cent of those surveyed say it was checked on arrival by UK Border Force.

More than 500 travellers responded to the online poll.

Clive Wratten, chief executive of the BTA, said: “We hope our data revealed today will provide a stark reminder to the government of the many pitfalls of the UK’s current approach to global travel and testing, and we continue to call on them to get global travel moving safely, smoothly and securely once again.”

Simon Calder13 September 2021 11:04

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More than 300,000 suspected to have broken quarantine rules between March and May

Nearly a third of travellers arriving into the UK between March and May are suspected to have broken quarantine rules, new figures show.

Figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request show that 301,076 cases of suspected quarantine rule breakers were passed to investigators during 17 March and 31 May, reported the BBC.

It is unclear how many of these were determined to have broken the rules.

The figures “confirm our worst fears” about the government’s “lax border policy”, said the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, accusing the Home Office of “gross negligence”.

The Home Office has said it aims to follow up all suspects of breaking quarantine with a home visit.

Lucy Thackray13 September 2021 10:28

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Passengers turned away from EU flights due to invalid passports

Several disappointed travellers have contacted The Independent after being turned away from their holiday flights to the European Union this weekend

They had inadvertently breached the EU rules on passport validity that the UK helped to draft while a member, and to which it is now subject.

The European Union says: “If you are a non-EU national wishing to visit or travel within the EU, you will need a passport valid for at least three months after the date you intend to leave the EU country you are visiting, and which was issued within the previous 10 years.”

The Independent has been warning about the passport problems precipitated by Brexit since the start of the year.

But when do you need to renew your passport, post-Brexit?

Simon Calder13 September 2021 09:51

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[rulystuff]

https://servicemeltdown.com/cuba-and-venezuela-the-western-hemispheres-axis-of-evil/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/cuba-and-venezuela-the-western-hemispheres-axis-of-evil/

CUBA AND VENEZUELA: THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE'S AXIS OF EVIL

Editor’s note: President Trump’s speech before the United Nation’s General Assembly, September 24, 2019, made clear that Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro’s Marxist regime was being held afloat with the help of his Cuban communist comrades: “The Dictator Maduro is a Cuban puppet, protected by Cuban bodyguards, hiding from his own people, while Cuba plunders Venezuela’s oil wealth to sustain its own corrupt rule,” said the President.

Former bus driver Maduro, a lackey of his equally corrupt predecessor Hugo Chavez, who came to power in a sham election in 2018, has made a shambles of a nation with the largest oil reserves in the world [Venezuela, by all accounts, has over 300 billion barrels of oil in the ground or roughly 33 billion more barrels of oil than does runner-up Saudi Arabia]. Yet, the country is beset by widespread shortages of food, water, supplies, electricity, and medicines due to widespread corruption and economic mismanagement. The rate of hyperinflation, generally defined as an inflation rate of over 50% per month, reached 80,000% in 2018. At this rate, consumers see the price of goods double every two weeks. It is a disgusting sight to see hungry people acting like mangy dogs scavenging through trash dumpsters looking for something to eat. Citizen protests, when they do flare up, are suppressed by the armed forces, the National Guard, and the colectivos or armed thugs that operate with impunity and with the full support of the local police. Perversely and emblematic of his paranoia, Maduro makes use of Cuban intelligence operatives to spy on his own armed forces looking for the disaffected. Tragically, there is more to Venezuela than an economic meltdown. Venezuela is riven by a homicide rate of sixty murders per 100,000 population [the country now averages over 17,000 homicides per year] second only in the world to the debauched and economic basket case of El Salvador which averages 82 murders per 100,000 population. It is no wonder that over four million Venezuelans have fled the nation in despair.

CUBA: VENEZUELA’S PARTNER IN CRIME

Marxist Cuba is literally Venezuela’s partner in crime. The Cubans are expert at exporting revolution and the Maduro regime has benefited from the Cubans’ track record and expertise in cracking down on political dissidents. Over the years the Cuban military has actively supported communist uprisings in Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, and Bolivia. The Cubans also fought against the United States in Vietnam, and on the side of the Arabs during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. More recently, the Cuban regime has deployed soldiers to help prop up the murderous gangs of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Cuba has not been immune to the occasional tug of freedom by its citizens. Recently, it has had to deal with its own civil unrest born of the miserable living conditions on the island accentuated by severe shortages of food and medicines. Against this backdrop, the Cuban government’s approach to grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic has been to obstinately refuse to purchase vaccines on the international market choosing instead to deploy its meager resources in developing its own vaccine which it claims to be 100% effective. Nothing seems to work, however. Government officials have now turned to blaming healthcare professionals for the state’s sorry response to the pandemic which has only motivated many physicians to attempt to set the record straight. “I want to denounce the collapse of our health system in our hospital and many others.” So said Dr. Hector Alejandro Santiesteban Fuentes at the contemptibly but aptly named General Hospital Vladimir Ilich Lenin. “We are afraid but we are not afraid of the pandemic, we are afraid of the government…” said Dr. Rafael Alejandro Fuentes Sanchez. Dr. Sanchez further acknowledged the possibility of government retaliation for speaking out.

Despite the massive protests across the island, Cuba’s heavy hand has rather easily handily suppressed most protests. With the help of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) People’s Armed Police (PAP), this paramilitary unit, which was instrumental in suppressing protesters in Hong Kong, has played a key role in training Cuba’s Black Berets or Avispas Negras – black wasps – in the fine art of crowd control.

APPEASING MARXIST REGIMES IS A LOSING PROPOSITION

In the light of this axis of evil which connects Cuba and Venezuela one has to question the wisdom of maintaining anything resembling diplomatic-level relations with either country. In Cuba’s case, this came about due to the folly and naivete of President Obama’s wanting to make nice with Castro’s Mafia while attempting to leave his mark on history. Well, he certainly has accomplished that. Cuba is no freer now than before his doing the wave with Raul Castro at a baseball game in Havana. And, in fact, one can argue that the Cuban government has grown bolder in the exploitation of its citizens since President Obama’s visit.

People-to-people travel to Cuba has been banned for U.S. citizens yet there are still twelve, purposely vague, travel conditions under which travel is allowed. Failing that, of course, all a U.S. citizen who has a burning desire to travel to the hellhole that is Cuba has to do is to travel to a third country like Mexico or Canada on his way to Cuba. Tourism to Cuba creates a pernicious problem as the hard currency brought into Cuba by tourists continues to finance Cuba’s narco-trafficking business and its support for the murderous Maduro regime. For their part, tour operators, commercial airlines, and American tourists need to understand how they are being played for the benefit of Castro’s Mafia.

As to ending the embargo, there should be no such plan without reciprocal actions by the Cubans. For starters, there needs to be verifiable evidence of democratic reforms, including freedom of the press, and the conduct of free elections. None of that is likely to happen, however, as the Cuban “constitution”, such as it is, sanctions only the political activities of the Cuban Communist Party. A move toward democratic freedoms is not the only condition the United States should seek if the two nations are indeed to play “nice” with each other. The release of political dissidents, and the return of thugs like the Puerto Rican, Victor Manuel Gerena sought by the FBI for bank robbery, and the Black Panther assassin Asata Shakur who is wanted by the FBI for the murder of a State Trooper in New Jersey should also be part of any final resolution. Moreover, the Cubans need to indemnify those Americans as well as Cubans whose property was confiscated by the Castro regime to the tune of approximately $8 billion.

The axis of evil is on a roll: first Cuba, then Venezuela. Now upheavals are being witnessed in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. And, although the accelerant for these upheavals differs from country to country the common thread providing the spark is Marxism. The United States will either be the beneficiary of the economic prosperity and political stability long sought by our neighbors south of the border or be left to handle the menace of Marxism on its own.