“This election is not, however, about the same old fights between Democrats and Republicans. This election is different. It really is about who we are as a nation. It’s about millions of Americans coming together to say: We are better than this. We won’t let this happen in America.” — Hillary Clinton
She’s right. On the one hand, of course every election is about who we are as a nation, as expressed in terms of the laws and policies we enact at home, as well as the actions we take abroad. But this one is different. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, in covering Clinton’s Tuesday night victory speech, recognized that she had characterized the coming campaign as a “national identity” election.
When Barack Obama became the first African-American president, it was a historic milestone, just as the election of the first female president would be. On the one hand, in addition to what he represents by the mere fact of his presidency, Obama has long spoken about our national identity in a more inclusive way than other political figures. This has had a profound effect on the way many Americans—in particular those who are members of minority groups—understand their relationship to their country.
However, his 2008 opponent, John McCain, did not reject the idea of America as a place where we judge people, to paraphrase the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin or their faith. Remember that one of McCain’s own supporters, at a rally less than a month before the election, declared to the crowd: "I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not, he's not, uh—he's an Arab.” The Republican nominee took the microphone back, corrected the previous speaker, and praised his opponent as “a decent family man [and] citizen.”
Rather than heighten—and use for his own political gain—the fear of the ‘Other’ that animates too many in our country, McCain did the exact opposite. In response, his own erstwhile supporters booed him for it and called out, in reference to then-Sen. Obama: “Terrorist!” Fast forward eight years, and ask yourself what Donald Trump would have done.
Medgar Evers memorial statue by sculptor Ed Dwight at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi
Medgar Evers memorial statue by sculptor Ed Dwight at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi
On June 12, 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, a shot rang out and the life of Medgar Wiley Evers was forever stilled. Evers knew he faced death for daring to fight for voting rights, and striving to end segregation and injustice in the South.
"If I die," he said, "It will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as soldiers in Vietnam." So spoke NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers as he moved about the beleaguered city of Jackson, Miss., in the long hot summer of 1963. "I'm looking to be shot," he told a friend, "any time I step out of my car." And when, on Tuesday, June 11, he dropped a second friend off after a meeting, he confided, "Everywhere I go, somebody has been following me."
Fifteen minutes later, shortly after midnight on June 12, Evers stepped out of his car in the driveway of his home on Guynes Street. A white man, hidden in a honeysuckle thicket 150 yards away, fixed him in the cross hairs of his high-powered rifle and fired one bullet, splattering his life and blood on the concrete driveway.
Myrlie Evers, who had been expecting the worst, ran out of the house, screaming, "Medgar," she said later, "was lying there on the doorstep in a pool of blood. I tried to get the children away, but they saw it all."
For decades his wife Myrlie sought justice for Medgar and fought to see Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith convicted for his assassination.
A 13-foot tall bronze statue of Evers (pictured above)—the work of African-American sculptor Ed Dwight—was installed at Alcorn State University, Evers’ alma mater, in 2013. Medgar Evers College was founded in his name in 1970 as part of the City University of New York (CUNY). There are other memorials to Evers, but the most important is the one we often overlook:
Voting.
As we watch millions of voters head to the polls in an election year—many of them African-American, other people of color, and female—too often we forget that those ballots cast were paid for in blood. By exercising the franchise, we actively pay tribute to those men and women who made it possible for us to do so.
Approximately 20 people are dead inside Pulse nightclub, Orlando Police Chief John Mina said Sunday morning, just hours after a shooter opened fire in the club. At least 42 people have been transported for medical treatment, he said.
Police have shot and killed the gunman, Mina told reporters.
Pulse is a gay bar, but without further information we don’t know if that was relevant in the gunman’s choice to target it. As usual in mass shooting situations, expect conflicting reports and changing casualty counts.
Proposed new element names. Check out compoundchem.com for more info.
Proposed new element names. Check out compoundchem.com for more info.
While I was reading this morning’s crop of pundits, CNN began reporting on events at a night club in Orlando, Florida. There’s still a chance that this is more smoke than fire, a chance that it’s not a hate crime, and a chance that the sounds heard nearby don’t represent some plan to extend the toll of injury through some sort of explosives. Right now, they’re not saying that anyone is dead. I’m going to carry on reading, and hope it stays that way.
You don’t want to start a Sunday morning this way. You don’t want to start any morning this way. Welcome to America.
The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel is now closed, its windows clouded over by sea salt. Only a faint outline of the gold letters spelling out T-R-U-M-P remains visible on the exterior of what was once this city’s premier casino.
Not far away, the long-failing Trump Marina Hotel Casino was sold at a major loss five years ago and is now known as the Golden Nugget.
But if you think those failures hurt Trump, you’ve missed the whole picture of how CEO’s work in modern America.
… even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.
Trump treated his failing business not as patients that needed more care, but as foundering ships into which he could hurl all the anvils he had handy. The nature of corporations means that, while they do a good job of isolating both officers and investors from attack from those outside the organization, they’re incredibly vulnerable in the short-term to sabotage from within. At their heart, corporations are wealth-concentration engines, designed along the assumption that those on the receiving end of the machine’s largess are in it together. Trump didn’t play it that way.
Mr. Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed. …
During a decade when other casinos here thrived, Mr. Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.
All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.
You want to know why Trump values his own name at $3 billion? There it is. The impression that he knows what he’s doing has allowed Trump to defy regulators, roll over boards, and turn even the most poorly-run business into a means of adding more gilt—though never more guilt—to his life.
So long as there are suckers ready to trust him, Trump rolls along.
While I was reading this, the news started using the term “mass causalities.” Dammit. Come on in anyway. I’m going to keep reading.
Female life expectancy by country in 2009. The red blob in the middle east is Afghanistan.
Female life expectancy by country in 2009. The red blob in the middle east is Afghanistan.
With the democratic nomination now in hand, expect to see a lot of material on differences between women and men. And by a lot, I mean ugly. It’s a subject ripe for exploitation and pseudoscience by the usual suspects. No doubt some of it will be beyond the pale, and some of that unsightly stuff will be mainstreamed or otherwise brought in from the cellar and shoved into respectable public discourse. So let’s skip through a few relevant facts of the matter.
Humans are sexually dimorphic primates. That means there are differences in form and function between the two sexes, beyond the usual primary morphological characteristics that come to mind when surveying those differences. Specifically, physical anthropologists might say that women are, on average, about ten percent smaller, they have higher voices, and a more gracile build. For hominids, and certainly for modern humans, once differential risks like childbirth are mitigated via modern medical science, females also naturally live a little longer than their male counterparts.
There are plenty of animal species, past and present, where the female version’s range of physical features complete overlaps and is congruent with their intra-specific male counterparts, and many others where the dimorphism is reversed. Let’s look at a few examples below the fold.
The graph above shows Arctic sea ice extent as of May 31, 2016, along with daily ice extent data for four previous years. 2016 is shown in blue, 2015 in green, 2014 in orange, 2013 in brown, and 2012 in purple. The 1981 to 2010 average is in dark gray.
The graph above shows Arctic sea ice extent as of May 31, 2016, along with daily ice extent data for four previous years. 2016 is shown in blue, 2015 in green, 2014 in orange, 2013 in brown, and 2012 in purple. The 1981 to 2010 average is in dark gray.
Texas and France both saw massive flooding over the last few weeks, but they are worlds apart in more than just geography. The two regions are diametrically opposed when it comes to how many residents accept anthropogenic climate change. The rot starts at the top:
(Texas Gov) Abbott is a climate science denier. He maintains it is an open question whether human activity is influencing the climate. ... Smith not only subscribes to specious theories about climate change, he also harasses climate scientists in the federal government and at nonprofit organizations with whom he disagrees. Last fall, for example, he subpoenaed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for its internal emails and research data because he believes the agency’s scientists are using “skewed” data.
This week, several articles appeared on H. floreisensis, aka the Hobbits, suggesting that they were indeed full grown individuals that underwent island dwarfism.
“Patti was the first real FAA Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation,” said Jim Muncy, principal of space policy consultancy PoliSpace. Smith, he said, ... “The rest of the FAA didn’t always think much of their new spacey colleagues, but they grew to respect Patti’s tireless advocacy of the future of U.S. commercial space transportation.”
The Aedes mosquito, which can carry the Zika virus.
The Aedes mosquito, which can carry the Zika virus.
Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the most recent previous Green Spotlight. More than 25,315 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.
OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES
Steve Horn writes—After Keystone XL: TransCanada Building North American Fracked Gas Pipeline Empire: “Though President Barack Obama and his State Department nixed the northern leg of TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in November, the Canadian pipeline company giant has continued the fight in a federal lawsuit in Houston, claiming the Obama Administration has violated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As the NAFTA lawsuit works its way through pre-trial hearings and motions — and as Keystone XL has become a campaign talking point for Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump — TransCanada has quietly consolidated an ambitious North America-wide fracked gas-carrying pipeline network over the past half year. Since Keystone XL North got the boot, TransCanada has either won permits or announced business moves in Canada, the United States and Mexico which will vastly expand its pipeline footprint and ability to move gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) to market.”
Pakalolo writes—Centers for Disease Control blisters GOP Congress: Give us the Zika funds we need to protect women: “President Barack Obama requested $1.9 billion four months ago to research this horrible virus and prevent localized outbreaks. The request is what the CDC said they needed to hopefully nip this virus in the bud before this national emergency explodes out of control. But guess what? The GOP Congress pushed through a $622 million bill to combat the virus. The Senate? Not much better. News.Lee.Net reports: The 241-184 House vote broke mostly along party lines as Democrats lined up in opposition, heeding a White House veto threat and a warning from a top government health official that the bill wouldn't do enough to respond to the growing threat from Zika.”
A group of mostly Democratic lawmakers has introduced a bill taxing patients who rely on certain types of prescription painkiller to help fund addiction treatment. Some details:
A group of U.S. Senators has introduced legislation that would establish a federal tax on all opioid pain medication. If approved, it would be the first federal tax on a prescription drug levied directly on consumers.
The bill, called the Budgeting for Opiod Addiction Treatment Act, would create a one cent fee on each milligram of an active opioid ingredient in pain medication. … Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Angus King (I-ME), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) are co-sponsoring the bill ...
This could provide badly needed funds for treating dependencies caused by legally prescribed drugs. Some patients, including those in terminal stages of disease or other with other issues, would be able to recoup the expense, and those with comprehensive insurance would still probably pay the same co-pay. But the bill could represent a substantial added expense for other patients:
"I don't understand how, in a world where we are getting upset about the 'tampon tax' we find it perfectly socially acceptable to tax chronic pain patients to pay for addiction treatment," said Amanda Siebe, who suffers from Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) … "With less than 5% of chronic pain patients becoming addicted to opiates, this leaves the other 95%, who are often some of the poorest in America and have nothing to do with addiction or addiction treatment, to pick up the tab ...
The proposed tax is one cent per milligram. Which means, depending on how the bill (Full text) is finally written and assuming it ever passes, it might penalize patients who use less powerful painkillers, including some that are considered less addictive. The newer opiod Tramadol comes in 50 to 100 mg doses and there’s a 300 mg extended release version. Hydrocodone and oxycodone are most often prescribed in doses ranging from 5 to 15 mg. Do the math.
The FBI would like to expand the national security letter statute, and the Senate is debating two proposals to do just that. The folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation quite rightly say this is a terrible idea that extends the reach of an unconstitutional law with added risks to civil liberties. EFF is part of a coalition that on Monday announced it will oppose this expansion.
NSLs are administrative subpoenas used by the feds to obtain information related to national security from “wire or electronic communication service providers.” This information is limited to “name, address, length of service, and local and long distance toll billing records.” For example, the NSL can request where emails originated and were sent but not access their content.
No judicial approval is required. NSLs typically include a nondisclosure provision that warns the recipient not to discuss with anyone the contents of the letter or even that a letter has been received. Effectively, a gag order. Tens of thousands of these NSLs have been issued since 2001, but the public has seen no more than a handful.
The FBI has been challenged in court over the constitutionality of including these non-disclosure requirements. So far, the challenges haven’t survived at the appeals court level.
Andrew Crocker at EFF writes:
The Senate’s proposed changes would allow the FBI to get a much larger range of Internet records, such as email to/from headers, Internet browsing history, and more, all of which it could not previously get with an NSL. Particularly given the FBI’s well-documented history of abusing NSLs, EFF opposes expanding the scope of this unconstitutional surveillance power to include even more revealing records. Yesterday we joined with a broad coalition of organizations and companies to urge the Senate not to pass these proposals.
Amending a surveillance law to let the FBI issue warrantless demands for new types of Internet users’ records—without even needing to go before a judge—is a significant expansion of that law. But to hear FBI Director James Comey explain it, the bills amount to a mere “typo fix.” That’s because the FBI thinks it was already entitled to get these records using NSLs, and Congress simply messed up when it drafted the law. The problem with this theory? The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which issues definitive interpretations of the law for the rest of the executive branch, looked at the issue in 2008 and concluded the FBI was flat wrong[.pdf].
So now the FBI wants to fix “the typo” and legally get the information that it was stretching the meaning of the statute to obtain in the past. This without judicial review and hidden from the citizenry. As EFF says, this is a worrying attempt to expand the FBI’s surveillance authority. It ought to be cast into outer darkness.
The guys on Wall Street were happy enough when robots were only replacing the people who cut their Brooks Brothers suits and creating custom platinum cases for their phones. That was called optimizing profit. But now, automation is coming for them.
Are the humans of finance an endangered species? ...
Squeezed by low interest rates, shrinking trading revenue, and nimbler technology-based competitors, banks are racing to remake themselves as digital companies to cut costs and better serve clients. In other words, they’re preparing for the day that machines made by men and women take over more of what used to be the sole province of humans: knowledge work. Call it self-disruption.
Wall Street already had a high degree of automation. It had to. Modern trading takes place in milliseconds, and billions of dollars depend on who has the fastest connection, the quickest calculations, and the best algorithms for predicting just the right moment to buy or sell. But traders still like to get their slow carbon-based fingers into the game. How else to justify that next Ferrari-sized bonus? Now the kill-all-humans attitude is extending into the rest of the financial game.
In February, State Street executives told analysts that after spending five years upgrading technology systems, they realized how much more could be done. “We have 20,000 manual interventions on trades every day,” said Michael Rogers, president of the Boston bank. “There’s a huge opportunity to digitize that and move it forward electronically.”
One thing that hasn’t changed on Wall Street? “Huge opportunity” means “get rid of a lot of people.” More than 6,000 of them, in this case.
At first it may be tempting to see this as fat cats finally being on the receiving end of some of the misery they’ve been doling out—chickens, meet roost, etc. However, the end result of this is to make the concentration of wealth even more concentrated.
The 0.1 percent are becoming the 0.001 percent. And that’s only the start.
