In the News

There's so much to read today, it feels sort of like a feast day.

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First up is a Smithsonian article by John Barry, author of the engrossing "The Great Influenza."  The article is receiving attention today because it details how a government that lies or distorts the facts about an epidemic can make its effects so much worse than they would have been otherwise.

The last five paragraphs are particularly interesting.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/

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Next, Paul Solman for the PBS NewsHour interviews David Enrich about his new book, "Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction."  The bank seems to have been helping launder money far longer than I ever knew.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-book-explores-the-schemes-and-scandals-of-deutsche-bank

Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/us/trump-deutsche-bank-tax-returns.html

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Finally, for me Anne Applebaum's writing is simultaneously dry and overwhelmingly intense.  (After 14 years of trying I still haven't finished "Gulag".)  She has just been to Venezuela.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-book-explores-the-schemes-and-scandals-of-deutsche-bank

The country’s National Assembly, which is controlled by the opposition, passed special measures to address the health crisis; the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Maduro, rejected them.

Most Venezuelans—80 percent according to a recent survey—now rely on boxes of food, containing staples such as rice, grain, or oil, from the government. Agencies known as Local Committees for Supply and Production hand the packages out to people who register for a Patria (“fatherland”) card or smartphone app, which are also used to monitor participation in elections... The hungrier people get, the more control the government exerts, and the easier it is to prevent them from protesting or objecting in any other way.

Like the destruction of [Venezuela's] economy, the destruction of the political culture took some time, because there were several decades' worth of democratic institutions to destroy.

...once in power [Chávez] slowly changed the rules, eventually making it almost impossible for anyone to beat him. In 2004, he packed the Supreme Court; in 2009, he altered the electoral system.

Chávez began to transfer the wealth of the country to his cronies. This process was extraordinarily well documented, in real time, by many people.

And yet it happened anyway.

...the two strongmen [Chávez and Maduro] have made it almost impossible for the independent press to function, undermined the credibility of experts, and distracted supporters,

...Chávez made up names for his enemies...

Over time, Chávez successfully polarized society into groups of fanatical supporters and equally dedicated enemies—warring tribes who felt they had little in common.

Extrajudicial murders... are now common."

Echoing Hannah Ahrendt:

Polarization adds to this cynicism by creating suspicion and mistrust on both sides; people hear politicians shouting diametrically opposing slogans or presenting contradictory facts, and their instinct is to cover their ears.

The second person I met who started to cry was a translator... As the translator put my answer into Spanish, she broke down. “I suddenly thought of my nieces and nephews,” she told me afterward. “All of those hopeful young people, all gone.”

Give us your tired...

Thread by @Breznican:

When I got back to the office, a senior reporter said, “So you went out with Nick? How’d it go?”

“Great,” I said, not wanting to call it “boring.” “We got some good stuff.”

“What’d you think of Nick?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer this. There was expectation in the question.

Was there something wrong with Nick that I didn’t realize?

“He was cool,” I said. “Nice guy.”

The older reporter just stared at me. Reading me. “You know who he is, right?”

Climate change: Bill McKibben’s advice for activists - Vox

Climate change: Bill McKibben’s advice for activists - Vox:

Sean Illing
I worry a lot of people have trouble connecting the dots between these food supply disruptions and the political chaos that results from them. For instance, you point out how a 2010 heat wave in Russia, which wrecked their grain harvest, led directly to the Arab Spring. How did that happen and what are similar scenarios that could play out in the near future?

Bill McKibben
That happened because the Arab world is the biggest importer of grain from eastern Europe and when the price went way up for a loaf of bread, the predictable trouble ensued. Probably an even more dire example is what happened in Syria. In the early part of this century, we had the deepest drought ever recorded in the Fertile Crescent. That drove an immense number of Syrian farmers, maybe a million farm families, off their land and into the cities.

And there’s been a lot of academic work to establish that that was one of the key things that triggered the civil war (here and here). Syria was already a brutal and unstable place, unable to cope with this massive influx of people. And so many of those people were spun out into the rest of the world where they utterly discombobulated the politics of Western Europe inside of 18 months.

So we can look at what happened in Syria and Europe and expect much more of that in the century ahead. And I think the low end is 200 million climate refugees and the high end approaches a billion. So take the kind of upheaval that the wave of refugees out of Syria created and multiply it by a couple of hundred and ask yourself how that’s going to impact war and peace, or development, or any of the other things we desperately care about?

Empathy

I'm a software developer from the early 1980s - a stereotypical asocial type, not very empathetic, not very well able to understand the world from the perspective of another.

In 2015 an old friend boiled up on social media, aroused by the prospect of Syrian refugees coming to the United States. "Will you fight? I'll fight!" he announced to everyone.

He wasn't alone. Many in the U.S. saw the refugees as terrorists, because of 9/11, Afghanistan, etc., and as cowards, because they were fleeing. "I would stay and defend my home!"

The news at the time carried images of apartment buildings gutted and flattened. What was there to defend? Friends and families lay crushed beneath collapsed concrete or pulped by shrapnel. Who was left to protect?

It was noted even then that climate events had helped trigger the Syrian civil war. A severe drought had killed livestock, raised food prices, made farmers flee from their fields to the cities. The civil war, triggered in part by their government's inability to relieve suffering, had made Syrians of all kinds flee for their lives.

By 2015 I'd traveled a bit. At times I'd lived, very briefly, without heat and running water. That mild experience gave a weak sense of what the world must be like for those refugees. No heat, no water. No food. No shelter from the elements. No place to relieve oneself. No clean clothing - nothing clean.

Try to stop after each of those items. Imagine what your life would be like without that one thing.

I'm lucky: life gave me experiences to compensate a little for my lack of empathy.

This morning the news describes the destruction in California.

Shirley Hertel returned to her Thousand Oaks home Friday morning after watching it catch fire on TV just hours before.

The sight left her in tears.

...

“I don’t even know that I even understand what happened here,” [said Shirley Hertel, a Thousand Oaks resident].

She took the fire — and the water damage she had just fixed in the home last month — as a sign that she should leave the city she’s lived in her whole life, she said. Her other daughters and granddaughter live in Kentucky, she said, and she wants to watch her grow up.

“This will always be my home, but Kentucky is where I’ll live,” she said.

Her home has been destroyed. There is nothing left for her to defend in Thousand Oaks. She is fleeing California for Kentucky.

At least she doesn't need to worry whether Kentucky will let her in.

U.S. citizens are now among the planet's refugees. Will this concrete experience bring us a little empathy?

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The Oakies were also climate refugees. But the dust bowl was a long time ago. It can no longer give us empathy through experience.

What can bring us empathy is just as likely, in this case, to bring us a Malthusian mess, with less food, water and livable earth divided among more people.

Read it, and weep

We have become a heartless, stupid people. 'Vaya con Dios:' the impossible life of a judge on the US immigration frontline | US news | The Guardian:

This is not greatness

Dave Winer lays it out in Scripting News:

Jewish people hiding while an armed fascist hunts them. In America. My grandfather said it would happen. I didn't believe him. Here we are.

On CBS and CNN and probably others the panelists all agree that of course Trump is not responsible for the massacre in Pittsburgh and the bombings of Democratic leaders. This is the bubble they live in. It's fiction. Of course Trump is responsible for all of it.

Shame on Trump. Shame on us. Vote, to put a stop to this bullshit.

"Be a Good Ancestor"

China made solar panels cheap. Now it’s doing the same for electric buses. - Vox:

The rapidly growing megacity of Shenzhen, China, was choked with diesel pollution in the early 2010s. Though buses were just 0.5 percent of the city’s vehicles, they were responsible for 20 percent of the air pollution. So, as the World Resources Institute recounts, Shenzhen electrified them. All 16,359 of them.

It got there through some cleverness — they planned out charging infrastructure and pushed manufacturers to offer lifetime warranties on batteries — but mainly through government subsidies, which covered up to half the upfront cost of the vehicles.

In 2013, China was bopping along with 1,700 BEBs. ...it realized that its rapidly expanding urbanization could not continue to rely on diesel buses, lest it make an already crippling air-pollution problem even worse.

So it decided to make electric buses a thing. How? By dumping a giant pile of money on the problem, subsidizing the purchase of more than 350,000 BEBs in the following four years.

Other cities are beginning to get on the BEB bandwagon as well.

[BNEF writes that] “Paris aims to electrify all of its 4,500 buses by 2025, Copenhagen has committed to procure only zero-emission buses from 2019, and Los Angeles has the same target for its fleet of 2,200 buses by 2030.”

sometimes problems are big and urgent, you need scaled-up solutions quickly, and you just don’t have time to mess around. China didn’t nudge its solar industry, it kicked it in the pants. Now it’s doing the same to the BEB industry.

As economists will rush to point out, there have been enormous inefficiencies and waste along the way, money lost on graft or junk technology. Solar has often been poorly installed or curtailed. According to BNEF, some 43 percent of the BEBs allegedly produced in China in 2015 were basically fraudulent.

[China] rightly recognized that the problems (coal and diesel pollution) are intensely urgent and it’s not that huge a mystery how to solve them.

Amortized over the next 50 to 100 years, the next several generations of humanity, the cost of transition are a screaming deal at almost any price. It’s just a matter of learning (or perhaps relearning) to take a long-term view of human interests — to be a “good ancestor,” as they say.

The First White President

There is a lot to consider in this, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Lest I create the false impression of a disjointed argument, please note that these are just a few bones taken from a beautifully articulated skeleton. The First White President:

After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigeur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed.

Trump’s white support was not determined by income... Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly [emph. added] every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31).

And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.

Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on.

“A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”

It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible.

I suspect all of the above is just background, to enable the reader to see in a new light the material to come: I've just reached the point where Mr. Coates begins recounting statements of the (all-white) Democratic candidates in the 2016 Presidential election. Recommended reading.