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West Virginia: pandemic closures end Lottery’s 17-year streak of topping $1B in annual revenue – Yogonet International

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

ith West Virginia casinos and Limited Video Lottery (LVL) locations shut down for more than two months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a 17-year streak of state Lottery annual gross revenues topping $1 billion ended in June, according to figures from the state Lottery Commission.

Gross revenue for the 2019-20 budget year, which ended June 30, topped out at $955.7 million, a drop of $187.4 million from 2018-19, as reported by Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Lottery Director John Myers had predicted the end of the streak last month, after Gov. Jim Justices stay-at-home orders forced casinos and LVL locations to close as of March 18. The latter reopened on May 30, while the states five casinos were allowed to reopen on June 5.

Despite the long closures, and probably due to pent-up demand, June was an especially strong month for the Lottery, with gross revenue of $103.74 million up 10% from June 2019. LVL had a record month, with $40.88 million in revenue, up 27% from June 2019.

With the loss of four business days, and with social distancing restrictions, casino racetrack video lottery and table games revenue of $40.9 million was about $5.1 million less than June 2019 revenue. For the budget year, the states share of Lottery profits, $424.05 million, was down $163.12 million from the 2018-19 budget year.

Myers said iGaming virtual casino-style games played on computers or smartphones launched on July 15, and in its first five days produced $160,379 in revenue on $7.9 million of wagers. That was equivalent to what sports wagering took in for the week, Myers said, while noting, We know sports wagering doesnt have a whole lot to wager on right now. Currently, only blackjack and roulette are offered on iGaming platforms, but plans are to approve additional games.

Furthermore, the Lottery Commission revoked Thursday the Lottery license and LVL operating permits for Karens Cookie Carnival, and fined the LVL location $92,100 for multiple instances of cashing checks and extending credit to patrons. The action followed a six-month investigation of the Huntington LVL location, located inside a laundromat.

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West Virginia: pandemic closures end Lottery's 17-year streak of topping $1B in annual revenue - Yogonet International

What Manitoba casinos will look like when they reopen – CTV News Winnipeg

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

WINNIPEG -- Manitoba casinos have been given the green light to reopen, giving Manitobans the chance to play as early as Saturday.

Even though casinos will be allowed to reopen as of July 25, they will look different from when they closed down in March.

Following the release of Manitoba's Phase Four reopening plan which allows casinos to open at 30 per cent capacity the South Beach Casino and Resort has announced it will be opening at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

"There will be significant changes to our gaming and our property, in general, to ensure that all our patrons and our employees are as safe as possible," Victor Da Mata, the chief financial officer for South Beach, told CTV News.

Da Mata said physical distancing will be enforced in the casino and restaurant. All table games, including Black Jack and Roulette games, have been removed completely to allow for more physical distancing.

Some slot machines will be shut off to ensure there is proper distance between players; other machines have been moved to separate areas in the casino.

"We're taking safety very seriously," he said, adding there will be safety ambassadors walking around the casino to wipe and disinfect all machines when players finish.

All employees will be wearing facemasks, and there will be multiple hand sanitizing stations around the casino.

He said the casino gaming floor will also be sprayed with disinfectant each night.

"We recognize that our clientele, especially during the week, tends to lean more on the older side," Da Mata said.

"We know those people will be particularly impressed with our enhanced safety measures."

WINNIPEG CASINOS TO OPEN ON WEDNESDAY

A spokesperson for Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries told CTV News that Casinos of Winnipeg, including Club Regent and McPhillips Station Casino, will reopen on Wednesday, July 29. The casinos will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m.

The Club Regent Event Centre is temporarily closed until further notice.

A full list of measures put in place at the Casinos of Winnipeg can be found online.

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What Manitoba casinos will look like when they reopen - CTV News Winnipeg

The Automation Revolution That Wasnt? – National Review

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

(VasilyevD/iStock/Getty Images Plus)A new study casts doubts on the notion that automation is fundamentally altering American life.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLEEarly in the 2010s, academics and entrepreneurs began to raise concerns about the economic consequences of artificial intelligence. Technological advances, the thinking went, would soon render vast swathes of the labor force obsolete, deepening income inequality and destabilizing society. Proponents of the automation revolution thesis called on policymakers to cushion workers from the effects of technological displacement through fiscal transfers and increased job training for technical fields.

MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, a pioneer in the economics of AI, said in 2014 that job loss due to automation would be the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade. Six years into the decade in question, it is time to take stock of his prediction. Is it true, as former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers said, that rapid automation isnt some hypothetical future possibility but something thats emerging before us right now?

Not quite, say economists Keller Scholl and Robin Hanson. In a paper published last month, they found that over the past 20 years, both the level and growth rate of job automation have been more or less flat. According to their analysis of 1,505 expert reports published by the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), while many workers are losing their jobs to machines, they are doing so at roughly the same rate as in the past.

Among the 261 occupational characteristics reported by O*NET such as the degrees to which jobs require creativity, physical strength, or numeracy two stand out in predicting automation: the importance of machinery and the importance of routine tasks. Unsurprisingly, assembly-line workers and data-entry clerks are particularly vulnerable to automation.

But factory work has seen a trend of automation going back several decades. Those sounding the alarms on AI have warned that not only factory workers but also skilled knowledge workers would face competition from machines. Indeed, algorithms are said to be capable of customer service, medical diagnostics, and news writing, among numerous other tasks. Yet the analysis of Scholl and Hanson indicates that workers are far more likely to be displaced by relatively dated technologies: manufacturing machinery, word processors, and spreadsheets. In other words, the types of jobs being automated havent changed much, despite technological advances.

The study also considers the vulnerability of jobs to automation by computers and machine-learning algorithms in light of two metrics devised by academics, called computerizability and machine-learning suitability. While the potential of digital technologies and AI to replace a given occupation appears to be a strong predictor of automation, its significance disappears when other factors, such as routineness, are taken into consideration. Which is to say that the threat posed by artificial intelligence is more or less the same as that posed by older technologies.

The fundamental nature of automation hasnt changed over the past 20 years, Hanson tells National Review. Theres this AI media story thats been played over and over again for the last decade, and people are so familiar with it that they dont bother to research it.

These finding calls into question the need for policies to address automation, such as former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yangs flagship universal-basic-income (UBI) proposal. Endorsed by a growing number of politicians and technologists, UBI is premised on the belief that automation will eliminate millions of jobs. The evidence doesnt suggest the need for such large-scale structural changes to the U.S. economy, but the threat of automation serves as an easy talking point for politicians. People pitch what they want to pitch, and frame it in terms of automation, Hanson argues. You can be pretty confident that those recommending a certain policy response to AI wont change their minds in light of his studys findings.

Because it relies on subjective reporting, the paper does not definitively disprove the automation-revolution hypothesis. In general, it is hard to get an objective picture of the magnitude of automation, and it is possible that labor experts have underestimated the rate at which it is happening. Scholl and Hanson do find that the average job is significantly more susceptible to automation today than 20 years ago, even as the level of automation remains somewhat constant. And the papers central finding that jobs dependent on technology are more likely to be automated raises the possibility of a feedback loop in which automation begets automation, potentially spurring exponential growth in the number of jobs replaced by machines.

But that possibility remains remote, and the burden of proof lies with those arguing that technology is fundamentally transforming American life, and that we must fundamentally transform public policy in response. Until they can marshal convincing evidence, we should be skeptical of proposals that would remake the economy to fit their vision.

The Automation Revolution That Wasnt? - National Review

U.S. Coronavirus Update: What We Have Right Now Are Essentially 3 New Yorks, Says Dr. Birx – Deadline

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

While it took 45 days to climb from 1 million and 2 million coronavirus cases in the United States, it took just only 16 days for infections to jump from 3 million to, as of Thursday, 4 million.

How did that happen?

What we have right now are essentially three New Yorks, said White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx on Today Friday, referring to the onetime epicenter of the pandemic in the nation if not the world.

On Thursday, the hot spots of California, Texas and Florida accounted for one-third of the new cases reported nationwide. Earlier in the week, California passed New York as the state with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the country, topping 400,000 infections.

Florida found its own sad distinction with respect to New York, topping the Big Apple as the state with the largest single-day increase in new cases, with 15,299 last week.

And in Texas, one overwhelmed county near the border announced this week that it was creating committees to review patients cases and send the worst off home to die by their loved ones.

Unfortunately, Starr County Memorial Hospital has limited resources and our doctors are going to have to decide who receives treatment, and who is sent home to die by their loved ones, County Judge Eloy Vera wrote on Facebook post Thursday. This is what we did not want our community to experience.

On Wednesday, Birx warned about rising crises in 11 cities, hoping to spur effective action before the pandemic overran efforts there. She said Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and St. Louis need to take aggressive steps immediately to avoid becoming the next hot spots.

Until you can see that explosion, its hard for people to understand how deeply you have to clamp down, Birx said. Thats why we called out the next set of cities where we see early-warning signs, because if you make changes now, you wont become a Phoenix.

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U.S. Coronavirus Update: What We Have Right Now Are Essentially 3 New Yorks, Says Dr. Birx - Deadline

What Is Cohorting? And Is It The Cure For Colorado’s Coronavirus School Worries? – Colorado Public Radio

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Breden said Denver Public Schools has done a lot of planning at the high school level for core subjects like math, English and science but she hasnt seen as much coordination around art and music, which typically involves the sharing of supplies or instruments.

The state has advised cohorts as just one precautionary step districts should take for students to return to school during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Alexis Burakoff, a medical epidemiologist with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

What we're hoping is that schools can limit the number of people that each student and staff member interacts with ideally to kind of one closed group so that if there is an illness among a member of that group, it's very clear who has been exposed, she said.

Summer child care is an example Burakoff used to compare the potential spread of COVID-19. If a positive case was found in places where staff and children mixed freely throughout a daycare, the entire location had to stop operations and every individual had to quarantine. In cases where children and staff were around the same 10 people in a single classroom, then only those 10 people had to quarantine for 14 days and the rest of the daycare could run as normal.

Our hope is that by using this strategy, we are both minimizing the spread of disease because we're limiting the number of contacts that each person has, but also really minimizing disruptions to schools, Burakoff said.

As an added layer of defense, the state also asks districts to have people wear face masks and practice social distancing, too.

Burakoff gets how cohorts are a challenge logistically, especially for older students, but she said its important for schools to be creative in how they strategize with things like block schedules.

We understand that this cohorting does not extend to what people do at home and on the weekends, et cetera, and so the best thing we can do is just continue to educate our communities about being safe outside of school hours, she said. What it can really do is help the response in the event that there are illnesses in school, which we know that there will be.

Sarah Christensen Fu of Centennial, a parent of three kids who attend STEM School Highlands Ranch, is fortunate to work from home and have the flexibility to choose how her kids get their education this year. Although the school has an option to do in-person learning or a hybrid of virtual and in-person, Christensen Fu said her kids would be doing online only.

With this pandemic spiking, schools being reopened just seems really rushed, she said. I do feel like most of the people I know are really excited to get their kids back to routine and so I feel like a little stodgier, like a nervous Nellie Going all into a big building seems like a bad choice.

Her 11-year-old son isnt happy about the decision. Christensen Fu said it feels like a choice between her kids seeing their friends or their grandparents.

Nicole Gates, the mother of two boys in Littleton Public Schools, also works from home and wants to get back to the normal routine. She realizes, however, that may not be an option this year.

There's part of me that thinks if we just have to put the school year on hold and it starts in January after a vaccine is available or if they say, Hey, your kid's going to graduate a year later than you thought because this school year, we can't figure it out and we don't know how to keep everyone safe, I'm fine with it, she said. This is a pandemic. We haven't seen anything like it in a hundred years.

So far, her family hasnt come in contact with the virus even with her sons participation in summer activities like baseball and hockey. While it would be nice to send her kids to school a couple of times a week in small groups, Gates understands why teachers would be concerned about their safety and possible exposure.

How do you feel about Colorado schools reopening? Tell us.

What Is Cohorting? And Is It The Cure For Colorado's Coronavirus School Worries? - Colorado Public Radio

July 24 evening update: The latest on the coronavirus and Maine – Bangor Daily News

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

The BDN is making the most crucial coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impact in Maine free for all readers. Click here for all coronavirus stories. You can join others committed to safeguarding this vital public service by purchasing a subscription or donating directly to the newsroom.

Another 26 cases of the new coronavirus have been reported in Maine, health officials said Friday.

Fridays report brings the total coronavirus cases reported in Maine to 3,757. Of those, 3,357 have been confirmed positive, while 400 were classified as probable cases, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency revised Thursdays cumulative total to 3,731, down from 3,737, meaning there was a net increase of 20 over the previous days report, state data show. As the Maine CDC continues to investigate previously reported cases, some are determined to have not been the coronavirus or coronavirus cases not involving Mainers. Those are removed from the states cumulative total.

No new deaths were reported Friday, leaving the statewide death toll at 118. Nearly all deaths have been Mainers over age 60.

So far, 378 Mainers have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Of those, 12 people are currently hospitalized, with nine in critical care and three on ventilators.

Meanwhile, 20 more people have recovered from the coronavirus, bringing total recoveries to 3,259. That means there are 380 active and probable cases in the state, which is unchanged from Thursday.

Heres the latest on the coronavirus and its impact on Maine.

In January, we surveyed readers on the political issues they cared about most going into the election year of 2020. Now, were asking again after the coronavirus upended the Maine economy and most of our lives. Michael Shepherd, BDN

State and local coronavirus aid is left out of a new pandemic relief package floated by Republicans in the U.S. Senate, but Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said on Friday she is hopeful it will be included in a final measure. David Marino Jr. and Michael Shepherd, BDN

A water district in Maine is collecting sewage samples for testing to determine the prevalence of the coronavirus based on whats being flushed down the toilet. The Associated Press

A bedroom community outside Portland is now the town with the highest rate of coronavirus cases in the state, more than a month after the state began releasing town-by-town coronavirus case data. Falmouth, with about 12,500 residents, had recorded 152 cases of the coronavirus as of July 12, translating into about 12 cases for every 1,000 residents. Caitlin Andrews, BDN

As of Friday evening, the coronavirus has sickened 4,097,270 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as caused 145,063 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.

They lost their mom and dad to coronavirus — 15 days apart – CNN

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Their mother Noehmi Esquivel, 39, and their father Carlos Garcia, 44, both died after fighting the coronavirus, the family confirmed to CNN.

Esquivel was taken to the hospital on July 2, and ended up dying the same day, her brother, Jacob Mendoza, told CNN.

"My mom spoke to her and told her that it was okay for her to go home ... and not to worry about Carlos and the boys," Mendoza said.

"[She] prayed over her in Jesus name and she passed away over the phone with my mom talking to her."

Then, just 11 days later, her husband, Carlos, landed in the hospital because of kidney problems. His family said he was recovering from coronavirus and it aggravated medical problems he was already having.

"He was barely recuperating ... [but] when he went into the hospital, he was doing well," Mendoza said.

On July 17, his fourth day in the hospital, Mendoza said Garcia's condition unexpectedly worsened.

"We had just gotten off the phone with him, and he sounded perfectly fine. He sounded like there was nothing wrong with him. And it surprised us when we got the call around one o'clock in the morning that he had passed away," he said.

Both Esquivel and Garcia had diabetes and other underlying conditions.

"It has just been very rough on us, because both of them, you know, they both had to die in the hospital by themselves because of this whole coronavirus pandemic," Mendoza said.

His father's funeral is on Tuesday at The Promise Church of Houston.

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They lost their mom and dad to coronavirus -- 15 days apart - CNN

Does The Candle Test Tell You If Your Mask Is Doing A Good Job? : Goats and Soda – NPR

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Birthday spoiler alert: If you want your mask to be a barrier to coronavirus transmission, you should not be able to blow out candles while wearing it. Florin Cristian Ailenei/EyeEm via Getty Images hide caption

Birthday spoiler alert: If you want your mask to be a barrier to coronavirus transmission, you should not be able to blow out candles while wearing it.

Each week, we answer "frequently asked questions" about life during the coronavirus crisis. If you have a question you'd like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the subject line: "Weekly Coronavirus Questions."

Can you blow out a candle with your mask on?

That question became ... a thing ... this month when Bill Nye (aka "The Science Guy") made a TikTok.

In it, he dons various types of masks that people are using during the pandemic, as he puts it, to "prevent particles from my respiratory system from getting into the air and then into your respiratory system" in other words, a way of limiting transmission of viral particles. Nye attempts to blow out a candle about a foot away a simulation for everyday respiratory exchanges and interactions such as coughs and conversations.

Most of his masks do the job (except for a knitted scarf), though in other versions of this experiment and in tests conducted by NPR mask wearers, a bandanna over the mouth usually allowed the wearer to extinguish the flame.

Basically, you want the flame to stay alive, says Amy Price, a senior research scientist at Stanford University's Anesthesia Informatics and Media Laboratory. Otherwise, it can be a sign that the mask isn't acting as a strong enough barrier. If you can blow out the flame easily while wearing a mask, she says, there's too much air exchange between you and the outside world.

Still, she cautions that the test isn't foolproof. Outside variables, such as the type of candle and your personal lung strength can affect the outcome. So take your results with a big, big grain of salt, Price says.

Abraar Karan, a physician at Harvard Medical School, notes: "Being able to blow a candle out may be some measure of how well particles can exit your mask, [but it's] unclear to me how reliable that is as a proxy for small aerosols exiting with normal speaking or coughing."

Nonetheless, Price says she believes the candle test can be a good way to suss out the masks that are clearly not doing their job the dead giveaway cases.

"It's an OK rule of thumb," she says. "It isn't scientific, but it's a pretty good estimate, especially when you combine it with other [tactics] and recommendations" regarding mask quality.

So what's in an effective mask?

A group of researchers at Stanford Medicine is working with the World Health Organization to figure just that out the team has helped roll out new guidelines for mask efficacy and safety along with WHO. And even these researchers agree that for most people, identifying a good, protective mask from a bad one can be confusing.

"People have no standards when they go to buy masks," says Price, who is a member of the team.

And it's not as if you can test the mask yourself. Renting mask-testing equipment costs more than $1,000, and it's not as if such devices are on the shelf in your neighborhood medical equipment store.

To make sure you're not flying mask-blind, it's important to keep abreast of WHO and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mask guidelines, which are regularly updated. Right now, Price says masks with three layers are the recommendation.

And there are some mask facts and hacks that can be helpful.

Karan says one of the most fundamental things to get right about your mask is fit.

You want your mask to fit snugly over your mouth and nostrils, up to the nose bridge, with little excess air escaping from the sides when you exhale. But you also want to be able to breathe, he explains. A good rule is as snug as you can go without finding it hard to breathe.

Make sure you get this right, he urges. One study found that "gaps due to improper fit resulted in over a 60% decrease in the filtration efficiency."

Then there's the question of mask material.

Price suggests two ways to test if your mask is crafted with a good weave: You can pick up a Foldscope microscope (they're made of paper and cost about $30 for a do-it-yourself kit) to zoom into the texture of the mask the weave should look thick and relatively opaque.

Or you can also just hold your mask up to a bright light source or use your phone flashlight. "Stretch it," Price recommends. "Can you see right through it?" If you can, that's a bad sign.

You can also check labels for preferable fabrics and materials; recent studies have shown that 100% cotton with high to moderate yarn count (that is, a heavier, coarser yarn) performed best in mask tests conducted, Karan says. While the process for figuring out yarn count can be a little tricky, the general rule is the thicker the fabric, the higher the yarn count.

"In short, you want a mask that fits you well, and that has cotton with high yarn counts and possibly with multiple layers, which many masks today do offer," Karan says.

Once you've found a great-fitting mask fashioned with a breathable and protective material, Price says her lab has identified some simple DIY steps to fortify your mask.

"You can make a small slit (between mask layers) and add paper towels," Price offers. "Or buy yourself some OLY fun (a craft product) and place a layer in the mask this can bring it up to a surgical mask's level of protectiveness."

Adding a static charge to the outer layer of a polyester mask by rubbing it with a latex glove for 30 seconds can also be effective, Price adds. The reason: COVID-19 particles have a charge, so adding static can help create an extra layer of repelling protection.

With the surge in mask demand, there are also new market conditions to navigate.

"If you're going to buy a mask, look at it carefully, Price says. "Don't buy things that claim to be 'specially treated' with copper or other irons that kill bacteria." The virus isn't bacterial, and those treatments haven't been proven to be effective with the novel coronavirus as of yet, she says.

Finally, if you want to make a homemade mask, Price emphasizes the power of improvisation and creativity.

Indeed, research shows that even the most surprising materials such as a pair of pantyhose can boost the power of your mask.

Pranav Baskar is a freelance journalist and U.S. national born in Mumbai.

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Does The Candle Test Tell You If Your Mask Is Doing A Good Job? : Goats and Soda - NPR

Trump Administration Aims to Block New Funding for Coronavirus Testing and Tracing – The New York Times

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

The drag is felt acutely in tourist destinations dependent on air travel, like the Canary Islands, hundreds of miles from mainland Spain. Airlines carried 15 million visitors to the archipelago last year, but the flight capacity this month is just 30 percent of what it was a year ago.

Italy has tried to promote national tourism by issuing a so-called holiday bonus, a 150-euro voucher per Italian for lodging, up to 500 per family. Dario Franceschini, the minister of culture and tourism, told Parliament this month that about 400,000 vouchers had been issued, worth 183 million in total. According to Italian news reports, however, only a small fraction of hotels accept them.

Greece, though suffering less from the pandemic than either Italy or Spain, has still seen scant evidence of a rebound in tourism. In the first 12 days of July, passenger traffic at the Athens airport was down 75 percent from a year ago.

Though all of the countries of southern Europe have emerged from lockdown, new outbreaks there and quarantine orders elsewhere have added hurdles. This month, Britain said that people coming from Portugal, among other countries, would be forced to quarantine on arrival, a move that essentially choked off British tourism there.

Outbreaks have also occurred around major tourism hubs like Barcelona, where about three million residents were told on Friday to stay indoors to help contain the coronavirus.

Carlos Garca Pastor, the marketing director of Logitravel Group, a Spanish travel operator that had revenue of about 800 million last year, said that his company expected earnings to drop at least 50 percent this year.

The final result, he said, will really depend on how many new outbreaks there are.

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Trump Administration Aims to Block New Funding for Coronavirus Testing and Tracing - The New York Times

Mass. has changed its coronavirus travel rules. Heres what to know. – Boston.com

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Since late March, travelers to Massachusetts have been asked to self-quarantine for 14 days. Soon, failure to comply, or failure to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test prior to arriving in the state, could result in fines.

Gov. Charlie Baker announced the new travel requirements, including a Massachusetts Travel Form for anyone coming to the state, unless theyre coming from a lower risk state or meet certain limited exemptions, during a Friday press conference. This includes Massachusetts residents who are returning to the state after traveling elsewhere and international travelers.

Every traveler coming to Massachusetts no matter where theyre from has a responsibility to help keep COVID-19 out of the commonwealth, Baker said.

The new travel order goes into effect on Aug. 1. Anyone who doesnt follow the new rules is subject to a fine of $500 per day.

At this time of year, many people are traveling to and from Massachusetts for vacation or in some cases getting ready to come back to school, the governor said. Weve already seen an uptick in activity at Logan Airport.

There are a few exceptions to the order. These include people (including returning Massachusetts residents) coming from nearby states, including the rest of New England Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont plus New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii, as theyre considered lower risk.

Other exceptions include people who commute outside the state regularly for work or school, people who are provided medical care from a Massachusetts-based doctor, military, and those who provide critical infrastructure cyber security, first responders, and emergency communications, among others.

People who are just passing through Massachusetts on their way to somewhere else are also exempt, the rules say.

All others, age 18 and above, plus unaccompanied minors, must complete the travel form before they enter Massachusetts, or when they do. This does include students when they return for the fall semester, according to a press release.

Travelers are exempt from the 14-day quarantine if they can show proof that they received a negative result from a COVID-19 test and the sample was taken no longer than 72 hours prior to their arrival in Massachusetts. If they took a test and are awaiting the results upon their arrival in Massachusetts, they have to quarantine until they receive their negative result, the regulations say.

The form mandates that the traveler must agree to the regulations, and must agree with one of four quarantine options:

The form also mandates that the traveler must agree that they have not had any COVID-19 symptoms, have not been in close contact within the last two weeks with someone who has it or is suspected of having it, and that they will wear a mask in public and maintain standard social distancing of six feet, according to the guidance.

While in quarantine, travelers must not have contact with anyone other than those theyve traveled with for two weeks, must not be out in public, must not let anyone else into their quarantine area, must have food delivered, and should have the correct amount of face coverings for everyone, the guidelines say. They can only leave to seek urgent medical care.

Prior to arrival, travelers will be notified of the order by airlines, bus companies, and train travel companies, as well as Airbnb, hotel, lodging operators, and major travel agencies, Baker said. He said employers are discouraged from sending workers outside of the lower risk states. Roadways will have signage informing drivers, too.

Lodging operators like hotels and Airbnb will be required to inform guests about this order at the time of booking and arrival, and [are] encouraged to communicate this information on their websites and on site, Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito said.

Compliance is based on an honor system, Baker said, saying that it has worked pretty well.

State Department of Transportation Secretary and CEO Stephanie Pollack said theres been a gradual but steady increase since March, both on our roads and at Logan Airport.

In July, traffic measurements at key areas were just 10 to 15 percent lower this year compared to last year. Passenger counts at Logan have also increased, though theyre still much lower than last year, according to Pollack.

Massachusetts residents are increasingly headed out to other states, and travelers from other states are increasingly coming to Massachusetts, she said. All such travelers have a responsibility to help the commonwealth keep transmission rates as low as possible.

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Mass. has changed its coronavirus travel rules. Heres what to know. - Boston.com

Is Orange County Turning The Corner On Coronavirus or Headed Off a Cliff? A Closer Look at the Numbers – Voice of OC

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

By Spencer Custodio | July 23, 2020

While it seems that the number of people hospitalized for Coronavirus in Orange County stabilized this week, there is concern that daily death counts seem to be creeping up, now well into the double digits with 22 people reported as killed by Covid on Thursday.

Orange Health Care Agency officials on Thursday also confirmed that they are increasingly transferring Covid patients from hospitals into skilled nursing facilities.

Editors Note: As Orange Countys only nonprofit & nonpartisan newsroom, Voice of OC brings you the best, most comprehensive local Coronavirus news absolutely free. No ads, no paywalls. We need your help. Please, make a tax-deductible donation today to support your local news.

An unknown number of Orange Countys coronavirus hospital patients have been moved to long term care facilities and skilled nursing facilities as hospitalization numbers ticked up the past couple weeks.

Yes, hospitalized COVID-19 positive patients are being discharged to long term care facilities. The OC Health Care Agency (HCA) does not track individual transfers. However, when a hospitalized COVID-19 positive patient is transferred to a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF), that patient would be subtracted from the hospitalized count (by the sending hospital) and added to the SNF count via the state daily reporting, HCA staff said in a Thursday email.

A daily situation report from the county Office of Emergency Medical Services on Thursday shows theres been an increase of over 500 virus-positive patients in skilled nursing facility cases since the beginning of the month to 1,837 cases. The report doesnt note which cases are transfers and which ones are virus cases originating from the facilities.

At a Thursday news conference, OC interim health officer Dr. Clayton Chau said he hasnt heard of any surges at the skilled nursing facilities.

In normal times, Chau said, a patient gets into an acute hospital and the next level of care that they need is a skilled nursing facility, then the hospital, as well as the family and their insurance company, will try and find a skilled nursing facility that is appropriate to place people.

As far as I know, I have not heard any surge in skilled nursing facilities, Chau said. Ive not heard staff reporting that weve had an issue yet.

UC Irvine epidemiologist Andrew Noymer said the transfers to nursing facilities could explain why hospitalizations are remaining relatively steady.

So that could explain why all the hospital numbers looked like they plateaued, Noymer said in a Thursday phone interview.

But, Noymer said, the deaths continue to increase.

Theres no shirking the deaths, I mean 22 deaths today, Noymer said. I know the death reporting is clunky but the seven-day average is 2.1 percent per day.

When deaths are reported, they can span a window of up to eight days, the Health Care Agency notes on its website.

So thats the number that Ive been watching and Ive been doing seven-day averages precisely so we dont go crazy over single day jumps because those are just reporting issues, Noymer said.

Meanwhile, the virus has now killed 543 people out of 32,648 confirmed cases, according to the county Health Care Agency.

There are 690 people hospitalized, including 233 in intensive care units.

Over 380,000 tests have been conducted throughout OC, which is home to roughly 3.2 million people.

Dr. Paul Yost, whos an anesthesiologist at St. Josephs Hospital in Orange, said it would be helpful to know how many hospital cases are transferred to skilled nursing facilities so the overall picture of the countys healthcare system can be better understood.

Yost, the CalOptima board chairman, also noted the current system wasnt designed for a pandemic.

Our whole healthcare system is not designed something like this a pandemic that strikes a large percentage of the population, he said. Its designed around providing high quality care around things like heart surgeries but a global pandemic, its not designed for.

Noymer said he cant predict which direction OC heads from here, based on the recent patterns.

So heres the thing, were basically treading water. When I look at the OC numbers the past few days, I see a county thats not changing very much. And compared to three weeks ago, were worse. But compared to last week, were holding steady. So you can say were about to turn the corner and do better or take the plunge into a precipice. And I cant tell you exactly which of the two it is.

Heres the latest on the virus numbers across Orange County from county data:

Spencer Custodio is a Voice of OC staff reporter. You can reach him at scustodio@voiceofoc.org. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerCustodio

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Is Orange County Turning The Corner On Coronavirus or Headed Off a Cliff? A Closer Look at the Numbers - Voice of OC

Heat, crowds, fire, coronavirus all causes for concern in Oregon outdoors this weekend – OregonLive

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

It could be a rough few days for those planning to be outdoors in Oregon.

Between extreme heat, wildfires, crowds and coronavirus, some officials are concerned about the next few days around Oregon as we approach the midpoint of summer.

On Friday, the National Weather Service issued heat advisories around the state, as Portland Fire & Rescue issued a burn ban for Multnomah County, and several national forests warned of increased fire danger.

All of that comes on top of public health officials continual warnings about the spread of COVID-19 as cases remain high including Gov. Kate Browns recent mandate on wearing face masks in crowded outdoor places.

READ MORE: How to stay cool and coronavirus safe this weekend

Some of the most dangerous weather conditions will be in southwest Oregon, where the National Weather Service is predicting temperatures as high as 105 in Medford on Sunday, with dry air and lightning expected over the region Monday.

Brett Lutz, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service in Medford, said that statistically speaking, the last week of July and first week of August are the most dangerous for wildfires in the region, and that conditions are now lining up to continue that trend.

Lightning ignited fires is the bottom line, and possibly a lot of them, Lutz said. Id be concerned if I had outdoor plans Monday.

The forecast is still evolving, he said, and things could change for southwest Oregon including the possibility of sporadic rainfall in some areas but as it stands, the latter part of Monday is a big concern, Lutz said.

Aside from heat, lightning, and crowds, late July is also peak mosquito season for some of the states most popular lakes and backpacking destinations. Theres also still a high risk of drownings, officials warned, especially in deep lakes and fast-moving rivers, though recreation areas around bodies of water also happen to be some of the most popular this summer.

At Oregon state parks, crowds have swelled this year on the Oregon coast and at parks situated along lakes and rivers. At those places, rangers have consistently seen holiday level crowding, parks department spokesman Chris Havel said, up from the normal weekend crowds they see this time of year.

Thats caused more concern when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. While risk of transmission outdoors remains low, researchers say the virus can still be passed between people at close proximity, especially in crowded places like public restrooms, viewpoints or narrow trails.

Though Oregon now requires face coverings when social distancing isnt possible outdoors, Oregon state parks officials have opted against strict enforcement in favor of education a strategy that has sometimes led to angry conflicts between visitors and rangers. Parks could shut down later this summer, Havel said, if people remain lax about simple precautions like face coverings and social distance.

Thats probably the easiest thing thats under your control right now, just do it, he said about wearing face masks. I cant do anything about mosquitoes, or heat or lightning strikes causing fires. Heres one thing we can do.

While state parks have been busy, another hot summer destination in Oregon, the Columbia River Gorge, has been a little quieter than usual. Thats because a lot of it remains closed.

Popular destinations like Multnomah Falls, Crown Point and the Historic Columbia River Highway have been closed since late March due to the coronavirus pandemic, and theres no immediate plan to reopen them to the public. Thats in addition to places still closed due to damage by the 2017 Eagle Creek fire, like the popular Eagle Creek Trail and Oneonta Gorge.

While places like Rooster Rock State Park and Wachlella Falls remain busy, officials said, the Columbia River Gorge as a whole is quieter than ever.

Stan Hinatsu, recreation staff officer for the U.S. Forest Service in the Columbia Gorge, said agencies hope to begin reopening the scenic highway later this summer, along with some of the waterfall day-use areas. It could happen piecemeal or all at once he said, depending on public health concerns and crowding, and could come with additional precautions put in place for visitors.

We just want to make sure that when we do open, were able to do so in a way that maintains public health and safety, Hinatsu said. Its likely things will look different when we do.

After months spent trying to navigate the pandemic, these heat advisories and wildfire warnings are much more familiar territory for Oregons outdoor recreation agencies, who have long-standing practices in place to warn people about campfires and water safety.

Those who want to avoid the dangers posed by nature and crowds this weekend should be prepared or simply stay at home, they said, and wait for more favorable conditions to go outside. Outdoor recreation can still be safe, as long as people show up with a bit of caution.

I think the most important thing is to try to stay in tune with what the forecast is and plan accordingly, Lutz said. While it seems like a concerning situation, and it definitely is, I think if people are smart and pay attention to the forecast and keep an eye to the sky, they can remain pretty safe.

--Jamie Hale; jhale@oregonian.com; 503-294-4077; @HaleJamesB

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Heat, crowds, fire, coronavirus all causes for concern in Oregon outdoors this weekend - OregonLive

Every Space Tourism Vacation You Can Book Right Now, If Youre Rich – Observer

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Things arent going so great on the planet Earth right now, and travel isnt easy, but if youve got a bit of cash, you can really get away. A number of well-capitalized companies have been hacking away at Space Tourism, or commercially flying regular people into space, and now its on the verge of reality. Thanks to a great deal of financial and human capital put in by organizations ranging from NASA to billionaire-backed startups, we are inches close to turning it into reality.

Space vacation packages come in a wide variety. For beginners, British billionaire Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic is offering a 1.5-hour joy ride to the edge of the Earths atmosphere. NASA is opening the International Space Station to private citizens. And, for hard-core space explorers, Elon Musks SpaceX has promised to fly you to the Moon (for a hefty price) in as soon as 2023.

Below weve put together the latest statuses of various space tourism projects in the market.

Destination: Edge of the Earths atmosphere

Price: $250,000 per person

Earliest available time: late 2020

Virgin Galactics supersonic spaceplane, VSS Unity, will fly passengers up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level, which is right above the Krmn Line dividing the Earths atmosphere and outer space. From there, passengers will get a stunning view of the Earths curvature. Then, during the descent, they will experience several minutes of weightlessness like a true astronaut.

VSS Unity has completed two successful human test flights and is in its final stage of testing. Virgin Galactic plans to fly its first paying customer, possibly the companys founder Richard Branson himself, as soon as this year.

Destination: The edge of the Earths atmosphere

Price: $200,000 and $300,000

Earliest available time: unknown

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, is developing a suborbital tourism program similar to Virgin Galactics but using a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL) rocket-capsule system called New Shepard. The New Shepard spacecraft has successfully flown above the Krmn Line and returned to the ground.

Blue Origin had planned to launch its first human test flight in 2019 and begin selling commercial tickets (reportedly priced between $200,000 and $300,000) soon after. Yet, the plan was quietly canceled last year. The company has yet to make public statements about new test and rollout dates.

Destination: International Space Station

Price: $35,000 per night

Earliest available time: late 2020

In June 2019, NASA unveiled its grand plan to allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station under the agencys Commercial Crew Program. Passengers will fly in either SpaceXs Crew Dragon spacecraft or Boeings Starlinervessel.

The Crew Dragon recently completed its final crewed test and is ready to be deployed for commercial missions. NASA has said it will allow up to two private trips to the ISS a year, each lasting up to 30 days. The total cost of the trip would be around $50 million per person, the agency said.

Destination: the Moon

Price: Not a trivial amount

Earliest available time: 2023

Elon Musks rocket company SpaceX has the ultimate space vacation offering: a personalized trip to the Moon. The package has one committing customer so far: Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa, who signed up for the trip in September 2018 and has put down an undisclosed deposit. Musk has said the full ticket price is not a trivial amount.

SpaceX is currently building prototypes for the rocket (Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) rocket) and spaceship (Starship) that will fly Maezawa to the Moon. If all tests go according to the plan, a human launch could take place as early as 2023.

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Every Space Tourism Vacation You Can Book Right Now, If Youre Rich - Observer

The Rise of the Social Justice Warrior – Big Easy Magazine

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Todays P.C. police have taken on a public mantle, and political correctness has taken on a new persona. These passionate people claim to represent the social conscience of our times, but are they taking things too far?

In this post, well explore the rise of the social justice warrior, and whether they are hurting the causes that they claim to support.

The term social justice warrior was first coined in 2015. There have always been people willing to fight injustice within a society, though.

Slavery ended thanks to activists. The civil rights movement is another pertinent example. More recently, the LBQT and transgender campaigns for equal rights have topped the agenda.

Social justice warriors may only have taken on the title recently, but these types of people have embraced the same principles for equality for millennia. The modern movement has embraced the concept of #SocJusthe shareable idea that nobody in society should feel marginalized.

SJWs (social justice warriors) are outspoken, ensuring that no rights are trampled for the voiceless minorities. The conflict arises where others feel that these types of comments have obliterated the right to free speech entirely.

Opponents claim that SJWs, in their rush for equality, are at risk of marginalizing those that they see as privileged. They have taken things too far.

An SJWs purpose today is to shine a light on injustice. With the #MeToo movement of 2017, it exposed the battles women face in a male-dominated society. The movement was a timely message, but some believe it was diluted by the actions of a few SJWs.

Pictures of men with their legs spread out on subways were shown as evidence of men dominating woman. The action is inconsiderate, but is it anti-feminist?

A more recent development on the social justice front is the #BlackLivesMatter movement. SJWs have blasted those who raised the issue of black-on-black violence as racially insensitive, for example.

Black-on-black violence isnt the reason behind the BLM movement. Rather, the fight focusses on systemic (and institutional) racism that allowed a white police officer to use excessive force against George Floyd and feel justified by his actions in the moment.

Still, we have to ask ourselves, Does a black murder only matter if its a white person committing the crime? Some even argue that institutional racism is a primary cause of black-on-black violence.

By making it politically incorrect to discuss the issue, SJWs could be ignoring one of the symptoms of the systemic racism they are trying to oust.

The harm of being so openly hostile is that these warriors risk losing the support of parties they need to win over. Berating those who are at fault puts them on the defensive and limits the discourse. The risk to SJWs is that these targeted groups miss the message completely and stop listening.

Instead of real change, potential proponents might pay lip service to the cause. Racism and anti-feminism are as much mindsets as deeds. By stifling free speech, we run the risk of these behaviors becoming more subtle, or even taboo.

Its like telling your teen theyre not allowed to drink or play on Goldenslot. Theyll find a way around the rules, but you wont know until its too late.

The danger is the society we createone that is politically correct only on the surface. Institutionally, it will become even harder to stamp out those flaws.

The Rise of the Social Justice Warrior - Big Easy Magazine

LETTER: Marxism and socialism is change, but to believe it offers hope for America is pure stupid audacity – Gadsden Times

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

I do not understand Americas left. Will they ever comprehend the damage their behavior and insane accusations they are inflicting upon our President and country?

Our countrys threat is not Russia, China or North Korea but our own bickering, which is destroying our country. Look at the lunacy we inherited from this socialistic political-correctness paradise. Police officers are murdered while on duty protecting us citizens, Black people who were never slaves are fighting white people who were never Nazis over a confederate statue erected by Democrats and somehow our President is at fault, so I ask how we became so ignorant.

Marxism and socialism is change, but to believe it offers hope for America is pure stupid audacity. As this lunacy continues we have two congressional members, Maxine Waters (California) call for impeachment and Maria Chapala(Missouri) blurting over the network kill our president. These people should be dismissed from their Democratic party now.

The most devastating transactions take place when unfit laws arent even read before passing. Yes, Americas legislative body needs a taste of their own medicine to understand what "We the People" means, it might help them realize the despair and distress they have created before passing future laws.

So many people are willfully blinded with ideology, refusing to admit that our country is being led towards a civil war. Our Pledge of Allegiance, In God We Trust is being attacked and if Hillary Clinton or her party somehow gets in, our country will be methodically destroyed.

There are thousands of men and women in this country who have served in our wars, facing death and now are fed up with this political correctness, allowing socialism to rule over our Constitution, but sadly the worst is now being activated, paralyzing our country from inside called "sabotage."

Mr. Obama, George Soros and all the socialist thugs, have you already forgotten why so many of our boys gave all for their country? Your shadow government, OFA, is un-American, including George Soros billions, which are helping to destroy our America.

America, you are being led to the slaughterhouse.

Bill Kaunzinger, Niceville

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LETTER: Marxism and socialism is change, but to believe it offers hope for America is pure stupid audacity - Gadsden Times

Does Tucker Carlson hate America? – The Independent

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Tucker Carlson is capable of only two facial expressions. One is a deeply furrowed brow that narrows his eyes to a point at which they almost disappear, not dissimilar to the face a child makes when they are angry, or lost, or both. He uses this expression when he is describing the point of view of someone with whom he disagrees. The other is a wide-eyed look of pleading which sends his eyebrows at least an inch in the other direction. It is an expression meant to portray logic and reason, of why-do-you-hate-America indignity. He uses it chiefly when describing his own views and solutions to the problems facing the country.

All of this is to say that if eyes are windows to the soul, Carlsons spirit is black and white. He is a binary man whose whole career has been defined by his opposition to, and his apparent hatred of, other people and ideas. And at a time when America is more polarised than ever, he is having a moment.

Tucker Carlson Tonight, his daily show on Fox News, became the highest-rated programme of all cable news over the last quarter, with an average audience of 4.3 million viewers. His voice bounces off the walls in the White House residence each evening, where the president is an avid watcher. Republican strategists have encouraged him to mount his own run for the most powerful office in the world.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The upcoming election has a real possibility of making Trump a one-term president, and conservatives are already looking for a vessel to keep Trumpism alive. Could Tucker Carlson, a man whose fortunes have risen in tandem with Trumps, outlast him?

*****

Carlsons breakout television role was not so different to what he does today. In the early 2000s, he played the voice of the right on CNNs Crossfire, a show that pitched liberals against conservatives in gladiatorial nightly debates. The format first aired in the 1980s and was revived when Carlson was brought in to do battle with alternating hosts from the left, Paul Begala and James Carville.

The show was emblematic of the growing trend in cable news at the time to chase ratings by setting up fights between their guests it was Punch and Judy punditry. It worked for a while, but viewers soon grew tired of it. The issue came to a head in an infamous appearance on the show in October 2005 by Jon Stewart, who took Begala and Carlson to task for their performative and partisan on-air fights, accusing them of hurting America.

Youre doing theatre, when you should be doing debate, he told them, to applause from Crossfires own audience. Here is what I wanted to tell you guys: stop. You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

That show was seen as a turning point. When it was cancelled three months later, Jonathan Klein, then-president of CNN, said he sympathised with Stewarts arguments.

Carlson was 35 when the show was canned. The Stewart dressing down was described by one YouTube commenter as Carlsons villain origin story, perhaps in recognition of the transformation he undertook over the next few years.

Following a three-year stint at MSNBC, during which his show was plagued by low ratings, Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller, a news website pitched as the conservative answer to Huffington Post.

No hype, just the advice and analysis you need

It was during his time as editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller that Carlson began to draw accusations of having sympathy for nationalist and white supremacist ideas. It would become a common theme in his career from here on out: Carlson would always deny harbouring these views himself, but would continually find himself in the company of people who did.

His association with the nationalist fringe became more pronounced with Donald Trumps ascendancy to the presidency. In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Centre a non-profit that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists wrote that the Daily Caller has a white nationalist problem.

Throughout the 2016 election and since, the Daily Caller has not only published the work of white nationalists, but some of its writers have routinely whitewashed the Alt-Right, while one editor there is an associate of key Alt-Right figures, the report said.

The Daily Callers embrace of white nationalists reflects the resurgence of the nationalist right, ethno and otherwise, represented by President Trump. Trumps campaign and Electoral College victory electrified the radical right and pulled the Overton Window further in their direction, it went on.

Carlson was still involved with the Daily Caller when he had his debut on the Fox News show that he still hosts today. Introducing the first episode on November 14, 2016, Carlson said he wanted to challenge people on their power, pierce pomposity, crush smugness.

And yet, he promptly started going after the party and associated establishment figures that had just lost power in a general election, along with the media, the deep state, and anyone but the most powerful man in the most powerful office in the world.

Like the Daily Caller, one of the shows primary themes was white grievance, a theme that continued to win him fans among white nationalists.

Will Carless, a journalist who covers extremism for the investigative site Reveal, co-authored an investigation into Carlsons influence on and relationship with the alt-right and white supremacists online. The 2018 report found widespread support for Carlson on websites and forums associated with hate speech.

Tucker Carlson claims senator who lost both legs in Iraq hates America

As our reporting showed, Tucker Carlson, more than any other major news personality, has been instrumental in bringing fringe ideas to the mainstream, Carless told The Independent.

Hes revered for that in some of the most vile corners of the internet, where racists and other extremists see him as their useful idiot, someone with huge reach who seems ever-willing to flirt with their hateful ideas.

Carlsons stock response to accusations of sympathy for white supremacists is indignation. Fox News did not provide comment when approached by The Independent.

Im not responsible for your views or the views of any other human being Im responsible for mine, he told Reveal in response to its investigation. Youre trying, quite transparently, to smear me with the views of people I have nothing to do with.

But the racism and the bigotry is not always so far detached. This month, his top writer, Blake Neff, was revealed by CNN to have been posting racist and sexist comments to an online forum for years.

CNN wrote that there has at times also been overlap between some material he posted or saw on the forum and Carlsons show. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace condemned horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behaviour.

Tucker Carlson Tonight is not so different to Crossfire, in that each night Carlson attempts to tear down a liberal position. But instead of debating another person, he argues against the most bad-faith interpretation of his opponents ideas.

In the early days of the show, he was fond of entertaining a theory that Trumps election was a blow to the corrupt elite, but that it still lurked in the background ready to rob hard-working middle-class Americans of their victory. This framing allowed the wealthy, privately educated heir to a large fortune (Carlsons stepmother is an heiress to the Swanson frozen food empire), avid supporter of the most powerful man in the world, to portray himself as an anti-establishment figure. In those shows he acted as a kind of anger translator for the syntactically challenged president. He would mock outraged reactions from the left to Trumps abuses of power.

The dog-whistle politics of Carlsons show has been a constant. But the 51-year-old father-of-four has grown increasingly fond of accusing those with whom he disagrees of hating America.

A recent segment on Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois and a former US Army lieutenant colonel who lost both of her legs in Iraq, was a classic example.

Carlson took issue with a suggestion by Duckworth, whose name has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Joe Biden, that there should be a national dialogue over the removal of statues dedicated to historical figures with links to slavery, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Its long been considered out of bounds to question a persons patriotism, said Carlson. Its a very strong charge, and we try not ever to make it. But in the face of all of this, the conclusion cant be avoided. These people actually hate America. Theres no longer a question about that.

If eyes are windows to the soul, Tucker Carlsons is black and white

The attack prompted Biden campaign spokesperson TJ Ducklo to respond. Tucker Carlson and his colleagues who traffic in hate speech masquerading as journalism are accomplices to Donald Trumps perverse mission to use division and bitterness to tear this country apart, he said.

Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim woman elected to Congress, also hates America, according to Carlson. She is a regular target on the show.

Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism, he said in a recent tirade. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people.

He also regularly attacks Omars fellow freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on one occasion calling her a moron and nasty, excoriating her for allegedly casting herself as a revolutionary while having had a comfortable upbringing.

There is indeed an aura of hate around Carlson, but most of it seems to emanate from him. It is directed towards anyone who doesnt look and think like Tucker Carlson, a side of America that is perhaps unfamiliar to him, but which is no less American.

Its a sign of the extremes to which Carlson has fallen that he attributes these unpatriotic feelings to Elmo, the beloved Sesame Street character. Carlson took issue with a segment on the show in which the puppet addressed the Black Lives Matter protests and tried to explain the issues behind them to his young audience.

Its a childrens show. Got that, Bobby?, Carlson said. America is a very bad place and its your fault, so no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you when you grow up, you have no right to complain.

Thats the message and it starts very young, he added, with his brow furrowed.

*****

A national reckoning over racial injustice sparked by the police killing of George Floyd might have been a humbling moment for Carlson. As the demonstrations spread to every corner of the country, polls showed a shift in support for the Black Lives Matter movement among the public.

At the same time, the public appeared to sour on President Trump and his handling of the protests, as he responded with calls to dominate the streets and displayed little enthusiasm to address the underlying causes of the anger.

Interestingly, however, this is where Carlson and the presidents fortunes differed. While Trumps ratings plummeted, Carlson seemed to find his voice. It might seem counterintuitive for a man who claimed racism doesnt exist in America to gain viewers at a time when the country seemed to be waking up to the idea that it very much did, but Carlson attracted even more viewers by pushing fears over the protests.

Carlsons show was dominated by images of fire and brimstone. The protesters were criminal mobs, the demonstrations were a form of tyranny and a threat to every American, according to Carlson.

Even as the protests calmed down and violence gave way to largely peaceful mass demonstrations, Carlsons backdrop remained on fire. It was us versus them.

On television, hour by hour, we watch these people criminal mobs destroy what the rest of us have built, he said during one nightly monologue.

People like this dont bother to work. They dont volunteer or pay taxes to help other people. They live for themselves. They do exactly what they feel like doing. They say exactly what they feel like saying.

There was little attempt to understand the grievances of the protesters, preferring instead to stoke the fears of his viewers by telling them they were in danger.

This may be a lot of things, this moment were living through, but it is definitely not about black lives, Carlson said. And remember that when they come for you and at this rate, they will.

It was Tucker Carlson at this angriest and most unhinged, and the ratings went up.

The president, who came to power by stoking us-and-them divisions, often takes his cues from Carlsons show. He watches it regularly and often models the White House agenda based on the shows topics.

A group of moms stands between federal agents and demonstrators during a Portland protest

REUTERS

A group of moms link arms to stand between federal officers and demonstrators in Portland. The call themselves the 'Wall of Moms'

REUTERS

Teal Lindseth reacts to tear gas after federal officers dispersed protesters from in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

Federal officers disperse protesters at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, during demonstrations in favour of racial justice and against militarised federal officers making arrests

A protester flies an American flag while walking through tear gas fired by federal officers during a protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

A federal officer pepper sprays a protester in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

Federal police disperse a crowd of about a thousand protesters at the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty

Federal officers use crowd control munitions to disperse Black Lives Matter protesters outside the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

A protester reacts to milk poured on his eyes after being tear gassed during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Oregon

REUTERS

A Black Lives Matter protester carries an American flag as teargas fills the air outside the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Orion Crabb holds his head back while a medic rinses tear gas from his eyes after federal officers dispersed a crowd of about 1,000 protesters from in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

Federal officers use crowd control munitions to disperse Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon

A protester kicks in temporary boarding at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

A protester holds his hands in the air while walking past a group of federal officers during a protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

Hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters hold their phones aloft during a demonstration in Portland, Oregon, where militarised federal police have been arresting demonstrators

Federal police walk through tear gas while dispersing a crowd of about a thousand protesters at the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

KaCe Freeman chants during a Black Lives Matter protest outside the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

A group of moms stands between federal agents and demonstrators during a Portland protest

REUTERS

A group of moms link arms to stand between federal officers and demonstrators in Portland. The call themselves the 'Wall of Moms'

REUTERS

Teal Lindseth reacts to tear gas after federal officers dispersed protesters from in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

A protester flies an American flag while walking through tear gas fired by federal officers during a protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

Getty Images

A federal officer pepper sprays a protester in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon

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Does Tucker Carlson hate America? - The Independent

Artist Canyon Castator Is Making The Apocalypse Palatable – Interview

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

The L.A.-based painter Canyon Castator uses a metaphor to frame his artistic practice: If the gallery is a dinner party, he says, hell be there on time and ready to start all the awkward conversations. The 30-year-old artists allegories for climate change, alt-right media, and American consumption come steeped in sardonic humor and alluring color. Filling his paintings with a bizarre assortment of characters that pull from TV cartoons, arcade games, and the streets of the American youth, Castator playfully serves incisive social commentary while inviting viewers to dig in.

Despite the cynicism of his work, Castator resists the clich of the miserable, self-isolating artist. Since setting up a studio in downtown L.A. five years ago, he has converted several floors in the building into working spaces for fellow artists, offering a readymade community to young practitioners navigating the citys sprawling landscape and disparate creative scenes. Recently, hes partnered with Carl Kostyl Gallery and the arts organization ILYSM to establish a month-long artist residency in one of his open studios.

With works now on view in two exhibitions that reflect on the socio-political impact of COVID-19We Used to Gather at Library Street Collective in Detroit and Riders of the Red Horse at The Pit in L.A.Castator appears to be hitting his stride within the dystopian climate of our current moment.We called up Castator at his studio to talk about art, the apocalypse, and opening up uncomfortable conversations.

ELLA HUZENIS: So many of your works depict these crowded arrangements of human and animal characters. How do you conceive of these scenes? And, has your perception of these kinds of gatherings changed at all in this era of social distancing?

CANYON CASTATOR: I guess the work to me is constructed a little differently. A lot of the charactersyes, they are people or cartoons or animals and theyre closely compactedbut theyre all kinds of symbolic icons for this relationship of ideas, jumping from one to another. You know, one character might represent this idea to me, another character represents another thing. So Ive kind of dehumanized them in a way, so that they can, in my mind, represent these themes and play off one another. In the early work, I was making paintings that had my friends and using old photographs but now, really, these characters are just stand-ins for ideas. And sometimes, its a clear concept, a clear idea, and other times, one thing contradicts another.

HUZENIS: Similarly, in the past, youve painted figures without backgrounds as well.

CASTATOR: That was really about de-contextualizing images from their environment and throwing them into a blender and kind of making them stand for themselves. If you have an entire scene, a deer looks like it belongs in a picture with nature in the backgroundits a setting, it just feels like it belongsbut then, if you remove that and you pair it up against something else and neither element really belongs or has an environment to react to, then those images are forced to react to one another, and I think you get more out of each one of those images that way. For a while, I was just completely de-contextualizing things in the space. It also allowed me to operate without gravity, or the rules that are inherently dictated by creating a space.

I loved the way that those paintings looked, but if you have the brightest color that you can possibly imagine, straight out of the tube onto an all-white canvas, that white is still going to eat it up. It makes it so hard to play colors off one another if theres always this very, very overpowering white background that they have to sit in. So I think on a conceptual level, I really liked the thinking behind it, but Ive been adding backgrounds and colors lately. I can sacrifice the de-contextualization of the image.

HUZENIS: Tell me about your most recent set of works, Real Tap Water, Karaoke Bar, and Sunset. Were all these made in quarantine?

CASTATOR: Real Tap Water was supposed to be shown at the Dallas Art Fair, which was canceled due to the pandemic. I kind of knew that that was going to happen while I was making it and therein didnt finish it in time for the deadline because the deadline meant nothing. I was afforded more breathing time because of that.

The other two paintings were both made during quarantine for Library Street Collective in Detroit. Both will be included in a catalogue and an exhibition called We Used to Gather. Id been speaking with them about what was going on and the kind of work I was making and things that I was missing, and they were telling me about the whole concept behind the show. I love, love, loveto an embarrassing degreekaraoke.

HUZENIS: Do you have a go-to karaoke song?

CASTATOR: Yeah, theres an Eminem song that I do, Without Me. My friends still, to this day, give me shit about it because its embarrassing how well I can do this one Eminem song. But I grew up in a trailer in the middle of nowherehe was a success story.

HUZENIS: The scenes in these works all share a kind of apocalyptic atmosphere. What is it about the apocalypse that interests you?

CASTATOR: Well, I think Ive kind of created this practice for myself where I can touch on incredibly serious and morbid or repulsive themes because Im balancing that out with humor, satire, these cartoon-like elements. I try to find a way to make these themes palatable because I think its difficult and unsettling for certain people. If a gallery is a dinner party, and somebody brings something that people dont want to talk about in a very direct manner, its awkward silence and then, oh we dont talk about that in this household. But if you do it in this kind of sardonic, playful approach, you can trick people into talking or thinking about things that they would typically find uncomfortable, which I think is a major part of my practice that I enjoy.

I had this show in New York and the concept behind the show was the fragile mind of someone who becomes attracted to conspiracy theories and throws themself into the conspiracy theory culture thats available on the internet. Its obviously all tongue-in-cheek, but Im able to take the temperature in real time of some of the ugliest sides of American history. Finding these back-door ways to open up uncomfortable conversations is really something I look for in the work.

HUZENIS: Tell me about your artist community in L.A. and the spaces youve been converting into artist studios.

CASTATOR: When I moved here, I didnt have the intention to move to Los Angeles. I came out for a two-week apartment switch with a friend. He was living in L.A., I was living in New York, and we just switched. By the time the two weeks was up, both of us had decided that we wanted to move, so we just both stayed. It was the most effortless, unplanned, and breathless effort to move to Los Angeles.

I had a room in a very large loft building with other people downtown, and I spent about a month-and-a-half just walking into buildings, looking for a studio that was close enough that I could commute on foot daily. I walked into dozens of these old industrial buildings, asking if they were open to renting to an artist. Then I just happened to be walking past this place one day and saw them drop a For Lease sign on the window, and I went up.

My dad is also an artist and lives in Los Angeleshe moved here six months before I did, coincidentally. He was also looking for a studio, and we found this beautiful, open space in this building. Eventually we developed this relationship with the landlord where he got over his hesitation about renting to artists. I think he still refers to it as this artsy-fartsy stuff that he doesnt understand, but we pay rent on time, so he loves that.

As businesses have moved out of the building, weve just jumped on the lease for each floor and have taken them over and built out artist spaces. Now its nothing but artists. Its amazing. Its completely transformed the feeling of the building.

HUZENIS: How do you determine who rents?

CASTATOR: Other artists have recommended friends. Thats how the majority of the spaces have been filled. But between myself and my father, weve kind of just wanted serious artists only. No vanity-project-bullshit. No DJs.

My friends outside of that little microcosm arent artists. I spend a lot of time with friends I grew up with in Colorado that ended up here or people that work and operate and exist in completely different worlds.

HUZENIS: What was it like growing up in a college town like Boulder?

CASTATOR: Well, I was born in Texas and lived with my mom until I was 10, out in the middle of the country, outside of Austin. Then I moved to go live with my dad at like 10 or 11. It was a completely different experience because we lived in the center of Boulderall of a sudden, I lived in a city. Well, maybe Boulders a city, maybe its a town, Im not sure. Its a big little place.

Boulder was a weird place to grow up because its a bubble. I think in the time that I lived there the school was voted number one party college in America. Im six-foot-three and have been since I was a freshman in high school, so it was amazing because if I was walking home and walked past some college party, I would just walk in and start bullshitting about how bad whatever program was that I was in and drinking. I was skateboarding a lot at the time, so all of my friends were older than me from the skate park, and they would invite me. I never had an eyebrow raised at the fact that I was like 15. It was a very quintessential college experience, without ever having to go to class.

HUZENIS: Were you a rebellious kid?

CASTATOR: I was just kind of a prick. I went to an alternative high school that I was able to not attend all the time because I was traveling for skateboarding. I rode for a small company and we would make videos and I would go on filming trips and compete in and out of state. Its a great way to grow up because the skate park is this amazing melting pot of different people and freaks and people that have grown up but still remain interested in this thing from their childhood. Just across the board, I was exposed to quite a bit.

HUZENIS: Both of your parents are artists, but aside from their influence, youre mostly self-taught.

CASTATOR: I didnt go to art school. I started painting around the end of high school and I moved to New York. No one in my high school in Boulder was ever like, Oh yeah, you should apply to Cooper Union, its free if you get in. I would have conversations with people at these institutions, and theyd be like, Well you might think you might want to be an X character now but well find some way that you can apply your talents to X, Y and Z. I was just so turned off.

So I moved to New York for exposure and to be around this thing that I didnt know anything about, but obviously realized was important. And, I guess, to cultivate taste, which I had none of before I moved there. I started working at galleries as an art handler and [with the recommendation of a close mentor, New Museum Deputy Director Karen Wong] the New Museum hired me on their installation staff. Then, by a weird chain of events, through Karen Wong, I was introduced to the artist Tal R, who invited me to be a guest student of his during his last semesters at the Kunstakademie in Dsseldorf.

As far as institutional education, thats the most that Ive got under my belt, and it was incredibly beneficial. It was 100 euro a semester as a registration fee. Thats it. And there were no real classes. It was just studio all the time. That has completely informed the way that I built up the studios here in the building. Very few of them have four walls. Theyre mostly just divided spaces with this kind of open-air, community feeling to them.

HUZENIS: What was the experience of working as an art handler at the New Museum like?

CASTATOR: My life opened up quite a bit because you do these very intensive installations and de-installations that were maybe two or three weeks worth of work where youd rack up a lot of hours and overtime. And then I had a month, basically, to be in studio. That was the best moment for me in New Yorkwork-life balance.

I helped install theChris Ofili retrospective, and just to be that close to those paintings and see them in person for the first time was amazing. I somehow wound up at a hotpot dinner with Chris and Karen Wong. Hes hands-down the coolest artist Ive ever met, maybe the coolest person Ive ever met. The guy literally just breathes in air, exhales cool. One of the coolest experiences from my last exhibition in New York was when [New Museum director]Lisa Phillipscame and did a walkthrough. It was a very surreal experience because I used to get checks with her name on the back.

HUZENIS: You mentioned that you still share your studio with your father. Tell me about your working dynamic.

CASTATOR: Were very similar, but we dont keep kind of the same hours. The space is divided; he has his zone and I have my zone. I feel like a lot of people couldnt spend that amount of time around their parents, but hes probably the most informed person I could talk to about my work, as hes seen it develop over the course of my entire life.

HUZENIS: Whats the most valuable lesson youve learned from him?

CASTATOR: I think the greatest thing hes instilled in me is how to remain excited about your work, to celebrate each tiny victory. Not everything is going to be amazing, so when you do have these moments where you feel like youve had some level of success, you have to bask in them and celebrate them. Hes been an artist my entire life, and hes remained excited about his practice and eager to make things. Thats just a really good way to live. Ultimately, being an artist is very much about living a life worth reflecting into objects or images. I think its important to be happy. I dont really get off on the whole miserable, brooding thing. Thats another reason why I like being in LA. Everyones happy and fucking tanned all the time. The sun is shining every single day. How are you going to be this suicidal masochist if you live here?

See the rest here:

Artist Canyon Castator Is Making The Apocalypse Palatable - Interview

New Mexico’s thin blurred line (The thin blurred line) High Country News Know the West – High Country News

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

In mid-June, on a sunny late afternoon, dozens of protesters led by Indigenous and youth organizers gathered in front of the Albuquerque Museum at the feet of La Jornada, a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oate. They called for the statues removal, saying it was a monument to a genocidal colonial history. On the outer banks of the crowd, at least six militiamen from the New Mexico Civil Guard, a civilian militia, flanked the protest in a tight semicircle, some of them shouldering assault rifles.

When some of the protesters began taking a pickax and chain to the statue, a man in a blue shirt later identified as Steven Baca Jr. sprayed a cloud of Mace at them. Then he threw a woman to the ground. Her head hit the pavement with an audible smack, and Baca fled, with protesters trailing him, shouting at him to leave. Baca turned to face a man in jeans and a black hoodie, who tackled him. A bystanders video caught the scuffle that followed: Baca drew a handgun from his waistband and fired four shots. Theres a man down, someone shouted. Theres a man down!

Protesters call for the removal of the statue of Juan de Oate as an armed militia member looks on outside the Albuquerque Museum on June 15 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Throughout the hours-long demonstration, Albuquerque police had waited behind the museum with an armored car, some watching from museum security cameras. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Civil Guard, dressed in Army uniforms and helmets, tried to keep protesters from the statue. They were there, they claimed, to keep peace and enforce the law. After Baca shot the protester three times, the militia surrounded him, protecting him as he sat in the street. The nearby police took four minutes to arrive. The protester, Scott Williams, was eventually taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The shooting at La Jornada, Spanish for the expedition, occurred several weeks after the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter protests in Albuquerque. At those demonstrations, too, a disquieting camaraderie between official police and another militia, the New Mexico Patriots, emerged. Were all here for the same cause, man, an Albuquerque police officer said to a group of body-armored gym-goers and militiamen before a #BLM protest, according to a video taken by a militia member and shared online. Were here to help.

The incidents are in line with the deeper history of the Albuquerque polices behavior during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. High Country News unearthed archival documents from the Center for Southwest Research illuminating a history of police cooperation and cross-pollination with radical right-wing and vigilante groups in New Mexico. According to police and FBI reports, newspaper clippings and the testimony of activists, that cooperation included surveillance, harassment and misinformation campaigns against social justice movements by informants and radical provocateurs.

While community members and activists have long complained about excessive use of force and surveillance at protests and in minority neighborhoods, these documents clearly show that New Mexico law enforcement tolerates and at times embraces white vigilantism. And despite the Albuquerque Police Departments statement condemning the New Mexico Civil Guard after the shooting, militiamen with known white-power affiliations continue to patrol protests with the silent encouragement of law enforcement.

Theres this overlap between the people who populate militias and populate police departments.

THEY ALL TRAVEL in the same circles, said David Correia, associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. Correia has done extensive research on the cross-pollination that occurred between police, radical right ideology and vigilantism during the civil rights movement. These are all former police or former military, or former guardsman or current guardsman. Theres this overlap between the people who populate militias and populate police departments.

Police brutality and political repression flourished in Albuquerque throughout the civil rights movement. A 1974 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented an array of alleged abuses and found that police in Albuquerque and across the state used unconstitutional and at times violent, even deadly, methods when policing minority neighborhoods and political dissidents, including the Chicano groups Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Black Berets.

The militant Black Berets regularly faced death threats from the local Minutemen militia as well as misinformation campaigns organized by the anti-communist John Birch Society. According to Beret leader Richard Moore, the group sent an informant to the militias meetings in the late-1960s and created a roster of those who attended, including multiple police departments comprising the secretive Metro Squad, a police intelligence unit. Many members of the right-wing Minute Men [sic] organization were from the sheriffs, the state police, and the Albuquerque Police departments. So making a distinction between the two sometimes wasnt easy, said Moore in 2001. The group gave out the list at a press conference in Santa Fe, including to a New Mexico attorney general, hoping for an investigation. It never came.

In 1968 and 1969, a spate of bombings struck some of Alianza leader Reies Lpez Tijerinas relatives. In May 1968, William Tiny Fellion a paid assassin, demolitions expert and John Birch Society member, as reported by state police just two months earlier blew off his left hand planting a bomb at Alianzas headquarters in Espaola, New Mexico. According to a New Mexico State Police report, Fellion told an officer that he would kill Tijerina and his followers free of charge because he has no use for that type of people. After Fellions botched bombing, tips came in that led both Alianza and the FBI Albuquerque Field Office to believe local police were behind the bombings.

ON THE CLOUDY EVENING of June 1, two weeks before the Baca shooting, members of the New Mexico Patriots met with at least six Albuquerque Police Department officers outside the Jackson Wink Mixed Martial Arts Academy in downtown Albuquerque, before a #BLM protest. If you guys would see something, gives us a holler, an Albuquerque officer told the militia. But take care of each other and, the main thing, take care of the people in Albuquerque.

Jon Jones, an MMA fighter, explained that their goal was to stop protester shenanigans without brandishing their guns.

A lot of these (protesters), they just move from one block to the next block to the next block, an Albuquerque police officer responded. So even just being two blocks away because police are moving there from one side that would be helpful, just right there.

Militia groups regularly coordinate with police.

Emily Gorcenski, a researcher and founder of First Vigil, a group that tracks far-right violence, says that there is an extensive history of armed vigilante groups collaborating with police. Militia groups regularly coordinate with police, she wrote, over Twitter. From Portland to Charlottesville, weve seen armed paramilitaries working directly with police against protesters over and over.

During the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017, police circulated a false white supremacist rumor that antifa planned to inject police with fentanyl. That same year, at a Portland alt-right rally, American Freedom Keepers militiamen helped police arrest counter-protesters, allegedly at police request.

In New Mexico, the NM Patriots and the Civil Guard both claim to coordinate with local police, reported the Albuquerque Journal, while the Civil Guard also says it has current and former law enforcement and military within its ranks.

Members of the New Mexico Civil Guard militia group are apprehended after a protester was shot in Albuquerque in June.

THE ALBUQUERQUE POLICE DEPARTMENT did not respond to requests for comment or to questions regarding its officers potential membership within citizen militias,including the New Mexico Civil Guard a group which APD Chief Michael Geier proposed bestowing hate group designation after the Baca shooting. In an email, a spokesperson from New Mexico State Police said their Investigations Bureau is actively investigating possible NMSP membership within militia ranks.

The Albuquerque Police Department has released few details about the shooting at La Jornada. The departments criminal complaint reported that Steven Baca Jr. acted in a manner in which to protect the statue from the protesters. It failed to mention his violent provocation, and described the crowd ejecting Baca from the scene as maliciously in pursuit of him. Steven was similarly recorded, leaving the area of the statue toward the street interacting with the crowd, the report read. However, his specific type of interaction with the crowd is unknown at this time.

Bacas charge for the shooting was dropped, leaving multiple other battery charges. He was an Albuquerque City Council candidate in 2019 and is the son of former Bernalillo County sheriffs deputy, according to Albuquerque Journal.

Given the departments history, Correia said, It's not clear where the line is between police and right-wing fascist militia in New Mexico.

We know it led to violence directed specifically at individual activists (and) should make us suspicious of the way APD operates today when it confronts social movements like (#BlackLivesMatter), Correia said. Because they've done this before, we shouldn't be surprised if they're still doing it.

After the June 1 meeting between Jon Jones, NM Patriots and the police, thebearded militiaman filming the meeting turned to address the camera directly. Were going to be out patrolling in a little bit,he said. See you guys out there.

Kalen Goodluckis a contributing editor atHigh Country News.Email himatkalengood[emailprotected]g or submit aletter to the editor.

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New Mexico's thin blurred line (The thin blurred line) High Country News Know the West - High Country News

How it feels to survive Silicon Valley and a pandemic – Engadget

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

If RSAs attendees were even able to score an Airbnb, it was second to the tech companies whod, for years, packed employees into expensive rentals that once were on the normal-person market. Companies whose fat salaries also pushed rents out of reach for locals. Both had ensured a steady flow of evictions among artists, writers, musicians, teachers, sex workers, people of color, the elderly, and restaurant workers. Or they became part of San Franciscos thousands upon thousands of homeless (like the grocery cashiers and pizza servers I knew living in cars).

This was February, yet I was already too aware of COVID-19s contagion to brave going to the RSA conference. My best friend, a hacker visiting for conference-related meetings, felt the same way. Instead, we went to Haight-Ashbury, essentially where I grew up, loving the gritty contrast of Haight street punks posing for Japanese tourists under the Ben and Jerrys sign on that iconic corner of colorful Victorians.

At Japantowns mall, she cautioned me to keep my phone clean with sterile wipes; while there we saw a man in a mask have a coughing fit that drove people away from him like dish soap dripped into a pan of oily water. She avoided RSA too, but caught covid when she got home. And in the following five months the world would come to a screeching halt and over half a million would be dead with no end in sight.

RSA Conference 2020 added 40,000 faces to our downtown of glittering towers and their corporate tenants technological promises of a better future, but that was a nominal blur for San Francisco tourism. We barely felt it. Yet the conference is a crystalline moment for me. I can pinpoint the day I began self-quarantining by the publication of my February 28 Bad Password column, Coronavirus bursts Big Techs bubble.

That column, like many of the Bad Passwords weve done here over the past five years, reads now like something that was published from the future, recognizing we were at the tipping point of the pandemic and cautioning the violent contractions to come.

Steve Nesius / Reuters

Like the rest of the world right now, Bad Password is going on a pandemic-induced hiatus. Shining a light on techs monsters and hypocrites has been our jam for five years, and theres been plenty of greed, data dealing, security chicanery, discrimination, misinformation, and recklessness to go around. When Bad Password started, infosec slang was finally becoming everyday terminology. No one understood yet what a skid was (most still dont) but I no longer had to explain what a dox was.

Right out of the starting gate we surfaced a National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) report that showed Facebook is the epicenter of abuse for over 23 million women -- with the sites real names policy at the heart of it. At the time, Facebook was targeting LGBTQ users and outing their names. After that column, I was real named by Facebook, who stalled their response to my attorneys, after which my account remained in Facebook jail for one reason or another. I dont miss it.

Bad Passwords next big fun-time was when Hacking Team, arguably a spyware-for-dictators company, got royally, publicly pwned. In How spyware peddler Hacking Team was publicly dismantled we examined what the hack revealed: a country-by-country rundown of who Hacking Team had done deadly deeds for. I cross-referenced Hacking Teams client work with human rights reports on digital abuses by date and place, then worked with a team to make an interactive map it was later used as a case study.

When Oculus Rift founder (and alt-right shitpost financier extraordinaire), Palmer Luckey, pivoted into pitching LIDAR tech to hunt immigrants, we took it apart brick by brick. Luckeys response made my colleagues envious by decrying it as fake news. Then there was the time we documented Elon Musks PR lackeys calling Pulitzer-prize winning investigative outlet Reveal an extremist organization for reporting on Tesla factory safety issues. And when that Bad Password was directly cited to Musk on Twitter, he famously responded with a call for a journalist rating system. Elon really wanted to leave me a bad Yelp review.

When FOSTA passed, we explained why this was a horrible defining moment for every internet user, and not just for sex workers. When revisiting it, we found it left a very real body count behind and that particular Bad Password is cited in academic articles on the topic. This heralded the great internet war on sex were suffering through, and with a sobering post-FOSTA terror we explained exactly how sex censorship killed the internet we love.

We did what Bad Password loves to do, which is show you the hypocrisy of a techie thing, shine a humorous spotlight on the greedy opportunists, and find the human thread to engender empathy (while seeking a strong positive to pull us forward when we can). I entered an alternative 1995 universe to take Rudy Giuliani, cybersecurity expert, down several notches. While others took the WikiLeaks bait hook, line, and sinker, we diagrammed exactly how Julian Assange was actually pushing propaganda. We hated Ajit Pai before it was cool. We also got to do one of the most thorough and painfully humorous takedowns of Ubers toxic techbro culture you may ever read.

Bad Password also reveled in exposing the lies, dirty dealings, and anti-sex crusades of all those alleged anti trafficking orgs that love policing sex on the internet (and off). We also did one of the most referenced investigations on PayPal, Square and big bankings war on the sex industry.

Where the past meets the present, before the disastrous 2016 election, we said yes, you should absolutely be worried about election hacking. And Bad Password did something many had hoped someone, somewhere would do: We drew a direct line between IBM working with Nazi Germany and tech companies working directly with ICE.

And yeah. Its still all Facebooks fault. I mean, theyve raised what, at least an entire generation on firmly defended Holocaust denial. So here we are.

Locked indoors during a global pandemic, re-reading the Bad Password about Apps and gadgets for the Blade Runner future we didnt ask for. Watching Georgias election-hacking Brian Kemp rescind all local mask mandates while masks have become mandatory in France (and other countries). Wondering if we can somehow hack our way out of all this.

Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

It has been five months since RSA Conference 2020. I feel like I emerged from my apartment to a San Francisco brutally ransacked by tech charlatans and venture capital Bioshock villains.

The tech buses are gone. The unbelievable traffic of Ubers, Lyfts, and Teslas has vanished. The Facebook, Google, Salesforce, and massive tech properties are vacant. The Twitter building is empty and could remain that way permanently. Tech employees have moved out in droves: one in ten city renters have broken their leases and moved out; others, like a house of Google employees who live near me, plan to be gone by the end of the year.

Vultures linger to see if we have anything left to bleed. Like Grubhub ignoring delivery fee caps and hiking fees on coronavirus-crippled restaurants yet again and Airbnb asking guests to donate money to their hosts.

Airbnbs across the city have no bookings. Zero. The (reviled) one on my block has nothing booked through at least 2021. It sits dark with the power shut off. I can see its back garden has turned brown, dry and dead. At least a third of the apartments and houses around me are vacant; Ive watched them move out.

Airbnbs linger on Craiglist as fully furnished apartments where they sit and gradually become discounted, then include all utilities and wifi, then offer the first month free. SF Craigslist, where rents are absolutely schizophrenic, veering drunkenly from 1990 levels ($1400/month) to tech boom heights ($5K and up). The Craigslist free section overflows with designer furniture and high-end household items. More often, these spoils of the pandemic get dumped on the sidewalk in haste.

I can tell you for a fact that we wont miss those people with more money than sense, whose businesses were so plainly naive and fraudulent, whose lack of empathy was a trait cherished as aspirational, and whose solidarity was predicated on the exclusion, use, and degradation of others. San Francisco had become a performative playground for sheltered college grads who wrote racist algorithms, who enforced "real names" policies on our LGBTQ communities, and whose companies leeched hate and deadly misinformation into our collective bloodstreams until eventually the world as we know it stopped.

Yet techs impact on my hometown, its invasive services no one wanted and human-unfriendly gig economy (as well as its economic crushing of the poor and disenfranchised), now combined with COVID-19 has delivered a one-two punch bringing us to our knees.

Where once we had localized areas of homeless encampments, they now sprawl block after block. Think Skid Row, but evenly distributed. Upper Haight, the neighborhood of my youth, looks like a post-nuclear blast zone town in Fallout 4, or Fallout 76. Five businesses on Haight closed permanently in the last week alone. Some blocks have two or three businesses remaining. Everything is boarded up. So many people have gone missing recently that my Haight Street friends and I wonder if its coronavirus, or a serial killer.

The smell of Ben and Jerrys ice cream is gone. For now.

bluejayphoto via Getty Images

While Big Tech had been unconcerned with the outcomes of their privacy abuses, held a blatant disregard for user security, and were unwilling to believe their tools would be used to livestream massacres, Bad Password tirelessly documented, raised the alarm, and worked its hardest to shine a light into the dark. Our attitude here has never been You should have known better. Instead, it has been the powerful people making decisions for the rest of us knew better, but did nothing.

Our plan is for Bad Password to return. Our hope is that when we do, the tech forces that got us into much of this mess (and certainly made it worse) will decide that enough people have died to justify excising anti-science propaganda, banning hate groups and Holocaust denial, and will own up to their catastrophic failures at being responsible, ethical, just, and compassionate participants in the world around them.

The days ahead feel dark now, but whatever comes next is in our hands. Let the unhappy techies keep their internet of shit garbage while we repurpose their devices and designs to reveal monsters, to document abuses that should never be repeated, and to take care of one another.

Where we go from here, is forward.

More here:

How it feels to survive Silicon Valley and a pandemic - Engadget

Redefine Meat wants to disrupt meat industry with 3D printed Alt-Steak – Food Dive

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Danzig

Eshchar Ben-Shitrit's world changed when his oldest son was born five and a half years ago.

As he became a father, he realized he now had a bigger role to play in shaping the world, both for his family and his son. And he did something he once thought impossible: He gave up meat.

While Ben-Shitrit has changed what he put on his plate, he told Food Dive his tastes have not changed. He still truly wants to eat a good steak. Which is why, on the day his second son was born two and a half years ago, he quit his job as a product manager in the 3D printing world. Soon after that, he founded a company to solve that problem: creating a plant-based steak that can be made with a 3D printer.

His company, Israel-based Redefine Meat, has done just that. Last month, the company announced the Alt-Steak a plant-based product with the texture, flavor and appearance of the real thing would be tested at some high-end restaurants in Israel, Germany and Switzerland later this year. The company plans to make the Alt-Steak widely available at restaurants in Europe starting in 2021, and in the U.S. at the end of 2021.

Redefine Meat has worked with butchers, chefs, food technologists and flavorings company Givaudan to create a product that replicates the look, taste,texture and cooking behavior of steak. The company says there are more than 70 sensorial parameters incorporated into the product.The company's proprietary 3D printers take three plant-based ingredient blends known as Alt-Muscle, Alt-Fat and Alt-Blood and put them together to create a multi-layered plant-based steak.

Eshchar Ben-Shitrit

Permission granted by Redefine Meat

The company, which raised $6 million in a funding round last year, has been working to disrupt the meat industry since its inception.

Not only is Ben-Shitritready to eat the steak his company produces, but he also thinks consumers want it. In the years since the company started, he said he's seen a big shift in consumer attitudes toward meat alternatives and the technology to produce them.

"I think that now people understand, with climate change and ... COVID-19, suddenly ...the notion of 3D-printed meat makes sense to them,"Ben-Shitrittold Food Dive."When we started, which was not so long ago, it didn't make sense. People told me, 'So why do we need meat not coming from an animal? Why would somebody want something that looks like meat?'And today, it's more, 'How efficient is it going to be? Is it healthy or not? Is it affordable or not?'"

Just a few years ago, 3D printing was seen as the next big thing in food technology. Trendwatchers said it could be used to amp up personalization of food, creating customized snacks, confections and decorations.

Fast-forwarding to today, the technology exists, but is not in wide use. Trends have moved more toward functional ingredients, alternatives to products that come from animals, and enhancing taste and texture.

The vast potential of 3D printing in the food world is part of what drew Ben-Shitrit to creating plant-based steaks.

In order to be successful, he said, the use of 3D printing "needs to be specific to a problem to solve a problem. In 3D printing of meat, you can solve problems. Thinking of snacks, OK. For chocolate, there's not really a problem to solve."

3D printing is really the only way to create a plant-based steak, he said. A conventional meat steak has different textures and juiciness, as well as fats that marble through different cuts. And even if a flavorist can perfectly replicate the taste of a steak,the appearance, texture and experience of eating steak are necessary for anything to serve as a convincing substitute.

Several other plant-based food companies that don't use 3D printing have tackled steak substitutes, and in some parts of the world, there are many choices on the market. European consumers can find many options at the grocery store, including one from Dutch manufacturer Viveraand one from Harmless Foods,a store brand at U.K. vegan grocer GreenBay. In the United States, both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have said they were working on developing steaks.

"When we started, which was not so long ago, it didn't make sense. People told me, 'So why do we need meat not coming from an animal? Why would somebody want something that looks like meat?' And today, it's more, 'How efficient is it going to be? Is it healthy or not? Is it affordable or not?"

Eshchar Ben-Shitrit

Founder and CEO, Redefine Meat

The printer that Redefine Meat has designed uses the three plant-based ingredients that mimic different components of steak and can print in dots tinier than a millimeter. They are used to create a multi-layered matrix that reproduces a conventional steak. Ben-Shitrit said the printer has made a single piece of meat that weighs about five pounds. It can produce a steak in about an hour, he said.

It took a lot of time and R&D to get to a product that is good and replicates a steak, mostly because eating is the most complex human behavior, Ben-Shitrit said. There is texture, scent, flavor and sight involved. The company put together high-tech machines and algorithms to try to determine the perfect balance of all of those aspects. A couple of months ago, Ben-Shitrit said, they found something that worked.

"It's an ongoing cycle of optimizingso many parameters," he said."This is where we use our technology. ...The computer, the algorithm, canlive with far greater complexity than what human minds can live with. If we just [designed meat ourselves], it would take usmillions of years."

Many food scientists, as well as conventional meat butchers, were vital in the development of the Alt-Steak. Redefine Meat's scientific team dug deep into the chemistry of what makes steak. The company has then found plant proteins that form the same amino acids, creating close to the same profile of the meat itself, fatty acids and blood in the red meat.

The ingredients to make up Alt-Steak components are relatively common plant-based ones. The main ingredients are soy and pea proteins, coconut fat and sunflower oil, natural colors including beetroot, water and natural flavors. Ben-Shitrit said that despite the chemistry deep dive used to create the ingredients, the company has not formed any novel ingredients mainly so there are no impediments in getting to market, he said. New ingredients take time to be cleared by regulators.

Optional Caption

Permission granted by Redefine Meat

The Alt-Steak is not only plant-based, but it is also healthier than its conventional alternative, Ben-Shitrit said. It has no cholesterol, less fat, less saturated fat and more fiber. And, he said, there's no potential dangers of being exposed to antibiotics or meat-related contamination.

However, he said, most people who eat steak are not doing so to be healthier. They're doing it out of enjoyment.

"But I think it is a healthy option," he said.

So far, Ben-Shitrit said his company has had a good relationship with conventional meat. Redefine Meat is working with several conventional butchers, both to get cuts, textures and blends right and for wisdom on how to make the best products. Ben-Shitrit said the company and the idea of plant-based steak has so far been embraced by the butchers.

"They don'tsee it as a threat.They see an opportunity there, and they also think that this will happen,"Ben-Shitrit said.

The ingredients and technology for an Alt-Steak give it a market price comparable to a high quality animal-based steak, and Ben-Shitrit says that's where he's aiming to price it. Unlike CPG plant-based meat, which producers are working to get to price parity with the conventional version to drive consumer adoption, the Alt-Steak targets consumers who are willing to pay for a dining experience, Ben-Shitrit said. He also is focusing on product quality rather than production economy, which drives a premium price.

Perfecting the Alt-Steak and growing it in foodservice is Redefine Meat's sole focus right now. Ben-Shitrit said the company is not going to be working on any other kind of meat in the near future. He said the company experimented with tuna filets in the past, but they haven't done extensive work on that product. Any other products are a couple of years away.

"What we're trying to achieve is to have a product in the market and to have a big presence to have an impact, and also to support the company," he said."And we believe that focusing on beef now makes a lot of sense. It's so big, it's so challenging. The opportunity's so big. So why confuse ourselves?"

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Redefine Meat wants to disrupt meat industry with 3D printed Alt-Steak - Food Dive

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