Astronomy tips: How to photograph the moon, stars, and sky – Los Angeles Times

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When life events knock you down, looking to the stars may give you a new perspective. It reminds you how small we are and how easy it is to find a diversion with your old friend, the camera.

It doesnt take a lot of expensive equipment to take good photos of the heavens. Astrophotography can involve equipment as simple as a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera with an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) rating of at least 1600 (the higher the number, the more sensitive to light it is).

Besides the camera, your equipment should include a sturdy tripod and a lens with an aperture (f-stop) opening of f/2.8 or higher.. The lower the f-stop the more light flows into the camera.

The size of the lens is also important. If you want a wide view with lots of foreground and more sky you should choose a 14 mm, 16 mm, 20 mm or 35 mm lens. If you want to take pictures of the moon, you will need a lens in the range of 200 mm to 600 mm.

Now find your location and attach your camera to the tripod. Switch off your automatic settings and find either the bulb or manual setting, which allows you to leave open the shutter for long exposures. The manual setting on most cameras will allow exposures of up to 30 seconds. Adjust your aperture to the maximum opening (the smaller numbers). Also, turn off the autofocus feature.

This 20-second exposure at iso-800 shows the difficulty with residential light pollution.

(Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times)

Your training wheels are gone now that youve turned off the automatic settings, and you can begin to experiment with your cameras manual adjustments. Start by manually focusing your lens to infinity and setting the ISO to 1600.

If your camera allows, adjust your shutter speed for an exposure of 15 to 30 seconds. Remember that Earth is rotating, so stars can appear to be streaking with exposures of 30 seconds.

Adjust your cameras image quality setting to RAW mode, which enables the highest-quality picture. Processing the pictures in RAW mode using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom or other post-production tools provides better color and contrast control.

There are apps for everything, including astrophotography. Raul Roa, an avid astrophotographer, suggests the Planets app, which gives precise locations and times for viewing Polaris, the Milky Way and other celestial objects. Roa also uses the Sun Surveyor app, which shows where and when the Milky Way will rise, which is useful in planning your trips or locations.

Stan Honda, another former news photographer-turned-astrophotographer, offers his favorite apps: SkySafari, PhotoPills and Stellarium, all of which give you an idea of what you can see right now.

Before heading out to photograph the night sky, check the Weather page in the Times or online for the phases of the moon. Look for when the moon will be full, when it rises and when it sets.

Roa likes chasing the moon, he said, because it is something primordial. I look up and just think of what or who might be out there. Most of us will never get a chance to step off the Earth, so looking up and dreaming is the next best thing for me.

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Astronomy tips: How to photograph the moon, stars, and sky - Los Angeles Times

Astronomers Took New Pics of 1998 OR2, The Asteroid About to Whoosh Past Earth – ScienceAlert

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There's an asteroid closing in on a safe Earth flyby. That's nothing unusual - near-Earth space has a lot of rocks in it. But 1998 OR2 is distinguishing itself in a series of happy snaps as it draws closer to periapsis.

Both the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have managed to catch glimpses of the asteroid as it grows brighter in our skies, travelling through space at around 31,320 kilometres per hour (19,461 miles per hour).

We have nothing to fear from 1998 OR2. It's relatively large, but it's not going to come close enough to threaten Earth. The asteroid was discovered in 1998, and astronomers have been watching it carefully to calculate its orbital path, which is projected all the way until the year 2197.

This year, 2020, will mark the asteroid's closest flyby in at least a century, and it's going to sail harmlessly past at a distance of 6.3 million kilometres (around 4 million miles). That's over 16 times the average distance between Earth and the Moon.

But because it's so large - estimates put it at around 4.1 kilometres long and 1.8 kilometres wide (2.5 by 1.1 miles) - it's unusually bright. It's therefore one of the largest and brightest near-Earth asteroids, and when it flies by on April 29 - periapsis, or its closest orbit, will be around 09:56 GMT - amateur astronomers may even be able to see it with smaller telescopes.

It is classed as a 'potentially hazardous' asteroid, because all asteroids above a certain size (140 metres) and within a certain distance of Earth (7,480,000 kilometres or 4,650,000 miles) are automatically classified as such.

But projections for 1998 OR2 don't indicate any kind of collision in our future. The next time it will come close to Earth will be in 2079, when it will swing by at a distance of 1.8 million kilometres (1.1 million miles). That's around 4.6 times the lunar distance.

In fact, this flyby is really cool. It will allow astronomers to take measurements of the asteroid so we can refine our size estimation techniques. We can also study the asteroid itself, to learn more about the composition of these space rocks. And tracking these objects also helps us develop measures for defending Earth against asteroids that could be genuinely hazardous.

If you want to try to catch a glimpse of this awesome chunk of rock, EarthSky has detailed instructions on the equipment you will need, and where in the sky to look.

If you are in the wrong place, or don't have a telescope, though, never fear - the Virtual Telescope Project will be livestreaming the event on its website.

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Astronomers Took New Pics of 1998 OR2, The Asteroid About to Whoosh Past Earth - ScienceAlert

Everything You Need to Know to Take up Stargazing – Thrillist

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This is a piece of the puzzle that gets stacked on top of other points below. Do you need a telescope to start stargazing? Not necessarily. Though you can't see everything with the naked eye. So, it depends on what you're looking for. If you want to view deep-space objects, youre going to need a telescope. If youre looking at planets, youll be able to see a lot of them with the naked eye. Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter are all easily visible. However, even a pair of binoculars will give you a more impressive view.

However, there are tools available beyond telescopes and binoculars. "The first thing I did when I started is to subscribe to the national magazines," Sreenivasan said. "The two largest ones are Sky and Telescopeand Astronomy." Though, he notes you can read them online as well. They have details about what you can see in the night sky over the coming weeks. (Of course, Thrillist also has details on many space events throughout the year.)

Additionally, there are apps that use augmented reality to show you what's in the sky and help you track down objects you want to see. Some of the most popular apps include Sky View, Sky Safari, Star Walk, and Night Sky. "Also, invest in a star atlas," Sreenivasan said. "There are several out there like Sky & Telescopes Pocket Sky Atlas.Thats one a lot of beginners use, and I still use it myself when I travel. Its just a set of star maps. Its a pretty small book, but its a pretty good book."

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Everything You Need to Know to Take up Stargazing - Thrillist

Astronomers Detected a Black Hole Merger With Very Different Mass Objects – Universe Today

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In another first, scientists at the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors announced a signal unlike anything theyve ever seen before. While many black hole mergers have been detected thanks to LIGO and Virgos international network for detectors, this particular signal (GW190412) was the first where the two black holes had distinctly different masses.

The event was observed by both LIGO and Virgo on April 12th, 2019, early in the detectors third observation run (O3). According to the study that describes the find, which recently appeared online and the LIGO website, GW190412 took place about 1.9 to 2.9 billion light-years from Earth. It involved the merger of two black holes weighting approximately 8 and 30 Solar masses, respectively.

The event is unique in the history of gravitational wave astronomy since all binaries observed previously by the LIGO and Virgo detectors consisted of two roughly similar masses. Analyses revealthat the merger happened at a distance of 1.9 to 2.9 billion light-years from Earth. The new unequal mass system is a unique discovery since all binaries observed previously by the LIGO and Virgo detectors consisted of two roughly similar masses.

This sharp difference in mass allowed the LIGO/Virgo scientists to verify something predicted by Einsteins General Theory of Relativity, which has so far remained untested. Frank Ohme is the leader of the Independent Max Planck Research Group aka. the Binary Merger Observations and Numerical Relativity at the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI). As he stated in a recent AEI press release:

For the very first time we have heard in GW190412 the unmistakable gravitational-wave hum of a higher harmonic, similar to overtones of musical instruments. In systems with unequal masses like GW190412 our first observation of this type these overtones in the gravitational-wave signal are much louder than in our usual observations. This is why we couldnt hear them before, but in GW190412, we finally can.

These observations once again confirms the theory of General Relativity (GR), which states that massive objects alter the curvature of space time and cause ripples aka. gravitational waves when they merge. The theory also predicts that binary systems where two objects are vastly different in terms of mass will introduce higher harmonics into the waveform.

When the LIGO and Virgo collaborations examined the signal produced by GW190412, they observed this very phenomenon at work for the first time in history. In short, the fundamental frequency of the GWs were two or three times higher than what has been observed with all other events that have been detected so far.

Says Roberto Cotesta, a PhD student in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity division at the AEI in Potsdam:

The black holes at the heart of GW190412 have 8 and 30 times the mass of our Sun, respectively. This is the first binary black-hole system we have observed for which the difference between the masses of the two black holes is so large! This big mass difference means that we can more precisely measure several properties of the system: its distance to us, the angle we look at it, and how fast the heavy black hole spins around its axis.

Another benefit of this latest detection is that it allowed the team to measure the systems astrophysical properties with greater precision. In short, unequal masses imprint themselves on a GW signal, which in turn allows scientists to more precisely measure properties like the mass and spin of the merging objects, as well as the distance to the source and angle of observation.

Essential to this was the accurate models of GWs produced from coalescing black holes, which were provided by researchers from the Albert Einstein Institute. For the first time, these models included both the precession of the black-holes spins and multipole moments beyond the dominant quadrupole which were crucial to measuring their properties and carrying out tests of GR.

The Institutes high-performance Minerva and Hypatia computer clusters at AEI Potsdam and Holodeck at AEI Hannover also played a significant role in the analysis of the signal. According to Alessandra Buonanno, the director of the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity division at the AEI, this type of unique signal is something that the two previous observations runs failed to detect. As she said:

During O1 and O2, we have observed the tip of the iceberg of the binary population composed of stellar-mass black holes. Thanks to the improved sensitivity, GW190412 has begun to reveal us a more diverse, submerged population, characterized by mass asymmetry as large as 4 and black holes spinning at about 40% the possible maximum value allowed by general relativity.

Another reason why this kind of observation was not possible before has to do with the recent upgrades made at all the detectors in the LIGO/Virgo international network. This includes a new technique where the quantum-mechanical properties of the lasers used by LIGO and Vigro are squeezed to enhance the sensitivity of the detectors.

This technique was pioneered by researchers at the German-British GEO600 detector in South Hanover, Germany designed and operated by scientists from the Max Planck Institute and multiple European universities. The technique has improved the sensitivity of the GEO600 detector by a factor of two and the AEI is leading the global effort to maximize the effectiveness of the light squeezing technique further.

When the first GW event was detected by scientists at LIGO in February of 2016, it signaled a new age in astronomy. In just over four years, improvements made to individual detectors and international collaborations have ushered in an era where events are being detected every week.

With every new detection, we are learning more about the exotic physics that power our Universe. Be sure to check out this simulation of what the GW190412 merger looked like, courtesy of the Albert Einstein Institute:

Further Reading: Albert Einstein Institute, LSC

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Astronomers Detected a Black Hole Merger With Very Different Mass Objects - Universe Today

Astronomers Discover The Science Behind Star Bursts That Light Up The Sky – Scoop.co.nz

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Thursday, 23 April 2020, 2:44 pmPress Release: University of Canterbury

University of Canterbury (UC) astronomers arepart of an international team that has revealed howexplosions on the surface of a white dwarf star can increaseits brightness by thousands or millions of times making itlook like a new star.

For many yearsastronomers have thought that nuclear fusion of material onthe surface of a white dwarf directly powers all the lightfrom a nova explosion, which happen about 10 times a year inour galaxy.

A nova, or stella nova Latin fornew star is a sudden explosion on the surface of awhite dwarf, which is the hot, burnt-out core of a star. Itproduces an incredible amount of energy and light,increasing the stars brightness by thousands or evenmillions of times. If a nova occurs relatively close toearth it can appear as a new star to the naked eye.

Innew research, a team of international astronomers has shownthat shock waves from the nova explosion, rather thannuclear fusion, cause most of the brightness.

The teamused NASAs space-based telescopes and ground-basedtelescopes, including some at the UCMt John Observatory in Tekapo, to observe a recentnearby nova in the constellation of Carina and proved thatit is indeed shock waves that cause most of the novasbrightness.

Their results are documented in a newpaper called Direct evidence for shock-powered opticalemission in a nova published this month in theinternational journal NatureAstronomy.

UC Associate Professor in Astronomyand Director of the University of Canterbury Mt JohnObservatory KarenPollard, who co-authored the paper, was observing atUCs Mt John Observatory using the McLellan telescope andHERCULES spectrograph a few days after the bright nova inCarina was reported.

I was excited to observe it a new bright novae in the galaxy is an importantopportunity to make a detailed study of the novasproperties and how these change with time. Usingspectroscopy we were able to examine shock-produced emissionand calculate how energetic the shock waves were and howfast the shocked material was moving, shesays.

Elias Aydi, a research associate in MichiganState Universitys (MSU) Department of Physics andAstronomy and lead author of the paper, says the discoveryleads to a new way of understanding the origin of thebrightness of novae and other stellar explosions. Ourfindings present the first direct observational evidence,from unprecedented space observations, that shocks play amajor role in powering these events.

When materialblasts out from the white dwarf, he says it is ejected inmultiple phases and at different speeds. These ejectionscollide with one another and create shocks, which heat theejected material producing much of the light.

Anotherside effect of astronomical shocks are gamma-rays, thehighest-energy kind of electromagnetic radiation. Theastronomers detected bright gamma-rays from the star, knownas nova V906 Carinae (ASASSN-18fv), whose explosion in theconstellation Carina was first detected in March2018.

An optical satellite happened to be looking atthe part of the sky where the nova occurred. Comparing thegamma-ray and optical data, the astronomers noted that everytime there was a fluctuation in gamma-rays, the light fromthe nova fluctuated as well.

The simultaneousfluctuations in both the visual and gamma-ray brightnessconfirmed that both were originating from shocks.

Theresearch team estimates that V906 Car is about 13,000 lightyears from Earth. This means that when the nova was firstdetected in 2018, it had actually happened 13,000 years ago.The new information may also help explain how large amountsof light are generated in other stellar events, includingsupernovae and stellar mergers, when two stars collide withone another. Each nova explosion releases about 10,000 to100,000 times the annual energy output of theSun.

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There’s No Version of US Liberal Hegemony That Would Have Been Good for the World – Foreign Policy

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Can we talk about something else for a moment?

Although it is nearly impossible to wrest ones mind away from COVID-19 and its implications, Im going to give it a shot this week. I want to explore a topic that my students and I were discussing a few days ago, in a class on realist and liberal conceptions of world order. The question was whether the U.S. attempt to create a liberal world order during the brief unipolar moment was doomed from the start.

To be more specific: are the criticisms that I (and others) have leveled at the U.S. strategy of liberal hegemony really fair? Is it possible that creating a global order based on liberal values (i.e., democracy, free markets, the rule of law, individual rights, etc.) was more feasible than it now appears? Might this strategy have succeeded if U.S. leaders had been a little smarter, less arrogant, a lot more patient, and a bit luckier? Was liberal hegemony really bound to fail, as John Mearsheimer suggested last spring, or were there plausible courses of action that would have led to the steady expansion and deep embedding of liberal values and institutions around the world? In the unlikely event that the United States found itself in a similar position of primacy again, could it learn from its past mistakes and do better the second time around?

That the first attempt was a costly failure should be beyond dispute. Instead of advancing, democracy has been in retreat around the world for more than a decadeincluding in the United States itselfand U.S.-led efforts at regime change have led not to thriving democracies but to failed states and costly occupations. Hyperglobalization under U.S. auspices produced a grave financial crisis in 2008, politically painful job displacement in a number of sectors, and helped trigger a wide-ranging populist backlash. NATO enlargement helped poison relations with Russia, and policies such as dual containment in the Persian Gulf inspired anti-U.S. terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks and all the negative consequences that flowed from that event. The end result of these developments has been a partial retreat from globalization, the emergence of would-be autocrats in Hungary, Poland, and even in the United States, and revitalized authoritarianism in many other places.

Given where we are today, does it matter whether a more sophisticated version of liberal hegemony might have succeeded? In fact, this issue is of paramount importance, because plenty of people are still convinced that trying to create a U.S.-led, liberal world order was the right goal and that the United States just needs to learn from past mistakes and do it better and smarter in the future. Defenders include unrepentant hawks such as Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh, who think what the Middle East needs is even more U.S.-led regime change, but also liberal academics such as G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, who believe the liberal order remains surprisingly resilient. Other proponents of this view are dedicated policy wonks such as Jake Sullivan, who thinks the problem is not the United States basic strategy but rather the fact that Americans are increasingly skeptical of it, and one sees similar impulses in the writings of Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and other defenders of an expansive U.S. role. If former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wins the presidential election in Novemberand, to be clear, I hope he doesthe apostles of U.S. primacy and its indispensable global role will be back in the saddle, and we are likely to see at least a partial attempt to turn the clock back to the halcyon days when the United States was actively trying to create a global liberal order.

Lets give this view the benefit of every doubt. Imagine that you could travel back in time to 1992, with full knowledge of all the mistakes that have been made since then. Then imagine that you still wanted to create a liberal world order, while avoiding all the missteps that were made over the past quarter-century. What would you do differently, and would this new approach work?

To start with the most obvious point: a smarter approach to liberal hegemony would have to be a lot more patient. In the 1990s, Americans felt they had found the magic formula for success in a globalized worldwhat Thomas Friedman called DOScapital 6.0and that other countries couldnt wait to become more like the United States. The wind was at the United States back, history was moving its way, and giving the world a healthy shove in the right direction would just accelerate the process.

This view was both self-congratulatory and naively optimistic, but one could still believe that the arc of history bends toward justice while acknowledging that bending the arc will take longer than one had previously thought. The United States should adopt a slow, steady, and decidedly nonmilitary approach to spreading liberal values, therefore, and recognize that it will take several decades (or more) to bear fruit. One might call this approach liberal hegemony lite.

In practice, liberal hegemony lite would have eschewed NATO enlargement and gone with the so-called Partnership for Peace (PfP) instead. PfP would have fostered security cooperation with the newly independent states of Eastern Europethereby helping strengthen their nascent democratic ordersbut it would have have included Russia and fulfilled the promises U.S. officials made before the Soviet Union broke up. Relations with Moscow might still have worsened as it regained some of its former strength, but not as fast and probably not as far. Absent NATO enlargement (and the misguided U.S. attempt to nominate Ukraine for a membership action plan in 2008), it is hard to imagine matters in Ukraine would be as troubled as they are today.

With the benefit of hindsight, a wiser United States would have pursued a more measured approach to economic globalization. Reducing barriers to trade and investment improves overall economic efficiency and is generally desirable, but taking it more slowly would have given the sectors that were harmed by greater foreign competition more time to adjust. It was also a mistake to bring China into the World Trade Organization prematurely, based on the hope that it would hasten Chinas transition to democracy and turn China into a responsible stakeholder. Instead, it just accelerated Chinas emergence as a peer competitor. Our time-traveling advisor would also caution against excessive deregulation of financial markets and warn against the dangers of loose money and asset bubbles, advice that would have made the financial crisis of 2008 less likely.

Hindsight would also warn against the policy of dual containment in the Persian Gulf, the attempt to create a Western-style democracy in Afghanistan after 9/11, and the foolish decision to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003. A wiser United States would have taken a more measured approach to the Arab Spring, supporting Tunisias transition to democracy but not the forcible ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. Instead of declaring Assad must go at the start of the Syrian civil war, the United States would have worked with all the interested parties (including Iran) to bring that conflict to an end quickly and with far less loss of life, even if the end result left President Bashar al-Assad in power.

In short, the United States could still have pushed for a more open, free, and essentiallyliberal world order, but in a more gradual and sophisticated way. It would have given economic, diplomatic, and rhetorical support to countries that were genuinely trying to move in more liberal directions, and it could have worked harder to preserve the United States as a model that others would want to emulate. But it would have refrained from attempting vast projects of social engineering in countries where the prerequisites for stable democracy were lacking, and it would have recognized that pushing the pace was going to trigger resistance from authoritarian leaders who had no intention of giving up power voluntarily.

Had the United States pursued liberal hegemony in this manner, many of the negative repercussions that actually occurred might have been avoided. Progress toward a more liberal world order would have been slower, of course, but the forward momentum of the early 1990s might have been sustained.

Does this argument mean that liberal hegemony was the right course after all, and that a more sophisticated version should be adopted should the United States ever find itself in a position of primacy again? I dont think so.

The flaw in the counterfactual described above should be obvious. It assumes that if policymakers in previous years had perfect knowledge of the results of their actions, then they could infallibly pick the right course of action at each critical point. Armed with perfect foresight, for example, former U.S. President George W. Bush would not have chosen to invade Iraq in 2003, or perhaps he would have devoted a lot more time and effort into preparing for the post-Saddam occupation. Yet even perfect knowledge about what went wrong would not guarantee success the second time around.

First, even when we know what mistakes to avoid, there may not be any course of action that would yield a successful outcome. The United States is very powerful, wealthy, and secure, but some tasks may simply be beyond its means and outside the limits of its understanding. Trying to use military force to transform deeply divided societies into liberal democracies seems to be one of them. Second, if the United States had taken a significantly different course of action at various critical points in the recent past, then history would have headed in a different direction and U.S. leaders would have faced a wholly different set of choices whose results could not be known in advance. In other words, the lessons drawn from events as they actually occurred may not help the United States decide what to do once history is following a different path.

Most importantly, even liberal hegemony lite entails a lot of complicated social engineering. By definition, a liberal world order is one where certain key political principlesdemocracy; sovereignty; low barriers to trade, investment, and travel; rule of law within multilateral institutions; and individual rights) are nearly universal. But we live in a world where these values are not universally embraced. Democracies have never been a majority, and millions of people think security, sovereignty, cultural values, national autonomy, and other political goals are more importantwhich means that trying to get others to embrace democracy requires considerable pressure and increases the risk of political instability. Such efforts inevitably trigger local resentments of various kinds, especially in a world where nationalism and other forms of local identity make people resentful and suspicious of even well-intentioned foreign interference.

Furthermore, the more far-reaching the changes occurring among any group of people, the more unpredictable the results will be and the more unintended consequences are bound to arise. Even progressive political change creates winners and losers, and the latter wont necessarily accept their fates with forbearance. Instead, they may take up arms to try to regain their former positions, thereby creating the sort of resistance that helped defeat U.S. efforts to promote a liberal order in the past. Even if future policymakers avoided all of the errors made between 1992 and 2016 (to say nothing of the blunders U.S. President Donald Trump has made since then), we may be confident they will mishandle some of the unforeseen developments that are bound to arise on their watch.

The bottom line: Liberal hegemony lite might have worked slightly better than what the United States actually did, but it wouldnt have achieved the ultimate goal of a single rules-based global liberal order. This realization is not an argument for U.S. disengagement or diplomatic passivity; the situation we are all dealing with on a daily basis today is a telling reminder that self-interest sometimes requires that the United States cooperate with other nations to solve global problems. Rather, it is an argument against chasing idealistic chimeras, based on the mistaken belief that most of humankind shares U.S. values and that creating a liberal world order will therefore be easy to do. The diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand may have been a great cynic, but he was right about at least one thing: Surtout, pas trop de zle.

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Liberal groups demand Joe Biden sever ties with Larry Summers – Washington Times

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The news that former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has Joseph R. Bidens ear as an economic adviser isnt sitting well with liberal activists who have been critical of his presidential campaign.

Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement announced on Friday they are launching a petition calling on Mr. Biden to sever all ties with Mr. Summers marking the latest in a series of demands that far-left groups say could help the former vice president bolster his support among younger voters.

Larry Summers legacy is advocating for policies that contributed to the skyrocketing inequality and climate crisis were living with today, the groups said in a joint statement. We hope Biden publicly rejects Summers role as an economic advisor to better earn the trust of our generation.

News reports surfaced Thursday that the Biden camps team of outside economic advisers included Mr. Summers.

Seeking to quell liberal concerns, a Biden adviser told Reuters that the presumptive Democratic nominee is listening to a very large and well-rounded informal network of experts on the policy front.

Joe Bidens will be the most progressive agenda of any president in generations, and he looks forward to his continuing engagement with progressive leaders to build on his existing policies and further the bold goals driving his campaign, the adviser said.

The response, though, evidently was not enough for some.

Justice Democrats, the group which helped give rise to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Sunrise Movement, said Mr. Summers record shows that he doesnt share their liberal economic worldview.

They said he has not done enough to support the clean energy movement, advocated for the Keystone XL Pipeline, and opposes a wealth tax on the nations richest individuals.

They also pointed out that Mr. Summers, as president of Harvard in 2005, offended women attending a conference by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math professions.

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Liberal groups demand Joe Biden sever ties with Larry Summers - Washington Times

Malcolm Turnbull shrugs off calls for him to be expelled from the Liberal Party over his memoir – ABC News

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Updated April 26, 2020 05:44:48

Malcolm Turnbull has led his party twice. Once as prime minister. But he's incredibly chipper about the prospect of being expelled as a member.

"Oh, I'd be wounded!" he moans theatrically when questioned about the move by Liberal Party officials to strip him of party membership. "I'd just be a crumpled mess in the corner!"

Questioned about the appropriateness of such insouciance for a man twice accorded the ultimate honour available to a political party member, Mr Turnbull responds smilingly that "a bit of insouciance never goes astray".

In an hour-long interview to be streamed online on Monday night for the Sydney Writers Festival, Mr Turnbull's disdain for the organisation he once led is palpable.

He argues that the "crazed ideology" dictating the Liberal Party's policy on climate could now only be altered by a crushing electoral defeat, or an about-face on the issue from media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

"It's basically just Australia and the United States above all where this issue of climate policy has been turned into an issue of belief," the nation's 29th prime minister says in the interview.

"And it's bonkers."

"To be honest with you, I think the only way out of it unless you believe the Coalition can have a road-to-Damascus conversion which I think is unlikely is a devastating electoral defeat. I'm not saying I want that to happen, I'm just saying, being practical, that is what would shock the Coalition."

Mr Turnbull describes Rupert Murdoch's media empire as "the largest endorser of climate denialism in the world".

"I think if Lachlan Murdoch decided to become a greenie overnight, the Coalition would switch instantly. They'd turn on a dime. Andrew Bolt would suddenly discover he was a greenie, Alan Jones would develop a passionate love for solar panels, Peta Credlin would be, you know, into pumped hydro they'd all switch," he insists.

Mr Turnbull first joined the Liberal Party in 1973, and subsequently re-joined in 2001 after a long absence when he became interested in the seat of Wentworth, but has entertained a longstanding interest in Labor history and characters, a quirk which over the years has elicited reactions from his Liberal colleagues ranging from astonishment to fury.

As a student, he developed a fascination with the irascible (and by then, nonagenarian) Depression-era Labor premier of NSW, Jack Lang, whom Turnbull visited many times and about whom he subsequently wrote an unpublished musical with the late Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis.

He was good friends with Bob Carr and a long-term business partner of Neville Wran two more NSW Labor premiers.

The Howard government's long-term communications minister Richard Alston a recent federal president of the Liberal Party last week told The Australian that Mr Turnbull shouldn't wait to be expelled, but should see himself off the premises.

"For me, the first thing is Malcolm should reflect on is why he wants to belong to a party [for] which he clearly has no affinity," Mr Alston said.

"He should acknowledge the reality that he has no interest in party politics and no interest in the Liberal Party."

The 675 pages of Mr Turnbull's memoir A Bigger Picture contain multiple unflattering assessments of former colleagues including Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and Mathias Cormann.

But the revelation that provoked Mr Alston's ire was Mr Turnbull's own disclosure in the book that he had been an instrumental agent in the establishment of the Guardian's Australian operation.

In 2012, Mr Turnbull writes, he suggested to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger that he should look at publishing in Australia. Mr Turnbull writes that he then brokered a meeting between Rusbridger and Wotif millionaire Graeme Wood (a generous donor to the Greens), and introduced the editor to senior Australian journalists Lenore Taylor and Katharine Murphy.

Mr Alston was horrified by Mr Turnbull's revelation.

"The way he has behaved with the Guardian, pushing an outfit that was hostile to almost everything the Liberal Party believes in, tells you that he has no reason to want to stay other than to just cause trouble or be part of a vanity project."

Mr Turnbull is unrepentant.

"Do we no longer believe in the diversity of the media?" he asked.

"Do we no longer believe that our media, our political and public life is enhanced by having more voices, particularly if they're quality ones and practice good journalism and not just propaganda sheets like so many are?"

Malcolm Turnbull's Sydney Writers Festival session with interviewer Annabel Crabb will be streamed at 7:00pm on Monday.

Topics:government-and-politics,federal-parliament,federal-government,books-literature,turnbull-malcolm,australia

First posted April 26, 2020 05:00:59

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Malcolm Turnbull shrugs off calls for him to be expelled from the Liberal Party over his memoir - ABC News

Liberalism is the human face of white supremacy – Middle East Eye

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The white US liberal intelligentsia has been constantly frustrated since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.

The more attacks the white and corporate-controlled liberal US media outlets launch against the business-supported Trump, the more popular he becomes.

As white liberals feign concern over Trumps continued dismantlement of the welfare state and restoration of an unapologetic white supremacist system, his many supporters celebrate these achievements and demand more.

What is it that makes Trump so much more persuasive to so many Americans than the liberal media and its pundits?

To comprehend how US political culture understands the welfare state and the dismantlement of institutional white supremacy, we must go back and understand how they came about in the first place.

When amid the Great Depression, then US President Franklin Roosevelt opted for the New Deal to transform the country into a welfare state beginning in the 1930s (expanded by his successors through the 1960s), he did so to save US capitalism from the impending communist threat while maintaining white supremacy, and not because of any socialist leanings.

US liberal journalism, mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated these transformations

The Russian Revolution was institutionalising itself by the mid-1920s as an example for the world to follow, and by the 1930s the US Communist Party's influence on American workers became a veritable threat to the capitalist order.

Indeed, with the major triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, the threat of communism had become so great by the end of WWII that the white capitalist powers opted to stop their competition and unite against the communist threat.

Anti-Soviet propaganda began in earnest after the war, as the Americans launched a religious war against the Soviets, condemning them as secular and Godless atheists. Former President Dwight Eisenhower decided to get baptised in office and brought the fanatical reverendBilly Graham in as a spiritual adviser to the White House.

Eisenhower began the tradition of the National Prayer Breakfast and started his cabinet meetings with a moment of silent prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance was transformed in 1954 by Eisenhower from I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, to pledging allegiance to one nation under God.

In 1956, Congress enacted a law signed by Eisenhower that introduced the phrase In God We Trust to be printed on American paper currency, replacing the erstwhile phrase E pluribus unum (out of many, one), in use since 1776.

Two years later, Congress enacted a law introducing the phrase In God We Trust as the national motto of the US.

US liberal journalism, mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated these transformations. It was the Eisenhower administration that enlisted religion and invented anti-communist Islamist jihadism as a weapon against Soviet communism and Third World socialism, with Saudi Arabia subcontracted for the role soon after.

As a result of Eisenhowers Protestant Christian institutionalisation, the proportion of religious Americans rose from 49 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960.

How coronavirus is fuelling American hate

These transformations took place when the US South was run by a white supremacist, racial segregationist system, while racist institutions and structures dominated the north and the federal government.

Federal laws created white-only towns called the suburbs, enforced by racially restrictive covenants for home ownership, while the 1944 GI bill made benefits in housing and education available only to white people.

In the context of an institutionally white supremacist US, American journalists and intellectuals sang the glories of US democracy against Godless communism.

But if the welfare state was able to pull the rug out from under the communists, white supremacy made the US vulnerable to anti-racists, communist or otherwise, around the world. This was especially grave for US imperialism, as recently decolonised countries around the world,who had just rid themselves of the European colonial racist yoke,looked to the Soviets as an anti-racist, socialist example with which to ally, rather than the white supremacist US.

Just as the welfare state put a human face on capitalism, there was a need for a human face to be placed on US white supremacy. The 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education began the dismantling of the racist apartheid educational system. This was mainly done not as a concession to African Americans, but as part of the imperialist strategy to attract Third World countries repulsed by US white supremacy.

But the momentum of the black struggle to end white supremacy within the US could not be stopped, and it proceeded apace in the 1960s, with increasing white liberal concessions from the state and its judicial system - especially as the dismantlement of formal white supremacist structures seemed to beautify the ugly reality of US white supremacy.

US liberal journalism and the liberal white intelligentsia again celebrated the states achievements - while simultaneously targeting black radical civil libertarians with racist propaganda campaigns - as proof of the glories of US democracy against totalitarian communism.

This, however, did not appeal to the massive white racist political culture, especially as racist depictions of non-whites in US culture continued on liberal white-dominated television screens and in the culture at large.

Horrified by these concessions that weakened formal white supremacy, the new right, emboldened by white liberal anti-communism, racism, and Eisenhowers institutionalised religion, began to organise in the late 1960s, demanding the reinstatement of white supremacy and the dismantling of the welfare state.

The New Jim Crow system was instituted in the 1970s and has intensified since the 1980s to keep African Americans in their place, while former President Ronald Reagan and his successors heeded corporate demands to get rid of the Soviets once and for allso that the New Deal could be safely dismantled.

Once the Soviets were gone, presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama intensified the destruction of the welfare state, while putting a lovable human face on US neoliberalism and white supremacy. This is why Obama, especially, was and remains the best thing that ever happened to white liberals.

With the fall of the communist threat, the liberal discourse of US democracy deployed since the 1960s lost its efficacy. Liberal notions of multiculturalism and diversity, which had not improved the lives of the majority of blacks, Latinos or Native Americans, whose poverty and oppression persist, as is the case with poor whites (and the majority of the poor in the US are indeed white), were quickly understood as neoliberal and liberal ruses of white supremacist racial tokenism.

The liberal US corporate media never laid blame for the poverty of Americans on the white owners of big business, having itself been part of the white supremacist corporate attacks on the welfare state since the 1970s as a system of privilege for lazy non-white Americans at the expense of hard-working white Americans.

As a result, the majority of the white poor became ingrained with the idea that their real and only identity was white, not poor, and that their enemy was not the white owners of the corporations that impoverished them, but the victimised poor non-whites and immigrants.

When Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that they had not been taught by US culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism

When Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that they had not been taught by US culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism since Billy Graham.

Trumps strategy, like that of the white supremacist right of which he is a part, was to tell the white poor that as white people, he was on their side, and that their enemy was not only what remains of the US welfare state, but also (the pretend) US multicultural democracy that white liberalism has used to cover up US white supremacy since the 1970s.

Yetwhat Trump promises poor white Americans who lack white and class privilege - and whom white liberals, such as Hillary Clinton, find deplorable - is a restoration of formal white supremacy, which they mistake for an amelioration of their poverty.

As there is no longer a communist threat, and Third World neoliberal elites have been converted since the 1970s into the biggest fans of the US (now that they can be inducted into the one percent through diversity and multiculturalism programmes), conservative US white supremacists correctly realised that they could come out of the closet and demand the reversal of all the concessions the liberal white supremacists had instituted during the communist threat years.

Trump's vision of what makes America great: Hegemonic state violence

Trump represents these corporate aspirations, which have been pushed by the US liberal media and culture for decades. Indeed, Trump is a creation of white American liberalisms own trajectory, not a contradiction to it.

This is why when hypocritical US liberal journalists and pundits question Trump during press conferences - most evident during the recent coronavirus crisis - or debate his appeal on liberal television networks, he shows them up easily for the hypocrites they are.

What accounts for this achievement is Trumps sincere commitment to the restoration of an unabashed, unapologetic US white supremacy and runaway capitalism that easily withstandsthe wishy-washiness of white US liberalism and its continued commitment to white supremacy with a human face,whether a white one or in blackface.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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Liberalism is the human face of white supremacy - Middle East Eye

China, the coronavirus, and the liberal international order – OpenGlobalRights

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The global COVID-19 pandemic has become a contest not just between differing public health approaches, but also between the different political systems they represent. In Chinawhere the outbreak began in late 2019the Communist Party, led by President Xi Jinping, has touted its success against the virus as a victory for the Chinese model of governance, which validates Xis belief in tight social control and surveillance, political centralization and strict party discipline, and the value of propaganda in mobilizing the masses and shaping public opinion. Meanwhile, as the center of the outbreak shifts from Asia to Europe to North America, liberal democracies that emphasize the right to privacy, a free press, and other fundamental human rights appear to be struggling to contain the new diseaseif not failing altogether.

Although Chinas initial response to the coronavirus was marked by a critical lack of transparencyand stifled by a bureaucracy afraid to deliver bad news to Chinas leadersby late January the outbreak had become too big to cover up. To contain it, China took unprecedented and often coercive measures. Authorities placed some 60 million people in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei Province under a strict quarantine.Within the hardest hit area, officials also conducted a door-to-door search for possible COVID-19 patients and sent them to makeshift isolation facilities, even against their will.In other cities far from the center of the outbreak, authorities imposed restrictions on how often residents could leave their homes, or tightened controls on citizens movements, using a mixture of old fashioned Mao-era neighborhood committees and sophisticated new surveillance technology for enforcement.

In Beijing, Xi also shifted the blame for any early missteps in handling the crisis to local officials in Wuhan.He fought back against suggestions he had let others take charge of the response to the outbreak, releasing an extraordinary internal speech where he declared he had constantly followed the spread of the disease and the work to contain it, and have never stopped issuing oral orders and instructions.At the same time, he also punished or fired hundreds of officials for dereliction of duty and other violations of party discipline, ranging from the deputy director of the local Red Cross to the Communist Party Secretary of Hubei Provincethe latter replaced with a Xi protg.

Perhaps most importantly, China launched a massive propaganda campaign to mobilize the nation and bolster support for the Communist Party. Xi declared the fight against COVID-19 to be a peoples warthe same term used to describe Maos fight against Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War (1945-49). Chinese media repeatedly invoked military language to describe the battle against the virus, hailing medical workers as front line heroes and dubbing Xi the commander. Similarly, during a March 10 visit to Wuhan, Xi announced the tide was turning, as victory over the virus appeared in sight.

The true scale of COVID-19 in China remains a mysteryofficial Chinese statistics are notoriously inaccurate, and often colored by politicsand the true number of lives lost may never be known. China is already bracing for a second wave of the virus as workers return to their jobs, and the economy is still struggling to get back on its feet. But the Communist Party is nevertheless keen to create an image of success against the virusan image that may be a distortion of reality, but is not a total illusionto strengthen its legitimacy at home, excuse its failures, and add luster to Xis leadership.

More critically, China wants to use this image of success to raise its own standing in the world. China has not only taken the lead in sending masks, test kits, and needed medical equipment to other countries affected by the virus, but has also sought to portray itself as a responsible great power, appealing for global solidarity to fight the outbreak and stabilize the economy. [China's] efficiency fighting the virushas fully demonstrated the Partys leadership and the strong political and institutional advantages of our socialist system,Vice Premier Sun Chunlan declared in a recent commentary. Some Chinese media outlets have even argued Chinas anti-virus model is the only way to stop the pandemic, and urged other countries to adopt it.

But Chinas perceived success fighting COVID-19 also has long-reaching implications for human rights. Some of the methods China used to contain the virus seem to have been adapted from the Communist Partys playbook for maintaining political stabilityespecially in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been isolated in internment camps since 2016. Moreover, newer methods of surveillance pioneered during the outbreak are also likely to join the Partys toolkit for monitoring and controlling society.

Chinas willingness to use coercive or intrusive measures against the virus has also sparked a debate in liberal democracies now struggling with the outbreak, as they seek to balance public health with civil liberties. In Canada, the federal government has invoked the Quarantine Act to force returning citizens to self-isolate for 14 days, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has declined to rule out using smartphone data to track compliance. The United Kingdom has gone even further, with Parliament granting the government emergency powers to detain those suspected of having the virus. By contrast, in the United States, although some state governors have used their police powers to issue stay-at-home orders, the federal government has limited power to impose a nationwide lockdownand all such moves are questionable under the Constitution. South Koreawhich updated its public health laws following an outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015has opted for a third way, allowing the government to collect private data to track infections but also mandating maximum government transparency.

China has long tried to deflect criticism of its own human rights record by pointing to real and imagined abuses in other countriesespecially the United Stateswhile extolling its own achievements at reducing poverty and improving living standards for hundreds of millions of people. Chinas success against COVID-19 will now become part of this equation.

The stakes are high, not just for global health but for human rights and the liberal international order. The next time dissidents inside Chinaor liberal democracies around the worldcriticize the Communist Party, China will respond simply by pointing to COVID-19: our system worked, and yours didnt.

An earlier version of this piece first appeared on the CIPS Blog.

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China, the coronavirus, and the liberal international order - OpenGlobalRights

Media Matters and other liberal groups file for coronavirus small-business relief loans from Trump administration – Washington Examiner

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Several liberal groups, including Media Matters, have filed for small-business loans during the coronavirus pandemic from the Trump administration.

Media Matters, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center, and other liberal groups have filed to receive funds from the small-business relief program, which was replenished with $484 billion, according to Fox News.

Its hard for me to imagine that any of these liberal groups are going to pull their punches on criticizing government because they got a loan, Gara LaMarche, the president of liberal donor group Democracy Alliance, told the New York Times.

Up to 14 state affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union also applied for loans (one of them receiving $154,000), and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center applied for a loan of $160,000.

Conservative nonprofit groups are also seeking loans.

I would love someone to give us free cash, said Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks.

President Trump signed a $484 billion coronavirus relief package into law on Friday, which included $370 billion in aid for small businesses, $75 billion for hospitals that are having trouble covering costs, and $25 billion for virus testing.

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Media Matters and other liberal groups file for coronavirus small-business relief loans from Trump administration - Washington Examiner

Vote by Mail in Wisconsin Helped a Liberal Candidate, Upending Old Theories – The New York Times

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The liberal candidate in Wisconsins hard-fought State Supreme Court race this month prevailed in voting by mail by a significant margin, upending years of study showing little advantage to either party when a state transitions from in-person to mail voting.

The gap suggests that Democrats were more organized and proactive in their vote-by-mail efforts in an election conducted under extraordinary circumstances, with voters forced to weigh the health risks of voting in person against the sometimes unreliable option of requesting and mailing in their ballots. Still, it is likely to add to the skepticism President Trump and Republicans have expressed about mail voting, which they worry would increase Democratic turnout at Republicans expense.

The liberal jurist, Jill Karofsky, performed 10 percentage points better than her conservative opponent in votes cast by mail than she did in votes cast at Election Day polling places, a gap that powered a surprising 11-point victory over all in a state both parties view as crucial to winning Novembers presidential election.

The voting data, collected by The New York Times from 27 Wisconsin municipalities that segregate ballots cast on Election Day from those sent by mail, shows that Judge Karofskys advantage in mail ballots over the conservative incumbent, Justice Daniel Kelly, was consistent across communities of varying size, geography and partisan lean. In a state with little history of voting by mail, more than 1.1 million of 1.55 million votes cast came by mail.

The Times analysis of Wisconsin records shows a staggering gap between in-person and mail voting in some communities. At a single precinct, Beloits 11th Ward, Justice Kelly won 64 percent of the Election Day vote while Judge Karofsky took 70 percent of votes cast by mail.

Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is among the academics who have produced studies that found no partisan advantage to mail voting, said the Times analysis of the Wisconsin data did not align with any previous studies from states such as Colorado and Utah, which transitioned to fully vote-by-mail systems in recent years.

Im surprised by the results, Mr. Burden said when told of the gap between in-person and mail results. It is convincing and surprising that Karofsky appears to have done better among mail voters than in-person voters. Thats a change from past trends. Its unclear if thats going to be a permanent change or something very specific to this particular election.

Judge Karofsky performed better in the mail voting in every Wisconsin community in which results were made available to The Times. In Milwaukee, the states largest city, her performance among mail ballots was 5.8 points better than it was on Election Day, when voters waited in line for hours to vote at the five polling places that remained open.

Even in the Republican heartland of Waukesha County, Judge Karofsky performed far better among mail voters than she did on Election Day. In New Berlin, she won just 33 percent of votes at polling sites, but 43 percent in the mail, where four in five of the citys votes were cast. In the City of Pewaukee, she took 27 percent of the Election Day vote and 37 percent of the mail ballots.

The pattern helped Judge Karofsky carry swing communities that are crucial to winning statewide races in Wisconsin. In Neenah, in the Fox Valley south of Green Bay, Justice Kelly won the Election Day vote, 53 percent to 47 percent. But Judge Karofsky took 60 percent of the mail ballots. She won the citywide vote, 58 percent to 42 percent.

None of the academic studies cited as evidence that there was no partisan advantage to mail voting had been able to segregate mail voting results from in-person ones for a single election.

Such results are available from Wisconsins April 7 election because 32 of the states municipalities, including Milwaukee, count absentee ballots at a central location using separate tabulating equipment. The states other 1,800 cities, villages and towns do not segregate absentee ballots from those cast on Election Day when counting them, according to Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Robert Stein, a political scientist at Rice University who has helped put in place vote-by-mail systems across the country, said the Wisconsin results showed the ability of Democrats there to build a statewide vote-by-mail system essentially from scratch just weeks before the election.

You probably had much more core frequent and Democratic voters voting by mail and late-deciding voters waiting to vote at the polls, he said. The Democrats proved they can mobilize their voters to vote by mail.

The gap in mail voting may have been influenced by the diverging concerns about the coronavirus pandemic among Wisconsins Democrats and Republicans. A Marquette Law School poll released six days before the election found 87 percent of Democrats were very concerned about the coronavirus, compared with just 56 percent of Republicans.

Amelia Showalter, the data analytics director for Barack Obamas 2012 campaign, said the Wisconsin results might change the perception of mail voting.

The people who used it were older voters who voted more Republican, Ms. Showalter said. As you get more widespread adoption, you get into more of those low-propensity voters. It might advantage Democrats.

Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, attributed Judge Karofskys success in mail voting to the partys mid-March decision to focus entirely on educating Democrats about how to request and complete a mail ballot.

The Democratic Party decided weeks out from the election to switch 100 percent of its efforts to vote-by-mail in the first time in its history, Mr. Wikler said. I think Republicans bought some of their own disinformation.

Wisconsin Republicans acknowledged that the states Democrats became far more invested in encouraging their voters to request and return absentee ballots before this months election.

They were invested in doing this starting as early as the first week in March, said Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly who, on Election Day, was photographed in full personal protective equipment during his stint as a poll monitor in his hometown, Burlington. I would say that, stereotyping, Republicans like to go vote on Election Day.

Mr. Vos said the Wisconsin election was evidence that no changes in the states voting laws and procedures are necessary before the November general election, when twice as many people are expected to vote. Democratic requests to mail ballots to all registered voters and to remove requirements that voters upload a photo identification to request an absentee ballot and obtain a witness signature before returning ballots are out of the question, Mr. Vos said.

The only reason they would want to expand voting would be to create an opportunity for potential fraud or because they want to give themselves some kind of partisan advantage, Mr. Vos said. The current situation is pretty fair to everybody.

Mr. Vos and other senior Wisconsin Republicans rejected the idea that Mr. Trumps repeated dismissal of mail voting depressed conservative voters interest in voting absentee.

The daily hubbub in Washington, that stuff doesnt necessarily break through with our voters, said Brian Reisinger, who served as a senior aide to former Gov. Scott Walker and Senator Ron Johnson.

Yet there was some acknowledgment that the G.O.P.s political apparatus in Wisconsin, which built a powerful get-out-the-vote machine that elected Mr. Walker three times and gave Mr. Trump a shocking 2016 victory, was slow to adapt to a rapidly changing public health situation.

The right is more rigid, said Matt Batzel, the Cedar Grove, Wis.-based national executive director of American Majority Action, a conservative grass-roots training organization. People on the right need to use the rules of the game and use all the voting opportunities that are available.

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Vote by Mail in Wisconsin Helped a Liberal Candidate, Upending Old Theories - The New York Times

Liberal media gives Trump EPA head Andrew Wheeler a bad rap – Washington Examiner

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Liberal journalists routinely describe Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler as a former coal lobbyist and climate change denier, suggesting that he is destroying the EPA from within and in cahoots with big business. But this narrative is essentially wrong and misleading on all counts.

I interviewed Wheeler recently to discuss how his agency was marking the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and his tenure more broadly. I encountered a very different man than the one youd read about in the New York Times.

When Earth Day began in 1970, Americans faced a drastically different environment than we do today, Wheeler said. I am proud of the work our nation has done, and continues to do, to be a leader in clean air and clean water progress.

Our conversation led me to ask the administrator about the most common criticisms leveled against him.

He explained that perhaps the most frustrating one is the way liberal media outlets always introduce him as a former coal lobbyist. This is an example of something that is technically true but extremely misleading.

Wheeler was, for just over eight years, an energy lobbyist. Among his many clients were nuclear power companies and, yes, coal companies and workers. But the decision made by liberal journalists to only highlight coal in their descriptor is undoubtedly an intentional and political one.

So, too, when former coal lobbyist is used as the only descriptor to introduce the administrator, this ignores Wheelers arguably much more relevant stint at the EPA early in his career and several decades of work in Congress on environmental issues. Lobbying was one job he held for a small part of his long career in environmental policy. (For what it's worth, Wheeler's qualifications are rather impressive: He holds not just a bachelor's degree in science but also a law degree and an MBA).

Something tells me that a similar EPA head appointed by a Democrat, who had once worked as an energy lobbyist with solar as a client, would instead be described by the liberal media as a career public servant and veteran legislative expert.

We also discussed Wheelers alleged climate change denial, which is simply not a thing. He does believe man-made climate change is real, he does want to reduce carbon emissions, and he strongly supports nuclear power the most efficient, emissions-free power source available and one that, bizarrely, many Democrats oppose despite claiming to believe in global warming.

Wheeler did stress that he doesnt believe climate change is the existential threat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes it out to be when she says were all going to die in 12 years or, at least, if we don't destroy our economy in the next 10 years.

The administrator also explained that, for him, the most important environmental issue right now is clean water, not climate change. On a global basis, nearly 1 million people still die every year from the lack of access to safe drinking water. (And Flint, Michigan, shows this isnt just an international issue, but still one here as well).

Wheeler was not denying climate change, of course, but it is not his top priority. If liberal journalists want to argue that Wheeler doesnt take climate change seriously enough, isnt adequately focusing on it, or doesnt support the appropriate climate change policies, this might provide the occasion to do so. It's at least a fair question to debate. But it's simply a lie to label Wheeler a climate change denier. This is an example of how the charge becomes a bad-faith smear upon anyone who isnt googly eyed at the "Green New Deal."

Examples of this bad-faith coverage of Wheeler and his EPA abound in the policy arena as well.

Take, for example, the administration's Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science. Its a complicated rule, but essentially, it would require that the EPA only use studies in their policymaking for which the data is made publicly available and transparent not secret. As for the chorus of privacy and methodological concerns raised, Wheeler said researchers can adjust the way they do studies, and data can be anonymized. He also pointed out that the rule allows EPA to make exceptions when necessary.

Our regulations will be better understood on both sides, Wheeler told me. I really see it as an open government proposal getting data out there for people to look at.

This eminently reasonable suggestion that the federal government does not blindly make rules based on secret data has been met with a shriek from the liberal media, which has implicitly and explicitly deemed it an assault on science. Wheeler complained that critics are misleadingly calling it the secret science rule when, if anything, its really the opposite. The agency is still taking comments and working on the final draft of the rule, but most of the engagement has been made in bad faith.

"When finalized, the science transparency rule will ensure that all important studies underlying significant regulatory actions at the EPA, regardless of their source, are available for a transparent review by qualified scientists," Wheeler said.

And while Wheelers EPA has indeed played a role in the Trump administrations broader pro-growth deregulatory agenda, the administrator also stressed to me the key pro-environment work theyve done.

For instance, he pointed out that, last year, they cleaned up more contaminated Superfund sites than in any year since 2001. He touted the work theyve done pairing the GOP tax bills economic opportunity zones with EPA-sponsored Brownfield grants to promote environmental cleanup. (For some completely unknown reason, these accomplishments made it into almost none of the news reports I reviewed while preparing for our interview.)

In our interview, Wheeler certainly didnt come across as the anti-government fanatic that the liberal media makes him out to be. While dedicated to promoting efficiency in the EPA and open to downsizing it, the administrator actually cited as his biggest concern the agencys inability to retain employees for more than a few years. (This is due in part, he said, to millennials flighty job habits.) Thats not exactly a telling sign of someone hell-bent on abolishing the EPA from within.

This disconnect between liberal media coverage and reality spreads throughout Wheelers tenure at EPA. It surely cant be good for democracy to have so many people relying on a deeply distorted portrayal of their government for basic information.

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Liberal media gives Trump EPA head Andrew Wheeler a bad rap - Washington Examiner

Liberal group MoveOn demands Trump be removed from office because of Lysol remark – Washington Times

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

New organizations were quick to frame President Trumps recent remarks about injecting disinfectant into coronavirus patients as a serious suggestion about a potential course of treatment. The misleading media coverage has already prompted the first call to remove Mr. Trump from office in its aftermath.

MoveOn, the 7-million member progressive activist organization, has issued an aggressive demand to remove the president, citing the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Trumps comments about injecting disinfectant arent even the only incoherent, incompetent, or dangerous thing hes said this week. More to the point, its not just Trumps words but his actions that reveal his utter inability to discharge the duties of his office, said executive director Rahna Epting in a statement which offered a laundry list of accusations against the president.

Among other things, Ms. Epting claimed Mr. Trump downplayed the threat of the virus for months, went golfing instead of preparing for the pandemic, failed to provide testing or protective gear for sick people , and has not gotten relief to families in need. Many of these points have also been reflected in recent press coverage of Mr. Trump.

He reportedly doesnt attend coronavirus briefings, but rather governs by watching TV. His egotism, intentional ignorance, and lack of rudimentary understanding of or respect for the Constitution are clear evidence of his inability to govern. If it wasnt already abundantly clear it should be now: its past time for the Cabinet to exercise its constitutional responsibility and remove Trump from office, Ms. Epting said.

MSNBC analyst Mike Barnicle, in fact, has also called for Mr. Trumps removal based on the remarks.

Both based their rationale for their move on Section 4 of the 25th Amendment which reads as follows:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

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Liberal group MoveOn demands Trump be removed from office because of Lysol remark - Washington Times

Liberal GWU student group blasts other liberal student groups as ‘too white’ – The College Fix

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A progressive pro-Palestinian student group at George Washington University is miffed that its politically kindred-spirit organizations are awash in Caucasians.

Students Against Imperialism issued a statement on Thursday complaining about this fact, and demanded other GWU groups remedy [it] immediately.

The groups letter begins by noting leftist students of color feel consistently excluded from organizing spaces and actions which leads to exclusionary [] white social spaces.

Right-wing and liberal student groups push agendas that inherently muffle the voices of people of color and perpetuate racism through their implicit support of capitalism and imperialism, the statement continues. Black and brown bodies are not buzzwords to be thrown around. We are people, not props.

It goes on to complain that white-centered activism, such as that regarding climate change, ignores the injustices of the US military, aka the worlds largest polluter. In addition, those pertaining to Israels occupation of Palestinian land also are overlooked, SAI claims, and this apartheid situation is non-negotiable.

Zionism is racism, point-blank, period. the group says.

SAI lists three demands:

Five specific progressive student organizations, such as the Progressive Students Union, must respond with a statement indicating how they will address the issues raised.

All (liberal) groups must work together to ensure that marginalized students feel comfortable in airing their beefs.

Students of color must be prioritized by being placed in leadership roles and made more visible on projects. White students must help distribute the workload in an equitable manner.

Unsurprisingly, the statements concluding paragraph is a hodgepodge of studies jargon: [W]e cannot hope to confront and deconstruct other forms of unjustly hierarchical social relations

GWU Student Association President Howard Brookins III endorsed SAIs statement on his Facebook page, writing GW has a passionate and active community of leftists that is too often dominated by white students [] I stand with the students and their demands made by the GW Left Coalition and call on the GW community to do better.

The Young Americas Foundations Kara Zupkus reacted thusly:

Aside from being absolutely laughable, this demand letter is exactly what GW leftists deserve. Every year, left-leaning student organizations race to see who can become the most radical, far-left caricatures of leftism. Theyve set themselves up for a woke Olympics, and now they must reap what they have sowed.

An otherwise supportive GWU student asked on Facebook: You [SAI] made extremely broad assertions of widespread racism and oppression at GW without showing any proof of it, which given these claims there must be a lot of. Could you please provide some of your evidence of what is occurring within the organizations you named?

Read the full SAI statement and Zupkus article.

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Liberal GWU student group blasts other liberal student groups as 'too white' - The College Fix

Texas cops blast liberal judges draconian mask order and suggest they wont enforce it – The Sun

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THE Houston Police Officer's Union has released a statement slamming "draconian measures" by a Harris County judge ordering the mandatory wearing of face masks.

Judge Lina Hidalgo said yesterday residents of 10 or older need to be covering their nose and mouth while out in public, with the possibility of a $1,000 fine for anyone not complying.

But the police union today released a statement slamming the measures.

HPOU FOP Lodge President Joe Gamaldi wrote: "[We] believe everyone should be wearing a mask in public...However we draw the line at the draconian measures Hidalgo has decided to engage in."

"The statement continues: "Our officers work every day to bridge the gap with our community and earn their trust, we will not stand idly by and allow that bridge to be torn down."

The union also blasted the judge's leadership as "horrific" and accused her of making "echo chamber" policies, calling the mask order "idiotic".

The HPOU has reached out to the Attorney General's Office to check the legality of the enforcement too, the statement says.

It adds: "The last thing any of us need to do is kick our community while they are down."

The union also argues their police force are "stretched too thin" as is, and don't have the means to enforce the punishment aspects of the order.

And Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, warned that Hidalgos order could lead to unjust tyranny," the Texas Tribune reports.

Crenshaw Tweeted: Should guidelines for masks in confined spaces be emphatically promoted? Absolutely."

But we will NEVER support 180 days in jail or $1,000 fine for not wearing a mask.

In their statement, the HPOU urged officers to use discretion when enforcing the rules, although the Houston Chronicle reports Hidalgo has recommended this too.

And Galveston County Judge Mark Henry called the requirement unconstitutional. While we encourage that you consider these recommendations for your own safety and the safety of others around you, I will not be mandating it because I believe it is unconstitutional to do so."

Asked about the pushback, Hidalgo said: There's always going to be a minority voice. People are entitled to their opinions.

The uproar comes amid anti-lockdown protests sweeping the nation.

Protesters havecalled the lockdowns "tyrannical" and have demanded businesses reopen but many governors have stated they will not ease restrictions while the pandemic continues to sicken people.

Thousands of people have protested the shutdowns in recent weeks, many dismissing the shutdown as an infringement of their constitutional rights.

Many argue that if healthy people are not able to work then the economy is at risk of collapsing.

Protesters argue that they should not be forced to stay home and close their businesses, despite orders from state legislatures.

Healthcare workers across the country havestood in front of protesters, making their own statements to encourage people to stay homeamid thecoronavirus pandemic.

The organization ReOpen Virginia said in a news release: "Government mandating sick people to stay home is called quarantine. However, the government mandating healthy citizens to stay home, forcing businesses and churches to close is called tyranny.

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Many protesters have been outspoken about the economic impacts of the shutdown, noting that Americans are losing jobs increasingly as businesses have been forced to close.

Last week alone, 5.2 million Americans filed for unemployment.

At the beginning of this month it was recommeneded by the government Americans wear face coverings while out in public - but they discouraged the use of medical or N95 masks, as those are required by healthcare workers.

Do you have a story for The U.S. Sun team?

Email us at exclusive@the-sun.com or call 212-416-4552.

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Texas cops blast liberal judges draconian mask order and suggest they wont enforce it - The Sun

Conservatives reject Liberals’ tentative agreement with NDP, Bloc on Parliament’s return – CBC.ca

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The Liberal governmentreached a tentative agreementwith the NDP and the Bloc Qubcois about the conditions under which Parliament could reconvene this week but the Conservatives' rejection of thatdeal could lead to MPsreturning to the Commons on Monday.

"One sitting each week is unacceptable, even if it is eventually supplemented by a virtual sitting for a handful of additional MPs," Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said during a news conference on Sunday. "Physical distancing means staying two metres apart, not staying away from Parliament."

The Official Opposition's insistence on meeting in the House of Commons three times a weekmeans negotiations between federal parties remain up in the air on the eve ofApril 20 thedateMPs were intendedto reconvene when Parliament adjourned five weeks ago.

The Liberal Party told its staff Sunday that if no deal is reached between all four parties before late Monday morning, the party will attend theHouse sittingin reduced numbersand with minimal staff present.

That scenario would see the NDP and the Bloc each sending three MPs to the House. B.C. MP Paul Manly would attend on behalf of the Greens.

Scheer said the Conservatives are sending the same number of MPs as the last emergency sitting. The Liberals told CBC News they would do the same.

Scheer is scheduled to speak about Parliament's returnat 10:15 a.m. ET on Monday.

Earlier Sunday, Liberal House Leader Pablo Rodriguez shared on Twitter details of theagreement struck with the NDP and the Bloc, which includes a combination of in-person and virtual sittings each week.

"Under the agreement, the House of Commons will hold one day of in-person meetings per week, with a small group of MPsin the chamber. As well, there will be additional virtual sessions with a small number of MPs from across the country," the statement reads.

Rodriguez said the proposal will give MPs the same amount of time toquestion ministers and the prime minister as they would normally have under regular parliamentary circumstances.

During his Sunday COVID-19 briefing earlier in the day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau criticizedthe Conservatives for their repeated calls to convene in the Commons' chamber.

"I'm looking forward to taking questions from opposition parties, but it has to be done in a responsible way and right now, the Conservatives are not taking a responsible approach," Trudeau said.

Late Saturday, CBC News learned that the Trudeau government had offered to compress five days of question period into two days a week.

The arrangement would have involvedvirtual sittings every Tuesday, with MPs across the country taking part in the equivalent of two question periods. On Wednesdays, a smaller number of MPs and the prime minister would sit in the House of Commons and face the equivalent of three question periods.

In contrast, the tentative deal between the Liberals, NDP and Blocstarts with a proposal for asingle in-person sitting beginning this Wednesday.

By next week, one session would be held virtually on Tuesday, followed by a sitting in the chamber on Wednesday.

The following week and all subsequent weeks would see MPs meeting virtually on Tuesdays and Thursdays and in-person on Wednesdays, for a total of three sessions per week.

The arrangement is similar to the NDP's initial recommendation, which called for the House to meet in-person once a week on top of two virtual sessions that would involve hearing from a larger contingent of MPs.

"I think the reality is the more we are meeting in person, the more that increasesthe risk. That's why the NDP proposal, I think, makes a lot of sense," said NDP House Leader Peter Julian.

Trudeau said during his morning remarksthat convening all 338 MPsand their staff in the House of Commons would amount to an "irresponsible" move due to public health guidance urging Canadians to practisephysical distancing.

Scheer fired back at the prime minister for suggesting that any parties were advocating for afull roster of MPs to return to the Commons on Monday.

"That is completely false, and it's disingenuous to try to put that forward before Canadians as if that was a real scenario," Scheer said.

The outgoing leader also said that his proposal which includes two hours per session to question ministers is in line with theprotocols legislators followed during the government's last two emergency sittings.

"Thirty-twoMPs attended representing all parties," Scheer said. "This allowed us to follow public health advice and still carry out our duties."

While the Green Party of Canada does not hold recognized party status, former leader Elizabeth May saidshesupports sitting in the Commons only if there is a compelling reason to do so, such as passing legislation.

Commenting on Scheer's insistence thatvirtual sittings do not allow for proper parliamentary scrutiny and oversight, May said she believes remote platforms do just fine when it comes to holding politicians to account.

"We've already seen standing committees meet by Zoom," May said in an interview with CBC News. "I've seen [Conservative MP] Pierre Poilievre go at Bill Morneau. It wasn't any different in quality than question period. His opportunities were exactly the same."

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Conservatives reject Liberals' tentative agreement with NDP, Bloc on Parliament's return - CBC.ca

Allen stayed busy on and off the field at Pike Liberal Arts – The Troy Messenger – Troy Messenger

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Pike Liberal Arts senior Davis Allens athletic career with the Patriots was highlighted by two state championships in baseball.

The senior is now saying goodbye to the Patriots after being very active on the playing field and in the classroom.

Its been really fun, especially with the two state championships, Allen said. That was extremely fun. Im going to have lifelong friends from Pike and Im going to remember a lot.

Allen and the rest of the class 2020 wont have the excitement of finishing out their high school career in the halls of Pike Liberal Arts. Allen wont have the opportunity to do the things that previous seniors had the opportunity to do.

Its been difficult not being with my friends, Allen said. Im not certain if we are going to have an on-time graduation or other senior activities.

Along with playing for the Patriot baseball team, Allen also played football for head coach Gene Allen. Off the field, Allen was just as busy. He was the SGA Treasurer the past two years and was in many different clubs throughout his high school career.

Its good to be in different groups and organizations, Allen said. You have different friends outside of sports.

On the field Allen excelled in both baseball and football. Before his baseball season was cut short, Allen played in 15 games for the Patriots in 2020. He had 57 plate appearances and 48 official at-bats. He had a .417 batting average with an on base percentage of .509. He had one home run and nine RBI. As a junior, Allen earned First Team All-State honors.

Allen played football all four years of high school The Patriots best season during Allens high school career came in 2018 when they finished they finished the regular season 10-1.

It was extremely fun, Allen said. I have been extremely blessed to play on such great teams.

Allen and the Patriots baseball team are back-to-back state champions and looked like they had a chance to return to Montgomery in 2020. The success of the program doesnt come to a surprise to Allen.

I have played baseball with the guys in my grade for a long time, Allen said. We have been pretty good throughout the years. We kind of expected to win, so we worked hard and accomplished our goals.

On the football field in 2020, Allen took more of a leadership role after the Patriots said goodbye to key seniors including Jade Sikes, Cody Hollis and Max Copeland. It was a role he carried into baseball season.

Becoming a senior, I felt like I needed to become more vocal, Allen said. It something that I worked on.

Allen will always be thankful for the impact that both Gene Allen and Allen Ponder made in his career.

I will always remember them helping me, Allen said. They were really great.

Allen is now looking ahead to college. He hopes to continue playing baseball at the collegiate level.

I am going to play baseball at the next level, Allen said. The recruiting has been put on pause because of what has been happening. I have a couple opportunities and I havent really decided yet.

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Allen stayed busy on and off the field at Pike Liberal Arts - The Troy Messenger - Troy Messenger

Malcolm Turnbull on how the Liberal Party operates behind closed doors – 7.30 – ABC News

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ANNOUNCER: Malcolm Turnbull from Wentworth.

REPORTER: Brendan Nelson's leadership was on borrowed time.

ALEX SOMLYAY: I'd like to announce that Malcolm Turnbull has been elected as the leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party.

REPORTER: It was hardly a decisive victory but more than enough for the man who'd coveted the job for the best part of a year.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am.

CHRIS UHLMANN, REPORTER: The leadership threat comes from inside his own tent and some Liberals seem determined to destroy the leader.

KERRY O'BRIEN: If Tony Abbott becomes leader on Monday, he will be your third new leader in two years. That is not a good look, is it?

NICK MINCHIN: I think it is unhealthy for parties to keep changing leaders all the time.

TONY ABBOTT: Very impressive.

REPORTER: Tony Abbott seemed as shock as any one at the outcome of the Liberals leadership vote

TONY ABBOTT: I am feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Australia is under new management and Australia is once more open for business.

(Cheering)

SABRA LANE: While the Prime Minister survived the spill motion, it was effectively a vote of no confidence in him.

TONY ABBOTT: Good government starts today.

REPORTER: Malcolm Turnbull delivered a bombshell eight months in the making.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott's leadership.

TONY ABBOTT: We are not the Labor Party.

SCOTT BUCHHOLZ: Malcolm Turnbull was successful on 54, Tony Abbott, 44.

REPORTER: His second rising as Liberal leader comes almost 7 years to the day from his first.

TONY ABBOTT: There will be no wrecking, no undermining and no sniping.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Hi there, I'm Malcolm.

ANDREW PROBYN: Mr Turnbull's initial stratospheric ratings reflected his broad appeal but compromises on climate change and same-sex marriage shattered his mystique.

POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think he has had difficulty conveying a clear message for what he stands for.

PETER DUTTON: I would challenge for the leadership of the parliamentary Liberal Party.

LEIGH SALES: Three years after Malcolm Turnbull rolled Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton is trying to oust Malcolm Turnbull.

MATHIAS CORMANN: We advised the prime minister of our judgement that he no longer enjoyed majority support in the party room.

SCOTT MORRISON: This is my leader and I'm ambitious for him.

NOLA MARINO: The successful candidate was Scott Morrison. He won this vote by 45 votes to 40 for Peter Dutton.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Australians will be just dumb struck and so appalled.

LEIGH SALES: Malcolm Turnbull. welcome back to the program.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Great to be with you.

LEIGH SALES: You handed over the final part of your book to your publisher a couple of months ago.

Could you possibly have imagined how much the world would have changed in the period of time before it came out?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, no, it seems like a completely different world but it's important for us, for life to go on.

It is important for us to keep reading. It's an Australian book with an Australian publisher, an Australian printer and Australian book sellers who all need things to sell.

So we decided to press on and stick to the date we'd set last year.

LEIGH SALES: What are your observations as you look at what is going on in the world at the moment?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: This virus defies our very humanity. This is biology confounding politics just like climate change is physics confounding politics.

Here in Australia, so far, the response has been effective and we are seeing the curve flattening.

So I think all the governments in Australia can take some satisfaction, no cause for complacency, of course, but some satisfaction that so far the measures are working but the economic shock will be massive.

LEIGH SALES: Let's go back to a time before we were all living in this new normal when politics was politics and that was the final week of your prime ministership.

You, yourself, had set the bar of losing 30 Newspolls in a row as justification for the removal of a leader?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: That is not quite true with great respect. I wish I'd never said that but the critique I made of the Abbott government was that essentially that it was a bad government and I cited as evidence that its political cause was lost really as a means of persuading my colleagues that we had lost 30 Newspolls in a row.

But yes, I certainly mentioned it but that wasn't the reason I challenged Tony Abbott, not at all.

LEIGH SALES: None the less, you did by citing that then give you colleagues a excuse later to say well, you live by the sword, you die by the sword?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Certainly they were able to use that but the reality is that when the coup occurred, when Dutton and the right-wing group that supported him, Abbott and others and their friends in the Murdoch media and the right-wing media generally, they overthrew my government and overthrew my prime ministership not because they thought I'd lose an election but because they thought I would win it.

LEIGH SALES: Why do you think they didn't want you to win an election when you were leading their side?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: This is what's happened to the Liberal Party. It has become so tribalised.

There are some very key observations of George Brandis in the book which I think are among the most insightful about the way in which the right-wing have basically taken the Liberal, the liberalism out of the Liberal Party and they would have preferred Abbott and his friends and the Murdoch media, the right-wing shock jocks, they would have preferred Bill Shorten to be prime minister than me.

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Malcolm Turnbull on how the Liberal Party operates behind closed doors - 7.30 - ABC News

Dancing around the COVID hammer – The Jakarta Post – Jakarta Post

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Now that most of us have been under lockdown for more than a month, how have we coped emotionally, economically, socially and politically?

For almost everyone, we have been stressed out of our minds. It is difficult to think rationally or objectively when we confront our own mortality, with very uncertain and tough choices in the months ahead.Online learning platform Course Hero vice president Tomas Pueyo puts the dilemmas simply when he contrasts the alternatives as Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance. We need a hammer to lock down the pandemic quickly and aggressively.

The mitigation option is too slow, threatening to overwhelm our hospital facilities, causing high death rates, as Wuhan, Lombardy, Madrid,New York and London have all faced.After you have hammered (suppressed the coronavirus spread), the tough part of the dance is how to keep the coronavirus contained until we find the vaccine. If we keep the infection rate R below one, the epidemic dies down. To do so means wearing masks, keeping social distance and living and working very differently.With the lockdown come massive economic costs.

We forget to our peril that we are social animals.Few of us do well as loners. In the enforced lockdown, we struggle desperately to get out to meet friends and familybut also to self-reflect and understand why we are in this terrible dilemma. It is catastrophes like this that changed the world through new ideas.French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1640) abhorred the senseless destruction of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) so deeply that he created not just the philosophy of rationalism, but also the mathematical foundations of modern science.His most famous statement, I think, therefore I am is that of an individualist aware of his will and consciousness to think and act rationally.

Rationality meant excluding emotions, forgetting that all emotions are reflexive, that our fears or anger are magnified socially, spreading virally.

This individualism was captured by neoliberals to argue that individual greed can create social good. But carried to its extreme, modern individualism has become narcissistic and venalthinking that individual freedom is absolute

whereas the pandemic revealed that we live in social networks in which everything is interconnected, interdependent and therefore relative. Individual freedom comes with social responsibility. You cannot be selfish at expense of other peoples lives.

Ethiopian cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane recently challenged the Cartesian premise of individualism.Going back to African roots, she quoted Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti: I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am. None of us are self-contained because we are all permeated by genes and memes (ideas) through society. In the Zulu language, A person is a person through other persons.

Recognizing this and the fact that the economy is a social institution, the pandemic has exposed all the flaws and inadequacies of the current income-expenditure-debt model. We consume in excess because we are given credit in the form of debt. When we cannot pay, the government has to step in to create more debt. The Fed has just added US$2.4 trillion to its balance sheet to support the US economy.None of us, including central bankers, know how this will ever be repaid if the lockdown continues for much longer.

This is why smart re-opening of the economy will involve more testing, tracing and containment.But the honest truth is that the coronavirus is hiding in the weakest and poorest segments of society, as Singapore has found in its clusters of foreign workers. Rich countries can close their borders, but if the pandemic rages on in poor, over-populated countries, the pandemic will return through civil and border wars.

Thus, the hammer cannot kill the virus or the fly. We have to dance with the virus and prepare for its mutation and co-evolution with other viruses that will emerge with climate warming.

Many businesses are already adapting to the new online world of business transactions, in which many more of us will be working at home and interacting only digitally. The digital economy cannot be a one-way system in which the seller does not care about the income of the buyer.One reason why the Alibaba and Tencent platforms are much more user-friendly and sustainable than the Google and Amazon models is that the user can earn income so that they can also spend through these platforms.

The American models push sales through advertising and if you cant afford to buy, they can offer you credit cards. But the pandemic revealed that if you cant earn, you cant spend.Only when the platform is two-way and not debt-dependent, will it be sustainable.

Rather than thinking linearly that globalization will retreat, glocalization will accelerate with more localization of ideas and innovations that have global market appeal. Notice how in the United States, governors have performed better than the federal government. Spontaneous innovation is occurring in different communities to create diverse innovation in getting medical supplies, improving food chains and working on vaccines and other badly needed medicines. The virus spread through a one-size-fit-all globalization.Anyone can fly, so can viruses. Herd immunity is built through mass diversity.

But diversity also brings differences of opinion and therefore the polarization of politics, which is in a very dangerous blame-each-other phase. In the animal kingdom, all creatures large and small have a truce in equally going to the shrinking water pool during a drought. They do not hunt each other until after they had their share of water, and even then they kill only what they need for survival, not wantonly. Animals do not blame each other for the drought.

We must learn to dance with each other in harmony with our environment, rather than applying a hammer to each other and to every present and emergent problem. Not every problem is a nail nor is every person we disagree with an enemy.

The pandemic has opened up an important conversation that eluded us in our blind pursuit of individualism, freedom, democracy and money. The old era is gone with the virus.Whether we like it or not, we will have to reimagine and shape collectively what the post-coronavirus economy and society will entail.This can no longer be built top-down, but through a dialogue where everyone recognizes that we are all facing common and existential fates.

The coronavirus makes or breaks us as a community. That is the truce that we need before the dance.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.

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Dancing around the COVID hammer - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta Post