Ad industry bodies urge Michigan governor to recant ban on advertising nonessential items – AdAge.com

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On Thursday, five ad industrytrade associations released a joint statement urging Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to retract a portion of a new executive order that prohibits large retailers from advertising nonessential items and property owners from advertising short-term rentals.

The Association of Advertising Agencies (4As), the American Advertising Federation (AAF), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) say the ad ban violates free speech, does nothing to help public health and could further hurt the economy.

In arbitrarily prohibitingadvertising by large retailers and rental property owners, theorder violates a fundamental tenant of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of free speech by targeting specific speakers based on what they want to say, reads the letter.

The Michigan executive order was issued on April 9, 2020, and is slated to last for the rest of the month. The order is meant to slow the spread of COVID-19 by requiring residents to stay at home and keep nonessential businesses closed.

The trade associations are specifically addressing sections 11 and 12 of the order which prohibittwo groupslarge retailers and property ownersfrom advertising.

The order instructs that stores of more than 50,000 square feet, refrain from the advertising or promotion of goods that are not groceries, medical supplies, or items that are necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation, and basic operation of residences by April 13, 2020.

The mandate also states: No one shall advertise or rent a short-term vacation property except as necessary to assist in housing a health care professional or volunteer aiding in the response to the COVID-19 crisis.

We dont see a rational basis [for the order], or any basis at all, says Dan Jaffe, group exec VPof government relations at ANA. We agree with the Governor that people need to be protected, but we dont want restrictions on advertising. It might just increase issues were facing economically.

Jaffe says that as far as the industry is aware, the ad ban applies to all formats and distribution channels in the state, but says the order is not specific enough when it comes to these details.

Under the constitution, a state has the power to prohibit advertising, but the Supreme Court has made it so that a state has to prove it has a substantial interest in doing so, says Jaffe. Health is a substantial interest, but we believe this is unconstitutional, he says. The proposal has no effect on public health and violates the first amendment.

A major piece of contention in the order is the difference in freedoms given to small stores and large retailers. Why can a store that is relatively small advertise and not a large store? he says, adding that often social distancing is harder to accomplish in small stores where there are fewer aisles.

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Ad industry bodies urge Michigan governor to recant ban on advertising nonessential items - AdAge.com

Recent books with Harvard connections – Harvard Magazine

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Inside the Hot Zone, by Mark G. Kortepeter 83, M.P.H. 95 (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska, $34.95). Now a public-health professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the author is a retired army colonel with long experience in defense against biological agents. His thriller-like account, subtitled a soldier on the front lines of biological warfare, is a timely reminder that alongside natural threats (Ebola, coronavirus), life sciences can be weaponized in stealthy, alarming ways.

Traces of J.B. Jackson, by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Ph.D. 69, RF 01 (University of Virginia, $39.50). John Brinckerhoff Jackson 32 had an engaging, diverse, creative three-year undergraduate career at Harvard, following which his life experiences in Europe, New Mexico, and the military led him to create Landscape magazine and to shape, profoundly, landscape studies at Berkeley, the Graduate School of Design, and elsewhere. Horowitz, now emerita from Smith College, provides an accessible, handsomely illustrated guide to the life and work of the man who taught us to see everyday America.

Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America, by Philip G. Schrag 64 (University of California, $29.95 paper). A Georgetown Law professor details the too-long history of locking up minors (he worked in a jail full of toddlers) brought into this country, often for basic reasons of safety, and political leaders refusal to address their needs for minimally humane care. An issue that lingers because the people who would have to caredont.

Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, by Alexandra Petri 10 (W.W. Norton, $25.95). A collection from the work of The Washington Post columnist, whose zany satiresfar more carefully and wickedly crafted than they at first seemgo far beyond her role as dedicated humorist in the nations capital. It seems almost unfair for her to get to practice in an era so rich in possibilities. A Good Time to Talk About Gun Laws (President Donald Trump said he would do so as time goes by) notes that Not now is not the same as never. It must be on a day when there has been not recent gun violence. So not today, and not tomorrow, and not the day after that. But someday. That was in 2017.

The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever, by Kent Garrett 83 and Jeanne Ellsworth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). A retired television journalist (see Reel Revolution, March-April 2017, page 55) tells the stories of 18 youngsters who grew up when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided; entered Harvard as the largest group of Negroes admitted to a freshman class to date; and graduated as the civil-rights confrontation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, began to break segregation: the era when Negro gave way to black (hence the title). He recalls the special sting of dorm crew: I was a Negro doing Negro workI was in my place. In recording what it meant to be pulledinto an unknown world, Garrett and Ellsworth have captured the nascent movement toward a broadened institutiona change well worth remembering.

Why We Swim, by Bonnie Tsui 99 (Algonquin Books, $26.95). The writer/swimmer/surfer reports on the enigma of land-adapted Homo sapiens loving to live by and plunge into the water. Journalism cum poetry: We submerge ourselves in the natural world because the natural world has a way of eliciting awe.

The Long Fix, by Vivian S. Lee 87, M.D. 92 (W.W. Norton, $26.95). The president of health platforms at Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet/Google analytics enterprisea Rhodes Scholar, and former dean of the University of Utah School of Medicineseeks solutions to Americas health care crisis with strategies that work for everyone. In a system marked by waste, overtreatment, deadly mistakes, inconsistent care, excessive bureaucracy, and other serious ailments, she attacks the bias of paying for action (the pervasive fee-for-service paradigm) rather than demanding results.

Healthy Buildings, by Joseph G. Allen, assistant professor of exposure and assessment science, and John D. Macomber, senior lecturer in finance (Harvard, $35). A public-health scientist and a Business School teacher join forces to explain why the indoorswhere humans in developed societies spend 90 percent of their timedrive performance and productivity, as the subtitle puts it. A useful complement to the energy- and climate-focused concerns of the green-building movement.

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason 98 (Little, Brown, $27). The physician-novelist (The Winter Soldier, The Piano Tuner) presents a series of precisely crafted, often historically informed, stories about mystery and the unexpected turns of diverse lives.

The Caregivers Encyclopedia, by Muriel R. Gillick, professor of population medicine (Johns Hopkins, $22.95 paper). Given the burgeoning obligation to assist increasingly dependent elders, many of their grown children, and others, will gratefully receive this compassionate guide to caring for older adults. It is admirably forthright, clearly organized, and helpfully illustrated, proceeding from an initial focus on understanding someones underlying health state through visiting doctors, entering the hospital, and proceeding from acute to long-term care, at home and in specialized facilities.

The Fairest of Them All, by Maria Tatar, Loeb research professor of Germanic languages and literatures and of folklore and mythology (Harvard, $27.95). The preeminent scholar of folklore (profiled in The Horror and the Beauty,November-December 2007, page 36) here examines the cruel, jolting tale of Snow White in the global context of 21 tales of mothers and daughters. A creepy, revealing collection.

Cook, Taste, Learn, by Guy Crosby, adjunct associate professor of nutrition (Columbia University Press, $26.95). A brisk, attractively formatted history of the science of cookingwith color-coded inserts on the learning (emulsions, the chemical structure of fats, etc.) and for recipes.

Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, by Suzanne Nossel 91, J.D. 96 (Dey Street, $28.99). The CEO of PEN Americaformerly COO of Human Rights Watchadvances a common set of rules for speech in an era when our global conversation is now a mosh pit of expression and [h]ateful speech is on the rise.

The Obama Portraits, by Tana Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard. J. Powell, and Kim Sajet (Princeton, $24.95). Three National Portrait Gallery colleagues and a Duke art historian (Powell) document the making of and extraordinary public response to the official portraits of President Barack Obama, J.D. 91, and First Lady Michelle Obama, J.D. 88.

The first post-nomination portrait of Abraham Lincoln, by William Marsh, May 20, 1860, taken in Springfield, IllinoisPhotograph by William Marsh/ The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Public Domain

Lincoln on the Verge, by Ted Widmer 84, Ph.D. 93 (Simon & Schuster, $35). A gripping, minutely detailed account of Abraham Lincolns 13-day progress from Springfield to Washington, to take possession of the presidency at the then-United States moment of greatest challenge. Evocatively illustrated, and resonant with the kind of leaderly rhetoric and character that sustained the nationand made it great.

When Truth Mattered, by Robert Giles, curator emeritus, Nieman Foundation for Journalism (Mission Point Press, $16.95 paper). The then-managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, Giles now has written a fiftieth-anniversary account of the Kent State shootingswhen protest was cut down by state power gone horribly wrongand of the role of a free press in getting the news right. In an uncomfortable number of ways, his story resonates with current circumstances.

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Recent books with Harvard connections - Harvard Magazine

An open letter to Gov. Roy Cooper and local governments across the state – Laurinburg Exchange

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Tthe North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law has offered its assistance to Gov. Cooper and local governments in rescinding or revising orders unconstitutionally restricting the rights of the people to free speech and to assembly.

We understand the seriousness of the situation, not just in terms of COVID-19 itself but also in terms of how government is violating the constitution during the crisis.

The First Amendment and the North Carolina Constitution protect the peoples right to free speech and to assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances. These rights may be limited if government has a compelling interest and uses narrowly tailored means to achieve that interest. NCICL recently posted an explanation of the test, called strict scrutiny, used by courts to decide whether this tough burden has been satisfied when a government limits fundamental rights like the right to free speech. That explanation and other resources are available at http://www.ncicl.org.

First Amendment rights arent absolute, but neither is government power. If Gov. Cooper or local governments want help, NCICL is more than willing to help them revise or rescind their orders to ensure that constitutional rights are respected.

Jeanette Doran

President/general counsel

NC Institute for Constitutional Law

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An open letter to Gov. Roy Cooper and local governments across the state - Laurinburg Exchange

Gov. Whitmer responds to drive-by rally at the state capitol – Fox17

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The drive-by rallly at the state capitol in Lansing was highly publicized mainly on social media. Gov. Whitmer mentioned earlier in the week that she was all for people excersizing their right to free speech, but has been very vocal about the importance of social distancing.

FOX 17 talked with Gov. Whitmer about the turnout at the rally and why she says it may impact the stay-at-home order in the future.

"Well, i think that yesterday's event was a political rally," said Whitmer. "I know that there were some people there that came to protest the stay at home order, but the vast majority of people there were there, making political statements. Whether it was open carry people that had AR-15s that they were carrying on their bodies or it was people that were flying the confederate flag, people that were using swastikas."

Governor Whitmer also raised concern after some protesters did not stay in their cars.

"I know that this is, this was an event where people will now go back to different parts of the state, and could could actually pass COVID-19 on in a greater number," Whitmer said. " The irony the sad irony is that they were protesting the state home order. and because of their actions might make it necessary to take this posture even longer if COVID-19 continues to spread, because of this irresponsible action."

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Gov. Whitmer responds to drive-by rally at the state capitol - Fox17

The future of quantum computing in the cloud – TechTarget

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AWS, Microsoft and other IaaS providers have jumped on the quantum computing bandwagon as they try to get ahead of the curve on this emerging technology.

Developers use quantum computing to encode problems as qubits, which compute multiple combinations of variables at once rather than exploring each possibility discretely. In theory, this could allow researchers to quickly solve problems involving different combinations of variables, such as breaking encryption keys, testing the properties of different chemical compounds or simulating different business models. Researchers have begun to demonstrate real-world examples of how these early quantum computers could be put to use.

However, this technology is still being developed, so experts caution that it could take more than a decade for quantum computing to deliver practical value. In the meantime, there are a few cloud services, such as Amazon Bracket and Microsoft Quantum, that aim to get developers up to speed on writing quantum applications.

Quantum computing in the cloud has the potential to disrupt industries in a similar way as other emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning. But quantum computing is still being established in university classrooms and career paths, said Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Quantum Ecosystem Development. Similarly, major cloud providers are focusing primarily on education at this early stage.

"The cloud services today are aimed at preparing the industry for the soon-to-arrive day when quantum computers will begin being useful," said Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, an orchestration platform for quantum computing.

There's still much to iron out regarding quantum computing and the cloud, but the two technologies appear to be a logical fit, for now.

Cloud-based quantum computing is more difficult to pull off than AI, so the ramp up will be slower and the learning curve steeper, said Martin Reynolds, distinguished vice president of research at Gartner. For starters, quantum computers require highly specialized room conditions that are dramatically different from how cloud providers build and operate their existing data centers.

Reynolds believes practical quantum computers are at least a decade away. The biggest drawback lies in aligning the quantum state of qubits in the computer with a given problem, especially since quantumcomputersstill haven't been proven to solve problems better than traditional computers.

Coders also must learn new math and logic skills to utilize quantum computing. This makes it hard for them since they can't apply traditional digital programming techniques. IT teams need to develop specialized skills to understand how to apply quantum computing in the cloud so they can fine tune the algorithms, as well as the hardware, to make this technology work.

Current limitations aside, the cloud is an ideal way to consume quantum computing, because quantum computing has low I/O but deep computation, Reynolds said. Because cloud vendors have the technological resources and a large pool of users, they will inevitably be some of the first quantum-as-a-service providers and will look for ways to provide the best software development and deployment stacks.

Quantum computing could even supplement general compute and AI services cloud providers currently offer, said Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.In that scenario, the cloud would integrate with classical computing cloud resources in a co-processing environment.

The cloud plays two key roles in quantum computing today, according to Hyoun Park, CEO and principal analyst at Amalgam Insights. The first is to provide an application development and test environment for developers to simulate the use of quantum computers through standard computing resources.

The second is to offer access to the few quantum computers that are currently available, in the way mainframe leasing was common a generation ago. This improves the financial viability of quantum computing, since multiple users can increase machine utilization.

It takes significant computing power to simulate quantum algorithm behavior from a development and testing perspective. For the most part, cloud vendors want to provide an environment to develop quantum algorithms before loading these quantum applications onto dedicated hardware from other providers, which can be quite expensive.

However, classical simulations of quantum algorithms that use large numbers of qubits are not practical. "The issue is that the size of the classical computer needed will grow exponentially with the number of qubits in the machine," said Doug Finke, publisher of the Quantum Computing Report.So, a classical simulation of a 50-qubit quantum computer would require a classical computer with roughly 1 petabyte of memory. This requirement will double with every additional qubit.

Nobody knows which approach is best, or which materials are best. We're at the Edison light bulb filament stage. Martin ReynoldsDistinguished vice president of research at Gartner

But classical simulations for problems using a smaller number of qubits are useful both as a tool to teach quantum algorithms to students and also for quantum software engineers to test and debug algorithms with "toy models" for their problem, Finke said.Once they debug their software, they should be able to scale it up to solve larger problems on a real quantum computer.

In terms of putting quantum computing to use, organizations can currently use it to support last-mile optimization, encryption and other computationally challenging issues, Park said. This technology could also aid teams across logistics, cybersecurity, predictive equipment maintenance, weather predictions and more. Researchers can explore multiple combinations of variables in these kinds of problems simultaneously, whereas a traditional computer needs to compute each combination separately.

However, there are some drawbacks to quantum computing in the cloud. Developers should proceed cautiously when experimenting with applications that involve sensitive data, said Finke. To address this, many organizations prefer to install quantum hardware in their own facilities despite the operational hassles, Finke said.

Also, a machine may not be immediately available when a quantum developer wants to submit a job through quantum services on the public cloud. "The machines will have job queues and sometimes there may be several jobs ahead of you when you want to run your own job," Finke said. Some of the vendors have implemented a reservation capability so a user can book a quantum computer for a set time period to eliminate this problem.

IBM was first to market with its Quantum Experience offering, which launched in 2016 and now has over 15 quantum computers connected to the cloud. Over 210,000 registered users have executed more than 70 billion circuits through the IBM Cloud and published over 200 papers based on the system, according to IBM.

IBM also started the Qiskit open source quantum software development platform and has been building an open community around it. According to GitHub statistics, it is currently the leading quantum development environment.

In late 2019, AWS and Microsoft introduced quantum cloud services offered through partners.

Microsoft Quantum provides a quantum algorithm development environment, and from there users can transfer quantum algorithms to Honeywell, IonQ or Quantum Circuits Inc. hardware. Microsoft's Q# scripting offers a familiar Visual Studio experience for quantum problems, said Michael Morris, CEO of Topcoder, an on-demand digital talent platform.

Currently, this transfer involves the cloud providers installing a high-speed communication link from their data center to the quantum computer facilities, Finke said. This approach has many advantages from a logistics standpoint, because it makes things like maintenance, spare parts, calibration and physical infrastructure a lot easier.

Amazon Braket similarly provides a quantum development environment and, when generally available, will provide time-based pricing to access D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti hardware. Amazon says it will add more hardware partners as well. Braket offers a variety of different hardware architecture options through a common high-level programming interface, so users can test out the machines from the various partners and determine which one would work best with their application, Finke said.

Google has done considerable core research on quantum computing in the cloud and is expected to launch a cloud computing service later this year. Google has been more focused on developing its in-house quantum computing capabilities and hardware rather than providing access to these tools to its cloud users, Park said. In the meantime, developers can test out quantum algorithms locally using Google's Circ programming environment for writing apps in Python.

In addition to the larger offerings from the major cloud providers, there are several alternative approaches to implementing quantum computers that are being provided through the cloud.

D-Wave is the furthest along, with a quantum annealer well-suited for many optimization problems. Other alternatives include QuTech, which is working on a cloud offering of its small quantum machine utilizing its spin qubits technology. Xanadu is another and is developing a quantum machine based on a photonic technology.

Researchers are pursuing a variety of approaches to quantum computing -- using electrons, ions or photons -- and it's not yet clear which approaches will pan out for practical applications first.

"Nobody knows which approach is best, or which materials are best. We're at the Edison light bulb filament stage, where Edison reportedly tested thousands of ways to make a carbon filament until he got to one that lasted 1,500 hours," Reynolds said. In the meantime, recent cloud offerings promise to enable developers to start experimenting with these different approaches to get a taste of what's to come.

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The future of quantum computing in the cloud - TechTarget

Physicists Successfully Use ‘Hot’ Qubits to Overcome a Huge Quantum Computing Problem – ScienceAlert

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As quantum computers continue to grow in size and complexity, engineers are hitting a major obstacle. All of that added machinery means higher temperatures - and if anything can ruin a perfectly good quantum bit, it's heat.

There are a few possible solutions, but any fix needs to be small and compatible with existing silicon technology. Two recently published papers confirm a new device developed by engineers at Australia's University of New South Wales (UNSW) could be the way to go.

Early last year, the researchers tentatively announced tiny semiconducting materials called quantum dots could be isolated and still used to carry out the kinds of quantum operations needed for the next generation of computing, all at a relatively toasty 1.5 degrees Kelvin.

"This is still very cold, but is a temperature that can be achieved using just a few thousand dollars' worth of refrigeration, rather than the millions of dollars needed to cool chips to 0.1 Kelvin," says senior researcher Andrew Dzurak from UNSW.

That research has not only now been given the thumbs-up in a peer review, it's also been validated by a second, completely different study conducted by a team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Having confirmation that this proof of concept device works as theorised should give us confidence that this technology, if not something like it, will be one way we'll scale up quantum computers to increasingly useful sizes.

Where conventional computing uses a binary system of 'bits' to perform logical operations, quantum computing uses the probabilistic nature of quantum states to manage particular calculations.

Those states are most easily represented in the features of tiny (preferably subatomic sized) particles. While in an unmeasured form, these particles can be described mathematically as possessing a blend of characteristics in what's known as a superposition.

The mathematics of superposition particles called qubits when used this way can make short work of algorithms that would take conventional computers far too long to solve, at least in theory.

But to really get the most out of them, qubits should work collaboratively with other qubits, entangling their mathematics in ever more complex ways. Ideally, dozens of qubits should work together if we're to make a quantum computer that's more than just an expensive toy.

Some tech companies claim to be at that point already. For them, the next step is to connect hundreds, if not millions together. It's a lofty goal that presents engineers with a growing problem.

"Every qubit pair added to the system increases the total heat generated," says Dzurak.

Heat risks making a mess of the whole superposition thing, which is why current designs rely so much on cooling technology that freezes particles to a virtual stand-still.

Just adding more heat sinks runs into space and efficiency problems. So Dzurak and his team looked for ways to house a qubit that could handle rising temperatures.

The trick, they found, was to isolate electrons from their reservoir on a pair of nanometre-sized islands called quantum dots, made from silicon metal-oxide.

The electron states can then be set and measured using a process called tunnelling, where the quantum uncertainty of each electron's position allows them to teleport between dots.

This tunnelling within an isolated qubit nest gives the delicate states of the electrons a level of protection against the slightly higher temperatures, while still allowing the system to link in with conventional electronic computers.

"Our new results open a path from experimental devices to affordable quantum computers for real world business and government applications," says Dzurak.

As a proof of concept, it's exciting stuff. But plenty of questions need to be answered before we'll see it marry with existing quantum computing technology.

Cooking qubits at temperatures 15 times warmer than usual seems to work just fine so far, but we're yet to see how this translates to entangled groups, and whether methods for correcting errors still work for a 'hot' qubit.

No doubt researchers will be turning their attention to these concerns in future experiments, moving us ever closer to quantum computers capable of cracking some of the hardest problems the Universe can throw at us.

This research was published in Nature here and here.

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Physicists Successfully Use 'Hot' Qubits to Overcome a Huge Quantum Computing Problem - ScienceAlert

Alex Garland on ‘Devs,’ free will and quantum computing – Engadget

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Garland views Amaya as a typical Silicon Valley success story. In the world of Devs, it's the first company that manages to mass produce quantum computers, allowing them to corner that market. (Think of what happened to search engines after Google debuted.) Quantum computing has been positioned as a potentially revolutionary technology for things like healthcare and encryption, since it can tackle complex scenarios and data sets more effectively than traditional binary computers. Instead of just processing inputs one at a time, a quantum machine would theoretically be able to tackle an input in multiple states, or superpositions, at once.

By mastering this technology, Amaya unlocks a completely new view of reality: The world is a system that can be decoded and predicted. It proves to them that the world is deterministic. Our choices don't matter; we're all just moving along predetermined paths until the end of time. Garland is quick to point out that you don't need anything high-tech to start asking questions about determinism. Indeed, it's something that's been explored since Plato's allegory of the cave.

"What I did think, though, was that if a quantum computer was as good at modeling quantum reality as it might be, then it would be able to prove in a definitive way whether we lived in a deterministic state," Garland said. "[Proving that] would completely change the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at society, the way society functions, the way relationships unfold and develop. And it would change the world in some ways, but then it would restructure itself quickly."

The sheer difficulty of coming up with something -- anything -- that's truly spontaneous and isn't causally related to something else in the universe is the strongest argument in favor of determinism. And it's something Garland aligns with personally -- though that doesn't change how he perceives the world.

"Whether or not you or I have free will, both of us could identify lots of things that we care about," he said. "There are lots of things that we enjoy or don't enjoy. Or things that we're scared of, or we anticipate. And all of that remains. It's not remotely affected by whether we've got free will or not. What might be affected is, I think, our capacity to be forgiving in some respects. And so, certain kinds of anti-social or criminal behavior, you would start to think about in terms of rehabilitation, rather than punishment. Because then, in a way, there's no point punishing someone for something they didn't decide to do."

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Alex Garland on 'Devs,' free will and quantum computing - Engadget

CIP partners with ISARA to offer crypto-agile technology to complement innovative Whitethorn platform – Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source

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The onset of large-scale quantum computing will challenge the security of current public-key cryptography and create widespread vulnerabilities. The rigidity of todays infrastructure makes cryptographic migrations complex and costly. Establishing crypto agility in existing systems is the first step towards seamless migrations.

The strategic partnership allows CIP to offer industry leading quantum-safe, crypto agile and hybrid certificate offerings from ISARA. This ground-breaking technology enables systems to be quantum safe without disruption of operations while maintaining the availability and integrity of existing security systems.

The new agile certificates will be recognisable by CIPs Whitethorn Platform a digital certificate, key discovery, and lifecycle management solution that provides unrivalled discovery, management and automation.

Andy Jenkinson, Group CEO CIP, said: Quantum computing is the next major development within the global technology area. The biggest challenge to cyber security is the lack of understanding of cryptography and PKI in todays classical computing, let alone in a post-quantum world. The partnership with ISARA will enable all our clients to realise full discovery, management and automation of their crypto-agile PKI.

Scott Totzke, CEO & Co-founder of ISARA, said: We are excited to partner with CIP to ensure their clients migration to quantum-safe cryptography starts with integrating crypto-agility, an essential first step towards cryptographic resilience and long-term security. This is some welcome good news in these turbulent times.

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CIP partners with ISARA to offer crypto-agile technology to complement innovative Whitethorn platform - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source

Science of Star Trek – The UCSB Current

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In the most recent episode of his YouTube series Science vs. Cinema, UC Santa Barbara physicist Andy Howell takes on Star Trek: Picard, exploring how the CBS offerings presentation of supernovae and quantum computing stack up against real world science.

For Howell, the series that reviews the scientific accuracy and portrayal of scientists in Hollywoods top sci-fi films is as much an excuse to dive into exciting scientific concepts and cutting edge research.

Science fiction writers are fond of grappling with deep philosophical questions, he said. I was really excited to see that UCSB researchers were thinking about some of the same things in a more grounded way.

For the Star Trek episode, Howell spoke with series creators Alex Kurtzman and Michael Chabon, as well as a number of cast members, including Patrick Stewart. Joining him to discuss quantum science and consciousness were John Martinis a quantum expert at UC Santa Barbara and chief scientist of the Google quantum computing hardware group and fellow UCSB Physics professor Matthew Fisher. Fishers group is studying whether quantum mechanics plays a role in the brain, a topic taken up in the new Star Trek series.

Howell also talked supernovae and viticulture with friend and colleague Brian Schmidt, vice- chancellor of the Australian National University. Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping to discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

"We started Science vs. Cinema to use movies as a jumping-off point to talk science Howell said. Star Trek Picard seemed like the perfect fit. Star Trek has a huge cultural impact and was even one of the things that made me want to study astronomy.

Previous episodes of Science vs. Cinema have separated fact from fiction in films such as Star Wars, The Current War, Ad Astra, Arrival and The Martian. The success of prior episodes enabled Howell to get early access to the show and interview the cast and crew.

"What most people think about scientific subjects probably isn't what they learned in a university class, but what they saw in a movie, Howell remarked. That makes movies an ideal springboard for introducing scientific concepts. And while I can only reach dozens of students at a time in a classroom, I can reach millions on TV or the internet.

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Science of Star Trek - The UCSB Current

Pentagon wants commercial, space-based quantum sensors within 2 years – The Sociable

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The Pentagons Defense Innovation Unit is looking to the private sector to develop space-based quantum sensing prototypes within two years the kind of sensors that could contribute to a space-based quantum internet.

Highlights:

Quantum technologies will render all previously existing stealth, encryption, and communications technologies obsolete, so naturally the Pentagon wants to develop quantum technologies as a matter of national security.

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has opened a solicitation to evaluate commercial solutions that utilize demonstrable quantum technology to achieve significant performance improvements for aerospace and other novel applications to include, but not limited to, inertial sensing, timing and gravimetry.

The DIU wants a prototype within 24 months that consists of acompact, high-performance quantum sensor for precision inertial measurement in deep space and other GPS-denied environments.

There are a lot of technical concepts that go into this technology, but for simplicitys sake, the DIU is looking for quantum sensing technology that can perform accurate measurements by overcoming the effects of gravity on time and space.

While the DIU did not go into any specifics about what the quantum sensing technology would actually be used for, we may gleam some ideas from what the military has already been researching specifically improved communications, precision navigation, and precision timing.

For example, the Air Force Research Laboratory has been investigating a variety of quantum-based sensors to create secure, jam-resistant alternatives to GPS, according to National Defense Magazine.

And because quantum sensors can detect radar signatures and beyond, they may be used by the military tobypass just about any stealth technology.

Other potential applications could include Earth defense mechanisms that could detect, prevent, or respond to missile attacks, asteroids, and comets, as well as keeping track of satellites and space debris that whiz around Earths orbit.

Additionally, a network of quantum technologies could offer the military security, sensing and timekeeping capabilities not possible with traditional networking approaches, according to the US Army Research Laboratory.

If we take the idea of quantum sensors a step further and into the realm of quantum sensing networks, then we are looking at one component of a quantum internet, when combined with quantum computing.

A quantum internet will be the platform of a quantum ecosystem, where computers, networks, and sensors exchange information in a fundamentally new manner where sensing, communication, and computing literally work together as one entity, Argonne Laboratory senior scientistDavid Awschalom told How Stuff Works.

The notion of a space-based quantum internet using satellite constellations is becoming even more enticing, as evidenced in the joint research paper, Spooky Action at a Global Distance Resource-Rate Analysis of a Space-Based Entanglement-Distribution Network for the Quantum Internet.

According to the scientists, Recent experimental breakthroughs in satellite quantum communications have opened up the possibility of creating a global quantum internet using satellite links, and, This approach appears to be particularly viable in the near term.

The paper seems to describe quantum technologies that are nearly identical to the ones the DIU is looking to build.

Aquantum internet would allow for the execution of other quantum-information-processing tasks, such as quantum teleportation, quantum clock synchronization, distributed quantum computation, and distributedquantum metrology and sensing, it reads.

SpaceX is already building a space-based internet through its Starlink program. Starlink looks to have 12,000 satellites orbiting the earth in a constellation that will beam high-speed internet to even the most remote parts of the planet.

The company led by Elon Musk has already launched some 360 satellites as part of the Starlink constellation.

All the news reports say that Starlink will provide either high-speed or broadband internet, and there are no mentions of SpaceX building a quantum internet, but the idea is an intriguing one.

SpaceX is already working with the Pentagon, the Air Force, NASA, and other government and defense entities.

In 2018, SpaceX won a $28.7 million fixed-price contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory for experiments in data connectivity involving ground sites, aircraft and space assets a project that could give a boost to the companys Starlink broadband satellite service, according to GeekWire.

Lets recap:

By the looks of it, the DIUs space-based quantum sensing prototypes could very well be components of a space-based quantum internet.

However, there has been no announcement from SpaceX saying that Starlink will be beaming down a quantum internet.

At any rate, well soon be looking at high-speed, broadband internet from above in the near future, quantum or otherwise.

Quantum computing: collaboration with the multiverse?

US Energy Dept lays foundation for quantum internet, funds $625M to establish quantum research centers over 5 years

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Pentagon wants commercial, space-based quantum sensors within 2 years - The Sociable

The Government Has a Lot More Emergency Powers Than Libertarians Like, but It Still Can’t Control Everything – Cato Institute

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Dont these orders go beyond the Commerce Clause, infringe the Privileges or Immunities Clause, or violate one of the other constitutional provisions Im constantly banging on about? Surely Icant approve such extreme impositions on economic liberty, the right to travel, and just the basic freedom to go about your daily life as you choose so long as you dont get in the way of others freedom to do the same?

Well, thats the rub. As Iexplained during Catos online forum on Coronavirus and the Constitution, in apandemic when we dont know whos infected and infections are often asymptomatic, these sorts of restrictions end up maximizing freedom. The traditional libertarian principle that one has aright to swing ones fists, but that right ends at the tip of someone elses nose, means government can restrict our movements and activities, because were all fistswingers now.

This isnt like seatbelt mandates or soda restrictions, where the government regulates your behavior for our own good, becausesetting aside the issue of publicly borne health care coststhe only person you hurt by not wearing aseatbelt or drinking too much sugar is yourself. With communicable diseases, you violate others rights just by being around them.

The federal government is one of enumerated and thus limited powersat least in theory, if observed largely in the breach since the New Dealbut states have police powers to govern for the public health, safety, welfare, and morals (the last one having fallen away in recent decades). Accordingly, in light of the best epidemiological data we have, state and local executives ordered shut downs to prevent people from being around too many other people and thus spreading the disease.

Interestingly, despite the infamous pictures of springbreakers and St. Patricks Day revelers, these government actions were lagging indicators. Restaurant traffic and airline travel fell off acliff before any official action. Airports are still open, even though the president has total authority to shut them down, as George W. Bush did on 9/11.

People began socialdistancing and wearing masks without any edicts. Sports leagues canceled their seasons without so much as a dont play ball from state umpires.

Not being satisfied with this largescale recognition of the threat we face and compliance with commonsense rules for the new normal, however, governors and mayors have begun to overreach. Although Ihad been telling reporters that nobody was going to get arrested for reading in the park or enjoying wildlife with her family, police were indeed telling people to move along if they were in apublic space, even if they were nowhere near anybody else.

When we got questions at that Cato forum about restrictions on the sale of nonessential products or prohibitions on fishinga right going back to Magna Carta!I thought these were farfetched hypotheticals, but it turns out they were all too real.

Then came the bans on parking at achurch and staying in your car to hear asermon, ahead of Easter Sunday, no less, which led toone of the best district court opinionsIve read in along time, reversing such an order in Louisville. (Full disclosure: Judge Justin Walker is afriend, and Im advising the Mississippi Justice Institute on one of these cases in Greenville, Miss.)

Look, this isnt about religious liberty, or any other constitutional right in particular. Assuming that socialdistancing is required to flatten the curve and fight COVID-19, such rules are fine so long as theyre applied equally everywhere, whether to yoga studios or churches, hackathons or street protests.

But theyre not fine when theyre arbitrarily targeted at some businesses and not others, as if coronavirus spreads more in gun shops than liquor stores. Theyre also not fine when they have nothing to do with socialdistancing, as with the fatwas against drivein liturgy or closing only aisles three and five of abigbox store. Or when tennis courts are closed even if the players wear allwhite masks and promise not to both go to the net at the same time. Or that video of the cop chasing that poor guy going for arun on the beach by his lonesome.

These ridiculous examples of petty tyranny led to mymost viral tweet ever: Angered by citations for being in park with nuclear family, or in car at church, or running on the beach. Or nonessential goods roped off in stores. These things have nothing to do with fighting the virus and everything to do with powerhungry politicians and law enforcement.

Just because significant restrictions on our daytoday lives are warranted doesnt mean its afreeforall for government coercion. To borrow alegal standard from adifferent context, the rules have to be congruent and proportional to the harm being addressed. As amatter of law, judges will give executives awide berth to deal with acrisis, but their enforcement measures still have to pass the constitutional smell test.

More fundamentally, any regulations that dont make common sense, that arent seen as reasonable by most people, are simply not going to be taken as legitimate, and they wont be followed. The American people will decide what restrictions are reasonable, and for how long. Just like they decided when to shut down, they have total authority to decide when to reopen.

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The Government Has a Lot More Emergency Powers Than Libertarians Like, but It Still Can't Control Everything - Cato Institute

Libertarian Illinois Policy Institute wants a timeline for reopening businesses thats just not possible – Chicago Sun-Times

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The libertarian-leaning Illinois Policy Institute has tried reaching out more to Democratic legislators since Gov. Bruce Rauner lost his reelection bid. Rauner at one point was so close to the group that he fired several of his longtime staffers and replaced some of them with IPI staff, which did not work out well, to say the least.

The organizations political wing has contributed money to more than a few legislative Democrats campaign funds in recent months, and they were able to introduce some bipartisan legislation last year and this year although the spring session is now mostly a bust because, as I write this, the General Assembly has no set plans to return amid the pandemic.

An IPI staffer even posed for a picture with Gov. J.B. Pritzker and posted it on Twitter last year. Looking forward to working with his administration, the caption read. Its been on a serious mission to change its image.

If you go to its website, youll see the IPI has devoted an entire section to empathetic interviews with small business owners about how theyre faring during the pandemic. Theyre well-written, including one featuring the owner of a Chicago restaurant.

In general, everyone is standing, waiting in the wings until were allowed to open back up regularly, which obviously no one knows when thats going to be yet, the owner was quoted as saying.

The organization claimed this week in a private Facebook group it runs that it wants the state to begin planning to reopen the economy and give people visibility on what that might look like.

But then it tipped its hand in the comment section.

As an owner of 2 small businesses, one essential (radon mitigation), one a restaurant ... nothing I can say will express the absolute disdain I have for this man or his policies, a commenter complained about Pritzker.

A Policy Institute staffer replied to her comment asking if she would be open to speaking to a member of the IPI team. Weve been doing our best to give our community a voice on our site and pressure JB to reopen the states economy.

Another commenter predicted that Pritzker and his boss lori lightfoot will kill Illinois. An IPI staffer replied with the same request to speak with her about her story. Weve been featuring small business owners on our site to try to pressure the governor to reopen the states economy.

The IPIs privately admitted agenda did not go over well with the governors press secretary, as you might imagine. She let it fly.

COVID-19 has left a trail of devastation across the globe. There is no country, no city, no community that is immune, wrote Jordan Abudayyeh. Every day, we grieve with the families who have lost loved ones in this battle. And we yearn for the time when life can return to normal.

We usually ignore the Illinois Policy Institutes institutionalized and reflexive partisanship, but in this time of crisis, we cannot afford to let this dangerous ideology go unanswered. We all want the economy to reopen no one more than the Governor, Abudayyeh continued. But to suggest that should happen before the science says it is safe is not only foolish, its dangerous.

In Illinois, more than 500 people have succumbed to the virus and more than 16,000 people have been sickened. Those numbers climb every single day and because of that fact, an overwhelming majority of Illinoisans are working together to flatten the curve. The IPI has lobbied for some atrocious policies in the past, but this time their efforts could mean the difference between life and death for many Illinoisans. They need to stop lying to people about whats at stake in this crisis and own up to the public responsibility we all have to be committed to a truthful and honest conversation about our collective public health.

Yikes.

A spokesperson for the IPI said they want the governor to establish a process and timeline to safely and effectively open the economy, so we are not only protecting lives but also safeguarding livelihoods.

But a timeline simply isnt possible right now because literally nobody can say with certainty when this will all end.

The spokesperson went on to say that the governors refusal to discuss this is causing uncertainty, which is making residents wary.

Wary of what, he didnt say.

We will continue to tell their story, he said. And continuing the pressure, no doubt.

Im thinking there will be no more photo-ops with the governor.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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Libertarian Illinois Policy Institute wants a timeline for reopening businesses thats just not possible - Chicago Sun-Times

Idahos stay-at-home order has sparked a rebellion, and outraged activists are urging people to disobey coronavirus restrictions – Business Insider

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captionA woman holds a sign during a protest over concerns related to coronavirus disease (COVID-19), after attending an Easter Sunday church service organized by libertarian activist Ammon Bundy, at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, Idaho, on April 12, 2020.sourceReuters/Jim Urquhart

Idahos coronavirus-related restrictions are under attack throughout the state as residents organize public gatherings and rallies demand businesses reopen.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little issued a stay-at-home order on March 25, banning all nonessential gatherings and shuttering all nonessential businesses. He recently extended the order until the end of April, angering some who have argued that the rules violate their constitutional rights.

You have to disobey, urged Wayne Hoffman, the president of the libertarian Idaho Freedom Foundation, in a Facebook Live broadcast on Wednesday. You have to do whats best for your business, you have to do whats best for your employees and your customers. You have to do whats best for your livelihoods and your families.

He continued: There are more of us than there are of them.

The restrictions have also sparked the ire of Ammon Bundy, the famed rancher and libertarian activist who led the armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2016.

Bundy, who lives in Idaho, has organized a number of gatherings, including an Easter service that drew what appeared to be dozens of residents in a venue for a church service.

Photos showed the attendees sitting close together on fold-up chairs, none of whom wore masks or kept a distance of six feet, as public-health experts have recommended.

Bundy has argued to media and in Facebook videos that governments around the world are using the coronavirus as an excuse to destroy the agency of man.

I want the virus now, Bundy said, according to The New York Times.

The state has so far reported more than 1,400 cases of the coronavirus and 39 deaths from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins tally.

One Idaho lawmaker, State Rep. Heather Scott, urged residents to push back against the states stay-at-home order and exercise their constitutional rights to peacefully assemble.

In a letter titled The virus that tried to kill the Constitution, Scott warned that citizens were facing increasing restrictions of civil liberties during a climate of relentless fear mongering and media hysteria.

Some members of law enforcement, too, have questioned Littles order. Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler released an open letter urging Little to change course.

In the spirit of liberty and the Constitution, you can request those that are sick to stay home, but, at the same time, you must release the rest of us to go on with our normal business, he wrote. I do not believe that suspending the Constitution was wise, because COVID-19 is nothing like the Plague. We were misled by some Public Health Officials, and now it is time to reinstate our Constitution.

Idaho medical experts have reacted to the backlash with distress, saying the stay-at-home order was meant to slow the virus transmission and thereby protect vulnerable residents and reduce the pressure on hospitals.

Dont take legal advice from a doctor, Dr. Benjamin Good of Bonner General Health told The New York Times. And dont take medical advice from a sheriff.

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Idahos stay-at-home order has sparked a rebellion, and outraged activists are urging people to disobey coronavirus restrictions - Business Insider

Is there any alternative medicine for the Coronavirus? – NewsPatrolling

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Coronaviruses belong to an enormous family of viruses that are mainly found in different animal species that include the cattle, bats, and camels as well. A unique strain of the Coronavirus has been identified that is resulting in severe respiratory illness in human beings. This strain was first located in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization addressed the virus, causing disease as COVID-19 on 11th of February, 2020.

Many people have been seeking alternative methods of curing COVID-19 or adapting preventive measures for the same. Some of these remedies involve the drinking of herbal teas and practising herbal treatments. However, no specific scientific proof has been gathered to support this particular remedies helping with Coronavirus treatment. As a matter of fact, some of these so-called remedies going viral might not be safe for consumption.

Read on this article to find out if there are any alternative medicines discovered or not.

Some preventive measures to take:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has put up with some of the preventive measures that you can try to remain at least safe from being affected by the disease.

Seeking for alternative medicines:

China has started experimenting on a variety of drugs and chemicals to come up with an alternative to treat the disease. Reports about the database prepared by the biomedical students in China have listed a few investigations among various other controlled therapies, traditional medicines, and experimental procedures. All of these treatments are varying in the amount of evidence to prove their efficacy.

The two HIV drugs that block the enzymes, which the viruses require to replicate have managed to reduce the levels of coronaviruses resulting in SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).

A biotechnology company Gilead located in the Foster City of California has managed to come up with some success stories by testing drugs treating coronaviruses in animals. In January, there were reports released stating that a person affected by COVID-19 in the United States has managed to survive after being treated with Remdesivir (the probable alternative medicine).

This February, China has launched placebo-controlled trails on 760 patients affected with Coronavirus by using Remdesivir. The studies are supposed to give out the final results by April and Remdesivir is more likely to be accepted as the alternative drug.

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Is there any alternative medicine for the Coronavirus? - NewsPatrolling

Alternative medicine teams join battle against corona – Daily Pioneer

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The teams of alternative systems of medicine have joined the battle of defeating the corona virus. They are playing important role in the identified areas of the districts.

It is worth noticing here that following the instructions of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Ayurvedic doctors are distributing preventive and immunity boosting medicines to the common people. Homoeopathy medicines are also being given in some areas.

The people have showered praise on the team members approaching them. They have appreciated the initiative of providing preventive Ayurvedic medicine.

In Bhopal, Khushi Lal Sharma Government Ayurveda Hospital's Medical Officer along with the subordinate staff are going to the identified areas and advising people to save themselves from the corona virus.

It is noteworthy that the Chief Minister had also given instructions to give AYUSH medicines. Medicines have been distributed to millions of people in many districts.

Mainly people are being given trikatu churna and samsamani vati. It is advisable to have 5 gms of Trikatu Churna, Basil 3 to 5 leaves, one liter of water after boiling it and reduce to half and tske sip.

It is also recommended to take 2 tablets in morning, and two in the evening. These medicines will boost immunity. Khushi Lal Sharma Government Ayurveda Hospital Bhopal is providing relief to the residents in Kolar region. Ayurveda Medical Officer Dr Prabin Raghuvanshi informs that 15 teams of Khushi Lal Sharma Government Ayurveda Hospital Bhopal are distributing Ayurvedic medicines free of cost in identified areas.

Each team consists of seven members, who are going door-to-door explaining them to use the medicines. The Ayurveda and Homoepathy medical teams are giving the message to people to stay alert and healthy.

Residents of the Kolar region greeted them by clapping. The efforts of administration and enthusiastic public support will help control the spread of Corona virus.

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Alternative medicine teams join battle against corona - Daily Pioneer

War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses – TIME

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When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself a wartime president, Trump likened the countrys COVID-19 response to the U.S.s mobilization during World War II. Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation, Trump insisted.

This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring war on any conceivable enemy whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.

War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war and the beginning of what is ironically known as the postwar period the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the presidents behalf.

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Drafted and circulated in 1950, the councils NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake and argued that Americans must be willing to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens and indefinitely so.

In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. [f]reed from major challengers remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of human rights.

It is therefore no surprise that Americans have long understood challenges far from the battlefield (such as COVID-19) through the lens of war. Beyond the actual experience of war as combat, as historian Michael Sherry has shown, the United States obsession with war has meant imagining many things in terms of it from President Lyndon B. Johnson depicting incidents of urban unrest as a war within our own boundaries to President Richard Nixon declaring a war on cancer in 1971 (as the Vietnam War raged), from LBJs War on Poverty to Pat Buchanans war for the soul of America (i.e., the culture wars) to the interlocking wars on crime and drugs. The band Wilco lamented this war fetish in their 2001 song War on War, in which frontman Jeff Tweedy sings that, in such a conflict, Youre gonna lose.

Americans know war, theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes, and when we are frightened ironically war makes us feel safe. Michael Sherry concurs building on the work of the late historian Marilyn B. Young when he calls the United States a nation deeply wedded to and defined by war, though maddeningly reluctant to admit it.

Still, real war remains distant and abstract for the overwhelming majority of Americans. As scholar Andrew Bacevich indicated in 2011, approximately half of 1 percent of our citizens bear the burden of service and sacrifice meaning 99.5% of Americans are not personally attached to the military or the national security state. The physical and emotional distance separating most Americans from the battlefield allows them to glorify war while knowing nothing of its unspeakable horrors or the sacrifice it entails.

War is destructive, violent and annihilative. But the nations commitment to war (both as reality and metaphor) has a tendency to take other policy approaches off the table. What has been called the troopification of everything generates financial and political support for any activity conducted under the umbrella of war. And so Americas over-reliance on the blunt, imprecise instrument of war hinders its ability to respond to myriad other problems, from public-health emergencies to chronic issues such as hunger. The infrastructure needed to address such concerns doesnt mesh well with war. Its use as a rhetorical and framing device within our present crisis therefore represents a dismal failure of imagination.

Most damningly, perhaps, Americas recent wars whether directed at targets physical, abstract, domestic or foreign have mostly failed. The United States excels at war, Sherry observes, though no longer at winning it. In just the past 50 years or so, the U.S. has failed to win the War in Vietnam, the war on cancer (despite many notable achievements in research and treatment), the War on Poverty (although LBJs campaign slashed poverty rates), the war on crime (which did much to terrorize and imprison poor and working-class black and brown people but little to actually curtail crime), the war on drugs (given the persistent reality of drug addiction) and the seemingly endless global war on terror.

This track record does not bode well for the nations war against COVID-19. We need an efficient, coherent public-health response coordinated by a competent federal government. What we dont need is another war.

Paul M. Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses - TIME

The War on Drugs Victimized a Generation. Now We Have to Give Them a Future. – Jacobin magazine

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Unfortunately, Mexico is a country of discrimination, even among Mexicans themselves. I was at the Congress when they were discussing the Amnesty Bill. [The Amnesty Bill, passed by the House of Deputies in December 2019, would provide an amnesty to nonviolent offenders, including woman who had abortions or the doctors who performed them, political prisoners, indigenous people who did not receive due process in their language, and in cases of minor theft without battery. Its passage is pending in the Senate.] I tried to explain that someone who has lived comfortably, who had his parents, who had money, and then one day goes out and kills someone is a different case to someone whose environment is violent, and who has to survive. You cant judge them the same.

And thats where the amnesty comes in. What are we going to leave to the younger generations? I decided to get out of the gang world because I didnt want my children to inherit my problems. We need to get rid of the stigma that a person with tattoos or a shaved head is bad, that the dark-skinned person doesnt deserve to sit next to me because Im white.

Look: there is a crisis of power. I have the power to kill someone because I want to, and I do it. There is a crisis of impunity. You see my cell phone; its worth $25,000 pesos and you decide to steal it because you know it wont cost you that much. Why?

Because even if the police catch me, they wont respect the chain of custody. Then theyll take me to the public prosecutor who wont do their job right, and then the judge will see that they didnt follow due process and let me go, even though Im guilty. But what if the police do their job, the prosecutor does theirs, the judge does theirs, and what you thought was going to be cheap winds up costing you a lot.

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The War on Drugs Victimized a Generation. Now We Have to Give Them a Future. - Jacobin magazine

The war on the virus: Scientists race to develop tests, drugs to stop coronavirus in its tracks – Palo Alto Online

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Lab workers unload filled vials of remdesivir, a drug produced by Gilead Sciences Inc. that scientists from various institutions across the globe are using in test trials as they look at ways to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Photo courtesy of Gilead.

Three weeks into a virus-induced shutdown, as downtown streets remain silent and the economy finds itself teetering on the brink of a steep and sudden recession, a research boom is sweeping through local universities, hospitals and commercial labs. For scientists working nonstop behind the scenes, the race is on to defeat a deadly virus that has brought the whole world to its knees.

Their war has many fronts, but chief among them are testing and treatment, which are seeing a flurry of activity. Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have ramped up their testing capacity and launched clinical trials at a furious pace. Since the coronavirus pandemic took off, Stanford's epidemiologists have been working with Santa Clara County health officials to model the pandemic's trajectory; its virologists have developed various ways to test for virus; and its medical researchers are now launching clinical trials for promising drugs that have proved effective for fighting Ebola, the flu and Hepatitis D.

Researchers also are collaborating with counterparts in other universities as well as public agencies and private labs to share and scale their breakthroughs.

Private companies also have stepped up, with commercial labs developing tests and distributing drugs that they believe may become critical weapons in the war against COVID-19 and with manufacturers joining the effort to create personal protective equipment, such as masks and face shields, for health care workers.

Thus far in the battle, public health strategies have led the charge, deploying the tactic of social distancing. On Tuesday, Santa Clara County residents received a glimmer of hope: Staying home to help "flatten the curve" appears to be working, even though the number of COVID-19 cases is still expected to climb between now and May 1, Dr. Sara Cody, the county's health official, told the county Board of Supervisors during her April 7 update.

Yet the hopeful news came with another message: Numerous conditions have to be met before officials can relax their social-distancing orders.

The county will need to get to a point where widespread testing for COVID-19 is available and hospitals can safely and effectively treat everyone living in the county.

"We have to at least be able to test everyone who has symptoms," Cody said. "And we also have to have enough testing capacity so that we can test where we think there is some risk of accelerated transmission or there is risk in a particular community. So we've got to have testing capacity."

Testing as defense

While Cody said she is optimistic about the latest data on COVID-19 cases, county, state and federal officials have consistently pointed to testing as a glaring weakness in the collective response to coronavirus. As of Thursday, only 13,360 people in Santa Clara County have been tested for COVID-19, county data show, with 1,442 testing positive a rate of 10.79%. It takes an average of 2.27 days to get a test result, a problem that Dr. Karen Smith of Santa Clara Public Health Department attributed Tuesday to delays at just about every step of the testing process.

Testing, she said, is limited by a shortage of swabs that are used to take samples and by the worldwide shortage of reagent, a key chemical for sample analysis.

That said, where the government has lagged, Stanford has been able to rev up its testing capacity. One of the nation's first coronavirus tests came from Benjamin Pinsky, associate professor of pathology and of infectious diseases at Stanford School of Medicine who has been developing a COVID-19 test since late January and whose team was validating and confirming results throughout February, according to Stanford.

In early March, Stanford's Clinical Virology Laboratory, of which Pinsky is medical director, was capable of conducting 1,000 daily tests, with a turnaround time for results between 36 and 48 hours, according to the university. Now, the lab can now perform 2,000 tests daily, Pinsky told this news organization in an email, and the turnaround time has been cut down to 24 hours.

Pinsky said the team has been able to optimize its workflow and boost production over the past month by validating multiple additional extraction instruments and thermal cyclers machines that amplify DNA segments using a copying process called polymerase chain reaction.

UCSF also has boosted its testing capacity by opening a new lab that can process more than 2,000 samples per day and return results in 24 hours. In early March, when UCSF began testing for COVID-19, it had a capacity to test only 60 to 100 tests daily, according to the university.

On Tuesday, UCSF Health President and CEO Mark R. Laret and UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood co-wrote in a letter that it will allow public health officials from the nine Bay Area counties, including San Mateo and Santa Clara, to submit their samples to UCSF for free analysis.

While virology labs at Stanford and UCSF are using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to zoom in on the virus' DNA segments, a research team headed by Eran Bendavid, associate professor of medicine at Stanford, is looking at blood samples for evidence. On April 3 and 4, the team took 2,500 blood samples from volunteers at drive-thru sites in Mountain View, Los Gatos and San Jose. The team used targeted Facebook surveys in an attempt to get a population-representative sample of the county for its experiment.

The goal of the study is to examine the antibodies in the blood sample, a technique known as serology, to gauge the percentage of county residents who are or have been infected with COVID-19. A similar study was concurrently conducted in the Los Angeles area by researchers from University of Southern California.

"We need to understand how widespread the disease actually is," Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who is involved with the project, said on Saturday morning, as the second day trial was kicking off. "To do that, we need to understand how many people are infected. The current test people use to check whether they have the condition the PCR test it just checks whether you currently have the virus in you. It doesn't check whether you had it and recovered. An antibody test does both."

Stanford Health is also using blood samples to test its employees for COVID-19. On April 6, the serologic test that was developed by Stanford Medicine was launched at the university's medical facilities. While the university is currently only testing health care workers, Stanford Health spokesperson Lisa Kim said Stanford hopes to deploy these tests more broadly within the next two months.

"The test will enable us to determine which health care workers might be at low risk for working with COVID-19 patients, as well as understanding disease prevalence in our communities," Kim said.

Going on the offensive

Just as testing has accelerated, so have medical trials of potentially life-saving drugs. At an April 2 virtual town hall put on by medical leaders at Stanford, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado and Dean of Stanford Medicine Dr. Lloyd Minor, both said that the university's early development of the PCR test has increased the university's capacity to stage trials.

"Because we are one of the first to launch our own PCR test and we hope we'll have serologic testing available in the near future as well it gives us the capacity to monitor patients for not only immediate medical care but clinical trials," Maldonado said.

Two of Stanford's trials involve remdesivir, a drug produced by the Foster City-based company Gilead Sciences, Inc. Scientists from various institutions across the globe, including a team at Stanford Hospital, are examining whether remdesivir can prevent the coronavirus from replicating.

"The RNA virus gets into the cells and uses them as little hotels (to replicate)," said Kari Nadeau, co-investigator and professor of pediatric food allergy, immunology and asthma at the School of Medicine.

With the virus proliferating, some COVID-19 patients' immune systems overreact, causing severe symptoms that lead to death. Researchers hope that limiting the virus' replication will prevent the immune system from becoming overly active.

Gilead announced on April 4 that it has produced 1.5 million doses of remdesivir, enough to treat 140,000 patients. It plans to supply the drug at no charge.

Nadeau's trial began enrolling patients on March 30. Stanford is collaborating with 65 other sites worldwide; the aim is to study the drug's effects on 600 patients.

For the trial, Stanford patients will receive an intravenous dose of the medication daily for 10 days. The researchers will see how the patients do over a 15-day period. Nadeau said they expect to see a difference between the control group and those who receive the drug. They hope the drug will result in fewer people needing ventilators and fewer deaths.

Neera Ahuja, the study's principal investigator and division chief of hospital medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, said if the evidence is convincing of the drug's effectiveness, and the side effects and adverse reactions pass federal scrutiny, the FDA approval could come within a month.

"That's unheard of in the non-pandemic world," she said.

Stanford is one of many institutions now looking at remdesivir. Among the National Institutes of Health trials of the drug is one involving patients who are on ventilators; another is studying patients with moderate COVID-19 symptoms. A third will compare the results for moderately ill patients who will be given the drug and for people who only receive standard care.

The studies involve dozens of hospitals throughout California, including the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Stanford Health Care, Kaiser Permanente and the Regional Medical Center in San Jose. Gilead also is involved in studies using remdesivir in China and France.

Stanford is also looking at other drugs, including those that have in the past proved effective in treating other infections. Maldonado said at the April 2 town hall that in addition to its work on remdesivir, Stanford is preparing to move ahead with trials for Lambda, an immunomodulator, and the viral inhibitors Camostat and favipiravir.

"They have been studied in other infections, so we think we can obtain rapid FDA INDs so that we can start doing primarily outpatient trials for these drugs," Maldonado said, referring to "investigational new drug" authorization.

"So if they work in reducing symptoms and perhaps prevent spread by reducing viral shedding from an infected person, then these could be scaled up in the not too distant future. We're hoping those will enroll (patients) pretty quickly."

Prassana Jagganathan, a Stanford infectious disease specialist who is heading the trial on Lambda, said the drug may be able to strengthen the human immune system to better fight COVID-19. Lambda, he said, appears to target cells that are located on the epithelium (outer tissue layer) of respiratory tracts, including areas such as lungs and pharynx. As such it can be particularly suitable for treating patients with COVID-19, which can trigger respiratory failure.

"It's a molecule that we think can actually stimulate and aid antiviral defenses against a multitude of different viruses," Jagganathan said.

While Lambda had not been used to treat respiratory illnesses, another interferon called Alfa had proven effective, he said. The problem with using Alfa to treat COVID-19, Jagganathan said, is that the receptors for Alfa are far more distributed throughout the human body, including in immune cells. Thus, side effects of Alfa include fever or the flu, symptoms that resemble those of COVID-19.

The primary outcome of the randomized clinical trial, which will include 120 participants, is to see how long people are shedding the virus, Jagganathan said.

"We are hypothesizing that the folks who get Lambda will have a shorter duration of virus that we can detect," Jagganathan said.

In addition to drugs, Stanford is experimenting with another promising remedy: the antibodies from patients who have already contracted and recovered from COVID-19. The new experimental therapy program, which Stanford Blood Center announced on April 7, takes blood from the recovered patients, removes the plasma containing the antibodies, and returns the remaining blood components such as red blood cells back to the donor. The antibodies are then given to critically ill COVID-19 patients through a transfusion, the center stated.

The blood center is working with Stanford Medicine in hopes that the antibodies, which are immune proteins that attack pathogens such as viruses, might help lessen the severity of the COVID-19.

Though the use of antibodies to treat COVID-19 patients is in the investigational phase, the technique, also known as passive antibody therapy, dates back as far as the 1890s. And prior outbreaks with other coronaviruses, including the one that caused SARS, showed that neutralizing antibodies were helpful in reducing the effects of the disease.

Likewise, the technique was used in the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza virus pandemic to reduce patients' respiratory viral load, inflammatory reactions and death, researchers Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski wrote in an article published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation on March 13. It also was used in the 2013 West African Ebola epidemic.

Stanford Blood Center will begin collecting the plasma this week and plans to increase collections in the following weeks as it identifies more donors. The donors must be fully recovered and symptom-free for at least 14 days. If they are only symptom-free for 14 to 28 days, they will be asked to retake a COVID-19 test at no cost. The repeat test must be negative to be eligible to donate.

The process takes about one to two hours using standard blood- and plasma-removal methods. The collections take place at the center's Palo Alto headquarters at 3373 Hillview Ave. in Palo Alto, where special care will be taken by a small team in a dedicated room, according to Dr. Suchi Pandey, the blood center's chief medical officer. (Interested donors can visit stanfordbloodcenter.org/covid19plasma and fill out an intake form.)

Getting enough of the antibodies to treat many patients could take time. Pandey said in an email that there's also no known way to cultivate or increase the amount of plasma in a laboratory, so blood centers and hospitals rely on donors.

"The volume of plasma collected from a donor is based on specific donor parameters such as weight. Depending on the volume of plasma collected, the unit may be divided into separate plasma components, which can be used to treat up to three patients," she said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved use of the antibody treatment by hospitals, initially only for critically ill patients.

It will later be used in clinical trials on patients in different stages of the disease, according to the blood center.

Find comprehensive coverage on the Midpeninsula's response to the new coronavirus by Palo Alto Online, the Mountain View Voice and the Almanac here.

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"I would have done it": Filmmaker on indentifying with the "How to Fix a Drug Scandal" perpetrators – Salon

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In "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," a new four-part Netflix docuseries, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents the stories of Massachusetts drug lab chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, and how the discovery of their respective misconduct led to the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history.

Farak had been using the drugs that came through her lab in Amherst, filling out test results while high, while Dookhan had fabricated thousands of test results in her Boston lab, revealing major holes in a neglected legal system designed to streamline the "war on drugs."

Over the last decade, Carr has become something of an expert on the art of true crime. She is a master of dissecting the kinds of stories that seem made for splashy, gossipy rag, pulling at the dominant narratives which are often those easiest to tell and consume, built on familiar tropes and formulas and also, our collective hunger for them.

Carr's documentary, "Thought Crimes: The Case of The Cannibal Cop," dug into the case of Gilberto Valle, an ex-NYPD cop who was convicted of conspiracy to kidnap after his wife found that Valle had spent time detailing plans to kidnap, rape, and cannibalize several women on a number of fetish websites.

In 2017, she released "Mommy Dead and Dearest" about the death of Dee Dee Blanchard at the hands of her daughter Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and Gypsy's boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. Her 2019 documentary "I Love You, Now Die" delved into the death of Conrad Roy, who was prompted via text by his girlfriend, Michelle Carter to kill herself.

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Carr spoke with Salon about the making of "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," how she chooses her documentary subjects, and what it looks like to film with "radical empathy" in mind.

One of the things I really appreciate about your documentaries is that you take stories that are kind of prime for sensational headlines "Thought Crimes," "Mommy Dead and Dearest," "I Love You, Now Die" and you really dig into the people and sometimes policies behind them. How do you determine if a story is one that you want to pursue for a documentary?

This is actually the number onequestion I get asked, because it's very clear in all the work that it's the same person doing it, but they involve different systemic issues. So the easiest way I can explain it is sort of the most straightforward: Is it about a woman? Is there a complicating factor? Are there layers to it which means are there other stories within it? And is it watchable and fun?

And finally, is it going to be hard to get people to watch this?

You know, Sheila Nevins, who I first started making films with, she would talk to me about how this is sort of like television; there's a commercial reality to this in that you don't want to ever make a boring cold open.

You literally have 90 seconds to draw the audience in and they are going to decide if they want to watch it enough just based on that 90 seconds. So like, do your thing.

What drew you to the stories of Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan?

You know as a sober person, and as an "out"sober person, there was something that so resonated with me about the deception of addiction. You're at work surrounded by all of these substances, and the purest substances the best of the best, you know? I don't think this is a very popular thought, but like, I would have done it. I think it's hearkening back to Adam and Eve. Like if the apple is right there and there are no cameras, you're going to take a bite of the apple.

Some people say they would never do that, that it would never cross their minds to do that, and alright, good for you. But I'm somebody that doesn't feel that way.

So I really wanted to have a series that talks about addiction, talks about temptation, talked about mental health, and continued those conversations in a way where it really looks at all aspects of it. But then you also had so many people that really set issues with the people [Farak and Dookhan's findings] convicted. Like, "They had drugs, they're guilty,"and I don't agree with that either. So it's really understanding it all from a human perspective.

And I think that definitely leads into my next question. You've talked before in interviews about how "radical empathy" is a guiding approach in your filmmaking. How did you practice that in creating "How to Fix a Drug Scandal?"

Well, I think that Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak and the prosecutors, to some extent, can all be very one-dimensional villains; and I think with Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, specifically, I tried to see them as individuals versus villains, and really tried to stratify the line between those things.

I think it's often really about sort of caring about these people and knowing, "I am not a narrative filmmaker right now."I am making films about people's realities, what happened and it has to be thetruth, it has to be second source verified, I cannot make any of this stuff up.

So when I sit with the fact that somebody who's going to watch this and have opinions about Sonja, am I going to be able to sleep at night? Did I do the right thing? Did I three-dimensionalize her?

And I think "radical empathy"has been this phrase that I have carried around with me, but I don't give it to everybody. I did not do that with Larry Nasser, for example. I did not believe in terms of "At the Heart of Gold"that I could humanize him because that would be giving the movie over to him. So that's sort of my internal question with myself. If I have radical empathy, should that not lend itself to everybody? I think I'm sort of figuring that out as a filmmaker and as a human being as I go along.

Well, and I think that ties into how this story was structured. I thought it was interesting how, early in the first episode, we established that we were going to be recreating Sonja Farak's grand jury testimony using unsealed court transcripts. How did you come to the decision to structure the series in that way?

God, Ashlie it was rough. So you're sitting there and you have an entire binder full of grand jury transcripts. They have previously been sealed. They are literally the confession, the core part of this story.

And then you're faced up against the fact that people hate recreations and you cannot get the person who said these things to say any of these things. So my producing partner Will Cohen said, "You can do transcript-on-screen, you can do animation, you can do an actor."At one point, I really wanted Edie Falco to read it because she's out about recovery, and I was like, "That's a great idea."But then it was like, "No, that's not going to work that will be very slotted in."

So I was really having to push myself as a director and be like, "Okay, I need to make these transcripts come alive and the best way to do that is to recreate it, and if I'm going to do that, I'm going to really try to work as seamlessly as possible as getting that inside the narrative without being jarring."

And I remember I was sitting with my family and I was showing them "How to Fix a Drug Scandal,"and they were like, "Wow, it's really crazy that the woman would reenact that,"and my first thought was, "Were they too similar looking?"

But I had wanted it to be sort of seamless; and according to Twitter, according to critics, it's working. It's what you need to get through that story, and I have no apologies for it.

Right, well, and Sonja and Annie's convictions ultimately led to the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history, which is absolutely staggering. What was it personally like investigating a story that impacted so many people?

It's interesting because as a filmmaker, I knew that thousands of people were impacted by it, and I thought that I would have my pick of who I could talk to; and what I recognized was the opposite. People that had prior drug convictions were incredibly distrustful of the system. Sometimes they would get on the phone, sometimes they would not, and a bunch of times we just ran into this brick wall of them saying, "I just can't do it. I don't trust that this will do anything for me."Stepping away from the filmmaker perspective, it's incredible to see what hell two chemists had wrought.

And to me, it was also really about examining post-release, like when you get out of jail what happens? When you're trying to get your convictions lifted because there's so much ripple effect. Can you apply for food stamps? Can you apply for affordable housing? Can you vote? What does your life look like then? And I think it was about showing all of these things that are sometimes really hard to get audience members to care a ton about.

But inside the show, you can really see it through Rolando Penate and Rafael Rodriguez.

"How to Fix a Drug Scandal" is now streaming on Netflix.

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"I would have done it": Filmmaker on indentifying with the "How to Fix a Drug Scandal" perpetrators - Salon

Author Don Winslow: Trump’s administration feels like it’s "manifested itself" as the coronavirus – Salon

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Don Winslow is one of America's most widely read and acclaimed crimewriters. His work has been adapted for major Hollywood movies and TV series.

In his bestselling books "The Cartel" (2015), "The Force" (2017), and "The Border" (2019), Winslow has taken the mystery, action, grittiness, moral dilemmas, and authenticity that typifies the best of crime fiction as a genre and combined it with epic storytelling and complex characters against the backdrop of America's failed war on drugs.

Winslow's new book "Broken" is a collection of six short novels focusingon the tragedies and triumphs, and day-to-day lives of people cops, bounty hunters, drug addicts, drug dealers, detectives, their loved ones, friends, and community who are criminals, those trying to stop them, and the human rubble left along America's "criminal highway."

Winslow is also a very outspoken truth-teller about the criminality, cruelty and inhumanity of Donald Trump and his regime.

In theconversation below, Winslow explains how Donald Trump embodies everything wrong with American masculinityand shares his observation thatthe coronavirus pandemic is a perfect metaphor for the pain and harm being caused to the American people and the world by Trump and his movement.

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Winslow also reflects on the obligations of the artist in a time of crisis and why he has chosen to be so vocal about Trump and his regime's many crimes against human decency and democracy.

You can also listen to my conversation with Don Winslowon my podcast "The Truth Report"or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Could you have imagined all that has happened with Donald Trump being president? If it was fiction no reasonable person wouldbelieve it.

No, you can't make this up. It's the problem with writing fiction right now. Every day you get up, and the headlines have outpaced anything you could reasonably imagine. It's discouraging. To me the coronavirus feels like the physical manifestation of some sort of metaphysical infection that we have had during the last three years at least with Donald Trump and this situation. Now Trump and all that has come from him feels almost feels like it's finally physically manifestedin the form of the virus. Now we have to see how we are all going to get through this intact.

America issick society. The sickness is so omnipresentthat too many people have become used to it as being "normal."Your description of the coronavirus as being both physical and metaphysical is such a perfect encapsulation of the Age of Trump.

I'm really beginning to come to that conclusion. It feels like in a weird way that we must get through the coronavirus in order to get past it and what it represents. It is all like the fever breaking and you go through the sweats and the shakes and the bones hurting and all that comes with getting through the illness.

And there is of course the surreal aspect of it all, with Trump's religious leaders telling people to lick the floors of churches to prove that the virus does not exist, or still telling the congregation to come to church and then they inevitably get sick from the coronavirus. Trump leads a cult. It is all a manifestation of how sick American society really is.

The first thing I do in the mornings is I usually look at five or six newspapers online. For the last few days, I almost haven't wanted to. I almost have to force myself to follow my routine. Each day's headlines are always worse than yesterday's. And then we read this ridiculous stuff about peoplelicking the floors of churches and other madness, and then one has to ask themselves, "Is this who we are as a people? As Americans? What is going on?"

In terms of a narrative and the traditional Western storytelling form, there is no climax with the Age of Trump. There is no end, just one horrible thing after another without pause. One must wonder what that lack of closure is doing to the emotional and intellectual lives of the American people.

In my trilogy about America's drug wars I intentionally abandoned the three-act structure in exchange for a five-act structure, which is the classic structure of tragedy. That is what this moment feels like to me. It is a tragedy.

A person cannot continue to support Donald Trump and still be an introspective and decent human being. To support Donald Trump is to abandon being a human being who actually thinks deeply about right and wrong. To support Donald Trump is to be a party to and support all the horrible and cruel things he does.

I don't want to just recite the whole "Greatest Generation" trope about World War II but I live in a very rural area, and it's mostly Republicans. I'm the Democrat who gets sent out to talk to my Republican neighbors when a school bond issue or some related matter comes up.

For some reason they like me. I can tell them, "Hey, we need to get these school bonds funded." They respect me, and we can work together. I have never had an issue with the 70- and 80-year-olds. They are rock-ribbed, conservative ranchers who wear cowboy hats and boots. They get it. If I go to them and I say, "Hey, we need this.I need you to vote this way because the kids need this for their educations," then they are on board. It is the 50- and 60-year-olds who are not supportive. Their response is, "Yeah, if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for them." I tell them, "That's funny because your own dad doesn't think so."

Would you even be able to properly write Donald Trump as a character in one of your books?

I don't think so. But he appears in another form in a book of mine called "The Border."But really it is impossible to write a parody of a parody. It just can't be done. Here's this guy Donald Trump in the midst of this coronavirus crisis with people dying, worried, and scared. What does Trump talk about? How it cost him billions of dollars to become president. What? Gilbert and Sullivan couldn't write lyrics for this guy. So no, I'll take a pass on it. Thank you.

We fiction writers are all struggling right now about how to write anything about and in this era. Our stories for the most part are set right now. We have to describe this moment in this era somehow. It is very difficult to do. As a writer it is easy to find yourself wandering into sarcasm, which means there will be more irony than you might otherwise want.

In America we truly are living a caricature of reality with Trump as president. What type of art do you think this moment is going to produce?

I don't think anyone's going to write anything really good about it this moment for another 10 years. We need perspective on it. I don't think that there's much in terms of novels anyway or films that are going to be done because it is so very immediate. Everything that is happening is simply too close. We also don't know the truth and all the facts about what Donald Trump has done. That reflects a broader problem with contemporary culture:with the 24/7 news cycle everything is so fast. The first story is usually wrong. To fully grapple with Donald Trump and that has happened and is happening needs time. We will also need more time before anything approaching art is made in response to Trump and this moment.

What is the obligation of the artist in a time of crisis?

I do not think that there's a responsibility to speak out. Let me just stick with my own genre. I think it's perfectly okay to write what is just a good suspense novel that entertains people and maybe to a certain extent informs the reader. That is perfectly appropriate. I kind of got into speaking about politics simply because of what I was writing about. I never intended to be a political person and I never intended to be terribly outspoken. Frankly, it goes against my personality. My inclinations tend towards being an introvert.

But in the 22 years of doing my drug trilogy, I felt that if I didn't speak out then I was almost being some type of voyeur on the genuine suffering of the people being hurt by the drug wars.

If I knew, which I do, that the war on drugs is both futile and counterproductive and wrong, then at a certain point it was incumbent on me to step outside of the novel and say it. If I knew that Trump's wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was a cruel travesty in terms of solving the heroin epidemic, the opioid crisis, then at some point I needed to step outside of saying it in a novel and say it in public. That was necessary for me to do but I don't think it is necessarily a responsibility that every artist has.

I was thinking about the border wall and how Trump and Stephen Miller and other people who share their values talk about nonwhite migrants, refugees, and immigrants. Driven by bigotry and racism, itis very easy for some people to disparage and hate people that they never met and don't know.

It frustrates me terribly when I hear people from the Northeast claim to be experts on the border, and they've maybe come down for an hour or two and gotten the standard tour. I live very close to the border. I know the people who live here. They're my friends. They're my neighbors. They went to school with my kid. We're on committees together. They're, for the most part, really fine people. It infuriates me when I hear Donald Trump call them "rapists" and "murderers" and blame them for bringing diseases into the country, including the coronavirus.

I believe that very few people, regardless of their political persuasion, could physically, in person, see somebody suffering or dying in person and not do something to help them. That's on the micro level. On the macro level though, we talk about "illegal immigrants" and "wetbacks" and use other such language and then it is very easy for people to become indifferent and cruel.

I wrote "The Border" to get beneath the headlines in these discussions about immigration. Let's live with an immigrant, albeit through fiction, for a few hundred pages. Let's not talk about the opioid crisis. Let's live with a young woman who is a heroin addict. Let's live with a cop on that beat. Let's try to see what is happening from that individual level. That makes a huge difference. To be able to do that is one of the great opportunities provided by fiction as a genre because we can create a story in our heads and hearts and then bring the reader close that world and feelings.

There are many ways to create that type of connection with the reader. The technique that I choose is to see life through the eyes of the people in my stories. And that does require a certain amount of empathy. It requires sitting down and talking to people. It really requires sitting down and listening to people which is something by the way that we as writers need to remind ourselves to do.

As human beings we share a common humanity. While fortunately I have not suffered in the way that the people in "The Border" or my other books have suffered because of the war on drugs, we do all have common human experiences. We've all suffered loss,we've all suffered fear, we've all felt hope, we've all felt disappointment, and I think that we can relate on those levels.

One of the throughlines in your books are questions of masculinity and violence, and the relationships that men have with one another as fathers, sons, brothers, and comrades. When I see Donald Trump, I don't see a "bad man" ora real tough guy. I see a man pretending to be tough, a wannabe mafia boss.

All the real tough guys I know are either dead or in jail. Very often these Hollywood wannabe tough guys have made a gangster movie andthey think they are the character in real life. They are not. Donald Trump wants to be a badass and clearly is not. Growing up, my intuition is that Donald Trump didn't have any friends or other people to tell him that, "Hey, you're being a jerk." It appears that Donald Trump did not have anyone to help define him as a person and help him learn boundaries and correct behavior.

Trump's wannabe tough guy swagger and machismo bullying and posturing is part of his appeal. Again, it reveals a sickness in American society. Specifically, a crisis in American masculinity.

Much of this is in fact a crisis in masculinity. Donald Trump represents most of what I don't like about men. Donald Trump represents men at our worst with all that macho posturing and other nonsense.

In the research for your books you have encountered some real bad men, legitimately tough and dangerous people. What were they like?

They are each different. They remind me of the famous Tolstoy observation that, "All happy families are the same, and all unhappy families are different."That is true of the real bad guys.

I have sat across a table from multiple murderers who can be as charming as anyone you've ever had dinner with, and yet you look in their eyes and you definitely see it. Others are just cold businesspeople. To them, violence is unfortunate but necessary. Others are very quiet. Those ones are the really serious guys. Some are sociopaths or psychopaths and others are just muted. What you typically don't see though with these types of real bad men is the macho posturing because they have no need to do it.

As the clich goes, is all writing therapeutic?

No. Not for me. That's not the deal that I have with the reader. The reader doesn't care and shouldn't care about Don Winslow's feelings. The purpose of my books is not for me to bare my soul. The purpose of my books is hopefully to tell a really good story in a good way and to maybe give people some information that they didn't have. I also hope that after finishing one of my books that the readers see the world in a different way than they had before.

How did writing become your vocation?

I've always wanted to be a writer. I felt that ways since I was a little kid. I grew up around great storytellers. My dad was a sailor and one of the great raconteurs of all time. He and his buddies had seen the world and could tell such amazing stories.

I used to sit, literally, at their feet hiding under the table. They'd pretend not to know I was there while they're drinking beer and telling great old stories. And the stories got better every year. My mom was a librarian, so I grew up around books. My dad was a tremendous reader, so I always thought thatI wanted to read and write for a living. But at some point, we often experience a crisis of confidence. I remember thinking to myself, that "No.I am not good enough to write for a living. I don't have the talent to do that." I needed to make a living, so I did that by trying to do things that were more interesting as opposed to less interesting and I was lucky enough to get some of those gigs.

I remember this vividly. I was in Africa on a safari photographic safaris to be clear sick with dysentery and a malaria relapse and thinking to myself, "You better do this thing,man.You better just stop thinking about it, stop talking about it and really do it."And I'd heard Joseph Wambaugh say that when he was a Los Angeles homicide cop which he was for many years he really wanted to be a writer. So, he decided to write 10 pages a day. I said to myself, "Well, I can't write 10 but I can do five." I did it every day for the next three years until I had my first book. All the other things I did for money were just ways of evading what I really wanted to do which is to be a professional writer.

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Author Don Winslow: Trump's administration feels like it's "manifested itself" as the coronavirus - Salon