Salon: Judge blocks Trump from giving coronavirus relief for Native American communities to corporations

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration Monday from passing out coronavirus relief funds intended to help Native American communities to certain for-profit corporations owned by Natives. [...]

More than a dozen tribal governments sued the administration, arguing that the decision would dilute funds intended to help areas among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. [...]

The administration argued that ANCs could deliver services to communities like a tribal government, but Mehta said there was no evidence that ANCs were providing public services during the crisis. He also took issue with the government's claim that the Treasury Inspector General could simply take back the money if it was improperly distributed.

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The Guardian: Clean air in Europe during lockdown ‘leads to 11,000 fewer deaths’

Sharp falls in road traffic and industrial emissions have also resulted in 1.3m fewer days of work absence, 6,000 fewer children developing asthma, 1,900 avoided emergency room visits and 600 fewer preterm births, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

While the pandemic continues to take a terrible toll – more than 220,000 deaths worldwide since the start of the year – the authors of the report say the response has offered a glimpse of the cleaner, healthier environment that is possible if the world shifts away from polluting fossil fuel industries.

Compared with the same period last year, levels of nitrogen dioxide have fallen by 40% while tiny particulate matter – known as PM2.5 – is down 10%, which means that people without Covid-19 can breathe easier. These two forms of pollution, which weaken the heart and respiratory system, are together normally responsible for about 470,000 deaths in Europe each year. [...]

Health experts said the findings echoed their experience during the pandemic. “We have seen many fewer patients admitted with exacerbations of asthma and COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] over the last month and there is no doubt that a fall in air pollution is part of the reason,” said Dr LJ Smith, a consultant in respiratory medicine at King’s College hospital in London.

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UnHerd: Did anyone predict coronavirus?

I want to argue two things. One, predictions are amazingly hard. It doesn’t feel that way after the fact — we assume that whatever happened was always obviously going to happen, a phenomenon called hindsight bias. But actually it was not obvious in January or February that the outbreak in Wuhan would end up like this. Some people were saying it would; some that it wouldn’t. Suggesting in hindsight that the Government should have listened to the right people and not the wrong people isn’t much use.

But two, I want to argue that this shouldn’t let the Government off the hook — and, actually, it shouldn’t let the media off the hook, either. Just because you can’t foresee some outcomes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t act to avoid them. [...]

Sure, you might think it’s 90% sure that we’re not going to see a global pandemic. But that means you think there’s a 10% chance that there will be! We don’t play Russian roulette, even though there’s an 83% chance we’d be fine: a small-but-not-that-small chance of a terrible outcome is a serious thing that needs to be taken seriously. [...]

There’s an irony here. Dominic Cummings, the government adviser, is sometimes accused of pushing the Government towards the much-criticised “herd immunity” approach. He’s also linked to the Bay Area tech-rationalist people. If it turns out that the UK Government got it wrong, the problem may have been that Cummings didn’t listen hard enough to the nerds he admires so much.

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UnHerd: Can Emmanuel Macron reinvent himself?

If I had to sum up Macron’s argument in a few words, it would be these: there is no going back to the world before 2020. If we in the West want to preserve those things that we value most — democracy, openness, some level of prosperity, the environment — we must learn the lessons of Covid-19 and do things differently: more manufacturing close to home; more focus on people, less on finance; more national and European sovereignty; better, not less, multilateral or international cooperation. [...]

But all the same, Macron is extraordinary. Compare his willingness, and ability, to wrestle intellectually with the greatest crisis of our lifetimes with Donald Trump’s ignorance, narcissism and bluster; Boris Johnson’s evasive eloquence; and even Angela Merkel’s belief that Germany’s rigid, pre-Covid approach to Europe can be re-assembled Humpty-Dumpty-like without change. [...]

All the Macron achievements of the past three years — and there are many — look likely to be dwarfed or ruined by Covid-19. French unemployment had fallen sharply for the first time in a decade; there are suddenly nine million people on a temporary unemployment scheme (the most generous of its kind in the world with state funding of 80% of net salaries). How many of those jobs will survive the crisis?

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Pindex: Will 60% Get Coronavirus? w Stephen Fry.

Will coronavirus keep resurging until we reach herd immunity, with 60% of the population infected? Or can we hold it back until a vaccine is available?

Vox: How China is ruthlessly exploiting the coronavirus pandemic it helped cause

The Chinese government spent weeks denying and downplaying the severity of its growing coronavirus outbreak that eventually spread to the rest of the world. That obfuscation cost nations crucial time in preparing for and potentially curbing the damage of Covid-19. Some experts Vox spoke with believe President Xi Jinping’s regime should be held accountable for the more than 3 million infections and 200,000 deaths that have taken place worldwide. [...]

China has capitalized on the world’s distraction to claim sovereignty over disputed islands in the South China Sea, intimidate Taiwan, and assert more authority over Hong Kong in an attempt to quash the pro-democracy movement there. [...]

And after the US suspended funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) for allegedly being too cozy with Beijing, the Chinese government pledged millions of dollars in additional support for the organization, giving China even more influence in the global health agency and allowing the country to portray itself as the new champion of multilateralism. [...]

Xi himself has said as much. During a major speech in October 2017, he named specific timelines for his grandiose goals: China would have a “moderately prosperous society in all respects” by 2021; it would be a world leader in technology and military modernization by 2035; and by 2049, Beijing’s decades-long dispute with Taiwan would be resolved.

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FiveThirtyEight: Have States With Lockdown Protests Been Hit Harder By Unemployment?

Overall, according to news reports, there were 28 states over the past week with gatherings of at least 100 people protesting stay-at-home orders and six with at least 1,000 people, out of a possible 42 states (plus Washington, D.C.) with shelter-in-place orders. When looking at what would predict whether a locked-down state would have a protest of at least 100 people, we broke down each state based on the share of the labor force that has filed advance claims since March 15; the state’s number of confirmed coronavirus cases;3 the number of days since the state enacted the lockdown; and the party affiliation of the governor. Here are the averages in each of those categories, depending on whether the state saw a protest:

None of the differences above are statistically significant, but they do show a few interesting trends about which states have protests — and why. On average, states with protests have 28 percent fewer confirmed coronavirus cases than states without protests, which might play into a mindset that places the economic fallout of the crisis ahead of the virus’s health implications. But states with protests have also seen smaller shares of their workforce file advance unemployment claims than their counterparts, which suggests that the protests are not purely economic in nature. (Although 15 percent of the labor force filing for unemployment in a five-week span is certainly not nothing.) Protest states have also been under lockdown for slightly fewer days, on average, than states without protests.

Perhaps most surprising in this breakdown is that a larger share of protest states had Republican governors than the states without protests, given the perception (from states like Michigan and California) that protesters — often organized by conservative interest groups — were trying to undermine Democratic governors’ stay-at-home orders. (Then again, maybe this simply speaks to a more right-leaning tendency for the populations of states that saw protests.)

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TLDR News: Amazon Has Been Shut Down in France: Coronavirus in Europe

City Beautiful: What is a suburb?

The Guardian: How the US helped create El Salvador’s bloody gang war

A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night. [...]

The murders that occurred here happened in the middle of a truce that the government negotiated between the rival gangs, which was credited with halving the homicide rate. But the reality, the informant says, is that it taught them to hide their victims in clandestine graves such as these. Ticas was not formally trained in forensics, and many of the techniques he uses he discovered himself. But he is not the only one learning in the process. [...]

Rather than a problem to be deported away, however, the reality of the gang is considerably more complex. Born out of the ecology of Los Angeles’s fierce gang warfare, MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a brutal civil war still raging at home. In time, the gang expanded to include other nationalities, and it spread to other American cities. Today, in the US, it numbers no more than 10,000 members and functions mostly – its penchant for sensational violence aside – like an average American street gang, fighting to control neighborhood turf and local drug sales.

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New Statesman: Keir Starmer: The sensible radical

Starmer tends to speak in a language of moral absolutes, but his speech that evening was neither a Corbynite meditation on good and evil, nor a clarion call for a new kind of politics. Rather, it was a straightforward elevator pitch. With a flair and levity that seems to escape him on television, he told members that he was the best person to take on – and defeat – Boris Johnson. “I really do think that man is dangerous,” he said. Corbyn and his politics, he told them, had been unfairly maligned by the press – but had still lost Labour December’s general election. He could break the cycle. [...]

Yet few will profess to knowing the real Keir Starmer. Some even contend that his leadership campaign has been an exercise in hiding from view. His pledges over the course of the campaign have, at times, seemed contradictory: he will not “oversteer” away from Corbyn’s radicalism on the economy, but he will curb the leadership’s worst excesses, win back lost ground in the south, as well as the north and Midlands, and exorcise the demons of factionalism from Labour’s ranks. Officially, Starmer calls it the politics of unity: a word that is emblazoned across his campaign material and baked into almost every line of his stump speeches. Corbyn’s enforced departure presented Labour MPs, the trade unions and its membership with an existential choice: does it continue along the road that led to a fourth successive election defeat, or veer away? If Long-Bailey’s pitch is the former, and Nandy’s the latter, then Starmer’s aim is to convince members that they can have both. [...]

His politics are continental but are not the “bland centrism” criticised by supporters of Long-Bailey. “He was very much what Europeans would now call a red-green,” said the QC Gavin Millar, who interviewed Starmer for his pupillage in 1987 and later shared rooms with him in a set of Middle Temple chambers run by Emlyn Hooson, the radical Liberal MP who had defended the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Growing up, Starmer had never knowingly met a lawyer: Geoffrey Robertson, another QC and pioneer of the progressive bar, described how he turned up for the interview in a cardigan, was “nervous and awkward”, and “looked about 14”. By then Starmer had moved into a flat above a brothel in Highgate, where he devoted himself to work. Stacked high about his room were boxes of Socialist Alternatives, an obscure and atrociously written Trotksyite pamphlet, for which he was once a co-editor. [...]

Starmer decided against prosecuting the police officers responsible for the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube having been wrongly identified as a terror suspect following the London attacks of 2005, and of Ian Tomlinson, the London newspaper seller pushed to his death at the G20 protests in 2010. Under his leadership, the CPS charged anti-austerity protesters for staging a sit-in at Fortnum & Mason in 2012; one academic accused Starmer, who once defended the rights of acid house ravers, of criminalising peaceful assembly and protests.

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WorldAffairs: Xi Jinping Won the Coronavirus Crisis

Two months ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping looked like he would emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic with his legitimacy and his ambitions for Chinese global leadership in tatters. Today, as the Chinese government lifts its lockdown on the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, Xi can present himself instead as a forceful and triumphant leader on the world stage. Leaders in Europe and the United States are increasingly looking to China for help as they struggle to contain the virus in their own countries. [...]

Many liberal-minded Chinese intellectuals and officials had hoped that the crisis would lead to more openness and transparency. After the 2002–3 SARS epidemic, the government revised the Law on the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases to improve information flow and at least give the impression of greater transparency. But the coronavirus crisis has had the opposite effect. The public demands for reform after Dr. Li’s death appear to have alarmed Chinese leaders, prompting a crackdown on critical social media users and even more intense state censorship at government media outlets, some of which have been instructed not to cover the economic ramifications of the pandemic.[...]

The Chinese government has turned the crisis to its advantage internationally, as well. A triumphant Xi, having evidently halted the COVID-19 epidemic at home, is now projecting his nation’s soft power abroad with “mask diplomacy.” He has sent test kits and personal protection equipment to 82 different countries, although there have been reports that some of the equipment has been faulty. And as of March 10, 25 Chinese provinces had proposed economic recovery packages worth $7 trillion, which will be used both to stimulate China’s domestic economy and to support the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s ultra-ambitious global development strategy that spans nearly 70 countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

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Social Europe: Eurobonds: why they are needed, how they would work (10th April 2020)

The ECB enjoys the power of monetising public debts—a privilege most eurozone members would not enjoy if they kept their pre-euro national currencies. The PEPP is a step in the right direction, granting fiscal space to the governments of the euro area. [...]

First, as with the ECB, the finance ministers grouped in Ecofin could decide to enforce the SGP after 2020 and thus force countries on to an austerity path of adjustments once again. Secondly, increasing fiscal deficits means increasing bond spreads between eurozone countries. The temporary character (and limited scope) of the PEPP does not guarantee public debts in the long term and it opens the door to solvency problems, as in the 2010-12 crisis, for most eurozone members. What we need is a financing mechanism which guarantees no austerity in the future. [...]

Two institutions are already in place. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) has announced that it has at its disposal €410 billion (3.4 per cent of eurozone GDP), to be lent to euro-area members in amounts up to 2 per cent of their GDP. To finance the rescue packages of Greece or Spain, the ESM has already been issuing de facto eurobonds, guaranteed by all eurozone members, to the extent of their share in the ESM capital. The problem is that countries gaining access to the ESM funds would do so through the Precautionary Conditioned Credit Line, conditioned by a memorandum of understanding (MoU).

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Social Europe: EUR-bonds in the corona crisis and beyond (10th April 2020)

In crisis times like these, sovereign debt is of pivotal importance as safe assets. Due to their countercyclical price movement, safe sovereign bonds serve as an anchor of macroeconomic stability. In an economic downturn or after an exogenous shock, a flight to safety increases the price of these bonds, simultaneously lowering their yield. The lower financing costs increase the fiscal space, while the higher price improves the banking system’s balance sheets. [...]

It is debatable whether the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, acted wisely when she said that ‘we are not here to close spreads … there are other actors to actually deal with those issues’. Yet, despite the unfortunate timing, she raised a valid point: it was the responsibility of governments in 2010 to dispel fears of a Greek default and it is their responsibility to have each other’s back in today’s crisis. In the same vein, Lagarde called upon euro-area governments to act and issue eurobonds, a demand also formulated by groups of economists on March 20th and March 21st, as well as by nine of the 19 euro-area governments on March 26th. [...]

The governments simply agree, in this time of crisis, to ask the ECB to package their bonds into EUR-bonds as a signal and an instrument of solidarity, unity and determination. The ECB could even buy these bonds on the secondary market as part of its purchase programme. Ideally, however, EUR-bonds would be purchased by banks and other investors as safe assets, whereas the ECB would focus its purchasing programmes on eliminating any sovereign-yield differentials which may persist—despite the signals sent out by euro governments in issuing debt together.

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UnHerd: How Putin subverts the past to seal his future

The constitutional change is remarkable for the cynicism in the assumption that fixing the constitution for the sake of Putin and his circle would pass without much opposition. According to the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, quoted in The Economist, the enriched Kremlin elite were “feeling nervous about their own future” if he were to leave office. The fragile shoots of democratic rule and the already-stunted growth of civil society have been stamped on hard — if not, hopefully, obliterated. Does it show that Russia cannot escape its authoritarian past? That depends to a large extent on the people: and history has not been kind to them as proactive agents of democracy, in the eyes of both foreign and Russian observers. [...]

In 2013, when a new set of history textbooks was commissioned, the then Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, argued that “in historical mythology [facts] do not mean anything at all… everything begins not with facts but with interpretations… if you like your motherland, your people, your history, what you’ll be writing will always be positive.” Christopher Coker, who quotes Medinsky, writes (in The Rise of the Civilizational State) that “myths are usually immune to factual rebuttal…they tend to operate at a deeper level of consciousness in their claim to communicate a more immediate, metaphysical truth”. For many in Russia today, a deeper level of consciousness is picturing the Stalinist era as one in which Russia was greater and its society better. [...]

Ostrovsky writes that no-one, not even President Putin, is uniquely to blame, since he is “as much a consequence as a cause of Russia’s ills.” He governs corruptly, and now seems determined to stay at the apex of power by whatever means; yet he also restored order and a sense of greatness to Russia. He has kept some of the unprecedented freedoms of the Boris Yeltsin decade, such as travel, relatively free speech, internet use, while, Ostrovsky writes, “all the Kremlin asked in return was for people to mind their own business and stay out of politics — something they gladly did(my italics).”[...]

Yet Russia is authoritarian, not wholly despotic. Maxim Trudalubov, one of Russia’s sharpest commentators, wrote in the New York Times that “the Russian regime is slowly turning into a more rule-based governance system… today’s Russians seem to be less and less impressed by the show of strongman leadership at home and Russia’s military might abroad. A demand to be acknowledged as dignified citizens, not obedient subjects, is palpable in numerous protest movements that are ready to stand up to government and police pressure”.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Bernie Sanders Lost (APR. 8, 2020)

In 2016, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money, but lost to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. In 2020, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money but lost to Biden, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. Sanders got almost no backing from elected Democrats in 2016, and didn’t court the party establishment that much in 2020 either. That was a major barrier to his candidacy — not only did Sanders again get little support from the party elite, but that same elite was instrumental in helping Biden consolidate the field and winnow the race to a two-man contest. [...]

Sanders and his aides also made new mistakes in 2020. There were some clear indications that some of Sanders’s success in 2016 — among white voters without college degrees, in particular — had more to do with anti-Clinton sentiment than strong support for Sanders. But the senator’s advisers seemed to think that Sanders had a unique appeal to white working-class voters that would simply continue in 2020. So the Sanders campaign decided to invest heavily in the March 10 primary in Michigan, a state packed with white voters without a college degree. Biden not only won Michigan easily, but he won overall among white voters without a college degree (and pretty comfortably). [...]

We made this case in more detail in an article earlier this week, arguing that Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic left were always going to face an uphill climb in the 2020 primary. Democrats’ overriding priority in 2020 has been defeating Trump, and many in the party view left-leaning ideas as something that makes it harder to win over swing voters. The boomlets around former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, neither of whom had the traditional qualifications for a presidential nominee, had the feeling of the Democratic Party desperately searching for a white, male, centrist-y candidate to take on Trump. The party landing on Biden (white male, centrist-y) fits that general narrative. [...]

The way the primary process played out, with Sanders the clear front-runner after the Nevada caucuses and Biden needing a surprising comeback to win, suggests that Sanders could have won in 2020. But it would have been somewhat fluky if a candidate (Biden) who led in the polls for basically the entire race crashed without the party’s establishment able to mobilize behind any alternative. Had Biden not run in 2020 or faltered fairly early, could Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even Warren have defeated the Vermont senator in the same way Biden did, by getting into a one-on-one race with Sanders, running to his right and receiving the bulk of support from the party’s establishment? That seems entirely possible.

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VoxEU.org: German division and reunification and the ‘effects’ of communism

The location of the border between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is not the random outcome of where American, British, and Soviet tanks stopped at the end of WWII in 1945. Instead, in anticipation of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the three allied forces had agreed in 1944 on a division of post-WWII Germany into Soviet and Western occupation zones that followed the pre-WWII borders of the German Empire states and the provinces of the largest state, Prussia (with a few very minor exceptions for geographic connectedness). As a result, the East–West border separated the populations of pre-existing regions with distinct histories and cultures.

Since the border follows pre-existing regions, we can explore pre-WWII county-level data to investigate whether West and East differed in relevant dimensions. A first dimension is the size of the working class, strongly emphasised by communist countries. Inspecting pre-WWII data, we see that the East Germany already had a substantially higher working-class share in 1925 (Figure 1), well before the area became communist. The difference between East and West in working-class share amounts to 12 percentage points. In fact, the working-class share jumps quite abruptly in several regions around the later inner-German border: it is significantly detectable when focusing on counties within 100 kilometres of the later border or on the counties that have a direct contact with the later border. [...]

East and West were differentially affected by WWII and the occupying forces. Using data from the German Census jointly administered in all four occupation zones in October 1946, we show that the ratio of men to women was substantially lower in the Soviet zone. No such differences had existed in the last pre-WWII census, in 1939. [...]

What is sometimes overlooked is that also about half a million people migrated from the West to the East before 1961. GDR propaganda describes them as “not in agreement with the capitalist system”. We show that six of the 19 Politburo members in the early GDR (1949–1961) had been born in what became West Germany, including long-time GDR leader Erich Honecker. Taken together, the evidence suggests that there was selective migration and sorting by political preferences.

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Aeon: How the philosophical paradox of aspiration is resolved by a new theory of self-creation

Let’s say you’ve decided to enrich yourself by learning to appreciate classical music, even though you didn’t have much previous interest in it. Such a resolution is hardly uncommon, but acting on the aspiration requires you to value an activity that you don’t yet know how to. In this video, Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, borrows from her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) to put forth a solution to this paradox centred on understanding our current and future selves as inexorably bound through the act of aspiration. Further, she argues, in resolving this paradox, we can understand ourselves as responsible for the act of self-creation – and, by extension, for our own morals and values. This video is part of the series Into the Coast, which sets out to capture philosophy as a ‘living discipline’ through interviews with leading academic philosophers.

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UnHerd: Can Keir Starmer rescue Labour?

Keir Starmer was victorious because he was the best candidate to take Labour to at least some sort of electoral respectability. His campaign was planned, professional and aimed at Labour members exhausted by repeated defeats. That, for now, is enough to give him a mandate that will last beyond the exceptional politics of the coronavirus crisis. His actions in the first few days of his leadership are already indicating that this professionalism maybe the hallmark of a new era. In this he has been helped by the weakness and division of his opponents within the party. [...]

This failure was compounded in the election for deputy leader. Since 2015 the left has unified around single candidates and slates to win elections. Not his time. It was split between support for Angela Rayner, nominated by Momentum, and Richard Burgon, supported by McDonnell. Rayner won her victory; Burgon was beaten into third place. [...]

What will Keir Starmer do and how quickly? Historically, Labour leaders focus on two aspects of leadership: management and policy. Neil Kinnock was the example of a leader who used the party machine to attack Labour’s internal dissenters and show the electorate it was serious. It was his courage in the Eighties that paved the way for New Labour in the Nineties. He brought in new, younger management of the party, most notably in the form of Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications in 1985, but also promoted young new MPs such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most of the future New Labour government. [...]

The first item will be cleaning up anti-Semitism. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been summoning evidence from a wide range of Labour members to get into the history of this mess, going back to when Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. There are pending legal as well as political consequences. Labour has to show not just contrition for the past; it has to reveal its managerial and political failures and then prove that it has a defined route to ensure they are never repeated. Action has to happen immediately and be visible.

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UnHerd: The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

War For Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (published on 21 April) reads a bit like Dan Brown’s pol sci doctoral thesis — standby flights to Washington, 3am Skype calls with Kremlin advisors, mittel European intrigue in Budapest, racists in ashrams, a Black Hand of high-end political operators, all united by their faith in a shadowy paleo-religion.[...]

The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies. [...]

Most influential of all is Aleksandr Dugin, a long-time foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin. Though his relationship to the Kremlin has often been informal, it was Dugin’s ‘tanks to Tblisi’ sloganeering that persuaded Putin to seize South Ossetia in 2008, and his dreams of a greater Russia that undergirded both the taking of Crimea in 2014 and the continuing attempts to hack bits off eastern Ukraine. Dugin even wrote a book on Traditionalism: The Fourth Political Theory. [...]

The question of whether Traditionalism is a religious ideal with political dimensions or a political one with religious ones is never quite resolved. At its heart, it takes a sort of gnostic, Unitarian ideal of faith. It hardly matters which faith — but older, more ancestral creeds are prefered, which is why so many Scandinavian neo-Nazis embrace Wodin and Thor, and why Hinduism is considered an acceptable choice for the modish skinhead intellectual. It’s ancient, it’s pantheistic, it’s bafflingly non-linear. Which is why in 2009, two of America’s alt right founding fathers, John B Morgan and Daniel Friberg, ended up living at a Hare Krishna temple near Chennai. [...]

But Bannon is also far more pragmatic than either Dugin or de Carvalho. He seems to draw upon his intellectual tools like a bag of golfing irons. He tells Teitelbaum that “Traditionalism is a total rejection of racism in that it is a brotherhood of the spirit”. What he seems to be, at base, is anti-liberal. Be it in trade, migration, or even education.

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Social Europe: Only a ‘New Deal’ can rescue the European project (7th April 2020)

The combined sanitary and economic crisis that the new coronavirus brings upon us may in the short term seem one that affects some European Union member states more than others. But it will soon become a systemic crisis for the EU as a whole and not just for the eurozone. [...]

This is not the time to reopen a discussion on the responsibilities of the member states, or for a beauty contest among the more or less virtuous. Comparisons with the 2008 financial crisis are inherently misleading. This is an exogenous shock, and it hits all member states. Some of them might be able to put on their own recovery plan, with national budgets. But this will not save them. If some countries face, in the coming months, a structural crisis of their public health services and a deep and long-lasting recession, all member states will, at some point, be affected. [...]

The European Union must seize this opportunity to overcome its divisions and mobilise the necessary resources both to help the Member States and to develop its own European action. Issuing a specific kind of European bonds to complement the gigantic effort already made by member states to strengthen their health systems and their economies is the smartest and cheapest way to prevent a violent destruction of human lives and of millions of jobs.

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Marker: What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage

In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports. [...]

If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused. [...]

While toilet paper is an extreme case, similar dynamics are likely to temporarily disrupt supplies of other goods, too — even if no one’s hoarding or panic-buying. The CEO of a fruit and vegetable supplier told NPR’s Weekend Edition that schools and restaurants are canceling their banana orders, while grocery stores are selling out and want more. The problem is that the bananas he sells to schools and restaurants are “petite” and sold loose in boxes of 150, whereas grocery store bananas are larger and sold in bunches. Beer companies face a similar challenge converting commercial keg sales to retail cans and bottles.

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WorldAffairs: MS-13 and El Salvador's World of Violence

How did El Salvador become one of the most violent countries on earth? And what role did the United States play in creating the notorious MS-13 gang? On this week’s episode, we explore the origins of El Salvador’s bloody gang war with journalist William Wheeler. Wheeler spoke with gang members, frustrated reformers, crime investigators and government officials to better understand the violence in the country and what is driving El Salvadorans northward and for his new book: “State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence.” He is in conversation with World Affairs executive producer Joanne Elgart Jennings.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why False Claims About COVID-19 Refuse to Die

There is a pandemic of misinformation about COVID-19 spreading on social media sites. Some of this misinformation takes well-understood forms: baseless rumors, intentional disinformation, and conspiracy theories. But much of it seems to have a different character. In recent months, claims with some scientific legitimacy have spread so far, so fast, that even if it later becomes clear they are false or unfounded, they cannot be laid to rest. Instead, they become information zombies, continuing to shamble on long after they should be dead.

It is not uncommon for media sources like Medium to retract articles or claims that turn out to be false or misleading. Neither are retractions limited to the popular press. In fact, they are common in the sciences, including the medical sciences. Every year, hundreds of papers are retracted, sometimes because of fraud, but more often due to genuine errors that invalidate study findings.2 (The blog Retraction Watch does an admirable job of tracking these.) [...]

Researchers have found, however, that the process of retraction or reversal does not always work the way it should. Retracted papers are often cited long after problems are identified,4 sometimes at a rate comparable to that before retraction. And in the vast majority of these cases, the authors citing retracted findings treat them as valid.5 (It seems that many of these authors pull information directly from colleagues’ papers, and trust that it is current without actually checking.) Likewise, medical researchers have bemoaned the fact that reversals in practice sometimes move at a glacial pace, with doctors continuing to use contraindicated therapies even though better practices are available. [...]

Other cases are more subtle. One major question with far-reaching implications for the future development of the pandemic is to what extent asymptomatic carriers are able to transmit the virus. The first article reporting on asymptomatic transmission was a letter published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine claiming that a traveler from China to Germany transmitted the disease to four Germans before her symptoms appeared.12 Within four days, Science reported that the article was flawed because the authors of the letter had not actually spoken with the Chinese traveler, and a follow-up phone call by public health authorities confirmed that she had had mild symptoms while visiting Germany after all.13 Even so, the article has subsequently been cited nearly 500 times according to Google Scholar, and has been tweeted nearly 10,000 times, according to Altmetric.

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Social Europe: ‘Corona bonds’ and Europe’s north-south divide (13th April 2020)

The compromise agreed provisionally by the Eurogroup meeting of finance ministers on April 9th was a relief. For the Eurogroup to have broken up a second time in a week without a deal would have been a disaster. It would probably not have resulted in a bond-market panic—massive interventions by the European Central Bank have neutralised that possibility for now. But in political terms it would have sent a terrible signal of disunity.

The three-pronged package—with funding for health expenditure via the European Stability Mechanism, loans for businesses from the European Investment Bank and €100 billion for the European Commission’s unemployment fund—is modest in scope. It is disappointing to those of us who support the ‘corona bonds’ position. But it is a relief at least that it was a compromise, rather than a humiliating capitulation inflicted on the coalition of the nine advocates of corona bonds by the stubborn and short-sighted egotism of the Dutch and Germans. [...]

Of course, one should never say never. Sophisticated polling reveals an openness on the part of the German public towards corona bonds, which could be exploited by creative and brave political leadership. Expert opinion has shifted quite markedly; the broad-based calls for joint action from German economists are new and extremely welcome. Both in Germany and the Netherlands a large part of the public is frankly embarrassed by their government’s positions.

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Social Europe: Not (yet) up to the task: how eurozone members are gambling away post-Covid economic recovery

Action at the European level is key to rein in the economic shockwave following the Covid-19 outbreak. As the former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, recently affirmed, economic recovery will be easier the more public treasuries step in and relieve the private losses of workers and firms. The goal is to ‘keep the lights on’— to prevent the production system sinking under the accumulating burden of debt and losses until workers can get back to work and consumers can buy again under safer conditions. [...]

While these measures allow public and private debt to increase, the Eurogroup was supposed to provide a final safety net for public finances as the linchpin of the package. Such a safety net would have to meet two bottom-line requirements. [...]

Stagnation and further macroeconomic divergence will be the most likely outcome. Besides the predictable upsurge of political discontent and populist temptations, financially weaker members will likely be subject to speculative attacks, and therefore be even more dependent on long-term ECB support than before.

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Business Insider: People in Wales are creating witty travel posters encouraging visitors to stay away

While the United Kingdom remains in lockdown, there have been reports of day-trippers still visiting the country.

In an attempt to discourage travel and give people a laugh, Owen Williams designed witty posters. [...]

The idea sparked when the country's tourism body, Visit Wales, tweeted out: "Visit Wales. Later."

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The Guardian: How Greece is beating coronavirus despite a decade of debt

The bookish professor and no-nonsense former mayor are the faces who have come to be associated with the government’s drive to contain the spread of Covid-19. Their efforts at keeping the country virus-safe appear to be paying off: in a population of just over 11 million, there were, as of Monday, 2,145 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 99 fatalities, far lower than elsewhere in Europe. Italy to date has registered 20,465 deaths.

Greece, it is generally agreed, is having a better crisis than may have been expected. Tsiodras recently allowed himself to speak of “a flattening of the curve” even if authorities accept that the prospect of Orthodox Easter, on 19 April, is unlikely to be without challenge. Traditionally, Greeks flock to ancestral villages in the countryside to celebrate the biggest festival in their religious calendar.

The country’s ability to cope with a public health emergency of such proportions was not a given. After almost a decade embroiled in debt crisis – years in which its economy contracted by 26% – Greece’s health system has far from recovered. [...]

Greece, like Italy, also has a large elderly population, with about a quarter of pensionable age. “There were realities, weaknesses, that we were very aware of,” said Dr Andreas Mentis who heads the Hellenic Pasteur Institute. “Before the first case was diagnosed, we had started examining people and isolating them. Incoming flights, especially from China, were monitored. Later, when others began to be repatriated from Spain, for example, we made sure they were quarantined in hotels.”

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FRANCE 24 English: Tale of two cities: How virus lockdown has exposed France's class divide

Class tensions -- never very far from the surface despite the fine sentiments of the French national motto "liberty, fraternity and equality" -- exploded. [...]

The virus had "shown up our inequalities," she said. "When it comes to a certain social class... when our precious liberty is called into question, equality becomes just an ideal," she added.

When France declared its lockdown three weeks ago, an estimated fifth of the population of the capital escaped to the country and the seaside, sparking a wave of resentment in the provinces. [...]

Unions too are worried about growing tensions between low-paid staff in the service sector who have been forced to keep on working, even with schools closed, and their white-collar colleagues who can work from home.

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WorldAffairs: Saudi Arabia: Mecca is empty + Oil is Cheap

Now that the global economy is mostly on hold, the demand for oil has dropped dramatically, destroying the market and threatening countries whose economies depend on selling it. Saudi Arabia and Russia have been engaged in an oil-price war to keep the markets in their favor. Saudi Arabia saw another economic loss when the kingdom decided to limit access to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, violence in some of the most at risk countries rages on. In Yemen, preventable diseases like cholera already threaten people with limited access to healthcare and basic necessities. Would a global ceasefire help war-torn countries like Yemen manage their coronavirus outbreaks? On this week’s episode, we talk with experts from around the world about Yemen, oil and Saudi Arabia.

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The Prospect Podcast: Jonathan Haidt on political speech

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt joins the Prospect podcast to discuss political anger on both sides of the Atlantic, from Boris Johnson’s discussion of Brexit to the American 2020 election.

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Wisecrack Edition: How Pandemics Change Society

The Art of Manliness: The Strenuous President

In the first year of his presidency, the press used Theodore Roosvelt’s name in connection with the word “strenuous” over 10,000 times. He was known as “the strenuous president,” and with good reason: from his youth, TR had lived and preached a life of vigorous engagement and plenty of physical activity.

Today on the show Ryan Swanson, professor of sports history and author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete, discusses not only how TR was shaped by what was called “the strenuous age,” but how he shaped it in turn by promoting sports, and participating in athletics himself. We begin our discussion with what was going on during the late 19th century that got people interested in what was then called “physical culture.” We then turn to the beginning of Roosevelt’s introduction to vigorous exercise as a boy, and how he famously decided to make his body. We discuss TR’s fitness routine when he went to Harvard, and how his becoming a fan of football there led to him supporting the preservation of the game as president. We then discuss how TR lived the strenuous life while in the White House, and thereby inspired the American public to live vigorously too. We take a fun look at what TR thought of the game of baseball, how he went to a health farm at age 58 to get back in fighting shape, and what kind of exercise and athletics TR would be into if he were alive today.

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BBC4 In Our Time: The Gin Craze (09 August 2018)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the craze for gin in Britain in the mid 18th Century and the attempts to control it. With the arrival of William of Orange, it became an act of loyalty to drink Protestant, Dutch gin rather than Catholic brandy, and changes in tariffs made everyday beer less affordable. Within a short time, production increased and large sections of the population that had rarely or never drunk spirits before were consuming two pints of gin a week. As Hogarth indicated in his print 'Beer Street and Gin Lane' (1751) in support of the Gin Act, the damage was severe, and addiction to gin was blamed for much of the crime in cities such as London.

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WorldAffairs: Eco-Anxiety: Climate Change and Mental Health

A burning Amazon rainforest. Thinning ice sheets. Sea level rise. Wildfires in California. Thawing Arctic permafrost. It’s no surprise that many of us have anxiety about our planet’s future. The mental health impacts of climate change are increasing distress about the future while intensifying the trauma of natural disasters already happening. On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, Caroline Hickman, Executive Committee member of the Climate Psychology Alliance and teaching fellow at the University of Bath joins WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez to discuss eco-anxiety in the age of climate change.

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Vox: The big lesson from South Korea's coronavirus response

In South Korea, citizens have flattened the curve of the novel coronavirus -- and it's because of lessons they learned from fighting the MERS outbreak in 2015. Through a combination of aggressive and widespread testing measures, along with a system know as “contact tracing,” they’ve been better positioned to spot the path of the virus and curb its spread. While they are still vigilant for a second wave of Covid-19 cases, people in South Korea are slowly returning to public life. Watch the video above to find out how their testing and contact tracing measures work, and how it can be a lesson for countries still in lockdown.

TLDR News: Is Hungary a Dictatorship Now? Orban's Controversial Coronavirus Law Explained

SciShow: The Delightful Mutation Behind Siamese Cats

It's easy to assume a cat's coat pattern is based exclusively on genetics, but that isn't entirely the case for Siamese cats. Their unique coloration comes from a combination of genetics, a fragile enzyme, and losing heat from little noses and toe beans.

TLDR News: Coronavirus: How Long Will Lockdown Last?

Around the world, people have been placed under lockdown. As the weeks tick on, people are becoming increasingly tired of the process, so we're asking... how long is this going to last. In the video, we explain how long the lockdown is likely to continue and why it's not going to be over soon.

Fortune: Countries that mandate TB vaccine are seeing fewer coronavirus deaths

The preliminary study posted on medRxiv, a site for unpublished medical research, finds a correlation between countries that require citizens to get the bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine and those showing fewer number of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19. Though only a correlation, clinicians in at least six countries are running trials that involve giving frontline health workers and elderly people the BCG vaccine to see whether it can indeed provide some level of protection against the new coronavirus.

Gonzalo Otazu, assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, started working on the analysis after noticing the low number of cases in Japan. The country had reported some of the earliest confirmed cases of coronavirus outside of China and it hadn’t instituted lockdown measures like so many other countries have done. [...]

Among high-income countries showing large number of Covid-19 cases, the U.S. and Italy recommend BCG vaccines but only for people who might be at risk, whereas Germany, Spain, France, Iran and the U.K. used to have BCG vaccine policies but ended them years to decades ago. China, where the pandemic began, has a BCG vaccine policy but it wasn’t adhered to very well before 1976, Otazu said. Countries including Japan and South Korea, which have managed to control the disease, have universal BCG vaccine policies. Data on confirmed cases from low-income countries was considered not reliable enough to make a strong judgment.

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Flandersnews: “Virus was probably present among the young much earlier ”

The country’s got a thousand confirmed cases but only two deaths. Prof Herman Goossens, a microbiologist from Antwerp University, points to Iceland’s higher testing capacity. It means more people can be tested even people without symptoms. This shows us that more people are infected than we thought. Young people appear to be carriers and spreaders of the virus without even displaying symptoms. [...]

Iceland was able to carry out more testing thanks to a unique project: the deCODE company registers the genetic code of the entire population, some 360,000 souls. It reveals who is related to who. The genetic research means the company can carry out molecular tests. The whole company has now been reoriented to map out the corona outbreak in the island. [...]

Prof Goossens: “If you look at the age curve, you see the same picture as in South Korea: most of those infected are aged between 20 and 40. Half of these people are unaware of it.”

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Social Europe: What Europe can learn from living-wage campaigns

While the United Kingdom may be leaving the European Union, the UK campaign for a ‘living wage’ has lessons in this regard for the remaining member states—notably in the context of the European Commission’s commitment to introduce an EU-wide legal instrument on minimum wages, in line with the fair-wage provisions of the European Pillar of Social Rights. The campaign brings together employers, unions, researchers and civil-society activists of different stripes to make the case for decent pay for employees at the bottom of the pay ladder. [...]

Statutory minimum wages are not designed to ensure a minimum standard of living. Legal wage floors have multiple objectives, including raising the income of employees on low pay, ensuring a level playing field for all employers and ‘ending exploitative low pay and redressing power imbalances between employers and workers at the lower end of the labour market’. Crucially, these goals need to be achieved with little or no negative employment effects. But the minimum wage is not designed to provide beneficiaries with a minimum acceptable standard of living. The raison d’être of living-wage campaigns is to go this one extra step, based on a detailed costing of what it takes to have a socially acceptable standard of living and to derive a wage from that costing. Campaigns covered in a recent Eurofound review of initiatives worldwide estimated the living wage as anywhere between 13 and 82 per cent higher than the relevant national legal hourly minimum wage. [...]

National minimum wages are blind to growing regional cost-of-living differentials. There is a single statutory minimum wage regime in the UK but there are two distinct living wages based on where one lives. The London living wage is 15 per cent higher than its rest-of-UK equivalent. This underlines the large difference in regional cost of living, notably between larger, more economically dynamic, metropolitan areas and their hinterlands in the same country. The legal minimum wage is likely to be especially inadequate in high-cost cities. This raises sustainability issues for the individual, households and society. The high living costs of cities make it hard for those on low pay to make ends meet. This may also jeopardise labour supply in many services in the public and private sectors, in health and care as well as in retail, hotels and restaurants.

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Social Europe: Democracy, authoritarianism and crises

In the former category, for example, are the Nordic countries. Experts consistently rate these countries’ democracies as strong, while their citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and levels of social trust remain very high. The responses of the region’s governments and societies to the crisis clearly reflect these features. [...]

On the policy front, the Swedish government also quickly announced measures to help citizens and businesses through the crisis, including covering workers’ salaries to avoid layoffs, providing loans, tax holidays and more. As in Denmark, the minority social-democrat government’s ability to pass such policies and its general response to the evolving crisis has been facilitated by the willingness of opposition parties to co-operate in parliament. In Sweden, as in Denmark, the idea that it is the government’s job to protect society and the economy is uncontroversial. [...]

One of the most striking aspects of the initial American response was the deep divergence between elites and citizens over basic facts. Initially, many Republican politicians and much of the right-wing media portrayed the crisis as a ‘hoax’, and the ‘hysteria’ about it a left-wing conspiracy to ‘destabilise the country and destroy’ Donald Trump. One prime-time host on Fox told viewers that concerns about the coronavirus were ‘yet another attempt to impeach the president’. [...]

But it isn’t just the government’s capacity to respond to challenges that has decayed. The willingness of Trump and Republicans even to recognise the need for government action is also lacking. They have used mistrust of ‘big government’—and more generally a rejection of the idea that it is the government’s job to protect society and the economy—as an excuse to reject policies that even conservatives in other countries accept as necessary.

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Social Europe: Europe’s failure to address Covid-19 shows the need for a European ‘health citizenship’

The way the world is organised has proven to be catastrophic for the management of this epidemic. In Europe, each country has reacted in a different way, perhaps revealing the distinct characters of national elites. Germany has managed to keep death rates low with heavy testing, but other European countries have been far slower to react, while some governments appear to have been less open about the situation they were facing and only reacted when the virus was at their doorstep.

Some countries, such as Austria and Poland, have demonstrated nationalist instincts in their responses by closing down their borders. Meanwhile in Spain, the approach has included the centralisation of healthcare responsibilities following the declaration of a state of emergency, even though the relevant expertise is located at the regional level, and some Spanish regions which advocated for a lock down have remained open.

In contrast, In Italy, the regions of Veneto and Lombardy were early movers in setting up a quarantine and urging locals to stay home. In Lombardy, local health authorities established strong containment measures in the initial cluster by quarantining several towns in an attempt to slow transmission of the virus. In Germany, states have taken the lead in fighting the virus, while in the UK Wales and Scotland have acted first by announcing policy measures such as school closures which were then followed by the whole country. [...]

Today, European citizenship is defined by a common European health card as much as a European passport. However, the European role in managing health crises has remained modest. The Covid-19 crisis highlights that public health (the management of global public risks) is an area where the EU should be more proactive. Given the nationalistic and even selfish policies implemented by various member states, the creation of a European wide public-health authority must now be viewed as an urgent matter to consider as part of wider reforms. Being European should entail having a European health citizenship.

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The Guardian: 'Thank you Greta': natural solutions to UK flooding climb the agenda

The UK’s flooding this year is a story of desperation – but also hope, says John Hughes, development manager at Shropshire Wildlife Trust, who works in the valley. Following widespread acceptance of the climate and ecological emergency, Hughes believes people are increasingly looking to nature for solutions. [...]

“I say thanks very much Extinction Rebellion and Greta [Thunberg] – you’ve done a great job. It’s the job we’ve been trying to do for 50 years. We need to take a holistic view – land can do many, many things.”

In the past, flood plains acted like sponges that soaked up water and stopped it flowing headlong into settlements downstream. Wetter habitats provided useful materials such as willow and reeds for baskets and thatched roofs. However, natural wet woodland, neutral grassland, fens and marshes were ironed out of the postwar landscape and now cover just 11% of English and Welsh flood plains. Intensive agriculture covers 70%. [...]

The problem is that reducing food production is currently counterintuitive to most farmers’ business plan, says Dr Marc Stutter, a soil and water scientist at the James Hutton Institute. “The biggest thing we’re fighting against is that the farmers and their fathers and grandfathers have been very proud of the way they’ve brought the land into condition for crops and quite rightfully so. Their parents have spent a lot of effort draining the land and now there’s someone telling them they want pockets of it to be wet up again.

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