RSN: Charles Pierce | The 2020 Elections Do Not Require Armed Vigilantes Outside Polling Places
12 October 20
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WE HAVE A SERIOUS IMMEDIATE PROBLEM ON DONATIONS - Still the vast majority of visitors to “Reader Supported News” refuse to donate. It is not working. What does work are “reasonable donations.” We won’t get rich but we will pay the bills and further the organization’s mission. Throw something in the hat. It matters. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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Charles Pierce | The 2020 Elections Do Not Require Armed Vigilantes Outside Polling Places
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "If we had a functioning federal government, instead of a madman's puppet show, someone would be concerned enough to do something about this."
he upcoming elections are devolving into something out of Gangs of New York. If we had a functioning federal government, instead of a madman's puppet show, someone would be concerned enough to do something about this. From the Washington Post:
A private security company is recruiting a “large contingent” of former U.S. military Special Operations personnel to guard polling sites in Minnesota on Election Day as part of an effort “to make sure that the Antifas don’t try to destroy the election sites,” according to the chairman of the company. The recruiting effort is being done by Atlas Aegis, a private security company based in Tennessee that was formed last year and is run by U.S. military veterans, including people with Special Operations experience, according to its website.
The company posted a message through a defense industry jobs site this week calling for former Special Operations forces to staff “security positions in Minnesota during the November Election and beyond to protect election polls, local businesses and residences from looting and destruction.”
Me? I think it's a dead giveaway in a week where white-supremacist goons get busted for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan to say that you're recruiting Special Ops guys to "protect" polling places from Antifa.
The prospect of armed guards outside election sites alarmed election officials in the state. It is illegal in Minnesota for people other than voters and elections staff — or those people meeting the requirements to be a registered election “challenger”— to be within 100 feet of polling sites. There are also laws against voter intimidation that could prevent armed civilians from being in the area even if outside the buffer, according to election officials in Minnesota.
It's as though the election is Altamont and it's a buyer's market for Hells Angels. This cannot end well.
Murder hornets. Meth 'gators. And now...SuperPigs! From Popular Mechanics:
The 2017 film Okja posited a Cujo-like super-pig, but researchers say that idea is now close to a reality for some groups of feral pigs. That’s because most wild pigs in the U.S. are some level of hybrid between domestic pigs and wild boars, creating heterosis or hybrid vigor...The Atlantic says the first generation of pigs that break out of farm enclosures will grow tusks (typically removed by farmers) and start to roam over a 20-mile-plus range if needed. They’ll even turn nocturnal if circumstances require it. And, as is often the case, some human error has played a part: leisure hunters have imported wild pigs for sport hunts. Now, many states offer hotlines where residents can report, well, 30 to 50 wild hogs in their yards—or any other pig sightings.
I keep thinking of that line from Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Nature...finds a way." I have a friend whose family lives in a lovely place in rural Georgia where a bunch of us occasionally visit to talk about writing. They warn us about wandering around at night. Every morning, the yard looks like they'd held a tractor pull. Them pigs are serious animals.
Elsewhere in science, while the president* certainly deserves his share of the blame for the wildfire element of the pandemic, if you're looking for someone more intelligent to blame, Nature has your back on that.
A recent genetic association study identified a gene cluster on chromosome 3 as a risk locus for respiratory failure upon SARS-CoV-2 infection. A new study comprising 3,199 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and controls finds that this is the major genetic risk factor for severe SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization (COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative). Here, we show that the risk is conferred by a genomic segment of ~50 kb that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by ~50% of people in South Asia and ~16% of people in Europe today.
From SciTechDaily:
“It turns out that this gene variant was inherited by modern humans from the Neanderthals when they interbred some 60,000 years ago,” says Hugo Zeberg. “Today, the people who inherited this gene variant are three times more likely to need artificial ventilation if they are infected by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.”
So, 60,000 years ago, some Neanderthals and Homo sapiens got busy and, today, we all have to stay home and not spend time chilling at our locals. As they used to say in Hygiene class, one night of pleasure can lead to millennia of regret.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "No, No, No" (The Nation of Gumbolia): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are some postal workers in 1917, using their cool new motorized scooters to go on their appointed rounds. I'm not sure why this didn't catch on, considering that motorized scooters are the latest things today. History is so cool.
In Copenhagen, they've created a pleasant way to handle the increased rainfall that comes along with the climate crisis. From Fast Company:
The park, called Enghaveparken, originally built in the 1920s in a lower-income neighborhood, was redesigned in a way that preserved its historic design while preparing for the realities of climate change. “It was kind of a Catch-22 situation—how to preserve this park and redo it, and still make room for this insane amount of water,” says Flemming Rafn, a founding partner at Tredje Natur, the Copenhagen-based architecture firm that worked on the project for the City of Copenhagen along with Cowi and Platant.
Some existing spaces in the park, such as a hockey court and an area inside a rose garden, were lowered a few meters to become reservoirs for water. Because the park is built on a slight downslope, the designers realized that they could also build a small levee around three sides of the park, leaving the highest part open so water could flow in from the surrounding neighborhood during a heavy downpour and then be held in place by the levee. That created another challenge, though: The designers had to be able to construct the park to hold water without also walling off visitors on three sides. “It was like, we have a solution, but we can’t get people into the park,” Rafn says. He realized that they could equip the levee with small gates that, during normal weather, serve as park entrances but when triggered by water, automatically close in the event of a major storm.
Republicans like Senator Martha McSally like to dodge the climate crisis by saying that they're in favor of "innovating our way out of it," but this country is woefully behind on that score, too. And, as another hurricane zeroes in on Louisiana, we ought to be embarrassed by that.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Science Alert? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Based on six years of research, the experts behind this study say that the toothless, feather-covered dinosaur would have lived around 72-66 million years ago, growing to some two metres (6.6 feet) in length as an adult. It's what the species tells us about the evolution of the oviraptor family of dinos that's most interesting though: a species losing a functional finger like this hasn't been seen before, and it's evidence of a changing diet and lifestyle." Oksoko avarsan is interesting because the skeletons are very complete and the way they were preserved resting together shows that juveniles roamed together in groups," says palaeontologist Gregory Funston from the University of Edinburgh in the UK.
Gangs of young dinosaurs, roaming the landscape, looking for trouble. "When you're an oviraptor, you're an oviraptor/From your first cigarette, to your last dying breat'." They lived then to make us happy now.
I'll be back on Monday as Confirmation Kabuki returns to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which, I hope, has removed all the spittle left behind on the witness chair by Brett Kavanaugh. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and wear the damn mask.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee begins its confirmation
Senate Judiciary Panel to Begin Barrett Confirmation Hearings Amid Pandemic
Kelsey Snell, NPR
Snell writes: "Judge Amy Coney Barrett is set to give a glimpse of her judicial philosophy as her Supreme Court confirmation hearing begins in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday."
"Courts have a vital responsibility to enforce the rule of law, which is critical to a free society," Barrett is set to say in her opening statement. "But courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life. The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the People. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try."
NPR obtained the opening statement from a source familiar with the hearing preparations who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Barrett, who is President Trump's pick to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, also plans to detail in her opening statement her link to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked.
"When I write an opinion resolving a case, I read every word from the perspective of the losing party," Barrett will say in her statement. "I ask myself how would I view the decision if one of my children was the party I was ruling against: Even though I would not like the result, would I understand that the decision was fairly reasoned and grounded in the law? That is the standard I set for myself in every case, and it is the standard I will follow as long as I am a judge on any court."
Voting "very soon"
The confirmation hearing is moving ahead under exceedingly unusual circumstances, with Election Day looming and a coronavirus outbreak still roiling Washington.
Republicans are aiming to stick to a tight and closely choreographed timeline that would allow Barrett to join the court before Election Day on Nov. 3.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been adamant that the Judiciary Committee hearing should proceed despite three Republican senators, including two members of the committee, testing positive for the coronavirus.
The committee members were among those who attended an event in the White House Rose Garden to announce Barrett's nomination. That event has been at the nexus of the ongoing spread of the coronavirus in GOP political circles.
McConnell has said that the committee is capable of holding hearings that are part virtual and part in person and that the development will not prevent Barrett's confirmation. The Republican leader did postpone floor votes for two weeks after the news of the outbreak.
"We will be voting on the nominee, you know, very soon," McConnell said in a recent appearance on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. "I haven't picked an exact point to bring the nomination up, but it's front and center for the American people."
Confirmation in a pandemic
The committee plans to allow members to appear either in person or virtually and has drastically reduced the number of people allowed in the hearing room. Barrett's family will be seated as a pod, press access will be pared down and hygiene stations with masks, gloves and sanitizer will be accessible throughout the room, according to committee aides.
Those protections have not been enough to assuage protests from Democrats, who say the hearings should be halted. They are calling for committee-wide testing and in-person hearings for a nominee who is chosen by whoever wins the election in November.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has accused Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., of barreling ahead with the confirmation even as committee members Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have been diagnosed with COVID-19.
"Moving forward with the committee process when three Senators have recently tested positive for Covid-19 is irresponsible and dangerous, but doing so without requiring all members to be tested before a hearing in accordance with CDC best practices would be intentionally reckless," Schumer said in a statement. "If Chairman Graham doesn't require testing, it may make some wonder if he just doesn't want to know the results."
Republicans have rejected those calls and are moving ahead with the ambitious schedule that leaves little room for error.
Election politics in the hearing room
Republican leaders have known since shortly after Barrett was nominated that they have the votes to confirm her.
The lack of drama over the potential outcome of a final vote on the Senate floor opens opportunities for both parties to use the hearings as part of a final pitch to voters who are deciding the outcome of both the presidential election and Senate races that could shift the balance of power in Washington for several years.
For Republicans, the four days of hearings will be an opportunity to highlight Barrett's legal career, conservative judicial philosophy and close connection with Scalia. They also plan to draw out political attacks from Democrats, according to several aides familiar with the committee.
Outside groups have rushed to help both parties build not only a case for Barrett but also a political argument to the public. Groups like the Article III Project, which was created to defend Trump's judicial nominees, have been holding press calls, writing opinion pieces and appearing on TV to advocate for Barrett.
"Wrapped within the whole political moment of a presidential election and a Supreme Court confirmation is the very question of, what do we want our structure of government to look like?" said Ian Prior, a senior counselor for the group. "The Senate is really the place where there's going to be the most to gain or to lose based on how those hearings go, how people conduct themselves in those hearings, especially when you're talking about in the middle of a presidential election."
Four Republicans on the Senate committee are running for reelection, many in races that have tightened in recent weeks. Graham, Tillis, Texas' John Cornyn and Iowa's Joni Ernst are all on the ballot in their home states. Democrats hope to use the nationally televised hearings to their advantage, according to several Democratic aides.
Democrats have few options for slowing the nomination or preventing a vote on the Senate floor. However, the hearings create a national stage for members of the Judiciary Committee to make a final pitch to voters.
For Democrats, that means talking first and foremost about health care. They say Barrett could be the key vote for GOP attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act in a case that is scheduled to be argued before the court on Nov. 10, one week after Election Day.
Democrats say Barrett was chosen specifically on the belief that she would dismantle the health care law. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told reporters on a call last week that he has already raised those concerns with Barrett and plans to do so again during the hearing.
"I just wanted her to hear directly from me that what I'm most concerned about is that in the middle of a pandemic, President Trump and 18 Republican state attorneys general are trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act and its protections," Coons said. "The ACA is not just on the docket of the Supreme Court — it's on the ballot in the fall."
Faith and judicial decisions
Democrats also plan to focus on Barrett's stance on abortion. That has become a tricky subject as Republicans accuse Democrats of attacking Barrett for her conservative Catholic faith, not her judicial philosophy.
Republicans, from McConnell to committee members, have spent the past several weeks accusing Democrats of religious bigotry in how they discuss Catholicism and Barrett's faith. They point to questions Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked Barrett during her confirmation hearings in 2017 when she was before the committee for her current post on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. At the time, Feinstein said, "The dogma lives loudly within" Barrett.
Democrats have vowed to avoid discussions of faith with Barrett in recent weeks, but Republicans have focused intently on the issue. Committee members like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, have been on cable news and Twitter denouncing Democrats for a "smear campaign" against Barrett.
But Democrats call the religion discussion an attempt at a political trap that they have vowed to avoid.
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Russian present Vladimir Putin. (photo: Getty Images)
Michael Klare | Talking Tough and Carrying a Radioactive Stick: The Nuclearization of American Diplomacy
Michael Klare, TomDispatch
Klare writes: "On August 21st, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready U.S. B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe."
The MQ-9 Reaper, a drone armed with Hellfire missiles, has been a workhorse in Washington’s forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, but its days could be numbered. According to Air Force Magazine, that service “has grown skeptical that the Reaper could hold its own against advanced nations like Russia and China, which could shoot the non-stealthy aircraft down or jam its transmissions.” While more advanced drones may be coming, however, the Reaper’s still where it’s at. Not so surprisingly, then, that plane is now being repurposed to use not just against Afghans or Iranians or Iraqis or Somalis, but the Chinese.
That fits with the Pentagon’s urge to leave those forever wars behind (as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, has been writing at this site for a surprisingly long time). Its top strategists would prefer instead to focus on recreating a nostalgia-filled twenty-first-century version of the Cold War. One sign of this: in recent naval exercises off the California coast in which three Reapers “performed airstrikes during [a] simulated amphibious assault on San Clemente Island,” the military unit responsible for those planes sported a dramatic new shoulder patch. It displayed a Reaper over a silhouetted all-red map of... well, yes, I guess it must still be “Red China.”
And if you don’t consider that ominous, then check out Klare’s piece today on the nuclearization -- such a term should exist, if it doesn’t already -- of American “diplomacy.” Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Talking Tough and Carrying a Radioactive Stick
The Nuclearization of American Diplomacy
n August 21st, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready U.S. B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe. Although the actual weapons load of those giant bombers was kept secret, each of them is capable of carrying eight AGM-86B nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) in its bomb bay. Those six planes, in other words, could have been carrying 48 city-busting thermonuclear warheads. (The B-52H can also carry 12 ALCMs on external pylons, but none were visible on this occasion.) With such a load alone, in other words, those six planes possessed the capacity to incinerate much of western Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The B-52 Stratofortress is no ordinary warplane. First flown in 1952, it was designed with a single purpose in mind: to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and drop dozens of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Some models were later modified to deliver tons of conventional bombs on targets in North Vietnam and other hostile states, but the remaining B-52s are still largely configured for intercontinental nuclear strikes. With only 44 of them now thought to be in active service at any time, those six dispatched to the edge of Russian territory represented a significant commitment of American nuclear war-making capability.
What in god’s name were they doing there? According to American officials, they were intended to demonstrate this country’s ability to project overwhelming power anywhere on the planet at any time and so remind our NATO allies of Washington’s commitment to their defense. “Our ability to quickly respond and assure allies and partners rests upon the fact that we are able to deploy our B-52s at a moment’s notice,” commented General Jeff Harrigian, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. "Their presence here helps build trust with our NATO allies... and affords us new opportunities to train together through a variety of scenarios."
While Harrigian didn’t spell out just what scenarios he had in mind, the bombers’ European operations suggest that their role involved brandishing a nuclear “stick” in support of an increasingly hostile stance toward Russia. During their sojourn in Europe, for example, two of them flew over the Baltic Sea close to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania that houses several key military installations. That September 25th foray coincided with a U.S. troop buildup in Lithuania about 65 miles from election-embattled Belarus, a Russian neighbor.
Since August 9th, when strongman Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in a presidential election widely considered fraudulent by his people and much of the international community, Belarus has experienced recurring anti-government protests. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country might intervene there if the situation “gets out of control,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has implicitly warned of U.S. intervention if Russia interferes. “We stand by our long-term commitment to support Belarus’ sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as the aspiration of the Belarusian people to choose their leader and to choose their own path, free from external intervention,” he insisted on August 20th. The flight of those B-52s near Belarus can, then, be reasonably interpreted as adding a nuclear dimension to Pompeo’s threat.
In another bomber deployment with no less worrisome implications, on September 4th, three B-52s, accompanied by Ukrainian fighter planes, flew over the Black Sea near the coast of Russian-held Crimea. Like other B-52 sorties near its airspace, that foray prompted the rapid scrambling of Russian interceptor aircraft, which often fly threateningly close to American planes.
At a moment when tensions were mounting between the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebel areas in the eastern part of the country, the deployment of those bombers off Crimea was widely viewed as yet another nuclear-tinged threat to Moscow. As Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), tweeted, “Extraordinary decision to send a nuclear bomber so close to contested and tense areas. This is a real in-your-face statement.”
And provocative as they were, those were hardly the only forays by U.S. nuclear bombers in recent months. B-52s also ventured near Russian air space in the Arctic and within range of Russian forces in Syria. Meanwhile other B-52s, as well as nuclear-capable B-1 and B-2 bombers, have flown similar missions near Chinese positions in the South China Sea and the waters around the disputed island of Taiwan. Never since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 have so many U.S. nuclear bombers been engaged in “show-of-force” operations of this sort.
“Demonstrating Resolve” and Coercing Adversaries
States have long engaged in military operations to intimidate other powers. Once upon a distant time, this would have been called “gunboat diplomacy” and naval vessels would have been the instruments of choice for such missions. The arrival of nuclear arms made such operations far more dangerous. This didn’t, however, stop the U.S. from using weaponry of this sort as tools of intimidation throughout the Cold War. In time, however, even nuclear strategists began condemning acts of “nuclear coercion,” arguing that such weaponry was inappropriate for any purpose other than “deterrence” -- that is, using the threat of “massive retaliation” to prevent another country from attacking you. In fact, a deterrence-only posture eventually became Washington’s official policy, even if the temptation to employ nukes as political cudgels never entirely disappeared from its strategic thinking.
At a more hopeful time, President Barack Obama sought to downsize this country’s nuclear arsenal and prevent the use of such weapons for anything beyond deterrence (although his administration also commenced an expensive “modernization” of that arsenal). In his widely applauded Nobel Peace Prize speech of April 5, 2009, Obama swore to “put an end to Cold War thinking” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” Unfortunately, Donald Trump has sought to move the dial in the opposite direction, including increasing the use of nukes as coercive instruments.
The president’s deep desire to bolster the role of nuclear weapons in national security was first spelled out in his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review of February 2018. In addition to calling for the accelerated modernization of the nuclear arsenal, it also endorsed the use of such weapons to demonstrate American “resolve” -- in other words, a willingness to go to the nuclear brink over political differences. A large and diverse arsenal was desirable, the document noted, to “demonstrate resolve through the positioning of forces, messaging, and flexible response options.” Nuclear bombers were said to be especially useful for such a purpose: “Flights abroad,” it stated, “display U.S. capabilities and resolve, providing effective signaling for deterrence and assurance, including in times of tension.”
Ever since, the Trump administration has been deploying the country’s nuclear bomber fleet of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s with increasing frequency to “display U.S. capabilities and resolve,” particularly with respect to Russia and China.
The supersonic B-1B Lancer, developed in the 1970s, was originally meant to replace the B-52 as the nation’s premier long-range nuclear bomber. After the Cold War ended, however, it was converted to carry conventional munitions and is no longer officially designated as a nuclear delivery system -- though it could be reconfigured for this purpose at any time. The B-2 Spirit, with its distinctive flying-wing design, was the first U.S. bomber built with “stealth” capabilities (meant to avoid detection by enemy radar systems) and is configured to carry both nuclear and conventional weaponry. For the past year or so, those two planes plus the long-lived B-52 have been used on an almost weekly basis as the radioactive “stick” of U.S. diplomacy around the world.
Nuclear Forays in the Arctic and the Russian Far East
When flying to Europe in August, those six B-52s from North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base took a roundabout route north of Greenland (which President Trump had unsuccessfully offered to purchase in 2019). They finally descended over the Barents Sea within easy missile-firing range of Russia’s vast naval complex at Murmansk, the home for most of its ballistic missile submarines. For Hans Kristensen of FAS, that was another obvious and “pointed message at Russia.”
Strategically speaking, Washington had largely ignored the Arctic until a combination of factors -- global warming, accelerated oil and gas drilling in the region, and increased Russian and Chinese military activities there -- sparked growing interest. As global temperatures have risen, the Arctic ice cap has been melting at an ever-faster pace, allowing energy firms to exploit the region’s extensive hydrocarbon resources. This, in turn, has led to feverish efforts by the region’s littoral states, led by Russia, to lay claim to such resources and build up their military capabilities there.
In light of these developments, the Trump administration, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has called for an expansion of this country’s Arctic military forces. In a speech delivered at the Arctic Council in Rovaniemi, Finland, in May 2019, Pompeo warned of Russia’s growing military stance in the region and pledged a strong American response to it. “Under President Trump,” he declared. “We are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area.”
In line with this, the Pentagon has deployed U.S. warships to the Arctic on a regular basis, while engaging in ever more elaborate military exercises there. These have included Cold Response 2020, conducted this spring in Norway’s far north within a few hundred miles of those key Russian bases at Murmansk. For the most part, however, the administration has relied on nuclear-bomber forays to demonstrate its opposition to an increasing Russian role there. In November 2019, for example, three B-52s, accompanied by Norwegian F-16 fighter jets, approached the Russian naval complex at Murmansk, a move meant to demonstrate the Pentagon’s capacity to launch nuclear-armed missiles at one of that country’s most critical military installations.
If the majority of such nuclear forays have occurred near Norway’s far north, the Pentagon has not neglected Russia’s far eastern territory, home of its Pacific Fleet, either. In an unusually brazen maneuver, this May a B-1B bomber flew over the Sea of Okhotsk, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by Russian territory on three sides (Siberia to the north, Sakhalin Island to the west, and the Kamchatka Peninsula to the east).
As if to add insult to injury, the Air Force dispatched two B-52H bombers over the Sea of Okhotsk in June -- another first for an aircraft of that type. Needless to say, incursions in such a militarily sensitive area led to the rapid scrambling of Russian fighter aircraft.
The South China Sea and Taiwan
A similar, equally provocative pattern can be observed in the East and South China Seas. Even as President Trump has sought, largely unsuccessfully, to negotiate a trade deal with Beijing, his administration has become increasingly antagonistic towards the Chinese leadership. On July 23rd, Secretary of State Pompeo delivered a particularly hostile speech in the presidential library of Richard Nixon, the very commander-in-chief who first reopened relations with communist China. Pompeo called on American allies to suspend normal relations with Beijing and, like Washington, treat it as a hostile power, much the way the Soviet Union was viewed during the Cold War.
While administration rhetoric amped up, the Department of Defense has been bolstering its capacity to engage and defeat Beijing in any future conflict. In its 2018 National Defense Strategy, as the U.S. military’s "forever wars" dragged on, the Pentagon suddenly labeled China and Russia the two greatest threats to American security. More recently, it singled out China alone as the overarching menace to American national security. “In this era of great-power competition,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper declared this September, “the Department of Defense has prioritized China, then Russia, as our top strategic competitors.”
The Pentagon’s efforts have largely been focused on the South China Sea, where China has established a network of small military installations on artificial islands created by dredging sand from the sea-bottom near some of the reefs and atolls it claims. American leaders have never accepted the legitimacy of this island-building project and have repeatedly called upon Beijing to dismantle the bases. Such efforts have, however, largely fallen on deaf ears and it’s now evident that the Pentagon is considering military means to eliminate the island threat.
In early July, the U.S. Navy conducted its most elaborate maneuvers to date in those waters, deploying two aircraft carriers there -- the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan -- plus an escort fleet of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. While there, the two carriers launched hundreds of combat planes in simulated attacks on military bases on the islands the Chinese had essentially built.
At the same time, paratroopers from the Army’s 25th Infantry Division were flown from their home base in Alaska to the Pacific island of Guam in what was clearly meant as a simulated air assault on a (presumably Chinese) military installation. And just to make sure the leadership in Beijing understood that, in any actual encounter with U.S. forces, Chinese resistance would be countered by the maximum level of force deemed necessary, the Pentagon also flew a B-52 bomber over those carriers as they engaged in their provocative maneuvers.
And that was hardly the first visit of a nuclear bomber to the South China Sea. The Pentagon has, in fact, been deploying such planes there on a regular basis since the beginning of 2020. In April, for example, the Air Force dispatched two B-1B Lancers on a 32-hour round-trip from their home at Ellsworth Air Force Base, North Dakota, to that sea and back as a demonstration of its ability to project power even in the midst of the pandemic President Trump likes to call “the Chinese plague.”
Meanwhile, tensions have grown over the status of the island of Taiwan, which China views as a breakaway part of the country. Beijing has been pressuring its leaders to foreswear any moves toward independence, while the Trump administration tacitly endorses just such a future by doing the previously unimaginable -- notably, by sending high-level officials, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar among them, on visits to the island and by promising deliveries of increasingly sophisticated weapons. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has upped its military presence in that part of the Pacific, too. The Navy has repeatedly dispatched missile-armed destroyers on “freedom of navigation” missions through the Taiwan Strait, while other U.S. warships have conducted elaborate military exercises in nearby waters.
Needless to say, such provocative steps have alarmed Beijing, which has responded by increasing the incursions of its military aircraft into airspace claimed by Taiwan. To make sure that Beijing fully appreciates the depth of American “resolve” to resist any attempt to seize Taiwan by force, the Pentagon has accompanied its other military moves around the island with -- you guessed it -- flights of B-52 bombers.
Playing with Fire
And where will all this end? As the U.S. sends nuclear-capable bombers on increasingly provocative flights ever closer to Russian and Chinese territory, the danger of an accident or mishap is bound to grow. Sooner or later, a fighter plane from one of those countries is going to get too close to an American bomber and a deadly incident will occur. And what will happen if a nuclear bomber, armed with advanced missiles and electronics (even conceivably nuclear weapons), is in some fashion downed? Count on one thing: in Donald Trump’s America the calls for devastating retaliation will be intense and a major conflagration cannot be ruled out.
Bluntly put, dispatching nuclear-capable B-52s on simulated bombing runs against Chinese and Russian military installations is simply nuts. Yes, it must scare the bejesus out of Chinese and Russian officials, but it will also prompt them to distrust any future peaceful overtures from American diplomats while further bolstering their own military power and defenses. Eventually, we will all find ourselves in an ever more dangerous and insecure world with the risk of Armageddon lurking just around the corner.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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In this photo taken April 21, 2017, President Donald Trump looks out an Oval Office window at the White House. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Trump Slight Against Gold Star Families Adds to Military Woes
Rebecca Kheel, The Hill
Kheel writes: "President Trump has sparked a new wave of criticism over his treatment of members of the military after suggesting he may have caught the coronavirus from Gold Star families."
The latest row comes after a series of scandals in which Trump was accused of disparaging service members, giving his political rivals an opening and calling into question whether he can hold on to a bloc of voters seen as central to his base.
With the presidential election now less than a month away and Trump trailing in both national polls and key battleground states, the president can ill afford more incidents that generate negative headlines and risk alienating any service members, veterans or other military supporters.
“If the polls can be believed, he’s in the stop-the-bleeding phase of the operation,” said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who was a White House adviser to former President George W. Bush. “And he keeps nicking himself, sometimes with paper cuts, sometimes with deeper slices. But whatever it is, it's not the thing that he needs.”
The latest self-inflicted wound came when Trump said he thinks an event at the White House that honored families of slain service members could be the source of his COVID-19 infection.
“I figured there would be a chance that I would catch it,” Trump said in a phone interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. “Sometimes I'd be with, in groups of, for instance, Gold Star families. I met with Gold Star families. I didn't want to cancel that. But they all came in, and they all talked about their son and daughter and father.”
“And I can't back up, Maria, and say, ‘Give me room. I want room. Give me 12 feet. Stay 12 feet away when you talk.’ They come within an inch of my face sometimes,” he added.
“They want to hug me, and they want to kiss me. And they do. And frankly, I'm not telling them to back up. I'm not doing it. But I did say it's like — it's obviously dangerous. It's a dangerous thing I guess if you go by the COVID thing,” he said.
Trump appeared to be alluding to a Sept. 27 event at the White House for Gold Star families. One person who was at that event is known to have since tested positive for the virus: Coast Guard Vice Commandant Adm. Charles Ray.
None of the Gold Star families are known to have since tested positive as of Friday.
Doctors have not disclosed how or when Trump may have gotten the virus, and White House officials have repeatedly refused to answer questions on when his last negative coronavirus test was.
“Considering it has been 13 days since the event, all Gold Star family are all doing well and exhibit no symptoms of COVID-19,” Timothy Davis, president and chief executive of the Greatest Generations Foundation, a nonprofit that helped families attend the event, said in a statement.
All Gold Star family attendees were tested by the White House medical team before entering the building and tested negative, he added.
The White House has sought to clean up Trump’s comments. Communications director Alyssa Farah told reporters he was not blaming Gold Star families for his infection but rather laying out a timeline of events within the period in which he might have been exposed.
“His point was merely that in the time frame that he was potentially exposed, there were a number of different venues he'd been at and individuals he had interacted with that it could have come from — and by no means are blaming anyone who was present,” Farah said. “And we did take a lot of precautions for that event. So based on contact tracing, the data we have, we don't think it arose from that event."
But Trump did not call out any other recent event specifically, such as the Sept. 26 White House ceremony where he announced his latest Supreme Court nominee. Dozens of attendees and their contacts have tested positive for COVID-19 since that event, which top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci referred to as a “superspreader” Friday.
Nor was it the first time Trump appeared to blame military-connected individuals for the White House outbreak.
After close aide Hope Hicks tested positive at the beginning of the month, Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that “it’s very, very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement.”
“And they come over to you, and they — they want to hug you, and they want to kiss you because we really have done a good job for them. And you get close, and things happen,” he said.
After Trump’s Gold Star families comments, congressional Democrats pounced.
“Can you believe that he would say such a thing?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked at her weekly press conference.
The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, called the remarks “a shocking statement even for this president.”
“Instead of casting aspersions on the families of the fallen for infecting him, President Trump should be transparent about his own actions, who he met with and when, and release detailed medical information including a timeline and do some real contact tracing to help stop the spread,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said in a statement. “Stop blaming, deflecting and denying, Mr. President, and start leading.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Army veteran who lost both her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, tweeted that Trump “has no shame,” while Marine veteran Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) tweeted that Trump blaming Gold Star families “when he has been flouting medical advice since day one of the pandemic would be laughable if it weren't so reprehensible.”
“The President who refused to stand up to Putin in defense of our troops is now offloading blame on Gold Star families, who've sacrificed everything for our nation,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in his own tweet. “It’s time for this President to show respect for our military & take responsibility for his failed #COVID response.”
Warner appeared to be alluding to an alleged Russian plot to offer the Taliban bounties for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan. Reports about the bounties over the summer caused a firestorm for Trump, who has said he never raised the issue in calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump also faced a scandal last month over allegations first reported by The Atlantic that he called U.S. troops who died in battle “suckers” and “losers.” He has denied the reporting but fanned the flames of that scandal by then accusing Pentagon leaders of deciding to send forces into war to appease defense contractors.
The successive scandals have given the Biden campaign ammunition to attack. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden hit Trump over the “suckers” and “losers” comments at the first presidential debate, though Trump quickly pivoted to attacking Biden’s son Hunter.
At the vice presidential debate on Wednesday, Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), cited all of those scandals — as well as Trump dismissing troops’ brain injuries in Iraq earlier this year as “headaches” and his repeated criticism of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for being a prisoner of war — to argue Trump has a “pattern” of disparaging the military. Vice President Pence defended Trump against “slanders” he described as “absurd.”
Trump has weathered controversies over his treatment of the military and veterans before. His criticism of McCain dates back to the 2016 election, and during the same cycle, Trump also feuded with a Gold Star family.
But Trump’s political situation is more precarious now, Feaver said.
“It's hard for anything to penetrate and sink in nowadays,” he said. But the White House “went to some length to try to walk that statement back, clarify what the president meant to say, etc., etc., which they don't bother for many of his other equally offensive comments. And so that tells you that the White House political people understand that this is toxic in a way so that even though it's hard for anything to sink in, it may still matter.”
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Wildfires in the western United States. (photo: Getty Images)
Suspicion in Deadly California Fire Again Turns to PG&E
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Fire investigators looking into what caused a wildfire that killed four people in far Northern California have taken possession of equipment belonging to Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility reported Friday."
PG&E said in a filing with the Public Utilities Commission that investigators with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection seized some of its electrical equipment near where the Zogg Fire started Sept. 27.
The fire erupted in Shasta County during high winds and quickly grew, killing four people in the community of Igo, population 600. It later spread to neighboring Tehama County. As of Friday, it had scorched 88 square miles (nearly 228 square kilometers) and destroyed more than 200 buildings, about half of them homes. It was almost fully contained.
The utility said it does not have access to the evidence collected by Cal Fire, which has yet to determine a cause for the fire.
PG&E, the nation’s largest utility, recently emerged from bankruptcy stemming from financial fallout from several devastating wildfires caused by its utility equipment that killed more than 100 people and destroyed more than 27,000 homes and other buildings in 2017 and 2018.
Customers in the area where the fire started, near Zogg Mine Road and Jenny Bird Lane north of Igo, are served by a 12,000-volt PG&E circuit. On the day the Zogg Fire began, the utility's automated equipment in the area “reported alarms and other activity between approximately 2:40 p.m. and 3:06 p.m.," PG&E told regulators. The line was then de-activated.
The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office identified one of the victims as Alaina Michelle Rowe, 45, who was found dead along a road on Sept. 28. The sheriff's department said another victim was a minor but did not report the identity. KRCR-TV in Redding reported that Rowe and her eight-year-old daughter Feyla died as they tried to escape the fire.
The two other victims, also found a day after the fire started, are Karin King, 79, who was found on the road where the fire started, and Kenneth Vossen, 52, who suffered serious burns that day and later died in a hospital.
PG&E said in a statement that it is cooperating with the investigation.
“We recognize the tragic losses sustained as a result of this year’s fire season and are thankful, as always, for the efforts of the first responders who have worked tirelessly to contain the fires and protect the lives and property of California residents," the statement said.
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Search and rescue teams in Azerbaijan. (photo: Reuters)
Nagorno-Karabakh Truce Frays as Both Sides Allege Attacks
Nailia Bagirova and Nvard Hovhannisyan, Reuters
Excerpt: "Azerbaijan and Armenia accused each other of serious violations and crimes against civilians, and Azerbaijan also said it had launched airstrikes as a day-old humanitarian ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh looked increasingly frayed on Sunday."
The Russian-brokered ceasefire, clinched after marathon talks in Moscow, was meant to halt fighting to allow ethnic Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh and Azeri forces to swap prisoners and war dead.
The talks were the first diplomatic contact between the two since fighting over the mountainous enclave erupted on Sept. 27, killing hundreds of people. Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but is populated and governed by ethnic Armenians.
Both sides accused one another of breaking the ceasefire almost immediately, and Azerbaijan gave the impression in public comments from top officials that it saw it as only a brief breathing space anyway.
Azerbaijan, making the first claim of an attack since the truce, said on Sunday it had carried out airstrikes against an ethnic Armenian regiment, inflicting heavy losses. Reuters could not independently verify that claim.
A spokesman for the leader of Nagorno-Karabakh told Reuters he did not have information about the alleged attack.
Earlier on Sunday, Azerbaijan accused Armenia of heavily shelling a residential area in Ganja, its second largest city, in the early hours of the morning, and of hitting an apartment building.
The Azeri Prosecutor General’s Office said nine people had been killed and 34 wounded in the attack. Reuters could not independently verify Azeri assertions about the number of deaths or injuries.
A Reuters photographer in Ganja saw rescue workers carrying one dead person from the ruins of the apartment building on Sunday morning. The structure had been almost levelled. An excavator was clearing the debris.
Buildings and cars in the immediate vicinity had also been severely damaged.
CASUALTIES MOUNT
Baku says more than 40 civilians have been killed and 200 injured since the start of the conflict.
The Armenian defence ministry called the Azeri allegations about the attack on Ganja “an absolute lie” and accused Azerbaijan of continuing to shell populated areas inside Karabakh, including Stepanakert, the region’s biggest city.
Reuters footage from Stepanakert showed a small brick house damaged by shelling, its windows shattered and its roof caved in. The Karabakh authorities said at least five civilians had been killed since the ceasefire was supposed to take effect on Saturday and that 429 servicemen had been killed since fighting erupted last month.
Azerbaijan accused Armenia of also launching an unsuccessful rocket attack on an Azeri hydro-electric power station in Mingachevir. Ethnic Armenian forces in Karabakh denied the assertion.
Arayik Haratyunyan, the leader of ethnic Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, early on Sunday described the overall situation as relatively calm, but said he did not know how long it would last and that the frontline remained tense.
He accused Azeri forces of trying to unsuccessfully take control of the town of Hadrut, and said the process of the two sides exchanging prisoners should have started on Sunday, but that it was unclear if and when that would happen.
Renewed fighting in the decades-old conflict has raised fears of a wider war drawing in Turkey, a close ally of Azerbaijan, and Russia, which has a defence pact with Armenia.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu asked his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in a phone call on Sunday to press Armenia to abide by the terms of the truce, Turkey’s foreign ministry said.
Armenia’s foreign minister was due in Moscow on Monday for talks with officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk group led by France, Russia and the United States.
The fighting is the worst since a 1991-94 war that killed about 30,000 people and ended with a ceasefire that has been violated repeatedly.
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'Carbon capture is still in its infancy.' (photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images)
Carbon Capture 'Moonshot' Moves Closer as Billions of Dollars Pour in
Oliver Milman, Grist
Milman writes: "As the world dices with the climate emergency, businesses and governments are starting to push funding toward technology that aims to trap planet-heating gases rather than let them saturate the atmosphere."
Carbon capture is a controversial idea, attacked as a costly distraction from stopping emissions occurring in the first place.
But last month, the International Energy Agency said it was an imperative part of the mix, warning that it would be “virtually impossible” for the world to hit climate targets without capturing and storing emissions generated from factories, power plants, transportation, and other sources. The transition to renewable energy, such as solar and wind, would not cut emissions in time, the IEA said.
In an eye-catching recent deal, a consortium including Amazon and Microsoft invested in CarbonCure Technologies, a Canadian firm seeking to slash the carbon dioxide emissions of concrete. Producing cement, the key ingredient in concrete, creates so much CO2 that if the industry were a country, only China and the United States would emit more over the course of a year.
CarbonCure works with nearly 300 concrete producers to inject captured CO2 into their product. The injected gas chemically transforms into limestone, reinforcing the concrete. Amazon will use the concrete in its buildings, including its vast new headquarters in Virginia.
Currently, CarbonCure is injecting CO2 normally used in products such as carbonated drinks, but hopes to “close the loop” by capturing it from cement production in order to reduce global concrete emissions by 500 million metric tons by the end of the decade.
“The funding from Amazon will be critical to rapidly scale up the solution we’ve developed,” said Christie Gamble, the director of sustainability at CarbonCure. To make a significant dent in pollution, emissions from concrete will have to be captured, or new non-concrete materials will need to be used on a vast scale, even as countries such as China and India rapidly build new infrastructure.
“Is that possible? Absolutely. Will it be challenging? You bet,” said Gamble on the prospects for capturing carbon from concrete production. “This investment is one that indicates a huge amount of optimism of what is possible.”
This broad sweep of technology can be split roughly into two types — air conditioner-like machines that can suck CO2 directly from the air; and infrastructure that captures emissions at source and stores them, usually underground.
Carbon capture is still in its infancy — there are only about 20 projects in commercial use worldwide, according to the IEA — but billions of dollars in investment is flowing into the sector. Microsoft has announced a “moonshot” climate plan that will involve direct air capture of CO2 and biomass energy carbon capture and storage, where wood chips are burned and the resulting carbon is injected into rock formations.
Norway is launching a full-scale carbon capture and storage project, named Longship after the Viking vessels, while a direct air capture project for the Permian Basin in the southwestern United States is doubling in size and aims to suck up 1 million tons of CO2 a year. The U.S. government is pitching in, recently awarding $72 million to two dozen different carbon capture initiatives.
“We are at a tipping point and no one knows quite how it will tip,” said Klaus Lackner, an Arizona State University expert in the field who invented “mechanical trees” that remove CO2 from the air. Lackner said the world was likely to surge beyond the 1.5 degree C (2.7 degree F) global heating limit set out in the Paris climate agreement. “We are living in an overshoot world where 1.5 degrees C will be missed,” he said. “We are going to have to step harder on the brakes and we are going to have to get carbon back.”
But many environmentalists are not keen on an idea that would burnish the green credentials of fossil fuel companies by installing carbon capture technology on power plants. “Carbon capture and storage is not a solution to the climate crisis, it is part of the problem,” said Karen Orenstein, the climate and energy programme director at Friends of the Earth. “This extraordinarily expensive pipe dream is just false rhetoric propagated by the fossil fuel industry in an attempt to save itself.”
Critics point to the example of Petra Nova, a $1 billion flagship carbon capture project in Texas that was mothballed this year after the crashing price of oil made it economically unviable (supporters of the project note that it captured 92 percent of the CO2 that passed through it, exceeding expectations).
Lackner said that retrofitting aging “zombie” power plants with carbon capture units was often pointless, with renewables waiting in the wings to replace fossil fuels. The technology should instead be used, he said, for stubbornly persistent pollution coming from shipping, aviation, and trucks that could not easily be removed by the shift to cleaner energy.
“Scaling up is the issue and so it needs investment and it needs regulation,” Lackner said. “We’ve ignored the problem and now we are in a hole. We have to stop digging but we have to fill the hole up, too.”
Lackner said the industrial capacity for widespread carbon capture exists, but it required political will. “Much like … sewage in the 18th century, we don’t see the value of cleaning up a mess until it hurts us,” he said. “There’s going to be irreversible harm: Species are going to go extinct, seas will rise, and we won’t be able to unmelt glaciers. We will get there, the question is how much collateral damage we will do on the way.”
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