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Bill McKibben | The Holidays, the Coronavirus, and the Marshmallow Test
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas - thanks to Pfizer (with BioNTech) and Moderna, these holidays are going to be the real marshmallow test for Americans, the chance to find out, at the end of this terrible year, what we're still made of."
The famous Stanford psychology experiment has been an irresistible analogy for pundits ever since the coronavirus crisis began. Paul Krugman, for instance, wrote in the Times, in June, that measures such as imposing social distancing were much like offering a young child a marshmallow, but telling her that if she can refrain from eating it for fifteen minutes she’ll get a second one. “You have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread,” he wrote.
But back then the analogy wasn’t quite right. Our behavior during the first wave of the pandemic—which was pretty exemplary, at least in the cities that were initially hit hardest—was less a matter of will power than of sheer terror. The marshmallow was poisoned; if you ate it, you might die. And, as the second and third waves came on, the analogy faltered in a different way: there was no fifteen-minute time limit. As the summer and then the fall ground on, it began to seem as if we were trapped in a never-ending saga, and each week one could feel oneself weakening.
Some of the choices made were baffling: did anyone really need to head to South Dakota to join with nearly half a million motorcyclists (as opposed to just riding a motorcycle, alone, which is about as covid-safe an activity as it gets)? But birthdays and weddings are parts of being human, and it’s hard to pass them up. Changing them around is possible—our family hosted a wedding with six people in attendance, all of whom had quarantined for two weeks, and, if it wasn’t what the bride and groom had imagined, it turned out to be wonderful in a whole different, intense way. (One comes, among other things, to really know and trust one’s new in-laws.) Still, the desire for things to just be normal is a powerful force.
It’s easy to place the blame for our weakening resolve on the current occupant of the White House—a man so unable to control his vanity that he arranged a series of rallies that possibly contributed to the spread of the virus during his campaign. But the same trend was under way in Belgium, too, and in Italy, Peru, and other places safely beyond his writ. Even where I live, in Vermont, which has fared far better than any state, in large part because its levels of social trust are anomalously high, coronavirus numbers have begun to climb in recent weeks, with many of the cases linked to a hockey rink near the State House. (Fortunately, the state has had just five covid-related deaths since July, and currently there are only three infected patients in the I.C.U.) Perhaps an indefinite suspension of normalcy turns out to be too much to ask: of hard-pressed restaurant owners and salon owners, and also just of people in general. Life in a high-consumer society has not, it turns out, been great preparation for delaying gratification. We want.
So the news from the pharmaceutical giants that they have vaccines in the works that seem to be more than ninety-per-cent effective, and safe to boot, represents therapy not only for our immune systems but also our flagging will power. (On Monday, Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced that their vaccine has so far proved seventy-per-cent effective on average in trials, and it is cheaper and easier to store than the Pfizer and Moderna versions.) Suddenly, the picture is different. Now it’s not having to contemplate a world without Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas: it’s having to contemplate a world without one Thanksgiving and one Hanukkah and one Christmas. Then, all signs indicate that, sometime next winter or spring, a pharmacist will stick a needle in your arm (twice), and things will start slowly returning to normal—and our job is to get through to that singular event.
That should be doable. Anyone can understand that, in the holiday season of 2020, love of extended family and friends means staying safely at a distance. Anyone can gear themselves up for wearing a mask if the duration is measured in months that you can count on your fingers. The first health-care workers may get vaccinated in mid-December—that’s two or three weekends away. Give yourself twenty or so weekends without parties—anyone can do that. With an end in sight, our job is to get everyone around us safely there: it was devastatingly sad that people died of covid-19 last March, but such deaths would be tragic in a different way this March.
We have reason to feel pride in our initial response to the virus: moved not just by fear but by the heroism of health-care and frontline workers, we did the right thing for a while. We also have reason to feel shame: as a society, we couldn’t figure out how to get everyone to take the simple measures necessary to protect the most vulnerable as the pandemic wore on. But now we have a tie-breaking opportunity to get it right. If you keep your mask on, there’s no chance you’re going to eat that marshmallow.
Travelers walk through Newark International Airport on November 21 in Newark, New Jersey. (photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)
Why a Negative Covid-19 Test Before Thanksgiving Isn't an All-Clear
Brian Resnick, Vox
Resnick writes: "More frequent Covid-19 testing is one key to help end the pandemic. But as individuals, we can't rely on testing alone to protect ourselves and others."
READ MORE
Rev. Raphael Warnock greets guests during a campaign event in Atlanta, Nov. 3. (photo: Tom Williams/AP)
Democrats' New Plan to Win Georgia's Crucial Senate Seats in a Pandemic Is to Actually Knock on Doors
Zahra Hirji and Ryan Brooks, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "With the Senate majority up for grabs, supporters of Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock are embracing a strategy in the January runoffs that Democrats largely avoided during the general election due to the coronavirus pandemic: door-knocking."
"It’s about having high-quality face-to-face conversations, and we tend to be able to do that by knocking on people’s doors," said the executive director of New Georgia Project.
The stakes couldn’t be any higher in Georgia. After losing competitive races in Maine, Iowa, and the Carolinas, Democrats need to win both seats in the state to clinch a working majority in a 50-50 Senate with Vice President–elect Kamala Harris serving as a tiebreaker. Then, and only then, will they have even a chance at passing the kind of legislation needed to achieve President-elect Joe Biden’s plans for tackling racial inequality, revving up the pandemic-struck economy, slashing climate pollution, and more.
Democrats are optimistic after Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992. But they know it’s going to take a lot of work because they did not secure down-ballot victories for Ossoff and Warnock the first time around. Moreover, Republicans have historically fared better in the state’s runoff elections, where there’s a dropoff in the number of voters who participate compared to general elections.
So a growing number of progressive organizers are masking up to register new eligible voters and motivate people to go back to the polls despite surging coronavirus infections and hospitalizations.
More than 250,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, hospitalizations nationwide are at an all-time high, and the next weeks will likely be brutal. And while new cases are currently not as high in Georgia as they were in July, infections are on the rise.
“I think we’re still trying to figure out exactly what the right formula is,” said Brionté McCorkle, executive director of the environmental group Georgia Conservation Voters. “There’s a lot of digital engagement in response to COVID-19, but I think that folks are seeing that there was a loss by not being at the doors.”
The revived strategy in Georgia is markedly different than the Democratic Party’s approach to canvassing during the general election. While the pandemic spread across the country in the lead up to Nov. 3, Democrats steered away from in-person canvassing and relied heavily on digital field programs like phone-banking and texting to turn out their voters. Some national Democrats, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have pointed to sparse field programs in post-election analyses of why the party underperformed expectations in House and Senate races.
“The decision to stop knocking doors is one people need to grapple with and analyze,” she tweeted in the days after the election.
Evan Weber, the political director and cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s analysis.
“Democrats, somewhat wisely in line with public health standards, didn’t invest heavily in field operations in the middle of a pandemic,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I think there were some decisions made by party operatives where we could’ve done some of that in a safe way; there was major field handicap that hurt Democrats of all political ideologies.”
The push for in-person campaigning is not coming directly from either of the Democratic Senate campaigns, at least not publicly.
“Rising COVID cases are a huge consideration here and how can we do this safely,” an Ossoff campaign spokesperson told BuzzFeed News about door-knocking. “That’s going to be a decision we’ll have to make down the road.”
Warnock’s campaign has largely focused its volunteers on phone-banking and dropping off literature at voters’ doors. “Georgians’ safety comes first, and we try to have a hyperawareness around the precautions we’re taking related to the virus,” a spokesperson for Warnock’s campaign told BuzzFeed News.
The two Democratic challengers have opted for drive-in rallies and outdoor events, sometimes together, where masking and social distancing is enforced.
Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the Republican incumbents, are going all in on in-person campaigning, often without basic COVID-19 precautions. At a “Save Our Majority” rally last week featuring Loeffler, for example, many maskless supporters gathered in a windowless room.
Starting this week, Vice President Mike Pence is joining Perdue and Loeffler on a bus tour around the state. Neither of the Republican Senate campaigns responded to requests for comment.
Door-knocking has always been a core part of campaigning for former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan group that has registered thousands of new voters across the state. The mesh of in-person and digital efforts was a resounding success, with the group getting much of the credit for helping spur record turnout among Black communities statewide. The organization has around 100 organizers on the ground and plans to scale up its field program during the runoffs.
“It’s about having high-quality face-to-face conversations, and we tend to be able to do that by knocking on people’s doors,” executive director Nsé Ufot told BuzzFeed News. “We try to have high-quality conversations where people get to be reflective and talk about the fears and the hopes that they have. That’s our central tactic, and sometimes that’s in one-on-one conversations at doors; sometimes that’s at small group meetings in church basements, or housing projects, or cafés with a number of community leaders.”
New Georgia Project has already identified over 100,000 new eligible Georgian voters to register to vote ahead of the Dec. 7 deadline.
For many other groups though, the focus on in-person get-out-the-vote efforts is a shift from the general election. In some cases, New Georgia Project is helping make this possible.
“We’ve largely relied on larger groups like New Georgia Project to be able to do that door-to-door work,” said McCorkle of Georgia Conservation Voters.
“We are actually introducing COVID-safe canvassing because what we’ve seen in the South is door-to-door contact is still one of the more successful ways to engage voters,” Shanté Wolfe, coordinated campaigns director at the Sunrise Movement, told BuzzFeed News. “In this case, it will be doorstep to doorstep to do social distancing.”
And the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced last week that it was committing to a multimillion-dollar field effort that would include on-the-ground field organizers to help turnout and voter registration efforts.
In one of House Democrats’ only pickups of the election, Rep.-elect Carolyn Bourdeaux’s suburban Atlanta campaign fully switched its voter outreach programs to digital as the pandemic spread. Now, as Bourdeaux’s team focuses on assisting Ossoff and Warnock, her campaign manager, Shelbi Dantic, told BuzzFeed News that it’s open to the possibility of in-person campaigning.
“Moving forward, and as we’re thinking about how Carolyn’s campaign and our field teams plug into the runoff, I think there’s an opportunity to feel really good about if we are knocking doors to get people engaged in a runoff election, which I think is going to take an extra step or two to get them to go out to the polls,” she told BuzzFeed News.
Dantic added that the campaign would follow the Senate campaigns’ direction, but that they weren’t completely opposed to canvassing in person.
But the uptick in coronavirus cases is an ever-present worry. To stay safe, organizers are donning personal protective equipment, such as masks and face shields, and trying to meet outdoors.
“We’re going to be having our first full runoff hub meeting in a park on Sunday,” Wolfe said. “We’re doing it rain or shine because we understand the urgency of this moment and we’re not afraid of a little rain.”
The pandemic is also a big reason some local organizers are telling people from out of state to stay home and leave the ground efforts to them.
“We’re not encouraging anyone to come here from out of state. We know that our medical infrastructure in south Georgia isn’t up to par, and we understand that rates of the virus are increasing. So we’re encouraging people from out of state to text with us, and that robust program is moving,” said Britney Whaley, a political strategist with the Working Families Party.
“If people are from here and they want to get involved and canvass,” she said, “that program is happening, and we’ve padded our staff to make sure that our folks are safe.”
The organization is dedicating certain staffers as “safety captains” who will take the temperatures of canvassers and distribute literature to members to avoid big gatherings; it is also planning some outdoor meetings.
“We’re giving out additional PPE to canvassers. This may sound extra, but if people answer the doors with no mask, we’re asking them to close the door so we can leave them some so that they can put on the mask and then we can engage with them from 6 feet away,” Whaley said. “If they don’t want to because they’re at home, then we just move on to the next door. There’s no pressure for our canvassers to be in someone’s face or engage.”
National progressive groups are now focusing their attention on the Georgia races even without sending in staffers and volunteers.
At the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund, executive director Kevin Curtis is encouraging donors and members to give money. “Give money to the candidates, give money to Stacey Abrams’ group, give money to the Georgia Democratic Party, all of which is going to be focused on getting people to turn out to vote,” he told BuzzFeed News.
Donating to Ossoff, Warnock, and the Georgia Senate Victory Fund all currently feature prominently on the online GiveGreen platform, a collaboration between the environmental groups NRDC, billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen America, and the League of Conservation Voters.
Zhanon Morales, 30, of Philadelphia, raises a fist during a Nov. 5 voting rights rally. President Trump's campaign unsuccessfully used spurious claims of voter fraud to invalidate votes in Philadelphia and other largely Black cities. (photo: Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
Trump Push to Invalidate Votes in Heavily Black Cities Alarms Civil Rights Groups
Juana Summers, NPR
Summers writes: "When Joe Biden thanked Black voters in his first remarks as president-elect, he credited them with lifting his campaign from its lowest point during the Democratic primaries."
"You've always had my back, and I'll have yours," he promised.
While Biden won Black voters overwhelmingly across the country, they were key to his victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — places where President Trump and his allies have been targeting ballots in cities with large Black populations in an attempt to overturn the president's defeat and retain power.
Trump's campaign and his allies have presented no real evidence of widespread voter fraud or other impropriety in any of these cities, and they have faced multiple defeats in court. But the persistence of the president and loyal Republicans has alarmed Black leaders, civil rights activists and historians who see an unprecedented attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them Black.
The president's campaign has denied racial motivations in its lawsuits, saying that its recount strategy is not targeting Black voters.
Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign's senior legal adviser, said in a statement to NPR that "every American deserves to know that our elections are conducted in a legal manner, no matter who they are or where they live."
"That's our only goal: to ensure safe, secure, and fair elections," Ellis added. "That's what our Constitution requires."
But Bob Bauer, a senior legal adviser to the Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign's "targeting of the African American community is not subtle. It is extraordinary" and that "it's quite remarkable how brazen it is."
"This is straight out, discriminatory behavior," Bauer told reporters on Friday.
A group of Michigan voters has also filed a lawsuit against Trump and his campaign, arguing that "defendants are openly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters," including those in Detroit.
The plaintiffs, who are represented by lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, allege that the Trump campaign has attempted mass voter suppression by pressuring election officials into not certifying the election results in their state, and that Trump's apparent attempt to pressure Michigan election officials and state lawmakers was a violation of the provision against voter intimidation included in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
"Defendants' tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation's history, as Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the Republic." the lawsuit said.
Trump and his allies have made similar efforts in Pennsylvania, with false claims about widespread voter fraud in Philadelphia. There have been charges leveled against the electoral process in Atlanta as the political universe is focused on Georgia ahead of two runoff elections that will determine control of the U.S. Senate. In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign has called for a recount of ballots in the diverse, large counties of Milwaukee and Dane, which put Biden over the top there, but the Trump campaign did not ask for recounts in the rest of the state's whiter counties.
To many civil rights advocates, this is another grim chapter in what they see as an expansive, decades-long effort by Republicans to gain more power by suppressing the votes of people of color.
"It is difficult for me to think of another president in modern time who has literally driven a national scheme to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color en masse, in the way that we see with these post-election lawsuits," said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She said there was "racial motivation" in Trump's focus on cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
Trump's attempts hit a significant roadblock on Monday as Michigan's state canvassing board certified Biden's victory with one of the board's two Republican members abstaining.
Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, called that action "appalling." He pointed out that the Trump campaign was aided by supporters and allies across the country in his failed efforts to reverse Biden's victory.
"It's only because of the environment that was created by this president to defy the rule of law, to destroy customs and practices, and to really push people toward a sense of tribalism that's not in our economic interest, that's not in the interest of democracy, for his own selfish and self-reflecting outcome," Johnson said in an interview. "And it's unfortunate that there have been so many people willing to put their character, their integrity at stake for such activity."
Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, said voter suppression is typically thought of as rules or practices that, when put in place, have the impact of making people of color less likely to vote than their white counterparts.
The effort that Trump is undertaking, she said, is a new type of attempted voter suppression in which the president is attempting to invalidate ballots that have already been counted.
"I think he has targeted heavily African American cities because they happen to be heavily Democratic cities, and if he's going to invalidate enough votes to turn the election in his favor, this would actually be the best place to do it," Gillespie said.
Trump's attempt to overturn the election result comes at the end of an election season in which the nation elected its first Black vice president, California Sen. Kamala Harris. It also comes at the end of the year where many voters, particularly voters of color, faced unprecedented obstacles to cast ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic.
With the election challenges serving as a sort of punctuation mark on all of that, Clarke said, "I think this will stand out in the history books as one of the darkest moments in our nation's history."
Konar Province, 2010. (photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos)
Andrew J. Bacevich | A Good Deed From the Wicked Witch? Actually Ending the War in Afghanistan
Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch
Bacevich writes: "Within establishment circles, Donald Trump's failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, the song featured in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz nicely captures the mood of the moment."
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Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul has been in detention for 900 days. (photo: Reuters)
Saudi Arabia to Put Women's Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul on Trial
Emma Graham-Harrison, Guardian UK
Graham-Harrison writes: "Saudi Arabia will put women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul on trial on Wednesday, more than 900 days after she was detained, and just after the country wrapped up hosting duties on a virtual G20 summit, her family have been told."
READ MORE
Nine of the 15 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps) autopsied for the study were emaciated when they died, zero were considered to be in 'robust' condition. (photo: Inwater Research Group)
Are Industrial Chemicals Killing Rare Whales and Familiar Dolphins?
Cypress Hansen, Mongabay
Hansen writes: "Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science."
“Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,” said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”
Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.
While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.
The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.
The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.
“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,” Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.
Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. “A lot of these [ailments] can be caused by stranding or shock, but they can also be caused by toxin exposure,” said Page-Karjian.
Veterinarians traditionally record pathological data during autopsies, but they don’t usually test for toxins. The authors believe there’s value in looking at both. Even if the toxins aren’t the direct cause of death, explained Page-Karjian, they “could have led to the animal’s demise.”
However, it’s difficult to prove that the pollutants killed the animals, said Kathleen Colegrove, a clinical professor of zoological pathology at the University of Illinois. “The authors did a great job in really trying not to make that jump,” she told Mongabay.
One species included in the six-year project, the Gervais’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon europaeus), is so elusive only a few people have ever seen them alive. “[This study] had three species of beaked whales, which is amazing because those animals rarely strand,” said Colegrove, who was not involved in the study.
Many offshore species like the Gervais’ beaked whale spend their lives thousands of kilometers from shore, foraging thousands of meters underwater. And yet, evidence shows they contain potentially lethal levels of industrial chemicals, suggesting the hazards of ocean pollution reach farther than we thought.
The study is an effective first step toward broadening our understanding of chemical contamination in offshore species, Colegrove said. She added that the report “will set up future studies to take a finer-tuned look” at how pollution affects some of the ocean’s least-studied mammals.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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