05 June 21
If Everyone Donated What They Could
If every one of our subscribers stopped today and donated what they could — reasonably afford — we could stop fundraising for a year. It’s true.
Not everyone can afford to donate a thousand dollars. But if you donate what you can, this works beautifully.
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Marc Ash
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05 June 21
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Tom Hanks | You Should Learn the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre
Tom Hanks, The New York Times
Hanks writes: "I consider myself a lay historian who talks way too much at dinner parties, leading with questions like, 'Do you know that the Erie Canal is the reason Manhattan became the economic center of America?'"
Some of the work I do is making historically based entertainment. Did you know our second president once defended in court British soldiers who fired on and killed colonial Bostonians — and got most of them off?
By my recollection, four years of my education included studying American history. Fifth and eighth grades, two semesters in high school, three quarters at a community college. Since then, I’ve read history for pleasure and watched documentary films as a first option. Many of those works and those textbooks were about white people and white history. The few Black figures — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — were those who accomplished much in spite of slavery, segregation and institutional injustices in American society.
But for all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.
An employee checks the chamber of an assault-style rifle at a shooting range. (photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: State Will Appeal After Federal Judge in
San Diego Strikes Down California's Assault Weapons Ban
US Judge Overturns California's Ban on Assault Weapons
Don Thompson, Associated Press
Thompson writes: "A federal judge Friday overturned California's three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, ruling that it violates the constitutional right to bear arms."
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego ruled that the state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Under no level of heightened scrutiny can the law survive," Benitez said. He issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of the law but stayed it for 30 days to give state Attorney General Rob Bonta time to appeal.
Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, calling it “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period."
In his 94-page ruling, the judge spoke favorably of modern weapons, said they were overwhelmingly used for legal reasons.
“Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle," the judge said in his ruling's introduction.
That comparison “completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to this weapon," Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not backing down from this fight, and we’ll continue pushing for common sense gun laws that will save lives.”
Bonta called the ruling flawed and said it will be appealed.
California first restricted assault weapons in 1989, with multiple updates to the law since then.
Assault weapons as defined by the law are more dangerous than other firearms and are disproportionately used in crimes, mass shootings and against law enforcement, with more resulting casualties, the state attorney general’s office argued, and barring them “furthers the state’s important public safety interests.”
Further, a surge in sales of more than 1.16 million other types of pistols, rifles and shotguns in the last year — more than a third of them to likely first-time buyers — show that the assault weapons ban “has not prevented law-abiding citizens in the state from acquiring a range of firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense,” the state contended in a court filing in March.
Similar assault weapon restrictions have previously been upheld by six other federal district and appeals courts, the state argued. Overturning the ban would allow not only assault rifles, but things like assault shotguns and assault pistols, state officials said.
But Benitez disagreed.
“This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of Second Amendment protection. The banned ‘assault weapons’ are not bazookas, howitzers, or machine guns. Those arms are dangerous and solely useful for military purposes," his ruling said.
Despite California's ban, there currently are an estimated 185,569 assault weapons registered with the state, the judge said.
“This is an average case about average guns used in average ways for average purposes," the ruling said. “One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter."
“In California, murder by knife occurs seven times more often than murder by rifle," he added.
In a preliminary ruling in September, Benitez said California’s complicated legal definition of assault weapons can ensnare otherwise law-abiding gun owners with criminal penalties that among other things can strip them of their Second Amendment right to own firearms.
"The burden on the core Second Amendment right, if any, is minimal,” the state argued, because the weapons can still be used — just not with the modifications that turn them into assault weapons. Modifications like a shorter barrel or collapsible stock make them more concealable, state officials said, while things like a pistol grip or thumbhole grip make them more lethal by improving their accuracy as they are fired rapidly.
The lawsuit filed by the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition is among several by gun advocacy groups challenging California’s firearms laws, which are among the strictest in the nation.
The lawsuit filed in August 2019 followed a series of deadly mass shootings nationwide involving military-style rifles.
It was filed on behalf of gun owners who want to use high-capacity magazines in their legal rifles or pistols, but said they can’t because doing so would turn them into illegal assault weapons under California law. Unlike military weapons, the semi-automatic rifles fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, and the plaintiffs say they are legal in 41 states.
The lawsuit said California is “one of only a small handful states to ban many of the most popular semiautomatic firearms in the nation because they possess one or more common characteristics, such as pistol grips and threaded barrels,” frequently but not exclusively along with detachable ammunition magazines.
The state is appealing Benitez’s 2017 ruling against the state’s nearly two-decade-old ban on the sales and purchases of magazines holding more than 10 bullets. That decision triggered a weeklong buying spree before the judge halted sales during the appeal. It was upheld in August by a three-judge appellate panel, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in March that an 11-member panel will rehear the case.
The state also is appealing Benitez’s decision in April 2020 blocking a 2019 California law requiring background checks for anyone buying ammunition.
Both of those measures were championed by Newsom when he was lieutenant governor, and they were backed by voters in a 2016 ballot measure.
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: BioSpace)
America Still Needs to Learn From Its Biggest Pandemic Failure
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "America's biggest mistake in fighting Covid-19 began with an assumption made long before the virus behind the pandemic first appeared in humans."
America’s pandemic playbook assumed the US could take collective action. The country proved that wrong.
In the federal government’s previous pandemic playbook, the initial actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration, and advice given by experts, there was a common theme: that America would come together against a major national threat, helping put it down collectively.
Over the past year and a half, we’ve learned how wrong that was. While the US did manage to lock down at first, those lockdowns soon gave way to protests. Not long after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended masking and most states adopted the advice into mask mandates, masks became political symbols as many Americans rejected wearing one often, if at all. Even after the country built up its coronavirus testing capacity, translating that into collective action through, say, contact tracing, centralized isolation, or genomic sequencing (to track variants) just didn’t happen in most of the US.
Case and death rates have gotten much better recently, thanks to the vaccines. But that’s largely due to a lot of individuals acting in their own interest and getting the shot. The policy proposals to make a more collective push for vaccines — through, for example, vaccine passports — have been widely rejected, including by the White House.
Whenever collective action is called for, Americans don’t do it — or, at the very least, don’t do it sufficiently. America is too politicized, fractured, and, above all, individualistic for a collective move to save it.
“It’s a facet of the United States before Covid, during Covid, and I’m not sure it’s going to change after Covid,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “That’s one of the challenges the US has faced throughout the Covid pandemic.”
When the US writes its next pandemic playbook, it can’t ignore this reality. Going forward, tackling a pandemic or collective public health threat will require a more individualistic approach to public health — one more focused on clear guidance, risk communication, harm reduction, and making the safest choice the easiest.
The research suggests collectivistic places handled at least some aspects of the pandemic better. But in a highly individualistic society like the US, maybe such approaches are simply unrealistic. After suffering one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls among developed nations and in the world, America may have to find its own individualized alternative.
“We haven’t had a pandemic in our lifetimes,” Kates said, noting that past guidelines were modeled after smaller-scale or older events. “We actually now know what didn’t work. The playbook could be rewritten and should be rewritten to account for what happened in the US.”
America has failed at collective action
Many Americans did take Covid-19 seriously, social distancing and masking up as federal officials and experts asked them to. They have continued to do so, too, getting vaccines as soon as they were available.
But with Covid-19, just a few people can spoil everything. A few people going out, gathering, and failing to wear masks can launch an outbreak across a community. That ends up exposing not just the people in the initial outbreak but anyone else who gets caught in the subsequent contact chain. Maybe someone contracted Covid-19 by hosting an ill-advised Halloween party, and then spread the coronavirus further when he went into work, bought groceries, picked up food at a restaurant, and visited family. A single person’s mistake can have a lot of fallout.
This is a big thing that went wrong with America’s approach to Covid-19. Yes, most people wore masks at least sometimes, and a lot of people made some sacrifice to social distance in the past year. But many others, fueled by Trump’s downplaying of the virus and politics in general, rejected the precautions, describing them as violations of civil liberties. And even those who didn’t reject precautions at times slipped up, going to a Thanksgiving or Christmas party they shouldn’t have, or forgetting to put on a mask before they went out. Many people just got tired — ultimately deciding they’d rather risk getting Covid-19 than continue to warp their lives.
Meanwhile, calls for more collectivistic actions have gone nowhere. Lockdowns quickly proved to be unsustainable, with protests and Trump’s demands to “LIBERATE!” economies soon leading just about every state in the country to reopen too quickly and see a surge in Covid-19 cases. Mask mandates were adopted in most states, but not all. Places that did keep some restrictions, from social distancing to mask mandates, barely enforced them — cops weren’t going around breaking up a lot of house parties. Even after the US built up a respectable number of tests, the idea of using those tests to closely trace contacts and isolate people was widely rejected, as much of the public rebuked the idea of sharing their personal information, especially their close contacts or locations, as a violation of privacy.
Multiply all of this across the whole country and you get one of the worst epidemics in the world.
Much of this was driven by individualism: the sense that Americans can and should make their own choices about their health, with minimal interference from government or, really, anyone else. A recent series of studies in PNAS found that, whether measured at the state or country level, more collectivistic places tended to have higher mask use.
“It’s not just a between-countries story,” Jackson Lu, lead author of the studies, told me. “Our research shows the link even within the United States. Within the same large nation, regions with higher collectivism had higher mask usage.”
Even with a progressive president in office, the rejection of collective action has remained the reality. The Biden administration’s vaccine efforts have worked through individualistic channels, making it as easy as possible for people to get the shot and asking people to do so. Anything close to a form of collective action, like a hard mandate or requirement for vaccine passports, has been repeatedly rejected by federal officials. Among the general public, polls suggest such mandates are generally unpopular, too.
Consider the CDC’s recent mask guidance. After the research showed that vaccines truly protect those who are vaccinated and likely prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the CDC and the Biden administration could have leveraged that information to encourage states or Congress to enact a vaccine passport system that would let vaccinated people avoid masking and social distancing. Or maybe the administration could have released guidance tying the lifting of restrictions to specific vaccine thresholds, as Michigan did — encouraging collective action for collective benefit.
Instead, the administration embraced an individualistic approach. If you’re vaccinated, you don’t have to wear a mask, the CDC said. What about those who are unvaccinated? They should keep wearing a mask. But what if people lie? Well, tough luck for them, because they’re really just exposing themselves to Covid-19.
As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it, “The science demonstrates that if you are fully vaccinated, you are protected. It is the people who are not fully vaccinated in those settings who are not protected.”
The problem is this isn’t always true. For some immunocompromised individuals, the vaccines may not be that effective. For children and people with other health problems, vaccination may be an impossibility. If those who are unvaccinated don’t wear masks around these groups, there’s a risk of dangerous spread. That could be used as a rationale for more collective action: Keep wearing a mask not because you need it, but because it helps keep people around you safe.
Yet the Biden administration ran with the CDC’s announcement, holding a press conference in which Biden urged individuals to follow it. “It’s vaxxed or masked,” he said.
It was ultimately an acknowledgment: America is an individualistic nation, and a progressive administration alone can’t change that.
The next pandemic playbook has to acknowledge reality
One way to fix these problems would be to try to make Americans more collectivistic. We could tap into better messages and better policies, encouraging people to come together for major crises.
But in reporting out Germany’s Covid-19 failures, one thing that became clear to me is it only takes a bit of dissent and complacency for things to fall apart. America’s federalist structure also makes collective action, handed down from the federal level, extremely difficult. That’s the context in which one very loud politician or a handful of contrarian states have managed to throw the collective project into chaos over the last year and a half.
“Broad, especially federal mandates are often going to be less effective than we would hope,” Daniel Goldberg, a medical historian and public health ethicist at the University of Colorado, told me. “Something like that is completely unenforceable — there’s no way the federal government could enforce a mask mandate in every county.”
In public health, a core concept is meeting people where they are. Well, Americans are in a very individualistic place. That comes with benefits — the PNAS study noted individualism is “an important driver of creativity, innovations, and long-run economic growth.” But in a truly national health crisis, it comes with major downsides, and so it has to be acknowledged and worked around.
“The lessons from epidemics and pandemics is that politics, culture, and socioeconomic variables matter as much as the health aspects of whatever the health issue is,” Kates, of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “You cannot separate out the qualities or characteristics of communities from how the response is structured and talked about.”
What could that look like in reality? One approach would be to focus on making the best choice the easiest. The federal government got at some of this during the pandemic, like when it offered paid time off for people sick with Covid-19. But it was never embraced very widely.
For example, US officials spent the fall and winter admonishing Americans for gathering indoors, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas, in violation of CDC guidance and sometimes state or local laws.
But these same officials typically spent little to no time making it much easier for people to gather outdoors, especially in the cold. Outdoor public or even private spaces — many unused as a result of the pandemic canceling events — could have been spruced up, lined with outdoor heaters to keep people warm as necessary during the winter. Maybe officials could have offered some free food and drinks in outdoor areas, or at least free space and ingredients to cook a meal.
There are other possible examples: To make it easier for people to isolate if they got sick or were exposed to Covid-19, the country could have offered genuinely good spaces in all of those unused hotel rooms for free. To encourage masking, the feds could have produced good-quality masks and provided them for free. To let risky indoor businesses close, governments could have offered a bailout. All of this would have made the right choice easier, even if it wasn’t guaranteed.
It’s the kind of approach already taken in other parts of public health, particularly drugs. Obviously, it would be great if no one used dangerous drugs, and our society goes to great lengths to emphasize that. But the reality is some individuals choose to use drugs anyway. Rather than simply punishing these people, experts have over the years pushed toward a more empathetic approach that combines harm reduction — making drug use less risky by, say, offering sterile syringes or anti-overdose medications — with easy access to treatment. It’s an approach that acknowledges individuals won’t always make the right decisions, but it’s possible to make those right decisions more enticing and accessible.
Some places have moved in this direction recently with vaccine incentives, with many offering free beer and some giving away $100 or a chance at $1 million with vaccination. But these efforts have been mostly small (beer is, unfortunately, not that expensive) and patchwork — with very little done at the federal level.
America may not really know how to do this for pandemics yet. A lot of the playbook was written under the assumption that Americans would take collective action — that they would social distance, mask up, and follow other recommendations. Much of the research focused on those methods.
So the country still has to figure out what a true alternative looks like, requiring more study and policy experiments than it has now. But the past year and a half has demonstrated that it’s worth figuring this out. We shouldn’t tolerate another 600,000 American deaths in the next pandemic.
An immigrant detention center. (photo: ABC)
US Border Officers Are Collecting DNA From Asylum-Seekers Even Though They Don't Have Criminal Records
Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed
Flores writes: "Although he was uncomfortable, David didn't push back when a US border officer in Texas told him to swab his cheek in order to collect his DNA."
READ MORE
Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Rep. Matt Gaetz Under Investigation for Potential Obstruction of Justice in Sex Probe
Dareh Gregorian, NBC News
Gregorian writes: "Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Rep. Matt Gaetz obstructed justice during a phone call with a witness in a potential sex crimes investigation, a law enforcement source confirmed to NBC News."
Investigators are eyeing a phone call the Florida Republican had with a witness in a sex-trafficking investigation, the source said.
The obstruction probe, which stemmed from an inquiry about whether Gaetz, a Republican of Florida, had an improper relationship with a minor, was first reported by Politico, which cited two sources familiar with the case.
A spokesperson for Gaetz, who has not been charged with any crime and has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, scoffed at the news of the obstruction investigation.
“Congressman Gaetz pursues justice, he doesn’t obstruct it," the spokesperson said in a written statement.
"After two months, there is still not a single on-record accusation of misconduct, and now the 'story' is changing yet again."
The witness in question is one of the women allegedly connected to Gaetz and his friend Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County, Florida, tax collector who pleaded guilty last month to several crimes, including the sex-trafficking of a 17-year-old girl.
A federal judge in Florida officially signed off on Greenberg's guilty plea on Thursday, and scheduled his sentencing for Aug. 19.
As part of his plea, Greenberg has agreed "to cooperate fully with the United States in the investigation and prosecution of other persons, and to testify, subject to prosecution for perjury or making a false statement, fully and truthfully before any federal court proceeding or federal grand jury in connection with the charges in this case."
Federal officials are looking into whether Greenberg and Gaetz used the internet to find women they could pay for sex and whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a minor he paid to travel with him, The New York Times reported, citing three people briefed on the matter.
In his guilty plea, Greenberg, a married father of two, admitted to having spent over $70,000 in 150 transactions to pay women for sex from 2016 to 2018. One of the women was under 18 "for part of the time" Greenberg paid her for sex acts "with him and others," he acknowledged in court filings.
Demonstrators take part in a protest to call attention to China's mistreatment of members of the Uyghur community. (photo: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images)
'The Horror Made Me Wonder if They Are Human': UK Inquiry Examines China Genocide Allegations
Gabriella Swerling, The Telegraph
Swerling writes: "Uyghur Muslims are shackled with 'tiger chains,' tortured, forcibly sterilised, raped, and live in fear under mass surveillance, an independent London tribunal heard on Friday, as it seeks to assess claims that Beijing is committing genocide in the Xinjiang region."
The Uyghur Tribunal will hear dozens of testimonies over four days in what campaigners hope will be the most comprehensive public investigation since allegations of abuses against Muslims in China emerged more than three years ago.
The evidence includes claims that more than 5,500 people from the Uyghur minority group are currently missing in China.
Beijing has launched an aggressive public relations campaign to counter such accounts and has repeatedly tried to undermine the Uyghur Tribunal, and has recently described the proceedings as a “farce” and a “special machine producing lies”.
The Chinese government has characterised its mass internment of Muslims in the Xinjiang region, where most of the country’s Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minority groups live, as a push to bring destitute people into the “modern, civilized” world.
However, the tribunal is set to hear a range of first-person accounts from alleged victims of forced sterilization and rape, torture, arbitrary detention and arrest, mass surveillance and intimidation, and forced separation of children from their parents.
On the first day of the hearing, the tribunal heard that there are 232 concentration camps, 257 prisons, and 5,567 missing people in Xinjiang, according to the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database (UTJD)
Giving evidence to the hearing, Omir Bekali, one of the first people to speak out publicly about his experience in a re-education camp in China’s Xinjiang region, told how he was tortured and tied up with chains.
In his written evidence, he told how a hood was placed over his head and he was taken by a policeman to a "a place like a hospital where a full body examination took place while my hood was still on".
Days later he was taken to the basement of a police station where he was allegedly tortured: “They hung me from the ceiling. They chained me to the wall and beat me with plastic, wooden, electric batons and metal wire whip.
“They forced me to accept three crimes: instigating terrorism, organising terror activities, and covering up for terrorists. I denied everything.”
"Experiencing horror non-stop makes you wonder whether these people are human,” he told the tribunal via a translator.
Another alleged victim, Patigul Talip, broke down in tears as she held up a photo of her family. “Both my son and my daughter, I don’t know whether they are alive or dead,” she said.
Ms Talip said she and her husband fled China after he was allegedly imprisoned and beaten for teaching the Arabic alphabet and the Quran.
They tried to get their children out of China and into Sweden but claimed that the kids were hauled off the plane as it was about to take off from Beijing.
She last had direct contact with them in 2015, she added.
"Only mothers who have children can understand the pain, how a mother would suffer.”
In another written testimony, Qelbinur Sidik, an Uzbek woman from Xinjiang and former teacher at an internment camp, described being forcibly sterilized, hearing guards brag of raping female inmates, and being sexually assaulted by a Chinese minder sent to her home as part of a government integration program.
The Tribunal is independent, not backed by any government and its determination (to be made by December) is not legally binding.
However, the panel hopes that the final ruling will help governments around the world evaluate their relations with China.
It was organised at the request of advocacy group the World Uyghur Congress in the hope of garnering international support and action.
It is being chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who previously led the prosecution of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal.
Last year, activists called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate abuses in Xinjiang but prosecutors declined, claiming a lack of jurisdiction because China is not a member state.
Clearing forest land for cattle farming is the main driver of deforestation in the Amazon. (photo: Carl de Souza/AFP)
Brazil's Amazon Deforestation Reaches Record Level for May
Marcelo Silva de Sousa, Associated Press
Silva de Sousa writes: "Preliminary government data released on Friday has raised concern that the coming dry season will see even more deforestation of Brazil's Amazon than last year's surge of cutting."
The area deforested in May, determined based on satellite images, jumped 41% compared to the same month in 2020, according to daily alerts compiled by the National Institute for Space Research’s Deter monitoring system.
That data is considered a reliable leading indicator for more complete calculations released at year end.
May marks the beginning of the dry season in the Amazon, when deforestation tends to spike. Deforestation in the month reached 1,180 square kilometers (456 square miles), the most for any May in at least five years. April and March figures also topped all prior readings for those respective months since the 2015-2016 start of the data series.
The data comes as President Jair Bolsonaro’s government faces heightened scrutiny and skepticism regarding his recent pledges to rein in deforestation, and as officials including his environment minister are under investigation for possibly facilitating the export of illegally cut timber. A separate probe is investigating whether Environment Minister Ricardo Salles obstructed an operation to seize illegal timber; he has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
The Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofits warned that the data released Friday marks a worrisome start to the dry season that is worst between June and August.
“If the trend continues over the next two months, the official deforestation rate in 2021 could end with an unprecedented rise,” the group said in a statement. Deforestation last year surged to a level unseen since 2008.
The annual deforestation tally, compiled with a more accurate system called Prodes, uses at least four different satellites to capture images. This helps to eliminate error caused by cloud cover in the satellite images of the monthly preliminary data.
Low rainfall in some parts of the Amazon from November to April complicates the outlook for destruction in the Amazon, where often trees are felled and then burned to clear land for pasture. Some regions, particularly those along the biome’s southern edge, have received 60% of their historic average rainfall, international environmental group WWF said in a statement.
May deforestation data “show an extremely critical situation,” Mauricio Voivodic, WWF’s executive director for Brazil, said in the statement. “In an environment with deforestation encouraged by federal government rhetoric and complete weakening of environmental regulation, this year’s drought added to the very high deforestation rates creates a situation conducive to big burnings.”
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