Tuesday, May 4, 2021
January 6 INSURRECTION & THE BIG LIE
May 3, 2021 (Monday)
Since the January 6 insurrection, Democrats have called the Republican adherence to the idea that Biden did not win the 2020 election “the Big Lie.” This term refers to a propaganda technique associated with Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels (although it did not actually originate with him). It refers to a lie told to garner power, a lie that is so big, so monstrous, and so outrageous that people believe it because they cannot imagine someone lying about something so important.
One of the hallmarks of the former president was his ability to turn any accusations against him into an attack on his opponents. True to form, this morning he set out to appropriate the term “the Big Lie” for his own. Rather than meaning his refusal to admit he lost the election, he wants to use the phrase to mean the opposite: that it refers to “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020.”
Trump’s insistence that he was robbed of the 2020 election is pure fantasy, designed at least in part to enable him to continue to raise money (as I’ve written about before), and certainly designed to whip up supporters to believe the Democrats are illegitimate. It has been the driving force behind voter suppression efforts in a number of Republican-dominated states, efforts that, in Florida, were so extreme they had Republican operatives contemplating carving out exceptions for elderly and military voters to make sure those traditionally Republican constituencies will not be hit by the new rules.
The effort to stoke the Big Lie continues to the present day. The Republican-controlled Arizona senate has authorized a private company with deep ties to Trump and his Big Lie to perform yet another recount of the ballots cast in Maricopa County last year. The firm, Cyber Ninjas, has no experience doing such a recount and is running the process without bipartisan observation. The goal appears to be to “prove” that the 45,000 votes Biden won in the county in 2020 were fraudulent, bringing his win of the state into question to “prove” that Biden’s overall win was fraudulent. One of the people performing the recount is Anthony Kern, a former state representative who was part of the January 6 insurrection.
Today’s incarnation of the Big Lie, though, appears to be an attempt of the former president to solidify his power over the remnants of the Republican Party leadership. According to a recent CNN poll, 70% of Republicans do not believe that Biden actually won the election, but a few leading holdouts, including Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), refuse to follow the party line. For her troubles, Cheney is facing a move to push her out of her position as the conference chair of the House Republicans, the third most powerful spot in the House for her party.
As he has consolidated power over the Republican Party after leaving office, the former president has been less and less tolerant of those Republicans who have called out his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election for what it is: a dangerous attack on our democracy. But Cheney is not giving in. After Trump’s announcement this morning, she tweeted: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
This fight is a proxy fight over whether Trump will win full control over the Republican Party. His loyalists have vowed to get rid of Cheney from her position in party leadership by the end of the month. An ally of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Scott Wong and Mike Lillis of The Hill: “She’s a liability, and McCarthy’s as fed up as the rest of us that she is focused on the past rather than winning back the House.”
But Cheney appears to have some key backing, including that of former president George W. Bush, who has recently said that if the party stands for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything.” Cheney is speaking out and standing firm. In a speech today at the annual retreat for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, in Georgia, she said: "We can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy…. We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed."
POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook: Mixed opinion on MANDATED vax for PUBLIC WORKERS — DOWNING wants INDEPENDENT redistricting commission — MARKEY Q and A
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RSN: Garrison Keillor | The Privilege of Happiness: One Man's Story
03 May 21
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Garrison Keillor | The Privilege of Happiness: One Man's Story
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes:
he first One Hundred Days of Uncle Joe have gone by in a whoosh and we’ve mostly forgotten the guy with the Art Deco hair. Time rushes on. I look at the unread novels on my bookshelf and wonder what crime I need to commit to get sentenced to prison long enough to read them all. Probably handing over nuclear secrets to the Russians but I assume they already have them.
Crime, however, seems unlikely due to the fear of virus transmission which has locked us in our homes and brought me under close supervision by my wife. Thanks to her, my consumption of double cheeseburgers is at an all-time low; my intake of greens is now close to that of an adult giraffe. I am in her hands even when I’m not in her arms. She keeps telling me, “There is no point in wasting money,” and so we live like tenant farmers in the Dust Bowl, we save tiny portions of leftover salad in little plastic containers and we use bars of soap until they are the size of a potato chip. I grew up with Frugal Monetary Theory, but I’ve been corrupted by the ATM: stick in a card and it blows money at you like bubbles from a pipe. She finds a wad of cash in my jeans pocket and says, “What do you need all this money for?” Good question.
I’m a happy man. I had a happy frugal childhood, riding my bike around the countryside back before cellphones and apps that parents could track you with on a laptop, but I avoid talking about happiness because I have young leftist friends who, if I admit to being happy, say, “Well, that’s very nice for you but not everyone is as privileged as you were.”
Privilege was not what made me happy. Dad worked for the post office, we were six kids, so though we weren’t impoverished, we could see it from there. No, it was the bike and freedom and the truck farmers who’d pay a kid to hoe corn and pick strawberries and I’d take my dough to the corner store and buy a couple Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls and take them down to the Mississippi and eat them and skip stones. It wasn’t about privilege. Why can’t a man talk about happiness without getting a poke in the eye from someone who’s just read a book about systemic inequity and wants you to know it?
The great privilege of my childhood was hoeing and weeding, which is denied to kids now whose moms go to Whole Foods to purchase raspberries from New Zealand and a bag of baby arugula hand-raised in the coastal foothills of Northern California by liberal arts graduates, instead of growing food in a garden and affording their children a useful education.
Weeding is editing and editing is a basic skill desperately needed now that the computer has led to floods, downpours, typhoons of verbiage. Everything is ten times too long. (I had a couple thousand words here about my old editor William Shawn, which I’ve taken out, as you can see.) I read a memoir now and then and I think, “This person never mowed a lawn or weeded a flower bed.” Their book has, in a manner of speaking, a lot of old rusted cars and busted appliances sitting in tall weeds that need to be thrown down in a coulee and the grass mowed.
I grew up mowing lawns, parallel lines, back and forth, it was deeply instilled in me and that’s why I write prose today and not
Butterflies go tipitipitipitipi
toward the blue
crocus and focus
looking for nectar
and stick out their
connector like a straw
and cry,
aha
Notice how the irregularity makes it seem sort of artistic. So what? Sew buttons on your underwear. I am happy going back and forth, back and forth, putting subject and predicate together. It’s therapeutic. When I was your age, kiddo, I had artistic ambition, which was the privilege of ignorance — to look down the road and imagine being honored by the U.S. Essay Association, but in the pandemic, it’s all about today. A walk in the park, a skinny sandwich for lunch, a brief nap, a poem.
A virus called COVID-19
Can be sneaky, mysterious, mean,
But once immunized
I have been surprised
By days that are calm and serene
And limericks that are pleasant though clean.
On January 19, 2019, protesters advocating for and against abortion access demonstrate at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
States Passed More Abortion Restrictions This Week Than in Last Decade
Mychael Schnell, The Hill
Schnell writes:
he number of abortion restrictions passed by states this week hit a record high, exceeding the number of restrictions passed in any one week in at least the last decade, according to a new analysis published Friday by the Guttmacher Institute.
Between Monday and Thursday of this week, 28 restrictions were enacted in seven states, which accounts for 46 percent of all restrictions passed in 2021 so far, according to the analysis from Guttmacher, a sexual and reproductive health research organization.
A number of these restrictions include abortion bans that directly challenge Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion across the U.S. in 1973.
Republican Govs. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Brad Little of Idaho signed bills this week banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. In Oklahoma, doctors who perform the procedure after a heartbeat is detected can be charged with homicide.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) signed legislation prohibiting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a bill this week that bans abortions if a mother wants to terminate a pregnancy because of a genetic abnormality in a fetus. A doctor who performs the procedure in violation of the law can face felony charges.
The institute wrote that state policymakers are "testing the limits of what the new U.S. Supreme Court majority might allow," now that conservative justices dominate the court six to three.
"We're seeing right-wing ideologues engaging in a shock and awe campaign against abortion rights as part of a large and deliberate attack on basic rights that also includes a wave of voter suppression laws and attacks on LGBTQ people," said Elizabeth Nash, the Guttmacher Institute's principal policy associate, in a statement.
According to Guttmacher, a total of 536 abortion restrictions have been introduced this year across 46 states as of Thursday, including 146 bans.
Of the restrictions introduced, by the institute's count, 61 have been enacted across 13 states, including eight bans.
The analysis noted that restrictions are also being imposed as regulations on abortion clinics, providers and medication abortion.
"The current barrage of coordinated attacks must be taken seriously as the unprecedented threat to reproductive health care and rights that it is," Nash said.
To put the surge of abortion restrictions into perspective, Guttmacher noted that the number of limitations recorded this year is far outpacing the data collected by this time in 2011, which they wrote is "the year previously regarded as the most hostile to abortion rights since Roe was decided."
At this time in 2011, the institute recorded, 42 restrictions had been enacted, including six bans.
"If this trend continues, 2021 will end up as the most damaging antiabortion state legislative session in a decade - and perhaps ever," the report writes.
Arkansas this week tied Louisiana's 1978 record for the most abortion restrictions enacted in a year, at 20, Guttmacher found.
The group noted that the restrictions enacted this year are largely expansions to previous policies. The report writes that "each additional restriction increases patients' logistical, financial and legal barriers to care, especially where entire clusters of states are hostile to abortion."
Ariane McCree's cousin Tabatha and brother Michael McCree. (photo: NBC News)
Police Fired 24 Shots at a Handcuffed Man. Why Didn't They Turn on Their Body Cameras?
David Paredes, Vicky Nguyen, Rich Schapiro, Michelle Tak and Merritt Enright, NBC News
Excerpt: "It has been almost a year and a half since Ariane McCree was shot dead by police in a Walmart parking lot, handcuffed and in possession of a gun, but his family still has a host of unanswered questions."
McCree, 28, had raced out of the Walmart in Chester, South Carolina, a small town an hour north of Columbia, after he was placed in handcuffs when he was accused of stealing a $45 lock in November 2019, police said.
But exactly what happened next remains unclear in part because the responding officers didn’t activate their body cameras until after McCree, a Black father and former high school football star, was gunned down in a hail of police bullets.
“A lot of things do not add up,” his cousin, Tabatha Strother, told NBC News. “But we would have known a lot of this if the bodycam was on."
Body cameras have been hailed as a key tool in enhancing transparency in policing and providing crucial information in use-of-force incidents.
The McCree case, along with the recent deadly police shootings of Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo and Ma’Khia Bryant highlight the importance of body camera video for transparency. Of the more than 12,000 local police departments around the country, roughly half have body cameras, but having body cameras doesn’t mean they’ll be used properly.
Experts say police departments need to implement three basic rules in order for the cameras to be effective: tell officers specifically when to hit record, ensure they announce they are filming, and outline clear consequences for when the rules are broken.
But many of the nation’s major police departments don’t follow these basic guidelines. Examining the body camera policies of 28 large police departments in a geographically representative array of U.S. states, along with the policy in Chester, NBC News found 45 percent gave specific instructions for when officers should start recording. Roughly 41 percent required officers to announce they’re recording. And only 34 percent clearly stated there are consequences for not recording.
“The cameras aren’t there just to be there,” said Danny Murphy, the deputy commissioner of compliance for the Baltimore Police Department.
“They’re meant to record interactions to foster accountability and public trust. And departments are setting themselves up for failure if they don't have a real policy.”
Murphy knows this firsthand.
He was previously assigned to revamp the New Orleans Police Department after a Department of Justice investigation found a wide range of problems within it.
With Murphy’s oversight, the department installed a raft of new policies and procedures, including new guidelines on the use of body cameras.
New Orleans police began matching data from the body cameras with officers’ incident reports, checking the accuracy of how police interactions with the public were documented. Body camera video also became part of the police department’s employee review process.
Murphy said the changes led to a sharp increase in officers following proper body camera procedures. Use-of-force complaints plunged by 60 percent – from 45 to 18 – between 2014 and 2018, according to Murphy.
“Body cameras are not a panacea,” he said. “But they are an important foundation for reform. Having the cameras is one thing. Ensuring you're turning on the camera is an essential next step. But then there needs to be oversight and accountability of how we're performing.”
Murphy began working for the Baltimore Police Department in April 2019 as part of a consent decree to help reform the agency after a Justice Department investigation found the agency was engaging in a pattern of unlawful conduct targeting the Black community in violation of both the Constitution and federal anti-discrimination laws.
The new Baltimore body camera policy requires officers to turn them on as soon as possible when responding to an incident.
“In a non-emergency call, our officers are supposed to activate the camera before departing the vehicle to capture that entire incident,” Murphy said. “In an emergency call, we're turning it on the moment that we get the call, whether we have one minute to the scene or five more minutes to the scene.”
That is not what happened in the McCree case.
He arrived at the Walmart in Chester before 9 a.m. on Nov. 23, 2019, according to police.
McCree picked up the $45.87 combination door handle-lock and walked out of the store without paying, telling a cashier to “put it on his tab,” police said.
He returned to the store a couple of hours later and approached an off-duty police officer he knew who was working as a Walmart security guard.
McCree asked how much the door handle-lock cost but was soon handcuffed and led to the store’s loss prevention office, according to state investigators.
Security video obtained by NBC News shows McCree charging at a different off-duty officer who was working security, identified as Sgt. Nicholas Harris, then running to the parking lot.
Harris chased after McCree, but lost him outside the store.
There are conflicting reports as to what happened next.
According to a report by the State Law Enforcement Division, which investigated the shooting, McCree, handcuffed behind his back, ran to his car to get a gun. Some witnesses said he fired it. Others said they never saw him carrying a gun.
The report says Harris told investigators that he found McCree across the parking by a Taco Bell, where McCree head-butted him and then ran off. Harris told investigators he located McCree again, but the handcuffed man was now armed, according to the report.
Harris told investigators he locked eyes with McCree and could see "he had full intentions of killing me." Harris fired several shots, then hid behind a car and called for help, stating he was out of ammunition.
About 11:30 a.m., a responding on-duty police officer, Justin Baker, arrived at the Walmart parking lot. As he pulled up toward the front of the store, he heard a call of “shots fired” over the police radio, according to the state investigation.
Baker exited his vehicle and walked through the parking lot with his gun drawn. McCree appeared from between two cars and Baker opened fire, the report said. Baker then approached McCree and pulled a silver pistol from underneath the front of the mortally-wounded man’s body, it said.
State investigators would later determine that Baker fired 13 rounds and Harris 11. No shell casings from McCree’s gun were found.
Baker would go on to tell investigators that McCree had pointed a gun at him and refused to comply with an order to drop his weapon.
But there was no way to verify that account – Baker switched on his body camera only after McCree was struck down by police bullets.
There is, however, some video from Baker's body camera of the moments leading up to McCree’s death. Outfitted with an auto-record feature, his body camera was set to save the previous two minutes of video — without sound — once he hit record.
The Chester Police Department released the body camera video in June as the case was receiving renewed attention in the wake of George Floyd's death while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
But for many, including the McCree family, the distant video with no audio raised more questions than answers.
Eric Piza, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, reviewed the body camera video of McCree’s shooting for NBC News.
“What stood out to me first and foremost was actually how little I learned about the situation from watching the video,” said Piza, who specializes in analyzing what leads to police use-of-force encounters.
“We don't hear any of the police officer orders or we have no idea if he was ordered to stop and if he was ordered to drop his gun. We have no idea if the officer even saw a gun,” he added. “All of these things are missing in our review of this incident.”
South Carolina’s attorney general declined to press charges against any of the officers, citing self-defense and the defense of others. The U.S. attorney is investigating the case.
Baker is no longer employed by the department, though police officials declined to say why. Neither Baker nor Harris responded to requests for comment. Two other off-duty officers who worked security with Harris at Walmart that day also did not respond to requests for comment.
Chester’s then-Police Chief Eric Williams was suspended in January and an interim chief was named after state investigators opened a probe into the department's finances, according to the Rock Hill Herald.
Before his suspension, Williams declined to comment on the McCree case to NBC News. He previously defended the officers involved.
“When someone is pointing a firearm at you and walking toward you, I don't know of a whole lot of de-escalation that you can insert in that situation but to respond," Williams said last June.
The city of Chester did not respond to a request for comment. NBC News reviewed the police department's body camera policy last September, but it's not clear whether it has been updated.
The Chester Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. Williams also did not respond to a request for comment.
The McCree family, meanwhile, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the police department.
In an interview with NBC News, McCree’s brother Michael called for strict body camera policies nationwide.
“A lot of people's lives are at stake,” Michael McCree said. “And people are taken advantage of because of the cameras not rolling.”
Bobby Paul Edwards; John Christopher Smith. (photo: J. Reuben Long Detention Center/WPDE)
Black Man Who Was Forced to Work Without Pay by White Boss Should Get $546,000 in Compensation, Court Rules
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root
Crockett writes: "Smith worked 18 hours a day, six days a week and was forced to live in a 'cockroach-infested' apartment behind the business."
his may be one of the most horrific stories that The Root has ever reported.
For 23 years, Bobby Paul Edwards, who owned the J&J Cafeteria in Conway, South Carolina, enslaved John Christopher Smith, an intellectually disabled Black man who Edwards beat and forced to work long hours for literally no pay.
Smith worked 18 hours a day, six days a week and was forced to live in a “cockroach-infested” apartment behind the business. Edwards’ family knew Smith was being enslaved and did nothing to try and stop it.
Whenever Smith’s family came looking for him, Edwards would lock Smith in the kitchen freezer or in another room so that his family couldn’t find him. Once, when Smith tried to escape he was caught and “hit in the head with a frying pan, burned with hot tongs, beaten with belt-buckles and called the n-word repeatedly.”
Edwards was finally caught, and in 2019 he pleaded guilty to one count of forced labor “coercing an African-American man with an intellectual disability to work extensive hours at a restaurant for no pay,” and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, the Justice Department said in a press release at the time, Insider reports.
As a part of the initial settlement, Smith was awarded $273,000 in unpaid wages and overtime compensation. Well, the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit doubled that amount, which would be $546,000.
Insider notes “that the court said the district court did not properly account for federal labor laws when it made the decision on compensation.”
“Minimum wages and overtime compensation must be paid on a current basis as work is done, such that an employee receives the prescribed compensation without delay. When an employer fails to pay those amounts, the employee suffers losses, which includes the loss of the use of that money during the period of delay,” the court argued in its filing.
One-hundred thousand lives hang in the balance. (image: Intelligencer/Getty Images)
The Pandemic's Lethal Twilight
Jeff Wise, New York Magazine
Wise writes:
hile everyone’s excited for “hot vaxx summer,” a reminder: Americans are still dying of COVID. Not in the same numbers as during last winter’s horrific peak, but still at an agonizing clip, with more than 700 fatalities a day on average. In other words, tens of thousands of otherwise healthy people walking around today will die of it in the months ahead.
Sure, there are plenty of reasons to feel optimistic. We now have highly effective vaccines, and close to half the adult U.S. population has gotten at least one dose, conferring a high degree of protection from the virus. Given that a third or more of the country may have built up immunity through already getting infected, that means we’re in striking distance of herd immunity, which will gradually drive new infections to sufficient rarity that the pandemic will effectively be over nationally. “We have reason to believe we’ll be in a good place by July,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins.
But it’s not at all clear how we’ll get there. After an unexpectedly successful rollout of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, uptake is now slowing, with many locations now having more doses than people taking them. Meanwhile, new variants of concern are emerging and spreading. One of them, B.1.1.7, first appeared around the New Year and now constitutes the majority of new infections in the United States.
“We’re in a footrace between the vaccine and the variants,” says Columbia University disease modeler Jeffrey Shaman. How that race plays out will make the difference between a gradually weakening pandemic that yields relatively few additional fatalities and one that drives the death toll to another spike. The experience of Michigan, where cases spiked eightfold between February and April even as overall caseloads in the U.S. were broadly declining, could be played out again and again in pockets of vulnerability.
Finding the right path is not an easy question, even for the experts. There’s a fundamental principle in control-systems engineering that in order to effectively manage something, you need to have a model of how it behaves. But from the beginning of the pandemic, researchers have struggled to pin down exactly what the virus is doing.
Part of the problem is the nature of the disease. Modeling COVID is fundamentally different from modeling, say, wildfires, where researchers who track the spread of a blaze can stream data from networked sensors into their supercomputers in real time. With COVID, some of the most important processes are invisible. Infected people can walk around for days spreading the virus before anyone even knows they’re sick. And even today, more than a year after the disease emerged, we still don’t fully understand all the different ways it can pass from one person to another. How much more likely is the disease to spread if you sit students three feet apart rather than six? If you reduce restaurant seating by 55 percent versus 33 percent? No one really knows. “At the microscale process level, right now, the data are just not there,” says Shaman.
Instead, COVID researchers have to infer what the disease is doing and make probabilistic estimates of how it will spread based on assumptions about the pace of vaccination, the infectiousness of variants, the safety measures that the public is carrying out, and so on. This technique can be reasonably effective when the infection rate is changing slowly but has proven woefully inadequate in the face of a sudden acceleration, such as the one that took place last November. At a time when about 40,000 people per day were getting sick, modelers forecast that that rate would hold steady for the next four weeks. Instead, infections soared past 105,000 per day and kept climbing into the new year. “We’ve seen the limitations of what these models can do,” says Nick Reich, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at UMass Amherst. “At these moments of change, unfortunately, they have not been as accurate at these moments where we really want them to be.”
One of the problems is the high degree of randomness of the coronavirus, what experts call “overdispersion” — the fact that the disease is transmitted disproportionately by superspreaders. As a result, a previously sluggish outbreak can suddenly spike. A famous example occurred early in the pandemic in South Korea, where a handful of cases had not led to much transition until a particular woman caught it and then attended several church gatherings and went to a buffet lunch at a hotel. The authorities eventually traced more than half of all the country’s cases back to that single individual.
If that one person had behaved differently, the course of the pandemic in South Korea might have played out differently. And that same thing is true everywhere. “When people look back at epidemics and pandemics, they’re very apt to attribute reason to everything that happens,” says Lessler. “It’s easy to look at the New York City surge last spring and say, ‘New York has a lot of international travel, there’s the subway, there’s a lot of high density, of course it was going to happen.’ But if that were the case, why wasn’t Chicago like that? Why wasn’t Boston? There’s a large element of random chance. Maybe somebody got on a subway one day when they were shedding virus like mad. We’ll never know. So I think we need to be humble and cognizant of the fact that, you know, when we see an epidemic, we’re really only seeing one realization of that epidemic.”
On a computer, researchers can run their models over and over again to see the different ways they can play out, a technique called “ensemble forecasting.” This can provide not only a sense of how things are most likely to pan out, but also point to outlier possibilities that might not be so obvious. Another form of ensemble forecasting is to pool together the results of a number of different models. Lessler at Johns Hopkins is running a project called the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub that combines the results of models run by six teams at five universities.
For the most recent run, conducted in March, each team was asked to run six-month scenarios based on different assumptions: whether vaccination rates are high or low, and whether the public continues to use masks and social distancing or gives them up prematurely. The goal was not to provide a forecast of what will happen but to suggest “optimistic and pessimistic views of what might happen in the future, to help people plan,” Lesslers says.
The scenarios his contributors came up with mostly jibe with the generally hopeful feeling that’s prevailing these days. “In most of the models we see either a leveling off of cases or a mini bump, and then everything goes down to essentially nothing around mid- to late-summer,” Lessler says. But there was a huge discrepancy in the total number of deaths between the best-case and worst-case scenarios. The death toll today is approximately 575,000. The ensemble scenario projected 628,000 total U.S. deaths if vaccination was widely accepted and people maintained a moderate use of masks and social distancing, versus 776,000 deaths if vaccination remained low and people stopped masking.
To be clear, these projections are not intended as numerical predictions of how many will die, but rather a relative indication of the impact these factors could have. Fortunately the latest short-term forecasts put out by the CDC are looking considerably better than even the more optimistic scenarios modeled a month ago. But the point they make remains valid. Until vaccines and acquired immunity drive down the number of people who can spread the virus, it will continue to spread, and a percentage of those infected will die. “Tens of millions of people are still fully susceptible,” Reich says. “Everyone’s itching to get back to normal, but I think it’s weeks too early. I think all the warnings for us to not let down our guard right now are really well founded because there’s still a lot that could go wrong.”
Remember the idea of flattening the curve? It applies at the end of a pandemic as much as it did at the beginning. “We’re beyond the hump,” says Lessler, “but if it’s a perfectly symmetric curve, we’re going to see as many people infected and die on the downside as you did on the upside. If we flatten the curve more slowly, we could see hundreds of thousands more deaths. If we accelerate the process, then we don’t have to see those deaths.”
Kim Eun-kang joined the Shincheonji church in 2014, but fled after a year. (photo: ABC News/Mitch Denman Woolnough)
Cult or Church? This Korean Sect Has Thousands of Devotees, but Ex-Believers Lost Faith and Money
Carrington Clarke, Sook-young Lee and Mitch Denman Woolnough, ABC News
Excerpt: "At 24, Kim Eun-kang was pursuing her dream of becoming a traditional Korean music singer. But she gave it all up to compete for a chance at immortality."
"I truly believed that I was going to live forever," the now 31-year-old told the ABC.
When she joined Shincheonji Church of Jesus in 2014, the church's spiritual leader Lee Man-hee was aggressively and successfully courting new followers.
Shincheonji was drawing away members from mainstream Christian denominations, who likened the sect to a cult.
The church has its own calendar and would hold large-scale outdoor events filled with followers — all built around the personality, prestige and purported power of its leader.
The proselytizing worked on a young and drifting Ms Kim. Despite her talent and the way her career as a singer was developing, she wasn't feeling fulfilled.
She hadn't previously been religious but says the church seemed to offer the possibility of something greater.
"Lee Man-hee said he possessed the spirit of Jesus. When he was shown in TV or in public, I would just start to cry. I felt some aura around him."
For Ms Kim, joining the church was about much more than just attending a service once a week.
"I quit my job, I devoted all time and started living in the Shincheonji," she said.
She said she was expected to spread the message of the church and bring in new members.
"When I was there I was like a robot," she remembered.
Why Shincheonji vie for a place in the afterlife
Shincheonji followers are awaiting judgment day.
Followers believe that after the apocalypse, only 144,000 true believers will be elevated to high priests.
The number is taken from Chapter 7 of the Book of Revelation, which it interprets literally. Jehovah Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have similar interpretations.
This presents a problem for Shincheonji members: The church has about 204,000 of them, which means about 60,000 can't reach the elevated status.
Byun Sang-wook is a well-known news anchor in South Korea and he made a documentary series on Shincheonji.
He said the "high priest" status cut-off creates competition among the devout for a spot, which is helpful for the church.
"Competition results in members doing more work in Shincheonji, giving more money to Shincheonji and bring more members to Shincheonji," Mr Byun said.
"This is difficult to do while working or studying, so Shincheonji encourages them to quit, telling them there's no use in finishing school when the apocalypse is coming soon."
Shincheonji denied this in a statement to the ABC.
"Shincheonji Church of Jesus has about 200,000 believers, and most of them live daily lives in very ordinary families," the church said.
Why so many fringe religions flourish in Korea
Compared with Europe, Christianity has a relatively short history in South Korea, but it's been very successful in converting believers.
Despite preachers only arriving there in the 18th century, about a third of South Korea's 51 million people now identify as Christian.
Presbyterian missionaries from the United States were influential in shaping the growth of the religion, and it's been noted that many of the sects that have sprung up mirror the beliefs of ultra-conservative sects spread across the American bible belt.
The country also has a history of shamanism, which appears to have fused with traditional Christian beliefs in these fringe sects.
Perhaps the most famous sect in Korean history is the Unification Church.
It was founded by its self-declared messiah, Sun Myuung-moon, in 1954 and his flock are colloquially known as 'Moonies'.
The sect gained sizeable media attention for its penchant for holding mass arranged weddings, often held in sports stadiums with tens of thousands of couples.
Another fringe sect exerted influence over the most powerful political office in South Korea.
Former President Park Geun-hye was impeached and then imprisoned on bribery, coercion and abuse of power charges.
She was brought down by her lifelong connection with a shadowy figure from an obscure religious cult that critics called a "shaman fortune teller".
Shincheonji came onto the Korean religion scene in 1984.
'We see people running away from home'
Like fringe groups before it, Shincheonji argues that mainstream churches are so corrupt and decadent that they have lost their power to save Christians, according to Mr Byun.
"Shincheonji says only through its interpretation of the Bible and through the leader can people be saved," he said.
Shincheonji is particularly active on university campuses.
Mr Byun said parents sometimes complained their children join the church and turned their backs on both their family and previous goals.
"We see people running away from home, dropping out of school and donating college tuition to Shincheonji," he said.
Shincheonji denied that it encouraged followers to leave behind their old lives.
"The Shinchoenji Church of Jesus has consistently provided recommendations to members that they should not run away from home, [give up] studying, or divorce because of their religion," it said.
The church has spread outside Korea's borders and has branches around the world, including in Australia.
The pandemic shines a light on the church
Shincheonji received global attention last year when it was the centre of what was, at the time, the biggest COVID-19 outbreak in Korea
More than 5,000 cases of COVID-19 were linked to the church and, at one point, it was calculated to represent 60 per cent of the cases in the country.
In a nation where the population is nearly universally compliant with social distancing and mask-wearing, there was outrage that the church was flouting the rules.
Kim Jin-yong was a member of Shincheonji when the outbreak occurred, and he said it tested his faith.
"I was told by Shincheonji we were immortal, but then I saw was witnessing members dying from COVID-19," he said.
"I realised Shincheonji was lying to me."
While Mr Kim was questioning his beliefs, saw greater scrutiny of the church and its practices.
The church was reluctant to hand over details of its members for contact tracing, arguing they needed to be protected from discrimination and prosecution.
The government said by withholding those details, the church wasted precious time, which allowed the disease to spread further.
Shincheonji's leader was chastened and during a nationally televised news conference, he knelt and bowed.
His apology wasn't enough for the authorities though. The 88-year-old was charged with breaking virus control laws.
In January, however, he was acquitted after the judge ruled that the church's failure to provide a full list of worshippers and church facilities did not amount to impeding the government's pandemic response.
But Lee Man-hee was found guilty of the embezzlement of the equivalent of $6.5 million.
He received a three-year suspended sentence, so wasn't sent to jail.
The court found that the embezzled money was partly used to fund a luxury 'palace of peace' on the outskirts of Seoul.
Although the compound was supposed to be used for church purposes, the leader admitted to occasionally using it as a home.
Families of followers track down the leader
According to court documents, Mr Lee is currently residing in a relatively nondescript apartment in outer Seoul.
Choi Mi-suk heads to the complex every day.
She sets up a small speaker and unfurls large banners, denouncing Shincheonji and Lee Man-hee.
Ms Choi hopes her pleas to the church leader will lead to the return of her daughter.
"Since my daughter left home, I gave up work. I have had no choice but to come out to the street to search for her," she said.
Ms Choi's daughter was 20 years old when she joined the Shincheonji Church of Jesus Christ.
She hasn't spoken to her daughter in more than a year
Ms Choi has not seen her child since February.
"At that time Shincheonji promised to let her come back home but she hasn't come yet," she said.
"I believe she will come back."
If the leader is in the building and hears her pleas, he has so far chosen to ignore them.
Ms Choi is undeterred, though, and vowed to continue her daily ritual until her daughter returns.
Shincheonji told the ABC that Ms Choi's daughter had not been a member of their church in three years.
It was also claimed by Shincheonji that Ms Choi and her child were locked in "an old family feud".
A police report from 2018 shows that Ms Choi and her husband were involved in a physical altercation with their daughter over her affiliation with the church, but no charges were laid.
Former believers try to save others
Kim Eun-kang lasted about a year in the church before choosing to leave.
She said members of the sect pressured her to stay but she found strength in the Ansan Sangrok Church, a congregation made up almost entirely by former members of Shincheonji.
Ansan Sangrok followers actively try to encourage people to leave Shincheonji, which they consider to be dangerous.
Ms Kim said she believed Shincheonji is manipulative and draws people away from their own families to further enrich the church, at the cost of followers' mental health.
She is back working in the arts, now as a dance teacher, and regularly attends services at the Ansan Sangrok Church where she sings.
She seems happy but gets emotional when she talks about her fears for young members of Shincheonji.
"I feel sorry that they spend their precious youth and time there," she said through tears.
"I only spent one year there but I struggled so much after I came out from there.
Ms Kim regrets walking away from her promising singing career in search of salvation.
"I can't restart my career so now I've had to spend a long time trying to find my identity," she said.
"Those were very hard times. I am so sorry that other young people will experience what I did."
A red-tailed hawk. (photo: Alamy)
How Did a Wildlife Lover Become One of the Bloodiest Poachers in California History?
Jake Flanagin, Guardian UK
Flanagin writes: "Richard Parker was a self-described naturalist. Then an anonymous tip led investigators to a scene of 'carnage.'"
he California department of fish and wildlife relies on an intricate network of citizen-informants to help do its job. The agency’s secret tip line is a critical tool in the fight against wildlife crimes because, in more rural areas of the state, a single wildlife officer can be responsible for thousands of miles of territory.
Todd Kinnard is one such officer – tasked with overseeing agency operations across the expansive Lassen county, five hours north-east of San Francisco by car. He was on duty when an anonymous tip came in that someone in the county was shooting raptors, birds of prey such as red-tailed and ferruginous hawks.
Raptors are not typically the subject of poaching tips. They are agile, apex predators that – due to a diet consisting largely of pests such as rats, snakes, and mice – tend to coexist with humans rather than compete with them.
Kinnard took the tip with a grain of salt. In Lassen county, it is not unheard of for neighbors to weaponize the department’s anonymous tip line against one another out of spite. Because something as seemingly innocuous as taking one too many fish from a local pond can result in substantial government fines, grazing-rights or property-line disputes can quickly mushroom-cloud into frenzies of sometimes bogus, sometimes legitimate, tit-for-tat poaching complaints.
Kinnard drove out to the site of the alleged raptor killings to carry out a preliminary, informal knock-and-talk inquiry. It was a large-tract property, roughly 80 acres, in the unincorporated town of Standish. The property sat perched on the banks of the Susan River, a few miles east of the county seat, Susanville. The owners, Richard Parker and his wife, Tonya, were not at home at the time.
But what Kinnard saw upon entering the property was stomach-churning. A cottonwood tree near the Parkers’ home was strung up with grisly ornamentation – several dead raptors, all at varying stages of decomposition. Other bodies were scattered around the tree’s base, approximately a dozen in all.
Kinnard was not prepared to bag and tag the gruesome cache of evidence dangling from the cottonwood tree. He seized what evidence he could and took the bodies to the fish and wildlife department’s forensic laboratory in Sacramento.
The agency’s raptor specialist examined the carcasses and was able to determine species, with corresponding protected statuses. Causes of death proved more elusive, however. The bodies had been left to field for quite some time.
Still, the probability of a dozen birds of prey dying of natural causes at the same location is spectacularly low. As the Sacramento laboratory got to work on identifying causes of death, Kinnard proceeded with his own investigation. The dead raptors recovered on that day in 2018 were only the tip of a blood-red iceberg.
Richard Parker, a seemingly ordinary country gentleman, appeared to have a secret, sadistic hobby and the anonymous tipster had led Kinnard to uncover one of the bloodiest poaching cases in California history.
An anti-government streak
Lassen county is tucked away in the sparsely populated north-east of California. It sits north of Lake Tahoe along the Nevada border, and east of Redding, the last major population center before the vast wilderness stretching between northern California and southern Oregon.
Lt Kyle Kroll, who oversees game wardens in the area, describes the region around Susanville as the Honey Lake Valley, a unique ecosystem straddling a transition zone between the desert and the mountains. “But with a lot of water,” he says, “because the aquifers flow eastward into the desert. It’s a perfect habitat for raptors, because it’s a rich area that attracts a lot of their prey.”
Topography aside, Lassen is an entirely different world, culturally speaking, from the metropolitan sprawl of the Bay Area to its south-west, or even the exurbs and rich farmland of the nearby Sacramento Valley.
The population in 2019 was just over 30,500 residents, less than half that of the San Francisco suburb of Palo Alto, spread out over more than 180 times the square mileage. It is the kind of place people go to get away from the congestion of coastal California’s urban-suburban sprawl, and the many customs and regulations woven into life there.
There is a palpable anti-government streak embedded in the culture of Lassen county – a “don’t tread on me” mentality that often pits the priorities of local residents against those of state conservation officers such as Kroll and Kinnard.
California’s sole pack of wild wolves inhabits a territory encompassing parts of Lassen county. There is no love lost between the endangered canines and area ranchers, who view the pack as a direct threat to their livelihoods. (Wolves occasionally feed on cattle and sheep.)
In December of 2020, a state investigation into the shooting of a protected wolf in Lassen county laid bare these tensions by implicating a 23-year-old, sixth-generation rancher, Brett Gagnon.
“I can’t believe you guys would waste your time to investigate somebody for shooting a miserable wolf,” Gagnon’s grandfather told state agents as they executed a search warrant on the family ranch.
Gagnon was not ultimately charged with the killing. Analysis of the bullet recovered from the wolf’s body did not match any of the guns seized from the Gagnon home. The case remains open.
The ordeal did little to warm relations between the fish and wildlife department and county residents. And perhaps a flavor of that tension informed the politics of one Richard Parker.
The stakeout
As the fish and wildlife department’s forensic examiners poked and prodded the bodies recovered from the Parker property, Todd Kinnard remained disturbed and restless over what he could only imagine had occurred there. He knew the physical evidence against the Parkers was damning, but not conclusive, and the agency would need solid proof that one or more members of the family were behind the brutal raptor killings in order to bring about any kind of justice.
Kinnard enacted what state agents call a Code Five surveillance plan. In March 2018, for several mornings in a row, he took up a vantage point on a neighboring property and, using a high-powered scope, staked out the Parker home.
On one of these mornings, he witnessed an individual emerging from the house, rifle in hand, later determined to be Parker, according to department officials.
Kinnard says Parker took up position in the yard, raised his rifle, and shot off several rounds in different directions. Kinnard recalls watching nearby foliage explode to life as birds fled the vicinity. He now had sufficient probable cause to corroborate the initial tip and secure a search warrant.
The warrant was served on the Parkers by a team of wildlife officers in the early hours of 11 March 2018.
“I’ll be honest, we thought we were only going to find what was already around that tree,” Kroll recalls. “But that was just one of the specks of evidence that we found.” The true extent of the horror would stretch from fence to fence.
Recollecting the broader examination of the property, Kroll describes a scene of complete carnage within a 300-yard radius of the Parker home. “Every bird within reach of his house, anything he could hit, was lying there on the ground. Dozens and dozens of carcasses.”
“It was just an unbelievable amount of evidence,” Kroll says. The team needed to restrategize. Time was of the essence – many of the bodies had clearly been decomposing for some time. Some were little more than skulls and delicate wing bones.
State wildlife officers assembled in a kind of phalanx formation and began meticulously surveying the property in four waves. The first wave made initial identifications of body locations, marking points on a GPS app. The second took photographs; the third recorded copious notes on the state and positioning of the carcasses. The fourth collected and bagged them.
The process created a map of the butchery, which investigators later transposed on to satellite imagery of the Parker property. It provided unsettling insight into Parker’s bloody method.
“As he entered his property by vehicle, any raptors he’d see perched along the access road he’d shoot,” Kroll says. “It was a row of dots along the road and around his home.”
Parker, for his part, was surprised by the raid, yet calm, Kroll recalls. Kinnard obtained an admission on the scene from Parker that he had shot a red-tailed hawk just the day before. The justification offered was that he believed the raptors were killing off local game birds.
“He was an upland game hunter,” Kroll says, conceding that raptors are known to predate on certain species of quail, dove and pheasant, favored by sportsmen. “He said he thought he was doing the game bird population a favor by eradicating the predators.”
Kroll believes this may have been Parker’s original intent, “but it eventually became a sick sport”, he speculates. “There might have been an adrenaline rush; people get addicted to that. We see that from time to time with the larger-scale poaching cases.”
Likewise, the map of Parker’s killings seemingly refutes the notion that his motives lay chiefly with preserving the area game bird population. All of the bodies recovered from Parker’s property were killed along the access road and in the immediate vicinity of his home. There is no evidence to suggest he made treks further afield to enact this purported, self-directed population-control program.
That same day, Parker was arrested and booked into Lassen county jail on charges including unlawful killing of birds of prey, killing of migratory non-game birds in violation of the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and possession of wildlife unlawfully taken.
The man who relished the hunt
The man wildlife agents took into custody that day had not necessarily lived a life indicative of a future sport killer. Richard Earl Parker was born and raised in Lassen county. He graduated from Susanville high school, and after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Sacramento State University in 1973, he returned to the area to settle down.
He became a significant figure in the Honey Lake Valley, according to local people who spoke with the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. Parker still has friends in the area. Susanville is small. And even two years after his conviction, anxiety about retaliation persists. “They [don’t] want to stir up anything,” one local resident explains.
For 20 years, Parker was the area milkman. When the home milk-delivery business died out, he pivoted to insurance sales. He served in the Lassen County Chamber of Commerce for 15 years and participated in local theater productions.
Members of the community in Susanville say Parker’s local status was polarizing. He was intensely liked by his circle of friends and confidants and intensely disliked by others.
“A lot of people from his community called us after the arrest came out,” Capt Patrick Foy of the department of fish and wildlife says. “They acknowledged that he was a powerful, well-connected guy in the community, and there was concern he was not going to be prosecuted fairly.”
Indeed, local residents tell the Guardian that Parker viewed the Honey Lake Valley as a manor and himself as its lord.
And like all standard-issue country gentlemen, Parker relished a stalk and a hunt.
Sport hunting in many parts of rural America sits at an awkward philosophical crossroads between conservationism and libertarianism. On the one hand, there is a rationale for the preservation of wild lands, which arises from a mixture of legitimate appreciation for nature and simple supply-and-demand economics: better habitats attract more creatures to hunt. On the other hand, there is a natural tension between the autonomy of the hunter and the conservationist machinations of the state.
Parker seemingly resided, for a time, at this crossroads. But the tension perhaps proved untenable for him.
In the late 1990s, shortly after purchasing the property in Standish, Parker asked state forestry authorities to set a controlled fire on his land. Parker thought the riverside property was a perfect nesting ground for waterfowl. But at the time, it was infested with whitetop, an invasive weed that chokes out competing grasses.
The controlled blaze, administered in November 1999, wiped out a mat of whitetop and made way for the area’s natural weeds and grasses to take root.
“What I was going to grow was wildlife, little critters, waterfowl,” Parker told the Lassen County News just after the fire. “My interest is to have birds and wildlife around me.”
But something in Parker’s philosophy would change in the ensuing years. The self-described hunter and naturalist began advocating seemingly contrary positions to the conservationist movement.
In 2013, he told the Lassen County Times, another local newspaper, that he hoped a commission tasked with making countywide economic projections would prioritize logging, largely viewed as one of the most ecologically devastating industries in the world. “This committee should recommend to the people that our biggest opportunity for economic growth is timber,” he said.
The inciting incident for this change of heart may have been a small-town political scandal, at the heart of which was Parker himself.
Despite the shades of anti-government spirit that pervade Lassen county, Parker seemed to crave public office. He has made several runs at various positions – most recently, it appears, in 2008, for the Lassen Community College board.
In 2000, he was elected director of the Lassen municipal utility district, the public utility provider for the county. Less than a year into his tenure, citizens launched a vigorous recall effort against Parker and his fellow board members.
Organizers accused Parker of “abdication of authority”, “violation of public trust”, “abuse of power”, and “intentional misuse of public funds” arising from a proposed 162% rate hike in electrical costs for the county that year.
Public meetings in response to the proposed rate hike were “vile” and “disorderly”, according newspaper reports from the time, with community members lodging concerns that such a move would destroy the county’s fragile economy.
Richard Parker was effectively villainized by the whole ordeal. The place to which he devoted years of time and effort cultivating a reputation seemed to be rejecting him. And he scrambled to shift blame – first, to unnamed local environmentalists, allegedly to blame for preventing the construction of more power plants.
“Bunny huggers”, he called them in one public meeting, with palpable, newfound derision.
The crimes come full circle
Nearly two decades after the recall effort, Parker found himself on trial for conduct that was arguably the polar opposite of bunny hugging. In April of 2019, Parker, then 68, pleaded guilty to crimes associated with poaching in excess of 150 birds of prey and other wildlife. He was sentenced to three months in jail, a $75,000 fine, and five years’ probation. Terms of his probation forbid him from possessing firearms or engaging in hunting or fishing of any kind.
Wildlife officers are reluctant to label crimes like Parker’s “serial killings”, as it conflates terminology associated with homicide and animal poaching. Still, they acknowledge a distinction between the crimes of Richard Parker and your average poacher.
“Poaching can be taking one too many trout from a pond, or redirecting a creek on your own property,” says Foy. “But there are individuals who seem to enjoy killing for the sake of killing,” he says, noting that in cases where the body count is as high as Parker’s, it is difficult to identify a motive other than rank cruelty or sadism.
“Who knows what the true extent was,” Kroll says of Parker’s crimes. “We uncovered a hundredfold more than we assumed we’d find. But things don’t last long in the wild. The true extent of the carnage was probably much greater. We truly think that his kill number was so much higher than what we were able to collect.”
Kroll speculates Parker’s conviction was largely attributable to the strength of the government’s case against him, primarily due to forensic assistance from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Because these birds are federally protected, we were in constant contact with them,” Kroll says. “They were an immense help because we were able to ship the [dead] birds up to their lab in Ashland, Oregon, which is really world-renowned in wildlife forensics. They spent an immense amount of time going through every piece of evidence submitted and writing a comprehensive report for each – way beyond anything we could have compiled locally.”
Ultimately, despite committing several federal crimes, Parker was tried in state court by the office of the former California attorney general Xavier Becerra. This, Kroll says, allowed for the story of Richard Parker – bloody as it may be – to inspire a happy ending.
“Because of the case disposition, a huge sum of money went back into community conservation and education programs,” he explains. Per the California fish code, 10% of fish and wildlife-related fines go to individual county fish and game commissions, which can reinvest those funds to the benefit of local ecology. Seventy-five hundred dollars goes a long way in Lassen county.
“They might donate the money to a fishing program for inner-city youth,” Kroll says, “Or wildlife projects like installing [water] guzzlers for antelope in the high desert.
“It’s a nice way of bringing wildlife crimes full circle,” he says. Despite himself, Richard Parker, one of the most extensively prosecuted poachers in California history, became an indirect bunny hugger after all.
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