marble falls
marble falls's JournalMcConnell Says He Was 'Wrong' To Claim Obama Didn't Leave A Pandemic Playbook "I clearly made a mist
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mcconnell-wrong-obama-playbook-pandemic_n_5ebded27c5b6ee0b69e82f3eMcConnell Says He Was ‘Wrong’ To Claim Obama Didn’t Leave A Pandemic Playbook
“I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” the Senate Republican leader said on Fox News.
By Nick Visser
<snip>
“I was wrong,” McConnell told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “They did leave behind a plan, so I clearly made a mistake in that regard. As to whether or not the plan was followed, or who’s the critic and all the rest, I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details.”
The senator sparked controversy earlier this week during an online interview with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and campaign adviser, when he went after the Obama administration’s handover to Trump’s team. He also lambasted the former president for criticizing in a private meeting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 1.4 million people in the U.S., saying Obama had been “a little bit classless” and “should’ve kept his mouth shut.”
<snip>
In fact, Politico reported in March that the Obama White House did leave a detailed, 69-page document on fighting pandemics that included a bevy of measures the administration should have taken amid early reports a new viral pathogen was spreading overseas. At the time, a National Security Council official told Politico the document was “quite dated” and said the administration’s own efforts were “a better fit” and “more detailed.”
Trump has been criticized by some for being slow to respond to the virus as it first began to spread in the United States, but he has lashed out at those claims, instead seeking to blame Obama, the World Health Organization and even his own medical advisers.
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For those of us who don't want to pick through tweets regarding RGB/Whitewater references at SCOTUS
RBG Immediately Went There, Asked Trump Lawyer How Whitewater and Watergate Were Different from Tax Return Case
Colin Kalmbacher
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rbg-immediately-went-there-asked-trump-lawyer-how-whitewater-and-watergate-were-different-from-tax-return-case/ar-BB13YjQj
<snip>
“Counsel, in so many of these prior cases, there was a cooperation,” Ginsburg began. “For example: tax returns. Every president voluntarily turned over his tax returns. So, it gets to be a pitched battle because President Trump is the first one to refuse to do that.”
The famed liberal justice continued:
Initially, [Trump] said because of an audit was ongoing. Now it seems to be broader than that. But the aura of this case is really: “Sauce for the goose that serves the gander as well.” So, how do you distinguish, say, Whitewater when President Clinton’s personal records were subpoenaed from his accountant or even Hillary Clinton‘s law firm billing records were subpoenaed. It seems that in prior cases–you say this one is one-of-a-kind–but it seems that in prior cases there was a much greater collision of interests. [Indistinguishable] the Nixon tapes. How do you distinguish all of those cases, Watergate, Whitewater, the Nixon tapes case, the Paula Jones case?
“Well, your honor, we distinct them in a number of ways,” Trump’s attorney Patrick Strawbridge responded. “With respect to Watergate and Whitewater, obviously, those are cases of relatively recent vintage. And in separation of powers disputes, this court has generally–such as in Noel Canning–looked back for a much longer precedent for the type of issue that needs to be decided with examples of the encroachment on the separation of powers. And the recent examples–there are just a handful of them that the House identifies–are too recent under that stricture, as the court recognized in Southwest General.”
<snip>
Principal Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, representing Trump as a government official, made a separate attempt to protect Trump’s tax returns by asserting that sitting presidents are held to a different legal standard.
“How’d that work out in the Paula Jones case?” Ginsburg quipped.
One Way To get Help in a Domestic Violence Situation
Rutger Bregman: 'Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate'
Rutger Bregman: 'Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate'
The historian offers a hopeful view of human nature in his latest book, Humankind. It couldn’t have come at a better time
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/rutger-bregman-our-secret-superpower-is-our-ability-to-cooperate
Jonathan Freedland
Jonathan Freedland
@Freedland
Sat 9 May 2020 04.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 9 May 2020 10.58 EDT
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Stone by stone, Bregman breaks up the foundations that underpin much of our understanding of ourselves as callous, uncaring creatures hiding beneath a veneer of civilisation. That understanding has acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, he says: if people expect the worst of each other, they’ll get it. He can cite the experiments that show even lab rats behave worse when their handlers assume they’ll behave badly. Our true nature is to be kind, caring and cooperative, he argues. We used to be like that – and we can be again.
<snip>
The argument he makes is compelling, not least his suggestion that gloomy assessments of humankind such as William Golding’s or Milgram’s flourished in the postwar era, as the world tried to make sense of the Holocaust. One section of the book is titled “After Auschwitz”. Which brings us to the biggest roadblock in the way of his argument. How to square the notion that humans are fundamentally good with a long and continuing history of humanmade horror, exemplified by the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews, including more than a million children? Bregman does an admirable job debunking those post-Holocaust experiments and theories, but the Holocaust itself still stands there, implacable and unmoving.
<snip>
Bregman cites evidence that the motivation of perpetrators was often rooted in qualities we’d ordinarily admire: loyalty to their fellow soldiers, for example. He notes how the friendliness that sets humans apart – he calls our species “Homo Puppy” – has a dark side, because empathy with “us” can turn to murderous hostility to “not us”. “Our secret superpower” is our friendliness and ability to cooperate, he says, and yet “we’re also the cruellest of species”. But surely, that latter statement fatally undermines his thesis?
“I would emphasise that I’m not actually saying that people are good. The title of the book in Dutch is De Meeste Mensen Deugen, which is ‘Most People Are Deugen’, with deugen a word that you cannot translate. It’s sort of like ‘pretty decent deep down’ or ‘good after all’.” Later he refers to human destructiveness in these terms: “We’re not born to do this, but we’re capable of it.”
• Humankind by Rutger Bregman is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
Society books
When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Rutger Bregman
@rcbregman
Sat 9 May 2020 04.00 EDT
Last modified on Sun 10 May 2020 01.53 EDT
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I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain’s name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: “Mates share 50-year bond”. Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: “Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature.” Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.
<snip>
But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”
<snip>
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.
<snip>
They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
• This is an adapted excerpt from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. A live streamed Q&A with Bregman and Owen Jones takes place at 7pm on 19 May 2020.
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For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing
For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/magazine/for-some-holocaust-survivors-even-liberation-was-dehumanizing.html
“If their eyes were mirrors, it seems I’m not far from dead.” After being freed by Allied troops, some former prisoners continued to be mistreated.
By Jennifer Orth-Veillon
April 28, 2020
<snip>
Some liberators treated the surviving prisoners this way not only because they were disgusted by the reality of the heinous crimes committed upon them, but also because they were poorly prepared for what they would find. The historian Robert Abzug, who studied the way American G.I.s reacted to liberation, found that even the most “battle-weary” service members were stunned, unable to reconcile the Nazi terrors with their bloodiest memories of combat. Yet Allied intelligence had known that Jews were being rounded up, deported and massacred for years. In August 1944, major American newspapers covered the Soviet discovery of Maidanek, an extermination camp near the Polish city of Lublin. Similarly, in late January and February 1945, the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz made headlines, but these reports didn’t seem to prepare the soldiers for what they would find. When Captain Hagood was being taken to Hannover-Ahlem, he thought it was a prisoner-of-war facility, which he might have assumed would follow fair treatment laws outlined in the Geneva Conventions that Germany signed in 1929. He wrote: “All the grisly scenes I’d witnessed in four years of combat paled as I viewed the higgedly-piggedly stack of cadavers.”
Unlike Semprún and Levi, who met their liberators while still in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Ruth Kluger encountered her first American in the town center of Straubing, Germany, after escaping Christianstadt. In her memoir, “Still Alive,” she recalled that when her mother told him they had fled a concentration camp, he put his hands over his ears, having apparently had his fill of those who claimed to be camp survivors. “Here was my first American, and he deliberately closed his ears,” she recalled. “One thing, I figured, was certain: this war hadn’t been fought for our sake.”
Some of these reactions suggest soldiers were experiencing a kind of shock, while others point to anti-Semitism, even within the most senior echelons of the military. After inspecting displaced persons camps in Germany in summer of 1945, Earl G. Harrison, a lawyer and American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, expressed harsh criticism of the ways Jews were treated by the Americans, claiming evidence of conditions similar to the Nazi-run concentration camps from which they had been freed. He summarized his observations by stating, “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” When President Harry Truman read the report, he ordered Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to inspect displaced persons camps. During a visit to a camp in Bavaria, Gen. George S. Patton told Eisenhower that he blamed the refugees for the squalor. He complained they were “pissing and crapping all over the place,” and wanted to open his own concentration camp “for some of these goddamn Jews.” Maj. Irving Heymont, who was stationed at the Landsberg displacement camp, said in his letters that some Americans proclaimed that they preferred German civilians, who seemed normal, to the Jewish survivors, whom they characterized as animals undeserving of special treatment.
Despite these racist views, meaningful connections happened in the days and months following liberation — on physical and social levels. Survivors reported that liberators who handled their bodies gently in the days following liberation — when the slightest medical error meant life or death for those in the most critical condition — brought an immediate sense of restored humanity. Levi compared baths from Soviet nurses to the one forced upon him by American military personnel. The nurses washed “with tender hands” and “soaped, rubbed, massaged, and dried” him “from head to foot.” This bath was not one “of humiliation, no grotesque-devilish-sacral bath, no black-mass bath like the first one which had marked our descent into the concentration camp universe nor was it a functional antiseptic, highly automatized bath, like that of our passage into American hands many months later.”
<snip>
Jennifer Orth-Veillon, a freelance writer and university lecturer based in Lyon, France, holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Emory University. Between 2016 and 2019, she curated “WWrite: A Blog Exploring WWI’s Influence on Contemporary Writing and Scholarship” for the United States World War I Centennial Commission.
There are photos at the link. They are stark and while not graphic are possibly triggering.
The Ghost Dogs of the Amazon Get a Bit Less Mysterious
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It took 50 researchers to get a clearer picture of where this mysterious canid roams in the Amazon rain forest.Credit...Galo Zapata-Rios and WCS
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/science/ghost-dog-amazon-rainforest.html?algo=identity&fellback=false&imp_id=77413872&imp_id=834701063
The Ghost Dogs of the Amazon Get a Bit Less Mysterious
Scientists have produced data that shows the range of an enigmatic short-eared canid species that has yet to be widely studied.
By Cara Giaimo
May 4, 2020
It is one of the Amazon rain forest’s most elusive and enigmatic mammals. Experts call the species “shy” or even “a ghost.”
<snip>
Or at least a type of dog. The short-eared dog is the only member of the canine genus Atelocynus, and the only such species unique to the Amazon rainforest. In a study published last month in Royal Society Open Science, 50 researchers chipped away at the creature’s mysteries by putting together a large location data set gleaned mostly from camera trap cameos. By mapping the species’s range and determining its preferred habitat, the scientists, many of whom have never encountered the animal in person, hope to help protect it.
<snip>
(video at link)
<snip>
As a result, the species is “one of the least studied dogs worldwide,” Mr. Rocha said. We don’t know much about their life histories or reproductive strategies, or how many of them exist. We don’t even really know what they eat, although scat studies suggest that they like fish, small mammals and fruit.
Individual experts have gone to great lengths to change that. Renata Leite Pitman, a contributor to the study and the director of the Research Center for Atlantic Forest Conservation, once obtained a short-eared dog pup that had been raised with domestic dogs. She and her assistant, Emeterio Nuñonca Sencia, trained the dog to walk on a leash and took careful notes on what he sniffed at, ate and avoided. She has also managed to track several dogs with radio collars.
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As scientists set up camera traps to study other animals and later looked through the footage, “these dogs would appear,” and they have seldom been studied.Credit...Daniel Rocha
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New Hampshire State Rep. Resigns After Graphic Tweet About Tara Reade Allegation
New Hampshire State Rep. Resigns After Graphic Tweet About Tara Reade Allegation
Richard Komi apologized to “anybody whose feelings may have been hurt” by his tweet dismissing Reade’s sexual assault claim against Joe Biden.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-komi-resigns-biden-tara-reade_n_5eaeb712c5b62ee946018dbf
By Hayley Miller
<snip>
In his resignation letter to state House Speaker Steve Shurtleff (D), Komi apologized to “anybody whose feelings may have been hurt” by the tweet, The New Hampshire Union Leader reported.
“I am by this email offering my resignation as a member of the New Hampshire House,” Komi reportedly wrote. “I also want to offer my sincere apologies to anybody whose feelings may have been hurt by the tweets.”
He continued:
I am and will continue to be a supporter of victims of sexual and domestic assault. The tweets were very poorly worded and do not reflect who I am and what I stand for. I ask for the forgiveness of all who have been a victim of sexual or any other kind of assault. I in no way excuse my poor judgment on this matter and hope that every one will know that I am truly sorry for my mistakes.
Komi, who endorsed Biden for president in July 2019, faced calls for his resignation from liberal activists and state party leaders, including Shurtleff, following his bizarre defense of Biden in a tweet Friday.
<snip>
I read the tweet and I was shocked by it. Anybody who read it can understand why I did not include it.
I'm sorry he had to go, I was hoping there was some way to for him to walk this all back.
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