Axios reports: Pollution levels have plummeted over China and it’s “partly related to the economic slowdown following the outbreak of coronavirus,” NASA said in a statement accompanying the release of satellite images demonstrating the nitrogen dioxide (NO2) changes.
The outbreak caused China’s factory activity to fall to a record low of 35.7 in February from 50.0 in January, officials said Saturday, per the Financial Times. NO2, a key contributor to smog and a major health hazard, is the gas that’s emitted by motor vehicles, power plants and other industrial facilities.
NO2 levels in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. Photo: NASA
This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event.”
— Fei Liu, air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA scientists first noticed the reduction in NO2 pollution in January near Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. They then noticed changes in pollution levels across the country as the virus spread.
Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recalled seeing a fall in NO2 levels over several countries during the economic recession that began in 2008, but that was more gradual.
This is not the right way to combat global warming, obviously. But it is a very sharp illustration of what’s causing it.
This Washington Post feature about a Southern, white, suburban woman struggling with her Republican identity is well worth reading. I realize that many people will find her to be a totally reprehensible person for failing to fully confront the patriarchal, white, supremacist society in which she lives. But this piece is a sensitive look at the way a person might actually change from within a culture and society that has trained her mentally and emotionally to see the world in a certain way.
These things are not easy and the story shows just how thoroughly inculcated in conservative values so many of these people are. And it shows how Trump is having the effect of opening some of the women’s eyes to how cruel and hypocritical it really is. And that’s scary.
The following excerpt is just a part of the conclusion. We have been reading about this woman Miranda and her friend Liz, a Democrats with whom she has been sharing her feelings about politics and Trump. This is about her husband Philip:
He knew that Miranda had some issues with Trump’s behavior.
“She finds Trump sometimes a little off-putting with his personality,” he said. “She does get kind of like, ‘I wish he wouldn’t say that.’ But I’m more of a results guy. I’m not as concerned about his brash statements as Miranda. I think he’s probably grown a lot as a man in a good way. I see him as being a gracious man.”
He thought about why he and Miranda might see things differently.
“She tends to run on emotion,” he said. “Not to make a sexist statement, but a lot of women do. I run more on logic. I think that balances us well.”
He was not worried about Miranda’s worries about Trump, Miranda’s friendship with Liz, or whatever they were talking about in the woods.
“As long as she and Miranda get along, I’m happy with it,” Phillip said.
[…]
Things Miranda had never told Phillip:
That she thought Trump was racist, and when he questioned the legitimacy of the first black president, she thought about her black students and how wrong it was to rob them of pride.
That she thought Trump was cruel, and when he mocked a reporter with disabilities, she felt the same surge of blind rage she had once felt when a boy called her sister a “retard.”
She thought Trump was immoral, and when she heard Christians defending him, she wanted to say, “How? How do we worship the same God? There are so many things that we as human beings should not condone, should not excuse.”
She had told Phillip about being sexually assaulted by a man when she was 8 years old, but she had not told him that when she heard Trump boasting about how he could kiss women “without even asking” and “grab them by the p—y,” he had reminded her of the man who had grabbed her when she was walking to school, and the feeling of hands forcing themselves on her, and the feeling of struggling to break free, and the feeling of running for her life, and of “exactly that fear, that helplessness,” and that when Trump got elected, she felt none of that mattering.
She had not told Phillip that when she saw Trump smiling on a screen in her living room, she felt physically ill. That she found him “revolting” and “vulgar.” That Trump was the opposite of everything she had always believed her husband to be: decent, honorable, Christian, the sort of man who would find Trump offensive.
She had not told Phillip what she wanted from him: “I want to hear him say, ‘The way he talks about women is not okay. The way he talks, period, is not okay.’ ”
She had not told him what she wanted to say to him and all Southern men who believed in some chivalrous ideal: “I need you to stand up for me.”
That is a powerful, powerful insight for any woman. And I think quite a few have had that devastating recognition in recent times. Most of them have shoved it down and tried to forget it. Some just can’t do it.
But it’s complicated. Speaking with her liberal friend Liz over dinner, they talk about what it’s like to be out of the mainstream in Southern society:
They talked about how Liz always positioned her phone when she met with parents, so they wouldn’t see her Ruth Bader Ginsburg sticker, and about the most recent Democratic debate and the candidate Miranda would vote for — Warren, probably; Buttigieg, definitely; Sanders, maybe; Klobuchar, interesting; Biden, sure — and they continued talking, seeming in harmony about all of it, right up until Miranda began taking issue with a candidate’s position on gun control, which struck her as too extreme, and as she continued, she noticed Liz’s face changing.
She stopped herself.
“I’m not making you mad, am I?” Miranda asked.
There was a pause.
“No,” Liz said. “You’ll never make me mad.”
Later, on her way home, Miranda was still thinking about the pause.
It was dark, and she passed the empty parking lots of strip malls, the neon signs of chain restaurants and the quiet of so many subdivisions on a Sunday night in a place where there were so many expectations of a woman like her.
Maybe Liz was mad at her, she thought. Maybe Liz thought she wasn’t liberated enough, or brave enough. Maybe she was disappointed.
And what about Phillip? If she finally told him what she thought about Trump, maybe he would feel she was judging him. Maybe he would judge her. Maybe he would think she was “crazy” and “off the deep end.” Maybe he would not understand at all, and then what?
She looked out the window at a place that had felt so familiar for so long, and which now looked so different, so accepting of cruelty and racism and vulgarity. She exited the highway and drove along the two-lane, a white, Southern, suburban woman who was not accepting of that. She was lost to Trump, lost to a Republican Party still embracing him, and for the first time in her life, she was thinking not about what was expected of her, but what she expected of herself.
Again, I understand why people have no sympathy for this privileged woman who has failed to see the racism and cruelty of the society in which she grew up until Trump made it impossible to ignore. I’m a privileged white woman and I have seen it my whole life, even when I was growing up in a very conservative family.
But if she’s changing, isn’t that good thing? Or are we in a French Revolutionary mode in which all these people must be purged forever from the body politic?
Read the whole thing if you can. It’s very thought-provoking.
“This is Trump’s Churchill moment. He’s got to bring the country together, which he’s doing. He’s got to confront not just the virus, but the economic contagion that’s coming out of China… He does that, you don’t need to worry about 2020.”
Who can forget the day Winston Churchill stood before the world and whined that his opponents were mean and declared The Blitz to be a hoax?
You may have heard that the Trump campaign has sued the New York Times for libel. Seriously. But you really can’t understand how daft it is until you see what it is they’re suing over.
The most important thing to know about this suit is that, however crazy you’ve heard it is, it’s actually crazier.
Let me explain. 1st, the suit claims “harm caused by The Times’ intentional false reporting.” But the suit’s all about 1 article–an opinion piece, not news reporting.That’s not to say opinion pieces can’t in theory be defamatory. But it’s eyebrow-raising, especially calling it “reporting”
2nd, the suit claims NYT “published the statements at issue knowing that they were false at the time of publication.” The suit claims their falseness became clear w/ the Mueller Report’s publication in April 2019.
So: time travel?
3rd, Mueller didn’t demonstrate the statements were false–the opposite. The statements said Russia helped Trump b/c it expected pro-Russia policies if Trump won. Mueller detailed extensive Trump campaign-Russia connections & efforts to dilute Republicans’ policy on Russia.
4th, here’s the key NYT statement:
“There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign & Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal.” With 3 years of pro-Russia policies & invitation of 2020 interference, does anyone disagree?
This is a tactic Trump has used for years. Ironically, he is the poster boy for “Tort-reform” which the Republicans used to flog as one of their top strategies for defunding the left, by defunding plaintiff’s lawyers who tend to support Democrats. Once again Trump has exposed their monumental hypocrisy.
Mercedes Schlapp really wanted Fox News to play a clip of Trump from his CPAC speech as the South Carolina Democratic Primary was unfolding. Trump’s speech was not about policy or issues, but one of high buffoonery and imbecilic nonsense.
And of course Fox News obliged because Trump was attacking Mike Bloomberg in his usual juvenile fashion.
Former Trump official and the wife to the always odious Matt Schlapp (who organizes CPAC), Mercedes “Mercy” Schlapp, joined Bret Baier and Fox News’ coverage of the Democratic South Carolina Primary Saturday night where Trump always has to take center stage.
Bret Baier is supposed to be Fox News’ premiere straight news man, but instead of steering the discussion forward a a reporter, he acquiesced and joined in the hijinks.
As she laughed, Baier, “All right we gotta show it — we have this tape –“
Schlapp said, “It’s too good, it’s too good.” Baier explains that Trump was discussing Elizabeth Warren going after Mike Bloomberg during one of their debates.
“And this is what happened,” he said.
Trump started out by calling Bloomberg “mini- Mike” and then slowly shrunk behind the podium to mock his size. After they finished airing the short clip Brett Baier began laughing and said, “I mean, wow.”
The GOP’s handbook used to be “Atlas Shrugged” an overblown teenage romance novel. They have regressed to modeling themselves on “Lord of the Flies.”
The Republican incumbent in the 2020 presidential election built his 2016 election victory on fear. Fear of the Other. White fears of loss of power. White fears of becoming a mere plurality in a former white-majority nation. As soon as he can no longer sustain claims the coronavirus is a liberal hoax, as soon as his MAGA faithful start dying from it, as soon as they stop coming to his rallies for fear of contagion, as soon as he cannot get his weekly fix of their adulation, he’ll need someone to blame for it (other than his administration’s failed response). He’ll need new scapegoats for supporters to fear. You, maybe.
In the meantime, fear of the unknown may have powered former Vice President Joe Biden to his first primary victory in his third attempt to reach the Oval Office.
Zak Cheney-Rice explains for New York magazine’s Intelligencer how the black vote in South Carolina powered a blowout Biden victory there on Saturday :
… the same themes keep emerging whenever reporters ask black South Carolinians, who comprise the majority of the state’s Democratic electorate, why their support for him has been so durable: With Biden, they know what they’re getting. “Black people are rightfully suspicious of things they don’t know, so that’s why name recognition becomes critical,” organizer and Elizabeth Warren surrogate Leslie Mac told Politico in January. “[People] don’t know Elizabeth Warren,” added Antonio Robinson, a 42-year-old who works in education. Julius Stephens, 74, told Politico that he likes what Warren and Bernie Sanders stand for, but thinks that Americans “would never vote for a woman and a liberal that’s been branded a socialist.”
These are objections borne primarily of doubt and uncertainty, not philosophical disagreement. And while they cannot be taken to represent the views of all black South Carolinians — a cohort whose support for Biden and Bernie Sanders, for example, is split by age, with more young voters backing the Vermont senator — the reticence they convey is typical of how black voters have long been required to consider their political choices. The costs of racist demagoguery in South Carolina have long been the steepest for black people; the legacies of the lynching era, Jim Crow, and an ongoing mass incarceration crisis all attest to this. For a population with such a rich history of supporting Democrats since the parties realigned in the 20th century — and facing a Republican president who exhibits many of the same ideological and temperamental traits they’ve come to associate with all manner of racist violence — Biden’s recognizability was the likeliest channel for their partisanship and survivalist risk aversion, especially in such a cluttered field.
But Biden’s soft-focused invocation of Barack Obama and some bygone era of bipartisan cooperation seems as out of step with reality as our acting president’s fantastical claims that the coronavirus is hoax. Indeed, Jill Biden on Saturday promised a meeting of North Carolina Democrats’ state executive committee that her husband would reach across the aisle, bridge divides, and work in a bipartisan fashion to get things done, etc.
Where have they been since January 2009? Maybe get back to us when Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell no longer controls the U.S. Senate.
Fears of Donald Trump’s reelection may have driven South Carolina voters to seek refuge in the familiar, Cheney-Rice writes, but “should not be mistaken to mean that the familiar is safe.” Rather than a glowing endorsement, Biden’s win may be “a concession to a politics of fear.”
With the coronavirus spreading underdetected in the U.S. and the first reported death here on Saturday, and with Vice President Mike Pence praying the virus away, there is plenty of fear to come.
An eye-catching headline at the Daily Beast landing page this morning promises “This May Be the Best Face Mask You Will Ever Use.” If your first thought was it heralded a new medical device, welcome to the COVID-19 scare. It was for a cosmetic.
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