Stephan: Could the criminality of Trump be any clearer?
Donald Trump; William Barr; Robert Mueller Credit: AP/Getty/Salon
Donald Trump has inflicted mass death on the American people through his malevolent, indifferent and willfully cruel response to the coronavirus pandemic. In the United States more than 5 million people have been diagnosed and 166,000 people have now died — and the true numbers are likely much higher. Public health experts predict that the final death toll may be as high as 250,000 to 300,000.
Trump’s pandemic response is not the same as Nazi Germany. It is not Rwanda. But Trump’s response is something that is well beyond a policy mistake. One hundred thousand people are dead. There are likely to be 150,000 or perhaps even 200,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The estimates are that two-thirds or more of the deaths could have been prevented. …
Moreover, it was premeditated. There were people in the White House and elsewhere warning Donald Trump, “People are going to die. We need to do something […]
Stephan: How deeply embedded is White racism in the American psyche? This story tells you the truth. We should be ashamed. This must change.
In the United States, racial disparities in human health can impact even the first hours of a person’s life, according to new research.
Black newborn babies in the United States are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by Black doctors, but three times more likely to die when looked after by White doctors, a study has found.The mortality rate of Black newborns shrunk by between 39% and 58% when Black physicians took charge of the birth, according to the research, which laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person’s life.By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor’s race.The findings support previous research, which has shown that, while infant mortality rates have fallen in recent decades, Black children remain significantly more likely to die early than their White counterparts.
Stephan: There is an ignorant gun-obsessed minority in this country, racist, sexually disturbed, resentful, and prone to violence. Trump fosters their outrage and hate exactly as Hitler provoked an angry, resentful, anti-semitic minority in Germany.
Phil Robinson, a co-founder of the Michigan Liberty Militia, came to several anti-lockdown protests, in black cargo pants, a flak jacket, and tactical gloves, with a sidearm and a long gun. He sees himself as an impartial guardian of the Bill of Rights. Credit: Mark Peterson / Redux/The New Yorker
Early in the morning on May 11th, the neon “Open” sign in the front window of Karl Manke’s barbershop was dark. A crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet arrived in Owosso, Michigan, a small town an hour and a half northwest of Detroit; people had on heavy coats and snow gloves, or sat in their trucks with the heater running. Michelle Gregoire, a twenty-nine-year-old school-bus driver and mother of three, looked unbothered by the cold. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she smiled and waved a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag at the passing traffic. She said of Manke, “He’s a national hero.”
Seven weeks earlier, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, had added “personal-care services” to […]
Stephan: Our media is consumed with the insanity and incompetence of Trump, the racism and hatred he has fostered; his rejection of climate change. The ignorance and racist hatred and resentment of his followers. But as big as that story is it is being overwhelmed by a story that is getting almost no attention: The Great Melting. So today's edition of SR is devoted to that.
Stephan: My regular readers will find this a familiar trend. I have been talking about the collapse of the Himalayan hydrology for a decade because this trend is going to impact 1.4 billion people directly and primarily and every other human on earth secondarily. Yet it is happening in front of us with almost no attention directed to it.
Glaciers in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, in the High Mountain Asia region. Credit: Université Grenoble Alpes/IRD/Patrick Wagnon.
The ice in one of the world’s highest concentrations of non-polar glaciers could see significant melting before the end of the century, potentially affecting sea levels around the globe, according to a new computer model from the NASA Sea Level Science Team.
The region, known as High Mountain Asia, could see ice loss run from 29 to 67 percent, depending on the level of greenhouse gas emissions over the period modeled.
According to the study, water flow in monsoon-fed river basins, driven largely by melting glaciers, could hit its peak by 2050 – potentially reducing runoff beyond that time and forcing changes in how water is consumed, or forcing communities to find other water sources. Understanding the coming changes in such flows is critical to proper planning for hydropower, irrigation, and water supplies.
A Leap Forward in Glacier Modeling
The new “Python Glacier Evolution Model,” or PyGEM, uses extensive data sets, instead of less detailed estimates from isolated, […]
