“A number of unique factors this year combined with long-term trends to create the devastating and unprecedented fires of 2020. But a major reason for the massive scale of the destruction is that natural fires and burning practices first developed by Indigenous people have been suppressed for generations.
Wildfires are essential to many Western ecosystems, restoring nutrients to the soil, clearing decaying brush, and helping plants germinate. Without these fires, vegetation in woodlands, grasslands, and chaparral shrublands accumulates, so more fuel is available to burn, especially when a megadrought keeps drying the fuel out, year after year. A debt to the landscape starts to mount, and when it comes due, there is hell to pay.
“If we’re not using fire in the same way that this landscape evolved with over millennia, then we could be creating a situation where we’re creating a further imbalance,” said Don Hankins, an environmental geographer at California State University Chico and a Plains Miwok Indigenous fire practitioner.”
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“With the suppression of natural fires and indigenous burning practices, some sections of the forest grew to be anywhere from twice as dense to 10 times as dense as they were when fires were more frequent, increasing the likelihood of what’s known as a “stand-replacing fire.” These are massive blazes that can wipe out almost all of the living trees in an area, including towering overstory trees. When there’s a drought, more trees means there’s less water to go around, leading to drier and more flammable vegetation.”
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“The question now is how to scale up these Indigenous burning practices across federal, state, and private land and develop an appreciation for the knowledge behind them. Even with the record-breaking blazes across the United States in recent years, there are still millions of acres of wildlands that have yet to burn and could still be devoured in megafires. And as the climate changes, more areas will become primed to ignite.”
“Berlin continues to fall short of NATO defense spending targets”
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“Trump’s attacks on Berlin’s modest military spending may trigger outrage in Germany, but in the U.S., they are viewed as among his less controversial outbursts.
That might be because, like Obama before him, he has a point. Why should the U.S. continue to bear the financial brunt of protecting Europe’s richest country? That question becomes even tougher to answer when considering Germany’s continued engagement with Russia — such as via the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline — despite the loud objections of the U.S. and other allies.”
“In the middle of a pandemic that has killed roughly 1 in every 1,020 Black Americans — a disproportionate death toll likely to worsen as coronavirus cases spike in much of the country — it’s not just lives that are being imperiled. Racial wealth gaps are worsening, and progress towards economic equity is being undone.”
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““When the pandemic translates into a disproportionate burden on low-wealth households, that is correlated with race,” says Jones. “The median wealth of white households is between 9 and 10 times as much as the median black household. And during this pandemic, the people with the lowest level of the wealth don’t have the emergency savings to hold themselves over.”
At the same time, Black and Latino workers are more likely to have “frontline” jobs that put them at heightened risk of Covid infection. For many, it’s a bind: You have less of a financial cushion to fall back on and need the work. But the job itself puts you at heightened risk of Covid infection, your health insurance is generally tied to your job, and if you lose it and catch Covid, you face potential financial ruin. Even when the pandemic ends, Jones expects that Black and Latino households will be “worse off, relative to white households, than when it began.””
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“For years, workers have had a continually eroding level of leverage in the workplace. The ways companies have redefined labor as “external contractors” basically causes more and more people to not be covered by workplace protections. During this pandemic, those people couldn’t get unemployment insurance at all. It’s indicative of a larger problem: The labor market is being reoriented in a way where workers have less and less power. One reason that’s important is that if you don’t have a lot of say, you’re going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place: forced to either not work, or to go to work under far less-than-ideal circumstances in terms of protections from Covid infection and other health problems. Do they have the right protective equipment? Do they have sick leave? Probably not.
Related to health care, we have health insurance driven by where you’re employed. During a time like this — a pandemic with acute and chronic health implications and high rates of unemployment — going in and out of access to health care is particularly devastating. In the long run, we need some form of universal health care access to offset this problem of people losing their access to health care if they lose their jobs.”
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” We found that people are sensitive to changes in their paychecks from month to month, and that’s particularly true for Black and Latinx households and households with a low level of liquid assets. What I mean by liquid assets are savings and other assets that are either cash or which can be quickly converted into cash — so your bank account, your savings account, and some investments you can quickly cash out. The households with the lowest level of liquid assets had the most vulnerability. When there were changes in their income, they had to make bigger adjustments, or adjustments that were going to be more painful. Relative to white households, Black and Latino households were more sensitive to those fluctuations, and that seems to be a result of the fact those households generally have less in terms of liquid assets, which is related to broader racial wealth gaps driven by a number of factors”
“Macron announced the Cabinet will on Wednesday dissolve a pro-Hamas organization known as Cheikh Yassine, which he said was “directly involved” in the gruesome assassination of Samuel Paty, the eighth-grade teacher who was killed after he showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed during a class discussion on freedom of speech.
The teacher reportedly tried to be mindful of the sensitivity of the subject for some of his pupils by asking those who might be offended to either leave the class or look away, sparking the ire of one pupil’s father, among others.
After the disgruntled parent and several others posted a video on social media denouncing the teacher, calling for mobilization against him and mentioning the address of the school, an 18-year-old man, without apparent ties to the school, waited for Paty and beheaded him. On Tuesday, French media reported the investigation into the beheading revealed the assailant had been in touch with the father prior to the killing.
The assailant was of Chechen origin, and Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Tuesday evening, according to the Elysée, which said Macron “wants to reinforce Franco-Russian cooperation in the fight against terrorism and illegal immigration.”
The attack is not the first beheading or the bloodiest terror attack France has suffered in recent years, but it has struck a nerve. Schools and teachers, though underpaid and under-equipped, hold a unique place in the collective imagination of the French, who see themselves as the torchbearers of enlightenment. It also goes to the heart of the unique French conception of freedom of speech — one that prides itself on offending and tackling all sacred cows.”
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“France has had a homegrown radical Islam problem for decades. It has caused problems for successive presidents and governments, which have struggled to reconcile the repression necessary to stamp it out with French laws, due process and freedom of speech. It culminated in 2015 with the bloodiest string of terror attacks in Europe: In January, assailants attacked satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and then in November, the Bataclan concert hall as well as cafés and restaurants in Paris.
The place of Islam in French society has been a lightning rod issue since former President Jacques Chirac passed a law banning French public service employees from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols, widely interpreted as a roundabout way of banning the Muslim headscarf.”
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“Macron will award Paty the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian honor, and will lead a national tribute to him. It will take place at the Sorbonne University, a location chosen by Paty’s family.
“The Sorbonne is the symbolic monument of the spirit of enlightenment and of French cultural, literary and educational influence,” according to an Elysée official.”
“Argentina was one of the richest countries on the planet at the start of the 20th century. In 1913, Argentina “was richer than France or Germany, almost twice as prosperous as Spain, and its per capita GDP” almost equaled Canada’s, according to Edward L. Glaeser, Rafael Di Tella, and Lucas Llach, writing in the Latin American Economic Review in 2018. The source of those unprecedented levels of wealth was Argentina’s 1853 constitution, which made private property inviolable, outlawed expropriation, encouraged immigration, and allowed the free circulation of goods across provinces. It also ended slavery, protected press freedom, and established the right to freely worship.”
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“At the end of this era, Peron and his supporters attacked the foundations of Alberdi’s classical liberalism in order to impose their model of corporatist autocracy. As Alejandro Herrero, a professor at Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de Lanús, writes, Peronist theoreticians denounced the 1853 constitution’s “egotist individualism” which they claimed “harmed Argentina’s Christian tradition.” Although the constitution’s second article stated that “the federal government will sustain the Roman Catholic cult,” the Peronists decried its purported atheist element. Even worse, they argued, the constitution was imbued with the materialist economic doctrines of the Manchester school of thought, whose adherents defended free trade policies in 19th century Britain. So in 1949, when the Peronists drafted a new constitution, they restored the country’s Christian legacy by “binding the individual to society,” which meant increasing restrictions on economic and personal liberties.
It was not only in Argentina that classical liberal policies brought considerable economic success, only to be overturned by collectivists under a religious guise. In Colombia, too, mid–19th century governments eliminated the state’s tobacco industry monopoly, abolished slavery, got rid of academic requirements to practice all professions except medicine, allowed full freedom of worship and expression by striking down defamation laws, and radically decentralized the collection of taxes. As historian David Bushnell wrote in his book The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself, the country’s constitutions of 1853, 1858, and 1863 increasingly sought “to diminish the government and other corporations’ control over individuals’ decisions and activities.” As a result, “it seemed that the state itself was about to vanish,” since it was broadly accepted that “the best government is that which governs least.”
Colombia’s 1863 constitution was especially radical since it left the central government only in charge of foreign affairs, national defense, and some amount of taxation (along with a few other duties). The president had weak powers and was elected for two-year terms. In turn, the nine states that comprised the United States of Colombia were sovereign, to the extent that they each gained the right to command an army and some issued their own stamps. This hyper-federalism proved counterproductive since several states raised commercial tariffs against one another and occasionally fought the central government. Some governments took anti-clericalism too far, expelling the Jesuits in 1850 and expropriating church lands and buildings shortly thereafter.
Nonetheless, the emphasis on international trade and the tobacco industry’s liberation from state control produced the first export boom not related to precious metals, which had been extracted since colonial times. A thriving export market of cotton, quinoa, and coffee soon took hold. As economist Salomón Kalmanovitz writes, these new links to global markets led to much greater economic growth than in the previous decades. Between 1850 and 1870, Colombia increased its per capita exports by 247 percent, a growth rate that surpassed Uruguay, Cuba, and Argentina, the region’s exporting powerhouses. This bonanza led to greater development of cities, which became new centers of commerce with improved fluvial transport.
Then, in 1880, Rafael Nuñez—an up-and-comer within the Liberal Party and a critic of the 1863 constitution—won the presidency (and was elected to a second term in 1884). He raised tariffs on foreign goods and got a new constitution ratified in 1886, all part of his program of moral regeneration or an attempt to remake the country in the image of orthodox Catholicism.”
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“In the modern era, some of the earliest arguments in favor of individual rights, limited government, and economic freedom arose in 16th and 17th century Spain, among the late scholastic clerics of the School of Salamanca, a group of Jesuit and Dominican scholars who turned to natural law in order to answer pressing questions that arose from the discovery of the New World and the rise of the Spanish Empire.”
“The past few months have been an American experiment with Covid-19: Can the country keep bars, restaurants, gyms, and other businesses open while fighting the virus with milder measures, including some social distancing and widespread masking?
Six months after spring shutdowns ended, the answer is clear: The milder approach isn’t working.
The US surpassed 100,000 daily new coronavirus cases on November 4, and it’s gone on to regularly break new records for coronavirus cases since then — with the most recent high exceeding 180,000 on Friday. Hospitalizations have skyrocketed to their highest level of the pandemic, leaving a growing number of hospitals around the US, from Arizona and Texas to Ohio and Tennessee, nearing or at capacity. And deaths are climbing: now above 1,000 a day once again, with a growing likelihood that the country will surpass 2,000 or even 3,000 a day in the coming weeks and months — on top of the more than 246,000 Covid-19 deaths that America has seen so far.”
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“To avert possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths in the months before a vaccine becomes widely available, the US needs to close down once again. That means temporarily shuttering in-person, indoor services at nonessential businesses, particularly bars and restaurants; restricting larger gatherings, including in private homes; and encouraging, or outright mandating, people to stay home as much as possible — only going out for food, work, exercise, health care, and other basics needs — and limit their social interactions to their own households.”
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“if closing down is necessary again, Congress should make similar moves — from boosting unemployment insurance to offering financial aid, even a bailout, to the businesses most affected. This wouldn’t just ease people’s economic suffering but also make closing down more bearable and, as a result, more sustainable.”
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“we’ve now seen again and again what happens when countries try to keep indoor businesses in particular open as cases remain elevated or go up. Unlike many countries in Europe, Asia, and Oceania, the US never truly suppressed cases, outside of a handful of states, largely because it moved to reopen so quickly. That’s left the country in a vulnerable position as we barrel to what may be the worst Covid-19 outbreak the country will ever see.”
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“A Health Affairs study found government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the growth rate of coronavirus cases, particularly the longer measures remained in place. A study in The Lancet produced similar results. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Delaware found its lockdown, paired with contact tracing and a mask mandate, contributed to 80-plus percent drops in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by the summer.
A more pessimistic working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, while lockdowns reduced Covid-19 cases, their effect might have been limited because people were already voluntarily staying home at the time. But that still means the concept of people social distancing and limiting their interactions is effective. (That differs from the situation today, where increasingly fewer people are voluntarily distancing.)”
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“In September, Israel suffered what was the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the world at the time. The country first tried milder, more targeted measures — and, after they failed, imposed a lockdown. And despite some public opposition, it worked to massively reduce cases from October to this month.”
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“There are real downsides to closing down. Throughout the pandemic, people have reported more mental health problems, and drug overdose deaths have increased. There are massive economic problems, with the spring lockdown producing record-shattering unemployment filings (in the millions) and likely increases in poverty only averted by the CARES Act passed by Congress.
The effects of the lockdown were also unequal. While wealthier people in office jobs could largely transition to working from home, lower-income workers either lost their jobs as their employers shut down or were effectively forced to work in “essential” workplaces. A Nature study, looking at cellphone data, found that mobility during the spring lockdown dropped significantly more in higher-income communities than in their lower-income counterparts.”
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“many of these problems could be mitigated with more action by Congress.”
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“A key mistake made during the spring lockdown is that the US didn’t use the time it bought productively. Instead of building a national testing and tracing system, President Donald Trump’s administration punted the issue down to the states. Congress and state officials should take steps to ensure things go differently this time around — building up testing and tracing regimes, and full cooperation between states’ systems, to keep the US safe as cases are, hopefully, suppressed closer to zero.
In addition, all levels of government could use the time to prepare for widespread vaccine distribution.”
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“A big reason that states aren’t closing down right now is because they simply don’t have the resources or reach, especially as they deal with an economic downturn, to offer enough financial support to individuals and businesses hurt by new restrictions. The federal government does.”
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“The alternative, at the current rates of spread, is we go through the winter and into the spring with a widespread scourge that kills possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans and, ironically, impedes our ability to reopen more of the economy as much of the public remains terrified of going out while cases are high and it takes months to roll out a vaccine. (There’s historical evidence for this: A preliminary study of the 1918 flu pandemic found the US cities that took stronger measures against outbreaks saw quicker economic recoveries.)
Everyone wants to go back to normal. As unpopular as closing down may be right now, it’s how we can do it sooner rather than later.”
“On Election Day, there will be literally hundreds of polling places open in Harris County, Texas—which makes sense because more than 4.7 million people live in the county that includes Houston, America’s fourth-largest city.
But voters who requested absentee ballots will have to either put them in the mail or return them to a single location: a parking lot outside the Houston Texans’ NRG Stadium. That’s because Republican officials in Texas—like in Ohio and elsewhere—have ordered counties to have no more than one ballot dropoff location.”
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“it’s difficult to look at the available data regarding absentee balloting for the 2020 election and conclude that these Republican-backed efforts are anything other than a cynical ploy to salvage an election that could get ugly for the GOP. In states that track the party affiliation of voters who requested absentee ballots, the numbers are overwhelmingly tipped towards Democrats. But requested ballots mean nothing until they are returned—and therefore any barriers erected to reduce the number of ballots returned is likely to help Republicans.”
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“In close states, every little bit could matter.”
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” Until a court says otherwise (and perhaps even then, depending on appeals rulings) all of this is legal. But it’s also ugly, cynical, and corrosive to the legitimacy of elections.”
“After a week of hearings, it’s very unlikely that the public understands Barrett better now than they did on Monday, considering that the committee spent more time posturing than probing the judge’s judicial philosophy. Grandstanding may be an effective political strategy, but it didn’t tell us anything useful or significant about Barrett, and it won’t affect the outcome of her confirmation vote.”