Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Juneteenth, or June 19, will soon be the 12th federal holiday https://t.co/dPaUwa6mZU
— Stars and Stripes (@starsandstripes) June 17, 2021
The corporation Spousal Unit works for replaced Columbus Day with Juneteenth on its roster of paid days off. It wouldn’t surprise me if other businesses chose the same route, since ‘Indigenous Peoples Day’ is also being proposed as a replacement for Thanksgiving…
Thursday Morning Open Thread: One (Baby) Step At A TimePost + Comments (173)
I’ve been quoted in two news articles yesterday and today. I’m reasonably pleased with both of them.
Exclusive: US assessing reported leak at Chinese nuclear power facility
Zachary Cohen called me with not enough information on this reported leak. The odd thing about it was that France had notified the United States, and high-level US meetings were reported. So: secretive country, nuclear leak. Hard for me, even, not to feel resonances with Chernobyl. My early guess from the information we had was that it was a broken fuel element, and that’s what it turned out to be. The reason France contacted the US had to do with sharing nuclear information. When a country gets nuclear technology from the US, restrictions are attached about sharing it.
The Lab Leak Theory Doesn’t Hold Up
Justin Ling covers the major claims about a laboratory escape being the route of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into humans and finds them wanting; further, that a natural pathway from animals to humans is more likely. Long article and may have a paywall. This one should become the standard reference for refuting the lab leak bros.
Open thread!
From the New Yorker, a medical doctor asks Heidi Larson: “The world’s richest countries are now its most vaccine-hesitant. Can we learn to trust our shots before the next pandemic?”:
… Larson, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, studies vaccine rumors—how they start, and why some flourish and others wither. Public-health experts often address vaccine hesitancy on an informational basis, by debunking rumors and misinformation. But, in her recent book, “Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start—and Why They Don’t Go Away,” Larson argues for a more expansive view of the problem. “We should look at rumors as an eco-system, not unlike a microbiome,” she writes. Tackling misperceptions individually is like eliminating a single microbial strain: when one germ is gone, another will bloom. Instead, the entire ecosystem must be rehabilitated.
In 2010, in London, Larson founded the Vaccine Confidence Project, with the goal of putting these ideas into practice. Its analysts—trained in digital media, political science, artificial intelligence, psychology, statistics, epidemiology, and computer science—monitor news sites and social media in more than a hundred languages, then strategize with local health groups about how to tackle the rumors they find. Larson describes the Vaccine Confidence Project as “investigating the global vaccine weather, while zooming in to local storms.” This year, the project has fielded requests for help from health officials in some fifty countries, including, in the few days before one of our phone calls, Sudan, Somalia, Turkey, and Iran. Her team works in an epidemiological spirit, hoping to contain outbreaks of misinformation swiftly, before they can spread.
Larson has also developed a tool for quantitatively mapping vaccine hesitancy: the Vaccine Confidence Index, a set of validated questions concise enough to reach vast populations. In 2015, she posed the questions to sixty-six thousand people in sixty-seven countries—the first time a rigorous survey of vaccine attitudes had been conducted at that scale. Larson’s results took many public-health experts by surprise. The lowest levels of vaccine confidence were found in countries with the highest education levels and the best health-care systems; seven of the ten most vaccine-hesitant countries were within the European Union. (France ranked first.) Global-health efforts tend to focus on poorer countries such as Nigeria, but the results suggested that the ability of vaccines to end pandemics might also be weak in wealthier countries—the same nations that export public-health expertise to the developing world…
Intriguing Reads on ‘Vaccine Hesitancy’Post + Comments (122)
This photo…
Putin sees 'double standard' in US Capitol riot prosecutions https://t.co/XLfC6VJn2o
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) June 5, 2021
Not to encroach on Adam or Cheryl’s territory, but: It seems from what I’m seeing on the web that Vladimir Vladimirovich’s ‘St Petersburg International Economic Forum’ has been taken as a bold, yet misguided attempt to show the world that he was not mad actually he was laughing right now in advance of the G7-is-quite-enough-thank-you meeting this week.
Here’s the Washington Post — “Russia aimed for post-pandemic ‘normal’ at its business expo. Critics saw many holes”:
… The event, attended by Russia’s elite and held in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, was billed by Putin and others as the first in-person international event of this scale since the pandemic changed the world. A total of 13,000 people attended, according to the organizers.
It was also an attempt to project Russia’s strength, with a first summit between Putin and President Biden less than two weeks away.
“Half of the world is sitting at home, but here the situation is better compared to many countries,” Putin boasted Friday at the forum, Russia’s answer to the annual global business conference in Davos, Switzerland. “Thanks to timely measures, the Russian economy and labor market are already approaching precrisis levels.”…
Meanwhile, Russians’ real disposable income contracted 3.5 percent in 2020, according to the state statistics agency. The spike in food prices has become the top issue for ordinary Russians.
Maria Pevchikh, an ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, said on Twitter that the economic forum is a “portal to a parallel fake world.”
But Russia’s reality permeated the conference. The foreign attendee presence was slimmer, in part because of the pandemic. But no-shows were also a result of Moscow’s growing status as an international outcast — over crackdowns on political opposition and Western claims that Russia has become a haven for computer hackers and ransomware pirates…
The importance of the St. Petersburg forum for Putin was underscored by the fact that he made an in-person appearance, a rarity for him since the start of the pandemic.
Though Putin said he was inoculated with one of Russia’s domestically made vaccines earlier this year, he has continued to largely conduct his meetings over video conference. Most who meet with him face-to-face are first required to quarantine for two weeks.
‘First among equals’, but now the equals are exposed as a bunch of fellow kleptocrats and grifting hangers-on. Life was so much more fun when the Oval Office was in the hands of a subservient crony…
Foreign Affairs Open Thread: <em>Let’s Not Argue About Who Killed Who…</em>Post + Comments (36)
This is one of those multidimensional stories with great photos, but slow to load, on my device anyway.
It’s well worth it.
An East Bay (California) Municipal Utilities District ranger in the Mokelumne River Watershed discovered a treasure trove of fossils. There are still things to discover in California.
First of all, we have a false notion that Tulsa was an oasis of exceptional Black people. It wasn’t even the MOST POPULAR “Black Wall Street.”
Look up the Hayti neighborhood in Durham. Look up Boley, Oklahoma. Look up Richmond’s Black Wall Street.https://t.co/Ee2i3H812g
— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 30, 2021
The 1921 Tulsa Massacre: Essential (Harrowing) ReadingPost + Comments (70)
I wrote this about a spectacularly dumb candidate tweet that simply would not let me rest. https://t.co/x3GSq9dH8b
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) May 28, 2021
David Roth, emerging national treasure, at Defector:
… It is both an uneasy and an incredibly easy time to be an ambitious Republican politician. A generation of hothouse freaks bred for and molded by the conservative political ecosystem are running up against the realization that their base cares nothing about the ludicrously shitty and unpopular policies they’ve been pushing for generations, and also hates their tricksy and smug debate-club rhetoric, and also hates them, really, mostly for the usual reasons that people dislike Yalies but also because they are boring. But what has replaced all that professional stuff is just trolling and recrimination and bile; there is no real reasoning to it, or with it.
What this base wants to see is itself, reflected in shades of gunmetal and gold, because it does not trust and cannot care about anything but that reflection. This is the language that Jenner is trying to learn to speak, the uncanny patois of sunburned small-business tyrants and seething but secretly bored bosses and aggrieved middle-management. The task before Jenner is to learn the things that the deranged hornball grifters and serial antagonizers of customer service professionals and sloppy hair-trigger affluenza cases hear all day from their televisions, and then learn to say it back to them. Trump was able to do this because, for all his wealth, he was exactly as small of spirit and vacant of principle and jealously selfish as the people that idolized him, and just as voracious a consumer of the same terrible television. For all the other things that might hold Jenner back as a candidate, she does at least seem to have all that going for her.
But she is not there yet. It is something like the point that Canceling The Cancel Culture and Waking Up The Woke don’t really mean anything. They’re statements made up of recognizable words, but they’re more about the sound than the shape. It is a way of saying “I, Caitlyn Jenner, am as upset about whatever these things might mean or be, as you are, in something like the same way,” and loading that I Would Also Like To Express My Fondness For That Particular Beer falseness up with a barely implicit promise to hurt their shared enemies. That it comes out so clotted and clanging and strange—that it somehow looks so ugly on the page, what with the random capitalization and that grating extraneous comma between the two consecutive “cancels”—is part of the point, both in how it consciously apes Trump’s own grandparental syntax and copy and because of the specific way it is trying to pander. It is a message from a candidate, but that candidate is both vapid enough and advised by sufficiently cynical professionals to know that the message will land better if it looks like a Facebook comment left under a Fox News video by a senescent shut-in, or like a text message from one bored rich grump to another.
This would all be a lot easier to laugh at if Trump hadn’t won, and if his presidency hadn’t ended the way it did, and if his legacy wasn’t being carried forward in the ways that it is. But Jenner is bad enough at this, both in terms of her wholly absent talent for the game and toweringly checked-out rich person’s laziness, that there’s still a certain bleak comedy in watching her flail away at trying to appear as aggrieved and fatuous as she is. “I will wake up the woke with an alarm clock called reality,” Jenner will read, robotic and blinking, from some teleprompter somewhere, at some point. “And there is no snooze bar.” …
And there will be some more applause, and then it will peter out, and in the moment before she starts speaking again, the absently vengeful and proudly vacuous people listening to her, all these little tyrants wrecked by leisure and softened unto death by their own laziness, will perk up—less because of anything the candidate might say and more in the hope that they might catch some glimpse of themselves in the blank, reflective surface of it as it goes by.