Wednesday, February 26, 2020


Koala Saved From Wildfires Won't Stop Snuggling His Rescuers

Caitlin Jill Anders

© Bill BlairBill Blair was capturing drone footage of the burnt terrain after wildfires raged through Australia when he suddenly spotted someone in need of help. Huddled at the base of a tree on Kangaroo Island was a little baby koala, all alone and so confused. Blair had been on his way back to his car when he noticed the little guy, and he immediately knew there was no way he could leave him behind.
© Bill Blair“I remembered I was told when I arrived if I come across a koala at the base of a tree, it means it's got nothing left in the tank and needs help, toss something over it like a blanket or a shirt as it will calm it down,” Blair told The Dodo. “So I took off my shirt and placed it over the koala, picked him up and carried him back to the car with the drone in the other hand.”

The koala wasn’t afraid as Blair approached him and scooped him up, and seemed to know that Blair was there to help him. All four of his tiny paws were burned, and it was a miracle he’d been able to survive on his own.
© Bill BlairAfter loading the koala into his car, still wrapped up in his shirt, Blair started driving toward the makeshift koala hospital that had been set up on the island. He hadn’t been driving for very long when suddenly the koala popped his head out of the shirt, watched Blair for a bit and then decided to have a look around.
© Bill Blair“Slowly he climbed out of my hat he was sitting in next to me and began exploring around the car, lots of looking out the window like a child,” Blair said. “Then when relaxed enough he came over and after climbing on the seat backs for a while, settled on my seat back just next to my shoulder and cuddled up.”

The little koala stayed that way for the rest of the car ride, all snuggled up next to Blair, so thankful to his rescuer for saving his life.
© Bill BlairWhen the pair finally arrived at the hospital, Blair passed the koala off to the team so they could give him the care he needed — but both Blair and the koala were definitely reluctant to say goodbye.

“I think he seemed relieved I found him and certainly showed affection towards me,” Blair said. “He didn't want to leave me when I passed him over to the military nurse.”
© Bill BlairLuckily the orphaned koala was able to get the care and attention he needed to eventually be released back into the wild where he belongs, but there’s no doubt he’ll never forget the kind man who noticed him and took the time to help, just like so many other people across Australia.

“They are doing an amazing job there, koalas and kangaroos were being brought in every day by locals,” Blair said. “To see all these people working together to help these animals was truly amazing. I'm so glad I could be involved in a small way.”

If you’d like to help the animals affected by the fires in Australia, you can donate to WIRES.



Konrad Lorenz - Imprinting | Simply Psychology

Lorenz (1935) investigated the mechanisms of imprinting, where some species of animals form an attachment to the first large moving object that they meet.

Konrad Lorenz | Austrian zoologist | Britannica
 Konrad Lorenz, (born Nov. ... 27, 1989, Altenburg), Austrian zoologist, founder of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour by means of comparative zoological methods. ... He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the animal behaviourists Karl von Frisch and ...

Konrad Lorenz - Biographical - NobelPrize.org
Konrad Lorenz. Biographical. I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development. I grew up in the large ...

As Domestic Terrorists Outpace Jihadists, New U.S. Law Is Debated

When the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness issued its terrorism threat assessment for 2020 last week, it noted a marked shift.
 
© Jim Wilson/The New York Times Mourners in August after a mass shooting in El Paso killed 22 people. Proponents of a domestic terrorism law argue that it would streamline and clarify the patchwork of charges now used against homegrown extremists.

The threat level from violent, homegrown extremists, and specifically white supremacists, was marked in red as the top category: “High.” The threat from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and their ilk was demoted to third, in green: “Low.”

Terrorism experts believe that holds true for the entire United States.

“In the U.S., more people are killed by far-right extremists than by those who are adherents to Islamist extremism,” said Mary McCord, a Georgetown University law professor and a former senior Justice Department official for national security. Her comments came at a discussion last week at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which commemorates victims of the most notorious attack by international terrorists on American soil.


© Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times The F.B.I. director Christopher Wray told a House committee that “racially motivated violent extremism” was equal to the threat from the Islamic State.

Even as the menace from homegrown extremists grows more explicit, however, law enforcement is wrestling with how to combat it. That challenge has spawned a fervent debate over whether the United States needs a new law to specifically criminalize domestic terrorism, or whether such a statute would threaten basic First Amendment rights.

Proponents argue that a domestic terrorism law would streamline and clarify the patchwork of charges now used against homegrown extremists, charges that often avoid even mentioning terrorism.

Opponents counter that a new law amounts to a worrisome expansion of government powers, and might face constitutional challenges on the grounds of impinging on free speech.

Yet the New Jersey report laid out what is at stake in stark terms. “Some white supremacist extremists argue that participating in mass attacks or creating other forms of chaos will accelerate the imminent and necessary collapse of society in order to build a racially pure nation,” it said.


After Latino shoppers were targeted in a shooting in El Paso last August, leaving 22 people dead, Congress proposed a new wave of laws. However, most of those have stalled.

But the recent arrests of eight members of a white supremacist group called the Base, some of whose members were accused of planning a mass attack in Richmond, Va., have renewed focus on the issue. Three members arrested in Maryland pleaded not guilty last week to various charges, including transporting a firearm and ammunition with the intent to commit a felony.

Senior law enforcement officials express frustration that cases like those cannot be called terrorism in court.

“The statutes that are typically deployed in connection with domestic terrorism cases are really kind of pedestrian in nature,” said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the Justice Department’s counsel for domestic terrorism. “This confuses people. It leads to this pervasive but false narrative that somehow the government is paying more attention to the Islamic extremist threat than to the domestic threat.”

With both Democrats and Republicans proposing legislation, the issue is one of the few that does not divide strictly along partisan lines.



There is no legal mechanism for designating domestic extremist groups as terrorists. Federal laws define terrorism as a criminal attack intended to intimidate and coerce civilians in order to influence government policy or to otherwise affect government conduct.

They also define 57 specific acts as federal crimes of terrorism. Among the conditions required for formally labeling a crime terrorism in court are targeting an international airport, using a weapon of mass destruction or attacking federal officials.

Such charges come into play periodically. Using a weapon of mass destruction was among the accusations faced by Glendon Scott Crawford, a member of the Ku Klux Klan from upstate New York who failed in his attempt to build a radiation death ray that would inflict cancer on Muslims hit from afar. In 2016, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

However, current terrorism statutes do not incorporate most attacks on civilians that involve guns or vehicles, or the stockpiling of assault weapons, which Ms. McCord, the Georgetown law professor, said was a gaping hole considering their frequency. A new law would also underscore that society considers white supremacist violence on par with jihadism, she said.

Several draft bills seek to define domestic terrorism as a crime and to prescribe court sentences, including the death penalty. A less sweeping bill would force the federal government to make public statistics about all violence attributed to white supremacy.

The F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, told the House Judiciary Committee this month that the agency had more than 1,000 violent extremist investigations in progress, covering all 50 states, but he resisted providing a more detailed breakdown.

He described “racially motivated violent extremism” as a “national threat priority” equal to the threat from the Islamic State. The F.B.I. has also created the Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell to buttress its efforts, he said, stressing that the focus is “not about the ideology, it’s about the violence.”




Misgivings about a new law are also bipartisan.

African-American and Muslim organizations harbor deep concerns that a new law could actually be used against minority groups — organizations protesting police violence, for example — even though their communities are among the most frequently targeted. Current hate crimes laws are powerful enough to prosecute these acts, said Nadia Aziz, the policy counsel for the Stop Hate Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“We need to know how domestic terrorism investigations are being carried out right now instead of a new statute,” said Ms. Aziz, echoing a common criticism.

A sweeping new law also makes some conservatives uneasy. The lack of such a law has not hindered the prosecution of anyone who carried out terrorist attacks domestically, said Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in technology, privacy and civil liberties.

He pointed out that one domestic terrorism law proposed by a Republican congressman specified various prison sentences, including up to 25 years for destroying or damaging “any structure, conveyance or other real property.”

That means a protester who engaged in vandalism to make a political point could face 25 years in jail. “Beyond being unnecessary, it seems quite thorny and dangerous,” Mr. Sanchez said.

After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, more than 200 demonstrators were arrested, some in connection with smashing storefronts and damaging vehicles. All charges were eventually dropped, but under such a law the defendants could be charged with terrorism, Mr. Sanchez noted.


Critics of federal counterterrorism measures, and even some senior law enforcement officials, believe that the intense focus on the jihadist threat since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks slowed efforts to counter white supremacists.

“There is a blind spot within law enforcement about the threat white supremacy poses,” said Michael German, a former undercover agent with the F.B.I. who researches national security law at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The F.B.I. and other intel agencies were not putting their resources toward the most serious threats.”

Under the Trump administration, the F.B.I. began dividing domestic extremism among four categories, down from 11: racially motivated violent extremism; anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism; animal rights/environmental extremism and abortion extremism.

Members of Congress have expressed skepticism about lumping white supremacists with other groups given the recent history of violent attacks directed against Latinos in El Paso, Jews in Pittsburgh and African-Americans in Charleston, S.C., among others.


There is no official source on the number of attacks carried out by white supremacists in the United States. Statistics kept by academic centers or NGOs rarely match because of different methods, including various definitions of right-wing extremism.

In addition, the tendency to include them with other hate crimes leaves the extent of the problem unclear.

“The F.B.I. is being evasive,” said Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California and a member of the Judiciary Committee. “It raises the question as to whether or not they are seriously looking at white supremacy.”

In the short term, a far more likely scenario than a new law is the State Department designating a foreign white supremacist group as a terrorist organization, allowing for law enforcement agencies to pursue any U.S. adherents for providing material support for terrorism.

The debate over a domestic terrorism law underscores just how complex the terrorist threat has become in the nearly two decades since Sept. 11, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

“You look at the landscape now — it is scattered,” he said, with white supremacists and antigovernment organizations rivaling jihadists in their aspiration to foment mayhem. “It is a diversification of the homegrown threat in a way that we have not seen before.”






South Carolina: Gobs of jobs, but not enough offer living wage

As the Democratic presidential candidates take to the stage for Tuesday night's debate in South Carolina, they'll be speaking in a state with the nation's lowest unemployment rate — 2.3%, tied with Utah and Vermont.
But that rosy number obscures a harsher reality for many South Carolina workers: While they are employed, their low wages make it hard to pay for housing and other basics. Indeed, the state's median household income — about $52,300 last year — ranks only 42nd among all U.S. states, according to the latest Census data.

The pressures on working families in South Carolina comes as President Donald Trump touts the nation's 50-year low in unemployment and robust hiring. Yet many low- and middle-wage families around the country continue to struggle with economic insecurity. Income for middle-class Americans is projected to grow at less than half the rate as for the richest 1%, a recent Congressional Budget Office found.

Indeed, South Carolina is typical for states across the U.S., where job growth looks strong on the surface but much of that work offers meager wages and few benefits like health insurance and retirement savings. It's an issue facing growing numbers of Americans, with about 55% of the 225,000 private-sector jobs U.S. employers added in January offering wages of $10 to $15 an hour, according to an index of job quality. That translates to about $400 to $600 in weekly wages — well below the $765 in average weekly earnings for most non-government workers.

At the same time, South Carolina's economic expansion, which has lifted wages for high-earning professionals, is pushing up housing costs and pricing many workers out of the local housing market, according to the state's Housing Finance and Development Authority.

The state not only has the highest eviction rate in the country, but two-bedroom apartments in 41 of its 46 counties aren't affordable for the typical renter in the state, the housing authority says.


"You are not likely to have a huge inventory of high-wage jobs" in a state like South Carolina, which has a relatively small workforce of about 2.3 million adult workers, and is a "right-to-work" state, said Daniel Alpert, a founder of Westwood Capital and one of the creators of the Job Quality Index. Right-to-work states are those where employees don't have to join a union if their workplace is unionized.

Among the state's largest employers are manufacturers such as BMW and Boeing, yet service-related jobs are growing fast and now outnumber manufacturing jobs, according to the state's Chamber of Commerce. Leisure and hospitality jobs pay about $16.83 an hour on average, compared with $27.91 an hour for manufacturing jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Lowest jobless rate in the U.S.

On its face, South Carolina has an enviable economy. Its 2.3% jobless rate tied the state for the lowest in the nation in December, according to the latest BLS data. Holding a job, however, doesn't mean workers are earning a living wage.

Rates of worker pay in the state's two largest cities tell the tale. About 44% of workers in Charleston are employed in low-wage work, earning a median wage of $10.12 per hour, according to a recent study from the Brookings Institution. In Columbia, about 45% of workers earn median hourly wages of $9.84 per hour.

The state's minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, same as the federal wage floor. One state lawmaker told a local news outlet in December that raising the minimum wage in the state is a "non-starter" because the competitive job market means that most employers are already paying higher than the $7.25 hourly base rate.


Democratic candidates such as senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have pointed to widening income inequality as one of the nation's top problems, with both proposing taxes on the rich to raise revenue for social programs such as universal health care and education.

But for workers in South Carolina and nationally, a bigger issue may be whether the candidates have proposals to boost anemic wages.

A faulty CDC coronavirus test delays monitoring of disease’s spread

AMERICA UNPREPARED THANKS TO TRUMP

AND CANADA RELIES ON THE CDC FOR INFORMATION

Problems with a government-created coronavirus test have limited the United States’ capacity to rapidly increase testing, just as the outbreak has entered a worrisome new phase in countries worldwide. Experts are increasingly concerned that the small number of U.S. cases may be a reflection of limited testing, not of the virus’s spread.

While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights. Only about a dozen state and local laboratories can now run tests outside of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta because the CDC kits sent out nationwide earlier this month included a faulty component.

U.S. guidelines recommend testing for a very narrow group of people — those who display respiratory symptoms and have recently traveled to China or had close contact with an infected person.

But many public health experts think that in light of evidence that the disease has taken root and spread in Iran, Italy, Singapore and South Korea, it’s time to broaden testing in the United States. Infectious disease experts fear that aside from the 14 cases picked up by public health surveillance, there may be other undetected cases mixed in with those of colds and flu. What scares experts the most is that the virus is beginning to spread in countries outside China, but no one knows whether that’s the case in the United States, because they aren’t checking.

“Coronavirus testing kits have not been widely distributed to our hospitals and public health labs. Those without these kits must send samples all the way to Atlanta, rather than testing them on site, wasting precious time as the virus spreads,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

In a congressional hearing Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on whether the CDC test was faulty. He denied that the test did not work.

But in a news briefing that was going on about the same time, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that she was “frustrated” about problems with the test kits and that the CDC hoped to send out a new version to state and local health departments soon.

“I think we are close,” she said. She said that the agency is working as fast as possible on the tests, but that the priority is making sure they are accurate.

Currently, she said, a dozen state and local health departments can do the testing, although positive results need to be confirmed by the CDC. She also said she hoped that tests from commercial labs would soon come online.

Messonnier said the agency was weighing widening its testing protocols to include people traveling to the United States from countries beyond mainland China, considering the rapid spread of the virus in other places in recent days.

The nation’s public health laboratories, exasperated by the malfunctioning tests in the face of a global public health emergency, have taken the unusual step of appealing to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to develop and use their own tests. In Hawaii, authorities are so alarmed about the lack of testing ability that they requested permission from the CDC to use tests from Japan. A medical director at a hospital laboratory in Boston is developing an in-house test, but is frustrated that his laboratory won’t be able to use it without going through an onerous and time-consuming review process, even if demand surges.

“This is an extraordinary request, but this is an extraordinary time,” said Scott Becker, the chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which is asking the FDA for permission to allow the laboratories to create and implement their own laboratory-developed tests.

At one hospital in the Mid-Atlantic region, a patient who recently returned from Singapore, which has 90 cases, was admitted to the hospital with mild upper respiratory symptoms, according to a hospital official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the patient’s privacy. The patient tested negative for flu. Because of underlying medical conditions, the person was at higher risk for severe illness if this was a coronavirus infection.





Even though clinicians suspected coronavirus, and treated the person for it and placed the patient in isolation, the patient was not tested.

“If this person had returned from mainland China, they would have been tested for coronavirus,” the official said. The patient recovered and was discharged to their home.

Testing also affects other aspects of care.

People with confirmed cases can enroll in clinical trials for therapeutics. For patients who need more intense care in a facility with a biocontainment unit, that facility can receive reimbursement from the federal government for care, the official said.

The CDC announced a week and a half ago that it would add pilot coronavirus testing to its flu surveillance network in five cities, a step toward expanded testing of people with respiratory symptoms who didn’t have other obvious risk factors. Specimens that test negative for flu will be tested for coronavirus. But that expanded testing has been delayed because of an unspecified problem with one of the compounds used in the CDC test. About half of state labs got inconclusive results when using the compound, so the CDC said it would make a new version and redistribute it.

To public health experts, the delays — and lack of transparency about what, exactly, is wrong with the test — are extremely concerning.

“We have over 700 flights every month between Hawaii and Japan or South Korea,” where the virus is spreading in the community, said Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green (D), who is also an emergency physician. It’s unlikely that the CDC would allow state labs to accept a test from another nation, he said, but “this is an exceptional circumstance.”

In a letter to the FDA, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local laboratories, asked the agency to use “enforcement discretion” to allow the laboratories to create and use their own laboratory-developed tests.

“While we appreciate the many efforts underway at CDC to provide a diagnostic assay to our member labs … this has proven challenging and we find ourselves in a situation that requires a quicker local response,” said the letter, which was co-signed by Becker. “We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of CDC for the vast majority of our member laboratories.”




 © AP/AP This electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, blue/pink, cultured in the lab.Because a public health emergency has been declared, certified hospital laboratories that usually have the ability to internally develop and validate their own tests can’t use them without applying for an “emergency use authorization,” a major barrier to deploying the test.

“I think a lot of people, myself included, think it’s very likely this virus might be circulating at low levels in the United States right now. We can’t know for sure because we haven’t seen it,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He said the optimal testing scenario for flu is a 30-minute turnaround on a test, but right now, shipping samples to Atlanta to test for coronavirus means a 48-hour wait.

“A lot of hospitals are trying to do something similar, which is get a test up and running on an instrument, get it validated in-house,” Mina said. “I think all of us are coming to the same realization that we can’t do anything as long as this remains under the control of CDC and state labs.”

Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, which has performed a few hundred tests on behalf of more than a dozen countries, said that developing a test for a new pathogen is complicated and involves refinement and a back-and-forth between researchers who are constantly learning from one another.

“That is typical for a new disease outbreak. No one actually knows how this works, so you really have to build these assays on the fly,” Koopmans said.

But as the United States struggled to ramp up its capacity, the coronavirus test was added to the sentinel flu surveillance system in the Netherlands two weeks ago. The test was recently rolled out to 12 high-performing molecular diagnostic laboratories in the Netherlands so that they can be ready to scale up if demand increases.

Part of the problem in the still-struggling United States is the tension between regulations intended to ensure a high-quality standard for tests and the need to roll out diagnostic capabilities very quickly. No test is perfect, and with high stakes for missing or misidentifying a case, public health officials want to make sure that tests are as accurate as possible and are validated by labs that run them. But the slowness may also reflect years of underinvestment in public health infrastructure — and a bias toward developing treatments that may seem more appealing to the public.

“The public health system is not sufficiently built to surge very rapidly,” said Luciana Borio, the former director of Medical and Biodefense Preparedness Policy at the National Security Council and now a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a strategic investor that supports the U.S. intelligence community. “Over the years, when given limited dollars, we applied it toward vaccines and therapeutics, more so than diagnostic tests. I think there’s this idea: The diagnostic test is not going to save my life. But the fact is they underpin so much of the response and deserve a lot more attention.”

Read More:

The biggest questions about the new coronavirus and what we know so far

Inside a lab where scientists are working urgently to fight the coronavirus outbreak

Most coronavirus cases are mild, complicating the response




Crews battle large fire at L.A.-area refinery after explosion

EDMONTON IS A REFINERY CITY AS WELL 
AND LIKE LA OUR REFINERIES WERE BUILT FIFTY YEARS AGO 

An explosion and a large fire erupted at a Los Angeles-area refinery late Tuesday.
Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery is the largest on the West Coast with a crude oil capacity of 363,000 barrels per day
a city at night: Image: A fire burns after an explosion at the Marathon Refinery in Carson
© Scott Varley/The Orange County Register Image: A fire burns after an explosion at the Marathon Refinery in Carson

The blaze at a Marathon refinery in the city of Carson happened about 11 p.m. Tuesday.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department tweeted that an explosion preceded a fire in the cooling tower, and that Marathon fire crews were keeping the flames in check while the system was being depressurized. No injuries were reported by the county fire department, which was assisting.

Carson is a city in southern Los Angeles County, south of Compton.

Resident Pricilla Reyes told NBC Los Angeles in a phone interview that her niece came running over to ask whether she heard an explosion and that they saw the fire from their home, which is about four blocks from the refinery.

"I heard about four or five explosions, really loud," said Reyes. "You could see the flames and the smoke from our house," she said.

Reyes said she shut the windows of her home in case the smoke was harmful.

Michael Molina told NBC Los Angeles he saw sparks and then "a big fireball in the air."

"I heard a couple more thumps, and I could see like a big ball of smoke," Molina said.

Molina, a truck driver who works in the area, said the force of the blast shook his truck.

The city of Carson did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Carson station tweeted crews had secured a perimeter around the facility but did not anticipate needing to evacuate residents. The fire department was monitoring air quality.

Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery is the largest on the West Coast with a crude oil capacity of 363,000 barrels per day, according to its website.
Why Evolution Is True

PARIS IN THE THE SPRING


Paris: Food, cats, and scenery

Across the river lies Shakespeare and Company, a famous independent bookstore founded (in another Paris location) by Sylvia Beach in 1919, but now located right across from Notre Dame. Because of its literary reputation (many famous authors visited the original store, which also first published Ulysses in 1922), it remains a mecca for literary Anglophones. I went to see its famous cat, Agatha. (You can see Aggie’s page at Hotels with Cats, a great website).
Outside the store is a cat-lover’s sign:
And here’s Agatha, who roams the store. I think she resented my interrupting her nap.
More cat stuff in stores nearby. This store sells nothing but items with black cats on them. The proprietor wouldn’t let me take pictures inside, the meanie!


Peter Singer deplatformed in New Zealand for his stand on euthanasia of newborns

Why Evolution Is True

It seems to me that an enlightened philosophy would allow people to be able to end their lives in a humane way if they’ve undergone proper medical and psychiatric vetting. Some form of this “assisted suicide” is already legal in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Colombia, Switzerland, Victoria in Australia, and and in some states of the U.S. (California, Colorado, Washington state, Oregon, and—by court order—in Montana).

I further believe—and I’ve gotten into trouble for this—that we should also allow newborns afflicted with incurable conditions—conditions from which they will suffer and die young—to be euthanized humanely. The conditions under which I think this is not only allowable, but ethical, were first laid out in this post of mine. I was aware at the time that philosopher Peter Singer had agreed with and defended this view, but I can’t remember whether I arrived at it independently or read it in some of his writings. No matter, for it’s a view that people need to consider, and of course Singer has defended this view far more extensively and ably than I.

For his views, Singer has undergone considerable pushback, and has been not only deplatformed, but subject to calls for his resignation from Princeton (he splits his time between Princeton and the University of Melbourne). I, too, was subject to a surprising amount of publicity, nearly all negative, for my one website post about this. On her own website Heather’s Homilies, Heather Hastie defended my views, summarizing and answering some of the pushback I got (thanks, Heather!), I also wrote about the surprising opposition to my views here and here.

The opposition, of course, comes largely from believers, who see euthanasia of any sort as “playing God.” I swear that some of these people are Mother-Teresa-like in preferring horrible suffering to a merciful end. After all, Jesus suffered! (That was Mother Teresa’s excuse.)

But others object because they see the euthanasia argument as a slippery slope, leading to scenarios in which we can do away with Grandma in the nursing home simply by signing a paper. It doesn’t work like that, of course, as the states and countries who allow adult euthanasia have strict regulations. And euthanizing newborns with horrible and fatal conditions, like anencephaly, is even more unacceptable. Even though such infants are doomed, there’s something about them having been born that makes the prospect of euthanasia especially appalling to people. Of course I agree that strict procedures, including the agreement of doctors and parents, are essential here, but since these infants will die I see no credible objection to letting them have a peaceful death.

Against the strong negative publicity and many emails I got saying I’m a latter-day Satan (I also got emails from some handicapped people accusing me of wanting to deprive them of life), I received several letters from nurses and doctors who, having seen infants suffer and die, agreed with me. But these people, understandably, don’t want their views made public. I stand by what I said, and Singer stands by what he said. The man is clearly no monster, as his books and papers on ethics are extremely humane. And he walks the walk, giving away lots of his own income to the poor. (I should add that Singer is a recipient of the honor of Companion of the Order of Australia, that country’s highest civilian honor.)

Singer has been deplatformed for his views on infant euthanasia (see here, for instance). And, according to the Newshub article below (click on screenshot, and see a similar piece in Think, Inc.), now a country that’s supposed to be extremely liberal and enlightened, New Zealand, has deplatformed him as well. Singer had a contract to speak at SkyCity in Auckland in June, but the venue canceled his contract. And this was also due to his views on euthanasia.

Although Think, Inc. says that the Auckand incident shows that Singer “has been de-platformed for the first time in his 50-year career”, that’s not really true. Singer was disinvited from a philosophy meeting in Germany and also effectively deplatformed at the University of Victoria in British Columbia when shouting students made his talk inaudible. Those disruptions were also for his views on euthanasia of newborns, although Singer’s talk in Canada was about effective altruism, not euthanasia.

Anyway, the New Zealand story is here:





A quote from the piece above:

Singer, a philosopher who has been recognised both as the Australian Humanist of the Year and the most dangerous person in the world, was scheduled to appear at the Auckland central venue on June 14 for ‘An Evening with Peter Singer’.

However, the figure now says the event had been cancelled by SkyCity after a “news article attacking” his view that it may be ethical for parents to choose euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants.
“We decided that yes it was a reasonable decision for parents and doctors to make that it was better that infants with this condition should not live,” he has said.

On Saturday, Newshub reported that the New Zealand disabled community was frustrated by his appearance. Dr Huhana Hickey, who has used a wheelchair since 1996 and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010, said he wasn’t an expert in disability.

Do you have to be an expert in disability to know when a childhood condition or deformity is invariably fatal and causes suffering


Even Singer says it was the first time he was deplatformed, which mystifies me. But never mind. His contract was canceled because of a “free speech but. . ” argument (my emphasis below):


A statement from Singer on Wednesday said that this was the first time he had been “de-platformed” in his 50-year career.

“It’s extraordinary that Skycity should cancel my speaking engagement on the basis of a newspaper article without contacting either me or the organiser of my speaking tour to check the facts on which it appears to be basing the cancellation,” Singer said.
“I have been welcomed as a speaker in New Zealand on many occasions and spent an enjoyable month as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury more than 20 years ago. If New Zealand has become less tolerant of controversial views since then, that’s a matter for deep regret.”

A SkyCity spokesperson told Newshub: “Following concerns raised by the public and local media, SkyCity has cancelled the venue hire agreement for ‘An Evening with Peter Singer’.

“Whilst SkyCity supports the right of free speech, some of the themes promoted by this speaker do not reflect our values of diversity and inclusivity.”

Is it “inclusive” to allow children born with only part of a brain, or a brain outside the skull—children doomed to die within days or weeks—to suffer before their deaths? For that is what this is all about. In fact, in September Kiwi citizens will have a referendum on the legalization of voluntary euthanasia for adults with less than six months to live. At a time when they’re debating this, it is not only proper but essential to discuss the euthanasia of doomed newborns, who suffer but cannot give consent. As Wikipedia notes, “A poll in July 2019 found that 72% of the [New Zealand] public supported some kind of assisted dying for the terminally ill. Support over the past 20 years has averaged around 68%.” Why must the “terminally ill” include only adults?

In such a climate, it’s unconscionable to deplatform somebody for his views, especially when it’s not even clear that his “evening with Peter Singer” was going to touch on this subject. As the report notes above, nobody checked with Singer before canceling his contect.

Promoters of the talk are looking for a new venue, and I’ll report back if they find one.

Finally, here’s cartoon from Heather’s post, underscoring the futility of religion when it comes to helping the afflicted:


NO! AMERICA; FIDEL CASTRO IS NOT BERNIE SANDERS RUNNING MATE


Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is seeking a strong win in South Carolina to keep his campaign afloat, argued only he has the experience to lead in the world. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota repeatedly contended that she alone could win the votes of battleground state moderates. And Pete Buttigieg pointed to Sanders' self-described democratic socialism and his recent comments expressing admiration for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's push for education.
HOW BERNIE SUPPORTERS SEE HIM

HOW DNC, MSNBC/CNN/FOX OTHER DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES AND MIKE BLOOMBERG SEE BERNIE

JAMES CARVILLE CLAIMS THIS IS BERNIE'S RUNNING MATE 

Feb 10, 2020 - To news junkies of that era, there was James Carville: omnipresent and ... 
cryochamber to deliver a “fiery rant” against Bernie Sanders, to which ...
Trump’s flailing incompetence makes coronavirus even scarier

America’s pandemic response capabilities have been systematically dismantled.


By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Feb 25, 

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump visit the 
Taj Mahal in Agra, India, on February 24, 2020. 
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Late last week, the US government overruled objections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on an airplane with other healthy people.

The Trump administration swiftly leaked that the president was mad about this decision, and that nobody told him about it at the time. That could be true (or not — Trump and his team lie about things all the time). But even if it is true, it’s a confession of a stunning level of incompetence. The president is so checked out that he’s not in the loop even on critical decisions and is making excuses for himself after the fact.

Resolving interagency disagreements is his job. But Trump has never shown any real interest or aptitude for his job, something that used to loom large as an alarming aspect of his administration. That fear has faded into the background now that the US has gone years without many major domestic crises (the disasters and failed response in Puerto Rico being a big exception).

The Covid-19 outbreak, however, is a reminder that it remains a scary world and that the American government deals with a lot of important, complicated challenges that aren’t particularly ideological in nature. And we have no reason to believe the current president is up to the job. Trump not only hasn’t personally involved himself in the details of coronavirus response (apparently too busy pardoning former Celebrity Apprentice guests), he also hasn’t designated anyone to be in charge.
Italy has reported its fourth death from the new coronavirus, as the number of people contracting the virus continued to mount. Above, a woman in Milan with a face mask. Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

Infectious disease response necessarily involves balancing a range of considerations from throughout government public health agencies and critical aspects of economic and foreign policy. That’s why in fall 2014, the Obama administration appointed Ron Klain to serve as “Ebola czar” — a single official in charge of coordinating the response across the government. Trump has, so far, put nobody in charge, even though it’s already clear that because of the coronavirus’s effect on major Asian economies, the virus is going to be a bigger deal for Americans.

The Trump administration has asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the outbreak. But this is just a fig leaf. The reality is this administration keeps trying to — and at times does — slash funding for relevant government programs.
Trump keeps slashing pandemic response

In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.

The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office; then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.

RELATED
“We are at a turning point”: The coronavirus outbreak is looking more like a pandemic

That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.
Trump’s first budget proposal contained proposed cuts to the CDC that former Director Tom Frieden warned were “unsafe at any level of enactment.”
Congress mercifully didn’t agree to any such cuts, but as recently as February 11 — in the midst of the outbreak — Trump proposed huge cuts to both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
Perhaps because his budget officials were in the middle of proposing cuts to disease response, it’s only over this past weekend that they pivoted and started getting ready to ask for the additional money that coping with Covid-19 is clearly going to cost. But experts say they’re still lowballing it.
In early 2018, my colleague Julia Belluz argued that Trump was “setting up the US to botch a pandemic response” by, for example, forcing US government agencies to retreat from 39 of the 49 low-income countries they were working in on tasks like training disease detectives and building emergency operations centers.
Instead of taking such warnings to heart, later that year, “the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” according to Laurie Garrett, a journalist and former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As it happens, the Covid-19 problem arose from China, rather than from Africa, where the programs Trump shut down were working. But now that containment in China seems to have failed, the next big global risk is that the virus will spread to countries that have weaker public health infrastructure, from which it will spread uncontrollably — exactly the sort of countries where Trump has scaled back assistance.

Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has done anything in the midst of the crisis, his predominant focus seems to have been on reassuring financial markets, rather than on addressing the public health issue.
Trump picked a strange time to turn globalist

Austria, which borders northern Italy, is looking at reimposing border controls in light of the Covid-19 outbreak in several towns near Milan. Israel has taken action to bar all foreign nationals who have been to South Korea and Japan in the past 14 days from entering the country — adding to an existing ban on visitors from China.


The Israeli response, so far, is a bit of an outlier and perhaps has gone too far.

Still, it’s a bit strange that Donald Trump of all people has done so little to restrict travel at this point — you can book a direct flight from Beijing to Los Angeles tomorrow for $680 while Trump is busy expanding his anti-Muslim travel ban and crippling refugee resettlement based on made-up terrorism concerns.

Trump’s only public statements about this growing crisis are a weeks-old series of tweets in which he expressed confidence in Chinese leadership and said the problem would go away when the weather gets warmer. (Scientists say that may not be true.)

....he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2020

Now that the stock market is potentially crashing on coronavirus fears, maybe Trump will try to rouse himself to do something rather than underreacting for the sake of the Dow. But the biggest problem with Trump is it’s far from clear he really can pull himself together to do the job.
Trump is busy corrupting the American government

Over the past week, when the breakdown of some containment measures became known, Trump was busy replacing his director of national intelligence with an unqualified political hack who will also simultaneously serve as ambassador to Germany. It’s bad to have unqualified people in key roles, but the reason Trump did it is worse — Richard Grenell was installed after his predecessor Joseph Maguire got fired for briefing Congress about intelligence regarding Russian activities and the 2020 presidential election.

Trump felt the contents of Maguire’s briefing were politically embarrassing to him, and therefore wanted the information withheld.

That’s typical of Trump’s approach to governance — he sees the entire executive branch as essentially his personal staff, whose only obligation is to advance his personal interests.
President Trump, flanked by first lady Melania Trump and
 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began a two-day 
visit to India with a “Namaste Trump” rally in Ahmedabad, 
on February 24, 2020. Money Sharma/AFP via Getty Images

But in a crisis, it can be good for the country for embarrassing information to come to light if that’s what it takes to provoke a stronger and more accurate response. Trump, however, has clearly signaled he does not think this is the right way to do things. Consequently, in the middle of the crisis, Trump’s national security adviser went on Sunday shows to smear Sen. Bernie Sanders, rather than provide credible information about the international situation to the public.

Trump is also busy having his Customs and Border Protection officials wield airport security as a tactical weapon against the population of New York when these are the people who we’ll need to screen travelers.

More broadly, Trump has a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty and has acted over the years to clean house of any officials (James Mattis, Dan Coats, etc.) who develop a reputation for contradicting him. It’s almost impossible to know how this administration could convey accurate and credible information to Americans in a crisis even if it wanted to.

The country has thus far muddled through with Trump at the helm better than Americans had any right to hope, but the emergence of the occasional crisis is a constant in government. And with the world on the brink of a potential disaster, it’s terrifying to contemplate the reality that the man in charge just isn’t up to the job.
The US Supreme Court just held that a border guard who shot a child will face no consequences 

Hernandez v. Mesa ends with a decidedly Trumpy result.

By Ian Millhiser Feb 25, 2020
US Border Patrol agents conduct a training exercise in the Anapra area. David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images


Hernández v. Mesa is a case about a horrific event.

Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, a 15-year-old Mexican boy, was with his friends near the US-Mexican border when one of those friends was detained by US Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa. Hernández ran onto Mexican soil, and Mesa fired two shots at the boy — one of which struck him in the face and killed him.

Hernández and his family disagree about the events that led up to this shooting. The family says that Hernández and his friends were simply playing a game where they would run to the fence that separates the United States from Mexico, touch it, then run back to their own country’s soil. Mesa claims that Hernández and his friends threw rocks at him. (Significantly, the Justice Department has refused to take any action against Mesa.)

Regardless of who is telling the truth, the question in the Hernández case is whether Mesa is 
immune from a federal lawsuit even if he shot and killed Hernández in cold blood. The Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 decision along familiar partisan lines, that Mesa cannot be sued.

The case turns upon whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), which permitted federal lawsuits against law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution, has any real force in 2020. After Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Hernández, the answer to this question is a resounding “no.”

Alito’s opinion does not explicitly overrule Bivens, but it appears to be laying the groundwork for a future opinion that will eliminate Bivens’ protections against federal officers who violate the Constitution. Notably, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion in which he argues that “the time has come to consider discarding the Bivens doctrine altogether.”

Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, briefly explained


The Constitution’s Bill of Rights places a number of restrictions on law enforcement, including the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But the Constitution is silent about whether an individual officer may be sued if they violate one of these restrictions. Although a federal law does permit suits against state law enforcement officers who violate “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws,” there is no such statute that explicitly authorizes suits against federal agents.

Nevertheless, Bivens held that the right to sue federal law enforcement is implicit in the Constitution. “Power,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court in Bivens, “does not disappear like a magic gift when it is wrongfully used.” An officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus the Constitution must offer a remedy to victims of such rogue officers.

Bivens, in other words, rests on something comic book fans will recognize as the Spider-Man rule — with great power comes great responsibility. If the federal government gives someone a badge and a gun, and that person unconstitutionally abuses that power, then they may be held accountable for their actions and can be ordered by a court to compensate their victim.

But Bivens fell into disfavor not too long after it was decided, in large part because the Supreme Court took a sharp right turn.

“For almost 40 years,” Alito writes in Hernández, “we have consistently rebuffed requests to add to the claims allowed under Bivens.” When faced with a Bivens claim, the Court typically looks for reasons why the most recent case is “different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens cases decided by this Court.” If it is, the Court will dismiss the lawsuit if there are any “special factors counselling hesitation.”

Much of Alito’s opinion is a laundry list of reasons why the courts should hesitate to allow suits against border patrol agents involved in a cross-border shooting.

“The political branches, not the Judiciary, have the responsibility and institutional capacity to weigh foreign-policy concerns,” Alito claims, and “a cross-border shooting is by definition an international incident.” Thus, it is better for these incidents to be resolved through international diplomacy, rather than through a lawsuit.

Similarly, “the conduct of agents positioned at the border has a clear and strong connection to national security.” These agents “detect, respond to, and interdict terrorists, drug smugglers and traffickers, human smugglers and traffickers, and other persons who may undermine the security of the United States.” Allowing suits against these agents risks “undermining border security.”

Alito’s opinion, in other words, rests on a kind of anti-Spider-Man rule. Border patrol agents are given great power so that they can use that power. And it is not typically the job of the courts to interfere with how those guards exercise such power — even when it results in the death of a child.

Bivens is probably in its final days

The striking thing about Alito’s opinion is the sheer amount of ink he spills presenting Bivens as an anomaly that’s since been rejected by a new line of decisions. Bivens suits are “a ‘disfavored’ judicial activity,” and the Court has even suggested that if its previous decisions applying a Bivens remedy were “decided today” that it is “doubtful we would have reached the same result.”

Alito also suggests that Bivens does not show sufficient “respect for the separation of powers.” According to his Hernández opinion, “when a court recognizes an implied claim for damages on the ground that doing so furthers the ‘purpose’ of the law, the court risks arrogating legislative power.” If individual plaintiffs are to be given the right to sue law enforcement agents for constitutional violations, that right must be given by Congress, and not the courts.

Setting aside the fact that there are court cases stretching back at least 200 years holding that government actors may be sued when they violate the law, Alito’s view of the separation of powers is debatable. The Supreme Court, after all, established very early in American history that “it is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is,” and no one can reasonably question that the Fourth Amendment places limits on what law enforcement officers do with their weapons.

The question in cases like Bivens is whether the Fourth Amendment means anything — especially in cases where the government refuses to discipline an officer who steps out of line — or whether the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures necessarily implies that there must be some way to enforce that right.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hernández transforms the Bill of Rights into a paper tiger in many cases involving law enforcement overreach. And it foreshadows a future where Bivens is overruled in its entirety.