The Most Dangerous Film in the World
"We thought this film was defective. But we were mistaken. This is how radiation looks."  

Film stills from "Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks," Vladimir Shevchenko, 1986, 54 minutes.

By: Susan Schuppli

Three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on April 26, 1986, Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over the 30-square-kilometer site known as the Exclusion Zone. His assignment was to document the cleanup operations being carried out by Ukrainian workers and volunteers, most of whom would eventually succumb to the extraordinarily high levels of radiation they were exposed to while trying to contain the disaster.

When Shevchenko’s 35mm footage was later developed, he noticed that a portion of the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise. Thinking initially that the film stock used had been defective, Shevchenko eventually realized that what he had captured on film was the image and sound of radioactivity itself.

This article is adapted from Susan Schuppli’s book “Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence.” Buy the book: Amazon, Bookshop, more options

Upon projection, small flares of light momentarily ignite the surface of the film. Sparking and crackling, they conjure a pyrotechnics of ghostly defects that are the consequence of decaying radioactive particles moving through the exterior casing of Shevchenko’s 35mm Konvas camera to activate the emulsive properties of the film. What we are witness to, in this fleeting energetic event, is the radiological conversion of a somewhat pedestrian account of the disaster into the most dangerous film in the world.

“Radiation is a fatal invisible foe. One that even penetrates steel plating. It has no odor, nor color. But it has a voice. Here it is. We thought this film was defective. But we were mistaken. This is how radiation looks,” Shevchenko narrates over the film. “This shot was taken when we were allowed a 30-second glimpse from the armored troop-carrier. On that April night the first men passed here — without protection or stop-watches, aware of the danger, as soldiers performing a great feat. Our camera was loaded with black-and-white film. This is why the events of the first weeks will be black and white, the colors of disaster.”

Shevchenko’s film, “Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks,” provides us with an intimate view into the space of disaster. And while its pictorial mediation allows us to remain at a safe and objective distance from the hazard, the sudden distortion of the documentary’s sound and images, and the Geiger-like interference of radiation, inaugurates a sense of dread that what we are witnessing on film is in fact the unholy representation of the real: an amorphous and evil contagion that continues to release its lethal discharges into the present and future yet to come.


Given what we know about the radical chemistry and anarchic temporality of nuclear materials, it is impossible to fully distance ourselves from this fallout on film.

The contaminated film footage thus complicates the conventional partitioning of time by hurling us unwittingly back into the contact zone of the event — not merely as viewers but also as witnesses to an event whose time has not yet passed. Even when I am watching a safe VHS copy of this film, I am reminded of the transgressive agency of the nuclear to contravene the material borders that traditionally maintain the integrity between human and nonhuman entities, between bodies and images, between past and present.

Given what we know about the radical chemistry and anarchic temporality of nuclear materials, it is impossible to fully distance ourselves from this fallout on film, regardless of how far removed we believe ourselves to be from the event in both space and time.

Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks

Vladimir Shevchenko’s contaminated film signals an intensification of an already increasingly “unnatural” radiological world where anthropogenic contamination would become omnipresent.

The detonation of the first nuclear weapon in 1945 altered the planet’s baseline levels of ionizing radiation irrevocably as newly created isotopes such as caesium-134 and 137 began to supplement naturally occurring cosmic and terrestrial radiation. Although caesium-137 first appeared in the early solar system through processes of natural nuclear fission, more than 1.7 billion years would pass before it reappeared on Earth in any detectable amount — on December 2, 1942, as a result of a nuclear chain reaction produced by the first-ever human-made nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, built under the supervision of physicist Enrico Fermi.

In the decades that immediately followed Fermi’s experiment, “humanity began to significantly change the global radiation environment by testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere,” as a sobering article charting the fallout from nuclear weapons tests explains. “By the early 1960s, there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water and even polar ice.”

By extension, Shevchenko’s contaminated film, whether the original 35mm print or its VHS copy, signals an intensification of an already increasingly “unnatural” radiological world where anthropogenic contamination would become omnipresent. The interference that we observe within the image field of “Chronicle of Difficult Weeks” is a tacit reminder that the nuclear always operates in excess of containment and is thus ontologically predisposed to breaching imposed limits, whether they are film frames, reactor units, or remote test sites.


As one Polish protestor would scrawl months later on his placard, in an antinuclear demonstration: “Chernobyl is everywhere — except in the East.”

Although radiation is effectively everywhere, events around Chernobyl unfolded in such a way as to negate the scale and extent of the accident, and even initially to deny that it ever happened. As one Polish protestor would scrawl months later on his placard, in an antinuclear demonstration held after the USSR reluctantly admitted that an incident had occurred in the Ukraine: “Chernobyl is everywhere — except in the East.”

The irradiated image matter of Shevchenko’s documentary offers a paradigmatic account of a material witness in which trace evidence of an external event — the nuclear accident at Chernobyl — is registered directly by changes in the material composition of the artifact, producing information that opens up the artifact to further analysis and critical reflection.

In the case of Shevchenko’s defective film stock, there can be no dispute that the radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere by the reactor meltdown — at a magnitude 400 times greater than that of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima — were the source of the film’s contamination, and thus offered compelling evidence as to the scale and migrating nature of the disaster. Indeed, subsequent radiation readings also confirmed that all of his film equipment, including his Konvas and cherished Arriflex cameras, had been severely exposed, thus requiring their immediate decommissioning and disposal. Shevchenko himself died less than a year later, in March 1987.

The public contexts in which Chernobyl’s contaminants would come to feature as evidence that a major nuclear accident had occurred largely took place outside of the Soviet Union. Only when Sweden — after picking up unusually high levels of radiation — threatened to file an official alert with the International Atomic Energy Agency did the Soviet Union admit privately that there had been some sort of incident at Chernobyl. In the political aftermath of the tragedy at Chernobyl, the failure to inform its citizens served to expose the hubris of the Soviet State, which hid the disaster from the public, acted far too slowly in disclosing and managing the risk, covered up negligence in the reactor’s operational procedures, and ultimately exposed millions to unnecessary poisoning, especially as the contaminating winds blew northwest across the Ukrainian border into Belarus, and onward into Poland and Sweden.

Activities were underway for May Day celebrations throughout the USSR; Soviet officials felt that it would dampen festive spirits if news of the nuclear meltdown and potential health hazards were publicized during this period. As a result, atmospheric molecules carrying ionizing radiation entered into the respiratory systems of thousands of unsuspecting hosts. Children, it turned out, were the most susceptible to this migrating airborne malevolence. Radiation affects cells in the thyroid gland above all, which in young people are in an active state of duplication or growth. Consequently, irradiated cells were turned out at unprecedented metabolic rates, spawning, in turn, statistically abnormal increases in the incidents of thyroid tumors among children.

Today, an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians are still plagued with maladies linked to Chernobyl; many of them have received little or no compensation for their suffering. The situation in Belarus, recipient of 70 percent of Chernobyl’s airborne contaminants, is even grimmer.

Cover of Pravda newspaper, April 26, 1986, day of the Chernobyl nuclear accident; and cover of Pravda newspaper, May 15, 1986. Nineteen days after the accident at Chernobyl, President
Mikhail Gorbachev made a television address to the Soviet people.

A subsequent legal trial was organized entirely around procedural failings rather than the admission of any evidential artifacts of a material nature. In this regard, State silence around the various material expressions of nuclear contamination could more aptly be described as disclosing the management of the disaster as a “nonevent.” If the material witness’s dual obligation is to act as a registration system that archives trace evidence of events as well as accounting for the appearance of such evidence within the contested spaces of public discourse, then the willful lack of public acknowledgment for 19 harrowing days — the length of time before Soviet newspapers registered publicly that a major nuclear accident had taken place — could be said to constitute an event in and of itself. Silence, secrecy, and the withdrawal of the conventions of public speech should be understood as modes of evidence-making in their own right.

The willful lack of public acknowledgment for 19 harrowing days could be said to constitute an event in and of itself.

Within this context of denial, Shevchenko’s film is a material witness, and a hostile one at that, in both the literal and legal sense of the term. As a materially compromised artifact the film inadvertently offered up damaging testimony that was willfully antagonistic to the narratives of nuclear containment and crisis management that were being advanced by the State via their commissioning of the documentary, with its focus on cleanup operations.

As the airborne malevolence of Chernobyl moved beyond the borders of the Ukraine in the days immediately following the accident, the failure of the State to discharge its civil obligations was an act of malfeasance; one in which political silence was eventually reconfigured as evidence of gross negligence, and rematerialized in the form of public protest and anger. Today Chernobyl is regarded as the political catalyst that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991.

Susan Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of “Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence,” from which this article is adapted.

This Halloween, Look for the Hunter’s Blue Moon
The second full moon of the month gives Halloween an extra spooky atmosphere

Halloween features a full moon every 19 years, and it's always a blue moon. (NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

By Theresa Machemer

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

OCTOBER 26, 2020 

This October is flanked by full moons. October 1 featured an unusually late Harvest Moon, and on October 31, we’ll get an encore—a Hunter’s Blue Moon, Ashley Strickland reports for CNN.

The name “blue moon” doesn’t mean that the full moon will literally take on a blue hue, but that it is the second full moon in a single month. Blue moons only happen about every two and a half years. The last one rose on March 31, 2018, Tim Sharp wrote for Space.com in 2018. As the full moon following the Harvest Moon, the full moon that will rise on Halloween is also known as the Hunter’s Moon. And because the moon is within a day of reaching the furthest point from Earth along its orbit, the Halloween full moon will also appear about 14 percent smaller than the supermoon that appeared this April, Joe Rao explains for Space.com this month.

Halloween’s full moon will reach peak illumination at 10:51 a.m. on the east coast of the United States, according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. With some variation, in the U.S. the full moon will rise between 6 and 7 p.m. local time and set around 7 a.m. the next morning.

Because full moons occur about every 29.5 days, there is usually only one full moon per month, or 12 full moons in a year. But sometimes the lunar cycle will line up just right so that there are 13 full moons in a year, with one month (but never February) doubling up.

This definition is a relatively new way of describing a blue moon, though. Per Sharp at Space.com, a 1937 issue of the Maine Farmer’s Almanac relied on seasons, bounded by equinoxes and solstices, to identify the extra full moon. Usually, each season gets three full moons. But in the odd season with four full moons, the third was considered the blue moon.

The seasonal definition of blue moons doesn’t line up with the monthly definition, so the last time Earth saw a seasonal blue moon was in May 2019.

Whenever there’s a full moon on Halloween, it has to be a blue moon because of the 29.5-day-long lunar cycle, according to NASA. And while blue moons pop up every two and a half years, full moons only occur on Halloween every 19 years, reports CNN. That’s because the lunar calendar repeats itself every 19 years, a pattern known as the Metonic cycle because it was identified in 432 B.C. by Athenian astronomer Meton.

Halloween’s full moon is also called a Hunter’s moon. The Hunter’s moon always follows the Harvest moon, which is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox on September 22. The Harvest moon may have gotten its name because farmers could use the light of the moon to extend their workday even as daylight hours shortened, and so they could finish harvesting fall crops before the first frost. The Hunter’s moon is a reference to the way that humans and animals can use this time to stock up on food for the winter ahead, per the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Finally, the Halloween full moon appears within a day after the moon reaches the furthest point on its orbit around Earth, called apogee, per EarthSky’s Bruce McClure. The moon had its furthest apogee of the year in March. On October 30, the moon will be 252,522 miles away from Earth, and will look about 14 percent smaller than April’s supermoon. That makes it the opposite of a supermoon, sometimes called a “minimoon.”

Theresa Machemer is a freelance writer based in Washington DC. Her work has also appeared in National Geographic and SciShow. Website: tkmach.com

NASA's SOFIA discovers water on sunlit surface of Moon

Date:October 26, 2020

Source:NASA

Summary:NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

FULL STORY

Moon (stock image).
Credit: © taffpixture / stock.adobe.com

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

SOFIA has detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon's southern hemisphere. Previous observations of the Moon's surface detected some form of hydrogen, but were unable to distinguish between water and its close chemical relative, hydroxyl (OH). Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million -- roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water -- trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy.

"We had indications that H2O -- the familiar water we know -- might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon," said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration."

As a comparison, the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water than what SOFIA detected in the lunar soil. Despite the small amounts, the discovery raises new questions about how water is created and how it persists on the harsh, airless lunar surface.

Water is a precious resource in deep space and a key ingredient of life as we know it. Whether the water SOFIA found is easily accessible for use as a resource remains to be determined. Under NASA's Artemis program, the agency is eager to learn all it can about the presence of water on the Moon in advance of sending the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 and establishing a sustainable human presence there by the end of the decade.

SOFIA's results build on years of previous research examining the presence of water on the Moon. When the Apollo astronauts first returned from the Moon in 1969, it was thought to be completely dry. Orbital and impactor missions over the past 20 years, such as NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, confirmed ice in permanently shadowed craters around the Moon's poles. Meanwhile, several spacecraft -- including the Cassini mission and Deep Impact comet mission, as well as the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 mission -- and NASA's ground-based Infrared Telescope Facility, looked broadly across the lunar surface and found evidence of hydration in sunnier regions. Yet those missions were unable to definitively distinguish the form in which it was present -- either H2O or OH.

"Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration," said Casey Honniball, the lead author who published the results from her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu. "But we didn't know how much, if any, was actually water molecules -- like we drink every day -- or something more like drain cleaner."

SOFIA offered a new means of looking at the Moon. Flying at altitudes of up to 45,000 feet, this modified Boeing 747SP jetliner with a 106-inch diameter telescope reaches above 99% of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere to get a clearer view of the infrared universe. Using its Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST), SOFIA was able to pick up the specific wavelength unique to water molecules, at 6.1 microns, and discovered a relatively surprising concentration in sunny Clavius Crater.

"Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space," said Honniball, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Yet somehow we're seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there."

Several forces could be at play in the delivery or creation of this water. Micrometeorites raining down on the lunar surface, carrying small amounts of water, could deposit the water on the lunar surface upon impact. Another possibility is there could be a two-step process whereby the Sun's solar wind delivers hydrogen to the lunar surface and causes a chemical reaction with oxygen-bearing minerals in the soil to create hydroxyl. Meanwhile, radiation from the bombardment of micrometeorites could be transforming that hydroxyl into water.

How the water then gets stored -- making it possible to accumulate -- also raises some intriguing questions. The water could be trapped into tiny beadlike structures in the soil that form out of the high heat created by micrometeorite impacts. Another possibility is that the water could be hidden between grains of lunar soil and sheltered from the sunlight -- potentially making it a bit more accessible than water trapped in beadlike structures.

For a mission designed to look at distant, dim objects such as black holes, star clusters, and galaxies, SOFIA's spotlight on Earth's nearest and brightest neighbor was a departure from business as usual. The telescope operators typically use a guide camera to track stars, keeping the telescope locked steadily on its observing target. But the Moon is so close and bright that it fills the guide camera's entire field of view. With no stars visible, it was unclear if the telescope could reliably track the Moon. To determine this, in August 2018, the operators decided to try a test observation.

"It was, in fact, the first time SOFIA has looked at the Moon, and we weren't even completely sure if we would get reliable data, but questions about the Moon's water compelled us to try," said Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "It's incredible that this discovery came out of what was essentially a test, and now that we know we can do this, we're planning more flights to do more observations."

SOFIA's follow-up flights will look for water in additional sunlit locations and during different lunar phases to learn more about how the water is produced, stored, and moved across the Moon. The data will add to the work of future Moon missions, such as NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), to create the first water resource maps of the Moon for future human space exploration.

In the same issue of Nature Astronomy, scientists have published a paper using theoretical models and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, pointing out that water could be trapped in small shadows, where temperatures stay below freezing, across more of the Moon than currently expected. The results can be found here.

"Water is a valuable resource, for both scientific purposes and for use by our explorers," said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "If we can use the resources at the Moon, then we can carry less water and more equipment to help enable new scientific discoveries."

SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. Ames manages the SOFIA program, science, and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute at the University of Stuttgart. The aircraft is maintained and operated by NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703, in Palmdale, California.

Learn more about SOFIA at: https://www.nasa.gov/sofia


Related Multimedia:
YouTube video: SOFIA Discovers Water on a Sunlit Surface of the Moon


Journal Reference:
C. I. Honniball, P. G. Lucey, S. Li, S. Shenoy, T. M. Orlando, C. A. Hibbitts, D. M. Hurley, W. M. Farrell. Molecular water detected on the sunlit Moon by SOFIA. Nature Astronomy, Oct. 26, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01222-x

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Fly me to the Moon, let me swim among the stars

Mon 26 Oct 2020 // 21:32 UTC

Katyanna Quach 

Water molecules have been detected in soil in one of the Moon's largest sunlit craters, NASA announced on Monday, which means permanent bases on the natural satellite may be potentially a lot easier to support.

The discovery was made using a telescope onboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) – a modified Boeing 747 capable of flying 45,000 feet above our planet. The airborne 'scope spied what may well be water in the Clavius crater, which is visible from Earth, located in the southern hemisphere, and, coincidentally, the site of mankind's first Moon base in Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction novel 2001.

“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate.

“Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”

An illustration of water molecules in lunar beads and the location of the crater in the southern hemisphere of the Moon ... Source: NASA/Daniel Rutter

NASA doesn’t know exactly how much water in total is present in the crater. Initial readings, published in Nature Astronomy, show the Clavius regolith contains about 100 to 412 parts per million of water – that’s roughly a 12-ounce bottle of water, or about 355 ml of the liquid, per cubic metre of lunar soil.

In other words, the Moon is still pretty dry. The Sahara desert, for instance, contains 100 times more water than the amount found in the Clavius crater.

The water molecules are spread so thinly that they do not form liquid water or solid ice, said Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, during a press conference today. Instead, they are trapped within tiny beads, each one measuring about the size of a pencil tip. She believes the water is formed from solar wind and micrometeorite impacts.

Radiation from the Sun frees hydroxy (OH) from chemical compounds in the lunar soil, and tiny meteorite impacts provide the heat needed to merge two hydroxy particles to ultimately form water. This energy also melts surrounding material to form the glass beads that act as a protective casing to allow the water molecules to survive and persist despite the Moon’s lack of atmosphere.

Everything's falling apart. The Moon is slowly rusting up – and it's probably Earth's fault

READ MORE

Scientists know that some water is tucked away as icy deposits, known as cold traps, in the Moon's polar regions that are permanently covered in shadow. This is the first time water has been found in sunlit areas.

"Water is critical for deep space exploration,” Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Division, told reporters during the press briefing. “It can be turned into oxygen to breathe, water to drink, or be used for fuel supply.”

The American space agency hopes to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, and wants to eventually set up a lunar base [PDF]. If water can be extracted from the surface, it’ll make living on the natural satellite much easier, and provide a way for future generations of astronauts to restock and refuel on their way to more distant locations, such as Mars.

But the idea is purely speculative at the moment. Bleacher said scientists don’t yet know how accessible the water is, though finding it in sunlit areas is good news for upcoming lunar missions.

Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA’s project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said the data was recorded when its 747 flew over Nevada in 2018. It was the first time the airborne telescope had been directed at the Moon. The results are only now being released after months of analysis.

The team is planning more observations using SOFIA next year. In order to work out if the water is accessible, NASA will need to send spacecraft to collect and study samples of the lunar surface. Its next Moon rover, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), is designed to hunt for water at the Moon's south pole and is expected to launch in 2023.

Interestingly, in a separate study also published on Monday, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado predicted that the total area of cold traps on the Moon is some 15,000 square miles, double the amount in previous estimates. ®

Water found in new locations on the Moon, may be trapped in glass

Water is present in more places but won't be equally accessible.

JOHN TIMMER - 10/26/2020, 2:39 PM

Enlarge / The instrument used to detect the water flies on a 747.
NASA/Jim Ross

Despite its proximity to a very blue planet, the Earth's Moon appeared to be completely dry, with samples returned by the Apollo missions being nearly devoid of water. But in recent years, a number of studies have turned up what appears to be water in some locations on the Moon, although the evidence wasn't always decisive.

Today, NASA is announcing that it has used an airborne observatory to spot clear indications of water in unexpected places. But the water may be in a form that makes accessing it much harder. Separately, an analysis of spots where water could be easier to reach indicates that there's more potential reservoirs than we'd previously suspected.
Up in the air

With no atmosphere and low gravity, the Moon can't hang on to water on its surface. The first time that sunlight heats lunar water up, it will form a vapor and eventually escape into space. But there are regions on the Moon, primarily near the poles, that are permanently shadowed. There, temperatures remain perpetually low, and ice can survive indefinitely. And, to test this possibility, NASA crashed some hardware into a shady area near the Moon's south pole and found water vapor amidst the debris.

In fact, water liberated from elsewhere on the Moon can condense there before it escapes into space, potentially creating a growing pile of ice. Since water is going to be delivered by impacts with asteroids and cometary material, it's likely that this is an ongoing process.

But we wouldn't expect this to be happening in any areas exposed to sunlight. There, any water should be heated enough to drive it into the atmosphere, which would explain why samples returned from the Apollo missions show little water.

But there was a certain ambiguity in the data. Studies had indicated that some water-like material was present but couldn't differentiate between water and a hydroxyl group (OH), which could exist in some minerals. So, we weren't really sure what we were seeing there.

To figure this out, NASA turned to an infrared observatory that it's stuck in the back-end of a 747 with a hole cut out of the side. Known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy or SOFIA, the 747 brings the hardware up above much of the atmosphere. From there, there are far fewer molecules that would happily absorb some of the infrared light that the telescopes on SOFIA are designed to observe.

One of SOFIA's instruments is sensitive to wavelengths in the area of six micrometers (the Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope, or FORCAST). And that's critical because, while water can absorb and emit at this wavelength, hydroxyl groups cannot. So, anything detected here is definitively water.
Where’s the water?

The researchers looked at two regions of the Moon, one equatorial and one near a pole. This allowed them to use the equatorial site, which gets more sunlight and is therefore less likely to have water, as a control. The polar region, more likely to contain water, was the experimental. And it had a clear, strong signal corresponding to water. Nearly all of the areas imaged saw the water signal with a significance of anywhere from two sigma, and 20 percent of them exceeded four sigma. (For the Moon, the instrument could resolve patches of surface that are 1.5 x 5km.)

The authors of the new paper estimate the abundance of water as ranging from 100 to 400 micrograms per gram of lunar material. In a press conference, however, NASA decided to give an approachable value by mixing units: it's the equivalent of each cubic meter of Moon material having a 12 ounce bottle of water in it, on average.

And this is weird. The sunlight the area sees should be enough to cause any water to be cooked off rapidly. How is the water still there?

The authors' proposal—and it's just a hypothesis at this point—is that the water has been encased in glass. Rather than envisioning a literal 12 ounce glass bottle, you should be thinking of the disordered material that's formed by impacts. Some of the impacts on the Moon will come from water-containing materials, and that water will be vaporized by the impact. As will some of the rock and other materials, although they'll condense back to liquid quickly. As that rocky liquid cools off to form a disordered, glassy solid, it'll trap some of the water vapor.

Once trapped inside some glassy rock, the water will be impervious to the heating and cooling cycles that would normally drive the water back off the Moon's surface, which is why it's persisting at a sunny site on the lunar surface.

It also means that getting at the water will be a lot harder. Plenty of ideas about future lunar activities involve gathering water on the surface. But, if getting the water involves grinding down tiny pellets of glass, it may be significantly more trouble.
In the shade

But again, the focus on lunar water hasn't been in the sunny regions. Instead, the focus has been on the sites where shade might allow water to condense and form ice. And that's where the second paper comes in; it basically makes a catalog of all the potential sites on the Moon that are cold enough for ice to remain stable. And we mean all, even going down to considering rough surfaces that may create shady regions as small as one centimeter.

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The researchers figure out the location of large sites by looking through the images of the lunar surface and creating a 3D model that gets them the areas that would be shaded under all circumstances. For lower-volume areas, they examine images of the Moon's surface and figure out what percentage of that surface would end up shaded. They then model the diffusion of heat from the Sun-exposed sections and figure out which areas will remain cool enough to retain ice in the vacuum.

And, well, there's no shortage of potential places where water could exist without being encased in glass. The northern polar region has lots of regions with cold traps ranging from a meter up to 10 kilometers. But the southern polar region has far more that are over 10km in size. All told, this adds up to about 40,000 square kilometers of the Moon's surface that could hold water ice.

This doesn't mean that all that water is there. Some of it clearly is, based on NASA's earlier probe-crashing "experiment" that liberated some water vapor from the Moon's surface. But how much remains completely unclear. And whether it's in large, easily accessible ice deposits will remain an unknown until we get hardware to one of the locations we expect to host a large deposit.

Nature Astronomy, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01222-x, 10.1038/s41550-020-1198-9x (About DOIs).

IN ELECTION HAIL MARY, JARED KUSHNER TELLS BLACK PEOPLE THEY’RE LAZY AND UNAMBITIOUS

He said this while trying to argue that Black people should vote for Donald Trump.

BY BESS LEVIN OCTOBER 26, 2020

Jared Kushner at the White House after a morning on Capitol Hill, July 24, 2017.BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES.

For anyone who’s not entirely up to speed on first son-in-law Jared Kushner’s backstory, a brief primer: the son of a wealthy real estate developer who went to prison, in part for retaliating against his brother-in-law for cooperating with federal investigators by hiring a prostitute to seduce the guy, filming the encounter, and sending it to his sister, Kushner attended Harvard to which his dad had reportedly conveniently pledged $2.5 million shortly before he was accepted. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, he drove a Range Rover around campus, and according to a classmate, “He didn’t do it with a sense of humor. He did it, like, ‘I’m fucking rich.’” At 27, he became CEO of his family’s business while his father was in prison and was known for, among other things, buying an aging skyscraper on the eve of the financial crisis for a then record price of $1.8 billion—a deal that subsequently blew up in his face. In 2006, he purchased the New York Observer for $10 million with what he said was his own money earned doing real estate deals during his time at Harvard, not mentioning that the backing for those investments reportedly came from his family. You may have also heard that he has zero government experience but got his current gig because his father-in-law is the president, which is also the only reason he was able to obtain his security clearance.

All of which is to say, when people think of hard-working, boot-strapping individuals who’ve succeeded purely on their own merits, they don’t think of the Boy Prince of New Jersey, who has effectively earned nothing in his life and has had everything handed to him by either his rich father or rich father-in-law, while nevertheless thinking he’s found himself on third base because he hit a triple. And yet, strangely, here’s what he had to say about Black people on Monday morning while—we think??— trying to convince said Black people to vote for Donald Trump:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1320732710525038593

So, just to recap, that’s adviser to the president Jared Kushner not just saying that Black Americans only have themselves to blame if they’re not successful—and not, say, centuries of systemic racism—but that they should quit bitching about their circumstances. And this was supposed to persuade the people he’s referring to to give his boss a second term in the White House and, by extension, keep him employed for another four years. (For the Kushnerphiles, this will likely be reminiscent of the time Jared tried to get Palestinians to sign onto his Middle East peace deal by calling them “hysterical and stupid”.)

Anyway, because the interview was going so well, and Kushner was presumably thinking to himself, You are nailing this Big J, fingers crossed Ivanka remembered to hit record on the DVR so we can toast how great it went tonight, he continued:

https://twitter.com/misyrlena/status/1320709001546530816

As for Kushner’s wife’s father’s relationship with the Black community, the apple obviously does not fall far from the rich-daddy-fuckup-son tree. Here are just a sampling of the things that Trump, who last week claimed “Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump” with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln, has done to show his love for Black people:

Condemned Black Lives Matter and called it a “symbol of hate” while simultaneously defending armed white militants

Allegedly said “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole”

Reportedly only agreed to sign the First Step Act, which released or reduced sentences for thousands of inmates, many of whom were Black men who’d been convicted of nonviolent drug crimes, after being told it might help his poll numbers with Black people, and then “went s---house crazy” and asked “why the hell did I do that?” after it did not

Presided over a pandemic in which unemployment for Black people has disproportionately surged

Trump has also, according to the Washington Post, “maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments,” so maybe he and Kushner crafted this morning’s can’t-lose talking point together. 


Jared Kushner: ‘Complaining’ Black people have to ‘want to be successful’

Published on October 26, 2020 By David Edwards

Jared Kushner appears on Fox News (screen grab)

White House adviser Jared Kushner argued on Monday that the Black community is struggling because they do not “want to be successful.”

Kushner made the remarks on Fox & Friends after he was asked about a recent meeting with Ice Cube.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about the issues that were needed in the Black community for the last years, particularly it intensified after the George Floyd situation,” Kushner explained. “You saw a lot of people who were just virtue signaling, they’d go on Instagram and cry or they would put a slogan on their jersey or write something on a basketball court. And quite frankly, that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”

“And again, one thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat,” he continued, “is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out the problems that they’re complaining about.”

Kushner added: “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”

The White House adviser went on to claim that Trump has a “groundswell of support in the Black community because they’re realizing that all the different bad things the media and the Democrats have said about President Trump are not true.”

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Jared Kushner ripped to shreds for Fox News comments on Black Americans

Published on October 26, 2020 By Travis Gettys - Commentary

Jared Kushner on Fox News (screengrab)

Jared Kushner suggested Black Americans just didn’t want to be successful — and social media users were shocked and disgusted.

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser appeared Monday morning on Fox News, where he argued that the administration’s policies would help Black Americans, but only if they wanted to succeed.

“President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about but he can’t want them to be successful more than that they want to be successful,” Kushner said.

He also claimed that the nationwide protests were insincere after George Floyd’s killing by police.

“You saw a lot of people who were just virtual signaling,” Kushner said. “They would go on Instagram and cry, or put a slogan on their jersey or write something on a basketball court, and quite frankly that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”

You have to hand it to Jared Kushner, because that’s the only way he’s ever achieved or accomplished anything his whole life.
— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) October 26, 2020

Weird that black people don’t want to vote for someone like this
— Jaynie’s Got a Bun (@FreeGirlNowNYC) October 26, 2020

Racist prick.
— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) October 26, 2020

Jared Kushner’s family connections have provided him his only opportunities in life and he’s still failed miserably at every single thing he’s done, so perhaps it’s Jared who doesn’t want to be successful.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) October 26, 2020

Of this I am certain: The average Black person in this country puts in more work by noon than Jared Kushner puts in the whole damn day. https://t.co/exYSJZ6pAp
— Hakeem Jefferson (@hakeemjefferson) October 26, 2020

Closing message of “People crying after watching a human being slowly killed on camera were faking it for likes” is another interesting move https://t.co/7h7cLqsy0K
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) October 26, 2020

Jared Kushner is a condescending douchebag. https://t.co/J8y3KzDxtJ
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) October 26, 2020


This little weasel just doesn’t get it… https://t.co/3xG2l7QD5U

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) October 26, 2020


Jared Kushner – son and husband of privilege – has a message for the black community: You would have more wealth if you just wanted it more. pic.twitter.com/2zL2tgQgfi
— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) October 26, 2020

This coming from the guy whose family has made a fortune in low income housing and gouging tenants with ridiculous ” service fees” and ” late rent fees ” that keep their tenants perpetually broke
And with Kushner’s so called ” oppurtunity zones”, those problems will explode
— jimmy craig (@threepeaksexp) October 26, 2020

“Why can’t they get their daddies to buy them bootstraps, the way my daddy did?”
— Texas Triffid Ranch (A Uwe Boll Film) (@txtriffidranch) October 26, 2020

“have you tried pulling yourselves up by the boot on your necks?”
— The BabaDuke Zero (@B_Sputnik) October 26, 2020

The guy who inherited his father’s business, wealth and banking connections implies that Black people may not want to be successful as Trump wants them to be. Most of us didn’t have the luxury to fail up from day one Jared. I’ve heard this racist talking point before in the South

— Don Justo (@JTJ24) October 26, 2020

Slum lord says what? https://t.co/mBfx4ZEZww
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) October 26, 2020

Jared Kushner: There is a “ground swell” of support for Pres Trump among black voters
Fact: Black voters remain an overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning constituency, but a notable reduction in their support could be a problem for Joe Biden.
Read this: https://t.co/XtA7XxV0ZD
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) October 26, 2020

Bob Murray Was Vicious to Both Workers and the Environment

The deceased coal baron fought safety measures, presided over deadly mine collapses, allegedly sexually harassed his employees, and sued his critics to suppress free speech. Rest in peace?

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Bob Murray speaks at the site of the Crandall Canyon mine collapse.


Kate Aronoff/October 26, 2020

Fossil fuel interests have long argued that environmental rules kill jobs. Not having such rules, though, kills people. And that’s particularly clear when it comes to the coal industry.

Bob Murray, the 80-year-old coal baron who fought against safety and environmental regulations that would affect his mining empire, presided over several deadly mining disasters, and sued people who pointed that out, died this weekend. In the last years of his life, Murray—whose coal company was the eleventh to file for bankruptcy during the Trump administration—waged a fierce battle against anything that might alleviate black lung, a painful, incurable disease, also known as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, that affects a tenth of veteran coal miners in the United States. Last month, Murray filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for precisely the kind of black lung benefits he’d fought paying into for years. Last fall, he had conversely told NPR that his respiratory ailment didn’t have “anything to do with working in the coal mines.” An exact cause of death has not been announced, though in 2016 Murray was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, another lung disease common among coal miners.

As black lung cases ticked upward in 2014, Murray filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over a regulation curbing coal dust in underground mines, claiming that the rule intended to protect employees from irreversible lung scarring would cost the company billions. Weeks after Trump’s inauguration, which he helped fund, he handed the new administration an “action plan” that included calls to gut the Mine Safety and Health Administration and revise the “arbitrary” coal dust rules he’d been battling for years. He also pleaded for a federal bailout that would keep him from having to pay for health care and pensions of retired United Mine Workers of America miners; like many other coal barons, he attempted to shirk such obligations in bankruptcy court.

After reviewing Murray Energy’s bankruptcy filings, several of its creditors alleged that Bob Murray and his family had treated the company as a personal “piggy bank,” awarding themselves exorbitant pay amid layoffs. Murray took home $14 million in one year as the company’s debts mounted. During the same period, The New York Times reported, he earmarked $1 million for climate denial outfits like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heartland Institute. As the company navigated bankruptcy, it spent $100,000 in the first quarter of 2020 lobbying to—among other things—further slash the 50 cent excise tax on coal mined underground that funds the Black Lung Trust Fund. Justifying its ongoing assault on the tax, the National Mining Association cited hardships imposed by a pandemic respiratory illness that puts miners afflicted with black lung at higher risk of death. (Industry lobbyists had already succeeded in cutting the excise tax down from $1.10 per ton in 2018 and slashed the one on surface mining down to 25 cents.)

Murray repeatedly put what his company owed mine workers onto the government’s tab instead. Murray owed as much as $155 million to fund worker disabilities and treatment under the Black Lung Act but had put up just $1.1 million in collateral. When Murray Energy emerged from bankruptcy this summer as American Consolidated Natural Resources, the settlement declared that ACNR wasn’t responsible for claims against Murray under the Black Lung Benefit Act. Its $74.4 million worth of liability under that law was shifted to the Department of Labor’s Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, established under the BLBA.

Murray Energy had also been the last major contributor to the 1974 UMWA Pension Plan, providing what is often the sole source of income to some 92,000 miners and their families. Not long after Murray Energy filed for bankruptcy, Congress—under pressure from the UMWA—agreed to keep the fund solvent to preserve health care benefits for 13,000 miners. Murray wasn’t alone in trying to socialize the debts of his flailing company and privatize the rewards. In a Stanford Law Review article published just before Murray Energy’s and other high-profile coal bankruptcies, researchers Joshua Macey and Jackson Salovaara found that four of the country’s largest coal producers had used bankruptcy to shed $5.2 billion of employee and environmental obligations between 2012 and 2017.

Murray consistently rallied resources toward electing politicians who would keep him from having to pay anything more than the bare minimum to the people who built his fortune. Watchdog groups have raised questions over whether Murray coerced salaried employees to donate to Murray Energy’s Political Action Committee, which donated $1.4 million to almost invariably Republican politicians between 2007 and 2012. “We have only a little over a month left to go in this election fight,” one internal memo Murray sent out to employees, reported by The New Republic, warned. “If we do not win it, the coal industry will be eliminated and so will your job, if you want to remain in this industry.” A Murray foreman later sued over what she alleged was a wrongful firing after she declined to give to the Murray Energy PAC.

Murray frequently required miners to attend Republican political functions, where they would serve as political props, including for Donald Trump. He bussed miners up to Washington, D.C., to support EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt during his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, as well. Rounding out an illustrious career, Murray was also sued by two female employees in 2019 for sexual harassment. And he waged brutal legal battles against his critics in the media, including a well-publicized spat with Last Week Tonight host John Oliver for daring to point out that the 2007 Crandall Canyon collapses that killed nine people were probably caused by Murray Energy safety violations and not, as Murray had claimed, an earthquake. As news of Murray’s death spread on social media Monday, the song Oliver had dedicated to the coal baron recirculated as well: “Eat Shit, Bob.”

Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.

TRUMP JUST SIGNED AN EXECUTIVE ORDER LETTING HIM PURGE THOUSANDS OF FEDERAL WORKERS FOR DISLOYALTY
Even if he loses, the action could sabotage a Biden administration indefinitely.

BY BESS LEVIN OCTOBER 26, 2020

Historically, when Donald Trump has signed executive orders, like to issue a travel ban against people from majority-Muslim nations or to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, he’s done so with lots of fanfare, tweeting about how they’ve made America great again, inviting camera crews to watch him scribble his Sharpie across the page, and sending his lieutenants out to brag about them on TV. But last week, the White House was relatively, strangely quiet as the president signed the esoteric-sounding “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In the Excepted Service.” And that was probably by design; because the action not only gives Trump the power to purge thousands of federal workers—the kind whose job protections have allowed them to deal in facts and stand up to presidential intimidation—and replace them with politically appointed hacks who would spend the next four years doing Trump’s bidding, but it would cripple a Biden administration for months, at a time when it will need to act fast on, among other things, COVID-19.

Of course, that’s not how the administration has summarized the EO, saying, instead that it’s all about getting rid of “poor performers.” But competence has never been of much interest to Trump, who evaluates who is the best person for any given job based on how hard they kiss his ass and pledge to do his bidding no matter what. Unfortunately, until now the president has been bedeviled by rules saying he can’t just fire civil servants for writing reports that say mask-wearing helps stop the spread of COVID-19, or coal mining is hastening climate change, or refusing to say that a hurricane was headed for Alabama when it definitely wasn’t. Thus, this new plan.

Here’s how the Independent describes it:

The order…would strip civil service protections from a broad swath of career civil servants if it is decided that they are in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions”—a description previously reserved for the political appointees who come and go with each change in administration. It does that by creating a new category for such positions that do not turn over from administration to administration and reclassifying them as part of that category.

The range of workers who could be stripped of protections and placed in this new category is vast, experts say, and could include most of the non-partisan experts—scientists, doctors, lawyers, economists—whose work to advise and inform policymakers is supposed to be done in a way that is fact-driven and devoid of politics. Trump has repeatedly clashed with such career workers on a variety of settings, ranging from his desire to present the COVID-19 pandemic as largely over, to his attempts to enable his allies to escape punishment for federal crimes, to his quixotic insistence that National Weather Service scientists back up his erroneous claim that the state of Alabama was threatened by a hurricane which was not heading in its direction.

In creating the new category, called “Schedule F,” Trump would basically take employees whose jobs are nonpolitical and are protected from, for instance, a president who doesn‘t believe science is real, and make them “at will,” while at the same time, giving political appointees the very job protection he’s stripping from civil servants. That would obviously be extremely bad under a scenario in which Trump is elected to a second term—as the Washington Post puts it, “think of the Federal Aviation Administration employee evaluating whether an airliner is safe to fly” or “the Food and Drug Administration employee evaluating the efficacy of a vaccine”—and there isn‘t a single person left in the federal government who is qualified or non-corrupt. But it would also mean, in the likely event Trump loses, he could go scorched earth and screw over Joe Biden when time is of the essence:


Creating the new category…could allow a lame-duck President Trump to cripple his successor’s administration by firing any career federal employees who’ve been included on the list. It also could allow Trump administration officials to skirt prohibitions against “burrowing in”—the heavily restricted practice of converting political appointees (known as “Schedule C” employees) into career civil servants—by hiring them under the new category for positions which would not end with Trump’s term. Another provision orders agencies to take steps to prohibit removing “Schedule F” appointees from their jobs on the grounds of “political affiliation,” which could potentially prevent a future administration from firing unqualified appointees because of their association with President Trump.

Trump appointee resigns over order removing job protections for some federal workers

Shawna Chen

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Federal Salary Council Chair Ron Sanders resigned on Monday over President Trump’s recent executive order that strips civil service protections for some federal workers.

Why he's saying: Sanders, who was appointed by Trump in 2017, said he could no longer work for the president as “a matter of conscience.”

“[I]t is clear that its stated purpose notwithstanding, the executive order is nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the president, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process," Sanders, a lifelong Republican, wrote in his resignation letter obtained by Politico.

“Career federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law … not to be loyal to a particular president or administration,” he added.

Context: The executive order, signed last week, requires agencies to reclassify workers involved in "positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition" to a new category — named Schedule F — by Jan. 19.
Those workers will be exempt from some job protections.

Critics argue the order, which could affect tens of thousands of workers, will make it easier for the president to hire and fire federal workers. One prominent federal union leader told the New York Times the order was "the most profound undermining of the Civil Service in our lifetimes."

The White House says the order expedites removal of “poor performers.”

Trump’s Scorched-Earth War Against Federal Employees
His latest feint at draining the swamp could put a target on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s back.

MANDEL NGAN/GETTY IMAGES

Matt Ford/October 22, 2020

One advantage of a vague slogan like “drain the swamp” is that it can mean different things to different people. Does it mean ousting elected officials from their comfy seats in Washington, D.C., which is often said (and wrongly at that) to be built on a swamp? Perhaps it means cleaning up the murky influence of donors and campaign contributions in the nation’s capital. Maybe it even means washing away the toxic effects of lobbyists and well-funded interests groups in legislation and policymaking.

For President Donald Trump, however, draining the swamp appears to mean undermining the nation’s professional civil service. The White House released an unusual executive order on Wednesday night that could give the president the power to hire and fire a broad range of federal civil servants for any reason, or none at all. If fully implemented, the order would circumvent long-standing legal protections for government workers that were designed to insulate them from politicization.

This is a familiar theme over the last four years for Trump, who has complained all along that his presidency has been undermined by a “deep state” of federal employees who oppose him. His search for scapegoats for his own poor governance meshed well with the conservative movement’s disdain for civil servants in general, as well as its desire to demolish what it calls the “administrative state” of federal agencies and regulators. At risk is the hard-fought dream of a nonpartisan civil service without cronies or sycophants, and the confidence of Americans in their own government.

This latest executive order would create a new category of civil servants known as “Schedule F” and outlines how to shift a wide range of positions out of existing categories and into this new one. The White House made clear that it sought to seize greater flexibility in removing and adding federal employees who might otherwise be protected from dismissal by law. “Under the order, Federal agencies will have more flexibility to hire ‘Schedule F’ employees and will also be able to remove them without going through a lengthy appeals process,” the White House said when announcing the move.

The order itself framed the move as a good-governance measure of sorts, claiming that the problem was shoddy work on federal employees’ part. “High performance by such employees can meaningfully enhance agency operations, while poor performance can significantly hinder them,” it stated. “Senior agency officials report that poor performance by career employees in policy-relevant positions has resulted in long delays and substandard-quality work for important agency projects, such as drafting and issuing regulations.”

But the move takes place against a backdrop of Trumpian ire toward the civil service. As I noted in August, Trump and his allies see no difference between his personal political interests and the policy goals that drive the federal government. That worldview has led the president to dismiss officials like former FBI Director James Comey, who resisted pressure to drop a criminal case against one of Trump’s top allies in 2017, and purge nearly a dozen inspectors general earlier this year from their watchdog posts after the Senate acquitted him of abuse of power. More recently, Trump has hinted that he would fire current FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Bill Barr after the election if they don’t make politically charged arrests before November 3 to help him win.

Trump’s move against civil service protections is a dramatic escalation of this well-established trend. The order drew immediate criticism from union leaders who represent federal workers. “This is the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Thursday. “The president has doubled down on his effort to politicize and corrupt the professional service. This executive order strips due process rights and protections from perhaps hundreds of thousands of federal employees and will enable political appointees and other officials to hire and fire these workers at will.”

Lawmakers, however, took relatively little notice of the White House maneuver. The imminent presidential debate on Thursday may have drawn attention on Capitol Hill away from what could be a sea change in the executive branch. An exception was Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who connected the move to Trump’s history of corrupt behavior. “In his obsession to twist our govt to benefit him personally, Pres. Trump is now attacking the idea of a professional Civil Service, which dates back 100 years to the time of Vermonter Pres. Chester Arthur,” Leahy wrote on Twitter. “We must stand up for Federal Employees serving America, not Trump.”

What sort of civil servants could be subject to dismissal under Trump’s plan? Perhaps the most high-profile example would be Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Trump can fire Cabinet members, agency heads, and hundreds of other political appointees at will. But Fauci is what’s known as a “Title 42 employee,” a specialized category of federal employees that’s used to fill scientific positions. Under the order’s terms, White House officials could recategorize Fauci as a Schedule F employee and then dismiss him, effectively stripping him of his ability to appeal against his own removal. The administration could then refill his reclassified position as NIAID director with far fewer hurdles than normal.

As if there wasn’t already enough at stake in the 2020 election, the dream of a professionalized civil service without cronyism or sycophancy now also appears to be on the table. In theory, Congress could try to rewrite federal civil service laws to reverse Trump’s order. But a more surefire way to undo it would be to elect a different president, who could retract it. The order lays out a 90-day timeline for federal agencies to report which positions might be subject to change. That would make the deadline January 19, 2021—one day before Inauguration Day.

Matt Ford @fordm
Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic.

Doctors Are Appalled by White House’s “Barbaric” New Coronavirus Strategy
By “herd immunity,” the Trump administration means people should be encouraged to catch the coronavirus.

OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tells reporters that “we are not going to control the pandemic” Sunday morning.



Melody Schreiber/October 26, 2020

There are two things to understand about the “herd immunity” strategy the White House has reportedly “embraced” in the past month. The first is that the term, which originally referred to the protection a community gets from high vaccination rates, in this case is being used as shorthand for letting the coronavirus rampage through the nation until those who haven’t died have developed antibodies. The second is that health experts hate it.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the approach “simply unethical” earlier this month, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has called it “ridiculous” and “total nonsense.” “It’s barbaric,” Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine, told me. “You’re going to let millions die for some notion of herd immunity?” It’s a particularly bad strategy with coronaviruses, he said. “Who knows how potent and how permanent antibodies are to the disease?”

Yet doctors worry that the White House is still officially or unofficially implementing this idea—particularly given statements like White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s announcement on Sunday that “we are not going to control the pandemic.” And considering the time the medical community has spent saving lives and combating misinformation over the past year, the fact that this strategy is even being considered feels, to some, like a betrayal.“You’re going to let millions die for some notion of herd immunity?”

The “herd immunity” approach—also called “targeted protection”—would somehow focus on protecting those who are known to be vulnerable to the virus, like elderly people living in nursing homes, while encouraging everyone else to stop taking protective measures and succumb to the virus in order to achieve eventually some temporary form of immunity. “What we need to do is make sure that we have the proper mitigation factors, whether it’s therapies or vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don’t die from this,” Meadows added Sunday, without elaborating on how exactly a virus that’s so far killed some 225,000 in the country could magically be rendered nonfatal. It’s unclear how the vulnerable would be shielded from the less vulnerable. It’s also unclear who belongs in which group. Plus, no one even really knows how immunity to the virus works yet—whether it lasts a few months or a few years. Millions could die without communities ever reaching the goal of high levels of immunity.

Doctors, nurses, health specialists, first responders, food providers, and hospital cleaning staff have been working long hours, often without adequate protection from the virus, as cases across the country have mounted. By July, they were tired. Now they’re beyond weary. “For many, if not all, of us working in public health and health care, we are truly exhausted and frustrated,” Dr. Saskia Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist and infection preventionist, told me. “A push for herd immunity is not only dangerous and unethical but feels almost a slap in the face for those who have been working tirelessly to care for patients and provide public health resources.”

Not only is there no end in sight for health workers and experts working to address the virus; a strategy like this could result in a massive strain on an already overburdened health system. As cases have already begun resurging this fall, reaching a record high of 83,010 new cases on Friday, health workers are watching with dread. “This strategy could overwhelm hospitals and public health efforts like contact tracing,” Popescu said.

Without knowing more about how immunity to the virus works—and the potential long-term effects even of mild cases—it’s irresponsible to allow it to infect vast swaths of the country, experts say. “We are just barely starting to understand long-haulers,” Popescu said, “and the truth is that we’re barely 10 months into this pandemic, so it’s not just the immediate infection that could be life-threatening but also the longer implications that could be life-altering.” Long-term effects, in addition to the havoc they wreak on individuals’ lives, could place an additional strain on medical resources.

Here’s the original meaning of “herd immunity”: If enough people are vaccinated, it provides protection for others who are not able to be immunized, because the virus never really gains a toehold in the population—it’s never able to break through the wall of immunized people to be transmitted to the people without antibodies.

We have never reached herd immunity for a disease without a vaccine in the past; without one, cases rise and fall each year. It’s not clear how long natural immunity from being infected with the virus lasts. Right now, experts think it’s likely a few months. That means even if you survive the virus and have some immunity to it, you could be just as vulnerable—and maybe even more so, depending on how this virus works—in the future. Humans haven’t been around this virus long enough to know the answers to these questions yet.

“You could argue that it’s a distraction from the fact that we in the U.S. have been unable to control transmission of the virus.”

“You’re essentially saying that we are going to commit ourselves to a substantial number of people becoming sick, potentially with long-term complications of the virus, and a lot of people dying unnecessarily because we’ve chosen not to do the hard work of controlling transmission in the community,” Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, president of the global vaccine business unit at Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, told me. “You could argue that it’s a distraction from the fact that we in the U.S. have been unable to control transmission of the virus, and so we would effectively be throwing up our hands and saying that we’re going to find a way to justify our failure.”

Even if the strategy were implemented, Venkayya said, “we don’t even know who the vulnerable are, because those who have preexisting conditions may not be aware of it.” And although adults 65 or older account for eight out of 10 confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the United States, leading the elderly to be dubbed an at-risk population, many young, healthy people experience long-term effects of the illness. People who have long been marginalized, including people of color, have experienced higher rates of contracting the virus because their communities have frequently been neglected and mistreated for generations. Will there be attempts to protect these communities if this strategy is adopted? If so, how? Will at-risk essential workers be paid to stay at home? Will nursing-home workers have access to universal sick leave? And how would we control people’s movements such that the less vulnerable, who are supposed to contract the disease, never interact with the vulnerable?

Instead of allowing the virus to circulate unfettered, experts say, we need to circulate more and better information on how to protect everyone. “We’ve had a whirlwind of nine months of misinformation about this,” Gonsalves said. “And we’re going to have to really play catch-up.” Many Americans still don’t know anyone who has died from the virus, he pointed out. “There’s a lot of inability for people to understand risk when it’s not right in front of them.” Leaders in other countries, such as New Zealand and European nations, have communicated much more clearly what the risks are—and how and why to avoid them. “We’re going to have a lot of work to do about rebuilding confidence, getting the facts out,” Gonsalves said.

It’s tiring, seemingly endless work. But health experts and medical workers would rather keep doing it than let the people they’re fighting to save sicken or die. And responding to this pandemic shouldn’t rest entirely on their shoulders. This virus isn’t giving up, experts say, and we can’t, either.

Melody Schreiber @m_scribe is a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth, to be published in November 2020.