TBR News May 2, 2020

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. May 1, 2020: Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it. “
Comment for May 2, 2020:” Dealing with Trump, at a high level, is like trying to herd cats or pick up mercury. Not possible. He waffles, lies, erupts and generally behaves like the ego-centric they are. Here is a clear description of the narcissist. ‘In psychological terms, narcissism doesn’t mean self-love—at least not of a genuine sort. It’s more accurate to say that people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are in love with an idealized, grandiose image of themselves. And they’re in love with this inflated self-image precisely because it allows them to avoid deep feelings of insecurity. But propping up their delusions of grandeur takes a lot of work—and that’s where the dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors come in.
Narcissistic personality disorder involves a pattern of self-centered, arrogant thinking and behavior, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. Others often describe people with NPD as cocky, manipulative, selfish, patronizing, and demanding. This way of thinking and behaving surfaces in every area of the narcissist’s life: from work and friendships to family and love relationships.
People with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely resistant to changing their behavior, even when it’s causing them problems. Their tendency is to turn the blame on to others. What’s more, they are extremely sensitive and react badly to even the slightest criticisms, disagreements, or perceived slights, which they view as personal attacks. For the people in the narcissist’s life, it’s often easier just to go along with their demands to avoid the coldness and rages. However, by understanding more about narcissistic personality disorder, you can spot the narcissists in your life, protect yourself from their power plays, and establish healthier boundaries.
Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder
Grandiose sense of self-importance
Grandiosity is the defining characteristic of narcissism. More than just arrogance or vanity, grandiosity is an unrealistic sense of superiority. Narcissists believe they are unique or “special” and can only be understood by other special people. What’s more, they are too good for anything average or ordinary. They only want to associate and be associated with other high-status people, places, and things.
Narcissists also believe that they’re better than everyone else and expect recognition as such—even when they’ve done nothing to earn it. They will often exaggerate or outright lie about their achievements and talents. And when they talk about work or relationships, all you’ll hear is how much they contribute, how great they are, and how lucky the people in their lives are to have them. They are the undisputed star and everyone else is at best a bit player.
Lives in a fantasy world that supports their delusions of grandeur
Since reality doesn’t support their grandiose view of themselves, narcissists live in a fantasy world propped up by distortion, self-deception, and magical thinking. They spin self-glorifying fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, attractiveness, and ideal love that make them feel special and in control. These fantasies protect them from feelings of inner emptiness and shame, so facts and opinions that contradict them are ignored or rationalized away. Anything that threatens to burst the fantasy bubble is met with extreme defensiveness and even rage, so those around the narcissist learn to tread carefully around their denial of reality.
Needs constant praise and admiration
A narcissist’s sense of superiority is like a balloon that gradually loses air without a steady stream of applause and recognition to keep it inflated. The occasional compliment is not enough. Narcissists need constant food for their ego, so they surround themselves with people who are willing to cater to their obsessive craving for affirmation. These relationships are very one-sided. It’s all about what the admirer can do for the narcissist, never the other way around. And if there is ever an interruption or diminishment in the admirer’s attention and praise, the narcissist treats it as a betrayal.
Sense of entitlement
Because they consider themselves special, narcissists expect favorable treatment as their due. They truly believe that whatever they want, they should get. They also expect the people around them to automatically comply with their every wish and whim. That is their only value. If you don’t anticipate and meet their every need, then you’re useless. And if you have the nerve to defy their will or “selfishly” ask for something in return, prepare yourself for aggression, outrage, or the cold shoulder.
Exploits others without guilt or shame
Narcissists never develop the ability to identify with the feelings of others—to put themselves in other people’s shoes. In other words, they lack empathy. In many ways, they view the people in their lives as objects—there to serve their needs. As a consequence, they don’t think twice about taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends. Sometimes this interpersonal exploitation is malicious, but often it is simply oblivious. Narcissists simply don’t think about how their behavior affects others. And if you point it out, they still won’t truly get it. The only thing they understand is their own needs.
Frequently demeans, intimidates, bullies, or belittles others
Narcissists feel threatened whenever they encounter someone who appears to have something they lack—especially those who are confident and popular. They’re also threatened by people who don’t kowtow to them or who challenge them in any way. Their defense mechanism is contempt. The only way to neutralize the threat and prop up their own sagging ego is to put those people down. They may do it in a patronizing or dismissive way as if to demonstrate how little the other person means to them. Or they may go on the attack with insults, name-calling, bullying, and threats to force the other person back into line. (helpguide)

The Table of Contents
• Coronavirus scrambles 2020 expectations for Trump in must-win Florida
• The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here
• Trump is handling coronavirus so badly, he almost makes Johnson look good
• Trump erupts over poll slump and threatens to sue campaign manager
• New York-area coronavirus outbreak originated primarily in Europe, not China: report
• European travelers brought coronavirus to New York long before first case confirmed, studies suggest
• Did coronavirus really originate in a Chinese laboratory?
• Are We on the Brink of a ‘New Little Ice Age?’
• The Encyclopedia of American Loons

Coronavirus scrambles 2020 expectations for Trump in must-win Florida
May 1, 2020
by James Oliphant, Steve Holland and Saundra Amrhein
Reuters
TAMPA, Fla. (Reuters) – Before the coronavirus pandemic, Desi Marinov considered herself “apolitical.” The Fort Lauderdale, Florida, flight attendant didn’t even bother to vote in the 2016 presidential election.
Losing her job due to lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus and then waiting weeks for unemployment benefits has changed all that. Now she is determined to make sure President Donald Trump is not re-elected in November.
“I will go and vote and will convince as many people as I can … that this is the wrong type of leadership,” she said.
Marinov, 42, is the kind of voter that keeps the Trump campaign up at night. Of all the battleground states he won in 2016, Florida is the biggest prize with 29 Electoral College votes.
Trump had been considered the favorite to win Florida again over the prospective Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, despite edging out Hillary Clinton there by just 1.2%.
But two months into the biggest crisis of his presidency, the Republican has received mixed reviews for his response. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, a staunch Trump ally, meanwhile, has been criticized for being slow to close beaches and blamed for a faulty unemployment compensation system that locked hundreds of thousands out of benefits.
Recent polls now show Biden neck-and neck or slightly ahead of Trump in Florida as well as nationally. Trump’s internal polling shows the same, according to a Republican source close to his re-election campaign.
One in five Floridians are aged 65 and older, the age group most vulnerable to the coronavirus, compared with one in six nationally, according to U.S. census data from 2019.
“It’s much more competitive than it was. He doesn’t have the edge with seniors that he had before,” the source said, asking not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “Florida… is in play.”
According to a Reuters/Ipsos national opinion poll from mid-April, only about a third of Americans 55 and older think the country is headed in the right direction, down 6 percentage points from a similar poll in February.
Their preference in November’s election showed a small improvement for Biden, who drew 44% support from older Americans, about the same amount as Trump, who had 45%, according to the poll.
Biden’s strength with independent voters such as Marinov also appears to be growing, albeit marginally. He had a 4% lead among self-identified independents in April, compared to his 2% advantage in February.
Trump has been frustrated by the recent polls, at one point sharply questioning his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, over the numbers, according to a source familiar with the matter.
In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Trump said he did not believe his lock on the state was in jeopardy.
“I don’t think so,” Trump said, but added, “Look, I haven’t been looking at polls for a while.”
RE-OPENING FLORIDA
Of the major battleground states in the general election – also including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona – DeSantis has been the most aggressive about re-starting his state’s economy, which is heavily reliant on tourism and services.
About one million of Florida’s estimated 10 million-strong workforce lost jobs during the pandemic. State government data as of Thursday shows that about half of them have not been able to claim benefits after its automated compensation system crashed.
“We’re on the path to economic suicide,” said Ford O’Connell, a former Republican congressional candidate in Florida who regularly consults with the Trump re-election campaign on strategy. “The sooner DeSantis is able to return Florida to a sense of safety, the better Trump is.”
Florida plans to partially reopen on Monday, despite concerns among public health experts including on Trump’s team about the possibility of a spike in new cases should states ease social distancing measures too quickly.
“That might not go over well either,” the Republican source close to the campaign said.
Russell Green, 61, who suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is one of those who worries he and others will be at risk if the state opens too quickly. He believes Trump failed to take the spread of the virus seriously.
An independent who voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, the Naples resident plans to vote for Biden this time.
Economists say that with summer generally the slowest season for Florida’s industries, any economic rebound from a successful re-opening may not be apparent by November.
Trump’s allies say even a small uptick will benefit Trump’s re-election odds.
“Three months after this, people are going to say (DeSantis) handled it right and the president handled it right,” said Brian Ballard, a top Florida lobbyist and Republican power-broker.
A NEW OPENING
Sensing a possible opening in the state but with all in-person campaigning stopped due to the pandemic, Biden and his allies are doing what they can to reach voters in Florida.
This week, he gave an interview to local media in Miami, criticizing Trump’s handling of the pandemic, and local Democrats such as U.S. Representative Val Demings of Orlando, who is considered a possible vice-presidential pick, have been arguing his case for the presidency.
Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA plans to spend at least $13 million airing ads in Florida between now and Election Day, said Daniela Martins, the group’s Florida outreach director.
But Biden will need to raise much more money to stay visible in the state, which has several expensive media markets, analysts say. By the end of March, Biden trailed Trump in cash on hand by more than $180 million.
Mary Jane Lukas, 45, of Gainesville, Florida, an independent voter who supported a third-party candidate in 2016, remains unconvinced. She said she was leaning toward Trump, largely because she thinks Biden has kept too low a profile during the crisis.
“I don’t want to vote for (Trump),” Lukas said, “but I feel like I have to.”
Reporting by James Oliphant and Steve Holland in Washington and Saundra Amrhein in Tampa, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Sonya Hepinstall

The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet
April 30, 2020
by Matt Taibbi
Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type – ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:
Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were already not that dissimilar:
Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good.”
Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their “understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”
This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” pieces that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”
A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “I love the poorly educated!”
The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a Great Beast, that cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “American politics has gone insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual and political elite as society’s immune system:
Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.
The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to speech, don’t ask: tell.
As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube took down a widely-circulated video about coronavirus, citing a violation of “community guidelines.”
The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an “Urgent Care” clinic in Bakersfield, California. They’d held a presentation in which they argued that widespread lockdowns were perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and analyzing.
“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths,” said Erickson, a vigorous, cheery-looking Norwegian-American who argued the numbers showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate. “Does [that] necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies, furloughing doctors…? I think the answer is going to be increasingly clear.”
The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out that the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. The message boards of real E.R. doctors lit up with angry comments, scoffing at the doctors’ dubious data collection methods and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to issue a joint statement to “emphatically condemn” the two doctors, who “do not speak for medical society” and had released “biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests.”
As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right” audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’ claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades,” and YouTube and Google have “officially banned dissent.”
Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s monologue:
There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus trutherism.
Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the flu.”
He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up some pork.”
The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new “Utopia of Scolding”:
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.
In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.
Because this Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with its takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance fixation of the day.
When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take elite advice was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against “expertise-deniers.” For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp’s decision to end some shutdowns was, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”
At the outset of the crisis, America’s biggest internet platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented step to combat “fraud and misinformation” by promising extensive cooperation in elevating “authoritative” news over less reputable sources.
H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”
We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.
Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.
When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many people who really know their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing out – often based on nothing more than hunches or impressions of the personalities involved – which set of explanations is most believable. Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do this in order to explain the Ideal Gas Law, I had to do it to cover the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus threat.
• It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant portion of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong when they were polled by reporters back in the beginning of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast collecting the headlines, and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like MSNBC about others who “minimized the risk.” Here’s a brief sample:
• Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now: Washington Post
• Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread : USA Today
• Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do Every Winter : Time
Here’s my personal favorite, from Wired on January 29:
• We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus
There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same elements, including an inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is from the Time piece:
“Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help,” says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York’s Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. “The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn’t matter what the virus is. The routine things work.”
There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.
“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).
On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, let alone the general election. They believed that because they weren’t paying attention to voters (their ostensible jobs), but also because they’d never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked a hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the financial crisis, probably no more than a handful would have mentioned fraud or malfeasance.
Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have of late, with their emphasis on “authoritative” opinions.
“Authorities” by their nature are untrustworthy. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say it is. “Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly destroying our business for decades.
The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. The same thing happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence “experts” with grand titles who are now proven to have been wrong to a spectacular degree, if not actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.
We’ve become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we’ve lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.
Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous. Or we’re politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest the material. “Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden,” reads a Politico headline, as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?
From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not the best sources. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.
Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.

Trump is handling coronavirus so badly, he almost makes Johnson look good
The only thing protecting the prime minister from harsher criticism of his failures is that the US president’s are even worse
May 1, 2020
by Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
This government should be on the rack. The evidence that it botched crucial decisions at crucial moments is piling up. The litany is now so familiar it barely needs repeating, from the failure to secure personal protective equipment for frontline workers in health and social care to the 11 lost days of delay before imposing a lockdown that has proved essential for saving lives.
You can focus on specific judgments: why did ministers allow mass gatherings, from racing at Cheltenham to a Stereophonics gig in Cardiff, ignoring the warnings that such events would be a virus-fest? Why did it initially tell people to stay away from pubs and restaurants, but simultaneously allow those places to stay open? Why did the government call a halt in March to testing and tracing? If the answer is a lack of capacity, then why did it not immediately set about recruiting the “army of contact tracers” that will be required if we are ever to emerge from our homes? Why the focus on mega-labs, rather than seizing on the offer of small laboratories to do testing for their local hospitals, which, as Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, has argued, could have made those hospitals “safe places”? Why the rules initially limiting tests to those NHS employees with symptoms, which, as Nurse puts it, allowed staff to be on wards “infecting people”?
Or you can look at decisions going back a decade, pointing a finger at Tory austerity that starved public services to the bone, leaving them underequipped and eroding our resilience. Either way, the country now faces a death toll approaching 30,000.
And yet, far from being on the rack, the government continues to bask in public support. True, approval for the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen from the dizzying 61% it reached a month ago to 51% at last count. But 51% is still the kind of approval rating most politicians long for.
What accounts for this disconnect between the government’s record and the public’s high regard for those responsible? Put another way, why isn’t Boris Johnson in more trouble?
Any answer must begin with what pollsters call the “rally-around-the-flag” effect, the tendency for voters to back their leaders in a time of crisis. Data from around the world, in this era and in others, suggests that when citizens are scared, they want to believe those in charge have the wisdom and strength to protect them. Think of electorates as passengers on a plummeting plane: in that moment of peril, they need to trust the pilot.
In Johnson’s case, there’s an additional factor. No one can throw at him the traditional accusation directed at politicians, namely that he is out of touch with the seriousness of the disease. His own near-death experience with Covid-19 immunises him from that charge. The outpouring of sympathy while he clung to life in intensive care was real; some of it lingers when he briefs the nation from No 10 and grows visibly tired before the hour is up. That might prompt some voters to go a bit easier on the prime minister than they otherwise would, an indulgence buttressed by the arrival this week of a Downing Street baby. The extraordinary month Johnson has endured acts to protect the prime minister and, since this is very much his administration, the entire government.
He’s helped, too, by the fact that there is so little we know for certain about this disease. The UK may have the highest death rate in Europe, but as David Spiegelhalter argued persuasively, we won’t be sure of that “until the end of the year, and the years after that”. Even if Britain does turn out to be the worst hit, it’ll be easy to argue that it wasn’t the government’s fault but was rather a function of certain immovable facts about this country: that, for example, it includes a city, London, that has no direct European equivalent in size or scale.
Some voters are surely minded to give the government the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that it has merely been “following the science”. That could prove a valuable alibi, nicely positioning the scientists as the fall guys once all this is done. Even those who know that when it comes to public health policy there is no such thing as “the science” – that there are always going to be competing views over how to act on data once you’ve got it – could see that as a reason to cut ministers some slack: faced with a near-unprecedented threat, politicians have had to make life-and-death decisions with no clear manual to follow.
It helps that much of the press is supportive, putting the Johnson baby news or Capt Tom Moore on the front and condemning the dead to the inside pages. It’s handy, too, to have a few outriders attacking journalists for daring to ask awkward questions at a time like this, suggesting they should be biting their tongues in the spirit of national unity (when, of course, asking awkward questions of those in power is journalists’ essential duty). Nor does it hurt to have an opposition that – for reasons that may make sound political sense – has decided to offer mild, “constructive” criticism rather than to put the boot in.
All of these factors have helped insulate the government from the flak that would otherwise be coming its way. But there’s one more, perhaps less obvious explanation – and it relates to judgment by comparison. We don’t need to wait for a full statistical analysis to know that Johnson has not been the worst world leader in this crisis, because we can declare a winner in that contest right now.
Each day Britons wake up to ever more jaw-dropping news from across the Atlantic. Last week, it was Donald Trump advising Americans to inject bleach. On Friday, it was his claim to have seen evidence that coronavirus was developed in a Wuhan laboratory, a claim denied by his own director of national intelligence. The shocking images of protesters wielding assault weapons storming into the state assembly in Michigan on Thursday night are hardly a surprise, given that Trump himself was tweeting “Liberate Michigan!” a matter of days ago, cheering on those who are demanding their states defy the advice of Trump’s own White House and prematurely end the lockdown that has so far proved to be the only way to stop the virus.
However bad Johnson and his government of conspicuously few talents is, we know they’re not that. They can at least show a modicum of human empathy for those who’ve lost loved ones, a feat that continues to elude Trump. They have at least – eventually – united behind a coherent “stay home” message, rather than undermining that advice at every turn. They are not hawking quack cures and endorsing deranged conspiracy theories. They do not seem willing to countenance mass death in the insane belief that it will help them win an election. It’s a low bar, but these are low times.

Trump erupts over poll slump and threatens to sue campaign manager
President blows his top in Friday argument and reportedly tells Brad Parscale ‘I’m not fucking losing to Joe Biden’ in November
April 30, 2020
by Kenya Evelyn in Washington
The Guardian
A row between Donald Trump and his election campaign manager, Brad Parscale, over a recent drop in the president’s poll numbers resulted in Trump threatening Parscale with a lawsuit.
The argument reportedly happened last Friday, as the US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic reached 50,000 in three months and the fallout continued from Trump’s suggestion at the White House the night before that taking disinfectant internally could be examined as a possible treatment for coronavirus, even though it is potentially lethal.
But the blow-up was just the latest in a series of tense moments between Trump and his 2020 re-election team, according to reports from multiple outlets including the Washington Post, the Associated Press and CNN.
“I’m not fucking losing to Joe Biden,” Trump reportedly said on a call with Parscale during a meeting with aides. According to multiple sources who spoke to the AP, the president cursed at Parscale repeatedly.
Trump deflected much of the blame for the disappointing polls, ignoring criticism of his performances at the podium during daily White House coronavirus press briefings, where he has repeatedly attacked the media for questioning delays in the government’s response, pushed misinformation and shown little empathy for victims.
In a meeting two days before the call, political advisers briefed Trump on data sourced internally and from the Republican National Committee. The figures showed the president losing ground against Biden in key battleground states.
Advisers had warned Trump to change his tone at daily coronavirus briefings, citing data that showed the negative coverage was fueling a decline in approval ratings.
The president allegedly balked at the guidance, insisting viewers “love” them and think he’s “fighting for them”. Trump instead pointed to restricted travel and an inability to host campaign rallies as the source of the slump.
After initially refusing to comply with recommendations he step back from the briefings, Trump later relented – after making headlines over the disinfectant row, which prompted cleaning product companies to issue public warnings against ingesting or injecting disinfectant for any reason.
Last Friday, the president took no questions and abruptly left the short briefing, which had been stretching over two hours in evening prime time, and cancelled his weekend press briefings altogether.
“He’s pissed because he knows he messed up in those briefings,” a Republican close to the White House reportedly told CNN.
He also reportedly ranted about a New York Times story on him watching hours of cable news a day and then fuming about his coverage, before spending the weekend attacking reporters and media organizations on Twitter for their coronavirus journalism.
One official told the Washington Post the president was “in a terrible mood with everyone late last week”.
Trump shot back at reports of his growing frustration on Wednesday, telling Reuters he doesn’t “believe the polls”.
“I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent,” he said of Biden. Trump said he thought the election did not represent a referendum on his administration’s handling of the pandemic.
While neither the sincerity nor the grounds of the president’s lawsuit threat against Parscale isn’t clear, sources told CNN the two patched things up by that same night. On Thursday, Trump tweeted that Parscale “is doing a great job”.
“I never shouted at him (been with me for years, including the 2016 win), and have no intention to do so,” he wrote.
The president then lashed out at media outlets for reporting on the alleged tensions, taking particular aim at MSNBC and its lead anchor, Brian Williams, in a flood of tweets.
The new White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, last week signaled that the president’s White House coronavirus briefings would be less frequent and would take a different slant, pivoting to preparations for reopening the US economy. This week, Trump has been meeting with some state governors in the Oval Office.

New York-area coronavirus outbreak originated primarily in Europe, not China: report
April 9, 2020
by Dom Calicchio, Fox News
New York Post
Two separate studies show that the coronavirus outbreak in the New York City area – by far the most deadly in the US – originated from Europe, not China, according to a report.
Researchers conducting one of the studies have detected seven separate lineages of viruses that have arrived in the New York City area and they expect to find more, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The two studies are being conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the New York University School of Medicine.
Despite examining different examples of the outbreak, researchers from both teams reached largely the same conclusions about its origins, the Times reported.
“The majority is clearly European,” Dr. Harm van Bakel, a geneticist and co-author of the Icahn School’s study, told the newspaper.
Travelers likely carrying the virus had already been arriving in New York from Europe before Jan. 31, when President Trump limited entry by foreign nationals who’d been in China and March 11, when the president announced plans to block travelers from most parts of Europe, the Times reported.
On March 19, the newspaper reported that travelers arriving from Europe – where outbreaks in Italy and Spain were severe – were being asked at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport only if they had been to China or Iran, not if they had visited the hardest-hit nations in Europe.
“People were just oblivious,” Dr. Adriana Heguy of the NYU research team told the Times.
Researchers need to track the history of the virus so they will be able to develop vaccines and modify them as the virus mutates into other forms, the report said.
As of late Wednesday, the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, had infected 1.5 million people worldwide and killed nearly 88,000 people.
In the US, the virus had infected more than 420,000 people and killed more than 14,300.
In New York City, the virus had infected nearly 82,000 people (more than 19 percent of all US cases) and killed more than 6,200 (nearly 44 percent of all US deaths).

European travelers brought coronavirus to New York long before first case confirmed, studies suggest
by Ryan W. Miller
USA TODAY
The new coronavirus began spreading in New York weeks before the first confirmed case and came to the area via travelers from Europe, not China, new research suggests.
Two separate teams of scientists studying the genetics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the region came to similar conclusions: People were spreading the virus in New York as early as late January, before more widespread testing began, and it came mostly from Europe, not Asia.
“We know with certainty that these were coming from European strains,” Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at NYU Langone Health, told USA TODAY.
Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told the New York Times: “The majority is clearly European.”
The teams, whose research is still in early stages, looked at genomes of the virus taken from different groups of patients beginning in mid-March and found community spread of the virus before then.
The first case of the new coronavirus confirmed in New York came March 1. More than a month earlier President Donald Trump said he would increase restrictions on traveling from China. But it wasn’t until March 11 that Trump said he was restricting travel from Europe.
In New York, more than 7,000 people have died due to complications from COVID-19, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday. Almost 150,000 people have confirmed positive tests for the virus, according to the state’s health department.
As a researcher, Heguy normally focuses on other diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease. She said she was looking at work done on sequencing the virus from the University of Washington in Seattle when she got a call from her colleague, Matthew Maurano.
“It’s obvious that this is going to explode and we have no idea where all of these strains are coming from,” Heguy said she thought one morning. “The same morning, (Maurano) picks up the phone … and he said, ‘Adriana, I think we need to jump on this thing immediately.'”
The first patient NYU Langone team studied had no travel history, indicating they were infected by someone in the community. When Heguy and Maurano compared the genetic data of the virus from that patient to other’s in an international database, it was clear that strain came from England.
That our first case was community acquired gave us the hint that of course this has been going around for a while and it was just undetected because there was no testing happening before,” Heguy said.
Since then, the team has tested more than 90 samples and counting from the New York area to better track from which strain of the virus the region’s cases are originating.
Heguy and the team have pinpointed strains originating from European countries, including France, Austria and the Netherlands, in two-thirds of the patients they’ve conducted genetic sequencing of the virus. Other strains have come from countries in Asia and the West Coast of the U.S., but taken with the results from the Mount Sinai research, Heguy said it’s clear that New York’s outbreak largely originated from European strains.
The team has also shared its data and relied on results from scientists around the world to determine where the strains are originating through GISAID and Nextstrain, which are building a database and phylogenetic tree of the virus.
As the coronavirus passes from one person to another, it can mutate, or change its genetic information slightly, Heguy said. By tracking those mutations, scientists are able to locate from what region that strain of the virus originated.
The Mount Sinai study looked at 90 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from 84 confirmed COVID-19 cases in its health system in New York and found “multiple, independent but isolated introductions mainly from Europe and other parts of the United States from January through early March 2020,” the researchers wrote.
Van Bakel told the Times that his team identified seven distinct lineages of the virus circulating in New York.
“We will probably find more,” he added.
Without early testing and then sequencing of the virus, though, public health officials weren’t able to know where the virus was coming from and who could be at risk before it grew to its current levels, Heguy said.
“Every single case of strange pneumonias here in New York, they could have been testing earlier and then do immediately the contact tracing,” she said.
Heguy said continuing to collect data and build out a larger sample size will be a next step in the research. Scientists are also hoping to understand the clinical implications of the different strains of the virus. Sequencing the virus’ genetic information now will also help in case a second wave were to occur, she said.
“We want to be ready with all the sequences and the mutations in terms of when there’s a second wave so that we can effectually do surveillance,” Heguy said.

Did coronavirus really originate in a Chinese laboratory?
Did the novel coronavirus escape from a Chinese lab that researches bats? Though the early origins of the virus remain unclear, some Chinese scientists’ work is helping develop a vaccine. DW examines the facts.
April 18, 2020
by Fabian Schmidt
DW
Researchers and journalists have been speculating for months about how the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in the city of Wuhan, China. Initial indications pointed to a so-called wet market where fish was sold along with wild animals.
Now, however, Western media outlets are reporting that the virus possibly originated in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Similar theories began making the rounds on social media sites as early as January, mostly in connection to conspiracy theories referencing secret Chinese military labs developing bioweapons. At the time, The Washington Post newspaper brushed off theories that the virus was manmade, citing experts who assessed that its characteristics pointed to a naturally occurring virus and not a manmade mutation.
That assessment was confirmed by a team of researchers led by Kristian G. Andersen, who published a finding stating as much in the March 17 edition of the journal Nature Medicine.
Another factor that would seem to corroborate that assessment is the fact that the lab’s work is not secret, and that much of its research on various bat viruses has been published in professional journals. Western partners have also been involved in a number of research projects conducted in Wuhan. One of those partners was the University of Texas’ Galveston National Laboratory. Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper has reported that the US government also provided financial support for research at the lab in Wuhan.
Where did the first infection come from?
But despite all these indications to the contrary, it can’t be said for certain that the pandemic didn’t accidentally enter the world via the Wuhan lab.
As early as the end of January, the magazine Science published an article questioning the official theory that the virus had been transmitted from an animal to a human at the wet market. And another study published in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that 13 of the first 41 people diagnosed with COVID-19 had no contact whatsoever to the Wuhan market.
Moreover, it is likely that “patient zero” — the first person to have the disease — was infected as early as November 2019. Thus, the earliest cases had no connection to the market, as Daniel Lucey, a professor for infectious diseases at Georgetown University Medical Center in the US, told Science Speaks in an interview in late January.
Are researchers to blame?
But how did the virus make its way to the Wuhan market? Shi Zhengli, a professor of virology at the Wuhan Institute who published findings on bat viruses in a February issue of Nature, may have the answer. In a story on the professor that ran in the South China Morning Post newspaper on February 6, she told of how she had traveled to caves across 28 different Chinese provinces to collect bat feces.
As was also reported in magazines like Scientific American, she used those samples to create a comprehensive archive of bat viruses. In early 2019, she and her colleagues published an extensive study on bat coronaviruses. The report noted that the horseshoe bat was a vector for coronavirus strains similar to the one that would later appear in Wuhan.
It was her team’s work that made it possible to sequence and publish the virus’ genome so quickly, presenting a historically unprecedented opportunity for speedily coming up with a vaccine.
Still, over the past several weeks Shi Zhengli has been relentlessly attacked on social media sites in Asia and around the world. That has prompted a public defense from her New York-based research partner Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO focused on scientific research and pandemic prevention.
Speaking with the US public radio program Democracy Now!, Daszak said the theory that the virus found its way out of the Wuhan lab was “pure baloney.” He said he had personally worked with the lab for 15 years and that it does not store SARS-CoV-2 viruses on its premises.
“It’s really a politicization of the origins of a pandemic, and it’s really unfortunate,” he said of stories implying any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
It is notable, however, that the Chinese government recently began censoring stories dealing with those origins. When confronted with the accusations printed in the Daily Mail, the Chinese Embassy in London reacted angrily, calling them “groundless.” The embassy also released a statement saying that research aimed at finding the origins of COVID-19 was still underway.

Are We on the Brink of a ‘New Little Ice Age?’
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

When most of us think about Ice Ages, we imagine a slow transition into a colder climate on long time scales. Indeed, studies of the past million years indicate a repeatable cycle of Earth’s climate going from warm periods (“interglacial”, as we are experiencing now) to glacial conditions.
The period of these shifts are related to changes in the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis (41,000 years), changes in the orientation of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun, called the “precession of the equinoxes” (23,000 years), and to changes in the shape (more round or less round) of the elliptical orbit (100,000 years). The theory that orbital shifts caused the waxing and waning of ice ages was first pointed out by James Croll in the 19th Century and developed more fully by Milutin Milankovitch in 1938.
Undefined ice age conditions generally occur when all of the above conspire to create a minimum of summer sunlight on the arctic regions of the earth, although the Ice Age cycle is global in nature and occurs in phase in both hemispheres. It profoundly affects distribution of ice over lands and ocean, atmospheric temperatures and circulation, and ocean temperatures and circulation at the surface and at great depth.
Since the end of the present interglacial and the slow march to the next Ice Age may be several millennia away, why should we care? In fact, won’t the build-up of carbon dioxide (CO²) and other greenhouse gasses possibly ameliorate future changes?
Indeed, some groups advocate the benefits of global warming, including the Greening Earth Society and the Subtropical Russia Movement. Some in the latter group even advocate active intervention to accelerate the process, seeing this as an opportunity to turn much of cold, austere northern Russia into a subtropical paradise.
Evidence has mounted that global warming began in the last century and that humans may be in part responsible. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the US National Academy of Sciences concur. Computer models are being used to predict climate change under different scenarios of greenhouse forcing and the Kyoto Protocol advocates active measures to reduce CO² emissions which contribute to warming.
Thinking is centered around slow changes to our climate and how they will affect humans and the habitability of our planet. Yet this thinking is flawed: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future. The issue centers around the paradox that global warming could instigate a new Little Ice Age in the northern hemisphere.
Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily apparent in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One sees clear indications of long-term changes discussed above, with CO² and proxy temperature changes associated with the last ice age and its transition into our present interglacial period of warmth. But, in addition, there is a strong chaotic variation of properties with a quasi-period of around 1500 years. We say chaotic because these millennial shifts look like anything but regular oscillations. Rather, they look like rapid, decade-long transitions between cold and warm climates followed by long interludes in one of the two states.
The best-known example of these events is the Younger Dryas cooling of about 12,000 years ago, named for arctic wildflower remains identified in northern European sediments. This event began and ended within a decade and for its 1000-year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder.
The lack of periodicity and the present failure to isolate a stable forcing mechanism a la Milankovitch, has prompted much scientific debate about the cause of the Younger Dryas and other millennial scale events. Indeed, the Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state.
A whole volume that reviews the evidence for abrupt climate change and speculates on its mechanisms was published recently by an expert group commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences in the US. This very readable compilation contains a breadth and depth of discussion that we cannot hope to match here. [ “Abrupt Climate Change,” National Academy Press, 2002].
Presently, there is only one viable mechanism identified in the report that may play a major role in determining the stable states of our climate and what causes transitions between them: It involves ocean dynamics.
In order to balance the excess heating near the equator and cooling at the poles of the earth, both atmosphere and ocean transport heat from low to high latitudes. Warmer surface water is cooled at high latitudes, releasing heat to the atmosphere, which is then radiated away to space. This heat engine operates to reduce equator-to-pole temperature differences and is a prime moderating mechanism for climate on Earth.
Warmer ocean surface temperatures at low latitudes also release water vapor through an excess of evaporation over precipitation to the atmosphere, and this water vapor is transported poleward in the atmosphere along with a portion of the excess heat. At high latitudes where the atmosphere cools, this water vapor falls out as an excess of precipitation over evaporation. This is part of a second important component of our climate system: the hydrologic cycle. As the ocean waters are cooled in their poleward journey, they become denser. If sufficiently cooled, they can sink to form cold dense flows that spread equatorward at great depths, thus perpetuating the circulation system that transports warm surface flows toward high latitude oceans.
The cycle is completed by oceanic mixing, which slowly converts the cold deep waters to warm surface waters. Thus, surface forcing and internal mixing are two major players in this overturning circulation, called the great ocean conveyor.
The waters moving poleward are relatively salty due to more evaporation at low latitudes, which increases surface salinity. At higher latitudes surface waters become fresher as a consequence of the dominance of precipitation over evaporation at high latitudes.
The freshening tendency makes the surface water more buoyant, thus opposing the cooling tendency. If the freshening is sufficiently large, the surface waters may not be dense enough to sink to great depths in the ocean, thus inhibiting the action of the ocean conveyor and upsetting one important part of the earth’s heating system.
This system of regulation does not operate the same in all oceans. The Asian continent limits the northern extent of the Indian Ocean to the tropics, and deep water does not presently form in the North Pacific, because surface waters are just too fresh. Our present climate promotes cold deep-water formation around Antarctica and in the northern North Atlantic Ocean. The conveyor circulation increases the northward transport of warmer waters in the Gulf Stream at mid-latitudes by about 50% over what wind-driven transport alone would do.
Our limited knowledge of ocean climate on long time scales, extracted from the analysis of sediment cores taken around the world ocean, has generally implicated the North Atlantic as the most unstable member of the conveyor: During millennial periods of cold climate, North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation either stopped or was seriously reduced. And this has generally followed periods of large freshwater discharge into the northern N. Atlantic caused by rapid melting of glacial or multi-year ice in the Arctic Basin. It is thought that these fresh waters, which have been transported into the regions of deep water formation, have interrupted the conveyor by overcoming the high latitude cooling effect with excessive freshening.
The ocean conveyor need not stop entirely when the NADW formation is curtailed. It can continue at shallower depths in the N. Atlantic and persist in the Southern Ocean where Antarctic Bottom Water formation continues or is even accelerated. Yet a disruption of the northern limb of the overturning circulation will affect the heat balance of the northern hemisphere and could affect both the oceanic and atmospheric climate. Model calculations indicate the potential for cooling of 3 to 5 degree Celsius in the ocean and atmosphere should a total disruption occur. This is a third to a half the temperature change experienced during major ice ages.
These changes are twice as large as those experienced in the worst winters of the past century in the eastern US, and are likely to persist for decades to centuries after a climate transition occurs. They are of a magnitude comparable to the Little Ice Age, which had profound effects on human settlements in Europe and North America during the 16th through 18th centuries. Their geographic extent is in doubt; it might be limited to regions bounding the N. Atlantic Ocean. High latitude temperature changes in the ocean are much less capable of affecting the global atmosphere than low latitude ones, such as those produced by El Niño.
Whether the pathway for propagation of climate change is atmospheric or oceanic, or whether changes in oceanic and terrestrial sequestration of carbon may globalize effects of climate change, as suspected for glacial/inter-glacial climate changes, are open questions. Yet we begin to approach how the paradox mentioned above can happen: Global warming can induce a colder climate for many of us.
Consider first some observations of oceanic change over the modern instrumental record going back 40 years. During this time interval, we have observed a rise in mean global temperature. Because of its large heat capacity, the ocean has registered small but significant changes in temperature. The largest temperature increases are in the near surface waters, but warming has been measurable to depths as great as 3000 meters in the N. Atlantic. Superimposed on this long-term increase are interannual and decadal changes that often obscure these trends, causing regional variability and cooling in some regions, and warming in others.
In addition, recent evidence shows that the high latitude oceans have freshened while the subtropics and tropics have become saltier. These possible changes in the hydrological cycle have not been limited to the North Atlantic, but have been seen in all major oceans. Yet it is the N. Atlantic where these changes can act to disrupt the overturning circulation and cause a rapid climate transition.
A 3-4-meter, high latitude buildup of fresh water over this time period has decreased water column salinities throughout the subpolar N. Atlantic as deep as 2000m. At the same time, subtropical and northern tropical salinities have increased.
The degree to which the two effects balance out in terms of fresh water is important for climate change. If the net effect is a lowering of salinity, then fresh water must have been added from other sources: river runoff, melting of multi-year arctic ice, or glaciers. A flooding of the northern Atlantic with fresh water from these various sources has the potential to reduce or even disrupt the overturning circulation.
Whether or not the latter will happen is the nexus of the problem, and one that is hard to predict with confidence. At present we do not even have a system in place for monitoring the overturning circulation.
Models of the overturning circulation are very sensitive to how internal mixing is parameterized. Recall that internal mixing of heat and salt is an integral part of overturning circulation. One recent study shows that for a model with constant vertical mixing, which is commonly used in coupled ocean-atmosphere climate runs, there is only one stable climate state: our present one with substantial sinking and dense water formation in the northern N. Atlantic.
With a slightly different formulation, more consistent with some recent measurements of oceanic mixing rates that are small near the surface and become larger over rough bottom topography, a second stable state emerges with little or no deep-water production in the northern N. Atlantic. The existence of a second stable state is crucial to understanding when and if abrupt climate change occurs. When it occurs in model runs and in geological data, it is invariably linked to rapid addition of fresh water at high northern latitudes.
And now perhaps you begin to see the scope of the problem. In addition to incorporating a terrestrial biosphere and polar ice, which both play a large role in the reflectivity of solar radiation, one has to accurately parameterize mixing that occurs on centimeter to tens of centimeter scales in the ocean. And one has to produce long coupled global climate runs of many centuries! This is a daunting task but is necessary before we can confidently rely on models to predict future climate change.
Besides needing believable models that can accurately predict climate change, we also need data that can properly initialize them. Errors in initial data can lead to poor atmospheric predictions in several days. So one sure pathway to better weather predictions is better initial data.
For the ocean, our data coverage is wholly inadequate. We can’t say now what the overturning circulation looks like with any confidence and are faced with the task of predicting what it may be like in 10 years!
Efforts are now underway to remedy this. Global coverage of upper ocean temperature and salinity measurements with autonomous floats is well within our capability within the next decade as are surface measures of wind stress and ocean circulation from satellites.
The measurement of deep flows is more difficult, but knowledge about the locations of critical avenues of dense water flows exists, and efforts are underway to measure them in some key locations with moored arrays.
Our knowledge about past climate change is limited as well. There are only a handful of high-resolution ice core climate records of the past 100,000 years, and even fewer ocean records of comparable resolution. Better definition of past climate states is needed not only in and of itself, but for use by modelers to test their best climate models in reproducing what we know happened in the past before believing model projections about the future. We are not there yet, and progress needs to be made on both better data and improved models before we can begin to answer some critical questions about future climate change.
Researchers always tell you that more research funding is needed, and we are not any different. Our main message is not just that, however. It is that global climate is moving in a direction that makes abrupt climate change more probable, that these dynamics lie beyond the capability of many of the models used in IPCC reports, and the consequences of ignoring this may be large. For those of us living around the edge of the N. Atlantic Ocean, we may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.

Canada bans ‘assault-style’ guns after shooting rampage
Canada has announced an immediate ban on 1,500 models of firearms in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. “Canadians need more than thoughts and prayers,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
May 2, 2020
DW
A wide-reaching gun control program went into effect in Canada on Friday, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declaring an immediate ban on some 1,500 models of “assault-style” firearms.
“These weapons were designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time,” Trudeau said.
While the exact definition of an “assault-style” weapons or “assault rifles” varies between legislations, they are usually described as semi-automatic weapons with a pistol grip and detachable magazines. Most notably, the ban includesUS-made AR-15 rifles that are often used in mass shooting across the US.
The move comes less than two weeks after a shooting spree that claimed 22 lives in Nova Scotia. The shooter, a 51-year-old denturist, wore a police uniform, drove in a fake police car, and used several guns during his 13-hour attack, which was the deadliest in Canada’s history.
Owners to get compensation
The government decree bans sale, purchase, use, transport and import of the 1,500 military-grade weapons but does not make it illegal to own such firearms. The ban also includes a two-year amnesty period for the current owners, and Trudeau signaled there would be a compensation program that needs to be approved by the parliament.
Addressing the public on Friday, Trudeau said that “the vast majority of gun owners use them safely, responsibly, and in accordance with the law,” and that the use of firearms was tradition in many families.
“But you don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer,” he added.
More than ‘thoughts and prayers’
The Canadian prime minister dismissed the phrase “thoughts and prayers,” which is often used as an expression of sympathy following a public tragedy in North America.
“Canadians need more than thoughts and prayers,” he said.
The leader of the opposition Conservative party, Andrew Scheer, slammed the ban announcement and accused Trudeau of using “immediate emotion of the horrific attack in Nova Scotia” to push his “ideological agenda.”
“Taking firearms away from law-abiding citizens does not stop dangerous criminals who obtain their guns illegally,” he said.
Nearly four out of five Canadians support a ban on assault-style weapons, according to a survey released on Friday by the Angus Reid pollster.

The Encyclopedia of American Loons

Ronald Weinland

Ronald Weinland is a hardcore religious crackpot and leader of the Ohio-based doomsday cult the Church of God (a Herbert Armstrong splinter group), who apparently thinks that he has been appointed by God to reveal the timetable of the end of the world, as described in Revelations, to his fellow humans. His claims are laid out in his book 2008: God’s Final Witness, which identified his wife Laura as another Revelation witness, and which he continues to promote despite the rather obvious fact that his predictions for 2008 failed rather badly. He originally prophesied that Christ would return on September 29, 2011, but later changed it to May 27, 2012 (and issued a stern warning to those who mock him that they would be divinely cursed with “a sickness that will eat them from the inside out”). Tough luck, and after that date came and passed Weinland backpedalled and provided Pentecost 2013 instead, all the while urging his followers to give him money. Currently the idea seems to be that Jesus will return on “a future Pentecost,” and some people seem willing to continue to send him money.
The return, believes Weinland, will be heralded by a World War III that will cause the destruction of the US and most of the world, except for ten European countries that will unite under the rule of the Anti-Christ (most likely the Pope). Things will then go badly for the final 3.5 years of the Earth. There is a website debunking his claims (a rather straightforward task, really) here, though I am not completely convinced the people behind that site are ideally well-hinged either.
In June 2012, Weinland was convicted of five counts of tax evasion, and is therefore currently in jail, where he belongs.
Diagnosis: Rarely has anyone been a more deserving or easier target for mockery than the Weinlands. And he still seems to have supporters out there. Words fail.

Alex Jones

Alex Jones is the guy who has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t endorse, no matter how batshit insane it is (and, interestingly, no matter how much it conflicts with other conspiracy theories he already believes). For at least ten years he has predicted, in his rather popular radio program, the imminent roundup of Americans by the New World Order.
In addition to his radio program, he is also the director of several straight-to-video documentaries, and he runs the websites Infowars and PrisonPlanet (for those who wish to avoid the site itself, it is detailed here).
Some conspiracy theories endorsed by PrisonPlanet are:
-The Bilderberg Group (or Skull and Bones, or the Freemasons – it depends on the day, it seems) controls some/most/all governments in the world as well as the economy.
-The New World Order will kill almost everyone. Vaccine programs seem to be just one of their methods – of course Jones has endorsed Andrew Wakefield as a martyr. To get a feel for the level it is pitched at, you may want to check out this one – or then again, maybe not.
-In fact, Hurricane Katrina was merely an opportunity to test out the FEMA concentration camps.
-And the tsunami in south-east Asia in 2004 was man-made.
-9/11 was (of course) an inside job.
This is, of course, only a selection; in general it is hard to find a loon that Jones does not take seriously. He is basically a living embodiment of whale.to.
Other bizarre antics are chronicled on his wikipedia page. Apparently the ravingly mad and utterly dense (but British) Vicount Monckton views PrisonPlanet as a legitimate news outlet. That explains a lot.
The interesting thing about Alex Jones’ reasoning is that he does not seem to run with the common fallacy ‘authorities (e.g. scientific) say X; I don’t like X; hence there must be a conspiracy’, but rather with the inference rule ‘everything is part of a conspiracy; authorities say X; hence X is false’ (which is a fallacy as well, of course, but a somewhat more interesting one).
Now, some may think Alex Jones is batshit crazy, and he is. But surely he is beaten by Lorie Kramer, who believes that Alex Jones is a pawn created by the New World Order to divert attention. Seriously. And if that is not enough, this site, run by Gary & Lisa Ruby, claims that Jones is part of a scientologist conspiracy to take over the world and demolish Christianity. I guess this is what you risk when you start to gain notoriety in the hyper-paranoid and chaotic field of conspiracy theory.
Among Jones’s more notable collaborators is the equally insane Paul Joseph Watson, who may consider himself indicted by this entry as well (he does not deserve a separate one). Watson is, among other things, behind this, uh, illuminating screed.
Diagnosis: The ur-loon. Extremely famous and frighteningly influential, but one suspects that he would be able to convince anyone who were not already at least mildly unhinged. Jones may be partly in it for the money, but there is little question that he actually believes much of whatever falls out of his mouth.