The Pandemic Has Created a Huge Demand For Bespoke ASMR Videos (Vice)
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Thursday, February 11, 2021
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Elton John, Michael Caine Audition For Covid Vaccine Ad
[ed. "... let the little fellow know he didn't get the job" : )]
Inside the Worst-Hit County in the Worst-Hit State in the Worst-Hit Country
In medicine, when patients face a difficult decision whether to seek aggressive treatment, they are often asked what they are and are not willing to sacrifice. When patients cannot speak for themselves, someone else has to answer for them. This task can tear families apart; there is, for instance, the well-recognized seagull syndrome—in which the family member who lives farthest away from the patient flies into town and craps all over the plan. Designating a decision-maker helps insure that choices will be guided by the patient’s priorities, not anyone else’s.
Conflict is also why so many people say they hate politics. We want consensus—badly enough that we convince ourselves that it can be created if we only try hard enough. “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it,” Mahatma Gandhi said, getting closer to the truth. (Even Ronald Reagan repeated the sentiment.) Among the questions we now face is that of how our frayed democracy can cope with the conflict required to navigate the global pandemic.
As a country, we still face a long, potholed road. We will soon exceed half a million deaths from covid-19. It’s not inconceivable that we will reach three-quarters of a million or even a million deaths this year; the magnitude of certain dangers is difficult to predict. The world’s uncontrolled circulation of the virus has already bred mutant strains that are markedly more infectious than existing ones. Some have developed the ability to at least partially evade current vaccines, and further mutations may develop that more fully evade the vaccines, requiring updated formulations. Or—as has been our repeated pattern when public-health measures have succeeded in slowing the spread of the virus—we could simply take our foot off the brakes too soon.
These Precious Days
I can tell you where it all started because I remember the moment exactly. It was late and I’d just finished the novel I’d been reading. A few more pages would send me off to sleep, so I went in search of a short story. They aren’t hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes I’ll write a quote for the jacket. They arrive daily in padded mailers—novels, memoirs, essays, histories—things I never requested and in most cases will never get to. On this summer night in 2017, I picked up a collection called Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting. Now for no particular reason I changed my mind. Why shouldn’t Tom Hanks write short stories? Why shouldn’t I read one? Off we went to bed, the book and I, and in doing so put the chain of events into motion. The story has started without my realizing it. The first door opened and I walked through.
But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.
In case you haven’t read it, Uncommon Type is a very good book. It would have to be for this story to continue. Had it been a bad book or just a good-enough book, I would have put it down, but page after page it surprised me. Two days later, I sent an endorsement to the editor. I’ve written plenty of jacket quotes in my day, mostly for first-time writers of fiction whom I believed could benefit from the assistance. The thought of Tom Hanks benefiting from my assistance struck me as funny, and then I forgot about it.
Or I would have forgotten about it, except that I got a call from Tom Hanks’s publicist a few weeks later, asking whether I would fly to Washington in October to interview the actor onstage as part of his book tour. As the co-owner of a bookstore, I do this sort of thing, and while I mostly do it in Nashville, where I live, there have certainly been requests interesting enough to get me on a plane. I could have said I was busy writing a novel, and that would have been both ridiculous and true. Tom Hanks needs a favor? Happy to help.
“Do you even realize your life isn’t normal?” Niki said when I announced my trip. Niki works at the bookstore. She has opinions about my life. “You understand that other people don’t live this way?”
How other people live is pretty much all I think about. Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out. People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don’t add up to a plot. In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed—one action springboards into another, greater action. Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than they are in life. You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the map becomes clear. Maybe Niki was right about my life being different, but maybe that’s because I tend to think of things in terms of story: I pick up a book and read it late into the night, and because I like the book, I wind up on a flight to D.C.
I went by myself. I was going only for the night. I walked from my hotel to the theater and showed my ID to a guard who then led me to the crowded greenroom. I met the hosts of the event and a few people who worked for them. I was introduced to Tom Hanks’s editor, Tom Hanks’s agent, his publicist, his assistant, Tom Hanks himself. He was tall and slim, happily at ease, answering questions, signing books. Everyone was laughing at his jokes because his jokes were funny. The people around him arranged themselves into different configurations so that the assistant could take their pictures, each one handing over his or her cell phone. Audience questions arrived on index cards, were read aloud and sorted through. The ones Tom Hanks approved of were handed to me. I would ask them at the end of the event, depending on how much time we had. The greenroom crowd was then escorted to their seats, and we were ushered to the dark place behind the curtain—Tom Hanks, his assistant, and I. The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. “Such a beautiful coat,” I said to her. We’d been introduced when I arrived but I didn’t remember her name.
The experience of waiting backstage before an event is always the same. I can never quite hear what the person making the introduction is saying, and for a moment I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the theater or even the city I was in. There’s usually a guy working the light board and the mics who talks to me for a minute, though tonight the guy talking was Tom Hanks. He wanted to know whether I liked owning a bookstore. He was thinking about opening one himself. Could we talk about it sometime? Of course we could. We were about to go on.
“I don’t have any questions,” I whispered in the darkness. “I find these things go better if you just wing it.” Then the two of us stepped out into the blinding light.
As soon as the roaring thunder of approval eased, he pointed at me and said, “She doesn’t have any questions.”
“Come on, Sooki,” he said, his voice gone grand. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I need to find a Belvedere martini.”
I hoped he would ask me to join them. I’d spent two hours on a stage talking to Tom Hanks, and now I wanted to talk to Sooki. Sooki of the magnificent coat. She had said almost nothing and yet my eye kept going to her, the way one’s eye goes to the flash of iridescence on a hummingbird’s throat. I thought about how extraordinarily famous you would have to be to have someone like that working as your assistant.
Neither of them asked me out for drinks.
But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.
In case you haven’t read it, Uncommon Type is a very good book. It would have to be for this story to continue. Had it been a bad book or just a good-enough book, I would have put it down, but page after page it surprised me. Two days later, I sent an endorsement to the editor. I’ve written plenty of jacket quotes in my day, mostly for first-time writers of fiction whom I believed could benefit from the assistance. The thought of Tom Hanks benefiting from my assistance struck me as funny, and then I forgot about it.
“Do you even realize your life isn’t normal?” Niki said when I announced my trip. Niki works at the bookstore. She has opinions about my life. “You understand that other people don’t live this way?”
How other people live is pretty much all I think about. Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out. People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don’t add up to a plot. In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed—one action springboards into another, greater action. Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than they are in life. You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the map becomes clear. Maybe Niki was right about my life being different, but maybe that’s because I tend to think of things in terms of story: I pick up a book and read it late into the night, and because I like the book, I wind up on a flight to D.C.
I went by myself. I was going only for the night. I walked from my hotel to the theater and showed my ID to a guard who then led me to the crowded greenroom. I met the hosts of the event and a few people who worked for them. I was introduced to Tom Hanks’s editor, Tom Hanks’s agent, his publicist, his assistant, Tom Hanks himself. He was tall and slim, happily at ease, answering questions, signing books. Everyone was laughing at his jokes because his jokes were funny. The people around him arranged themselves into different configurations so that the assistant could take their pictures, each one handing over his or her cell phone. Audience questions arrived on index cards, were read aloud and sorted through. The ones Tom Hanks approved of were handed to me. I would ask them at the end of the event, depending on how much time we had. The greenroom crowd was then escorted to their seats, and we were ushered to the dark place behind the curtain—Tom Hanks, his assistant, and I. The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. “Such a beautiful coat,” I said to her. We’d been introduced when I arrived but I didn’t remember her name.
The experience of waiting backstage before an event is always the same. I can never quite hear what the person making the introduction is saying, and for a moment I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the theater or even the city I was in. There’s usually a guy working the light board and the mics who talks to me for a minute, though tonight the guy talking was Tom Hanks. He wanted to know whether I liked owning a bookstore. He was thinking about opening one himself. Could we talk about it sometime? Of course we could. We were about to go on.
“I don’t have any questions,” I whispered in the darkness. “I find these things go better if you just wing it.” Then the two of us stepped out into the blinding light.
As soon as the roaring thunder of approval eased, he pointed at me and said, “She doesn’t have any questions.”
***
When the event was over and more pictures had been taken and everyone had said how much they’d enjoyed absolutely everything, Tom Hanks and his assistant and I found ourselves alone again, standing at the end of a long cement hallway by a stage door, saying good night and goodbye. A car was coming to pick them up.“Come on, Sooki,” he said, his voice gone grand. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I need to find a Belvedere martini.”
I hoped he would ask me to join them. I’d spent two hours on a stage talking to Tom Hanks, and now I wanted to talk to Sooki. Sooki of the magnificent coat. She had said almost nothing and yet my eye kept going to her, the way one’s eye goes to the flash of iridescence on a hummingbird’s throat. I thought about how extraordinarily famous you would have to be to have someone like that working as your assistant.
Neither of them asked me out for drinks.
by Ann Patchett, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Sooki Raphael. Sparky Walks the Neighborhood with Ann, Nashville 2020
Image: Sooki Raphael. Sparky Walks the Neighborhood with Ann, Nashville 2020
The Next Act For Messenger RNA Could Be Bigger Than Covid Vaccines
On December 23, as part of a publicity push to encourage people to get vaccinated against covid-19, the University of Pennsylvania released footage of two researchers who developed the science behind the shots, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, getting their inoculations. The vaccines, icy concoctions of fatty spheres and genetic instructions, used a previously unproven technology based on messenger RNA and had been built and tested in under a year, thanks to discoveries the pair made starting 20 years earlier.
In the silent promotional clip, neither one speaks or smiles as a nurse inserts the hypodermic into their arms. I later asked Weissman, who has been a physician and working scientist since 1987, what he was thinking in that moment. “I always wanted to develop something that helps people,” he told me. “When they stuck that needle in my arm, I said, ‘I think I’ve finally done it.’”
The infection has killed more than 2 million people globally, including some of Weissman’s childhood friends. So far, the US vaccine campaign has relied entirely on shots developed by Moderna Therapeutics of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, in partnership with Pfizer. Both employ Weissman’s discoveries. (Weissman’s lab gets funding from BioNTech, and Karikó now works at the company.)
Unlike traditional vaccines, which use live viruses, dead ones, or bits of the shells that viruses come cloaked in to train the body’s immune system, the new shots use messenger RNA—the short-lived middleman molecule that, in our cells, conveys copies of genes to where they can guide the making of proteins.
The message the mRNA vaccine adds to people’s cells is borrowed from the coronavirus itself—the instructions for the crown-like protein, called spike, that it uses to enter cells. This protein alone can’t make a person sick; instead, it prompts a strong immune response that, in large studies concluded in December, prevented about 95% of covid-19 cases.
Beyond potentially ending the pandemic, the vaccine breakthrough is showing how messenger RNA may offer a new approach to building drugs.
In the near future, researchers believe, shots that deliver temporary instructions into cells could lead to vaccines against herpes and malaria, better flu vaccines, and, if the covid-19 germ keeps mutating, updated coronavirus vaccinations, too.
But researchers also see a future well beyond vaccines. They think the technology will permit cheap gene fixes for cancer, sickle-cell disease, and maybe even HIV.
For Weissman, the success of covid vaccines isn’t a surprise but a welcome validation of his life’s work. “We have been working on this for over 20 years,” he says. “We always knew RNA would be a significant therapeutic tool.”
Perfect timing
Despite those two decades of research, though, messenger RNA had never been used in any marketed drug before last year. (...)
Unlike most biotech drugs, RNA is not made in fermenters or living cells—it’s produced inside plastic bags of chemicals and enzymes. Because there’s never been a messenger RNA drug on the market before, there was no factory to commandeer and no supply chain to call on.
When I spoke to Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel in December, just before the US Food and Drug Administration authorized his company’s vaccine, he was feeling confident about the shot but worried about making enough of it. Moderna had promised to make up to a billion doses during 2021. Imagine, he said, that Henry Ford was rolling the first Model T off the production line, only to be told the world needed a billion of them.
Bancel calls the way covid-19 arrived just as messenger RNA technology was ready an “aberration of history.”
In other words, we got lucky.
Human bioreactors
The first attempt to use synthetic messenger RNA to make an animal produce a protein was in 1990. It worked but a big problem soon arose. The injections made mice sick. “Their fur gets ruffled. They lose weight, stop running around,” says Weissman. Give them a large dose, and they’d die within hours. “We quickly realized that messenger RNA was not usable,” he says.
The culprit was inflammation. Over a few billion years, bacteria, plants, and mammals have all evolved to spot the genetic material from viruses and react to it. Weissman and Karikó’s next step, which “took years,” he says, was to identify how cells were recognizing the foreign RNA.
As they found, cells are packed with sensing molecules that distinguish your RNA from that of a virus. If these molecules see viral genes, they launch a storm of immune molecules called cytokines that hold the virus at bay while your body learns to cope with it. “It takes a week to make an antibody response; what keeps you alive for those seven days is these sensors,” Weissman says. But too strong a flood of cytokines can kill you.
The eureka moment was when the two scientists determined they could avoid the immune reaction by using chemically modified building blocks to make the RNA. It worked. Soon after, in Cambridge, a group of entrepreneurs began setting up Moderna Therapeutics to build on Weissman’s insight.
Vaccines were not their focus. At the company’s founding in 2010, its leaders imagined they might be able to use RNA to replace the injected proteins that make up most of the biotech pharmacopoeia, essentially producing drugs inside the patient’s own cells from an RNA blueprint. “We were asking, could we turn a human into a bioreactor?” says Noubar Afeyan, the company’s cofounder and chairman and the head of Flagship Pioneering, a firm that starts biotech companies.
If so, the company could easily name 20, 30, or even 40 drugs that would be worth replacing. But Moderna was struggling with how to get the messenger RNA to the right cells in the body, and without too many side effects. Its scientists were also learning that administering repeat doses, which would be necessary to replace biotech blockbusters like a clotting factor that’s given monthly, was going to be a problem. “We would find it worked once, then the second time less, and then the third time even lower,” says Afeyan. “That was a problem and still is.”
Moderna pivoted. What kind of drug could you give once and still have a big impact? The answer eventually became obvious: a vaccine. With a vaccine, the initial supply of protein would be enough to train the immune system in ways that could last years, or a lifetime. (...)
Pivoting to vaccines did have a drawback for Moderna. Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, says that most vaccines lose money. The reason is that many shots sell for a “fraction of their economic value.” Governments will pay $100,000 for a cancer drug that adds a month to a person’s life but only want to pay $5 for a vaccine that can protect against an infectious disease for good. Lo calculated that vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average. “The economic model for vaccines is broken,” he says.
On the other hand, vaccines are more predictable. When Lo’s team analyzed thousands of clinical trials, they found that vaccine programs frequently succeed. Around 40% of vaccine candidates in efficacy tests, called phase 2 clinical trials, proved successful, a rate 10 times that of cancer drugs.
Adding to mRNA vaccines’ chance of success was a lucky break. Injected into the arm, the nanoparticles holding the critical instructions seemed to home in on dendritic cells, the exact cell type whose job is to train the immune system to recognize a virus. What’s more, something about the particles put the immune system on alert. It wasn’t planned, but they were working as what’s called a vaccine adjuvant. “We couldn’t believe the effect,” says Weissman.
Vaccines offered Moderna’s CEO, Bancel, a chance to advance a phalanx of new products. Since every vaccine would use the same nanoparticle carrier, they could be rapidly reprogrammed, as if they were software. (Moderna had even trademarked the name “mRNA OS,” for operating system.) “The way we make mRNA for one vaccine is exactly the same as for another,” he says. “Because mRNA is an information molecule, the difference between our covid vaccine, Zika vaccine, and flu vaccine is only the order of the nucleotides.”
by Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
In the silent promotional clip, neither one speaks or smiles as a nurse inserts the hypodermic into their arms. I later asked Weissman, who has been a physician and working scientist since 1987, what he was thinking in that moment. “I always wanted to develop something that helps people,” he told me. “When they stuck that needle in my arm, I said, ‘I think I’ve finally done it.’”
Unlike traditional vaccines, which use live viruses, dead ones, or bits of the shells that viruses come cloaked in to train the body’s immune system, the new shots use messenger RNA—the short-lived middleman molecule that, in our cells, conveys copies of genes to where they can guide the making of proteins.
The message the mRNA vaccine adds to people’s cells is borrowed from the coronavirus itself—the instructions for the crown-like protein, called spike, that it uses to enter cells. This protein alone can’t make a person sick; instead, it prompts a strong immune response that, in large studies concluded in December, prevented about 95% of covid-19 cases.
Beyond potentially ending the pandemic, the vaccine breakthrough is showing how messenger RNA may offer a new approach to building drugs.
In the near future, researchers believe, shots that deliver temporary instructions into cells could lead to vaccines against herpes and malaria, better flu vaccines, and, if the covid-19 germ keeps mutating, updated coronavirus vaccinations, too.
But researchers also see a future well beyond vaccines. They think the technology will permit cheap gene fixes for cancer, sickle-cell disease, and maybe even HIV.
For Weissman, the success of covid vaccines isn’t a surprise but a welcome validation of his life’s work. “We have been working on this for over 20 years,” he says. “We always knew RNA would be a significant therapeutic tool.”
Perfect timing
Despite those two decades of research, though, messenger RNA had never been used in any marketed drug before last year. (...)
Unlike most biotech drugs, RNA is not made in fermenters or living cells—it’s produced inside plastic bags of chemicals and enzymes. Because there’s never been a messenger RNA drug on the market before, there was no factory to commandeer and no supply chain to call on.
When I spoke to Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel in December, just before the US Food and Drug Administration authorized his company’s vaccine, he was feeling confident about the shot but worried about making enough of it. Moderna had promised to make up to a billion doses during 2021. Imagine, he said, that Henry Ford was rolling the first Model T off the production line, only to be told the world needed a billion of them.
Bancel calls the way covid-19 arrived just as messenger RNA technology was ready an “aberration of history.”
In other words, we got lucky.
Human bioreactors
The first attempt to use synthetic messenger RNA to make an animal produce a protein was in 1990. It worked but a big problem soon arose. The injections made mice sick. “Their fur gets ruffled. They lose weight, stop running around,” says Weissman. Give them a large dose, and they’d die within hours. “We quickly realized that messenger RNA was not usable,” he says.
The culprit was inflammation. Over a few billion years, bacteria, plants, and mammals have all evolved to spot the genetic material from viruses and react to it. Weissman and Karikó’s next step, which “took years,” he says, was to identify how cells were recognizing the foreign RNA.
As they found, cells are packed with sensing molecules that distinguish your RNA from that of a virus. If these molecules see viral genes, they launch a storm of immune molecules called cytokines that hold the virus at bay while your body learns to cope with it. “It takes a week to make an antibody response; what keeps you alive for those seven days is these sensors,” Weissman says. But too strong a flood of cytokines can kill you.
The eureka moment was when the two scientists determined they could avoid the immune reaction by using chemically modified building blocks to make the RNA. It worked. Soon after, in Cambridge, a group of entrepreneurs began setting up Moderna Therapeutics to build on Weissman’s insight.
Vaccines were not their focus. At the company’s founding in 2010, its leaders imagined they might be able to use RNA to replace the injected proteins that make up most of the biotech pharmacopoeia, essentially producing drugs inside the patient’s own cells from an RNA blueprint. “We were asking, could we turn a human into a bioreactor?” says Noubar Afeyan, the company’s cofounder and chairman and the head of Flagship Pioneering, a firm that starts biotech companies.
If so, the company could easily name 20, 30, or even 40 drugs that would be worth replacing. But Moderna was struggling with how to get the messenger RNA to the right cells in the body, and without too many side effects. Its scientists were also learning that administering repeat doses, which would be necessary to replace biotech blockbusters like a clotting factor that’s given monthly, was going to be a problem. “We would find it worked once, then the second time less, and then the third time even lower,” says Afeyan. “That was a problem and still is.”
Moderna pivoted. What kind of drug could you give once and still have a big impact? The answer eventually became obvious: a vaccine. With a vaccine, the initial supply of protein would be enough to train the immune system in ways that could last years, or a lifetime. (...)
Pivoting to vaccines did have a drawback for Moderna. Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, says that most vaccines lose money. The reason is that many shots sell for a “fraction of their economic value.” Governments will pay $100,000 for a cancer drug that adds a month to a person’s life but only want to pay $5 for a vaccine that can protect against an infectious disease for good. Lo calculated that vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average. “The economic model for vaccines is broken,” he says.
On the other hand, vaccines are more predictable. When Lo’s team analyzed thousands of clinical trials, they found that vaccine programs frequently succeed. Around 40% of vaccine candidates in efficacy tests, called phase 2 clinical trials, proved successful, a rate 10 times that of cancer drugs.
Adding to mRNA vaccines’ chance of success was a lucky break. Injected into the arm, the nanoparticles holding the critical instructions seemed to home in on dendritic cells, the exact cell type whose job is to train the immune system to recognize a virus. What’s more, something about the particles put the immune system on alert. It wasn’t planned, but they were working as what’s called a vaccine adjuvant. “We couldn’t believe the effect,” says Weissman.
Vaccines offered Moderna’s CEO, Bancel, a chance to advance a phalanx of new products. Since every vaccine would use the same nanoparticle carrier, they could be rapidly reprogrammed, as if they were software. (Moderna had even trademarked the name “mRNA OS,” for operating system.) “The way we make mRNA for one vaccine is exactly the same as for another,” he says. “Because mRNA is an information molecule, the difference between our covid vaccine, Zika vaccine, and flu vaccine is only the order of the nucleotides.”
Image: Selman Design
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
The Real Origins of the Religious Right
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
***
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
***
So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade. by Randall Balmer, Politico | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, February 8, 2021
Sunday, February 7, 2021
Saturday, February 6, 2021
Golf on the Moon: Remastered Images
Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. made space history when he took a few golf swings on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, successfully hitting two golf balls across the lunar surface. Space enthusiasts have debated for decades just how far that second ball traveled. It seems we now have an answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who digitally enhanced archival images from that mission and used them to estimate the final resting spots of the golf balls.
Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards.
Shepard's fondness for cheeky irreverence had popped up occasionally during his successful pre-NASA naval career, most notably when he was a test pilot at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He was nearly court-martialed for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge during a test flight, but fortunately, his superiors intervened. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1959, Shepard was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts. (The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton.)
Shepard beat out some fierce competition be chosen for the first American crewed mission into space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously became the first man in space on April 25, 1961, thanks to repeated postponements of NASA's Mercury mission, but Shepard wasn't far behind. He made his own flight into space one month later, on May 5. Alas, he was a grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière's disease, resulting in an unusually high volume of fluid in the inner ear.
Surgery four years later corrected the problem, and Shepard was cleared for flight. He narrowly missed being assigned to the famous Apollo 13 mission—NASA's "most successful failure" and the subject of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13 (one of my all-time faves). Instead, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, which launched on January 31, 1971, and landed on the Moon on February 5.
To the Moon!
The idea for Shepard's golfing stunt came out of a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope cracked a joke about hitting a golf ball on the Moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying to people watching back on Earth the difference in the strength of gravity. So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to adapt a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a collapsible aluminum and Teflon sample collector. Once NASA's Technical Services division added some finishing touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing at a course in Houston while wearing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit to prepare.
Most popular accounts describe Shepard as "smuggling" two balls and a golf club onto the spacecraft, but according to a later interview with Shepard, that wasn't the case. The astronaut ran the idea past then-NASA director Bob Gilruth, who was initially opposed but relented once Shepard laid out the precise details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would only be done once all the official exploration tasks had been completed and then only if the mission had gone off without a hitch.
On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift club with just his right hand. After two swings that were "more dirt than ball," he made contact with the ball on his third swing, "shanking" it into a nearby crater. ("Looked like a slice to me, Al," Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)
But Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball soaring out of camera range and declared that it traveled for "miles and miles and miles." And as he had anticipated, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly showcased the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Not to be left out, crewmate Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a javelin, which landed near the first golf ball. Once back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA museum and had a reproduction made that is now on display at the Smithsonian.
The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time—it's sitting in a crater next to Mitchell's javelin, about 24 yards from where Shepard stood when he took his swing. Saunders' remastering of archival photos enabled him to locate the second ball that traveled farther, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil.
"You can access Apollo imagery to very high quality online," Apollo historian and video editor W. David Woods told Ars. "These shots were taken at 55 millimeters, the negatives and transparencies, for 55 millimeters a side. The scans they've done on them that are available online are 11,000 pixels across. So they're enormous, huge pictures that you can really dive into, if you've got expertise in image processing."
Image tricks
Saunders has that expertise. He relied on recent high-resolution scans of the original flight film, and he also used a technique known as substacking, among others. (...)
Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards.
Shepard beat out some fierce competition be chosen for the first American crewed mission into space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously became the first man in space on April 25, 1961, thanks to repeated postponements of NASA's Mercury mission, but Shepard wasn't far behind. He made his own flight into space one month later, on May 5. Alas, he was a grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière's disease, resulting in an unusually high volume of fluid in the inner ear.
Surgery four years later corrected the problem, and Shepard was cleared for flight. He narrowly missed being assigned to the famous Apollo 13 mission—NASA's "most successful failure" and the subject of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13 (one of my all-time faves). Instead, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, which launched on January 31, 1971, and landed on the Moon on February 5.
To the Moon!
The idea for Shepard's golfing stunt came out of a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope cracked a joke about hitting a golf ball on the Moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying to people watching back on Earth the difference in the strength of gravity. So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to adapt a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a collapsible aluminum and Teflon sample collector. Once NASA's Technical Services division added some finishing touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing at a course in Houston while wearing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit to prepare.
Most popular accounts describe Shepard as "smuggling" two balls and a golf club onto the spacecraft, but according to a later interview with Shepard, that wasn't the case. The astronaut ran the idea past then-NASA director Bob Gilruth, who was initially opposed but relented once Shepard laid out the precise details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would only be done once all the official exploration tasks had been completed and then only if the mission had gone off without a hitch.
On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift club with just his right hand. After two swings that were "more dirt than ball," he made contact with the ball on his third swing, "shanking" it into a nearby crater. ("Looked like a slice to me, Al," Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)
But Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball soaring out of camera range and declared that it traveled for "miles and miles and miles." And as he had anticipated, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly showcased the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Not to be left out, crewmate Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a javelin, which landed near the first golf ball. Once back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA museum and had a reproduction made that is now on display at the Smithsonian.
The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time—it's sitting in a crater next to Mitchell's javelin, about 24 yards from where Shepard stood when he took his swing. Saunders' remastering of archival photos enabled him to locate the second ball that traveled farther, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil.
"You can access Apollo imagery to very high quality online," Apollo historian and video editor W. David Woods told Ars. "These shots were taken at 55 millimeters, the negatives and transparencies, for 55 millimeters a side. The scans they've done on them that are available online are 11,000 pixels across. So they're enormous, huge pictures that you can really dive into, if you've got expertise in image processing."
Image tricks
Saunders has that expertise. He relied on recent high-resolution scans of the original flight film, and he also used a technique known as substacking, among others. (...)
According to Saunders, given the known location of the TV camera, it was possible to identify Shepard's bootprints, showing his stance for his first two (failed) attempts. Using a known scale from images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, he was then able to measure the point between the divot and the second golf ball to come up with his estimate for 40 yards.
Saunders, whose forthcoming book is entitled Apollo Remastered, estimates that a professional US Open golfer like Bryson DeChambeau could, in theory, hit a ball as far as 3.41 miles on the Moon, with a hang time of 1 minute 22 seconds—much farther (and longer) than Shepard's feat. As he told the BBC:
Saunders, whose forthcoming book is entitled Apollo Remastered, estimates that a professional US Open golfer like Bryson DeChambeau could, in theory, hit a ball as far as 3.41 miles on the Moon, with a hang time of 1 minute 22 seconds—much farther (and longer) than Shepard's feat. As he told the BBC:
Unfortunately, even the impressive second shot could hardly be described as "miles and miles and miles," but of course this has only ever been regarded as a light-hearted exaggeration. The Moon is effectively one giant, unraked, rock-strewn bunker. The pressurized suits severely restricted movement, and due to their helmet's visors they struggled to even see their feet. I would challenge any club golfer to go to their local course and try to hit a six-iron, one-handed, with a one-quarter swing out of an unraked bunker. Then imagine being fully suited, helmeted, and wearing thick gloves. Remember also that there was little gravity to pull the clubhead down toward the ball. The fact that Shepard even made contact and got the ball airborne is extremely impressive.And of course, the astronaut's legacy as the first human to play golf on the Moon remains secure.
by Jennifer Quellette, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: NASA
[ed See also: here with a picture of the club Mr. Shepard used (Golf Digest).]
Insurrectionist Truther Doesn’t Believe He Was At Capitol
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Top Gun 2 (Extended Trailer)
Top Gun 2 EXTENDED SUPER BOWL Trailer
[ed. Looks fun. Remember, this was from Feb. 3, 2020 (with a release date of June, 2020). So, who knows when we'll finally see it. Hope they kept Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone in the soundtrack.]
Pan Sushi
Ingredients
1 1⁄2 cupsushi rice
3 cupswater
3 tablespoonssushi vinegar
6 ouncescrab meat or imitation crab meat, shredded
2 tablespoonsmayonaise
1medium japanese cucumber, sliced 1/16 inch thick
1avocado, sliced thin
shiso furikake as needed
2 sheets roasted nori (seaweed)
Instructions
Note: 2 each 8" x 8" pans are needed for preparation
Cook the rice in rice cooker. Once done fold in the sushi vinegar.
Spread the rice out so it can cool.
Combine the crab with the mayonnaise.
Line the first 8x8 pan with aluminum foil. Lay down a sheet of nori, then cover with half the rice.
Add the avocado, then cucumbers, then crab mayo mix, sprinkle with the shiso furikake. Then top layer of rice and nori.
Cover the top with plastic wrap, then place the second 8×8 inch pan on top. Weigh it down and let sit, pressed, for an hour.
Turn the square of sushi out onto a cutting board. Slice evenly.
Notes: If you want to make a sushi that you can serve out of the pan, instead of using nori sheets, just use nori furikake so it easy to cut.
[ed. For your (socially distanced) Super Bowl party. See also: Sushi Bake Is the Lockdown Trend I’ll Never Stop Making (Basically). Another easy favorite: Shoyu Chicken (Foodland). And in other news: A Massive Chicken Wing Shortage is Brewing (Restaurant Business).]
Why Tom Brady is One of America’s Most Polarizing Athletes
It difficult to find someone with a lukewarm opinion of Tom Brady. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback and New England Patriots legend inspires strong feelings on both ends of the spectrum.
To some, Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game, with the legendary resume and hardware to prove it. Others see a cheater, a shameless a brand builder who benefitted from playing for a football dynasty, who refused to take a personal stand on anything to avoid alienating fans, his consumers.
Like all things the truth likely falls somewhere in the middle. It makes Brady one of the most complicated figures in modern American sports, who can be viewed as the greatest athlete of our generation o tremendously overrated depending on your point of view.
Now, with his 10th Super Bowl appearance on the horizon, we dig into the legacy of one of the NFL’s most decorated players, and understand why he elicits such strong emotions.
Why do people love Tom Brady?
Brady represents the archetype of the underdog athlete. We don’t need to spend a great deal discussing this, because we’ve heard his story a million times, in a million different ways over the course of the last 20 years. Scouts didn’t believe in Brady entering the NFL from Michigan, and his average athletic showing at the combine cemented him as a sixth round pick.
He became a star due to circumstance. Taking over for an injured Drew Bledsoe, leading the Patriots to a Super Bowl in his rookie season in 2001 — it’s a story straight out of a sports movie. Brady’s ascension defied expectations in a way people love, and it perpetuated the dream that anybody with the smarts and drive could excel. I mean, if a slightly doughy, relatively unathletic Brady could win a Super Bowl, then the presumption is that anyone can — even if that’s not true.
Then Brady kept winning, kept succeeding, and in doing so cemented himself as the modern Joe Montana. The rest is history.
Why do people hate Tom Brady?
This one is a little more nuanced, because there isn’t a single overwhelming reason why people dislike Tom Brady. Obviously everyone’s reason for disliking an athlete are individual, but there are a few key buckets we can put people into.
The “Tom is a cheater” crowd
While Brady is certainly responsible for a lot of the Patriots’ success, he will be inexorably linked to two of the league’s biggest scandals: SpyGate and DeflateGate. Yes, tired names that are way too on-the-nose references to Watergate, but nonetheless impactful on his legacy.
You can look at recording the Rams’ practice, or using partially-inflated footballs as small competitive edges, but they raise questions. If these were the incidents that were caught, what lurked under the surface that we never learned about? There are the questions people ask when thinking of Brady as a cheater.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to levy the sins of an organization against one player, but heavy is the head that wears the crown. When you become the figurehead of an organization you take on the benefits, as well as the criticism. Quarterbacks in general get far too much credit and criticism for team results, so when a team is under fire for breaking the rules, naturally much of that will fall on the leader.
There were already debates about whether Brady was the vector for the Patriots’ success, or whether it was more on Bill Belichick — so when controversy swarmed the team there was was similar doubt. How much of this was on Belichick, and how much was on Brady? That alone soured the quarterback in a lot of peoples’ minds, and while perhaps not enough to add an asterisk to his rings, it was enough to raise doubt.
“Brady stands for nothing but his brand”
It’s impossible to separate athletes from their impact on society. That’s been true for decades. Normally this takes shape in frivolous things like product endorsements and sponsorships, with companies clamoring to leverage the facade of athlete approval into sales, but that changed substantially over the last four years.
Everyone in every field was asked for their stance on social justice and racial injustice. Some athlete chose to take a strong stand, turning their fame into activism and pressure for change — but Brady, much as he did throughout his career, sat on the fence and said little of substance.
In isolation this comment may seem innocuous enough, but it came at a time people were desperate for a stronger voice for someone of Brady’s stature. Considering it came not long after the quarterback was seen with a MAGA hat in his locker, which he claimed “found its way there” seemingly by magic, when questioned about it.
Brady has ensured his earning potential remained maximum by refusing to take a stand on just about anything off the football field. This often feels like a desire not to rock the boat, famously doing semantic gymnastics to say he supported his friend Donald Trump, but didn’t necessarily support his politics. The only area he seemed to take a strong stand was on his health and wellness brand TB12, which tells people not to eat tomatoes and live by a strict diet.
The cap to all this might have been the news that Brady, who has earned hundreds of millions of dollars over his NFL career, and is married to one of the highest-paid supermodels in history, took almost $1 million in Paycheck Protection Program funds, designed to insulate small businesses from Covid, in order to prop up his lifestyle brand. Money ran out of the fund for small mom and pop businesses struggling to stay afloat, while Brady’s pet project got funded.
To some, Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game, with the legendary resume and hardware to prove it. Others see a cheater, a shameless a brand builder who benefitted from playing for a football dynasty, who refused to take a personal stand on anything to avoid alienating fans, his consumers.
Like all things the truth likely falls somewhere in the middle. It makes Brady one of the most complicated figures in modern American sports, who can be viewed as the greatest athlete of our generation o tremendously overrated depending on your point of view.
Now, with his 10th Super Bowl appearance on the horizon, we dig into the legacy of one of the NFL’s most decorated players, and understand why he elicits such strong emotions.
Why do people love Tom Brady?
He became a star due to circumstance. Taking over for an injured Drew Bledsoe, leading the Patriots to a Super Bowl in his rookie season in 2001 — it’s a story straight out of a sports movie. Brady’s ascension defied expectations in a way people love, and it perpetuated the dream that anybody with the smarts and drive could excel. I mean, if a slightly doughy, relatively unathletic Brady could win a Super Bowl, then the presumption is that anyone can — even if that’s not true.
Then Brady kept winning, kept succeeding, and in doing so cemented himself as the modern Joe Montana. The rest is history.
Why do people hate Tom Brady?
This one is a little more nuanced, because there isn’t a single overwhelming reason why people dislike Tom Brady. Obviously everyone’s reason for disliking an athlete are individual, but there are a few key buckets we can put people into.
The “Tom is a cheater” crowd
While Brady is certainly responsible for a lot of the Patriots’ success, he will be inexorably linked to two of the league’s biggest scandals: SpyGate and DeflateGate. Yes, tired names that are way too on-the-nose references to Watergate, but nonetheless impactful on his legacy.
You can look at recording the Rams’ practice, or using partially-inflated footballs as small competitive edges, but they raise questions. If these were the incidents that were caught, what lurked under the surface that we never learned about? There are the questions people ask when thinking of Brady as a cheater.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to levy the sins of an organization against one player, but heavy is the head that wears the crown. When you become the figurehead of an organization you take on the benefits, as well as the criticism. Quarterbacks in general get far too much credit and criticism for team results, so when a team is under fire for breaking the rules, naturally much of that will fall on the leader.
There were already debates about whether Brady was the vector for the Patriots’ success, or whether it was more on Bill Belichick — so when controversy swarmed the team there was was similar doubt. How much of this was on Belichick, and how much was on Brady? That alone soured the quarterback in a lot of peoples’ minds, and while perhaps not enough to add an asterisk to his rings, it was enough to raise doubt.
“Brady stands for nothing but his brand”
It’s impossible to separate athletes from their impact on society. That’s been true for decades. Normally this takes shape in frivolous things like product endorsements and sponsorships, with companies clamoring to leverage the facade of athlete approval into sales, but that changed substantially over the last four years.
Everyone in every field was asked for their stance on social justice and racial injustice. Some athlete chose to take a strong stand, turning their fame into activism and pressure for change — but Brady, much as he did throughout his career, sat on the fence and said little of substance.
“It’s certainly been an offseason to listen, learn, have more compassion, and more empathy for one another. Everyone should deserve the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Being in the locker room for 20 years and being around guys with every different race, religion, skin color, background, and different state. Everyone something different to the table and you embrace those things.”On the surface this might sound like he’s taking a stand, but this is the definition of playing both sides. At a time where people of color were being marginalized and harassed, Brady was calling for “more empathy for one another,” as if it was an issue that flowed both ways.
In isolation this comment may seem innocuous enough, but it came at a time people were desperate for a stronger voice for someone of Brady’s stature. Considering it came not long after the quarterback was seen with a MAGA hat in his locker, which he claimed “found its way there” seemingly by magic, when questioned about it.
Brady has ensured his earning potential remained maximum by refusing to take a stand on just about anything off the football field. This often feels like a desire not to rock the boat, famously doing semantic gymnastics to say he supported his friend Donald Trump, but didn’t necessarily support his politics. The only area he seemed to take a strong stand was on his health and wellness brand TB12, which tells people not to eat tomatoes and live by a strict diet.
The cap to all this might have been the news that Brady, who has earned hundreds of millions of dollars over his NFL career, and is married to one of the highest-paid supermodels in history, took almost $1 million in Paycheck Protection Program funds, designed to insulate small businesses from Covid, in order to prop up his lifestyle brand. Money ran out of the fund for small mom and pop businesses struggling to stay afloat, while Brady’s pet project got funded.
by James Dator, SB Nation | Read more:
Image: Getty/NYT
Friday, February 5, 2021
Everything That's Wrong With Racoons
Too many people want you to dismiss a raccoon’s deal of “Oh they’re mischievous cat-dogs with friendly washed hands and a jewel-thief face” when it’s really an ALL-HANDS NO-FEET TRASH-CAT WITH A DOG’S STOMACH AND A POSSUM’S HEART.
It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.
Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.
YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR
They’re a dense badger lie
THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY
I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes
MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES
I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children
A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one
STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER
It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.
YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR
They’re a dense badger lie
THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY
I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes
MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES
I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children
A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one
STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER
by Mallory Ortberg, Toast | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. This has been getting a lot of clicks lately so it must have been re-posted somewhere. See also: So You've Decided to Drink More Water (Mallory Ortberg, The Hairpin)]
The N.F.L. Had Over 700 Coronavirus Positives. The Seahawks Had None.
On the N.F.L.’s march to complete a 269-game schedule amid a pandemic, more than 700 players, coaches and other team personnel tested positive for the coronavirus. It upended rosters, with the Denver Broncos starting a game without any of their three quarterbacks and the Cleveland Browns once fielding a team with nearly all of their receivers out, and it postponed games, with some outbreaks pushing them into midweek or to a bye week.
Through it all, only one of the league’s 32 teams remained untouched by the virus: the Seattle Seahawks. And how they made it through the long season virus-free, in Washington State, where the United States’ first positive case was reported, is a testament to innovative thinking and procedures. The team’s devotion to following health guidelines became a guidepost for the N.F.L. and other leagues grappling with how to proceed as the deadly virus continued to grip the country.
“They invented a playbook for a safe practice environment at a time when the future was deeply uncertain and people were questioning the wisdom of pro sports starting up,” said Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist who has helped organizations respond to the coronavirus and informally advised the Seahawks. “You have to be willing to absorb some costs, and you need leaders who can communicate in a crisis.” (...)
The Seahawks faced perhaps the most arduous circumstances in the N.F.L. Their 2020 schedule included five cross-country flights, which meant they would log more miles than any other N.F.L. team. And when they were home, the Seahawks trained not far from Kirkland, Wash., the nation’s first coronavirus “hot spot.”
This made the Seahawks witnesses to the pandemic well before the season kicked off, and its grim toll made them question whether football could be played safely. Sam Ramsden, the team’s director of player health and performance, cared for his wife, Lisa, in March, when, doctors believe, she had Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
“I didn’t really imagine the N.F.L. being able to have a full season,” Ramsden said. “I wasn’t a Debbie Downer about it, I was just trying to be realistic.”
Starting in late spring, after the N.F.L. began plowing ahead with plans for the 2020 season, Ramsden, Coach Pete Carroll and other team leaders used a combination of pragmatism, flexibility and gamesmanship to duck, bob and weave through the pandemic.
With training camps, the first in-person football activities of the season, set to open in late July, each team appointed an infection control officer to coordinate efforts to reopen its facilities. Ramsden, who has worked for the Seahawks for 22 years, took on the role rather than giving it to the head athletic trainer, who he felt would be too busy handling injuries.
Ramsden has an easygoing patter that belies his attention to detail, and his quiet intensity is a counterpoint to that of Carroll, a hands-on coach known for out-of-the-box ideas. Throughout the pandemic, Carroll pushed Ramsden for answers to problems. At other times, he deferred to his expertise. Carroll also did his own research, and floated ideas to Ramsden and others about minimizing exposure.
Like other teams, the Seahawks installed dividers in the showers and between lockers. To avoid crowding, two auxiliary locker rooms were added, and large rooms and practice fields were turned into meeting spaces. Ventilation systems were upgraded. Tents were set up outside for safer dining. Carroll had windows that could open installed in his office to increase air flow.
People in the organization took on extra tasks. The team’s football operations department created a schedule for who would be tested and when. (Almost 36,000 tests were ultimately given.) Each morning, trainers and others handed out sensors made by a German company, Kinexon, that tracked how close players, coaches and staff members were to one another and for how long. The hospitality staff members who usually managed corporate and internal events collected health questionnaires from people arriving at the facility. The travel coordinator made sure the team’s drivers were tested and buses were disinfected. On the road, a total of 139 players, coaches and staff rode to and from games and airports in seven buses instead of the usual four.
“It was like a band of brothers,” said Ramsden, who wore a T-shirt a few days each week that read, “Stay Negative or Stay Home.”
When they were at their team facility, the Seahawks ordered food with the Notemeal app on their phones, rather than stand in line in the cafeteria (where congregating unmasked led to transmissions on other teams). On road trips, the team asked hotel kitchens to use the app as well, something other teams adopted. (...)
Wide receiver Tyler Lockett considered opting out before the season because of a heart condition. He was born with the aorta on the right side of his heart, instead of the left, and had needed medical clearance to play before he was drafted in 2015. Ultimately, he chose to play this season because the N.F.L. was testing players every day, a protocol that Carroll pushed the league on early and loudly when executives did not initially embrace the idea.
The Kinexon devices told Ramsden when players and staff members were within six feet of one another for more than five, 10 and 15 minutes. They even recorded interactions between people separated by walls. To keep people moving, Ramsden had the facility’s intercom chime every 12 minutes.
Still, remaining vigilant inside the facility and outside it by not eating out or shopping wore on Lockett and others. “For me, and for a lot of guys, it felt like we actually played two seasons,” he said. “That’s how stressful it is just to make sure that you have to live up to these protocols that we have just to make sure we’re safe.”
The Seahawks’ protocols, though, didn’t extend to family and friends, who still posed an exposure risk, and they didn’t prevent false positive tests, which occurred often at the start of the regular season in September. That set Carroll off on a search for a way to verify test results.
Around Labor Day, with three news channels playing on his office TVs, Carroll saw Gupta, who works at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, on MSNBC describing a device that provided reliable test results in under an hour. The coach later called the doctor to get more information on using the kit to provide a backup to the tests analyzed by BioReference Laboratories, the diagnostics company hired by the N.F.L.
“I was struck by how involved he was,” said Gupta, who advised the Seahawks during the season. “He really wanted to understand the science.”
The Seahawks bought four test kits made by Mesa Biotech, which cost several hundred dollars each, and had doctors at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., use them to test family and friends of the team more than 750 times. Out-of-town visitors had to be tested immediately upon arriving in Seattle, remain in a hotel for 24 hours and get a second test. Only those who tested negative twice could see a player, coach or staff member.
Through it all, only one of the league’s 32 teams remained untouched by the virus: the Seattle Seahawks. And how they made it through the long season virus-free, in Washington State, where the United States’ first positive case was reported, is a testament to innovative thinking and procedures. The team’s devotion to following health guidelines became a guidepost for the N.F.L. and other leagues grappling with how to proceed as the deadly virus continued to grip the country.
The Seahawks faced perhaps the most arduous circumstances in the N.F.L. Their 2020 schedule included five cross-country flights, which meant they would log more miles than any other N.F.L. team. And when they were home, the Seahawks trained not far from Kirkland, Wash., the nation’s first coronavirus “hot spot.”
This made the Seahawks witnesses to the pandemic well before the season kicked off, and its grim toll made them question whether football could be played safely. Sam Ramsden, the team’s director of player health and performance, cared for his wife, Lisa, in March, when, doctors believe, she had Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
“I didn’t really imagine the N.F.L. being able to have a full season,” Ramsden said. “I wasn’t a Debbie Downer about it, I was just trying to be realistic.”
With training camps, the first in-person football activities of the season, set to open in late July, each team appointed an infection control officer to coordinate efforts to reopen its facilities. Ramsden, who has worked for the Seahawks for 22 years, took on the role rather than giving it to the head athletic trainer, who he felt would be too busy handling injuries.
Ramsden has an easygoing patter that belies his attention to detail, and his quiet intensity is a counterpoint to that of Carroll, a hands-on coach known for out-of-the-box ideas. Throughout the pandemic, Carroll pushed Ramsden for answers to problems. At other times, he deferred to his expertise. Carroll also did his own research, and floated ideas to Ramsden and others about minimizing exposure.
Like other teams, the Seahawks installed dividers in the showers and between lockers. To avoid crowding, two auxiliary locker rooms were added, and large rooms and practice fields were turned into meeting spaces. Ventilation systems were upgraded. Tents were set up outside for safer dining. Carroll had windows that could open installed in his office to increase air flow.
People in the organization took on extra tasks. The team’s football operations department created a schedule for who would be tested and when. (Almost 36,000 tests were ultimately given.) Each morning, trainers and others handed out sensors made by a German company, Kinexon, that tracked how close players, coaches and staff members were to one another and for how long. The hospitality staff members who usually managed corporate and internal events collected health questionnaires from people arriving at the facility. The travel coordinator made sure the team’s drivers were tested and buses were disinfected. On the road, a total of 139 players, coaches and staff rode to and from games and airports in seven buses instead of the usual four.
“It was like a band of brothers,” said Ramsden, who wore a T-shirt a few days each week that read, “Stay Negative or Stay Home.”
When they were at their team facility, the Seahawks ordered food with the Notemeal app on their phones, rather than stand in line in the cafeteria (where congregating unmasked led to transmissions on other teams). On road trips, the team asked hotel kitchens to use the app as well, something other teams adopted. (...)
Wide receiver Tyler Lockett considered opting out before the season because of a heart condition. He was born with the aorta on the right side of his heart, instead of the left, and had needed medical clearance to play before he was drafted in 2015. Ultimately, he chose to play this season because the N.F.L. was testing players every day, a protocol that Carroll pushed the league on early and loudly when executives did not initially embrace the idea.
The Kinexon devices told Ramsden when players and staff members were within six feet of one another for more than five, 10 and 15 minutes. They even recorded interactions between people separated by walls. To keep people moving, Ramsden had the facility’s intercom chime every 12 minutes.
Still, remaining vigilant inside the facility and outside it by not eating out or shopping wore on Lockett and others. “For me, and for a lot of guys, it felt like we actually played two seasons,” he said. “That’s how stressful it is just to make sure that you have to live up to these protocols that we have just to make sure we’re safe.”
The Seahawks’ protocols, though, didn’t extend to family and friends, who still posed an exposure risk, and they didn’t prevent false positive tests, which occurred often at the start of the regular season in September. That set Carroll off on a search for a way to verify test results.
Around Labor Day, with three news channels playing on his office TVs, Carroll saw Gupta, who works at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, on MSNBC describing a device that provided reliable test results in under an hour. The coach later called the doctor to get more information on using the kit to provide a backup to the tests analyzed by BioReference Laboratories, the diagnostics company hired by the N.F.L.
“I was struck by how involved he was,” said Gupta, who advised the Seahawks during the season. “He really wanted to understand the science.”
The Seahawks bought four test kits made by Mesa Biotech, which cost several hundred dollars each, and had doctors at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., use them to test family and friends of the team more than 750 times. Out-of-town visitors had to be tested immediately upon arriving in Seattle, remain in a hotel for 24 hours and get a second test. Only those who tested negative twice could see a player, coach or staff member.
by Ken Belson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sam Ramsden by Nicole Boliaux for The New York Times[ed. This is one of those articles where it really pays to watch the accompanying video. If you're having trouble with the paywall, try cookie remover.]
Thursday, February 4, 2021
The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare
This week, congressional Democrats advanced a budget resolution — the first step in using the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion fiscal rescue plan. I recognize that is not the most thrilling start to a column. But now that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have pledged their undying fealty to the filibuster, the budget reconciliation process is where Biden’s agenda will live or die. Oy, is that depressing.
Budget reconciliation reveals the truth of how the Senate legislates now. To counter the minority’s abuse of the filibuster rule, the majority abuses another rule, ending in a process that makes legislation systematically and undeniably worse. The world’s greatest deliberative body has become one of its most absurd, but that absurdity is obscured by baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand.
“Budget reconciliation.” It sounds sober, important and official. But it’s farcical — or it would be, if the consequences weren’t so grievous.
It’s understood, by now, that the filibuster has mutated into something it was never intended to be: a 60-vote supermajority requirement on almost all legislation considered by the United States Senate. I have made my case against the filibuster in detail before, and I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say, in a closely divided Senate, with highly polarized parties, it’s almost impossible to get 60 votes on major legislation. But there’s a workaround, and that workaround is getting both wider and dumber.
The budget reconciliation process was created in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It was an afterthought: an optional process to let Congress quickly clean up its spending plans so they matched the budget. No one even used it until 1980. But as the Senate was stalled by more frequent filibusters, clever legislators realized that the budget reconciliation process was immune to the filibuster, as it was limited to 20 hours of debate, and all kinds of bills could be routed through it.
In response, Senator Robert Byrd persuaded his colleagues to pass new rules to ensure budget reconciliation remained true to its original purpose. These rules, formally enshrined in the Budget Act in 1990, impose a series of tests on budget reconciliation bills. The most consequential are that every individual provision of the bill must alter taxes or spending, and not in a “merely incidental” way; the bill cannot increase deficits after the budget window, which is usually around 10 years; and the bill cannot muck with Social Security. Any senator can challenge any provision of any budget reconciliation bill for violating these rules. The parliamentarian then rules on the question, and if the parliamentarian rules for the challenger, the provision is struck from the bill. (The Senate can choose to ignore the parliamentarian, just as they can vote to change any Senate rule. That hasn’t happened yet where budget reconciliation is concerned, but it may soon. More on that later.)
Byrd’s reforms didn’t work as he intended. The problem of the filibuster demanded a solution, and even covered in “Byrd droppings,” budget reconciliation was the closest thing to an alternative. The Byrd rules didn’t prevent non-budgetary legislation from being passed through reconciliation, but they did make that legislation worse, and weirder, and the Senate has simply decided to live with the ridiculous results, and make the rest of us live with them, too.
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, for instance, were designed to expire — expire! — after 10 years because otherwise they would have increased deficits after 10 years, and so been ineligible for reconciliation. President Donald Trump’s tax cuts employ the same trick. This is a legacy of budget reconciliation: Massive chunks of our tax code are just set to disappear at an arbitrary point in the future, and what happens then is anybody’s guess.
The distortions don’t end there. Budget reconciliation warps policy design by pushing away from regulation and toward direct spending and taxation. An example: If you were designing a health care bill in budget reconciliation, you couldn’t pass a rule saying private insurers had to cover pre-existing conditions. But you could add a trillion dollars to Medicaid funding so it could cover anyone with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t get private insurance. Or to use an example that is actually in the reconciliation package Democrats are designing now: You can pass $1,400 checks through budget reconciliation, but you can’t pass emergency paid leave. When Congress writes laws through budget reconciliation, it writes them with one arm tied behind its back.
Even worse is the way budget reconciliation quietly decides which kinds of problems the Senate addresses, and which it ignores, years after year. Both House and Senate Democrats have said that their first bill will be the “For The People Act,” a package making it easier and safer to vote, and weakening the power big donors wield in politics by matching small donor donations at a 6:1 rate. But the “For The People Act” can’t pass through the budget reconciliation process, so it’s a dead letter.
“Why should it only take a simple majority to do tax cuts for the rich but it takes a supermajority to address the integrity of our elections?” Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, told me. “That makes no sense. Access to the ballot shouldn’t have a higher hurdle than helping the rich get richer.” But in today’s Senate, it does. The same is true for gun control or immigration reform.
But budget reconciliation doesn’t just alter liberal priorities. Social conservatives often complain that when Republicans hold Congress, their legislative asks are shunted aside for tax cuts and health care repeal laws. That is, in part, a budget reconciliation issue: You can pass tax cuts and (partially) repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation. You cannot regulate pornography or push school prayer through the process.
You can also only do a limited number of budget reconciliation packages each fiscal year. That forces legislators to craft giant bills that jam every legislative priority into one rushed package, rather than crafting one bill, debating and modifying it, and then passing it and moving onto the next.
“I find it ironic that people suggest reconciliation is somehow better for the institution,” Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and the author of the excellent new book, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” told me. “It’s terrible for the Senate!” As he notes, budget reconciliation decreases the power of committees and increases the power of the Senate leadership, “since leadership drives the assembly line for putting together these mega-packages. There’s no transparency and it creates a field day for lobbyists.”
In 2012, Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper arguing that American public policy had become defined by kludges. “The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system,” he wrote. “When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.”
Or, the Senate. The modern use of budget reconciliation is a kludge. The institution has become paralyzed by the filibuster and rather than rewriting its rules to solve that problem, senators have instead patched it through budget reconciliation. The Senate gets just enough done that no one can say it is actually impossible to pass big bills through the body. But budget reconciliation narrows the range of problems Congress can solve, the number of bills it can pass and the policy mechanisms it can use. No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way, but this is how the Senate has come to work, one kludge on top of another. “For any particular problem we have arrived at the most Gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response,” Teles wrote. That is both an apt description of today’s Senate and of the kind of policy budget reconciliation produces.
All of this is a choice. Every Senate rule can be changed by a simple majority vote. A simple majority could end or reform the filibuster — as we saw when Democrats ended it for most executive branch nominations and most judicial nominations in 2013, and when Republicans ended it for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. The details quickly get complicated, but a simple majority of senators could vote to loosen some of the limits on budget reconciliation, as Senator Bernie Sanders, the new chair of the Budget Committee, has suggested. The Senate is bound by nothing but its own convictions.
But this is a Senate that, collectively, has no convictions. It does not believe enough in the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to simply abide by it. It does not believe enough in passing bills by a simple majority to make that the standard. It is the self-styled moderates, like Manchin and Sinema, who freeze the institution in dysfunction, but there is nothing moderate about the modern Senate: It is radical in its inanity, a legislative chamber designed by dadaists.
Budget reconciliation reveals the truth of how the Senate legislates now. To counter the minority’s abuse of the filibuster rule, the majority abuses another rule, ending in a process that makes legislation systematically and undeniably worse. The world’s greatest deliberative body has become one of its most absurd, but that absurdity is obscured by baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand.
“Budget reconciliation.” It sounds sober, important and official. But it’s farcical — or it would be, if the consequences weren’t so grievous.
The budget reconciliation process was created in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It was an afterthought: an optional process to let Congress quickly clean up its spending plans so they matched the budget. No one even used it until 1980. But as the Senate was stalled by more frequent filibusters, clever legislators realized that the budget reconciliation process was immune to the filibuster, as it was limited to 20 hours of debate, and all kinds of bills could be routed through it.
In response, Senator Robert Byrd persuaded his colleagues to pass new rules to ensure budget reconciliation remained true to its original purpose. These rules, formally enshrined in the Budget Act in 1990, impose a series of tests on budget reconciliation bills. The most consequential are that every individual provision of the bill must alter taxes or spending, and not in a “merely incidental” way; the bill cannot increase deficits after the budget window, which is usually around 10 years; and the bill cannot muck with Social Security. Any senator can challenge any provision of any budget reconciliation bill for violating these rules. The parliamentarian then rules on the question, and if the parliamentarian rules for the challenger, the provision is struck from the bill. (The Senate can choose to ignore the parliamentarian, just as they can vote to change any Senate rule. That hasn’t happened yet where budget reconciliation is concerned, but it may soon. More on that later.)
Byrd’s reforms didn’t work as he intended. The problem of the filibuster demanded a solution, and even covered in “Byrd droppings,” budget reconciliation was the closest thing to an alternative. The Byrd rules didn’t prevent non-budgetary legislation from being passed through reconciliation, but they did make that legislation worse, and weirder, and the Senate has simply decided to live with the ridiculous results, and make the rest of us live with them, too.
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, for instance, were designed to expire — expire! — after 10 years because otherwise they would have increased deficits after 10 years, and so been ineligible for reconciliation. President Donald Trump’s tax cuts employ the same trick. This is a legacy of budget reconciliation: Massive chunks of our tax code are just set to disappear at an arbitrary point in the future, and what happens then is anybody’s guess.
The distortions don’t end there. Budget reconciliation warps policy design by pushing away from regulation and toward direct spending and taxation. An example: If you were designing a health care bill in budget reconciliation, you couldn’t pass a rule saying private insurers had to cover pre-existing conditions. But you could add a trillion dollars to Medicaid funding so it could cover anyone with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t get private insurance. Or to use an example that is actually in the reconciliation package Democrats are designing now: You can pass $1,400 checks through budget reconciliation, but you can’t pass emergency paid leave. When Congress writes laws through budget reconciliation, it writes them with one arm tied behind its back.
Even worse is the way budget reconciliation quietly decides which kinds of problems the Senate addresses, and which it ignores, years after year. Both House and Senate Democrats have said that their first bill will be the “For The People Act,” a package making it easier and safer to vote, and weakening the power big donors wield in politics by matching small donor donations at a 6:1 rate. But the “For The People Act” can’t pass through the budget reconciliation process, so it’s a dead letter.
“Why should it only take a simple majority to do tax cuts for the rich but it takes a supermajority to address the integrity of our elections?” Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, told me. “That makes no sense. Access to the ballot shouldn’t have a higher hurdle than helping the rich get richer.” But in today’s Senate, it does. The same is true for gun control or immigration reform.
But budget reconciliation doesn’t just alter liberal priorities. Social conservatives often complain that when Republicans hold Congress, their legislative asks are shunted aside for tax cuts and health care repeal laws. That is, in part, a budget reconciliation issue: You can pass tax cuts and (partially) repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation. You cannot regulate pornography or push school prayer through the process.
You can also only do a limited number of budget reconciliation packages each fiscal year. That forces legislators to craft giant bills that jam every legislative priority into one rushed package, rather than crafting one bill, debating and modifying it, and then passing it and moving onto the next.
“I find it ironic that people suggest reconciliation is somehow better for the institution,” Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and the author of the excellent new book, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” told me. “It’s terrible for the Senate!” As he notes, budget reconciliation decreases the power of committees and increases the power of the Senate leadership, “since leadership drives the assembly line for putting together these mega-packages. There’s no transparency and it creates a field day for lobbyists.”
In 2012, Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper arguing that American public policy had become defined by kludges. “The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system,” he wrote. “When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.”
Or, the Senate. The modern use of budget reconciliation is a kludge. The institution has become paralyzed by the filibuster and rather than rewriting its rules to solve that problem, senators have instead patched it through budget reconciliation. The Senate gets just enough done that no one can say it is actually impossible to pass big bills through the body. But budget reconciliation narrows the range of problems Congress can solve, the number of bills it can pass and the policy mechanisms it can use. No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way, but this is how the Senate has come to work, one kludge on top of another. “For any particular problem we have arrived at the most Gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response,” Teles wrote. That is both an apt description of today’s Senate and of the kind of policy budget reconciliation produces.
All of this is a choice. Every Senate rule can be changed by a simple majority vote. A simple majority could end or reform the filibuster — as we saw when Democrats ended it for most executive branch nominations and most judicial nominations in 2013, and when Republicans ended it for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. The details quickly get complicated, but a simple majority of senators could vote to loosen some of the limits on budget reconciliation, as Senator Bernie Sanders, the new chair of the Budget Committee, has suggested. The Senate is bound by nothing but its own convictions.
But this is a Senate that, collectively, has no convictions. It does not believe enough in the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to simply abide by it. It does not believe enough in passing bills by a simple majority to make that the standard. It is the self-styled moderates, like Manchin and Sinema, who freeze the institution in dysfunction, but there is nothing moderate about the modern Senate: It is radical in its inanity, a legislative chamber designed by dadaists.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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