Saturday, October 31, 2020

Mr. Trump's ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.

The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump's term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.

Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election about the country's future, and what path its citizens wish to choose.

The resilience of American democracy has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump's first term. Four more years would be worse.

But even as Americans wait to vote in lines that stretch for blocks through their towns and cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a full-throated assault on the integrity of that essential democratic process. Breaking with all of his modern predecessors, he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate outcome, and that if he does not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of the American people in the courts or even on the streets.

Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the editorial board's verdict on Donald Trump's presidency in a special edition of our Opinion Today newsletter. You can read it here.

The enormity and variety of Mr.Trump's misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.

It is the purpose of this special section of the Sunday Review to remind readers why Mr. Trump is unfit to lead the nation. It includes a series of essays focused on the Trump administration's rampant corruption, celebrations of violence, gross negligence with the public's health and incompetent statecraft. A selection of iconic images highlights the president's record on issues like climate, immigration, women's rights and race.

The urgency of these essays speaks for itself. The repudiation of Mr. Trump is the first step in repairing the damage he has done. But even as we write these words, Mr. Trump is salting the field — and even if he loses, reconstruction will require many years and tears.

Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation's ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation's pressing problems because he is the nation's most pressing problem.

He is a racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.

He has shown no aptitude for building, but he has managed to do a great deal of damage. He is just the man for knocking things down.

As the world runs out of time to confront climate change, Mr. Trump has denied the need for action, abandoned international cooperation and attacked efforts to limit emissions.

He has mounted a cruel crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration without proposing a sensible policy for determining who should be allowed to come to the United States.

Obsessed with reversing the achievements of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, he has sought to persuade both Congress and the courts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act without proposing any substitute policy to provide Americans with access to affordable health care. During the first three years of his administration, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.3 million — a number that has surely grown again as millions of Americans have lost their jobs this year.

He campaigned as a champion of ordinary workers, but he has governed on behalf of the wealthy. He promised an increase in the federal minimum wage and fresh investment in infrastructure; he delivered a round of tax cuts that mostly benefited rich people. He has indiscriminately erased regulations, and answered the prayers of corporations by suspending enforcement of rules he could not easily erase. Under his leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stopped trying to protect consumers and the Environmental Protection Agency has stopped trying to protect the environment.

He has strained longstanding alliances while embracing dictators like North Korea's Kim Jong-un and Russia's Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Trump treats with a degree of warmth and deference that defies explanation. He walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a strategic agreement among China's neighbors intended to pressure China to conform to international standards. In its place, Mr. Trump has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions of dollars in tariffs — taxes that are actually paid by Americans — without extracting significant concessions from China.

Mr. Trump's inadequacies as a leader have been on particularly painful display during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of working to save lives, Mr. Trump has treated the pandemic as a public relations problem. He lied about the danger, challenged the expertise of public health officials and resisted the implementation of necessary precautions; he is still trying to force the resumption of economic activity without bringing the virus under control.

As the economy pancaked, he signed an initial round of aid for Americans who lost their jobs. Then the stock market rebounded and, even though millions remained out of work, Mr. Trump lost interest in their plight.

In September, he declared that the virus "affects virtually nobody" the day before the death toll from the disease in the United States topped 200,000.

Nine days later, Mr. Trump fell ill.

The foundations of American civil society were crumbling before Mr. Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. But he has intensified the worst tendencies in American politics: Under his leadership, the nation has grown more polarized, more paranoid and meaner.

He has pitted Americans against each other, mastering new broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook to rally his supporters around a virtual bonfire of grievances and to flood the public square with lies, disinformation and propaganda. He is relentless in his denigration of opponents and reluctant to condemn violence by those he regards as allies. At the first presidential debate in September, Mr. Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists. He responded by instructing one violent gang, the Proud Boys, to "stand back and stand by."

He has undermined faith in government as a vehicle for mediating differences and arriving at compromises. He demands absolute loyalty from government officials, without regard to the public interest. He is openly contemptuous of expertise.

And he has mounted an assault on the rule of law, wielding his authority as an instrument to secure his own power and to punish political opponents. In June, his administration tear-gassed and cleared peaceful protesters from a street in front of the White House so Mr. Trump could pose with a book he does not read in front of a church he does not attend.

The full scope of his misconduct may take decades to come to light. But what is already known is sufficiently shocking:

He has resisted lawful oversight by the other branches of the federal government. The administration routinely defies court orders, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly directed administration officials not to testify before Congress or to provide documents, notably including Mr. Trump's tax returns.

With the help of Attorney General William Barr, he has shielded loyal aides from justice. In May, the Justice Department said it would drop the prosecution of Mr. Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn even though Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In July, Mr. Trump commuted the sentence of another former aide, Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation of Mr. Trump's 2016 election campaign. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rightly condemned the commutation as an act of "unprecedented, historic corruption."

Last year, Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of his main political rival, Joe Biden, and then directed administration officials to obstruct a congressional inquiry of his actions. In December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. But Senate Republicans, excepting Mr. Romney, voted to acquit the president, ignoring Mr. Trump's corruption to press ahead with the project of filling the benches of the federal judiciary with young, conservative lawyers as a firewall against majority rule.

Now, with other Republican leaders, Mr. Trump is mounting an aggressive campaign to reduce the number of Americans who vote and the number of ballots that are counted.

The president, who has long spread baseless charges of widespread voter fraud, has intensified his rhetorical attacks in recent months, especially on ballots submitted by mail. "The Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED," he tweeted. The president himself has voted by mail, and there is no evidence to support his claims. But the disinformation campaign serves as a rationale for purging voter rolls, closing polling places, tossing absentee ballots and otherwise impeding Americans from exercising the right to vote.

It is an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.

Other modern presidents have behaved illegally or made catastrophic decisions. Richard Nixon used the power of the state against his political opponents. Ronald Reagan ignored the spread of AIDS. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush took the nation to war under false pretenses.

Mr. Trump has outstripped decades of presidential wrongdoing in a single term.

Frederick Douglass lamented during another of the nation's dark hours, the presidency of Andrew Johnson, "We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe." But that is not the nature of our democracy. The implicit optimism of American democracy is that the health of the Republic rests on the judgment of the electorate and the integrity of those voters choose.

Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people — even those who would prefer a Republican president — to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.

Explore the Other Stories

AS EVIDENCED BY

HIS UNAPOLOGETIC CORRUPTION

BY MICHELLE COTTLE

WHEN SCIENCE IS PUSHED ASIDE

BY JENEEN INTERLANDI

HIS DEMAGOGY

BY JESSE WEGMAN

HIS FAKE POPULISM

BY FARAH STOCKMAN

HIS INCOMPETENT STATESMANSHIP

BY SERGE SCHMEMANN

WITH LASTING CONSEQUENCE

WOMEN'S RIGHTS UNDER ATTACK

Photographed on January 19, 2018

IMMIGRATION HALTED

Photographed on June 26, 2019

BLACK LIVES AT RISK

Photographed on June 6, 2020

A PLANET IN PERIL

Photographed on September 29, 2020

AN ECONOMY IN TATTERS

Photographed on April 9, 2020

THE HIGH PRICE OF THE HIGH COURT

Photographed on September 26, 2020

TOO MANY FINGERS ON TOO MANY TRIGGERS

Photographed on April 30, 2020

L.G.B.T.Q. PROTECTIONS DISMANTLED

Photographed on June 14, 2020

Video by Michael Vahrenwald for The New York Times

Monty Bannerman
MicroGrid Networks, LLC
cell: +1 305-984-1177
tel: +1 646-402-5076

Friday, October 16, 2020

The Wall Street Journal: More than 1,000 current and former CDC officers condemn U.S. COVID-19 response

Real Americans stand up.

More than 1,000 current and former CDC officers condemn U.S. COVID-19 response

Read in The Wall Street Journal: https://apple.news/ADfNAobTHRcWHWrP2Kf04gw

Shared from Apple News

Phys.org: Quantification of Unprecedented energy use since 1950 has transformed humanity's geologic footprint

Phys.org: Unprecedented energy use since 1950 has transformed humanity's geologic footprint.
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-unprecedented-energy-humanity-geologic-footprint.html

Phys.org: New feature found in energy spectrum of universe's most powerful particles

Phys.org: New feature found in energy spectrum of universe's most powerful particles.
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-feature-energy-spectrum-universe-powerful.html

Physicists Discover First Room-Temperature Superconductor | Quanta Magazine - although requiring crushingly high pressures

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-first-room-temperature-superconductor-20201014/

Fwd: Introducing Atlantic Planet

Date: Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 4:03 PM
Subject: Introducing Atlantic Planet
To: Monty Bannerman <mbannerman@arcstarenergy.com>

Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in chief, The Atlantic

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society."

So begins Henry David Thoreau's landmark essay "Walking," which was published in The Atlantic in 1862. Thoreau is one of many Atlantic writers to explore in our pages the complicated, fraught, and surpassingly consequential relationship between humanity and the environment. The Atlantic was a pioneer in writing about the environment, and we continue that tradition with the launch of a new section, Atlantic Planet, devoted to covering the changing climate.

We have no shortage of crises at the moment, but climate change may be the defining challenge of our time. It is already reshaping every aspect of our lives, from how we do business to where we live to what foods we eat. This is why The Atlantic is committing itself to examining the ways in which climate change will remake life as we know it, and to investigating and illuminating solutions that could allow humanity to save itself from possible catastrophe.

In Planet, you'll find: Vann R. Newkirk II on heat as the human-rights issue of the next decade; Lawrence Weschler on a climate future beyond denial and despair; Sabrina Imbler on the health and environmental risks of gas stoves; and an introduction to the new section by our lead climate reporter, Robinson Meyer.

Meyer is also the inquisitive and kinetic mind behind The Atlantic's forthcoming newsletter, The Weekly Planet, which we are thinking of as the curious person's guide to living through climate change. Every Tuesday, he'll bring you big ideas that are driving the climate conversation, along with vital information that will help us survive (and perhaps even flourish) on a changing planet. Sign up to receive the first edition of The Weekly Planet on October 20.

In the meantime, I hope you take a moment to explore Atlantic Planet and to read the stories that, like Thoreau's, speak up for Nature.

Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in chief

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

NYTimes: Fact-Checking the Trump and Biden Town Halls - the contrast you could expect

Fact-Checking the Trump and Biden Town Halls https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/15/us/fact-checking-town-halls

Monty Bannerman
mob: +1 305-984-1177
tel: +1 646-402-5076

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

The Verge: Solar energy reaches historically low costs - Now More Rapidly and Relentlessly than ever.

The Verge: Solar energy reaches historically low costs.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/13/21514902/solar-energy-cost-historic-low-energy-agency-outlook-2020

Monty Bannerman
mob: +1 305-984-1177
tel: +1 646-402-5076

NYTimes: As Coronavirus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Stock Sell-Off - insider trading on a scale exponentially larger than that which sent Martha to jail

As Coronavirus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration's Private Briefings Fueled Stock Sell-Off https://nyti.ms/34W02AB

Monty Bannerman
mob: +1 305-984-1177
tel: +1 646-402-5076

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

SciTechDaily: Researchers Extract More Energy From Sunlight – Could Boost the Efficiency of Solar Panels by 50%

SciTechDaily: Researchers Extract More Energy From Sunlight – Could Boost the Efficiency of Solar Panels by 50%.
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-extract-more-energy-from-sunlight-could-boost-the-efficiency-of-solar-panels-by-50/

Russia probe commissioned by Barr on orders from Trump concludes without charges or any public report - Boy, the boss is going to be pissed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-unmasking-review-no-charges/2020/10/13/0f63fd2e-0d67-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html?wpmk=1&wpisrc=al_news__alert-politics--alert-national&utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert&pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.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.Qj_eTl-rBGkBiWRD-V1P1-Mffnn24jHv_mjNQoq2GLQ

Sunday, October 11, 2020

25-Year Study of Nuclear vs Renewables Says One Is Clearly Better at Cutting Emissions

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-nuclear-won-t-cut-it-if-we-want-to-drop-carbon-as-quickly-as-possible

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Don’t Give Up on America - The New York Times - or bet against it

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/sunday/america-patriotism.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Friday, October 9, 2020

New York and New Jersey Both Record Most New Virus Cases Since Mid-May

New York and New Jersey Both Record Most New Virus Cases Since Mid-May ["https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/n-y-and-n-j-both-record-most-new-virus-cases-since-mid-may"]

Thursday, October 8, 2020

In a First, New England Journal of Medicine Joins Never-Trumpers

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/health/new-england-journal-trump.html

Monty Bannerman
mob: +1 305-984-1177
tel: +1 646-402-5076

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Top Trump aide Stephen Miller tests positive for Covid - hopefully turbocharged with karma

Monty Bannerman
MicroGrid Networks, LLC
cell: +1 305-984-1177
tel: +1 646-402-5076

From: Harry Strulovici <operatorsm1@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 6, 2020 7:10:14 PM
To: Monty Bannerman <mbannerman@arcstarenergy.com>
Subject: Fwd: BREAKING NEWS: Top Trump aide Stephen Miller tests positive for Covid

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: POLITICO <email@politicoemail.com>
Date: Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 7:08 PM
Subject: BREAKING NEWS: Top Trump aide Stephen Miller tests positive for Covid
To: <operatorsm1@gmail.com>

Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Donald Trump, tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Miller, a senior adviser to the president with a wide-ranging portfolio in the White House, joins Trump's wife, press secretary, campaign manager, party chair, counselor and numerous other staffers who have tested positive for coronavirus. Trump himself spent his first full day at the White House on Tuesday after a three-day stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

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