"I can imagine no other president in my lifetime failing to address the nation in a prime time speech during a crisis such as this. On the other hand, I cannot imagine another president whose words would be less welcome by so many of his fellow citizens."
@DanRather
Showing posts with label 2020/05 MAY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2020/05 MAY. Show all posts
Sunday, May 31, 2020
In Louisville, Ky., a tense confrontation in the middle of a crowded street was partially defused when a black woman stepped forward and offered a policeman in riot gear a hug. They embraced for nearly a minute.
- In Birmingham, Ala., protesters started to tear down a Confederate monument that the city had previously covered with a tarp amid a lawsuit between the state attorney general and the city.
- In Boston, a police S.U.V. was set ablaze near the State House, sending up a column of black smoke after a large group of protesters had mostly dispersed.
- In Philadelphia, police officers in riot gear and an armored vehicle used pepper spray to try to repel rioters and looters. A wall of officers blocked an entrance ramp to Interstate 676 in the city, where the mass transit system suspending service starting at 6 p.m. as part of a citywide curfew.
- In New York, demonstrators marched across the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, snarling traffic. The Manhattan Bridge was briefly shut down to car traffic. Chaos erupted in Union Square at around 10 p.m., with flames leaping up two stories from trash cans and piles of street debris. The night before in Union Square, the mayor’s daughter, Chiara de Blasio, 25, was among the protesters arrested, according to a police official.
- In Chicago, the police superintendent, David Brown, excoriated the looters on Sunday as Gov. J.B. Pritzker activated the National Guard at the city’s request.
- In Louisville, Ky., a tense confrontation in the middle of a crowded street was partially defused when a black woman stepped forward and offered a policeman in riot gear a hug. They embraced for nearly a minute.
The civil war in America is getting worse.
| BREAKING NEWS |
Police fired tear gas at protesters who set fires near the White House as unrest continued in cities across America. Here’s the latest. |
| Monday, June 1, 2020 12:01 AM EST |
Protesters seethed in dozens of cities, again defying curfews to demonstrate against police brutality following the death of George Floyd in police custody last week in Minneapolis.
|
| Read the latest |
LIVE UPDATES
Nationwide demonstrations resume, officials in several states reinforce their National Guard presence and anger mounts at increasingly aggressive tactics by the police.
RIGHT NOW
Fires are burning in the streets near the White House in Washington, where a curfew went into effect at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
The White House goes dark as fires rage nearby.
The Times has reporters on the ground in dozens of cities across the country. Here’s some of what they are seeing.
- Two Atlanta police officers were fired for using excessive force during a protest.
- A man is arrested after driving a truck through a crowd of Minnesota protesters.
- Trump is heard, but not seen, on a simmering Sunday.
- Could protesting spread coronavirus? Officials are worried.
- National Guard commanders say troops are meant only to keep the peace.
An interesting article about the problems in Minneapolis.
The Washington Post
Politics
Buildings burn, and Trump talks tough. Where are the healers?
By Marc Fisher
May 30, 2020
As protests quickly flipped from peaceful to fiery in more than two dozen U.S. cities, President Trump said little Saturday about the frustrations that drove thousands of people to crowd into downtown streets in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, the president defaulted to his usual style of leadership: tearing people down and talking tough.
“Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur [sic] or great fighter General George Patton,” Trump tweeted Saturday of the Democrat whose city was in flames. “How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!”
Trump blasted demonstrators who had confronted Secret Service agents outside the White House as “professionally managed so-called ‘protesters’ ” who “were just there to cause trouble.” And he seemed to savor a confrontation, tweeting that “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”
There was no talk of uniting the country and, hours later, only brief mention of those protesting racial injustice, police brutality and the killing by a white police officer of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Even then, Trump maintained the strategy he has used throughout his tenure, emphasizing the nation’s divisions and seeking to capitalize on them.
“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said after watching the SpaceX launch in Florida. “The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings.”
Protesters mass in cities across the country, National Guard activated in multiple states
In the absence of presidential leadership, and with crowds gathering yet again Saturday night, members of Congress, governors and mayors need to step up, said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer.
“If some leaders don’t offer a prospect of change in the next few days, that sense of hopelessness we’re seeing on the streets just gets worse,” said Zelizer, who studies the 1960s and ’70s, a period of similar social and economic upheaval when divisions over race and class exploded into riots.
“Good leaders cannot separate themselves from the turbulence,” Zelizer said. “If they’re silent, or if they’re too distant, it just adds to the frustration people feel.”
There is no magic formula for averting a long, hot summer of street violence and social discord, of raging flames and physical confrontations. Through several nights of intensifying protests following Floyd’s death on Monday, few moments have offered any promise of a healing connection. Rather, the people Americans have chosen to take charge in times of crisis have more often left a leadership vacuum — such as the remarkable absence of police and public officials on the streets of Minneapolis in recent days.
A rare exception came on Friday night in Atlanta. As fires burned and angry crowds banged up against lines of police officers, the city’s police chief, Erika Shields, waded into a clot of protesters and listened to their grievances.
Shields told the protesters that bad cops must be “weeded out and fired before they can choke somebody.” She told them again and again, “I’m with you.” She gently touched their arms.
“I’m standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd, and everybody’s thinking ‘How can we use force to defuse it?’ And I’m not having it. I’m not having it,” Shields told the crowd. “You have a right to be upset and be scared and to want to yell.”
Demonstrators thanked the chief, held her hand and cried to her about their fear for their children’s lives.
By contrast, the lack of evident leadership on the streets of Minneapolis on Thursday and Friday nights — a source of wonderment among TV commentators across the ideological spectrum — led to the sense that no one was in charge. Businesses burned to the ground. The nation watched on live TV as crowds looted liquor stores and other shops, with no pushback from the authorities.
Minnesota officials seemed to speak of everything but a constructive path forward. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), who represents Minneapolis, posted a video saying that “we can’t ask our community to be peaceful if we continue to not deliver justice for them.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) denounced the protests, calling Friday’s violence “a mockery of pretending this is about George Floyd’s death or inequities or historical traumas to our communities of color.”
The sight of demonstrators breaching and setting fire to the Minneapolis police department’s 3rd Precinct station on Thursday became a symbol of the government’s loss of control. Frey, the city’s first-term mayor, said he ordered police to abandon the station.
“The symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life, of our officers or to the public,” he said.
But Lucy Gerold, who spent 31 years with the Minneapolis police, the last six as commander of the 3rd Precinct, called that decision “an inexperienced and naive response” that sent the wrong message to demonstrators.
City leaders “just said okay, if we just give them the precinct, we’ll feed the beast and they’ll be satisfied,” said Gerold, who left the department in 2014. “That’s just feeding the fire. . . . I think that opened the door for the rest of it.”
Probably no political gesture, speech or legislative action could have prevented this week’s explosion of frustrations. But in the long, ugly history of American political street violence, the enduring images of healing often involve dramatic scenes of politicians and police who, rather than facing off against protesters, waded in for tough, painful confrontations that pointed a path toward reforms.
On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, as 34 U.S. cities burned in riots of grief and anger, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy stepped before a crowd in an Indianapolis neighborhood already engulfed in protest. Police had declined to accompany Kennedy because the crowd was too hot.
Standing on a flatbed truck, Kennedy said to a virtually all-black crowd: “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people among black, white people among white, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
Kennedy spoke that night for the first time in public about the killing of his brother, the president. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
The president at that moment, Lyndon Johnson, made no such gesture as U.S. cities burned. He felt betrayed, believing that by winning historic civil rights laws, he had done more for the country’s black population than any president in decades.
Trump, too, has perceived the week’s violence through the prism of his own political status. Retweeting a list of top Minnesota politicians, all Democrats, he wrote, “Time for a change!”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump urged the nation’s mayors to “get tougher,” and he dismissed protesters as “a lot of radical left bad people.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whom the president had accused of failing to provide police support for Secret Service officers guarding the White House, blasted Trump on Saturday for his brand of leadership.
“We need leaders who . . . in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens,” Bowser said.
The lack of a clear, consistent message helped create a sense of anarchy that fed reactions ranging from disappointment to denunciation around the world. America’s rivals and adversaries jumped on the violence as proof that the United States treats its people unjustly.
Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that a “racist and fascist approach” led to Floyd’s death and was a symbol of an “unjust order” in the United States. In Iran, people held a candlelight vigil in memory of Floyd. In China, state television broadcast a commentary contending that excessive police force “shows the deep social contradictions” in the United States.
Trump continued to talk tough; on Saturday, he reiterated an offer to make the Army available to suppress riots, saying, “We have our military ready, willing and able.”
Other political leaders also made clear that the street violence was unacceptable. Atlanta’s mayor directed a stirring, tough message to protesters who were setting fires on the city’s streets.
“This is not a protest,” said Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. . . . You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands and breaking windows in this city. . . . Go home!”
But there was little talk about the kinds of reforms that might at last repair relations between police and black Americans.
“That’s not going to come from this president, but policing is still mostly a local and state issue,” Zelizer said. “Just as we’ve seen with the pandemic, governors can and will step up.”
The reports from blue-ribbon commission and congressional investigations produced following past rounds of urban street violence would test the strength of any bookshelf. And that process has brought changes that have reduced the use of force in many police departments, especially in big cities.
But police brutality and racial bias continue to hold explosive power as political issues, and few elected officials spend much energy confronting the problem. It’s easier for some leaders to traffic in pat slogans, bashing either the police or the protesters.
Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — coined by a former Miami police chief and used at campaign rallies by the 1968 independent presidential candidate, segregationist George Wallace — was a reminder that it can be all too easy to use division and discord to bolster a political following.
Wallace built a movement with overtly racist appeals in 1968, lashing out at protesters. “If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car when I’m president, that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of,” he said.
Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president that year, blasted antiwar protesters. “They call themselves flower children. I call them spoiled rotten,” he said. But as the nation suffered through a summer of street violence, Nixon softened his campaign, settling for a while on a more hopeful message.
In one campaign TV ad, he summoned “the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. . . . They are black, and they are white; they’re native-born and foreign-born; they’re young, and they’re old. . . . They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.”
In 2016, Trump adopted not Nixon’s approach, but Wallace’s message, the one that clicked with disaffected, frustrated white voters — a politics of grievance, featuring full-throated attacks on elites, government and the media.
Late Saturday, as the nation braced for another scary night, Trump continued his campaign, tweeting, as ever: “Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
Mark Berman contributed to this report.
Politics
Buildings burn, and Trump talks tough. Where are the healers?
By Marc Fisher
May 30, 2020
As protests quickly flipped from peaceful to fiery in more than two dozen U.S. cities, President Trump said little Saturday about the frustrations that drove thousands of people to crowd into downtown streets in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, the president defaulted to his usual style of leadership: tearing people down and talking tough.
“Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur [sic] or great fighter General George Patton,” Trump tweeted Saturday of the Democrat whose city was in flames. “How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!”
Trump blasted demonstrators who had confronted Secret Service agents outside the White House as “professionally managed so-called ‘protesters’ ” who “were just there to cause trouble.” And he seemed to savor a confrontation, tweeting that “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”
There was no talk of uniting the country and, hours later, only brief mention of those protesting racial injustice, police brutality and the killing by a white police officer of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Even then, Trump maintained the strategy he has used throughout his tenure, emphasizing the nation’s divisions and seeking to capitalize on them.
“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said after watching the SpaceX launch in Florida. “The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings.”
Protesters mass in cities across the country, National Guard activated in multiple states
In the absence of presidential leadership, and with crowds gathering yet again Saturday night, members of Congress, governors and mayors need to step up, said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer.
“If some leaders don’t offer a prospect of change in the next few days, that sense of hopelessness we’re seeing on the streets just gets worse,” said Zelizer, who studies the 1960s and ’70s, a period of similar social and economic upheaval when divisions over race and class exploded into riots.
“Good leaders cannot separate themselves from the turbulence,” Zelizer said. “If they’re silent, or if they’re too distant, it just adds to the frustration people feel.”
There is no magic formula for averting a long, hot summer of street violence and social discord, of raging flames and physical confrontations. Through several nights of intensifying protests following Floyd’s death on Monday, few moments have offered any promise of a healing connection. Rather, the people Americans have chosen to take charge in times of crisis have more often left a leadership vacuum — such as the remarkable absence of police and public officials on the streets of Minneapolis in recent days.
A rare exception came on Friday night in Atlanta. As fires burned and angry crowds banged up against lines of police officers, the city’s police chief, Erika Shields, waded into a clot of protesters and listened to their grievances.
Shields told the protesters that bad cops must be “weeded out and fired before they can choke somebody.” She told them again and again, “I’m with you.” She gently touched their arms.
“I’m standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd, and everybody’s thinking ‘How can we use force to defuse it?’ And I’m not having it. I’m not having it,” Shields told the crowd. “You have a right to be upset and be scared and to want to yell.”
Demonstrators thanked the chief, held her hand and cried to her about their fear for their children’s lives.
By contrast, the lack of evident leadership on the streets of Minneapolis on Thursday and Friday nights — a source of wonderment among TV commentators across the ideological spectrum — led to the sense that no one was in charge. Businesses burned to the ground. The nation watched on live TV as crowds looted liquor stores and other shops, with no pushback from the authorities.
Minnesota officials seemed to speak of everything but a constructive path forward. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), who represents Minneapolis, posted a video saying that “we can’t ask our community to be peaceful if we continue to not deliver justice for them.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) denounced the protests, calling Friday’s violence “a mockery of pretending this is about George Floyd’s death or inequities or historical traumas to our communities of color.”
The sight of demonstrators breaching and setting fire to the Minneapolis police department’s 3rd Precinct station on Thursday became a symbol of the government’s loss of control. Frey, the city’s first-term mayor, said he ordered police to abandon the station.
“The symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life, of our officers or to the public,” he said.
But Lucy Gerold, who spent 31 years with the Minneapolis police, the last six as commander of the 3rd Precinct, called that decision “an inexperienced and naive response” that sent the wrong message to demonstrators.
City leaders “just said okay, if we just give them the precinct, we’ll feed the beast and they’ll be satisfied,” said Gerold, who left the department in 2014. “That’s just feeding the fire. . . . I think that opened the door for the rest of it.”
Probably no political gesture, speech or legislative action could have prevented this week’s explosion of frustrations. But in the long, ugly history of American political street violence, the enduring images of healing often involve dramatic scenes of politicians and police who, rather than facing off against protesters, waded in for tough, painful confrontations that pointed a path toward reforms.
On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, as 34 U.S. cities burned in riots of grief and anger, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy stepped before a crowd in an Indianapolis neighborhood already engulfed in protest. Police had declined to accompany Kennedy because the crowd was too hot.
Standing on a flatbed truck, Kennedy said to a virtually all-black crowd: “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people among black, white people among white, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
Kennedy spoke that night for the first time in public about the killing of his brother, the president. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
The president at that moment, Lyndon Johnson, made no such gesture as U.S. cities burned. He felt betrayed, believing that by winning historic civil rights laws, he had done more for the country’s black population than any president in decades.
Trump, too, has perceived the week’s violence through the prism of his own political status. Retweeting a list of top Minnesota politicians, all Democrats, he wrote, “Time for a change!”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump urged the nation’s mayors to “get tougher,” and he dismissed protesters as “a lot of radical left bad people.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whom the president had accused of failing to provide police support for Secret Service officers guarding the White House, blasted Trump on Saturday for his brand of leadership.
“We need leaders who . . . in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens,” Bowser said.
The lack of a clear, consistent message helped create a sense of anarchy that fed reactions ranging from disappointment to denunciation around the world. America’s rivals and adversaries jumped on the violence as proof that the United States treats its people unjustly.
Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that a “racist and fascist approach” led to Floyd’s death and was a symbol of an “unjust order” in the United States. In Iran, people held a candlelight vigil in memory of Floyd. In China, state television broadcast a commentary contending that excessive police force “shows the deep social contradictions” in the United States.
Trump continued to talk tough; on Saturday, he reiterated an offer to make the Army available to suppress riots, saying, “We have our military ready, willing and able.”
Other political leaders also made clear that the street violence was unacceptable. Atlanta’s mayor directed a stirring, tough message to protesters who were setting fires on the city’s streets.
“This is not a protest,” said Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. . . . You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands and breaking windows in this city. . . . Go home!”
But there was little talk about the kinds of reforms that might at last repair relations between police and black Americans.
“That’s not going to come from this president, but policing is still mostly a local and state issue,” Zelizer said. “Just as we’ve seen with the pandemic, governors can and will step up.”
The reports from blue-ribbon commission and congressional investigations produced following past rounds of urban street violence would test the strength of any bookshelf. And that process has brought changes that have reduced the use of force in many police departments, especially in big cities.
But police brutality and racial bias continue to hold explosive power as political issues, and few elected officials spend much energy confronting the problem. It’s easier for some leaders to traffic in pat slogans, bashing either the police or the protesters.
Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — coined by a former Miami police chief and used at campaign rallies by the 1968 independent presidential candidate, segregationist George Wallace — was a reminder that it can be all too easy to use division and discord to bolster a political following.
Wallace built a movement with overtly racist appeals in 1968, lashing out at protesters. “If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car when I’m president, that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of,” he said.
Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president that year, blasted antiwar protesters. “They call themselves flower children. I call them spoiled rotten,” he said. But as the nation suffered through a summer of street violence, Nixon softened his campaign, settling for a while on a more hopeful message.
In one campaign TV ad, he summoned “the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. . . . They are black, and they are white; they’re native-born and foreign-born; they’re young, and they’re old. . . . They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.”
In 2016, Trump adopted not Nixon’s approach, but Wallace’s message, the one that clicked with disaffected, frustrated white voters — a politics of grievance, featuring full-throated attacks on elites, government and the media.
Late Saturday, as the nation braced for another scary night, Trump continued his campaign, tweeting, as ever: “Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
Mark Berman contributed to this report.
Everything went perfectly. America did something right.
The 2 Americans entered the International Space Station today. I watched the whole thing. Before the docking the Americans had a chance to play with the controls. Everything worked perfectly.
After the docking, it took about 3 hours before they entered the Station. Lots of things had to be done first.
When they entered the Space Station it was a big fucking deal. Some politicians asked some questions and talked about what happened. And because this is Idiot America, the fucktards had to repeatedly say "god bless you". It was ridiculous.
After the docking, it took about 3 hours before they entered the Station. Lots of things had to be done first.
When they entered the Space Station it was a big fucking deal. Some politicians asked some questions and talked about what happened. And because this is Idiot America, the fucktards had to repeatedly say "god bless you". It was ridiculous.
The Galápagos Islands near Ecuador. I recommend looking this place up. Lots of interesting creatures. Charles Darwin was there.
Google Doodle slideshow captures the beauty of the Galápagos Islands
Wikipedia - Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands is a volcanic archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. It's considered one of the world's foremost destinations for wildlife-viewing. A province of Ecuador, it lies about 1,000km off its coast. Its isolated terrain shelters a diversity of plant and animal species, many found nowhere else. Charles Darwin visited in 1835, and his observation of Galápagos' species later inspired his theory of evolution.
Wikipedia - Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands is a volcanic archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. It's considered one of the world's foremost destinations for wildlife-viewing. A province of Ecuador, it lies about 1,000km off its coast. Its isolated terrain shelters a diversity of plant and animal species, many found nowhere else. Charles Darwin visited in 1835, and his observation of Galápagos' species later inspired his theory of evolution.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
An interesting comment at the Wall Street Journal. It's about the problems in Minneapolis.
"These are not 'demonstrations'."
Oh YES THEY ARE! Demonstrating just how ugly things can get when things are and have been unfair for a very long time!! I'll bet a month's salary you are not a Black American! NOONE should wonder if they're going to make it out "alive" after being cuffed and detained by police! EVERYONE knows this could happen to ANYONE, however, it was ANOTHER African American!! Enough!!!!
Oh YES THEY ARE! Demonstrating just how ugly things can get when things are and have been unfair for a very long time!! I'll bet a month's salary you are not a Black American! NOONE should wonder if they're going to make it out "alive" after being cuffed and detained by police! EVERYONE knows this could happen to ANYONE, however, it was ANOTHER African American!! Enough!!!!
GO ON WEATHER
THE THING IS GOING TODAY, ABOUT 1/2 HOUR FROM NOW.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
WELL DONE. THEY'RE ON THE WAY TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
3:35 pm: The astronauts reach orbit
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and officially reached orbit, as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley head to the International Space Station. They should arrive at the space station on Sunday at about 10:30 a.m. ET.
That would be 9:30 AM Chicago time.
NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
WELL DONE. THEY'RE ON THE WAY TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
3:35 pm: The astronauts reach orbit
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and officially reached orbit, as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley head to the International Space Station. They should arrive at the space station on Sunday at about 10:30 a.m. ET.
That would be 9:30 AM Chicago time.
NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV
This is extremely rare. The United States Army is not usually used to defend this nation from itself.
The Defense Department ordered the Army to prepare military police units to deploy to Minneapolis after another night of protests.
RIGHT NOW
The Pentagon says that active-duty units from across the country have been put on notice, at the behest of President Trump.
We seem to be having a civil war here in America.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) on Saturday said that he was “fully” mobilizing the state’s National Guard, a first in the state’s history.
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Protests in major U.S. cities marked by arrests, destruction
At least 20 U.S. cities are waking up to destruction and arrests Saturday morning after unrest over the death of George Floyd boiled over in the Twin Cities, sparking demonstrations — some peaceful, others violent — across the country.
Minneapolis
In Minneapolis, flames streamed from several businesses overnight — a gas station, a post office, a bank, a restaurant — and protesters defied an 8 p.m. curfew, milling in the streets and facing off with officers, even forcing Guard troops to retreat at one point.
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I don't care about gas stations. I don't care about banks. I don't care about restaurants. But destroying a post office, that's wrong. Civilized people do not burn down a post office.
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I don't care about gas stations. I don't care about banks. I don't care about restaurants. But destroying a post office, that's wrong. Civilized people do not burn down a post office.
Who are we?
"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
-- Carl Sagan
"Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact."
-- Carl Sagan
This blog has 51 posts about Carl Sagan at Carl Sagan.
Wikipedia - Carl Sagan
-- Carl Sagan
"Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact."
-- Carl Sagan
This blog has 51 posts about Carl Sagan at Carl Sagan.
Wikipedia - Carl Sagan
I'm adding this to my list of favorite quotes. It's about what makes human progress possible.
"Don't ever underestimate the value of a failure."
https://twitter.com/nasa/status/1263916717207695361
What someone else wrote:
"Not sure what my parents learned from me, but I'll let them know."
https://twitter.com/nasa/status/1263916717207695361
What someone else wrote:
"Not sure what my parents learned from me, but I'll let them know."
Today is Saturday, May 30, 2020. I know this is true because I looked it up.
Today I'm going to play chess and probably lose almost every game at https://lichess.org/.
I'm also going to watch the SpaceX thing be canceled again because of the weather at LIVE NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV. If despite the odds the SpaceX thing goes to the International Space Station, it will take off at 2:22 PM Chicago time (3:22 PM Florida time).
What Time Is the SpaceX Astronaut Launch? How to Watch
By The New York Times
May 30, 2020 Updated 7:54 a.m. ET
When is the launch, and how can I watch it?
On Saturday, for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in July 2011, NASA astronauts are scheduled to blast off from American soil on an American rocket to the International Space Station. In contrast to astronaut launches in the past when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, will be in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon, which the two astronauts will travel in.
The mission is scheduled to lift off at 3:22 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Coverage of the launch on NASA Television will begin at 11 a.m. The Times will provide live video of the launch.
The first attempt to launch, on Wednesday, was called off about 15 minutes before it was to occur because the weather wasn’t playing nice. SpaceX’s launch directors deemed the risk of lightning and other weather hazards too high to allow the astronauts to lift off safely.
The weather officers said that they expected conditions to clear up about 10 minutes after the scheduled launch time. But in order for the capsule to catch the space station at the right moment the next day, the launch had to go off at the precise time of 4:33 p.m. Eastern time.
How’s the weather looking today?
Not the most promising. Weather forecasts currently give a 50 percent chance of favorable conditions at the launch site. Mr. Musk said on Twitter early Saturday morning that the countdown was proceeding. The next opportunity on Sunday is slightly better, with a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions.
Lifting off in bad weather can be catastrophic to rockets. During the countdown, about 10 members of the 45th Weather Squadron, part of the United States Space Force, keep a close eye on conditions to see if they fall within predetermined launch criteria. If the weather conditions violate the criteria, SpaceX’s launch director will call off the launch.
The launch has to occur at a precise moment to allow the Crew Dragon to meet up with the space station, and there is no leeway for delays.
For the safety of the crew, the launch team also has to consider weather and ocean conditions just off the coast, where the capsule would splash down if there were an emergency on the launchpad or farther away in the Atlantic if a problem occurred on the way to orbit.
Who is blasting off?
The astronauts are Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, who have been friends and colleagues since both were selected by NASA to be astronauts in 2000.
They both have backgrounds as military test pilots and have each flown twice previously on space shuttle missions, although this is the first time they have worked together on a mission. Mr. Hurley flew on the space shuttle’s final mission in 2011.
In 2015, they were among the astronauts chosen to work with Boeing and SpaceX on the commercial space vehicles that the companies were developing. In 2018, they were assigned to the first SpaceX flight.
MEET THE ASTRONAUTS
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are good friends, and ready for their trip to orbit.
What are they flying in?
SpaceX has never taken people to space before. Its Crew Dragon is a gumdrop-shaped capsule — an upgraded version of SpaceX’s original Dragon capsule, which has been used many times to carry cargo, but not people, to the space station.
Crew Dragon has space for up to seven people but will have only four seats for NASA missions. If this launch succeeds, it will ferry four astronauts to the space station later in the year.
When will the astronauts arrive at the space station?
The Crew Dragon is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station 19 hours after launch on Sunday, at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. During their trip, the astronauts will test to test how the spacecraft flies and verify that the systems are performing as designed. Unless something goes wrong, the Crew Dragon’s computers usually handle all of the maneuvering and docking procedures.
The astronauts also said they planned to test out the capsule’s toilet.
I'm also going to watch the SpaceX thing be canceled again because of the weather at LIVE NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV. If despite the odds the SpaceX thing goes to the International Space Station, it will take off at 2:22 PM Chicago time (3:22 PM Florida time).
What Time Is the SpaceX Astronaut Launch? How to Watch
By The New York Times
May 30, 2020 Updated 7:54 a.m. ET
When is the launch, and how can I watch it?
On Saturday, for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in July 2011, NASA astronauts are scheduled to blast off from American soil on an American rocket to the International Space Station. In contrast to astronaut launches in the past when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, will be in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon, which the two astronauts will travel in.
The mission is scheduled to lift off at 3:22 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Coverage of the launch on NASA Television will begin at 11 a.m. The Times will provide live video of the launch.
The first attempt to launch, on Wednesday, was called off about 15 minutes before it was to occur because the weather wasn’t playing nice. SpaceX’s launch directors deemed the risk of lightning and other weather hazards too high to allow the astronauts to lift off safely.
The weather officers said that they expected conditions to clear up about 10 minutes after the scheduled launch time. But in order for the capsule to catch the space station at the right moment the next day, the launch had to go off at the precise time of 4:33 p.m. Eastern time.
How’s the weather looking today?
Not the most promising. Weather forecasts currently give a 50 percent chance of favorable conditions at the launch site. Mr. Musk said on Twitter early Saturday morning that the countdown was proceeding. The next opportunity on Sunday is slightly better, with a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions.
Lifting off in bad weather can be catastrophic to rockets. During the countdown, about 10 members of the 45th Weather Squadron, part of the United States Space Force, keep a close eye on conditions to see if they fall within predetermined launch criteria. If the weather conditions violate the criteria, SpaceX’s launch director will call off the launch.
The launch has to occur at a precise moment to allow the Crew Dragon to meet up with the space station, and there is no leeway for delays.
For the safety of the crew, the launch team also has to consider weather and ocean conditions just off the coast, where the capsule would splash down if there were an emergency on the launchpad or farther away in the Atlantic if a problem occurred on the way to orbit.
Who is blasting off?
The astronauts are Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, who have been friends and colleagues since both were selected by NASA to be astronauts in 2000.
They both have backgrounds as military test pilots and have each flown twice previously on space shuttle missions, although this is the first time they have worked together on a mission. Mr. Hurley flew on the space shuttle’s final mission in 2011.
In 2015, they were among the astronauts chosen to work with Boeing and SpaceX on the commercial space vehicles that the companies were developing. In 2018, they were assigned to the first SpaceX flight.
MEET THE ASTRONAUTS
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are good friends, and ready for their trip to orbit.
What are they flying in?
SpaceX has never taken people to space before. Its Crew Dragon is a gumdrop-shaped capsule — an upgraded version of SpaceX’s original Dragon capsule, which has been used many times to carry cargo, but not people, to the space station.
Crew Dragon has space for up to seven people but will have only four seats for NASA missions. If this launch succeeds, it will ferry four astronauts to the space station later in the year.
When will the astronauts arrive at the space station?
The Crew Dragon is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station 19 hours after launch on Sunday, at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. During their trip, the astronauts will test to test how the spacecraft flies and verify that the systems are performing as designed. Unless something goes wrong, the Crew Dragon’s computers usually handle all of the maneuvering and docking procedures.
The astronauts also said they planned to test out the capsule’s toilet.
Friday, May 29, 2020
SARS-CoV-2
ScienceDaily
Evolution of pandemic coronavirus outlines path from animals to humans
The virus's ability to change makes it likely that new human coronaviruses will arise.
Date: May 29, 2020
Source: Duke University Medical Center
Summary: A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
Conducting a genetic analysis, researchers from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University confirmed that the closest relative of the virus was a coronavirus that infects bats. But that virus's ability to infect humans was gained through exchanging a critical gene fragment from a coronavirus that infects a scaly mammal called a pangolin, which made it possible for the virus to infect humans.
The researchers report that this jump from species-to-species was the result of the virus's ability to bind to host cells through alterations in its genetic material. By analogy, it is as if the virus retooled the key that enables it to unlock a host cell's door -- in this case a human cell. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the "key" is a spike protein found on the surface of the virus. Coronaviruses use this protein to attach to cells and infect them.
"Very much like the original SARS that jumped from bats to civets, or MERS that went from bats to dromedary camels, and then to humans, the progenitor of this pandemic coronavirus underwent evolutionary changes in its genetic material that enabled it to eventually infect humans," said Feng Gao, M.D., professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study publishing online May 29 in the journal Science Advances.
Gao and colleagues said tracing the virus's evolutionary pathway will help deter future pandemics arising from the virus and possibly guide vaccine research.
The researchers found that typical pangolin coronaviruses are too different from SARS-CoV-2 for them to have directly caused the human pandemic.
However, they do contain a receptor-binding site -- a part of the spike protein necessary to bind to the cell membrane -- that is important for human infection. This binding site makes it possible to affix to a cell surface protein that is abundant on human respiratory and intestinal epithelial cells, endothelial cell and kidney cells, among others.
While the viral ancestor in the bat is the most closely related coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2, its binding site is very different, and on its own cannot efficiently infect human cells.
SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a hybrid between bat and pangolin viruses to obtain the "key" necessary receptor-binding site for human infection.
"There are regions of the virus with a very high degree of similarity of amino acid sequences among divergent coronaviruses that infect humans, bats and pangolins, suggesting that these viruses are under similar host selection and may have made the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 able to readily jump from these animals to humans," said lead co-author Xiaojun Li from Duke.
"People had already looked at the coronavirus sequences sampled from pangolins that we discuss in our paper, however, the scientific community was still divided on whether they played a role in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2," said study co-lead author Elena Giorgi, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"In our study, we demonstrated that indeed SARS-CoV-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans," Giorgi said.
In addition to Gao, Li and Giorgi, study authors include, Manukumar Honnayakanahalli Marichannegowda, Brian Foley, Chuan Xiao, Xiang-Peng Kong, Yue Chen, S. Gnanakaran and Bette Korber.
Evolution of pandemic coronavirus outlines path from animals to humans
The virus's ability to change makes it likely that new human coronaviruses will arise.
Date: May 29, 2020
Source: Duke University Medical Center
Summary: A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
Conducting a genetic analysis, researchers from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University confirmed that the closest relative of the virus was a coronavirus that infects bats. But that virus's ability to infect humans was gained through exchanging a critical gene fragment from a coronavirus that infects a scaly mammal called a pangolin, which made it possible for the virus to infect humans.
The researchers report that this jump from species-to-species was the result of the virus's ability to bind to host cells through alterations in its genetic material. By analogy, it is as if the virus retooled the key that enables it to unlock a host cell's door -- in this case a human cell. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the "key" is a spike protein found on the surface of the virus. Coronaviruses use this protein to attach to cells and infect them.
"Very much like the original SARS that jumped from bats to civets, or MERS that went from bats to dromedary camels, and then to humans, the progenitor of this pandemic coronavirus underwent evolutionary changes in its genetic material that enabled it to eventually infect humans," said Feng Gao, M.D., professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study publishing online May 29 in the journal Science Advances.
Gao and colleagues said tracing the virus's evolutionary pathway will help deter future pandemics arising from the virus and possibly guide vaccine research.
The researchers found that typical pangolin coronaviruses are too different from SARS-CoV-2 for them to have directly caused the human pandemic.
However, they do contain a receptor-binding site -- a part of the spike protein necessary to bind to the cell membrane -- that is important for human infection. This binding site makes it possible to affix to a cell surface protein that is abundant on human respiratory and intestinal epithelial cells, endothelial cell and kidney cells, among others.
While the viral ancestor in the bat is the most closely related coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2, its binding site is very different, and on its own cannot efficiently infect human cells.
SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a hybrid between bat and pangolin viruses to obtain the "key" necessary receptor-binding site for human infection.
"There are regions of the virus with a very high degree of similarity of amino acid sequences among divergent coronaviruses that infect humans, bats and pangolins, suggesting that these viruses are under similar host selection and may have made the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 able to readily jump from these animals to humans," said lead co-author Xiaojun Li from Duke.
"People had already looked at the coronavirus sequences sampled from pangolins that we discuss in our paper, however, the scientific community was still divided on whether they played a role in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2," said study co-lead author Elena Giorgi, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"In our study, we demonstrated that indeed SARS-CoV-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans," Giorgi said.
In addition to Gao, Li and Giorgi, study authors include, Manukumar Honnayakanahalli Marichannegowda, Brian Foley, Chuan Xiao, Xiang-Peng Kong, Yue Chen, S. Gnanakaran and Bette Korber.
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