The nature of APR is such that nearly every Sunday, I launch straight into one of this week’s editorials, generally from either the New York Times or the Washington Post. But this morning, I’ve come across something dire enough that it seemed worth communicating even though it falls outside the editorial page.
Amrith Ramkumar has some unpleasant news about something already very unpleasant.
Zika may pose a danger for far many more of us than pregnant women and babies, a new study suggests.
Mosquitoes have now transmitted the virus in a second area in South Florida, officials announced on Friday, as they advised pregnant women not to travel to the zone in Miami Beach. As the virus spreads in the Americas, with more than 10,000 cases confirmed in the United States, researchers are working to understand its subtleties and develop a vaccine.
In addition to causing the birth defect microcephaly, Zika can wreak havoc in our brains' stem cells, researchers from Rockefeller University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology found in a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell Thursday.
Zika virus has been around for some time in Africa. Luckily, the version of the virus that originated there has not been noted to bring either the birth defects, or the neurological damage of the strain that has appeared in the Americas.
Unfortunately, it’s the nastier strain which is now spreading locally in the area around Miami Beach. So, especially if you live in the Southeastern United States, start taking precautions now. Check around your home and neighborhood for items that could hold standing water—which includes things as small as disused water bowls for pets and that cup you left setting next to the shed when you were painting the trim, circa 1997. Mosquitoes breed prolifically in very small containers.
When you’re outside, light-colored clothing seems to help, and even if you normally shun harsher insect repellents like DEET, rethink your position. At least for now.
Work on a vaccine for Zika is underway, and if the Republicans will stop treating a deadly, spreading disease like leverage they can use in the umpteenth attempt to sink Obamacare, things could change quickly. Next summer this threat could be over.
But right now, a single bite, from a single mosquito, can ruin your life. Even if you’re not pregnant. Worse still, it can turn you into a vector to carry the disease to many more people. So take some damn precautions. Please.
Right now, I’m feeling ready to get after not just the Culicidae (mosquitoes) but the Vespidae. I’ll tell you about my gripe with them in a minute.
First, let’s do some pundits…
Leonard Pitts and the Trump trap.
I have a confession to make.
I am tired of Donald Trump.
At this point, November can’t come fast enough. If we could cancel September and October, I’d do so in a heartbeat.
In this, I’m hardly alone. Other pundits have said as much. Even comedians, for whom Trump is the functional equivalent of time off with pay, seem weary of him. As Larry Wilmore of the late, lamented “Nightly Show” recently put it, “Donald Trump has stopped being funny. He’s stopped being outrageous. He’s stopped being politically incorrect. He’s just downright dangerous.”
As so often happens, Leonard Pitts speaks for me. I would love to stop talking about Trump. But I can’t help but revisit aspects of this vile man a dozen times in a day. Including in this column. Sorry.
A couple weeks ago, I got an email from a friend of mine, a former journalist who attended a Trump rally in Jacksonville. He wrote that at one point, Trump insinuated Hillary Clinton is having an affair with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. “I’m surprised,” wrote my friend, “such a repugnant comment wasn’t picked up on by the national media.
A major candidate implying that his opponent is sleeping with another man? How awful is this guy that even a comment like that gets lost in the mix?”
The short answer? Very.
The New York Times wonders at the nation’s ability to survive Trump, even if he doesn’t win.
Donald Trump is heading to November like a certain zeppelin heading to New Jersey, in a darkening sky that crackles with electricity. He is fighting crosswinds and trying new tacks — hiring the head of Breitbart News to run his campaign, trying on a new emotion (regret) in a speech on Thursday night, promising to talk more this week about immigration, his prime subject. There’s still no telling what will happen when the gasbag reaches the mooring.
It could be that the polls are right, and Mr. Trump will go down in flames. But while that will solve an immediate problem, a larger one will remain. The message of hatred and paranoia that is inciting millions of voters will outlast the messenger. The toxic effects of Trumpism will have to be addressed.
Donald Trump has given license to every foul instinct and vile emotion. He’s turned caring, empathy, decency, and plain old manners into “political correctness” that can be dismissed with a stubby-fingered wave. Where conservatism has for decades waged a war against effective government, Trump’s campaign has been an ugly assault on the foundations of civilized society. Getting that hate-genie back in the bottle is going to take a lot longer that it did to unleash.
It’s no wonder that the nativists are feeling inspired, the bigots emboldened. The white supremacist David Duke is running for the Senate. Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s chief purveyor of conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant venom, is the natural ally of a candidate who hints that President Obama is a secret Muslim and who insists that Muslims in New Jersey danced by the thousands as the towers fell on 9/11.
My greatest fear is that Trump shows every sign of not stopping with election day, but rather turning his campaign into a rolling tent revival of hate backed by new media resources. Our democracy is not set up to survive a continuous assault. Trump may not know that, but I’ll bet Bannon does.
Daniel Hayes on Trump and gun lovers.
“The Second Amendment people have tremendous power because they are so united.” So said Donald J. Trump in North Carolina on Aug. 9, in an interview that followed controversial comments he’d made earlier that day. Warning his audience of the danger of Hillary Clinton’s choosing new Supreme Court justices, he seemed to suggest that gun rights activists could take action to stop her.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he said. “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
It was another provocative reminder that the New York real estate tycoon and Republican presidential candidate has made himself the most pro-gun-rights nominee in modern G.O.P. history. He has harnessed the power of the Second Amendment people — a strength that comes less from unity than desperation.
Actually, this is more a point of Trump expressing his more general love of solving problems through violence. But this is a good essay on the appeal of Trump to those who think they’re the last of something which is passing.
Daniel Williams explains how voters who think of themselves as Christians first, came to be backing Mr. Two Corinthians.
As the number of Republican politicians and conservative pundits who renounce Donald J. Trump continues to rise, one important contingent remains steadfast in its support: conservative white evangelicals.
As late as May, a majority of evangelical leaders said they intended to vote against the thrice-married adulterer and longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood. But now white evangelicals are overwhelmingly backing Mr. Trump. James C. Dobson and Richard Land are among the Christian right heavyweights — some of whom expressed grave reservations about the candidate — who are serving on an evangelical advisory board for the candidate. Nearly 80 percent of white evangelicals plan to vote for Mr. Trump, according to summer polling.
If this is makes you crazy, or makes you think these voters are crazy, don’t worry. Unlike so many other things in this election, this one has a simple answer.
Conservative evangelicals are fully aware of Mr. Trump’s flaws, but they are supporting him anyway because they believe his election is the only way they can regain control of the Supreme Court.
Falwell has a pro-Trump piece in this morning’s Washington Post. I’m not linking to it.
Nicholas Kristof is visiting national parks.
It was 100 years ago, in August 1916, that the United States established the National Park Service, after earlier moving to protect lands like Yellowstone and Yosemite. As a result, our nation’s most valuable assets are owned not by private equity tycoons but by you and me.
I backpacked 220 miles through the Sierras this summer with my 18-year-old daughter on the John Muir Trail, perhaps the most beautiful footpath in the world, coursing from 14,500-foot Mount Whitney (the highest point in the contiguous United States) through lush valleys and over snow-clad mountain passes to end at Yosemite National Park.
I’m extremely jealous. Long distance backpacking is my favorite thing, ever, and despite buying new gear magazines each season, I haven’t done anything longer than a few overnights on the Ozark Trail in a decade.
In an age of enormous inequality, these public lands are arguably our most democratic space. Wealth may buy political influence such that to speak of “one person one vote” seems naïve and incomplete. So the most democratic place in America is perhaps not the voting booth but rather our shared wilderness, as long as we sustain it.
Among the many diaries I have laying in my drafts-I-don’t-have-the-guts-to-publish stack is one titled “I love America’s national parks … so let’s close them.” It deals with the dilemma that, though the Park Service is pretty much next to saintliness and populated by fine people, it constantly misuses it’s meager resources to address crowding by building more roads and more parking lots, so more people can noisily traverse a park in a car, getting nothing from it but glimpses through the windshield. In the meantime, programs for education, for dealing with the environment on foot, and especially for protecting the park’s residents from the park’s visitors, almost invariably suffer. For me, those crowing “XX million more people visited a national park this year!” announcements are nothing to brag about. Tell me how fewer people came. And wandered.
The New York Times on an EPA regulation that’s coming soon to a highway near you.
The rule, announced last week by the Environmental Protection Agency, imposes tough new fuel economy standards on the 18-wheelers, buses, delivery trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles that make up only 5 percent of the vehicles on the road but account for 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions of the transportation sector.
The rule completes a suite of ambitious standards that, over time, are expected to deliver not only cleaner big rigs but also cars and S.U.V.s with double the fuel efficiency of current models. Collectively, these standards are an indispensable element of President Obama’s effort to meet his commitment at the December 2015 climate summit meeting in Paris to reduce America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
The really cool thing here? The industry was behind the change.
In this case, industry looked beyond the technological hurdles and saw benefits, the main one being that the $12,000 per vehicle cost of upgrading the fleet would be more than outweighed by projected fuel savings of $170 billion over 10 to 12 years. And executives knew it was long past time to upgrade a category of vehicles that average a minuscule six miles a gallon.
Everything about vehicles is in flux. It’s too early to say if this rule will have a long-term effect, or be a footnote in a future where the current system of trucks is replaced by something radically different. But it’s a good move in any case.
Ruth Marcus on the disgusting ploy from Trump that is still in its early stages.
Donald Trump — he who likes to fly home at night in the comfort of his own plane to sleep in the comfort of his own bed — is at it again on the question of Hillary Clinton’s stamina, or alleged lack thereof.
“To defeat crime and radical Islamic terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina,” he said in Wisconsin. “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina.”
And a day earlier, in case you missed it, “Importantly, she also lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.”
This all goes back to that Breitbart favorite—Hillary fell down once, four years ago, therefore, brain damage. Q.E.D.
It’s obvious what’s going on here. The strength-stamina combo is a gender-age twofer, a double whack at Clinton for the price of one. Strength, what men have and women lack; stamina, with its intimations of go-all-night virility. Clinton, in this depiction, is both a weak girl and a dried-up old crone.
Don’t worry. If they think anyone isn’t getting this, they’ll just say it more clearly.
Kathleen Parker and a positive column. About Trump.
Not only did Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, resign following reports of his involvement in Ukrainian politics, but also Trump hired a woman, Kellyanne Conway, to become his new campaign manager.
And: He suddenly started being nice.
Call it a woman’s touch or the desperation of a faltering candidate, but Trump was even kind of cute Thursday when he expressed regret for some of his ill-chosen words during the campaign, especially those that might have caused personal pain, presumably in others. What’s next, a prayer for forgiveness of sins? …
Will women suddenly forget everything Trump has said while being “too honest”? Will African Americans buy Trump’s promise that their lives will be “amazing” if they vote for him? Will the seed Trump planted of Clinton’s bigotry, seeing blacks only as votes, take root?
No. Because while Trump believes women and minorities are that stupid… they’re not that stupid.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff talks curing Lyme Disease. Using wolves.
Every year, at least 30,000 people — and possibly 10 times that — are infected with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, most in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Symptoms can include fatigue, joint pain, memory problems and even temporary paralysis. In a small minority of cases, the malaise can persist for many months. ,,,
What’s behind the rise of Lyme? Many wildlife biologists suspect that it is partly driven by an out-of-whack ecosystem.
Lyme disease is transmitted by bites from ticks that carry the Lyme-causing bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi. Ticks get it from the animals they feed on, primarily mice and chipmunks. And rodents thrive in the fragmented, disturbed landscapes that, thanks to human activity, now characterize large sections of the Northeast.
If humans have inadvertently increased the chances of contracting Lyme disease, the good news is that there’s a potential fix: allow large predators, particularly wolves and cougars, to return.
I like this plan, seriously. Anything that reduces tick born diseases is okay by me. Plus havng some wolves around would be cool.
About six weeks ago, I came down with blinding headaches that were like a migraine plus ten ice-pick headaches compounded together; spiking temperature that bounced between 100 and 104 several times a day; painful aches in my hands, hips, and knees; loss of appetite; and periods of fatigue so profound it seemed an effort just to shift my eyes. At first, the off-the-cuff diagnosis was Lyme Disease, then it was Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but the characteristic rash didn’t develop. Then it was maybe back to square one. But after three weeks, they finally decided to treat it as if it was RMSF. And I got better.
And now, since I’m telling health-related problems and have already had two insect-related pieces, it’s time to talk Vespidae. Vespidae are better known as “yellowjackets.” They’re a family of highly social wasps that have been around for at least 50 million years. I’m willing to bet that, across all that time, they’ve been a pain in the ass. And elsewhere.
Last week, I was cleaning out an old shed when I moved some boards and found that I’d ripped the top off a strange orange-brown structure. It was about the size of a soccer ball and the interior was filled with a series of inch-thick plates, each slightly apart from and a little offset from the next. It almost gave the impression of a kind of spiraling screw. It was also filled with a few thousand examples of Vespula maculifrons—the Eastern yellowjacket.
As the yellow and black wasps exploded upward, I sprinted for the door, but not before I was stung on the ear, the neck, the arm, the other arm, the back. The back. The back again. One of the little bastards even slipped under my shirt, hammering me four more times before I could smash him. In all, I was stung about twenty times. The Eastern yellowjacket has what is known to be “a very painful sting,” and like the invader under my shirt, they are capable of applying that sting many times. So, yeah, that hurt. Fortunately, I’ve always been one of those people who responded to stings with a few minutes of swearing, and then it was done.
Until this Friday. On Friday, I returned to the shed with two bottles of hornet killer, a long-handled garden rake, some newspaper, and a lighter. With smoke, spray, and energetic beating, I eliminated the nest. For good measure, I waited an hour and came back to spray the escapees who had returned to hover over the former site. I even hummed “Ride of the Valkyrie” as I got all Scorsese on their striped butts.
In all of this, I was stung only once, on the right wrist. It seemed worth it. But yesterday, I found that my “mild reaction” clock had run out. Instead, this final sting generated what’s known as a “moderate local reaction,” which in this case means that my hand is swollen up like a red balloon from which little Trumpian finger-stubs emerge and the skin on my puffed-up arm has that shiny tightness that looks like it could explode with a wet “boom” at any minute.
Insects. We can’t live without them. It’s so tempting to try.