Saturday Snippets is a regular weekend feature at Daily Kos.
• Donald Trump touts “super-duper missile” at unveiling of official Space Force flag: The new banner represents the first branch of the military initiated since the U.S. Air Force was separated from the Army in 1947. The new missile, Trump claims, will be 17 times faster than anything the Chinese or Russians have. As my colleague and civilian rocket enthusiast Mark Sumner wrote in January about U.S. research into hypersonic missiles, the prospect of these weapons is scary indeed. They could arrive at their target many times faster than cruise missiles and ICBMs. This leaves almost no time to detect, decide, and defeat them. All that’s left for a defender is a massive counterstrike, a nuclear exchange that in the global aftermath, as scientists pointed out in the 1970s, the living would envy the dead.
Trump’s claim for the missile’s alleged speed, laconically confirmed by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, is more than a bit hard to believe. Russian President Vladimir Putin late last year boasted that the Kremlin’s hypersonic Avangard missile can hit 27 times the speed of sound, nearly 21,000 mph, and fall like a meteor on enemy targets. It could carry a nuclear warhead of 2 megatons, 133 times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima 75 years ago. If the “super-duper” U.S. missile Trump claims with Esper’s help can go 17 times faster than the alleged speed of Russia’s hypersonic missile, it would race to its target at 352,000 mph. Meaning it could hit a target on the moon in 45 minutes or 17 days on Mars if there were anything to blast on either orb. Of course, when it comes to telling the truth about weapons systems or much of anything, Putin and Trump are peas in a pod.
• As with other programs, the pandemic has forced a budget hit on California’s climate mandates: Democratic Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed funding cuts to deal with what has been projected as a revenue deficit of $54 billion as a consequence of the economic response to the coronavirus. The state’s carbon cap-and-trade program pays for climate programs, which includes incentives for buying clean cars, electric buses, and off-road freight equipment. Newsom had been expecting that 2020-2021 cap-and-trade auctions would generate $2 billion. But oil refineries and cement factories that are big spenders in cap-and-trade auctions because they are big greenhouse gas emitters. They likely will be running at reduced levels for months to come, if not longer. Anne C. Mulkern at E&E News reports that clean car incentives aren’t a priority for whatever money is generated at the auctions. And that means the state mandate to reduce emissions 40% below what they were in 1990 by 2050 could sputter since California’s transportation sector is its largest emissions source. Without incentives, the conversion to more zero-emission vehicles, including electric buses and trucks, could be harder to achieve.
• Justin Amash decides he won’t run for president in 2020.
• With tourists and their money gone because of the pandemic, controlling wildlife poachers has become more difficult: While trying save black rhinos in Kenya, for instance, armed rangers are running into poachers who are more daring. The rhinos are prized for the huge sums that their horns can bring among people convinced falsely that they have medicinal qualities and by buyers seeking impressive-looking bracelets, beads, and necklaces. Although the black rhino population has been slowly growing, the species remains “critically endangered,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. At Ol Pejeta, there are more than 130 black rhinos, the largest population of the beasts in East and Central Africa. The conservancy’s managing director, Richard Vigne, told the Associated Press that protecting them is pricey—about $10,000 per year per rhino.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Amnesty International asks the Trump regime to release Reality Leigh Winner: Charged with “unlawful retention and transmission of national defense information,” the 28-year-old Air Force veteran and former intelligence contractor for the National Security Agency was sentenced in August 2018 to more than five years in prison for sharing with The Intercept a classified NSA report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. That report concluded that “Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before” the election. Amnesty International takes the position that Winner should be protected by whistleblower laws. She was instead prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which along with the eventually court-overturned Sedition Act, are among the more problematic U.S. laws ever passed. Amnesty International asks that she be freed because Winner has already served the majority of her sentence, the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where she is being held, has one active case of COVID-19 and one death from the virus, and she has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and bulimia, all of which Amnesty says can add to her vulnerability during the pandemic.
• Virginia chef plans to reopen fancy restaurant with mannequins in place as part of required social distancing: The Inn at Little Washington first planned to open on May 15, but Gov. Ralph Northam said there would be nothing but outside dining at 50% capacity for the first couple of weeks. That wouldn’t cut it at the luxury eatery. The 50% capacity rule will be still in place on May 29, but eating inside will be allowed. So chef Patrick O’Connell, a drama major in college, came up with a solution. Life-size mannequins will be seated strategically at various tables to put some space between the breathing diners. He has been working with Shirlington’s Signature Theatre to get these human dolls dressed in 1940s-era fashions. To enhance the effect, the wait staff will pour wine for them and to ask about their evening. O’Connell has also created masks with Marilyn Monroe smiles and George Washington chins. He didn’t explain how one eats with a mask on.
• Pandemic is stigmatizing healthcare workers in India, Egypt, Mexico, and elsewhere: Five Indian health workers dressed in protective suits seeking to quarantine contacts of a confirmed COVID-19 patient were attacked by a stone-throwing, insult-shouting mob. “Some people felt that the doctors and nurses will come and take their blood,” said Laxmi Narayan Sharma, the health union president in Madhya Pradesh, in central India. In Guadalajara, Mexico, the nation’s second-largest city, physicians and doctors at one hospital were warned to ditch their scrubs before checking out of work from their shift because of hostility healthcare workers have encountered on the street. Reaction among some Mexicans has been so serious that the government called out the National Guard to protect hospitals.