Good morning everyone!
This morning we’ll start with the continuing weather/energy crisis in Texas.
The Editorial Board of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is rightfully fed up with everything and everyone responsible for the crisis.
After 2011’s epic winter storm — known around here as the one that ruined the Super Bowl in Arlington — agencies at all levels offered recommendations to address the very problems that contributed to this outage, too.
There must be accountability. People must be fired. Companies must be fined and required to do better. Winterization of power plants must be a priority.
The immediate focus, of course, is on getting power back up as quickly as possible. We’re in for days more of this, and lives are at stake. If more electricity can’t be generated, blackouts must be rotated to offer relief to Texans who’ve been without power for a day or more.
Power companies and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, as every Texan now knows, have compounded the problem with miserably poor communication and broken promises. The promise of rotating outages flopped, and no one can explain why in plain English.
Once the crisis is over, laws must change. A thorough investigation of both the public and private actors is necessary. Gov. Greg Abbott’s declaration that ERCOT reform is an emergency priority for the Legislature is a start, but only that. Generators must be required to do a better job of winter preparation, even if the state or consumers must ultimately help pay the bill.
Here is the 357 page report prepared in 2011 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
Duncan Agnew and Julian Aguilar write for the Texas Tribune that the current weather/energy crisis is disrupting the food supply chain for families and food banks.
With grocery stores across the state shuttered for lack of power, supermarkets that remain open have seen supplies dwindle, shortages that ripple over to food pantries that count on grocery store surplus to keep their own shelves stocked.
Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable crops in the Rio Grande Valley have frozen over in what The Produce News described as a “Valentine’s Day produce massacre.” School districts from Fort Worth to Houston have halted meal distributions to students for the next several days, and Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said dairy farmers around the state are pouring $8 million worth of milk down the drain every day because they can't get it to dairies.
Celia Cole, the CEO of hunger-relief organization Feeding Texas, said that so far, eight food banks have asked the state for extra help feeding their communities. Several food banks affiliated with Feeding Texas have also started providing food supplies to emergency warming shelters in the state’s major cities. Wednesday afternoon, the Central Food Bank of Texas canceled its deliveries scheduled for Thursday in Austin and Rockdale.
Native Texan Karen Attiah writes for the Washington Post that the current crisis should turn out the lights on the myth of Texas exceptionalism.
Deeper is the failure of leadership, which the present crisis has placed on full display. Though Judge Clay Jenkins of Dallas County has definitely been a steady hand in the crisis, a number of other Texas politicians have been busily employing shameless gaslighting and partisan scapegoating to keep their partisan bases warm and toasty. In a now-deleted Facebook post, former Colorado City mayor Tim Boyd blasted his city’s residents for being “lazy” and instructed them to “quit crying and looking for a handout!”
Gov. Greg Abbott (R), a day before he gave a formal address to Texans on the disaster on his watch, popped up on Fox News to assert that the blackouts were somehow evidence that Democrats’ Green New Deal would not work. Abbott joined a chorus on the right blaming frozen wind turbines for the shambolic power situation — though wind accounts for only about 10 percent of the state’s winter power supply.
But Republican former governor Rick Perry, also a former U.S. energy secretary, was the one who boiled it all down to that Texas mythos, saying, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Talk about a Texas-size delusion. Our suffering is worth it, so long as we can stick it to the feds!
Julian Lee of Bloomberg News agrees with Ms. Attiah.
And then there’s the Texas exceptionalism. The state’s power grid is largely disconnected from the rest of the U.S. — for political, not technical reasons. That has left Texans largely unable to draw on power supplies from their neighbors, although many of them are suffering similar problems.
Add to that a lack of any sort of capacity market that would pay generators to guarantee back-up supplies or face stiff penalties and you end up with a system that only works when everything runs smoothly.
Mount Holyoke College Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations Andrew Reiter writes for the Boston Globe that he sees little good in establishing a truth commission to get to the bottom of the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. (Pushing fair use on this op-ed.)
A truth commission focused on Jan. 6 would produce very little. In most countries, the fact-finding objective of truth commissions is paramount. They investigate abuses that have been hidden and denied by those who committed them. They document methods of killing and torture, uncover mass graves, locate missing persons, and identify perpetrators. Such facts bring closure to families and discredit authoritarian actors, making it less likely for them to come to power again.
In the United States, however, most of the facts about the events of Jan. 6 are well known. Trump’s speech at the “Save America” rally was public; the insurrection was broadcast on television for all to see; and those who entered the Capitol shared their exploits on social media. What wasn’t seen before was revealed in the detailed video reproductions of the day presented at Trump’s impeachment trial. A commission would bring to light little new evidence.
Effective truth commissions also provide recommendations for a society to move forward. They may advocate for memorials and reparations for victims, accountability for perpetrators, and other types of reforms such as changes to school curriculums.
Those who participated in the insurrection are being arrested and charged, and Trump was acquitted by the Senate Saturday. Other than revisions to security protocols at government buildings, a commission would probably make no useful recommendations.
Moreover, any facts or recommendations would be discredited and dismissed by those on the right and simply reaffirm the views of those on the left. The increase in information on the Capitol insurrection in the past few weeks has moved the public opinion needle very little. The Republican Party has shown no indication of wanting to truly break from Trumpism. Indeed, state parties have voted to censure many of the Republicans who broke ranks and voted to impeach.
Read the entire piece. Especially that last paragraph.
I will link (but not excerpt) Elie Mystal’s piece for The Nation on the NAACP lawsuit utilizing the 1871 Ku Klux Klan statute simply because establishing a truth commission doesn’t have to be the only path to getting at the facts and the truth about the events and underlying causes of the January 6 Capitol Insurrection; we can (and will) do more at the same time.
Bill Scher of Washington Monthly wonders why the Democratic presidential primary schedule should be changed at all.
Going first is highly overrated. The presidential contest with the biggest clout on the Democratic primary schedule isn’t the leadoff hitter: overwhelmingly white Iowa. It’s the state that bats cleanup: majority-Black South Carolina.
To give nonwhite voters more voice in their presidential nominee selection, Democrats diversified their early primary schedule in 2008, moving Nevada, which had a 2020 caucus turnout that was 17% Hispanic, third, and South Carolina, which had a 56% African-American turnout in its 2020 primary, fourth, just following nearly all-white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The system has worked as intended.
Each winning nominee since the change—Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020—has been the candidate preferred by South Carolina voters and, in turn, the majority of African American primary voters. They were all buoyed by big delegate margins in southern states where African Americans comprise a majority of the Democratic electorate, or close to it, starting with South Carolina and carrying over to Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. (All three candidates also won Virginia and North Carolina, which have some “Black Belt” counties with a population that’s more than 40% African American.)
Iowa and New Hampshire historically have helped cull the field, but they haven’t teamed up to effectively determine the ultimate winner since 2004, which was before the elevation of Nevada and South Carolina. Part of the reason why Iowa and New Hampshire can’t easily pick the nominee is that the winner of the first contest doesn’t automatically generate enough momentum to win the second...
I agree with Mr. Scher.
For one, I agree that moving Nevada to third in 2008 was an even more critical move than the one being proposed now for Iowa and New Hampshire.
Second…
I’ve said that I always expected my former United States Senator, Barack Obama, to win the Iowa Caucuses in 2008; in fact, I was more confident that he would win the contest in Iowa than in South Carolina.
So I have to ask: Would Barack Obama have won the first primary if it were held in a more “diverse” state like...Pennsylvania or Georgia?
(FTR, I think that he would have won in that scenario simply because Barack Obama was that exceptional of a presidential candidate at that moment in time and history and I continue to think that we fail to appreciate that fact.)
I’m on board with ditching the caucus system in Iowa, of course. But I’m pretty OK with the schedule as is (especially with the California primary being held on Super Tuesday as opposed to the end of the primary calendar).
Jerusalem Demsas of Vox writes about how exclusionary residential zoning laws maintain racial segregation and poverty for black families. Ms. Demsas also includes some policy recommendations for the Biden Administration.
Neighborhoods matter. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews reported, researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz found in 2016 that moving to a wealthier neighborhood not only increased the likelihood that kids would go to college, but also increased earnings by roughly 31 percent by the time they’d reached their mid-20s.
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Exclusionary zoning laws essentially trap many Black families into low-income neighborhoods by pricing them out of richer ones.
Ending residential segregation would allow Americans to move from poor neighborhoods or cities to richer ones and allow lower-skilled workers to find better-paying jobs. To put a number on it, exclusionary zoning has artificially inflated the price of housing so much that one paper estimated that from 1964 to 2009, it lowered aggregate growth by more than 50 percent.
What sort of conclusions have you drawn from your work in foreign policy?
Foreign policy aims to resolve conflicts and mediate interests peacefully, based on the international rule of law. The network in which every state is enmeshed is complicated, there are different actors who all have very different ideas about society. Internationally, there are also very different cultures, traditions, and religions, not to mention the influence brought to bear by economic interests. Before 1989, debate on foreign affairs was shaped by the Cold War, with reciprocal nuclear threats and the Soviet push for global influence, including in Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, and Afghanistan. During this time, I realized that rhetoric on domestic policy cannot be a substitute for a wise foreign policy, or at least it should not be. There is an art to maintaining relations with countries that have very different social systems, whether that is Russia, China, Turkey, or the Arab world. The trick is to find common ground and seek to dismantle any antagonisms. You have to be guided by your own values, always, but still clearly perceive the world as it really is.
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One more question about the new US president: everyone is saying Germany and Europe should take on more responsibility. But what does “take on more responsibility” mean exactly, in that context?
One example would be the European drone project, something I advocated for in the negotiations that created our coalition government. This a flagship European project, an important indicator of Europe’s ability to act together. Specifically on that one, we work together with France, Spain, and Italy. If you want to have common European security policy, you need to work together on producing concrete defense capacity. If you want to talk the language of power, you need to have the tools of power to hand. Germany must hit the NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, not because the Americans want it, but because that spending is in our own interests. We need to work on improving our own defense capacities.
Does this mean Germany will get more actively involved in armed missions overseas? Because in Afghanistan, it looks more like Germany is withdrawing.
Our missions overseas are determined on our security interests and by our obligations to NATO and the European Union. Exit strategies form part of every mission of our armed forces overseas. From the outset, it was clear that our deployment in Afghanistan would at some point come to an end, and that any decision on that would be closely coordinated with our allies and with the government in Kabul. If the collective assessment is that our further presence is necessary, then our armed forces will continue to have a presence in Afghanistan. In the case of Mali, the operation is a French one, which seeks to maintain stability in the face of international terrorism. This is in both Germany’s and Europe’s interests.
Andrew Joseph of STATnews reports on the new research showing that the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine appears to lose its “neutralization power” against the B.1.351 variant of SARS-CoV-2.
In the new study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Pfizer, BioNTech, and the University of Texas Medical Branch examined how well blood taken from people who had received the companies’ shot fought off a virus engineered to have the key mutations found in B.1.351. They reported that there was about a two-thirds drop in neutralization power against the variant compared to other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
It can be difficult to extrapolate what such lab experiments mean for what happens if someone who received the vaccine is exposed to the variant. For one, these experiments only look at how one arm of the immune system, called neutralizing antibodies, responds to the modified virus. The vaccines generate a range of immune fighters, including other types of antibodies and T cells, so it’s possible that overall people retain more of their defenses in fending off the virus. It’s also possible that even though neutralizing antibodies don’t work as well against the variant, they can still mount enough activity to have an impact.
Moreover, vaccines that are less effective against B.1.351 or other variants that may emerge may still protect people from getting severe Covid-19; it’s just that they’re not as powerful against milder disease.
But based on the available data, some experts fear that the immunity elicited by vaccines won’t last as long against B.1.351 as against other variants, and that the immunizations won’t be able to drag down transmission of B.1.351 as well as they appear to be limiting the spread of other variants.
Serena S. Spudich and David A. Hafler report for the Washington Post that we need more research on the long-term effects that COVID-19 infection has on the brain.
In scrambling to address the many unknowns of how the virus may impact the brain, we rushed in March 2020 to create a specialty consultation service to advise on and learn from these patients. Among a panoply of different conditions, we saw patients who woke up too slowly after long stays in intensive care, who experienced new strokes and who suffered unbearable headaches. Many of these patients died from respiratory or circulatory failure. The majority survived.
The good news was that the severe confusion, headaches and other acute neurologic symptoms for most patients improved as they recovered in the hospital. But as the weeks wore on, we began to notice new syndromes, many of which seemed to persist or even emerge days or weeks after the illness. We learned of new headaches that wouldn’t go away and disturbing changes in sensation on the skin all over the body. Individuals with no prior mood problems reported severe depression or anxiety that interfered with sleep or even caused thoughts of suicide. Frustrated health-care providers and students found going back to their routines at work or school challenging due to difficulties with concentration and multitasking. Patients even presented to our emergency services with new psychoses that unexpectedly emerged, including paranoia, delusions and violent behavior.
Finally this morning, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Angry Grammarian notes some of the new additions to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.
Any measurement of our shape-shifting language is inherently subjective; for example, only one of the words or definitions below (the inexplicably all-caps COVID-19) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, which delivered its own update in December. (But the OED writes it as Covid-19, because the British aren’t monsters.) Here’s a roundup of a few of Merriam-Webster’s most notable (or questionable) additions.
COVID-19, n. — It took just 35 days for this word to go from coinage to official dictionary entry — a record. (The pandemic prompted an unusual midyear update last March.) The previous record-holder was AIDS, which was coined in 1982, entered the dictionary in 1984, and was still ignored by the Reagan administration until September 1985.
@, symbol — Meaning “to respond to, challenge, or disparage the claim or opinion of (someone)” — as in, “don’t @ me” — @ is the quirkiest addition in this year’s class. Good luck figuring out where it goes in the next printed dictionary, when you actually have to alphabetize it.
Everyone have a good morning!