Wednesday, November 24, 2021

November 24

He Convinced Voters He Would Be Like Merkel. But Who Is Olaf Scholz? Germany’s next chancellor is something of an enigma. He comes to power with a dizzying array of challenges, raising questions about whether he can fill the very big shoes of his predecessor......... Terse, well-briefed and abstaining from any gesture of triumph ........ he perfected the art of embodying her aura of stability and calm to the point of holding his hands together in her signature diamond shape. .........

“He’s like a soccer player who studied videos of another player and changed his game”

............ Rarely has a German leader come into office with so many burning crises. As soon as he is sworn in as chancellor in early December, Mr. Scholz will have to deal with a surging pandemic, tensions at the Polish-Belarussian border, a Russian president mobilizing troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, a more confrontational China and a less dependable United States. ........ and served in two governments led by Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, most recently as her finance minister. ....... Mr. Scholz grew up in Hamburg, the city he would later run as mayor. His grandfather was a railway man, his parents worked in textiles. He and his brothers were the first in his family to go to university. ........ the youthful idealist who mellowed into a post-ideological centrist might be turning more radical again in his 60s. ........ Three years ago, when his party’s approval ratings were hovering near record lows, he told The New York Times that the Social Democrats would win the next election. ...........

Like Ms. Merkel, he has a reputation for being a safe pair of hands and a decent person with a bipartisan aura.

.......... keeping the peace in an unusual and untested three-way coalition with two ideologically divergent parties: the progressive Greens, who want to spend 50 billion euros, or about $56 billion, on a green transition, and the pro-market Free Democrats, who will control the finance ministry and with it the purse strings. .......... if things go smoothly, Mr. Scholz’ Germany could turn out to be a pivotal power for European cohesion, for more trans-Atlantic unity on fighting climate change and for confronting strategic competitors like China and Russia, and, some hope, for a revival of social democracy in different parts of the world. .......... Not since the second term of former President Bill Clinton have both the White House and the German chancellery been in the hands of center-left leaders. ......... Belarus, a Russian ally that has been funneling migrants to the Polish border in an apparent attempt to destabilize the bloc.



What the Arbery and Rittenhouse Verdicts Couldn’t Tell Us Many of us wish that the public could witness the degradation and absurdity of everyday legal proceedings. ............ An officer testified that after the shooting, Mr. Rittenhouse approached his car with his weapon strapped to his chest and his hands up in surrender, but officers ordered him to get out of the way and rushed past him to search for the shooter. Apparently, it did not enter their minds that the baby-faced white teen could be the culprit. So Mr. Rittenhouse went home, and ultimately turned himself in. ............ Anyone who has practiced criminal law or even attended a trial knows that plenty of judges are not the objective and omniscient arbiters of popular imagination: They are idiosyncratic and sometimes biased....... Convicting Kyle Rittenhouse would have sent Kyle Rittenhouse to prison — that’s all. Laws and legal procedures are not ethical codes and cannot sustain the weight of moral reckonings on a national scale. Looking to these trials to repair social damage, answer a larger question or fulfill some notion of justice is a mistake.

Beyond the futility of hope, looking to the criminal system — which was heavily influenced by slave codes and still serves to reinforce racial hierarchies — further centers it in our moral discourse.

............ The injustice extends beyond police abuse. Conspiracy theories exacerbate public health crises. The attack on voting rights by the right leads us ever closer to minority authoritarianism. And urgent warnings of climate disaster have gone unheeded for decades. A win for the prosecution in the Rittenhouse case may have felt vindicating for those on the left side of the culture wars, but it would not have addressed any of these problems. .........

Neither would it have loosened the hold of racism on our legal system.

........ To get a sense of the way racism pervades our criminal justice system, I would recommend paying less attention to blockbuster cases and instead visiting a local criminal court on a random day and witnessing the parade of low-income people of color shuffled before the court, most of them accused of minor, victimless offenses. Pay attention as a judge decides, within minutes, how much money will be required for each person to get out of a cage. Listen to the defense lawyer describe the life circumstances of each client. And then ask what can be done. What structures, literal or figurative, must be dismantled, built or changed in order to create the change we seek? ...... That work is harder, and it’s slower, but maybe one day my clients will not be called “bodies.”

Maybe they will be afforded the same dignity and deference given to Mr. Rittenhouse.

Trump Wanted to Punish China. We’re Still Paying for It.
Family Arguments
Can Liberals Survive Progressivism?
The Novel That Riveted France During Lockdown Arrives in the U.S. “The Anomaly,” by Hervé Le Tellier, sold more than a million copies during an anomalous time. Now the genre-bending novel is translated into English.

How the $4 Trillion Flood of Covid Relief Is Funding the Future From broadband to transportation to high-tech medical manufacturing, benefits from America’s pandemic money infusion will linger. ......... Nurses wore trash bags as medical equipment. Nobody could buy toilet paper. ....... To date, the federal government has allocated $4.52 trillion in response to Covid-19 — a staggering figure, one that exceeds the entire federal budget in 2019. Most of that funding comes from just two bills: the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, passed in March 2020 ($2.2 trillion), and the American Rescue Plan Act, or A.R.P., from March 2021 ($1.9 trillion). ....... $10 billion to Moderna and $11 billion to Pfizer. .......

one of the biggest, fastest biomedical-research efforts that we’ve ever launched

........ The record turnaround from the Covid-19 vaccine will set a new standard for how fast other treatments can be developed with the appropriate funding. “Anything that involves getting an F.D.A.-​approved drug or medical device — whether it’s heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, lupus — all of these have the potential to benefit from these new approaches to clinical trial,” Fenton says. ........

U.S. government investment in nondefense R.& D. has fallen, slowly but significantly, over time, from 5.8 percent of the federal budget in 1966 to 1.5 percent in 2020.

....... “It felt like going back into a deployment again, where we knew a little bit of information but not the whole developed picture.” ....... Infrastructure, conjuring as it does images of potholes and rusted water pipes, often goes overlooked; politicians would rather be associated with cutting ribbons than maintaining systems. Paradoxically, that has meant the great leaps in American infrastructure often come from moments of great lack: the greater the crisis, the larger the possible investment. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which established the Federal Housing Administration and brought electricity to the rural United States; the Great Recession led to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which directly funded improvements to 2,700 bridges and 42,000 miles of road. ......

In the 1930s, modernizing the country meant electricity. In the 2020s, it means broadband.

......... “and it’s really necessary now to think about broadband in an infrastructure space.” The digital divide is sharp in the United States: Census Bureau data shows that broadband access is concentrated in cities and in the Northeast, Florida and the West Coast. In rural areas and the South, West and Midwest, far fewer Americans have access. .........

In the South, 111 counties have broadband subscription rates at or below 55 percent.

........ a majority of counties in Alaska have zero access to broadband ......

nearly one in five tribal reservation residents had no home internet access

........ nearly $1 billion for tribes, which face some of the worst internet access in the country ........ The American Rescue Plan included $20.4 billion exclusively for broadband access, and gave states and localities about $388 billion in flexible funding that can be used for broadband. ...... broadband access in areas of upstate New York with fewer than 10 subscribers per mile, where offering service often isn’t cost-effective.



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