Wednesday’s news links – Feb. 2, 2022

‘Please Do What Is Right’: Native American Lawmakers Urge Biden To Free Leonard Peltier HuffPost

Fired Dolphins Coach Exposes Damning Belichick Texts in NFL Discrimination Lawsuit Daily Beast

Brian Flores, one of the few Black head coaches in the National Football League’s history, was in the middle of interviewing with the New York Giants last week when he learned the team was leading him on. They’d already passed him over for a white man: Brian Daboll.

Repeated bomb threats rattle U.S. Black colleges and universities Reuters

Fury over early release of Chicago officer convicted of Black teenager’s murder Guardian

Labor unions

Thousands of Uber and Lyft Drivers Want the Right to Unionize. They Face An Uphill Battle Gothamist

More than 50 Starbucks stores now petitioning to unionize TheHill

UPDATE: The Amazon union election rerun in Bessemer, Alabama begins on Friday Feb. 4.

North Carolina fertilizer plant fire forces thousands to evacuate TheHill

pic.twitter.com/941ChS8GU9

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) January 31, 2022

Trump Wants Inquiry Into Why Pence Didn’t Overturn Vote Political Wire

Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines New York Times

Trump promises to ban transgender women from sports if re-elected NBC News

U.S. war drive

Congress to triple US military aid to Ukraine without the public’s consent Stephen Semler

U.S. has recently delivered 500 tons of ammunition to Ukraine. “And this is not the end.” – DM Anti-bellum

Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine The Nation

The Global Gas Crisis Has Made American LNG Hot Again OilPrice

The current gas crisis in Europe is an opportunity for U.S. LNG developers

#COVID19

U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries NYTimes

Oh great, love to read that Joe Biden, who has access to every epidemiologist and public health official on the planet, is getting COVID information from David Leonhardt, and his officials agree with Leonhardt that people are taking COVID too seriously. pic.twitter.com/oD8XZXoI5X

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) January 28, 2022

The Big-Name Journalists Who Are Trying to “Both Sides” Covid TNR

The New York Times’ David Leonhardt and others would have you believe that liberal overreaction to the pandemic is as big a problem as the anti-vax right.

To a certain extent, pieces castigating the vaccinated for their caution are the natural result of a culture that perceives health as a matter of individual risk. “We’re so used to health being something that’s about our bodies,” Dr. Richard Carpiano, a professor of public policy at University of California, Riverside, told me. “Wherever you fall in the political spectrum, left or right, there’s often the belief and argument that it’s my body, it’s my health, and therefore it’s my decision-making.” This belief has flourished in the past hundred years, even—or especially—during the HIV pandemic. “We’re used to things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and even injuries as the things that kill us,” Carpiano said. “We’re not used to this idea where our behaviors can have an impact on other people.” …

Believing that you’ve done everything right, and that gives you a ticket out of the pandemic, has other troubling implications, Carpiano said. “Like I’ve worked up credit, and somehow now I can go out into the world and I’ve got these chips and I can cash them. No, you really can’t yet.” The virus can affect vital social functions, from schools and hospitals to grocery stores and airlines, without leaders ever declaring restrictions, he said, simply because too many people are too sick to work. …

Allowing the virus to spread and infect those who aren’t yet vaccinated also has terrible repercussions for our health system—and for those who tried the best they could, like Katherine Jane Ripley, the 33-year-old breast cancer survivor in Idaho who died of a blood infection while waiting in the emergency department for an open bed. Try telling guilt-stricken children who brought the virus home to vulnerable relatives that most people are just fine.

Narratives that prioritize the risk levels of the most privileged fail “to understand that infectious disease inherently involves social interaction—we live and interact with people with different vaccination statuses and different (known and unknown) risks from infection,” Tomori said. People don’t make decisions based on theoretical individual risk—they make decisions in relation to one another, she said.

There are indeed “two Covid Americas,” but not in the way commentators like Leonhardt envision it. There are those who are still at genuine risk, and those who feel too inconvenienced to protect them. The former group have no choice but to take Covid seriously. The least the latter group could do is stop suggesting that those who value the vulnerable are pathologically silly.

Palestine

Israel’s antisemitism accusations become more meaningless than ever in row over Amnesty apartheid report Emad Moussa

Tonga

China’s navy comes to the rescue amid Australia’s huge failure News.com

Honduras

Fearing Corruption Charges, Honduran Defense Minister Requests Asylum from Biden The Intercept

See yesterday’s news links here

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