Vanessa Barbara | Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, Is Bringing Devastation to the World – The New York Times

By Vanessa Barbara

Ms. Barbara is a contributing Opinion writer who focuses on Brazilian politics, culture and everyday life.

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“SÃO PAULO, Brazil — “I’m an army captain,” Jair Bolsonaro said in 2017. “My specialty is killing.”

He has been true to his word. In just over three years in office, Mr. Bolsonaro has overseen an administration notable for its disregard for human life. There are, most immediately, the country’s 660,000 deaths from Covid-19 — the second most in the world, after the United States. Throughout the pandemic, he obstructed social distancing, sabotaged mask wearing and undermined vaccination. He maintains that he “didn’t make a single mistake during the pandemic.” So we have to assume it all went to plan.

Then there are the guns. A series of presidential decrees loosening gun controls have opened the floodgates. Last year the federal police issued 204,300 new gun licenses, a 300 percent increase from 2018. Permits granted by the army to hunters and collectors rose 340 percent. The country, which recorded the most homicides in the world in 2021, is awash with firearms.

And then there’s the planet. Deforestation in the Amazon has reached its highest rate in 15 years, thanks in no small part to the president’s eager dismantling and defunding of environmental enforcement agencies. Not content with his efforts so far, Mr. Bolsonaro is now attempting to push through five bills that will strip away Indigenous rights, open up the Amazon to rampant profiteering and bring untold damage to the planet.”

Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances – Wikipedia

Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.^[1]

The memorandum prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, “except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.^[2][3]

Source: Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances – Wikipedia

‘Like Living in a Horror Movie’: A Ukraine Town Dying a Slow Death – The New York Times

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak

Photographs by Tyler Hicks 

March 30, 2022

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“HULIAIPOLE, Ukraine — The shelling begins in earnest a little before midnight, well after the sky has turned oily black, the cell towers have powered down and the stray dogs have begun barking into the night.

There is no electricity or running water in Huliaipole. There is just darkness and long minutes of silence when the ticking of battery-powered wall clocks or the grating of open gates in the cold wind are anxiously scrutinized until the next explosion thuds somewhere nearby, rattling windows. And bones.

And then it happens again. And again. A high-pitched screech and then a boom. Sometimes the shells get closer. Or farther away. Maybe, for a few hours, they stop altogether. But it’s been the same routine for almost a month in this town along the front lines in eastern Ukraine, with each night bringing the same question: Where will the next one land?”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

Europe gratefully accepted help when they were invade and occupied. It is time for them to pay back. The US and parts of Europe guaranteed Ukraine’s independence when it agreed to give up over 500 nuclear warheads after the fall of the Soviet Union.

NATO should push the Russians out of the Ukraine. Some things are morally correct, and some things are worth taking risks for, even dying for.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.net

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Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances

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Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances

Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with the Republic of Belarus’/Republic of Kazakhstan’s/Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
U.S. President Clinton, Russian President Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Kravchuk after signing the Trilateral Statement in Moscow on 14 January 1994
Full text
Ukraine. Memorandum on Security Assurances at Wikisource

The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.^[1]

The memorandum prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, “except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.^[2][3]“

David Lindsay: This explains why Putin claimed self-defense. But is suggests we have an obligation to the Ukraine.

Bret Stephens | What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate? – The New York Times

“. . . But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?

“There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.”

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

Bret Thank you. It surprised me to learn late in life, from writers in the New York Times, that intelligent people sometimes have to learn to understand and hold two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time, understanding that there is some truth to both. There might be some relativity to reality, especially since reality might be unknowable with certainty.

I might dare to add to your sophisticated analysis, that all the critics of Putin might be completely right, but it makes no difference. Putin doesn’t need, and possibly wasn’t after Kiev, at least, as his primary objective. For these reasons, and many others, I support NATO to enforce a no fly zone. Some things are worth dying for.

David Lindsay is a military historian, and the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion,” an historical novel about a famous 30 year civil war in Vietnam, 1770-1802, who blogs at InconvenientNews.net.

Antarctica and the Arctic are at least 50 degrees warmer than average | AP via PBS NewsHour Weekend

“Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius), which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.

The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).

It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.

“They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time,” Meier told The Associated Press Friday evening. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.”

“It’s pretty stunning,” Meier added.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/hot-poles-antarctica-arctic-70-and-50-degrees-above-normal

Thomas L. Friedman | How to Defeat Putin and Save the Planet – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

“It is impossible to predict how the war in Ukraine will end. I fervently hope it’s with a free, secure and independent Ukraine. But here is what I know for sure: America must not waste this crisis. This is our umpteenth confrontation with a petro-dictator whose viciousness and recklessness are possible only because of the oil wealth he extracts from the ground. No matter how the war ends in Ukraine, it needs to end with America finally, formally, categorically and irreversibly ending its addiction to oil.

Nothing has distorted our foreign policy, our commitments to human rights, our national security and, most of all, our environment than our oil addiction. Let this be the last war in which we and our allies fund both sides. That’s what we do. Western nations fund NATO and aid Ukraine’s military with our tax dollars, and — since Russia’s energy exports finance 40 percent of its state budget — we fund Vladimir Putin’s army with our purchases of Russian oil and gas.

Now, how stupid is that?

Our civilization simply cannot afford this anymore. Climate change has not taken a timeout for the war in Ukraine. Have you checked the weather report for the North and South Poles lately? Simultaneous extreme heat waves gripped part of Antarctica this month, driving temperatures there to 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average for this time of year, and areas of the Arctic, making them more than 50 degrees warmer than average.

Those are not typos. Those are crazy superextremes.

“They are opposite seasons — you don’t see the North and the South (Poles) both melting at the same time,” Walter Meier, a researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, recently told The Associated Press. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.” And last Friday, no surprise, scientists announced that an ice shelf the size of New York City had collapsed in East Antarctica at the beginning of this freakish warm spell.

It was the first time humans observed “that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse,” The A.P. noted, adding that if all the water frozen in East Antarctica melts, it would raise sea levels more than 160 feet around the world.”

” , , , , , The best and fastest way to do that, argues Hal Harvey, the C.E.O. of Energy Innovation, a clean energy consultancy, is by increasing clean power standards for electric utilities. That is, require every U.S. power utility to reduce its carbon emissions by shifting to renewables at a rate of 7 to 10 percent a year — i.e., faster than ever.

Utopian? Nope. The C.E.O. of American Electric Power, once utterly coal dependent, has now pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, using mostly natural gas as a backup. Thirty-one states have already set steadily rising clean energy standards for their public utilities. Let’s go for all 50 — now.

At the same time, let’s enact a national law that gives every consumer the ability to join this fight. That would be a law eliminating the regulatory red tape around installing rooftop solar systems while giving every household in America a tax rebate to do so, the way Australia has done — a country that is now growing its renewable markets faster per capita than China, Europe, Japan and America.

When cars, trucks, buildings, factories and homes are all electrified and your grid is running mostly on renewables — presto! — we become increasingly free of fossil fuels, and Putin becomes increasingly dollar poor.” -30-

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

To the Editors of the New York Times,

I appreciate that you dropped your pay wall, for subscribers to share articles about the Covid 19 epidemic. I now think you should drop your pay wall, for subscribers to share articles about climate change and the sixth extinction. I would even argue, that the free articles about covid, are far less important.

As a hawk for the environment, I dare suggest, that the extinction of millions of species, including our own, is a bigger crisis that the pandemic. In fact, pandemics are one of nature’s ways to keep humans from overpopulating themselves to the point of their own oblivion.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.Net

State Death Tax Hikes Loom: Where Not To Die In 2021

Ashlea Ebeling

Senior Contributor

Personal Finance

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17 states and the District of Columbia impose estate or inheritance taxes separate from the federal … [+]

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Update: Iowa repeals its inheritance tax.

“As states address budget woes due to the pandemic, one place they may turn to for revenue as they have in past economic crises is death taxes. Already the District of Columbia has toughened its estate tax levy, effective January 1, 2021. In August, Mayor Muriel Bowser signed the “Estate Tax Adjustment Act” reducing the exemption from $5.67 million in 2020 to $4 million for individuals who die on or after January 1, 2021. A resident dying in 2021 with a taxable estate of $10 million would owe nearly $1 million in estate tax to D.C.

Seventeen states and D.C. impose their own estate or inheritance taxes separate from the federal estate tax levy, which hits far fewer people today. For 2021, the federal estate tax exemption is $11.7 million per person. It’s set to drop back to $5 million per person with inflation adjustments in 2026. But President-elect Joseph Biden has called for the federal estate tax to revert back to its 2009 level: $3.5 million per person. That change could come to help pay for fighting the pandemic and the infrastructure build out he’s promised. ”

Source: State Death Tax Hikes Loom: Where Not To Die In 2021

Margaret Renkl | The Boring Bill in Tennessee That Everyone Should Be Watching – The New York Times

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

“NASHVILLE — When a new energy infrastructure bill was introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly earlier this month, people could be forgiven for paying little attention. Compared to the legislature’s recent follies — an abortion bill that would out-Texas Texas, or a book-banning bill that would override the recommendations of school librarians, or a handgun bill that would let 18-year-olds carry a gun without a permit — an energy-infrastructure bill seems like a big yawn.

Thing is, almost nothing undertaken by the Tennessee General Assembly can be safely overlooked. That boring energy infrastructure bill, which passed the Tennessee Senate last Thursday, would let the state override local laws blocking fossil-fuel projects in their communities. In other words, if this bill becomes law, the state could allow an oil company to run a pipeline through a city over the objections of the city itself.

This may seem like a picayune matter with no relevance outside the state of Tennessee, but it’s exactly the kind of bill that ought to attract national attention — not because it’s happening in Tennessee but because it’s happening, or is poised to happen, in red-state legislatures across the country, according to the Climate Reality Project. Republicans are using rising gas prices as an opportunity to give the fossil-fuel industry whatever it wants in their states, even when their own cities have been trying to protect the environment and their people from that very industry.

Legislative pre-emption is part of a political ground war down here. These routine bills rarely rise to the level of national attention, but their presence explains as much about our national politics — and about what shapes our national elections — as any newly restrictive abortion law or newly lax gun bill does.”

Opinion | We Study Virus Evolution. Here’s Where We Think the Coronavirus Is Going. – The New York Times

By Sarah Cobey, Jesse Bloom and Tyler Starr and Nathaniel Lash

Dr. Cobey studies the interaction of immunity, virus evolution and transmission at the University of Chicago. Dr. Bloom and Dr. Starr study virus evolution at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Mr. Lash is a graphics editor for Opinion.

“As scientists who study how viruses evolve, we are often asked about the future of the coronavirus. Will it go away? Get worse? Fade into the background of our lives? Become seasonal like the flu?

Here’s what we know: The virus’s Omicron variant was significantly more infectious and more resistant to vaccines than the original strain that first emerged in Wuhan, China. There’s no reason, at least biologically, that the virus won’t continue to evolve. The coronavirus variants that have emerged thus far sample only a fraction of the genetic space that is most likely available for evolutionary exploration.”

‘CODA’ Triumphs at the Oscars, but Onstage Slap Takes Center Stage – The New York Times

By Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling

March 28, 2022Updated 8:33 a.m. ET

“LOS ANGELES — In an Academy Awards ceremony where an onstage altercation between Will Smith and Chris Rock overshadowed the honors, “CODA” from Apple TV+ won the Oscar for best picture, becoming the first film from a streaming service to be welcomed into that rarefied Hollywood club.

The 94th Academy Awards on Sunday had a freewheeling, irreverent tone from their start, with ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences laboring to prove that the Oscars could be lively and culturally relevant. By the ceremony’s end, it was certainly a night for the Hollywood ages.

An emotional Will Smith won the best actor Oscar for his performance in “King Richard” as the fiery, flawed coach and father of the tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams. Moments earlier, the ceremony had been derailed when Smith strode onstage from his seat and — in what at first seemed like it could be a preplanned bit — slapped Rock, who had just cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

Will Smith hits Chris Rock after joke about his wife, Jada.

March 27, 2022

“Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can’t wa Rhiit,” Rock said, a reference to her shaved head. She revealed her alopecia diagnosis in 2018. Demi Moore famously shaved her head to star in the 1997 film “G.I. Jane.” “

David Lindsay:  Thank you Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling for an excellent review of last night’s 94th Oscars, 2022, about 2021. I was delighted that CODA won, and I was one of the 6 percent of viewer s who lasted all the way through The Power of the Dog, which my partner loved.

This year was a record breaker for me. 40 years ago I used to not see any new movies until I watched the Oscars, during which, I would choose the three movies of the year I would see. This year I had actually seen six of the nominees for best picture, Dune, Don’t Look Up, King Richard, CODA, Macbeth, and The Power of the Dog. CODA was the clear winner in my heart, because it was delightful, surprising, funny, exciting, and you could recommend it to your Aunt Mildred and Uncle Joe in the mid west, to watch with their teen age children, and it wouldn’t scar the younger children either. Dune was extraordinary.

I was infuriated repeatedly by the Oscars show last night, and they need a new director, and a return to the good old days, when they showed extensive clips of the best film nominees,and of the other nominees, so the audience can learn about the movies, most of which, we haven’t seen, and don’t know anything about. Making the show an insiders game for those who have already seen all the movies, is a recipe for a bad show that deserves its declining ratings. Bringing back the host, or hosts, was a move in the right direction, but adding an extra 30 minutes of advertising to an already ad laden event was pathetic.

Of the films I saw, I also recommend Don’t Look Up, because it was hilarious satire, about the danger of ignoring the science of the impending climate crisis, by way of ignoring an asteroid headed toward earth. We both loved King Richard, and thought Will Smith was worthy of an Oscar, which is a low bar. Probably all the nominees deserved an Oscar, one shouldn’t take the winners too seriously. That is why the Oscar show has an artistic and moral requirement, to showcase and introduce all the nominees in all the categories, and reduce the speeches thanking my mother, my father, my children, and our pet dog and cat. The recipients should be required to spend part of their speech explaining to people what the movie was about, and why we should take the time to see it. Some of the presenters could talk about the shows, instead of their constant preening.