Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Is the ship still stuck?  Not so much:

The giant cargo carrier blocking the Suez Canal was partly refloated early Monday morning, nearly a week after it wedged sideways, threatening the world's global economy.

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi declared mission accomplished later in the day, saying in a statement that “Egyptians have succeeded today in ending the crisis of the stranded ship in the Suez Canal.”

He portrayed the efforts as a patriotic victory that assured the world that Egypt could be trusted with overseeing the 13 percent of all global trade that passes through the crucial waterway.

On the ground, the operation to fully free the vessel was still ongoing and appeared to be moving swiftly. The Suez Canal Authority said in a statement that the Ever Given had been 80 percent refloated, with the stern of the ship pulled away from the shore by roughly 334 feet. On Sunday, it was just 13 feet from the canal’s bank.

While the crew of this ship and others waiting to pass through the canal can now breathe a sigh of relief, it means the end to the cottage industry of memes and the web site produced about the incident.

Yesterday, we linked to the news that Trump coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx concluded that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved in this country had the Trump regime had treated the pandemic more consistently and aggressively.  It bears repeating:

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration, reveals her chilling conclusion in a new CNN documentary that the number of coronavirus deaths could have been "decreased substantially" if cities and states across the country had aggressively applied the lessons of the first surge toward mitigation last spring, potentially preventing the surges that followed.

It is a bracing retrospective from one of the top doctors who was tasked with halting the pandemic, and it comes at a time when many grieving families are still trying to understand how one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world was unable to prevent the loss of nearly 550,000 lives.  [snip]

One area that is drawing new scrutiny is how long it took for former President Donald Trump and his Covid-19 advisers to declare a pause to slow the spread in March 2020 after the initial surge in coronavirus cases began -- and how many lives could have been saved if all Americans had really adhered to the restrictions on gatherings and social distancing. In the new documentary, Birx gives Gupta her gut-wrenching answer when asked how much of an impact it would have made if the US had paused earlier and followed through with the safety measures that were proven to slow the spread.

"I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse," Birx says. "There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."

Of all the shameful legacies of Mango Mussolini/ President Pandemic, the incompetence and self- interest that cost the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives must come first.  Never forget that.

While we are preoccupied with the pandemic, gun violence, voting rights and so much more, it's easy to miss the fact that we've entered a new age of space exploration.  The Mars rover Perseverance is just one example of our return to space, and of the stunning pace of technological advancement in that field.  Infidel writes about one aspect of the Perseverance mission that's representative of that advancement, while paying homage to an earlier era. Here's a brief excerpt:

The current Perseverance rover mission on Mars represents yet another step forward.  It carries a helicopter, named Ingenuity, specially designed for flight on Mars.  When it first takes to the air (probably in early April), it will echo the Wright brothers by achieving the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet, barely a century after we first managed it on this one.  I think the Wrights would have been impressed at how we've carried their work forward.

Designing a helicopter for Mars was a major challenge.  Mars's gravity is only one-third as strong as Earth's, but the atmosphere is only one hundredth as dense, offering little purchase for rotors.  Since low gravity cannot be simulated on Earth on a large scale, it was impossible to test-fly the machine under true Mars-like conditions.  Ingenuity weighs only four pounds and has a rotor span of four feet, so it's comparable in size to a large drone.  Unlike a drone, however, it can't be operated by remote control in real time, because radio signals take several minutes to travel from Earth to Mars (the exact amount of time depends on the positions of the two planets along their orbits).  Ingenuity has its own onboard computers and navigation sensors, enabling it to autonomously carry out instructions transmitted from Earth in advance.

Democrats in the Senate are preparing to go it alone again on President Biden's $3 trillion infrastructure and social safety net program, anticipating no cooperation or compromise from dead- end Republicans:

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is exploring additional use of the budget reconciliation process to pass parts of Biden’s costly “Build Back Better” agenda, according to a Schumer aide.

Such a move could allow Democrats to move forward without support of Republicans, as they did with the recently enacted $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Biden is preparing this week to unveil parts of his next major legislative initiative focused on infrastructure and safety-net programs, which could have a combined cost in excess of $3 trillion.

While most bills requires 60 votes to advance in the Senate, legislation considered under the budget reconciliation process can move ahead with a simple majority.

These Democratic initiatives, like the COVID relief bill, have broad bipartisan support in the country, just not from the Republican sedition caucus in Washington.  Act accordingly!

The trial of Derek Chauvin starts today in Minneapolis:

Opening statements in the high-profile trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck as he lay dying in May 2020, are set to begin at 9 a.m. local time Monday.

Chauvin, 45, is charged with second- and third-degree murder as well as manslaughter in Floyd’s death. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts. 

Video recorded on a bystander’s cellphone and viewed millions of times across the world showed Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, crying out for help as Chauvin, who is white, and two other police officers pinned him to the ground.

Floyd’s killing sparked months of nationwide protests against police brutality and racism and led to a worldwide reckoning against racial injustice.

Not only a reckoning for Chauvin but for the American justice system. 

We finish again this week with the recommendation that a visit to Infidel 753's link round-up to interesting posts from around the Internet would be well worth your time.  As you will note from the excerpt on Perseverance above, you don't want to miss his essays, either.