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"And then you break into it, you might have some berries down here, but this will be empty. There is no wheat inside the wheat head."

Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.

Earlier this year, Oregon declared drought zones for eight counties, and six more have requested it since. Now the drought is rapidly expanding into usually cooler and wetter western Oregon, according to Ryan Andrews, a hydrologist for the state's Water Resources Department. He says the thirsty ground will absorb whatever rain comes, meaning streams and rivers will get little water.

The Berg's aren't the only ones suffering. The region is parched from near the Canadian border clear to the edge of Nevada, with triple digit temps on the way making it worse.

On her ranch, Berg says she's also worried about 1,000 acres of native grass seeds she has to plant this year into dry soil for a government conservation program. She says with all the Western wildfires in recent years, the wild grass and forage seeds have become expensive. She hates to plant them in shallow, bone-dry soil only to lose the crop if there's not sufficient rain.

Jeff Marti, a drought expert for Washington's Department of Ecology, says it hasn't been this dry since the 1920s.

"It's the story of the irrigation haves and the have nots," he says. "Meaning those folks who get their water from rivers or storage, are probably going to be fine for their irrigation needs. But the dryland users and the folks that have cattle that depend on forage on the rangelands may be more challenged."

Looking ahead, Marti says the warming climate may mean more rain for the Northwest, but also much less snowpack that melts sooner. That could stress water supplies even more.

A bit west of Alderdale, Washington, cattle rancher Gary Hess is also having a hard time with the drought. His grass-fattened mother cows bawl at their calves, wanting them to stay close and away from the cattle dog. But he only has enough irrigated pasture for a small part of his herd, the rest are on dryland range. So Hess recently sold 70 mother cows with calves at their sides to another operator in Wyoming. They had many more good calves in them, and he hated to see them go. But he has no dryland grass to keep them.

"When you have to sell younger cows, that's a disappointment," Hess says as he tears up a bit. "With the kind of weather we've had the last couple of years, and the drought and the lack of feed and lack of water, we just finally had to cut back."

This spring it's also been windy here, further drying out the landscape like a blow dryer. Hess is thinking he'll have to sell more cows soon just to survive. He says it's hard to lose animals and bloodlines that he's worked so hard to build up. He figures it could take him up to a decade to build his herd back up without going into debt.

Most ranchers say they don't have time to dwell on the trucked-off cattle or lost crops. They're busy applying for federal disaster aid. And they're also keeping an eye out for wildfires that are always top-of-mind in the dry, hot summer, but expected to be worse because of this year's terrible drought.

“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We had an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit of a climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and destructive changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”

it’s important to recognize the example Carter set for looking ahead, in a culture that prizes soundbites and short-term gains. “Carter was a trained engineer who believed in science,” Speth points out. “He understood things on a global scale, and believed in forecasting. Preparing for the long run is rare in politics.”

“If there is a gene for duty, responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or no potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born with it.”

Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four

That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another

What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything.

These days, the tourists are gone, mostly. But — and here’s the point — the bars, restaurants, and clubs are still full. I pass by them on my daily walk to the park and wonder: what are these people doing? How are they sitting there so close to one another, with no social distancing in place, laughing, joking in the middle of a literal pandemic that’s exploding all around them? What the?

The people I pass by in the bars are made of two social groups, largely. Young people, and the working class. That’s the same group, in a sense, since most young people are working class, until they amass enough wealth to rise beyond it

They have made a choice. Their beer and burger or cocktail and steak matters more than stopping the spread of a deadly disease. What the?

This group is putting the most vulnerable in society at profound risk. Those who are already ill, and immunocompromised. Those even lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them — minorities, the underclass, and so forth, among whom death rates are astronomical. The elderly, the frail, the aged.

Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends. What the?

The groups who are now apparently completely indifferent to spreading Covid seem to have taken their cues from leaders. Young people and the working class seem to have no conscience or compunction left whatsoever about spreading Covid

To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children. Are they right?

There is a kind of toxic indifference that seems to have spread through Western societies. Life itself is treated with a kind of shrugging fatalism — especially those of the vulnerable. It is literally valued less than a night out at the pub by much of society.

The attitude of toxic indifference is what the West seems to share in common now, and that is why it has been brought to its knees by Covid.

the West” is not monolithic. Certainly, toxic indifference is not at the same level across all of it

let me discuss the most extreme examples — America and Britain — to highlight where toxic indifference comes from: leadership.

In Britain and America, Covid cases have now exploded well past their first peak. America is approaching 100,000 cases per day — the point at which social breakdown will begin. Britain is hitting more than that, on a per capita basis. And yet neither of these societies has a national lockdown.

uccessful societies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and many more — deliberately crunched the curve. Their strategy was to eradicate Covid, through what’s now a global template of best practices — lock down, test, trace, quarantine, isolate, and so forth.

The approach of Western leaders, in other words, was reactive, hesitant, and cautious, not decisive, swift, and proactive:

Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died

Western leaders, in other words, modelled toxic indifference for their societies. They gave people a license to be indifferent, by acting largely indifferent themselves.

Young people justify it by saying that “they need to have social lives” — as if they weren’t spending most of their social lives online before Covid, and the working class by saying they need to work. Both of those arguments are partially true. But it’s truer to say that these are groups which have become dangerously indifferent to preserving the value of the lives of the vulnerable.

The young and the working class are punching down, as American leftists would put it.

More formally, more accurately, Covid has made Western societies predatory ones. The young and working class are exploiting and abusing those more powerless than them

Neither group seems to consider the possibility much that society needs to come together to defeat the pandemic, once and for all, and the only way that can be done is to put the vulnerable first.

America treating Covid indifferently is no surprise, after all — it’s a nation where kids are gunned down in schools, diabetics are simply left to die, people beg strangers online for money to pay for crippling healthcare costs

But it’s more surprising to see Europe turning predatory due to Covid, or having Covid expose its vulnerability to becoming predatory

I don’t mean to single the young and working class out. That is missing my point. What I am saying is that toxic indifference is trickling down in the West. From elites, like leaders, to the bourgeois — that’s been the case for the last few decades

Indifference is trickling down from the elite and the bourgeois, to the working class and the young.

we know where a society of indifference ends. It ends in America. In stupidity, ignorance, violence, hate, racism, brutality, and the poverty and despair which underlies it all.

The indifferent cannot act collectively, therefore they cannot invest, transform, change, unite, come together, and therefore they cannot live in a modern, functioning society, with an expansive, sophisticated, supportive, generous social contract

So what about climate change? Mass extinction? Ecological collapse? The massive waves of depression and ruin those will unleash — in the next decade? How can societies that can’t unite, act wisely, behave responsibly to fight Covid come together to do much about even larger catastrophes?

Covid reveals the decivilizing of the West. As I mentioned, Margaret Mead said the fundamental test of civilization is the healed femur: that someone took the time and effort to heal someone else. It is the absence of indifference and the presence of care, in other words

What made the West special, once upon a time, was not its brutality, but its idea of civilization, as the elevation and nourishment of every life, with dignity, purpose, belonging, truth, justice, and, more crucially, the idea that freedom was a society that was able to act in a civilised way.

freedom became free-dumb: the idea that my right to be abusive, exploitative, ignorant, violent, selfish — to carry a gun to Starbucks or deny you healthcare and retirement — came to prevail

If the pattern of the West’s decaying attitudes, the spread of the foolish American idea of free-dumb as “freedom,” is what Covid has revealed — I punch down, on the person below me, I exploit and abuse the person even lower than me in the socioeconomic hierarchy, because that is what I must do to survive, or at least what I have been taught to do to feel good and worthy — then the simple fact is that the West has little future

Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?

In a simpler way, maybe the simplest, what I am talking about is a lack of simple human goodness. That is what Mead’s Femur points to — the presence of goodness — and it is what is missing in America and Britain. They are now societies with a massive, gaping, jaw-dropping lack of human goodness, and Covid is just the latest example. But that deficit spells real trouble — it isn’t some kind of abstract moral concern.

Covid is a cold wind, and it shows that the flame is flickering. If anything, it shows us the future of civilization — in Mead’s sense, as the absence of violence, and the presence of decency, dignity, care, nourishment, equality, of human goodness realized — may lie in the East.

The study reveals, for the first time, the genetic sequence of the virus that may have infected Mr. Trump and dozens of others, researchers said.

Viruses constantly mutate, picking up tiny, accidental alterations to their genetic material as they reproduce. Few mutations alter how a virus functions. But by comparing patterns of mutations across many genetic sequences, scientists can construct family trees of a virus, illuminating how it spreads.

The genomes believed by these researchers to be connected to the White House outbreak do not identify a recent geographic source, in part because they are unusual.

The results show that even weeks after it was identified, the White House outbreak would be better understood by sequencing samples of more people who were infected.

In a study released on Thursday, the C.D.C. cited genetic sequencing and intensive contact tracing that documented an super-spreading event at a high school retreat in Wisconsin.

But the Trump administration is not known to have conducted its own genetic analysis of people infected in the outbreak. The White House declined to respond to questions on genetic sequencing of Mr. Trump and the cluster of aides and officials who tested positive or became ill.

Scientists not involved in the research who reviewed the results agreed with the conclusion that the two samples sharing rare mutations strongly suggested they are part of the same outbreak.

“These genomes are probably going to be identical or nearly identical to the genome that infected the president,” said Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

For months, the White House minimized the threat of the virus and eschewed basic safety precautions at official events, like wearing a mask or keeping people six feet apart.

At least 11 people who attended a Rose Garden celebration on Sept. 26 for Judge Barrett, which included an indoor event without masks, became infected with the coronavirus, including Mr. Trump.

The work is convincing, and it is the best way to piece together the progression of such an outbreak, said David Engelthaler, head of the infectious disease branch of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, where he and colleagues have sequenced thousands of genomes to track the spread of the coronavirus, including devastating outbreaks at Native American reservations in the state.

Earlier this year, Mr. Bolsonaro lashed out at two reporters who asked about a corruption case against one of his sons. He told one he had a “terribly homosexual face” and said to another that he was tempted to smash his face in.

Mr. Cuenca saw his criticism as comparatively high-minded. He said he disdains the Universal Church, which has grown into a transnational behemoth since its founding in the 1970s, because he believes it fueled Mr. Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency, enabling ecological destruction, reckless handling of the coronavirus pandemic and institutional chaos.“I was totally bored, distracted, procrastinating and angry over politics,” Mr. Cuenca said. “What I wrote was satire.”

Taís Gasparian, a lawyer in São Paulo who has defended several people who faced similar bursts of almost-identical, simultaneous lawsuits, said plaintiffs like the Universal Church abuse a legal mechanism that was created in the 1990s to make the justice system accessible and affordable to ordinary people.

The type of action filed against Mr. Cuenca doesn’t require that a plaintiff hire a lawyer, but defendants who don’t show up in person or send a lawyer often lose by default. Universal Church pastors began a similar wave of suits against the journalist Elvira Lobato after she published an article in December 2007 documenting links between the church and companies based in tax havens.The timing and the striking similarities among the lawsuits filed against Ms. Lobato and Mr. Cuenca make it clear they were copy-paste jobs, Ms. Gasparian said.

the 10 countries with the highest deaths per capita were all in Latin America or the Caribbean.

deep-seated skepticism among people like Mr. Arriaga — the workers who feed Mexico City and much of the nation — turned to shock, and eventually to resignation, as their neighbors, friends and loved ones died and their neighborhood became ground zero for the outbreak.

Officials had posted signs warning of Covid-19 and urging workers to report illnesses. In the beginning, most ignored them.“I think they made it up, to raise prices on the poor,” Mr. Arriaga said of the virus in March

A new reality set in for many: A prolonged economic shutdown was clearly impossible. People could wear masks, and distance as much as possible, but almost no one could afford to stay home. They had to keep working.

For the vast majority of people, risking illness or death has simply become the price of survival.

Mr. Arriaga’s own attempts to stay away from the market lasted only a month before he blew through his life savings and trudged back to work in fear.“I’ve got nothing left,” he said on a recent weekend, bracing himself for another long night in the market. “It’s either go out there and face the virus, or sit here and starve.”

Now, Mexico has the fourth-highest death toll in the world, with more than 70,000 lives officially lost to the virus. Experts say the real number may be tens of thousands more than that.

Tomas BravoMexico City8h agoGreat article. Even living in the same city there are different realities playing out, and this gives a good insight into the stories of some of the worst struck by the pandemic. Some local media have talked of these issues, but there is an ongoing effort from the government to deny these allegations. It is nice to see a story told from the perspective of individuals through which the bigger issues that have paved the way for this crisis are highlighted

(b) we see no arguments about mask wearing in CDMX stores/areas, and witnessed concerns about customers shooting up USA grocery stories if masks are enforced,

gtodonGuanajuato, Mexico3h ago@Ignacio Colin Perhaps in your neighborhood of sprawling Mexico City, the "community is strong and doing its part." Where I live, in Guanajuato, about half the people on the streets, and even in the stores, decline to wear masks, and half of those who do wear masks don't wear them properly; they appear to think they're chin-guards. The same is true in nearby León, a much larger city. In the state of Guanajuato, only San Miguel de Allende, with its large foreign population, takes Covid seriously.

BVINew York7h agoPowerful article with powerful images. I felt close to the shopkeepers and their families. The intimacy of these stories and revealing personal impact in such detail, without judgment, makes the story so much more human. "At every level, there is simply less." A sadly perfect summation of this pandemic's impact.

IvanMemphis, TN9h agoTwo failures seem to be conspiring to make this a catastrophe. First the governments failure to institute simple low cost and effective measures to reduce the spreed - like mandatory and enforced masks in crowded public areas. Second the failure of the public to take it serious and follow common sense guidance - because of paranoia about the motives of experts and government. I guess they are not that different from the US, except they have less resources to counter the predictable outcomes of these failures.

gnacio ColinMexico City8h agoOnce again, we are portrayed as a country that diminishes the virus’ impact and downplays it. It’s a great read but tbh most of the responsibility lays on the President, who has been adamant about employing techniques that do not combat the virus. Nonetheless, Mexico City’s government led by a PhD, Claudia Sheinbaum has done a great job and has countered the President in many ways regarding the management. We have a dormant President who chooses to look elsewhere instead of looking for solutions (he’s done the same with medication purchases, education, ecology, human rights commissions, to say the least). The Mexican community is strong and is doing its part on mitigating this national (and global) tragedy.

D. HendersonMexico City4h ago@Jorge Romero and @ E. Voigt, you have points and they are well taken. I live in CMDX and work in rural MX. In July, we made a "necessary" risky cross-country drive to see Ohio family b/c we suspect that such is impossible until a vaccine in spring 2021 or later. We used masks, face shields, alcohol solutions when at two hotels & gas stations. Some anectodal sharing

Like many people in Iztapalapa, they felt a sense of shame associated with the virus.“There’s a stigma,” said Mr. Dominguez, the organizer. “No one wants to admit they had it.”

ExPatMXAjijic, Jalisco Mexico7h ago@observer " We shouldn't be reporting on these "poor countries" as if we are so far removed on our American pedestal any longer." Thank you. Mexico is a magnificent country and the people remind me of how Americans treated each other with kindness and friendliness when I was young. They make eye contact on the streets, wish you a good day, you'll see teenage boys taking young siblings places with care and loving. There are some places in the US that this happens but a lot more places that it doesn't. Is the government corrupt? Certainly. But they are open about it while the US government is equally corrupt but hides it behind religion or other convenient excuses. We have been adopted" into a few Mexican families and attend birthdays, wedding, and fiestas. This article made me want to cry. The poor in Mexico are struggling to survive just as the poor in the US are similarly struggling. This article put faces on the essential workers who are risking their lives to feed their families (and the rest of the country) which I think is needed so the rest of us who are lucky can identify with what this disease is doing to people.

(c) CDMX is MASSIVE, centro de abastos is massive, hard to relay really its size and diversity and intensity. It IS "formally" and "informally" opening up again for many of the reasons explained in this article; it "feels" like a deal is being made with the COVID-19 devil (only time and the virus will dictate outcomes).

ONE. Thank you NYT for this article and to the commentators for their sharing. Good. TWO. When comparing citizen behavior in CDMX streets to what we saw in TX, TN, AR, KY, OH we note (a) NOW 95-100% of people in CDMX streets, metro, tianguis (markets) use masks, compared with 40-50% (or less depending on USA area),

PaulRio de Janeiro10h agoI cannot speak for Mexico, but I can speak for Brazil, where many cities have seen their numbers plummet, sometimes by over 90%. This is the case in Rio where much has been open for weeks, months in the case of malls and many other public places, without dire consequences.

At this very moment I personally know more people sick in Europe than I do here in Rio or even in Brazil. This is not to minimize the impact that Covid had on Latin America, on Brazil and on Rio. The opposite in fact: it is close to undeniable that some measure of herd immunity was attained in many of the hardest hit places, including New York City, northern Italy and several Brazilian cities.

d) urban CDMX life is different than rural MX life (and other MX cities) always and now; yet, there is a general lack of trust across the board about info and institutions, so much so that we know the death rate IS not accurate, many die in their homes rather than go to hospitals). Survive is what we all must do.

The recovery of places like Manaus, Recife, Rio, São Paulo and other Brazilian cities has been woefully underreported by the New York Times and others. It is too bad because an analysis of the data and of the facts on the ground could yield valuable insight for other countries and cities, especially in poor or emerging countries.

misinformation was as rampant as the virus itself.Ms. Aquino’s cellphone brimmed with clips sent via WhatsApp. Some claimed that the virus was a Chinese conspiracy, others that bleach was a cure. Even President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his own theories, contending that a clean conscience helped prevent infection.

“I’ve heard government is paying people to claim their loved ones died from Covid,” Ms. Aquino whispered. “I have two friends who were offered money.”At best, the rumors sowed confusion and doubt. At worst, they were a death sentence.

A dull acceptance of the new reality filled Iztapalapa: Coronavirus is a necessary risk, and the reward for taking it is merely survival.

Thank you for this story about our new home country. We live far from Mexico City in the state of Jalisco where the governor and local officials took the virus seriously. So far their efforts have been rewarded with per capita numbers of cases around 20 per 100,000, some of the consistently best results anywhere in the world.

I was born and raised in Mexico and all my family is still there. Back in March I received video in which a central de abastos worker mocks the pandemic and people who are quarantining calling them lazy, and those wearing masks, gullible. The video to me helped illustrate the hard truth that México, like the USA, has parallel narratives. There are those who believe the science and consume fact-checked news, like my relatives. And there are also many who believe conspiracy theories or folk remedies, including misinformation on YouTube. I believe the official tally of the sick and dead is much lower than the real numbers. This disease is exposing the fragility of Mexico’s institutions, much like it has American ones.

As a full-time resident of Mexico I can attest that most Mexicans either have had a family member ill from Covid and/or have lost a family member to Covid. It has attacked not only low income but also middle and upper classes. It is rampant here but unfortunately the wealthy have better access to adequate health care. Most Mexicans I know are very vigilant about mask wearing; unfortunately the American tourists who come to holiday here are not vigilant and are reluctant to wear masks.

ilToronto

Rachael EiermannLos Cabos, Mexico

Brad BurnsMexico

Election experts have calculated that, in a 20-year period, fraud involving mailed ballots has affected 0.00006 percent of individual votes, or one case per state every six or seven years.

Among the billions of votes cast from 2000 to 2012, there were 491 cases of absentee-ballot fraud, according to an investigation conducted at Arizona State University’s journalism schoo

intentional voter fraud is extremely uncommon and rarely organized, according to decades of research.

In June, The Washington Post and the nonprofit Electronic Registration information Center analyzed data from three vote-by-mail states and found 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of dead people in 2016 and 2018, or 0.0025 percent of the 14.6 million mailed ballots.

Mr. Trump’s effort to discredit mail-in voting follows decades of disinformation about voter impersonation, voting by noncitizens and double voting, often promoted by Republican leaders.

Voting by mail under normal circumstances does not appear to give either major party an advantage, according to a study this spring by Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research.

But many conservative outlets have promoted the idea that fraud involving mailed ballots could tip the scales in favor of Democrats.

Mr. Stedman said right-leaning outlets sometimes conflated fraud with the statistically insignificant administrative mishaps that occur in every American election

In a similar cycle, the Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative publications magnified the reach of a deceptive video released last month by Project Veritas, a group run by the conservative activist James O’Keefe. The video claimed without named sources or verifiable evidence that the campaign for Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, was collecting ballots illegally.

Stephen J. Stedman, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, said he thought “about disinformation in this country as almost an information ecology — it’s not an organic thing from the bottom up.”

Breitbart, The Washington Examiner and others amplify false claims of rampant cheating in what a new Harvard study calls a “propaganda feedback loop.”

The Washington Examiner, Breitbart News, The Gateway Pundit and The Washington Times are among the sites that have posted articles with headlines giving weight to the conspiracy theory that voter fraud is rampant and could swing the election to the left, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by data.

“EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of What Appear to be Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up — We are Working to Verify.” The envelopes turned out to be empty and discarded legally in 2018. Gateway Pundit later updated the headline, but not before its original speculation had gone viral.

Pennsylvania’s elections chief that the discarded ballots were a “bad error” by a seasonal contractor, not “intentional fraud.” Mr. Trump cited the discarded Pennsylvania ballots several times as an example of fraud, including in last month’s presidential debate.

“FEDS: Military Ballots Discarded in ‘Troubling’ Discovery. All Opened Ballots were Cast for Trump.” Headlines on the same issue in The Washington Times were similar: “Feds investigating discarded mail-in ballots cast for Trump in Pennsylvania” and “FBI downplays election fraud as suspected ballot issues found in Pennsylvania, Texas.” A Washington Times opinion piece on the matter had the headline “Trump ballots in trash, oh my.”

“DESTROYED: Tons of Trump mail-in ballot applications SHREDDED in back of tractor-trailer headed for Pennsylvania.” The material was actually printing waste from a direct mail company.

RIGGED ELECTION!” He linked to a Breitbart article that included a transcript of Attorney General William P. Barr’s telling the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that voting by mail “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.”

In that election, awful as the choices were, it was necessary to support Edwards. Bumper stickers read “Vote For The Crook: It’s Important.”

Reed used this example to show why voting for Clinton was so necessary in a race against Donald Trump, regardless of Clinton’s long record of terrible policies. “Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger,” Reed said. “It’s important.”

He, and many other famous leftists like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West, are saying the same thing this time around. “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics,” West commented.

Some people on the left find this argument very difficult to stomach, though. In a recent conversation on the Bad Faith podcast, Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas debated Chomsky about his stance.

In response to the “vote Biden to stop Trump” argument, they and others ask questions like the following:  But if we are willing to vote for the Democrat no matter how awful they are, what incentive will the Democratic party have to ever get better? How are we ever going to get better candidates if we don’t have some standards? Is there really no one we wouldn’t support, if they were the “lesser evil”?

while they are important, they can also seem strange if we examine how they would sound in other contexts. After all, think back to David Duke in 1991. Or the German election of 1932. Would it have seemed reasonable, faced with a Klan governorship, to ask: “But if I vote for Edwards, won’t I be incentivizing corruption? Isn’t the lesser evil still evil? Shouldn’t I demand Edwards stop being corrupt before I give him my vote?”

It’s also a mistake to think that the decision about whether or not to vote for Democrats in a general election can operate as an effective form of political pressure on Democrats. The mainstream Democratic Party does not see losing elections as a sign that it needs to do more to excite its left flank. John Kerry did not look at the 2000 election and think “My God, I need to work hard to appeal to Nader voters.”

The answers to these questions are: (1) maybe, but it doesn’t matter in the situation we’re currently in (2) yes (3) no, because if he declines to stop being corrupt, you’re still going to have to give him your vote, because the alternative is putting a Klansman in office, and “do unlikely thing X or I will help white supremacists win, or at least not work to stop them” is an insane threat to make.

The easy way to avoid being troubled by having to vote for people you loathe is to give less importance to the act of voting itself. Don’t treat voting as an expression of your deepest and truest values

Don’t let the decision about who to vote for be an agonizing moral question. Just look at the question of which outcome out of the ones available would be marginally more favorable, and vote to bring about that outcome

if faced with two bad candidates, forget for the moment about the virtues of the candidates themselves and look only at the consequences for the issues you care about.

Voting can have immensely important consequences—the narrow 2000 election put a warmongering lunatic in power and resulted in a colossal amount of unnecessary human suffering.

The mainstream (I would call it “propagandistic”) view of political participation is that you participate in politics through voting. But instead, we’re better off thinking of voting as a harm-reduction chore we have to do every few years.

(Reed compares it to cleaning the toilet—not pleasant but if you don’t hold your nose and get on with it the long-term consequences will be unbearable.) Most of our political energy should be focused elsewhere. 

Reed used an illuminating comparison to explain why it was so important in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. In the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial primary, the Republican candidate was former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. The Democratic candidate was the infamously corrupt Edwin Edwards, who would ultimately end his career in prison on charges of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud. It’s hard to imagine anyone you could possibly trust less in public office than Edwin Edwards… except David Duke.

it overemphasizes the role of “deciding who to vote for in the general election” as a tool of politics. One way to get better Democrats in general elections is to run better candidates and win primaries. Another would be to build an actually powerful left with the ability to coordinate mass direct action and shape the political landscape

the general election vote itself is not how we effectively exercise pressure, in part because it would be unconscionable to actually go through with anything that made Donald Trump’s win more probable. The threat not to vote for Biden is either an empty one (a bluff) or an indefensible one (because it’s threatening to set the world on fire).

The conversation between Chomsky, Gray, and Texas frustrated everyone involved, as these conversations often do. Essentially, for most of the hour, Gray and Texas asked variations of the same question, and Chomsky offered variations of the same answer. They appeared to think he was ignoring the question and he appeared to think they were ignoring the answer.

The question that is on the ballot on November third,” as Chomsky said, is the reelection of Donald Trump. It is a simple up or down: do we want Trump to remain or do we want to get rid of him? If we do not vote for Biden, we are increasing Trump’s chances of winning. Saying that we will “withhold our vote” if Biden does not become more progressive, Chomsky says, amounts to saying “if you don’t put Medicare For All on your platform, I’m going to vote for Trump… If I don’t get what I want, I’m going to help the worst possible candidate into office—I think that’s crazy.” 

In fact, because Trump’s reelection would mean “total cataclysm” for the climate, “all these other issues don’t arise” unless we defeat him. Chomsky emphasizes preventing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change as the central issue, and says that the difference between Trump and Biden on climate—one denies it outright and wants to destroy all progress made so far in slowing emissions, the other has an inadequate climate plan that aims for net-zero emissions by 2050—is significant enough to make electing Biden extremely important.

This does not mean voting for Biden is a vote to solve the climate crisis; it means without Biden in office, there is no chance of solving the crisis.

TEXAS: If these capitalist institutions result in recurring ecological crisis, and existential ones, as they do, then isn’t the real fight against those institutions instead of a reform that maybe gets us over the hump in 30 years

CHOMSKY: Think for a second. Think about time scales. We have maybe a decade or two to deal with the environmental crisis. Is there the remotest chance that within a decade or two we’ll overthrow capitalism? It’s not even a dream, okay? So the point that you’re raising is basically irrelevant. Of course let’s work to try to overthrow capitalism. It’s not going to happen *snaps fingers* like that. There’s a lot of work involved. Meanwhile we have an imminent question: are we going to preserve the possibility for organized human society to survive?

The important point here is that the question is not whether we attack capitalist institutions “instead of” reforms. The reforms are necessary in the short term; you fight like hell to force the ruling elite to stop destroying the earth as best you can even as you pursue larger long-term structural goals.

Gray and Texas note to Chomsky that for people who are struggling in their daily lives, climate may seem a somewhat abstract issue, and it may be hard to motivate them to get to the polls when the issue is something so detached from their daily reality. Chomsky replied that “as an activist, it is your job to make them care.”

Some have pointed out a tension in Chomsky’s position: on the one hand, he consistently describes voting as a relatively trivial act that we should not think too much about or spend much time on. On the other hand, he says the stakes of elections are incredibly high and that the future of “organized human life” and the fate of one’s grandchildren could depend on the outcome of the 2020 election.

There’s no explicit contradiction between those two positions: voting can be extremely consequential, and it can be necessary to do it, but it can still be done (relatively) briefly and without much agonizing and deliberation.

However, if the presidential election is so consequential, can we be justified in spending only the time on it that it takes to vote? Surely if we believe Trump imperils the future of Earth, we should not just be voting for Biden, but be phone-banking and knocking doors for him. Well, I actually think it might well be true that we should be doing that, reluctant as I am to admit it.

I actually asked Chomsky about this, and he said that he does believe it’s important to persuade as many people as possible, which is why at the age of 91 he is spending his time and energy trying to convince people to “vote against Trump” instead of sitting by a pool and hanging out with his grandkids

one thing is evident: if we want to look toward electoral strategies for change, it had better be mass-based oppositional models like the Bernie campaign, not third-party protest candidacies or the threat of nonvoting

The question of how to win power does not have easy answers. What to do from now until November 3rd is, however, easy; what to do afterwards is much, much more complicated no matter who wins. But political activism is not an untested endeavor. We can study how social movements set goals and win them.

Noam Chomsky’s view of electoral politics is, I believe, a sensible one. In fact, it’s not his; as he says, it’s the “traditional left view,” just one that we’ve lost clarity on

People mistakenly assume that by saying “vote against Trump,” Chomsky is putting too much stock in the power of voting and is insufficiently cynical about the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s completely the opposite: he puts very little stock in voting and is perhaps even more cynical about the Democrats than his critics, which is why he doesn’t think it’s surprising or interesting that Biden is offering the left almost nothing and the party is treating voters with contempt.

We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico. The border should not be a line that divides cultures and fragments their desert environment. It is a juncture where two nations connect, where history is shared, where cultures are alive and where a common future must unfold.

I think we’ve already reached the point where it’s clear that real change is finally coming, and that fossil fuel’s main hope is to slow and shape that change.

The crucial job of activists, then, is to always be demanding that we move faster.

If you want a really powerful signal, one came last week from Teen Vogue, which published an op-ed encouraging young people to not open accounts with banks that are reckless with the planet. (The authors’ “Not My Dirty Money” pledge can be found here.)

Greta Thunberg and fellow climate strikers sent an open letter to the European Union. (I am among the tens of thousands of people who signed onto it.) It says, “You must stop pretending that we can solve the climate and ecological crisis without treating it as a crisis.”

Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.

But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate.

And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation.

There is an optimum climate for human productivity — average annual temperatures between 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — and much of the planet’s far north is headed straight toward it.

And as the climate warms, Canada will move into the ecological sweet spot for civilization, benefiting from new Arctic transportation routes as well as an expanded capacity for farming.

This is why a group of Canadian business executives and academics have called on their government to turn the country’s immigration system into a magnet for the planet’s most talented people, hoping to nearly triple Canada’s population by 2100.

The race for prosperity in a climate-changed world is about achieving domestic self-reliance and also expanding geopolitical influence.

but Tchebakova’s research suggests that if humans continue to emit carbon dioxide at high rates, roughly half of Siberia — more than two million square miles — could become available for farming by 2080, and its capacity to support potential climate migrants could jump ninefold in some places as a result.

The wait may not be especially long. This season, crops of winter wheat and canola seed outside Tchebakova’s own city of Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia produced twice the yields as the year before.

As Vladimir Putin himself once glibly put it, a couple of degrees of warming might not be so bad: “We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”

But agriculture offers the key to one of the greatest resources of the new climate era — food — and in recent years Russia has already shown a new understanding of how to leverage its increasingly strong hand in agricultural exports

Russia’s agricultural dominance, says Rod Schoonover, the former director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and a former senior State Department analyst under the Obama and Trump administrations, is “an emergent national security issue” that is “underappreciated as a geopolitical threat.”

In 2010, in what was a rare and early official assessment of climate risk, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review warned that climate change “could have significant geopolitical impacts,” contributing to poverty, starvation, drought and the spread of disease

The current plan invites any Russians willing to relocate themselves in Siberia and the Far East, including in the Birobidzhan area of the Jewish Autonomous Region, to buy properties at 2 percent interest.

"Cities that have been built to date from scratch are more like real estate projects," Lore said in a promotional video for the project. "They don't start with people at the center. Because if you started with people at the center, you would immediately think, 'OK, what's the mission and what are the values?'

On Telosa's official website, Lore explains that he was inspired by American economist and social theorist Henry George. The investor cites capitalism's "significant flaws," attributing many of them to "the land ownership model that America was built on."

BIG's founder, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, is meanwhile quoted as saying that Telosa "embodies the social and environmental care of Scandinavian culture, and the freedom and opportunity of a more American culture."

It is not the first new city being planned by Ingels' firm, which famously installed a ski slope on top of a Copenhagen power plant and has co-designed Google's new headquarters in London and California. In January 2020, Japanese carmaker Toyota revealed that it had commissioned BIG to create a master plan for a new 2,000-person city in the foothills of Mount Fuji. Although significantly smaller than Telosa, the project, dubbed Woven City, promises autonomous vehicle testing, smart technology and robot-assisted living.

I’d have to learn to cultivate it, not least by centring the stories of communities that have always known how unsafe the world can be.

Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

“climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”

yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.

according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried

The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions.

Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another

These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential.

A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis

Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”

there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.

Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children

“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”

Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.

The notion has spurred a boom in beekeeping, most notably among corporations eager to demonstrate their green bona fides.

A malady originally dubbed disappearing disease had been afflicting honey bees for decades. In the fall of 2006, an American beekeeper named Dave Hackenberg checked on his 400 hives and found that in many, most of the worker bees had disappeared. Other beekeepers started to report that they were losing upward of 90 percent of their colonies. The phenomenon was renamed colony collapse disorder. The cause remains unclear, but experts tend to blame pesticides, an invasive parasite, a reduction in forageable habitat and climate change. An alarm was sounded, and “save the bees” became a rallying cry.

“There are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.”

there is a widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade.

Still, the save-the-bees narrative persists. Its longevity stems from confusion about what kind of bees actually need to be rescued. There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees in the world, and many people don’t realize they exist. That’s because they don’t produce honey and live all but invisibly, in ground nests and cavities like hollow tree trunks. But they are indispensable pollinators of plants, flowers and crops.

Researchers have found that many species of wild bees are, in fact, declining. So trying to save them makes eminent sense. But hobbyists and corporations, not to mention luminaries like Beyoncé and Queen Camilla, are drawn only to the seven or so species of honey bees — the one group supported by a multibillion-dollar agribusiness and that doesn’t need the help.

Hives are now getting installed at what beekeeping association leaders say is a record pace. As with the B&B Hotel, they are typically motivated by an impulse to do something positive for the environment that is also highly visible — an apiary form of greenwashing

New York City has a similar problem, says Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association. In February, MoMA asked him to install the hives it recently showed off. He declined.“The population is already overwhelming the finite floral resources,” he said. “We don’t need more honey bees here.”

Today, hives are so ubiquitous in some places, especially urban areas, that the amount of honey each yields is dropping. Slovenia now produces less honey than it did 15 years ago, according to government figures, even though it has more than doubled the number of hives in the country. That’s because there is not enough nectar to go around, said Matjaz Levicar, a Slovenian beekeeping instructor, and honey bees are consuming it to survive rather than turning it into honey.

Setiya’s treatise belongs to a particular genre: brainy books for the general public that present lessons for modern living from Aristotle, Montaigne or the Stoics.

in his view, given that there is much in life that makes us miserable, and that we can neither change nor ignore, we might as well find ways of dealing with the reality. Trying to live a perfect life in difficult circumstances, he states, “only brings dismay.”

Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize

We tell someone about an illness or a fight we had; they try to convince us not to worry so much, or to focus on the bright side. Worse still, they might tell us that “everything happens for a reason.”

such thinking can easily serve as an excuse to avoid compassion.

Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit.

Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths

Plato, too, he reminds us, held that true happiness lies in recognizing the lies of ordinary life, famously imagined as a cave filled with shadows

If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.

what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one

“Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.

Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumati

But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.

Setiya offers neither simple takeaways nor explicit instructions. Instead, he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle.

The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention.

Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies

Ideally, it also helps us imagine what it is like to inhabit the bodies of others, imbuing us with “presumptive compassion for everyone else.”

Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely.

By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.

Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.

He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime

Although “Life Is Hard” claims to be a work of accessible philosophy, many of its insights are borrowed from other areas — literature, journalism, disability studies

Setiya is certainly right that we should work to reduce injustice, to “mend the future” no matter how long that future may last. Still, it is hard for many of us to quell the fear that it may be too late to prevent an ecological catastrophe, or to ignore our grief for what has already been lost.

it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.

McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.

Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.

After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.

McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.

From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur

capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.

Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational

Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”

This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world

Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.

On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”

the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”

The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it

Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart

by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles

McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America

In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”

the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”

But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.

“get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition

recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted

where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”

however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.