Neutrality Acts of the 1930s

The Neutrality Acts were a series of acts passed by the United States Congress in the 1930s (specifically 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939) in response to the growing threats and wars that led to World War II. They were spurred by the growth in isolationism and non-interventionism in the US following its disillusionment after World War I, and sought to ensure that the US would not become entangled again in foreign conflicts.

The legacy of the Neutrality Acts is widely regarded as having been generally negative; they made no distinction between aggressor and victim, treating both equally as belligerents, and they limited the US government's ability to aid Britain and France against Nazi Germany. The acts were largely repealed in 1941, in the face of German submarine attacks on U.S. vessels and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Background of the Neutrality Acts

The Nye Committee hearings between 1934 and 1936 and several best-selling books of the time, like H. C. Engelbrecht's The Merchants of Death (1934), supported the conviction of many Americans that the U.S. entry into World War I had been orchestrated by bankers and the arms industry for profit reasons. This strengthened the position of isolationists and non-interventionists in the country.

Powerful forces in United States Congress pushing for non-interventionism and strong Neutrality Acts were the Republican senators William Edgar Borah, Arthur H. Vandenberg, Gerald P. Nye and Robert M. La Follette, Jr., but support of non-interventionism was not limited to the Republican party. 

The Ludlow Amendment, requiring a public referendum before any declaration of war except in cases of defense against direct attack, was introduced several times without success between 1935 and 1940 by Democratic Representative Louis Ludlow. 

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Democratic President Roosevelt and especially his Secretary of State Cordell Hull^] were critical of the Neutrality Acts, fearing that they would restrict the administration's options to support friendly nations. Even though both the House and Senate had large Democratic majorities throughout these years,^] there was enough support for the Acts among Democrats (especially Southerners) to ensure their passage. Although Congressional support was insufficient to override a presidential veto, Roosevelt felt he could not afford to snub the South and anger public opinion, especially while facing re-election in 1936 and needing Congressional cooperation on domestic issues. With considerable reluctance, the president signed the Neutrality Acts into law.

Neutrality Act of 1935

Roosevelt's State Department had lobbied for embargo provisions that would allow the President to impose sanctions selectively. This was rejected by Congress. The 1935 act, passed by Congress on August 31, 1935, imposed a general embargo on trading in arms and war materials with all parties in a war. It also declared that American citizens traveling on warring ships traveled at their own risk. The act was set to expire after six months. When Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, the State Department established an office to enforce the provisions of the Act. The Office of Arms and Munitions Control, renamed the Division of Controls in 1939 when the office was expanded.

Roosevelt invoked the act after Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935, preventing all arms and ammunition shipments to Italy and Ethiopia. He also declared a "moral embargo" against the belligerents, covering trade not falling under the Neutrality Act.

Neutrality Act of 1936

The Neutrality Act of 1936, passed in February of that year, renewed the provisions of the 1935 act for another 14 months. It also forbade all loans or credits to belligerents.

However, this act did not cover "civil wars", such as that in Spain (1936–1939), nor did it cover materials used in civilian life such as trucks and oil. U.S. companies such as Texaco, Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, and Studebaker sold such items to the Nationalists under General Franco on credit. By 1939, Spain owed these and other companies more than $100,000,000.

Neutrality Act of 1937

In January 1937, the Congress passed a joint resolution outlawing the arms trade with Spain. The Neutrality Act of 1937 was passed in May and included the provisions of the earlier acts, this time without expiration date, and extended them to cover civil wars as well. Furthermore, U.S. ships were prohibited from transporting any passengers or articles to belligerents, and U.S. citizens were forbidden from traveling on ships of belligerent nations. In a concession to Roosevelt, a "cash-and-carry" provision that had been devised by his advisor Bernard Baruch was added: the President could permit the sale of materials and supplies to belligerents in Europe as long as the recipients arranged for the transport and paid immediately with cash, with the argument that this would not draw the U.S. into the conflict. Roosevelt believed that cash-and-carry would aid France and Great Britain in the event of a war with Germany, since they were the only countries that controlled the seas and were able to take advantage of the provision. The cash-and-carry clause was set to expire after two years.

Japan invaded China in July 1937, starting the Second Sino-Japanese War. President Roosevelt, who supported the Chinese side, chose not to invoke the Neutrality Acts since the parties had not formally declared war. In so doing, he ensured that China's efforts to defend itself would not be hindered by the legislation: China was dependent on arms imports and only Japan would have been able to take advantage of cash-and-carry. This outraged the isolationists in Congress who claimed that the spirit of the law was being undermined. Roosevelt stated that he would prohibit American ships from transporting arms to the belligerents, but he allowed British ships to transport American arms to China. Roosevelt gave his Quarantine Speech in October 1937, outlining a move away from neutrality and toward "quarantining" all aggressors. He then imposed a "moral embargo" on exports of aircraft to Japan.

Neutrality Act of 1939

Early in 1939, after Nazi Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia, Roosevelt lobbied Congress to have the cash-and-carry provision renewed. He was rebuffed, the provision lapsed, and the mandatory arms embargo remained in place.

In September 1939, after Germany had invaded Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Roosevelt invoked the provisions of the Neutrality Act but came before Congress and lamented that the Neutrality Acts may give passive aid to an aggressor country. Congress was divided. Nye wanted to broaden the embargo, and other isolationists like Vandenberg and Hiram Johnson vowed to fight "from hell to breakfast" Roosevelt's desire to loosen the embargo. An "outstanding Republican leader" who supported helping nations under attack, however, told H. V. Kaltenborn that the embargo was futile because a neutral country like Italy could buy from the US and sell its own weapons to Germany, while US companies would relocate factories to Canada.

Roosevelt prevailed over the isolationists, and on November 4, he signed the Neutrality Act of 1939 into law, allowing for arms trade with belligerent nations (Great Britain and France) on a cash-and-carry basis, thus in effect ending the arms embargo. Furthermore, the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937 were repealed, American citizens and ships were barred from entering war zones designated by the President, and the National Munitions Control Board (which had been created by the 1935 Neutrality Act) was charged with issuing licenses for all arms imports and exports. Arms trade without a license became a federal crime.

End of Neutrality Policy

The end of neutrality policy came with the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to nations Roosevelt wanted to support: Britain, France and China.

After repeated attacks by German submarines on U.S. ships, Roosevelt announced on September 11, 1941, that he had ordered the U.S. Navy to attack German and Italian war vessels in the "waters which we deem necessary for our defense". Following the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Reuben James on October 31, many of the provisions of the Neutrality Acts were repealed on November 17, 1941: merchant vessels were allowed to be armed and to carry any cargoes to belligerent nations. The U.S. formally declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor of the previous day; Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941, and the U.S. responded with a declaration of war on the same day.

Subsequent Application

The provision against unlicensed arms trades of the 1939 act remains in force.

In 1948, Charles Winters, Al Schwimmer and Herman Greenspun were convicted under the 1939 Act after smuggling B-17 Flying Fortress bombers from Florida to the nascent state of Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. All three received Presidential pardons in subsequent decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Acts_of_the_1930s

Several Cases of Covid-19 Reinfection

— But the Implications Are Complicated

Andrew Joseph reports in Stat that re-infection with the coronavirus does indeed happen.  It is rare but can occur as a full-blown infection that is at least as damaging as the original infection.  See:

https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/28/covid-19-reinfection-implications/

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Some Recovering Patients Suffer Pains, Aches and Heart Issues

“Doctors are already finding that otherwise recovered coronavirus victims tend to experience lingering symptoms such as fatigue, breathing issues, and a host of cardiovascular problems.”

“A recent CDC report found that one-third of coronavirus patients endure symptoms that don’t go away.”

“One of the scariest things about the coronavirus is that there’s still a lot we don’t know about how the virus impacts victims in the longterm. And because the coronavirus can sometimes attack a victim’s organs, it’s entirely possible that a coronavirus infection might wreak havoc on a person’s body in unforeseen ways years down the line. We’re already starting to see this scenario play out amongst a small percentage of coronavirus patients who, even months after recovery, still experience lingering symptoms like fatigue and body aches.”

See:  https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/28/covid-19-reinfection-implications/

Ackman on U.S. Wealth Inequality

He Suggests a Proven Approach to Reduce that Inequality

William A. Ackman is a billionaire and founder of Pershing Square Holdings, which has just released unaudited condensed interim financial statements.  Included in those statements is a letter by Ackman, part of which is shown immediately below.

The Current Environment

I write this letter at an extraordinary time in the history of the world. Approaching one million people have died from the effects of the virus, the global economy is suffering to a degree that was unheard of since the Great Depression, and we are faced with a greater degree of political uncertainty in the United States and globally as far back as we can remember. The economic and health effects of the virus have and will continue to have a disproportionately negative effect on the poor and disadvantaged in the U.S. and globally. Yet, we find ourselves optimistic about the companies in our portfolio, which include quick service restaurant and coffee companies, a hotel management company/franchisor, a home improvement retailer, two residential mortgage guarantors, a scientific equipment manufacturer, and a real estate development company. What explains this dramatic seeming disconnect?

In sum, we are entering an era in which we expect the dominant, well-capitalized, great companies that comprise our portfolio to accelerate their growth in market share and profitability over the long term as they effectively adapt to the changes wrought by the virus. While many have been puzzled by the stock market’s resurgence, in our view, it can be best explained by this phenomenon writ large. Said differently, we have a corporate inequality phenomenon in addition to an income inequality problem.

The stock market is comprised of the biggest and strongest companies, and reflects the present value of what is to come for these businesses. It is not representative of the entire economy. If there were a stock market index of private, small businesses, it would likely be down 50% or more. Small business failures will make the income inequality problem even worse.

If we are to avoid continued political risk and disharmony which create serious risks to the sustainability of the capitalist system, we need to find a way for those left behind to participate to a greater extent in capitalism, broadly defined. This is an important problem that must be addressed, and it is incumbent upon all of us, particularly those of us who are the greatest beneficiaries of the system, to find a potential solution.

Despite its faults, we are strongly of the view that, while far from perfect, capitalism is by far the best system for maximizing the size of the economic pie. One of the principal problems with capitalism, particularly as it has functioned over the last several decades, however, is that wage growth has not kept pace with long-term wealth creation, which has disproportionately favored the wealthy and the upper middle class. This likely can be attributed to the higher after-tax returns generated by investment assets compared with wage growth over the same period. Without funds to invest for retirement – particularly after the housing crash destroyed many Americans’ only other source of long-term wealth creation – one has almost no hope to build wealth for retirement, or to give the next generation a head’s start. In sum, the American Dream has become a disappointment or worse for too many.

If capitalism continues to leave behind most Americans as the growth in wages has not come close to the more tax-efficient compound growth that has been achieved by investing in the stock market, more and more Americans will seek changes, potentially radical ones, to the current system, or seek an alternative system. Like those who rent rather than own their homes and thereby have no love lost for their landlords, Americans that have no ownership in the success of capitalism, and who are suffering economically, are more motivated to turn toward Socialism or other alternatives.

One potential solution to the wealth inequality problem is to create a way for those with no investment assets to participate in the success of capitalism. We need a program that makes every American an owner of the compounding growth in value of corporate America. Compounded returns over time are indeed one of the great wonders of the world, and every day we wait to address this issue, the problem looms larger.

There are a number of potential solutions to this problem. Among them, the government could establish and fund investment accounts for every child born in America. The funds could be invested in zero-cost equity index funds, be prohibited from withdrawal until retirement, and could compound tax free for 65 years. At historical rates of equity returns of 8% per annum, a $6,750 at birth retirement account - which would cost $26 billion annually based on the average number of children born in the U.S. each year - would provide retirement assets of more than $1 million at age 65.

Alternatively, or hopefully in addition, corporations could be required to set aside a fixed percent of salary or wages in a tax-free investment account for all workers that would also be restricted from withdrawal until retirement, similar to the approach used by the highly successful and popular Australian superannuation system, which has created savings of scale for growing generations of its citizens. Since the superannuation system’s launch in 1991, Australia now has $2.7 trillion of superannuation assets – nearly twice the country’s GDP. Remarkably, Australia has created the fourth largest pension system in the world, in the 53rd most populous nation.

In addition to helping all Americans build wealth for retirement, mandatory equity savings accounts for all would encourage greater financial literacy, and, as importantly, give all Americans the opportunity to participate in the success of capitalism.

We are not going to solve our country’s problems in a few short paragraphs, but we highlight the above problems as they are critically important for the country to address, and, like Covid-19, they present black-swan-type risks for investors. These and other issues of global concern, like climate change, create substantial unresolved risks and uncertainties, and we therefore continue to remain extremely vigilant, cautious, and selective about our approach to investing your capital.

We are extremely grateful for your long-term commitment of capital that has enabled us to generate the returns for which you are therefore entitled.

Sincerely,

 

William A. Ackman

https://pershingsquareholdings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pershing-Square-Holdings-Ltd.-June-2020-Interim.pdf [pages 13 to 15]

A Complete Dinosaur Skeleton

Scelidosaurus: ready for its closeup at last

The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than 150 years ago.

By Sarah Collins

University of Cambridge -- One hundred and sixty-two years ago, some fossilised bones were collected from the shore beneath Black Ven at Charmouth in west Dorset. They were sent to Richard Owen at the British Museum in London, who was at the time the acknowledged expert on fossils in Britain – among many other achievements, he had invented the word dinosaur.

These bones clearly belonged to a dinosaur, but were a jumble of the remains of several different animals. Owen encouraged the finder, James Harrison, to look for more specimens in order to clarify matters.

Within a year, Harrison had recovered a near-complete skeleton of one animal. Until that moment, dinosaurs had only been known from teeth and a few scattered bones, so their structure and appearance had been entirely speculative. Such rarity had led to the extraordinary (and largely incorrect) concrete models of dinosaurs built in 1853 and 1854 that can be seen today at Crystal Palace Park in London.

The world had its first dinosaur skeleton and it was in the hands of the man who had invented the word.

So, what did Owen do with this find? He published two short papers on its anatomy, but many details were left unrecorded. He failed to reconstruct the animal as it might have appeared in life, and made no attempt to understand its relationship to other known dinosaurs of the time. In short, he ‘re-buried’ it in the literature of the time, and so it has remained ever since: known, yet obscure and misunderstood.

For various reasons, the research staff of the Natural History Museum in London, where the specimen is now stored, did not restudy Owen’s old dinosaur, even though the skeleton had undergone decades of preparation to clean up its bones.

The rocks in which this dinosaur’s bones were fossilised, known as ‘Blue Lias’ on Dorset's Jurassic Coast, are around 193 million years old, close to the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs, making it a potentially vital specimen to understanding how the major dinosaur groups evolved and how they relate to one another.

Over the past three years, Dr David Norman from the University of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences has devoted much of his time to preparing a detailed description and biological analysis of this dinosaur, called Scelidosaurus, completing a project more than 150 years in the making.

The results of Norman’s work, published as four separate studies in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London, not only reconstruct what Scelidosaurus looked like in life, but reveal that it was an early ancestor of ankylosaurs, the armour-plated ‘tanks’ of the Late Cretaceous Period.

In the latter half of the 19th century Harry Seeley, who had been trained in Cambridge by Adam Sedgwick, established a fundamental classification of dinosaurs based primarily upon the shape of their hip bones: they were either saurischians (‘lizard-hipped’) or ornithischians (‘bird-hipped’).

This classification, first published in 1888, proved reliable: all dinosaur discoveries seemed to slot neatly into one or other of these groupings. This implied relationships between the major known dinosaur groups [Ornithischia, Sauropoda and Thetropoda].

However, in a 2017 paper, Norman and his former PhD students Matthew Baron and Paul Barrett argued that these dinosaur family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named. In a study published in Nature, the researchers suggested that bird-hipped dinosaurs and lizard-hipped dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus evolved from a common ancestor, potentially overturning more than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs.

Another fact that emerged from their work on dinosaur relationships was that the earliest known ornithischians first appear in the Early Jurassic Period. "Scelidosaurus is just such an Early Jurassic dinosaur and therefore represents a species that appeared at, or close to, the evolutionary ‘birth’ of the Ornithischia," said Norman, who is a Fellow of Christ's College. "Given that context, what was actually known of Scelidosaurus? The answer: remarkably little!"

Norman's study of all known material attributable to Scelidosaurus has now been completed and reveals a host of firsts.

"Nobody knew that the skull had horns on its back edge," he said. "It also had several bones that have never before been recognized in any other dinosaur."

"It is also clear from the rough texturing of the skull bones that it was, in life, covered by hardened horny scutes - a little bit like the scutes plastered over the surface of the skulls of living turtles," said Norman.

Its entire body was protected by skin that anchored an array of stud-like bony spikes and plates.

Now that its anatomy is well known, it has proved possible to examine the phylogenetic position and potential relationships of Scelidosaurus. It had been seen for many decades as an early member of the group that included the stegosaurs (including Stegosaurus with its huge bony plates along its spine and a spiky tail) and ankylosaurs (the armour-plated ‘tanks’ of the dinosaur era), but that was based on a poor understanding of the anatomy of Scelidosaurus. Now it seems that Scelidosaurus is an ancestor of the ankylosaurs alone.

So why are Scelidosaurus remains found only at Charmouth? "We don’t know," said Norman. "This dinosaur lived at a time when most of the continents of the world were clumped together in a world we now call Pangea. So, logically, animals in ‘Dorset’ would have been able to roam the globe and their fossil remains should crop up elsewhere. But for the moment we only know this dinosaur from this one location."

The dinosaur bones found at Charmouth are located in the harder limestone bands seen in the sea cliffs. The limestone bands are ‘diagenetic’ having been created by calcium carbonate precipitation from groundwater flowing through coarser sandy sediment in which these dinosaurs were buried. The coarser sediments indicate brief periods of higher energy water flow – possibly created by periodic flooding in the area. The floods washed some dinosaurs into the sea where they drowned, became buried and eventually fossilised.

"It is unfortunate that such an important dinosaur, discovered at such a critical time in the early study of dinosaurs, was never properly described," said Norman. "It has now - at last! - been described in detail and provides many new and unexpected insights concerning the biology of early dinosaurs and their underlying relationships. It seems a shame that the work was not done earlier but, as they say, better late than never."

                              https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/scelidosaurus

Sociology Meets Technology

The Next Dangerous Fad in Machine Learning

By Mona Sloane, MIT Technology Review

August 26, 2020 -- The AI community is finally waking up to the fact that machine learning can cause disproportionate harm to already oppressed and disadvantaged groups. We have activists and organizers to thank for that. Now, machine-learning researchers and scholars are looking for ways to make AI more fair, accountable, and transparent—but also, recently, more participatory.

One of the most exciting and well-attended events at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July was called “Participatory Approaches to Machine Learning.” This workshop tapped into the community’s aspiration to build more democratic, cooperative, and equitable algorithmic systems by incorporating participatory methods into their design. Such methods bring those who interact with and are affected by an algorithmic system into the design process—for example, asking nurses and doctors to help develop a sepsis detection tool.

This is a much-needed intervention in the field of machine learning, which can be excessively hierarchical and homogenous. But it is no silver bullet: in fact, “participation-washing” could become the field's next dangerous fad. That’s what I, along with my coauthors Emanuel Moss, Olaitan Awomolo, and Laura Forlano, argue in our recent paper “Participation is not a design fix for machine learning.”

Ignoring patterns of systemic oppression and privilege leads to unaccountable machine-learning systems that are deeply opaque and unfair. These patterns have permeated the field for the last 30 years. Meanwhile, the world has watched the exponential growth of wealth inequality and fossil-fuel-driven climate change. These problems are rooted in a key dynamic of capitalism: extraction. Participation, too, is often based on the same extractive logic, especially when it comes to machine learning.

Participation isn’t free

Let’s start with this observation: participation is already a big part of machine learning, but in problematic ways. One way is participation as work.

Whether or not their work is acknowledged, many participants play an important role in producing data that’s used to train and evaluate machine-learning models. Photos that someone took and posted are scraped from the web, and low-wage workers on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk annotate those photos to make them into training data. Ordinary website users do this annotation too, when they complete a reCAPTCHA. And there are many examples of what’s known as ghost work—anthropologist Mary Gray’s term for all the behind-the-scenes labor that goes into making seemingly automated systems function. Much of this participation isn’t properly compensated, and in many cases it’s hardly even recognized.

Participation as consultation, meanwhile, is a trend seen in fields like urban design, and increasingly in machine learning too. But the effectiveness of this approach is limited. It’s generally short lived, with no plan to establish meaningful long-term partnerships. Intellectual-property concerns make it hard to truly examine these tools. As a result, this form of participation is too often merely performative.

More promising is the idea of participation as justice. Here, all members of the design process work together in tightly coupled relationships with frequent communication. Participation as justice is a long-term commitment that focuses on designing products guided by people from diverse backgrounds and communities, including the disability community, which has long played a leading role  here. This concept has social and political importance, but capitalist market structures make it almost impossible to implement well.

Machine learning extends the tech industry’s broader priorities, which center on scale and extraction. That means participatory machine learning is, for now, an oxymoron. By default, most machine-learning systems have the ability to surveil, oppress, and coerce (including in the workplace). These systems also have ways to manufacture consent—for example, by requiring users to opt in to surveillance systems in order to use certain technologies, or by implementing default settings that discourage them from exercising their right to privacy.

Given that, it’s no surprise that machine learning fails to account for existing power dynamics and takes an extractive approach to collaboration. If we’re not careful, participatory machine learning could follow the path of AI ethics and become just another fad that’s used to legitimize injustice.

A better way

How can we avoid these dangers? There is no simple answer. But here are four suggestions:

Recognize participation as work. Many people already use machine-learning systems as they go about their day. Much of this labor maintains and improves these systems and is therefore valuable to the systems’ owners. To acknowledge that, all users should be asked for consent and provided with ways to opt out of any system. If they chose to participate, they should be offered compensation. Doing this could mean clarifying when and how data generated by a user’s behavior will be used for training purposes (for example, via a banner in Google Maps or an opt-in notification). It would also mean providing appropriate support for content moderators, fairly compensating ghost workers, and developing monetary or nonmonetary reward systems to compensate users for their data and labor.

Make participation context specific. Rather than trying to use a one-size-fits-all approach, technologists must be aware of the specific contexts in which they operate. For example, when designing a system to predict youth and gang violence, technologists should continuously reevaluate the ways in which they build on lived experience and domain expertise, and collaborate with the people they design for. This is particularly important as the context of a project changes over time. Documenting even small shifts in process and context can form a knowledge base for long-term, effective participation. For example, should only doctors be consulted in the design of a machine-learning system for clinical care, or should nurses and patients be included too? Making it clear why and how certain communities were involved makes such decisions and relationships transparent, accountable, and actionable.

Learn from past mistakes. More harm can be done by replicating the ways of thinking that originally produced harmful technology. We as researchers need to enhance our capacity for lateral thinking across applications and professions. To facilitate that, the machine-learning and design community could develop a searchable database to highlight failures of design participation (such as Sidewalk Labs’ waterfront project in Toronto). These failures could be cross-referenced with socio-structural concepts (such as issues pertaining to racial inequality). This database should cover design projects in all sectors and domains, not just those in machine learning, and explicitly acknowledge absences and outliers. These edge cases are often the ones we can learn the most from.

It’s exciting to see the machine-learning community embrace questions of justice and equity. But the answers shouldn’t bank on participation alone. The desire for a silver bullet has plagued the tech community for too long. It’s time to embrace the complexity that comes with challenging the extractive capitalist logic of machine learning.

Mona Sloane is a sociologist based at New York University. She works on design inequality in the context of AI design and policy.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/25/1007589/participation-washing-ai-trends-opinion-machine-learning/?itm_source=parsely-api

COVID-19 Virus and US Lifespan

Demographers put COVID-19 death toll into perspective

By Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley Media Relations

August 15, 2020 -- With over 170,000 COVID-19 deaths to date, and 1,000 more each day, America’s life expectancy may appear to be plummeting. But in estimating the magnitude of the pandemic, UC Berkeley demographers have found that COVID-19 is likely to shorten the average U.S. lifespan in 2020 by only about a year.

Seeking to put current COVID-19 mortality rates into historic, demographic and economic perspective, UC Berkeley demographers Ronald Lee and Joshua Goldstein calculated the consequences of U.S. lives lost to COVID-19 in 2020 using two scenarios. One was based on a projection of 1 million deaths for the year, the other on the more likely projection of 250,000 deaths.

Their findings, published online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, conclude that 1 million deaths in 2020 would cut three years off the average U.S. life expectancy, while 250,000 deaths would reduce lifespans by about a year.

That said, without the societal efforts that have occurred to lessen the impact of COVID-19, there could have been 2 million deaths projected by the end of 2020, a reduction of the average U.S. lifespan by five years, the researchers pointed out.

Their estimated drop in life expectancy is modest, in part, because 250,000 deaths is not a large increase on top of the 3 million non-COVID-19 deaths expected for 2020, and because older people, who typically have fewer remaining years of life than others do, represent the most COVID-19 fatalities, the study notes.

Still, while COVID-19 mortality rates remain lower than those of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the coronavirus epidemic could be just as devastating as the longer-lasting HIV and opioid epidemics if mitigation efforts fail, the researchers said.

“The death toll of COVID-19 is a terrible thing, both for those who lose their lives and for their family, friends, colleagues and all whom their lives touched. Those are real people, not abstract statistics,” said Lee, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of demography and associate director of the campus’s Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging.

“But the population perspective helps put this tragedy in a broader context. As we work to contain this epidemic, it is important to know that we have been through such mortality crises before,” he added.

Goldstein’s and Lee’s measures are based on factors that include a current U.S. population of 330 million, age-specific death rates and the economic valuation of saved lives.

Among their other findings:

• One million COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. in 2020 would be the equivalent of U.S. mortality levels in 1995, adding three years to each American’s biological age, albeit temporarily.

• The age gap (old versus young) for people dying from COVID-19 is marginally wider than during pre-pandemic times, while the male-female gap is slightly narrower. The researchers found similar death-by-age patterns across several countries.

• The economic cost of lives lost to COVID-19 in the U.S. is in the trillions of dollars. According to standard government measures, the demographers estimated that the loss of 1 million lives in 2020 would amount to between $10.2 and $17.5 trillion, while the amount for 250,000 deaths would range from $1.5 to $2.5 trillion.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/08/25/demographers-put-covid-19-death-toll-into-perspective/

The Men's Rights Movement

The men's rights movement (MRM) is a branch of men's movement [Not to be confused with the pro-feminist Men's liberation movement]. The MRM in particular consists of a variety of groups and individuals who focus on general social issues and specific government services which adversely impact, or in some cases structurally discriminate against, men and boys. Common topics debated within the men's rights movement include the alleged favor given to women in family law including but not limited to matters such as child custody, alimony and marital property distribution. The movement also concerns itself with parenting, reproduction, suicides, domestic violence against men, circumcision, education, conscription, social safety nets, and health policies. The men's rights movement branched off from the men's liberation movement in the early 1970s, with both groups comprising a part of the larger men's movement.

Since its inception, the men's rights movement has received substantial criticism, with some scholars describing the movement or parts of it as a backlash against feminism. Claims and activities associated with the men's rights movement have been criticized and labeled hateful and violent. In 2018, while noting "some corners of the men's rights movement focused on legitimate grievances," the Southern Poverty Law Center categorized some men's rights groups as being part of a hate ideology under the umbrella of 'male supremacy' (see androcentyrism and patriarchy). The movement and sectors of the movement have been described as misogynistic.

The modern men's rights movement emerged from the men's liberation movement, which appeared in the first half of the 1970s when scholars began to study feminist ideas and politics. The men's liberation movement acknowledged men's institutionalized power while critically examining the consequences of hegemonic masculinity. In the late 1970s, the men's liberation movement split into two separate strands with opposing views: the pro-feminist men's movement and the anti-feminist men's rights movement. Men's rights activists have rejected feminist principles and focused on areas in which they believe men are disadvantaged, oppressed, or discriminated against. Masculinities studies scholar Michael Kimmel notes that their critiques of gender roles 'morphed into a celebration of all things masculine and a near infatuation with the traditional masculine role itself.' In the 1980s and 1990s, men's rights activists opposed societal changes sought by feminists and defended the patriarchal gender order in the family, schools and the workplace.

Some men's rights activists view men as an oppressed group and believe that society and the state have been effectively 'feminized' by women's movements, i.e. entities like public institutions now discriminate against men. Sarah Maddison, an Australian author, has said that Warren Farrell and Herb Goldberg "argue that, for most men, power is an illusion, and that women are the true power holders in society through their roles as the primary carers and nurturers of children".

One of the first major men's rights organizations was the Coalition of American Divorce Reform Elements, founded by Richard Doyle in 1971, from which the Men's Rights Association spun off in 1973. Free Men Inc. was founded in 1977 in Columbia, Maryland, spawning several chapters over the following years, which eventually merged to form the National Coalition of Free Men (now known as the National Coalition for Men). Men's Rights, Inc. was also formed in 1977. Fathers and Families was formed in 1994. In the United Kingdom, a men's rights group calling itself the UK Men's Movement began to organize in the early 1990s. The Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF) was founded in 2005, and in 2010 claimed to have over 30,000 members.

Men's rights groups have formed in some European countries during periods of shifts toward conservatism and policies supporting patriarchal family and gender relations. In the United States, the men's rights movement has ideological ties to neoconservatism. Men's rights activists have received lobbying support from conservative organizations and their arguments have been covered extensively in neoconservative media.

The men's rights movement has become more vocal and more organized since the development of the internet. The manosphere emerged and men's rights websites and forums have proliferated on the internet. Activists mostly organize online. The most popular men's rights site is A Voice for Men. Other sites dedicated to men's rights issues are the Fathers Rights Foundation, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and subreddits like r/MensRights. Men's rights proponents often use the red pill and blue pill metaphor from a scene in The Matrix to identify each other online and in reference to the moment they came to believe that men are oppressed. There tends to be much hostility between the different subgroups. Critics say the r/TheRedPill is a subreddit dedicated to men's rights. However, others from within the subreddit claim they focus on personal and interpersonal improvement, and not men's activism. Some critics, outside the subreddit, believe r/TheRedPill is not a part of the men’s rights movement and that MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) are men who have no patience for either /r/TheRedPill or men's rights.

Fringe political parties focusing on men's rights have been formed including, but not limited to, the Australian Non-Custodial Parents Party (Equal Parenting), the Israeli Man's Rights in the Family Party, and the Justice for Men and Boys party in the UK.

Most men's rights activists in the United States are white, middle-class, heterosexual men. Prominent advocates include Warren Farrell, Herb Goldberg, Richard Doyle, and Asa Baber. Several women have emerged as leading voices of the MRM, including Helen Smith, Christina Hoff Sommers and Erin Pizzey.

Issues

Men's rights proponents are concerned with a wide variety of matters, some of which have spawned their own groups or movements, such as the fathers' rights movement, concerned specifically with divorce and child custody issues.  Major issues include adoption, anti-dowry laws, child custody, circumcision, criminal justice, divorce, domestic violence, education, female privilege, government structures, health, homelessness, incarceration, military conscription, paternity fraud, rape, reproductive rights, social security and insurance, and suicide.

Prominent Men’s Rights Activists

Noteworthy activists include Karen DeCrow, Marc Angelucci, Warren Farrell and Herb Goldberg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement

Stunning Internet Speed

Researchers at University College London Set a New World Record for Fastest Internet

By Joanna Nelius, Gizmodo

August 20, 2020 -- Imagine being able to download every single movie and TV show on Netflix in less than a second. Thousands of titles in a literal snap. Researchers at University College London have the ability to do that with a new world record they set for fastest internet—178 terabits a second, or 178,000 Gbps. Lecturer and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow Dr. Lidia Galdino and team collaborated with Xtera and KDDI Research on the project.

According to UCL’s announcement, that speed is “double the capacity of any system currently deployed in the world.” To get that insanely fast speed, UCL researchers used a greater range of wavelengths than what’s typically used in fiber-optic cables and different amplifier technologies to boost the signal. Fiber-optic cables tend to absorb signals (well, the photons that are transmitted through the cable to make the signal) after a few miles because of the material the cables are made out of. Repeaters, which are like a wifi extender, are needed to re-transmit those signals so they can travel for a longer distance. So what the researchers managed to do is not only extend the signal, but also massively amplify it.

Current infrastructure uses a limited spectrum bandwidth of 4.5THz and 9THz commercial bandwidth is just starting to enter the market. 5G on the high-band or millimeter wave spectrum operates on 24 GHz and above and can transmit data up to at rate of 1 to 3 Gbps. But the internet speed Dr. Galdino and team achieved uses a 16.8THz bandwidth to get 178,000Gbps. Makes 5G seem rather slow when you put those numbers side by side.

This kind of system would be cheap to integrate with our existing internet infrastructure, too. According to UCL, upgrading amplifiers at certain intervals would be a fraction of what it would cost to install new optical fiber cables, roughly $21,100 every 25-62 miles (40-100 km) versus $594,000 every 0.62 miles (1 km), based on today’s conversation rate of £1 to $1.32). This sounds like it could be a worthwhile solution to help shrink the digital divide, something that the current pandemic has further illustrated the seriousness of.

“Independent of the covid-19 crisis, internet traffic has increased exponentially over the last 10 years and this whole growth in data demand is related to the cost per bit going down,” Dr. Galdino said to UCL. “The development of new technologies is crucial to maintaining this trend towards lower costs while meeting future data rate demands that will continue to increase, with as yet unthought-of applications that will transform people’s lives,”

Internet traffic has surged due to many now working or attending school from home, in addition to a higher demand of digitally-delivered entertainment like streaming movies and playing videogames online. The internet is holding strong for now, but its clearer than ever that it’s woefully inadequate because many do not have reliable or affordable access to it—an issue long before the current pandemic.

The entire published paper, “Optical Fibre Capacity Optimisation via Continuous Bandwidth Amplification and Geometric Shaping,” is available to read at IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

https://gizmodo.com/researchers-at-university-college-london-set-a-new-worl-1844789699

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

 

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is an underground comic about a fictional trio of stoner characters, created by the American artist Gilbert Shelton. The Freak Brothers first appeared in The Rag, an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas, beginning in May 1968, and were regularly reprinted in underground papers around the United States and in other parts of the world. Later their adventures were published in a series of comic books.

The lives of the Freak Brothers revolve around the procurement and enjoyment of recreational drugs, particularly marijuana. The comics present a critique of the establishment, while satirizing counterculture.

Fat Freddy's Cat appears in many of the stories, spinning off his own cartoon strip (which appeared as part of the Freak Brothers comic page, in the manner of older comic strip double features) and later some full-length episodes.

An animated version, The Freak Brothers, was released in 2020

Comic Strips

The Freak Brothers first appeared in The Rag, an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas, beginning in May 1968. Their debut was in an advertising flyer for a winter 1968 film short called The Texas Hippies March on the Capitol.  Freak Brothers strips soon became popular and were regularly reprinted in underground papers around the United States and in other parts of the world.

                              Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #1, February 1971

The Freak Brothers' first comic book appearance was in Feds 'n' Heads, self-published by Shelton in the spring of 1968 (and later re-issued in multiple printings by Berkeley's the Print Mint). They also appeared in the first two issues of Jay Lynch's Bijou Funnies. In 1969 Shelton and three friends from Texas founded Rip Off Press in San Francisco, which took over publication of all subsequent Freak Brothers comics. The first compilation of their adventures, The Collected Adventures of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, had its first printing in 1971 and has been continually in print ever since. In addition to underground and college weekly newspapers, new adventures appeared in magazines such as Playboy, High Times, and Rip Off Comix; these too were collected in comic book form. Shelton continued to write and draw the series until 1992, in collaboration with Dave Sheridan (1974–1982, his death) and Paul Mavrides (1978-1992).

The majority of the comic books consist of one or more multi-page stories together with a number of one-page strips; many of the latter have a one-row skit featuring Fat Freddy's Cat at the bottom of the page. Issues #8-10 contained only the long-form story "The Idiots Abroad", which The Comics Journal listed as #44 of the "100 Greatest Comics of the Century."  The UK newspaper The Guardian said of a 2003 reprint of the story that, "The graphic quality is, even in slightly muddy reproduction, astonishing. Depictions of various European cities recall Hergé in their accuracy and detail ... As for the subject matter, considering the dates of composition, it has hardly dated.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Brothers

A.I. Invades Medical Specialties

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Pathologists, Radiologists, Microbiologists?

If artificial intelligence can replace some highly specialized medical doctors, is any job safe? It appears the biomedical profession is ripe for an overhaul.

Alex Berezow, himself a PhD microbiologist, writes for The American Council on Science and Health that the robots and algorithms are coming.  More at:

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/08/21/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-pathologists-radiologists-microbiologists-14979

Wear a Mask in Public Restrooms

Flushing public restroom toilets or urinals can spew clouds of particles carrying viruses, including COVID-19

From the American Institute of Physics

August 18, 2020 -- Think you don't need to worry about COVID-19 while using a public restroom? A group of researchers from Yangzhou University in China recently reported that flushing public restroom toilets can release clouds of virus-laden aerosols for you to potentially inhale.

If that's not cringeworthy enough, after running additional computer simulations, they've concluded that flushing urinals does likewise. In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, the group shares its work simulating and tracking virus-laden particle movements when urinals are flushed.

The researchers' work clearly shows public restrooms can be dangerous places for potentially becoming infected from a virus, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other work has shown that both feces- and urine-based virus transmission is possible.

"To do this, we used a method of computational fluid dynamics to model the particle movement that occurs with the act of flushing," said Xiangdong Liu. "The specific models are the volume of fluids model and discrete phase model."

Flushing a urinal, much like flushing a toilet, involves an interaction between gas and liquid interfaces. The result of the flushing causes a large spread of aerosol particles to be released from the urinal, which the researchers simulated and tracked.

What the simulations revealed is disturbing. The trajectory of the tiny particles ejected by flushing a urinal "manifests an external spread type, with more than 57% of the particles traveling away from the urinal," said Liu.

But that's not all. When men use urinals within a public restroom, these tiny particles can reach their thigh within 5.5 seconds when compared to the toilet flush, which takes 35 seconds to reach slightly higher. Particles from urinals, however, "show a more violent climbing tendency," Liu said. "The climbing speed is much faster than toilet flushing."

Urinals are used more frequently within densely populated areas, and the researchers point out that particles will travel faster and farther, which poses a serious public health challenge.

This work underscores how important it is to wear a mask within public places but especially restrooms.

"From our work, it can be inferred that urinal flushing indeed promotes the spread of bacteria and viruses," says Liu. "Wearing a mask should be mandatory within public restrooms during the pandemic, and anti-diffusion improvements are urgently needed to prevent the spread of COVID-19."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200818142132.htm

Overnight "Solar" Panels

This 'Anti-Solar Panel' Could One Day Produce Energy Even at Night

By Carly Cassella, Science Alert

August 17, 2020 -- Scientists are ironing out the kinks for an 'anti-solar power' cell, one that can harvest energy at nighttime, even when the sun isn't shining.

Instead of absorbing light from the Sun and converting it into electricity, like a normal solar panel would, this type of technology works in reverse.

At night, when there's no incoming heat for solar panels to capture, there's still outgoing heat we can make use of. By pointing a warm panel up towards the cold sink of space, this heat begins to radiate outwards as invisible infrared light.

This is known as radiative cooling, and if that outgoing heat can somehow be harnessed, it could cheaply light our cities at night. Storing solar power during the day is a relatively expensive proposition, so directly producing some nighttime power could help to reduce that load.

Using a thermodynamic model of a thermoelectric power generator, scientists from Stanford University have now worked out a rooftop proof-of-concept that could theoretically generate 2.2 watts per square meter without the need for a battery or an external energy source

While others have attempted similar nighttime cells, this particular design could produce 120 times more energy. In fact, it's nearly on par with the performance of a Carnot heat engine, which is a theoretical thermodynamic limit for the "perfect" engine. 

"This result is significantly higher than the previous reported results and points to the potential applicability of harvesting electrical power at night," the authors write.

The concept is based on existing technology that combines and optimises radiative cooling with a thermoelectric power generator - one that takes up less than 1 percent of the whole device's footprint, which is a good sign for scalability, as the thermoelectric power generator is the most expensive part of the system.

Using computer models based on real-life parameters, the authors put their optimised simulation  to the test. Placed on a rooftop, they claim the size of their cell creates the best balance between heat loss and thermoelectric conversion. 

"We are working to develop high-performance, sustainable lighting generation that can provide everyone - including those in developing and rural areas - access to reliable and sustainable low cost lighting energy sources," says electrical engineer Lingling Fan from Stanford University.

"A modular energy source could also power off-grid sensors used in a variety of applications and be used to convert waste heat from automobiles into usable power."

Of course, those practical applications are yet to be realised. The authors admit that while their demonstration of nighttime electrical power generation is "remarkable", it's still not enough to fulfil many of the desires mentioned above; still, a technology that doesn't rely on the burning of fossil fuels for our energy needs is worth exploring.

The study was published in Optics Express.

https://www.sciencealert.com/an-off-grid-anti-solar-panel-could-one-day-produce-energy-even-at-night

Donald Trump's Personal Lawyer Writes a Book

 

[President Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, went around bribing people and thereby “fixing” problems that Trump had created for himself.  Cohen was investigated and pleaded guilty to federal charges.  While in federal prison, he wrote a book, “Disloyal,” which is about to be released for sale in a few days.  The book begins with a forward, which has already been circulated on the internet to encourage Americans to buy the whole book and get the entire story of how Donald Trump actually thinks and acts while in power.  Here is that forward as distributed over the net.]

DISLOYAL, THE FOREWORD: THE REAL REAL DONALD TRUMP

The President of the United States wanted me dead.

Or, let me say it the way Donald Trump would: He wouldn’t mind if I was dead. That was how Trump talked. Like a mob boss, using language carefully calibrated to convey his desires and demands, while at the same time employing deliberate indirection to insulate himself and avoid actually ordering a hit on his former personal attorney, confidant, consigliere, and, at least in my heart, adopted son.

Driving south from New York City to Washington, DC on I-95 on the cold, gray winter morning of February 24th, 2019, en route to testify against President Trump before both Houses of Congress, I knew he wanted me gone before I could tell the nation what I know about him. Not the billionaire celebrity savior of the country or lying lunatic, not the tabloid tycoon or self-anointed Chosen One, not the avatar @realdonaldtrump of Twitter fame, but the real real Donald Trump—the man very, very, very few people know.

If that sounds overly dramatic, consider the powers Trump possessed and imagine how you might feel if he threatened you personally. Heading south, I wondered if my prospects for survival were also going in that direction. I was acutely aware of the magnitude of Trump’s fury aimed directly at my alleged betrayal. I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and I kept the speedometer at eighty, avoiding the glances of other drivers. Trump’s theory of life, business and politics revolved around threats and the prospect of destruction—financial, electoral, personal, physical—as a weapon. I knew how he worked because I had frequently been the one screaming threats on his behalf as Trump’s fixer and designated thug.

Ever since I had flipped and agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller and the Special Counsel’s Office, the death threats had come by the hundreds. On my cell phone, by email, snail mail, in tweets, on Facebook, enraged Trump supporters vowed to kill me, and I took those threats very seriously. The President called me a rat and tweeted angry accusations at me, as well as my family. All rats deserve to die, I was told. I was a lowlife Judas they were going to hunt down. I was driving because I couldn’t fly or take the train to Washington. If I had, I was sure I would be mobbed or attacked. For weeks, walking the streets of Manhattan, I was convinced that someone was going to ram me with their car. I was exactly the person Trump was talking about when he said he could shoot and kill someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it. 

My mind was spinning as I sped towards DC. For more than a decade, I had been at the center of Trump’s innermost circle. When he came to my son’s bar mitzvah, a generous gesture that I found touching, he told my then thirteen-year-old boy that his Dad was the greatest and that, if he wanted to work at the Trump Organization when he grew up, there would always be a position for him.

“You’re family,” Trump said to my son and I.

And I fucking believed him!

Pulling over at a service plaza, I gassed up and headed inside for a coffee, black no sugar. I looked around to see if I was under surveillance or being followed; a sense of dread consuming my thoughts. Who was that FBI-type in the gray coat or the muscle-bound dude a few paces behind me? The notion that I was being followed or stalked may have seemed crazy; but it was also perfectly logical. I wasn’t just famous—I was perhaps the most infamous person in the country at the time, seen by millions upon millions as a traitor. President Trump controlled all the levers of the Commander in Chief and all the overt and covert powers that come with the highest office in the country. He also possessed a cult-like hold over his supporters, some of them demonstrably unhinged and willing to do anything to please or protect the President. I knew how committed these fanatics were because I’d been one of them: an acolyte obsessed with Donald J. Trump, a demented follower willing to do anything for him, including, as I vowed once to a reporter, to take a bullet. 

On the eve of my public testimony, lying in the still of the night in my hotel room, taking a bullet assumed a completely different meaning. That was the level of ruination I had brought upon myself- complete and total destruction. I closed my eyes, wishing the nightmare would end. When I started working for Trump I had been a multi-millionaire lawyer and businessman, and now I was broke and broken; a convicted, disgraced and disbarred former attorney about to testify against the President on live television before an audience of more than 15 million Americans.

“Hey, Michael Cohen, do your wife and father-in-law know about your girlfriends?” GOP Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted at me that night, to cite just one example of the juvenile idiocy and menace aimed in my direction. “I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

Sitting in the green room on the morning of my testimony before the House Oversight Committee, I began to feel the enormous weight of what was about to happen. For some reason, after all that I’d been through, and all I’d put my family and the country through, waiting in that room was the moment when the gravity of what was about to happen truly hit home. The United States was being torn apart, its political and cultural and mental well-being threatened by a clear and present danger named Donald Trump, and I had played a central role in creating this new reality. To half of Americans, it seemed like Trump was effectively a Russian-controlled fraud who had lied and cheated his way to the White House; to the other half of Americans, to Trump’s supporters, the entire Russian scandal was a witch hunt invented by Democrats still unable to accept the fact that Hillary Clinton had lost fair and square in the most surprising upset in the history of American presidential elections.

Both sides were wrong. I knew that the reality was much more complicated and dangerous. Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors. I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything—and I mean anything—to “win” has always been his business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of President Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, “there’s no Russian collusion, I have no dealings with Russia…there’s no Russia.” 

The time to testify nearing, I asked the sergeant-at-arms for a few minutes of privacy and the room was cleared. Sitting alone, my thoughts and heart racing, I had the first panic attack of my life. I struggled to breathe and stand. The pressure was too much; I had contemplated suicide in recent weeks, as a way to escape the unrelenting insanity. Reaching for a seat, I started to cry, a flood of emotions overwhelming me: fear, anger, dread, anxiety, relief, terror. It felt something like when I was in the hospital awaiting the birth of my daughter and son, with so many powerful and unprecedented emotions welling up in anticipation. Only now I was that child being born and all of the pain and blood were part of the birth of my new life and identity.

Trying to pull myself together, I went to the private bathroom and checked my eyes to see if they were bloodshot or puffy. To my relief, they weren’t. I splashed my face with cold water and felt a calm coming over me, and then a surge of confidence and adrenaline. I had pled guilty to multiple federal crimes, including lying to Congress, but I was there to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I knew that Trump and the Republican House members would want me to hesitate, falter, show weakness, even break down. They wanted me to look unreliable, shifty, and uncertain about the truth and myself. This was blood sport and they wanted me to cower. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction, I decided. I was going to nail it.

“Showtime,” the sergeant-at-arms called out, opening the door. “You’re on Mr. Cohen.”

One deep breath and I stepped into the hallway, into a crush of photographers and TV cameras and the craziness of wall-to-wall national obsession. I made my way alone through the jostle and shove of the surging crowd as I experienced the out-of-body sensation of seeing myself on television screens walking in to testify. It was truly bizarre to be at the epicenter of American history at that moment, to personify so many fears and resentments, to be the villain or savior, depending on your point of view, to speak truth to power in an age when truth itself was on trial. There I was, watching myself on TV, the Michael Cohen everyone had an opinion about: liar, snitch, idiot, bully, sycophant, convicted criminal, the least reliable narrator on the planet.

So, please permit me to reintroduce myself in these pages. The one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever you may have heard or thought about me, you don’t know me or my story or the Donald Trump that I know. For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books, our contacts so entwined, overlapping and intimate that part of my job was to deal with the endless queries and requests, however large or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaintances. I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump.

Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.

There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me. I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them. I was the one who most encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy. When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.

To underscore that last crucial point, let me say now that I had agency in my relationship with Trump. I made choices along the way—terrible, heartless, stupid, cruel, dishonest, destructive choices, but they were mine and constituted my reality and life. During my years with Trump, to give one example, I fell out of touch with my sisters and younger brother, as I imagined myself becoming a big shot. I’d made my fortune out of taxi medallions, a business viewed as sketchy if not lower class. On Park Avenue, where I lived, I was definitely nouveau riche, but I had big plans that didn’t include being excluded from the elite. I had a narrative: I wanted to climb the highest mountains of Manhattan’s skyscraping ambition, to inhabit the world from the vantage point of private jets and billion-dollar deals, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there. Then there was my own considerable ego, short temper, and willingness to deceive to get ahead, regardless of the consequences.

As you read my story, you will no doubt ask yourself if you like me, or if you would act as I did, and the answer will frequently be no to both of those questions. But permit me to make a point: If you only read stories written by people you like, you will never be able to understand Donald Trump or the current state of the American soul. More than that, it’s only by actually understanding my decisions and actions that you can get inside Trump’s mind and understand his worldview. As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, it’s only gangsters who can reveal the secrets of organized crime. If you want to know how the mob really works, you’ve got to talk to the bad guys. I was one of Trump’s bad guys. In his world, I was one hundred percent a made man.

Before I could read my opening statement to the Oversight Committee on the day of my public testimony, the Republicans started to play procedural games. It was clearly an attempt to rattle me, I thought, a spectacle that only demeaned them and the institution itself. As I started to answer questions, it was evident that the Republicans didn’t want to hear a word I had to say, no matter how true or how critical to the future of the country. For all the hard truths I spoke about Trump, I wasn’t entirely critical of him, nor will I be in these pages. I said I know Trump as a human being, not a cartoon character on television, and that means I know he’s full of contradictions.

“Mr. Trump is an enigma,” I testified to the committee. “He is complicated, as am I. He does both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” one of the Republicans taunted me, perfectly expressing the stupidity and lunacy of his party’s antics. To drive this point home, they actually made a sign with a picture of me on it. In bold letters, the sign proclaimed, “Liar, Liar Pants on Fire.”

I recognized the childish games, replete with a Trump-like slogan, because I had played them myself. In the pitiful sight of Republicans throwing aside their dignity and duty in an effort to grovel at Trump’s feet, I saw myself and understood their motives. My insatiable desire to please Trump to gain power for myself, the fatal flaw that led to my ruination, was a Faustian bargain: I would do anything to accumulate, wield, maintain, exert, exploit power. In this way, Donald Trump and I were the most alike; in this naked lust for power, the President and I were soul mates. I was so vulnerable to his magnetic force because he offered an intoxicating cocktail of power, strength, celebrity, and a complete disregard for the rules and realities that govern our lives. To Trump, life was a game and all that mattered was winning. In these dangerous days, I see the Republican Party and Trump’s followers threatening the constitution—which is in far greater peril than is commonly understood—and following one of the worst impulses of humankind: the desire for power at all costs.

“To those who support the President and his rhetoric, as I once did, I pray the country doesn’t make the same mistakes as I have made or pay the heavy price that my family and I are paying,” I testified to Congress, exhorting them to learn from my example.

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” I concluded. “This is why I agreed to appear before you today.”

Representative Elijah Cummings had the final word, as chair of the Oversight Committee. I sat in silence, listening to this now deceased man with decades of experience in the civil rights movement and other forms of public service, who as a lawyer had represented disgraced lawyers like me. He understood that even the least of us deserve the opportunity to seek penance, redemption and a second chance in life. Cummings was the lone politician I encountered in all my travails who took an interest in me as a human being. When I reported to serve my sentence, he even took steps to ensure my security in prison. It was a selfless act of kindness for which I will always be grateful. 

“I know this has been hard,” Cummings said to me and the nation, his words hitting me like a kick in the gut. “I know you’ve faced a lot. I know that you are worried about your family. But this is a part of your destiny. And hopefully this portion of your destiny will lead to a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better United States of America, and a better world. And I mean that from the depths of my heart.”

Representative Cummings concluded by saying, “We are better than this.”

Amen, I thought. 

Now, sitting alone in an upstate New York prison, wearing my green government-issued uniform, I’ve begun writing this story longhand on a yellow legal pad. I often wrote before dawn so not to be disturbed in my thoughts when my fellow inmates awoke. I had to report to the sewage treatment plant where some of us worked for a wage of $8 a month. As the months passed by and I thought about the man I knew so well, I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully. The types of scandals that have surfaced in recent months will only continue to emerge with greater and greater levels of treachery and deceit. If Trump wins another four years, these scandals will prove to only be the tip of the iceberg. I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!” But that is the Trump I know in a nutshell. He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well. Whoever follows Trump into the White House, if the President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he has started to joke about—and Trump never actually jokes- will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.

Watching Trump on the evening news in the prison rec room, I almost feel sorry for him. I know him so well and I know his facial tics and tells; I see the cornered look in his eyes as he flails and rants and raves, searching for a protector and advocate, someone willing to fight dirty and destroy his enemies. I see the men who have replaced me and continue to forfeit their reputations by doing the President’s bidding, no matter how dishonest or sleazy or unlawful. Rudy Guiliani, William Barr, Jared Kushner and Mike Pompeo are Trump’s new wannabe fixers, sycophants willing to distort the truth and break the law in the service of the Boss. All this will be to no avail. Trump doesn’t want to hear this, and he will certainly deny it, but he’s lost without his original bulldog lawyer Roy Cohn, or his other former pitbull and personal attorney, Michael Cohen. 

During my testimony, Republican House members repeatedly asked me to promise that I wouldn’t write a book. I refused, repeatedly. It was another way of saying I shouldn’t be permitted to tell my story, in essence giving up my First Amendment rights. It was a clear sign of desperation and fear. I have lost many things as a consequence of my decisions and mistakes, including my freedom, but I still retain the right to tell this story about the true threat to our nation and the urgent message for the country it contains.

One last thing I can say with great confidence, as you turn the page and meet the real real Donald Trump for the first time: This is a book the President of the United States does not want you to read.

 

Michael Cohen

Otisville Federal Prison, Otisville, New York, March 11, 2020