New York Times: October 2

U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Surpasses 700,000 Despite Wide Availability of Vaccines The latest Covid-19 deaths were concentrated in the South, and included more younger people than before. Every age group under 55 saw its highest death toll of the pandemic this August.

Is the Coronavirus Getting Better at Airborne Transmission? The Alpha variant traveled more efficiently in small droplets, two new studies found. The Delta variant may have continued this evolution.

Progressives Flex Muscles on Biden Agenda, Adopting New Tactics Their persistence forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay a planned vote on the $1 trillion infrastructure bill. In the end, President Biden sided with their position.

This Is Why We Need to Spend $4 Trillion

Wonking Out: Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin

Perilous, Roadless Jungle Becomes a Path of Desperate Hope The recent surge at the Mexican border is likely to grow as more migrants, mostly Haitian, risk everything negotiating the notorious Darién Gap on their way to the United States.

Britain Is Heading Into a Nightmarish Winter Long lines outside gas stations. Panicked drivers fighting one another as the pumps run dry. Soldiers deployed to distribute fuel across the country. And in the background,

the pandemic stretching on, food rotting in fields and families sinking into poverty. This is Britain in 2021.

........ For many months, industry leaders across the economy have warned about chronic labor shortages — of truck drivers, yes, but also fruit pickers, meat processors, waiters and health care workers — disrupting supply chains and impeding businesses. .......... The signs of breakdown are everywhere: empty shelves in supermarkets, food going to waste in fields, more and more vacancy posters tacked to the windows of shops and restaurants. Meat producers have even called on the government to let them hire prisoners to plug the gap. ........

One of the main causes of this predicament is Brexit

....... Britain’s protracted departure from the bloc, undertaken without any real effort by Mr. Johnson to ensure a smooth transition, led to an exodus of European workers — a process then compounded by the pandemic. As many as 1.3 million overseas nationals left Britain between July 2019 and September 2020......... Three million households in Britain already live in fuel poverty, made to choose between heating and eating in the winter. ....... This grim confluence, from fuel shortages to spiraling poverty, has been described by many as a perfect storm. Yet the metaphor erases the active role the Conservatives — and in particular, the prime minister — have played in orchestrating these foreboding conditions. The bleak winter ahead is of their making.

Boris Johnson Is a Terrible Leader. It Doesn’t Matter. Britain’s freewheeling, clownish prime minister ...... and the retreat of liberal democracy around the world. ........ There have been accusations of corruption, reports of bitter rivalries on his closest team and, to top it off, explosive testimony from his former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, that laid responsibility for the handling of the pandemic in Britain — where over 125,000 people have died of Covid-19 — squarely at Mr. Johnson’s door. Story by story, scandal by scandal, Mr. Johnson has been exposed as

a slapdash, venal, incompetent leader

. ......... According to Mr. Cummings, Mr. Johnson initially claimed that the coronavirus “is only killing 80-year-olds”

and wanted to be injected with the coronavirus live on television to show that there was nothing to worry about

. ........... Covid-19 contracts worth billions of pounds going to friends of Conservative lawmakers with no experience in the health sector, business tycoons with direct lines to the prime minister to push their interests and a lavish renovation of the prime minister’s residence at Downing Street that involved a secret donation by a Tory backer. Talk of sleaze and Britain’s “chumocracy” has permeated even the typically loyal pages of the right-wing press. ......... Engulfed in scandal, unassailably popular — this has always been the essence of brand Boris. ........

Mr. Johnson has led Britain to one of the highest Covid death rates in the world, overseen one the worst economic downturns in the Group of 7 and imposed the third-strictest lockdown globally.

........... the modern Conservative Party. The party’s founding promise, laid down in Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto in 1834, was to stop Britain from becoming a “perpetual vortex of agitation.” Since the Conservatives regained power in 2010, Britain has become just that, with two referendums, three prime ministers and four general elections............... The Conservatives have flourished in these conditions, winning each general election since 2010 with a larger share of the vote than the last. But the spoils of victory have not been widely shared.

Wages have not risen against inflation for the longest period since the Napoleonic era, a third of children now grow up in poverty, and state welfare is now one of the stingiest in the developed world.

............ Despite all the havoc the Conservatives have caused, the party is in a stronger position than ever. And Mr. Johnson — the man who seems only ever to fail upward, blundering from one success to the next — is at its beating heart.

Boris Johnson Is How Britain Ends Not with a bang, but with a burst of blond ambition. .......... Boris Johnson, to whom lying comes as easily as breathing, is on the verge of becoming prime minister. He faces the most complex and intractable political crisis to affect Britain since 1945. ......... Mr. Johnson, whose laziness is proverbial and opportunism legendary, is a man well practiced in deceit, a pander willing to tickle the prejudices of his audience for easy gain. His personal life is incontinent, his public record inconsequential. ........

his premiership could bring about the end of Britain itself

....... Though

Brexit is primarily driven by English passions

, two of the four territories in the Union — Northern Ireland and Scotland — voted to remain. ....... his political career has been marked by ferocity of campaigning and indifference in office, as both London mayor and foreign secretary ........... He seems not to have principles.

In the late ’90s he told a surprised colleague he was “worried I haven’t got any political opinions”

— before going on to rehearse a hit parade of right-wing classics about “picanninies” and “bum boys” in his Telegraph column.

Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence Like America’s president, Brexiteers resent the very idea of governing as complex and based in facts........ One thing the two men share is a recklessness that looks like courage in the eyes of their supporters, but which also sabotages the work of policymaking and diplomacy. ........

In characteristically florid terms, Mr. Johnson’s resignation letter expressed fears that “we are headed for the status of a colony.”

......... nobody has any idea what “hard” Brexit actually means in policy terms. It is not so much hard as abstract. ....... What appear on the surface to be policy disputes over Britain’s relationship with Brussels are actually fundamental conflicts regarding the very nature of political power. In this, the arguments underway inside Britain’s Conservative Party speak of a deeper rift within liberal democracies today, which shows no sign of healing. .......... Government involves officials, data-gathering, regulating and evaluating. As a governmental issue, Brexit involves prosaic problems such as how to get trucks through ports. ......... A common thread linking “hard” Brexiteers to nationalists across the globe is that

they resent the very idea of governing as a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials

. .......... For hard-liners such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, it is an article of faith that Britain’s Treasury Department, the Bank of England and Downing Street itself are now conspiring to deny Britain its sovereignty. ........ and the public insist that only sovereignty matters and that the complexities of governing are a lie invented by liberal elites? For one thing, it gives rise to celebrity populists, personified by

Mr. Trump, whose inability to engage patiently or intelligently with policy issues makes it possible to sustain the fantasy that governing is simple

A Fanatical Sect Has Hijacked British Politics Boris Johnson is poised to become prime minister thanks to a small, unrepresentative population of Brexiteer voters bent on destruction. ......... Boris Johnson, the controversial journalist-turned-politician, with a lifelong weakness for causing offense and then laughing off the consequences. ....... the “electorate” consists of a mere 160,000 people, just 0.3 percent of the national electorate, who are significantly older and richer than average ......... the worry is that Britain is now in the grip of something combining the worst aspects of both oligarchy and representative democracy. It might best be described as unrepresentative democracy. ...........

Mr. Johnson’s appeal to his base rests heavily on his enthusiastic comments about “no deal” Brexit, a kamikaze policy that would devastate Britain’s economy and produce a state of emergency for basic civil infrastructure, such as the supply of medicines.

......... Conservative Party members are now so fixated on Brexit that they believe it is worth doing at almost any cost — even if it leads to Northern Ireland or Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, “significant damage to the U.K. economy” or, most strikingly, the destruction of the Conservative Party. ....... But if Mr. Johnson’s personality offers one glimmer of hope, it’s that he’s never shown any indication of holding principles, and is entirely relaxed about letting people down.

Britain Is Drowning Itself in Nostalgia Brexit has exposed my country as a solipsistic backwater. ......... If Britain were an airline, we’d be very much like the one British Airways gives us in its ad — idling on the runway, sipping our tea and mumbling our self-congratulatory eulogies, reveling in our isolation because

all sense of a destination has disappeared

. .......... We are, in almost every sense, on a plane to nowhere, and because we have nowhere to go, we have to convince ourselves that nowhere is exactly where we wish to be. ......... With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia. The result is that

Britain has entered a haunted dreamscape of collective dementia — a half-waking state in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the previous century leap vividly to the fore.

.............. or succumbing to fits of self-righteous fury because someone has dared to impugn the legacy of Winston Churchill. ...........

in our determination to rekindle the embers of our cooling significance, we seem perfectly happy to burn the future of our young for fuel

......... To protect that past, we seem prepared to abandon the future entirely, to tell ourselves that there is no future, just as to British Airways there are apparently no countries to fly to. ......... with the No. 1 shared value, as listed on their website, turning out to be the drably predictable assertion that “Ours is a great country of which people are rightly proud.” It’s the same old pillar of jingoism and self-regard to which, it increasingly seems, everyone must genuflect before, or even in place of, saying anything else at all. ........ We are not quietly leading any revolutions right now, unless one counts as a revolution

our project of self-dismantlement

. ........ We’re the world’s fifth-largest economy and likely to sink to seventh this year. Industry and finance are falling over themselves to flee. ......... the number of people sleeping on the streets has risen 140 percent since 2010; in which over a million emergency food packages were given to those struggling financially in the 2017-18 financial year; in which over 4 million children are living in poverty; and in which local councils in England face an £8 billion financial black hole by 2025, endangering not only their upkeep of communal spaces, but also their ability to provide adequate care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities. .......... There is no patriotic argument for Remain because Brexit itself is a cautionary argument against

blind national pride

. ............... We are pathologically unable to say what needs to be said: that nostalgia, exceptionalism and a xenophobic failure of the collective imagination have undone us. This is not a time of national pride, it is a moment of deep and lasting national shame. We are unable to lead yet determined never to follow. We have nothing of note to say and yet still refuse to listen. .........

unless we find in ourselves the humility we’ve always abhorred, we face a brutal and potentially permanent humbling.

Andrew Yang And The Two Party System a new party, which he has named “Forward.” This time, the candidate known for evangelizing universal basic income, or U.B.I., is championing ideas like open primaries and rank-choice voting .......... A few weeks ago, he announced he was abandoning the Democrats and forming a new third party. ....... I was completely anonymous and I made seven debate stages and mainstreamed universal basic income. I think the reverse should be true, which is how is it that someone who no one had heard of several years ago was a top contender for the mayoralty. .......... 42% of people on both sides would characterize the other party as downright evil, and both our media and our social media environments are exacerbating the situation. ..........

we’re at pre-civil war levels of political stress and they expect political violence to rise

.......... Right now Congress has an overall approval rating of 28% or so. The re-election rate for individual members of Congress is about 92%. Now, why that mismatch? ............ if I’m a Democrat or Republican in 83% of the seats around the country, it is a safe seat. I’m going to win if I get to the general. .............

the movement that I’m kicking off is around open primaries and ranked choice voting and reducing polarization

............ we have to try and liberate our leaders from the tyranny of the most ideologically extreme on either side. ........... when I say open primaries and ranked choice voting in every district around the country, some people react to that negatively. But I have a feeling that over time, they’re going to see, wow, this really would solve a lot of problems, would improve incentives, would fix things .......... right now 60% of Americans say that both parties are not really connected with the needs of the people and want a third party, which is the highest in a long time .......... change is structurally next to impossible because that that is just the way it’s been set up. ........... the Forward Party ............ the Forward Party is not left or right, it’s forward. It’s about solutions, fixing the process and incentives, fact-based governance, modernity ............ there are six core principles to the Forward Party. Number one is open primaries and ranked choice voting. This process change is the key to everything. So that’s number one. Number two is modern and effective government. We’re going to try and hold government’s feet to the fire to try and speed up and modernize. The third one I think people will — at least some people will appreciate this, it’s grace and tolerance. It’s that we don’t see anyone as our enemy. We don’t see other Americans as our enemy certainly. Our enemy is a system that’s rewarding people for pitting us against each other. ............ number four is fact-based governance .... The fifth will surprise absolutely nobody, which this universal basic income. ......... And the sixth is a human-centered economy. We right now measure our economic success and progress based upon capital efficiency, stock market prices, GDP, and none of those things corresponds to our generally deteriorating way of life. ..........

The big change we have to make is open primaries and ranked choice voting. ..... In 24 states, you have ballot initiatives so if you get enough people in that state together, as happened in Alaska, you could potentially see this process happen.

......... I am dedicated to building this party into the healing liberating force in American politics. ......... if you had ranked choice voting, Trump might not have won the Republican primary in 2016. ..........

open primaries, ranked choice voting, fact-based governance, universal basic income, human-centered economy, grace and tolerance and modern effective government

......... I’m going to spend years of my life mainstreaming open primaries and ranked choice voting as the key reform that’s going to set us free. .......... bipartisanship is such a rarity or unicorn at this point, in part because the incentives lead us that direction

Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar Over Instagram’s Effect on Teens The social network has been all hands on deck as it grapples with revelations that it knew the harmful effects its Instagram photo-sharing app was having on teenagers.

Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign. Many experts are rethinking longstanding core ideas, including the importance of inflation expectations. ........... “Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. “We’re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus,” just figuring out the basics of how the universe works. .............. “Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.” ........

basic precepts underlying economic policy are shifting beneath economists’ feet.

........ interest rates and inflation fell worldwide, for reasons that scholars are still trying to understand fully. That implied a lower “neutral interest rate,” or the rate that neither stimulates nor slows the economy, than was widely believed to be the case as recently as the mid-2010s. .............. huge budget deficits have been paired with low interest rates and abundant credit for businesses.

This Is No Way to End a Pandemic The world’s largest vaccine makers say they will soon have enough shots to inoculate just about the entire global population ......... data suggests and experts have argued that hardly any hospitalizations or deaths will be prevented by giving boosters to other groups like frontline workers, because their risk is so low to begin with. Still, health officials across the country report that people are clamoring for boosters ........ It’s also difficult to say whether Mr. Biden’s latest booster plan will undercut his recent pledge to help vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population by this time next year. Mr. Biden has pledged to donate more than a billion shots to that effort.

How I Knew I Needed to Quit Instagram Just like with alcohol, social media left me feeling anxious and removed from myself. ......... I had built “a platform” in publishing-world speak — a sizable audience with blue-check verified accounts — which enabled me to switch careers from advertising to writing in 2016, and secure my first book deal in 2018. ......... Over time, however, I noticed that Instagram was invading every part of my day. Checking the app was the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing I did at night. According to my iPhone usage report, I was spending up to six hours a day on the app ingesting thousands of images, reading hundreds of comments and messages, and comparing myself to countless other people. When

all that time online left me overwhelmed, anxious and burned out

(which was often), I convinced myself I had to stay for my career. Without Instagram to promote my work, I wasn’t sure I could actually make a living. I worried that if I didn’t consistently appear in people’s feeds, I’d become irrelevant. ........... I was so distracted by Instagram. I had difficulty concentrating and remembering things, and I was plagued by constant anxiety. I was so consumed by the information in my feed that I wasn’t focused at work, or in conversations. My daughter had to continually repeat herself because I wasn’t listening, even when she was right in front of me. My boyfriend told me he was worried about the impact it was having on my mental health. ........... most incredibly, I was actually present with people who were in front of me. .......

I realized that whenever I was on social media, I was chasing a goal that was impossible to reach.

......... No matter what I did, there would never be enough followers, enough approval, enough success. The more I posted, the less I felt like my true self. ......... we lose something vital: the ability to experience life in the here and now. And “the here and now” is where the true self lives. ........ I feel the buzz of fear in my stomach, the clutch of anxiety around my throat, the endless procession of negative thoughts and the fractured texture of my attention. When I do this, I remember it’s simply not worth it.

News: October 1