Saturday, March 28, 2020
It's A Really Funny Movie
Now that the residents of the horniest place on Earth, The Villages, are getting sick, the Florida governor is trying to blame NEW YORK, and not the fact that he refused to close the beaches to OWN THE LIBS, and so Trump is now talking about a QUARANTINE for NY, CT, and NJ, and though nobody has any idea what exactly that means, anyone who was thinking about leaving those places is going to soon!
100 Days From Now, Presidential ZOOM Press Conference
"Mr. President, where are the fucking 100,000 ventilators?"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would meet advisers early next week to discuss the next steps in fighting the coronavirus and the possibility of opening the U.S. economy, and said the United States would produce 100,000 ventilators in 100 days.Haha, no, it'll be like "how can Nancy Pelosi make it up to you, sir?"
Friday, March 27, 2020
Governing Is Hard Work
Mayors who aren't very interested in their jobs make me angry, especially mayors of big cities. Especially mayors of New York City! I've heard all of the arguments, which basically boil down to them not having as much authority as they would like due to various constraints (city council, budgetary authority, state meddling, etc.) but boohoo you aren't a dictator of your city and mayoring is hard work. Maybe you can't control everything, but you can get up every day and go to work to do the things you are capable of doing.
Shortly thereafter, he declined to cancel St. Patrick’s Day parade and then did. He resisted calls to cancel regular street sweeping and then did. He had a photo op at a 311 call center, where he told a caller who had just returned from Italy that she did not need to self-quarantine, advice that forced 311 to actually call the woman back and tell her to stay inside for 14 days. The mayor touted the city’s new, wide-scale testing capacity, only to have his Health Department announce that only hospitalized patients should be tested. He tweeted at Elon Musk to supply the city with ventilators. When a New York Times reporter wrote of his own gut-wrenching story about contracting COVID-19 and being unable to get help, a top mayoral aide chastised him online for seeking help at all rather than just getting better at home. And the mayor himself told a radio host that people who don’t display symptoms can’t transmit the disease, an assertion that contradicts information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Well he tweeted Elon, so everything is fixed now.
This Sucky Blog Is My External Memory
And people who were horrified by Katrina (and other things), rightfully, now get nostalgic for George Bush. And while I am no longer strongly on the side of "actually, George Bush was worse than Trump" as Trump finally has his moment to shine, I am still mad that...everyone forgot. Even people who pay attention to politics barely remember things that happened 4 years ago. It should not be very surprising that people who are blessed with more entertaining hobbies don't remember things that happened a month ago.
Herd
The UK press has done their best to memory hole it - THAT DID NOT HAPPEN SHUTUPSHUTSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP - but it wasn't that long ago that the UK virus plan was to let everybody get it as quickly as possible. The product was being rolled out. The prime minister claiming to shake hands of coronavirus patients in hospitals. Journalists being told that their "herd immunity" plan was JUST SCIENCE, BRO and Proper British Science, unlike those dumb euro-weenies. Critics - including the opposition party - being given the LOL DUMMIE IT'S JUST SCIENCE WHY DO YOU HATE SCIENCE treatment by asskissing journalists.
Until suddenly they realized that letting a million of their core voters die was not necessarily the best plan.
The Herd is YOU.
Yep. I really need some hipster analysis to reassure me
— Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) March 13, 2020
Until suddenly they realized that letting a million of their core voters die was not necessarily the best plan.
This stance became increasingly hard to defend after it emerged that the government’s initial strategy — allowing the virus to infect the young and healthy in the hope of building “herd immunity” that would protect vulnerable groups — was, at least partly, based on faulty modeling. Specifically, scientists advising the government had used data for a different disease with a much lower hospitalization rate than had been observed in countries hit earlier by COVID-19.
Pro-government commentators quickly divided into two camps, with the first adopting a position that’s almost too absurd to engage with seriously. They claimed that nothing about the government’s approach had actually changed, the public had simply failed to understand it properly.
That footage you watched of the UK’s chief scientific adviser explaining why “herd immunity” through widespread infection was a desirable goal? Those words didn’t actually mean what you thought they did. The Newsnight segment where a Public Health England official told us to see our elderly relatives, go to the pub, and generally carry on as usual if we didn’t have symptoms, despite the evidence globally of asymptomatic transmission? It simply never happened. Who are you going to trust, your lying eyes or the 2017 winner of the Political Commentator of the Year award?
The Herd is YOU.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus.
Mr Johnson said he had developed mild symptoms over the past 24 hours, including a temperature and cough.
Their Fault
One thing too few remember about Katrina was it wasn't just incompetence, but extreme racism. I don't mean extreme racism of Fox News, or the Bush administration. I mean of basically the entire media. New Orleans was treated as *too dangerous for the national guard to enter safely* because there were black people there, and when they weren't looting big screen TVs (a sensible thing to do in several feet of water), they were killing whitey. News coverage was dominated by accounts of crime in the Superdome. It was just *too dangerous to help people.*
You couldn't blame people for a hurricane, precisely, but you could blame them for the fact that you just couldn't help them. It was, ultimately, their fault. Easy to do with the racism, as that's standard stuff in this country.
But a hurricane hits a location. The virus is going to go everywhere. So, good luck places the president likes! He doesn't like any place, actually, and he isn't going to like you, either, when you make his numbers look bad.
You couldn't blame people for a hurricane, precisely, but you could blame them for the fact that you just couldn't help them. It was, ultimately, their fault. Easy to do with the racism, as that's standard stuff in this country.
But a hurricane hits a location. The virus is going to go everywhere. So, good luck places the president likes! He doesn't like any place, actually, and he isn't going to like you, either, when you make his numbers look bad.
Death Cult
When people in the future try to explain what happened, one crazy person is going to try to explain that it was all because of the president's favorite television stories, and he will be correct but laughed out of the academy.
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) March 27, 2020
Thursday, March 26, 2020
And Then The Moment Passes
Well I still have a job and my stonks are up. Sure the help all wear masks now, and every now and then I have to swap one out because, well, you know, but otherwise things are pretty much as they were. For me. The news is a bit depressing, so I stopped watching, and, yes, I lost some "friends" but those quotation marks are there for a reason.
The new normal is going to feel pretty much like the old normal to the people who rule us, fairly quickly. They'll be back to talking about funemployment and lucky duckies who are too poor to pay federal income taxes and splashing stories of "looters" and how "we" deal with them in your local newspapers.
The new normal is going to feel pretty much like the old normal to the people who rule us, fairly quickly. They'll be back to talking about funemployment and lucky duckies who are too poor to pay federal income taxes and splashing stories of "looters" and how "we" deal with them in your local newspapers.
Pop Goes The Aughts
Right wingers and "centrists" spent the decade after the beginning of the Great Recession demonizing the unemployed and finding any excuse for it other than the obvious ones. Depending on the telling it was just The Great Shirk (young men would rather play video games than work) or some version of structural unemployment (the robots have taken all the jobs! stupid kids didn't get STEM degrees even though there are no STEM jobs either!). Mass unemployment had an obvious cause and just as obvious solutions, but the people who rule us and the lickspittles-to-billionaires in the press spent years blaming the victims of their views and policies.
Gonna be the same thing but even more insane.
Gonna be the same thing but even more insane.
Failed State
Not making any point that a million other people aren't making, but we spend absurd amounts of money on things which are supposedly there To Protect Us And Keep Us Safe. Military, cops, militarized cops, prisons, etc. And, welp...
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
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