FUCKING ASSHAT HAS COVID-19

Yep, the October Surprise has already happened before large hunks of the country were even able to finish October 1st.

Technically though, we should add some clarity: we only know Trump has been exposed to coronavirus. No news has yet been released as of 1:30am EST / 10:30pm PST about the President’s symptoms (or lack thereof), but the president’s Twitter account did announce that he and Melania had both tested positive and were entering quarantine. Apparently the white house has also known for days that Hope Hicks tested positive and after she was positive was traveling and interacting with Trump, White House staff, and the White House Press Corps. There is as yet no guarantee that Biden was not directly or indirectly exposed, so watch for updates on that front.

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Energy Transformation & Nuclear Waste

I am happy to announce that for FreethoughtBlogs upcoming Panel of Inexpert Discussion, I have been able to secure the contribution of notable local luminary Ingibjörg Margarét Guðiradottir, Roy G. Biv Professor of Darwinian-Dysonian Radioecology at Nanaimo Technical University, British Columbia. She will be speaking next weekend, during our fundraiser, on a comprehensive plan to address problems with current nuclear waste disposal, accelerating the transformation of electricity production and energy markets more generally, with knock-on effects for demilitarization and updating older urban infrastructure to more modern building designs.

Before you read her intriguing abstract, please remember to click through to read about my own offer to craft custom short stories for your benefit and titillation.

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Hey, USA! How are those death Projections?

Well, despite my dramatic and terrifying underestimate of how US residents would pull together and alter their behavior to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, there are still many COVID-19 deaths happening around the USA. Looking at graphs, the growth of the disease looks a lot more linear than exponential lately, and that’s a very, very good thing. With linear growth, each doubling takes twice as long as the last doubling, which means that we buy ourselves lots and lots of time to make vaccines and take more preventative actions before reaching megadeath-scale numbers. Of course, this is still much worse than negative growth rate in COVID-19 deaths or just stopping the disease in its tracks, but when the choice is between linear growth and exponential growth, as it was for the USA at the end of last month, you have to choose the former.

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I’m Glad Pandemic Modeling Isn’t My Job

So just recently I wrote a post pointing out how reasonable it was to expect 6 doublings of COVID-19 deaths in the USA by early May (which would have given us a bit over a quarter million total persons dead), and how after that even one more doubling would be an unthinkable tragedy. But we’re not seeing doublings on the rate I feared (and which seemed reasonable given a comparison to other nations then-current rates of doubling when they had initiated nationwide stay-at-home policies before the USA). Commenter militantagnostic was early on the case, informing me on April 6th:

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US COVID-19 Death Rate: Understanding a link

So I linked to one important source I used in my non-professional but (hopefully) mathematically literate guesswork about how COVID-19 deaths in the US will increase over the next while. What I didn’t appreciate at that time was that the graphic that they used to discuss geometric growth in deaths in various countries is a dynamic graphic. Every time a country updates its total deaths on its own official websites, which happens once a day or more for Eurpoean and North American countries, the graphic itself updates. This means you can’t click on the link from a past article (or in this paragraph) and get easy access to the numbers I used when writing a particular blog post.

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How fucked is the USA? A COVID-19 DeathSplainer.

SARS-CoV2 infections were originally doubling once every 2.5 days, according to the CDC and the WHO. Over the last 4 days, deaths in different countries have had different doubling rates, but US deaths doubled very close to once in that 4 days.

This is a result of the fact that the places with the highest numbers of deaths also have done the most to slow transmission via shelter-in-place orders and other measures. So even if infections and deaths are doubling much faster in counties and states that haven’t yet been hit hard, the total number of deaths they add from a single doubling might yet be small compared to deaths in, say, New York City, which had over 500 on Friday. (By the way, New York City’s measures haven’t yet been effective at slowing the doubling: their deaths doubled in a mere 3 days.) We are not likely headed for a slowdown of the doubling rate because there are so many places where the virus is just beginning its infectious burn, and while each individual county might be small, there are many counties with many, many people in Texas and Florida and Georgia and other red states.

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Hand washing getting repetitive?

Now you have instant options! The website “Wash Your Lyrics” will generate a poster copied from the NHS but with the lyrics to the song of your choice – automatically, no typing of lyrics whatsoever. Input the song name and artist & away you go! My first creation was based on Bikini Kill’s Tony Randall, off the album Reject All American. This is how it came out:

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Trump Administration Ordered Immigration Courts to Spread Coronavirus

Is almost literally what happened earlier today, March 9th, 2020. The National Association of Immigration Judges recommended that immigration courts display disease prevention posters in english and several other languages to protect court employees, lawyers, and attendees.

But as odd as it seems for a court to be part of the executive branch, in the case of immigration courts, they are organized under Article II powers (executive powers, thus  accountable to the president) rather than article III (judicial powers, thus accountable to the Supreme Court generally on some matters, or the Chief Justice specifically on remaining matters) because the constitution gives authority over immigration and naturalization to the executive, subject to duly passed laws.

As a result, the President has the authority to interfere with immigration courts to the extent not prohibited by law passed by Congress and signed by the President (or passed with veto-override). Apparently the President or his delegates were none too pleased that immigration judges wanted to prevent death and disease and ordered immigration courts to take the posters down:

It’s hard to explain just how heinous and shortsighted this is, but mostly because it is so obviously heinous and shortsighted. To the Trumpists who actually need this explained, I doubt comprehension will ever come.