Cronyism

Our Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, who oversees the CDC and FDA, responded to the need for focus on COVID-19 by…looking around and picking an old pal. Who previously ran a labradoodle breeding business.

Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”

He has absolutely no qualifications for running a national response to a public health crisis.

Harrison, 37, was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields. In 2006, he joined HHS in a one-year stint as a “Confidential Assistant” to Azar, who was then deputy secretary. He also had posts working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the Department of Defense and a Washington public relations company.

Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.

I work at a state-funded institution. There are so many rules on hiring…I can’t just tap on old college chum on the shoulder and say, “Hey, we need someone to teach biochemistry. Would you like to…?” and then they say “But I work in construction!” and I tell them “Wing it, I’m sure you could do it” and fill out all the paperwork to get them a salary and the university rubber stamps it and next thing you know, we’ve got some seat-warmer running our biochem class by having the students sit and watch episodes of “Planet Earth” on a VCR. That’s what this feels like.

Instead, we convened a committee, wrote a detailed description of required qualifications, met with HR to get the ground rules explained to us, advertised the position nationally, screened a hundred applications, had phone interviews with 10, brought 3 to campus for a job/teaching talk, argued over the choices, and finally, after months of work, got an agreeable candidate, so we could submit paperwork to our division chair, who passed it on to the chancellor of our university, who got the approval of the president of the university and all its branch campuses, which meant we could finally put this person to work. All that, to hire one professor at a small liberal arts university in rural Minnesota.

We don’t put anywhere close to that much effort in selecting the national coordinator of our pandemic response? This is a problem. This is how idiots get placed in positions of power and influence when there is no process and no required minimal qualifications for an important job.

I do kind of wonder what Brian Harrison honestly feels about this appointment. I have more qualifications than he does — at least I have a biology degree — and if Alex Azar had mysteriously asked me to take on this job, I would have turned him down flat and said he needed to get someone with far more experience in public health than I do. Does the labradoodle breeder now sit in his office wondering how the hell he got there and having no clue how to start, who to contact, how to prioritize critical tasks with no knowledge about what any of the tasks are? Or is he so Dunning-Kruegered that he’s supremely confident that he can fix things, and is more happy that he can brag to his friends and family about how important he is?

No, really, if I suddenly swapped places with Brian Harrison I’d be having a total nervous breakdown right now, and trying desperately to find some better person to take my place. But then, I’ve never bred labradoodles.

Minnesota has its own nest of plague profiteers!

A Minnesota resident, Ben Dorr, takes credit for the recent surge of nitwits protesting in regional state capitals. The article calls him an “activist”, but a more accurate term would be “parasite”.

Amid the honking cars and the chants of “USA, USA,” the group’s leader, Ben Dorr, took credit for helping draw supporters to the rally.

“We’re done being quarantined, we’re done having our freedoms taken,” said Dorr. “It’s time to open up America.”

Across the country, Dorr and his older brothers, Chris and Aaron, have long opposed Republican legislators for not being conservative enough on issues ranging from guns to abortion. Their detractors say they spread disinformation to sow confusion among voters.

That’s right, this is not a new thing. The Dorrs are fanatical gun fondlers, and likewise fanatical anti-abortionists. If there’s a right wing mania about anything, the Dorrs will crank it up to 11 and monetize it.

Based on publicly available tax documents, the Dorrs’ efforts in Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio have raised more than $2.9 million since 2013, with at least a third of it going to a direct mail printing company in Iowa owned by the Dorr family.

This is how they make money, and quite a bit of it, by making swarms of Facebook groups and using them to whip the far right into a froth and compel them to make donations. They’re all about god, guns, and domination over womankind. Primarily, though, they are masters of Facebook, and have figured out the strategies behind the media and use it to recruit followers and radicalize them and empty their pockets.

Jeez, but I despise Facebook.

On the Reopen Minnesota page, which has 22,000 followers, members have likened coronavirus to the flu (coronavirus is more deadly), have questioned the science of wearing masks, even though it’s recommended by public health officials in Trump’s administration, and suggested that death rate numbers are being inflated to scare people into compliance.

They also like to oppose education and keep people ignorant. There’s more profit in stupid people, you know. Isn’t it amazing how Facebook has turned the internet into a tool for ignorance?

Aaron, Chris and Ben Dorr’s father Paul is also well known for fighting public school referendums in Iowa and in the Midwest. Motivated by his belief that children should be home-schooled or within a religious community, he’s also created Facebook pages, websites and videos to make his case.

One thing that’s amusing about them is that the Minnesota Republicans hate them with a passion, because they routinely take political positions so far to the right of the Republicans, and then target Republicans as milktoast wimps. They created a website to specifically explain that the Dorrs are scammers. “Right now, Senate Republicans are the only thing stopping Democrats from passing radical gun control”…how dare the Dorrs criticize us for not being radical enough?

They’re also fake activists. They talk the wild and crazy talk, but they don’t walk the wild and crazy walk — they just amble back to their computers to lie and beg for more money.

While Ben and his brother Chris are registered as lobbyists, Daudt said they do little to advance issues at the Capitol or support legislators during campaign season.

He recalled seeing Ben Dorr filming a video on the Capitol steps several years ago:

“He was just going on and on about how he’s going to turn around right now and go to so-and-so’s office and I’m not going to leave until they take a meeting with me,” Daudt said. “Then they cut the video … and they just wandered off to their vehicles.”

“They are definitely misleading people to make people think they are involved and engaged here,” Daudt said.

And that’s the kind of person behind the current wave of phony protests. There are exploiters out there who can mobilize the fringe to do stupid things that get their faces on the news.

There are more important things than living?

According to the Lt. Governor of Texas, anyway.

I’d like him to expand further on that line of thinking, beyond just vague platitudes about “saving the country”. Is allowing a large fraction of the country to die compatible with “saving the country”? He emphasizes “opening the markets” — are markets more important than the people in them?

I think he means it is less important that the poors should die, than that his wealthy friends should be compelled to make less money.

We really have to kill the Republican party.

News from the hinterlands of despair

I haven’t been sleeping at all well lately — that’s an understatement. I tend to go to bed at around 10 or 10:30 when I can’t even keep my eyes open, and then wake up around 2 or 3am and try by force of will to shut them, which usually doesn’t work at all. If I’m lucky I might fall back asleep around 4 to lie in restless semi-unconsciousness until the fornicating birds shrieking outside my window wake me back up as the sun rises.

Sometimes I just give up and pull up the iPad to read in bed for a while. That’s often a bad outcome — last night, I’m just browsing in the dark and come across “We Are Living in a Failed State”. It’s about time we noticed. I knew we were doomed when Ronald Reagan started spewing that “shining city on a hill” nonsense, which meant our leaders were lying to us and to themselves, and setting up a ridiculous fdcade to conceal real problems that needed real solutions, and worse, were actually all about building an intolerant theocratic state. But at least now in 2020, with disaster all around us, a few people are awake enough to tear down the false front.

Every paragraph in the article is a laser that burns away the propaganda our government has accreted around itself.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

It’s not a perfect summary, though, because it omits one critical target. It fails to discuss the contribution our failed media is making to the problem. Rupert Murdoch is briefly mentioned in passing, but no analysis of American failure is complete without pinning media moguls to the dissecting tray and taking a scalpel to them. Our media is sensationalist and dishonest and backed up by the ruling class and their money; stories are only as good as the number of eyeballs and clicks they gather, which translates into advertiser money, which roots the media directly in filthy loam of capitalism.

For instance, right now the hot stories that dominate the media are tales of protesters descending on state capitols in their shiny $40,000 pickup trucks, waving guns and Confederate flags, and pretending to be true Workers, needing to have stay-at-home orders lifted so they can get back to work producing food and manufactured goods for the American People. Actually, they’re shady phonies who want to force service workers to get back into the hair salons and coffee shops to provide them with the luxuries they desire.

These events are sensationalized by the media by putting reporters into the midst of the mobs, where it looks like a mass movement. Step back a few feet, and you see them for what they are…small demonstrations by a scattering of 20 to 200 middle class nuts riled up by Fox News saying ignorant things. For context, think back to the Women’s Marches in 2017 — teeny-tiny Morris, Minnesota, population 5,000, had almost 300 people peacefully protesting in our streets, while the large cities had huge demonstrations of tens of thousands of people.

I don’t trust our media to recall events as far back as three years ago, let alone put current events in perspective.

But enough of the Atlantic, that middle of the road semi-liberal magazine for the comfortably middle-class, like me. You’d expect that kind of site to be full of horrified soft people. Let’s look at the Marine Corps Times, instead, where we can expect to find tough talk and gruff can-do assertiveness, right?

There we find “I’ve reported on war for years. I’m more afraid now than I’ve ever been.”.

For years I kept one eye on the hysteria and extremism that’s been brewing in America while I covered atrocities half a world away.

Now that I spend more time in the states covering the Rust Belt and Appalachia, I must admit: I’m more afraid now than I ever was in a war zone.

Let me be clear: I’m not afraid of being killed in a gun battle or bombing on American soil, although by the looks of some of those protesters with the semi-automatic, military-style weapons, they appear to be itching for armed insurrection. They may just be waiting for some supreme conspiracy theorist, like QAnon or the president, to give them the green light.

Warzone deaths, while horrible, can at least be instantaneous and painless.

Nowadays, I’m afraid that America’s demise, (not to mention my own), will be slow, agonizing and too much to bear.

The last four-plus years of U.S. happenings have been fraught with the kind of anti-intellectualism and hatred of “outsiders” I’ve seen peddled by inept, tinpot dictators the world over and those with cruel acumen to sustain their tyrannical rules.

I’ve seen some of what’s playing out in America in countries riddled with bullet holes and craters where suicide bombers drove into a crowded market. Before they were destroyed, some of them were pretty nice, stable places.

I’m afraid this hatred of reason and logic that pervades Trump’s daily televised rallies from the White House is just the beginning of our slow painful decay into one of those nations that “once was” much more than it is now.

I should have known. What I’ve seen of the American military, as filtered through my son’s perspective, is less macho swagger and more pragmatic planning for the worst. More cautious realism, at least as long as we don’t look at the higher echelons and the defense contractors (there’s another place where capitalism has poisoned the purpose of the military).

So far, this was great bedtime reading, just what I needed to make sure I wouldn’t get any sleep at all last night.

So I tried turning to the lighter side. David Futrelle is writing about…Andrew Anglin, Rape Gangs, Sex Slavery and Breeding Farms. Yeah, the Nazis are all excited about the prospect of a post-apocalyptic future in which true Aryans get to roam freely over the wasteland, killing the mud people and rounding up the women to work in breeding farms, all for the purposes of fun and to build an army of white men to kill Mexicans. He really hates Mexicans, for some reason which I don’t understand — all the Mexicans I’ve met have been lovely people. Meanwhile, white Americans are fantasizing about Aryan Rape Gangs — that’s what Anglin openly calls them — and enslaving white women.

It makes one almost wish that we had roaming gangs of warriors who would cut down anyone who calls themselves an “Aryan”, flaunts a swastika tattoo, or waves a Confederate flag. Or at least a Republic that openly condemn people who practice such antisocial, antihuman activities.

Oh, well. It was something after learning what horrible corruption and failure that our country has collapsed into to read something that says how much worse it could be. See! A ray of sunshine! We haven’t quite hit bottom yet!

Protesters: think about what you are protesting for

The president is inciting people to protest governors who enforce serious restrictions to limit the spread of the pandemic. So now we’re getting parades of people waving Confederate flags and carrying rifles, calling for governors to be locked up and all constraints removed. So there they are, gathering in large groups, providing a lovely feeding ground for the voracious virus — acres and acres of respiratory epithelia to grow on.

Now they’re marching in Minnesota.

At noon, dozens of protesters could be seen lining the street in front of the governor’s residence, holding signs and American flags.

“I’m a small business owner and my business was shut down forcibly on the 17th of March, and I have yet to see any unemployment, any money come through from the government,” one protester told WCCO. “I’m sitting here waiting here without a paycheck, with no definitive answer on when I will be returning to work, and I don’t think that’s right.”

I think the government should be providing money to help carry him through this time, but waving guns and flags and violating stay-at-home orders is counterproductive. He is doing harm to others out of frustration with this situation — and all of us others are just as frustrated, and would rather not confound our difficulties with an infectious disease.

We’ve been through this before. This is an enlightening graph from 1918, when, in the face of the flu epidemic Denver first imposed restrictions that proved to be effective…so people demanded that they end, and the epidemic came roaring back.

This is what the protesters need to know. If the interventions are removed, people will die. Maybe they will die, or people they love will die. The pandemic will smolder longer and overtax our health care system. Your small business may be important, but is it that important? I know the system drills into everyone that your value is tied directly to your work and your income, but we need to get away from that terrible paradigm to one where your worth is intrinsic, it’s your life and you should be living it.

LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW STUFF

I was fascinated by this article for two reasons: first, because it clearly explains how ventilators work, and what some of the complex parameters of their operation are. There is information here. They need, for instance, to be able to sense the patient’s natural breathing rhythm and follow it, rather than just simply imposing a robotic rhythm of their own. This stuff is difficult.

But the second interesting thing is the clear explanation of how Boris Johnson and the UK government barreled ahead, deciding to harness the power of British industry to build ventilators, just as they built Spitfires in WWII. Unfortunately, the job was put in the hands of bureaucrats who didn’t have the slightest idea of what the medical requirements were, so they issued contradictory and invalid specifications that led to wasted effort and failure.

The author is on Twitter and explains some of the underlying concepts. The article itself is formally written, but Twitter lets him say what he really feels.

“LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW STUFF” is something the US government also needs to do.

David Brooks is still writing columns?

Why? What the fuck is wrong with the NY Times? (I know, I seem to have spent the last couple of decades asking that question, but I still haven’t had a good answer.)

Fortunately, Driftglass reads him, so I don’t have to.

Mr. Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago) after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since. Brooks is America’s most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred and has made his a career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes truly it can be said (and has been said, once or twice) that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation — from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song — there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Fucking Brooks.

I haven’t read the column, and I don’t plan to, so I don’t have direct observations to determine the accuracy of this summary, but I’ve read enough David F. Brooks to assume that the gist is correct.

First, I’m sorry Brooks’ kids no longer speak to him because he dumped their mother for an intern, and passive-aggressively lashing out at them via the op-ed page of The New York Times is the only way Brooks’ knows how send them a message, but honestly, that sounds like a “David Brooks” problem, and not a “the rest of us” problem.

Second, this is every bit the Brooks-brand wretchedly oblivious moral hectoring that you imagine it to be.

And third, in the interest of self-care during these dark times, you shouldn’t read it. After all, that’s my job.

I repeat, why does the NY Times still shovel money at that worthless blot of privileged rancidness? Driftglass would do a better job, and he’d probably work for less while deserving more.

The zombies have finally risen

They’re pounding on the walls and windows, trying to get in! Don’t let them!

That was the scene in Ohio, where people in MAGA hats and waving US and Confederate flags were protesting the restrictions that are supposed to save their lives. They were also shrieking in Michigan over the discomfiture of isolation.

These people were representative.

He’s blubbering because he needs his lawn fertilizer. She needs to get her roots done. Jesus.

They’ve got middle-class suburbanite syndrome real bad. I’ve seen this before. It’s a kind of virtue signaling — you have to keep your lawn green and uniform and well-tended, or the neighbors will look down on you. He’s terrified that he might lose the most superficial, trivial form of status. These are complacent, pathetic people who are not prepared to sacrifice anything for their community.

Zombies, every one.

Can Minnesota please join your club?

Did you hear the news? Washington, Oregon, and California have announced their independence on matters dealing with the pandemic, forming the West Coast Pact. The political fragmentation predicted in so many cyberpunk novels is actually happening! How exciting! Maybe.

COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities.

We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business.

While each state is building a state-specific plan, our states have agreed to the following principles as we build out a West Coast framework:

  • Our residents’ health comes first. As home to one in six Americans and gateway to the rest of the world, the West Coast has an outsized stake in controlling and ultimately defeating COVID-19.
  • Health outcomes and science – not politics – will guide these decisions. Modifications to our states’ stay at home orders must be made based off our understanding of the total health impacts of COVID-19, including: the direct impact of the disease on our communities; the health impact of measures introduced to control the spread in communities —particularly felt by those already experiencing social disadvantage prior to COVID-19; and our health care systems’ ability to ensure care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This effort will be guided by data. We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening, and we will be working in coordination to identify the best metrics to guide this.
  • Our states will only be effective by working together. Each state will work with it’s local leaders and communities within its borders to understand what’s happening on the ground and adhere to our agreed upon approach.

Those are smart, science-based goals, contrary to what we’re getting from the federal government and the nest of grifters and thieves that occupy it. I can understand why they’re doing this, and wish Minnesota could join them. We’d be a real asset! We’re a center for biomedical research and industry, and we can buy our way in with corn — lots of corn. I, personally, have strong ties to the west coast, as do many of our citizens. Let us in! You know, we’re surrounded by Greater Wingnuttia, with Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas all full of Trumpkins. Maybe we can negotiate a connection through Canada to Washington?

But then I think…you know, our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin have struggled against the forces of darkness for so long. For the last election Republicans cut the number of polling stations in Milwaukee from 180 to 5, citing coronavirus fears…but then these same Republicans refused to allow voting by mail-in ballot, while all the State Supreme Court justices who rejected the notion voted by absentee ballot. It was a blatant, criminal act of voter suppression, yet the voters persevered and kicked one of the conservatives off the court and elected a liberal judge.

Jill Karofsky beat Daniel Kelly, whom then-Gov. Scott Walker (R) appointed to the state’s high court in 2016. Trump endorsed Kelly and on Election Day urged Wisconsin voters “to get out and vote NOW” for the justice.

She won? In spite of all the hurdles Wisconsin threw in her way? This should be an inspiration to us all.

And then, South Dakota. Sioux Falls, SD is currently one of the hottest hot spots for coronavirus infections in the country, thanks to the Smithfield food processing plant, which responded to demands to keep the economy alive (and money flowing into the owners’ pockets) by keeping their workers toiling away. The city’s mayor did the right thing by asking to impose orders to limit the spread of the infection. He was listening to the recommendations of scientists.

“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota’s outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.

He was overruled by the Republican governor, Kristi Noem.

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

“It’s an exciting day,” she boasted, repeatedly citing her conversations with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

She was listening to the recommendations of Jared Kushner, slumlord, profiteer, con artist.

Noem deserves to rot in hell, but does TenHaken? Do the workers at Smithfield?

I’m beginning to doubt the wisdom of the Western States Pact, and I keep returning to that last statement in their declaration: “Our states will only be effective by working together.” I think that’s true, but I’m not sure what they mean by “our”. Which “our”, 3 states on the west coast? Or should we be thinking bigger, of 50 states and American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all working together to tear down one corrupt regime in Washington, DC, united to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. The problem isn’t Wisconsin, or South Dakota, or Idaho or Nevada or even Texas — it’s the incompetence and malfeasance of the Trump administration and the Republican senate. That’s what we need to work together to destroy.

Well, also, maybe Wall Street should be one of our targets.

Factio Republicana delenda est.