Viral dumping ground

Once again, let me get this out of my system, a dump of recent reactions to coronavirus news. Then I can just set it aside and think about more cheerful things for the rest of my day.

  • I am not at all a fan of Max Boot, who I consider an unpleasant warmonger with blood on his hands, but at least he gets one thing right: Trump is the worst president ever.

    So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times — not of all time. That left open the possibility that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen enough to take away the qualifier “in modern times.” With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history.

    Then he catalogs Trump’s lethally disastrous policies and errors.

  • You want more reasons? Do you need them? Where have you been? Just watch this nauseating performance.

    I’ve seen this before: the guy who hasn’t done the readings or the homework, called on to explain something, who then tries to fake it with a lot of oozing faux-sincerity and praise for the importance of the question, but who can’t actually say one word of substance.

  • How badly has Donald Trump fucked us over?

    Beyond the suffering in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international standing of the United States, damaging and diminishing its reputation as a global leader in times of extraordinary adversity.

    “This has been a real blow to the sense that America was competent,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior-most provider of intelligence analysis. He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This has been the opposite of that.”

    This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions.

    You’ve got to read the whole long article to get a sense of how catastrophic this presidency has been.

  • Unfortunately, one of the major contributors to the ongoing clusterfuck is the pseudo-objective “he-said-she-said” style of journalism that has been perfected by the New York Times. Here’s a perfect example of a NYT headline.

    Look at that. The presidential authority figure says testing is fine, but everyone else is saying he’s wrong…so let’s lead with the ass-in-chief lying and make it a story about “he-said-they-all-said” and not offend any Republicans. Even when scientists chime in to point out that Trump is all wet, the reporters stick their nose in the air and ignore the facts.

    Let’s just move on to Yale epidemiologist/infectious disease researcher Gregg Gonsalves kicking the Times’s ass, which sorely offended one of the Times writers so!

    “Move along,” said the pompously wrong New York Times reporter to the infectious disease specialist from Yale.

    Newspapers have responsibilities to the truth. When the NYT ceases to respect that, it’s time to disrespect the NYT.

  • Guess who’s advising the administration on the pandemic? That quack, Dr Oz. Enough said.

  • You may have seen a map going around that plots the distance people travel in a day, showing that southern states in particular were particularly bad at limiting their isolation. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t that Southerners are stupid.

    But there’s another reason that the red states are also “red states” when it comes to their travel distance. As former Obama White House official Christopher Hale points out, these maps correspond closely to areas that are “food deserts,” where the nearest grocery story requires making an extended trip. “Food deserts” is a term that is often applied to urban neighborhoods where good nutrition is outside of walking range, but these are counties where it takes an extended auto trip to find any kind of nutrition, even bad nutrition. Why? The simple answer is Walmart. These areas represent locations where big box retailers like Walmart have annihilated local grocers, and where the quest for an apple or a box of Pop-Tarts means crossing the county to a store that also sells tires, televisions, and potting soil.

    I’ve lived in one of these “deserts” where you can’t do anything without getting in a car and driving, only it wasn’t the south — it was in a Philadelphia suburb. We had the nice middle-class home in the development, surrounded by lots of other nice middle-class homes, and after we settled in, we realized that there’s absolutely nothing there but middle-class homes. You want groceries, or a movie theater, or a pharmacy, or even a nice walk in the park, you’ve gotta drive.

    This was a bit of a shock. I grew up in a small town where a kid could find everything he wanted in a short walk or a bicycle ride. We had just moved from Salt Lake City, and say what you want about Mormon Town, the city actually was extraordinarily livable and offered a variety of things in walking distance. These horrid suburbs…nope. Worst of everything. They’re designed around cars, and Walmart has taken advantage of that destructive car culture.

    Now I live in a small town again, and it is actually a pleasant environment. You need a car to get away from the town, but all your day-to-day needs are conveniently close. We don’t have a Walmart. I hope we never do.

  • Here’s Elon Musk a month ago.

    He got a lot of pushback on that, which crimped his ego, so he rushed to be the ever-helpful billionaire, you know, like the Elon Musk who threw together an impractical submarine to help rescue boys trapped in a flooding cave…that is, he made noise to make it sound like he was a good philanthropist. He promised to put his engineers to work making over a thousand ventilators that he would donate free to hospitals.

    Reality is less impressive. He instead bought a bunch of devices from another company, slapped a “Tesla” label on them, and handed them out…but they’re the wrong kind of ventilator. They’re not totally useless, but they’re also not an appropriate response to a need.

    The tweet features a photo of the “40 ventilators” Musk donated still in boxes labeled with ventilator company ResMed’s logo. Those 40 devices represent a portion of the more-than 1,000 Musk purchased from the San Diego-based ventilator maker.

    A closer look at the photo, however, reveals a device that is not the kind of ventilator hospitals are struggling to find. The American Association for Respiratory Care confirmed to FOX Business that the device is a “bi-level machine” traditionally used to help people with sleep apnea. In particular, the photo shows ResMed’s non-invasive, five-year-old S9 bi-level model.

    Is anyone surprised? This is another example of a billionaire posturing to get attention, but only delivering the goods that salve his ego, rather than what people actually need.

  • You probably don’t want to read this last link. A doctor describes the intubation procedure he has to routinely do to save lives.

    Usually, before this, patients would be on a vent for three to five days. Now we’re seeing 14 to 21. Most of these people have acute respiratory distress syndrome. There’s inflammation, scar tissue, and fluid building up in the lungs, so oxygen can’t diffuse easily. No matter how much oxygen you give them, it can’t get through. It’s never enough. Organs are very sensitive to low oxygen. First comes kidney failure, then liver failure, and then brain tissue becomes compromised. Immune systems stop working. There’s a look most people get, called mottling, where the skin turns red and patchy when you only have a few hours left. We have a few at that point. Some have been converted to “do not resuscitate.”

    I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick.

I am ashamed to make this suggestion

No, really, I am a bad person. I shouldn’t even be thinking this way.

If any of you are in Idaho, and you feel sick with COVID-19, could you give Ammon Bundy a big hug for me? You could also give him a kiss if you felt like it, or hug all of the other people there, or cough in the damn punchbowl, too.

Ammon Bundy, leader of the Y’all Qaeda militia that took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 to preserve liberty and get lots of attention for fringe radical groups that want to overthrow the government, just wants you all to know that there is no “public health” in the US Constitution, just as there is no “public land,” either. That’s why last week Bundy held a “town hall” in a commercial building he owns in Emmett, Idaho, to announce that Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s stay-at-home order was unconstitutional and very bad. And because it’s Ammon Bundy, you know damn well he promised to get the ol’ Vanilla ISIS dildo militia together again and lead an armed resistance to defend anyone who wanted to defy the order, too. But that would only be if the government forced him to, by doing something he didn’t like.

Boise State Public Radio reports that the meeting in Emmett, about 30 miles northwest of Boise, was

like something from a pandemic safety nightmare. Dozens of people sit elbow to elbow, greeting each other with hugs, even posing for pictures with an arm around Bundy’s waist.

The small rally is also illegal, according to the emergency order issued by Idaho’s governor.

I only suggest it because obviously Bundy and pals wouldn’t be at all averse.

I feel guilty, though, because accelerating the spread of the pandemic is also going to do harm to innocent people in the region. So I guess you shouldn’t do it. Never mind.

I can’t even hope that one of the attendees was already infectious, because as much of that stand of weeds over there really deserves to be exterminated, you can’t control a wildfire by casting a blind eye on some of the sparks.

Doing the right thing saves lives

I’m home alone and kind of miserable, but am willing to pay that small price if it reduces the death toll. It looks like Minnesota’s efforts might pay off!

When Walz issued the two-week stay-at-home order, the goal was an 80% reduction in face-to-face contact and viral transmission.

Modeling by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests this is working. Deaths so far haven’t been increasing in Minnesota at the expected exponential rate, prompting the institute to lower its forecasted COVID-19 deaths in the state from around 2,000 two weeks ago to 932.

“We’re seeing the impact of these measures and how early they are” put in place, said Ali Mokdad, chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington.

Meanwhile, a bunch of states with Republican governors are dragging their heels and killing people. That’s what happens when you belong to a party that ignores the data.

Dang, I’m surrounded by three of those states, Iowa, North and South Dakota. When will you guys learn: don’t vote Republican, ever.

We live in a country where Joe Rogan’s dumbass opinions are valued

We are so screwed.

For some reason, our media and many voters think it’s important to weight the opinions of some unqualified meathead named “Joe” — remember Joe the Plumber? — as somehow insightful or precious. It was one of Bernie Sanders’ missteps when he touted Joe Rogan’s endorsement as something worth promoting, when it was actually no more meaningful than a bird landing on his lectern at a rally. We should not be making racists and transphobes more prominent!

Rogan is a flittering twit who tries to pander to his audience of mostly young men, and who likes to appear as a radical with novel ideas. He has no coherent ideas at all. He previously endorsed Sanders, a democratic socialist, praising his consistency. Now he has turned around and endorsed donald trump, saying trump is fine with the pressure of the presidency, even as people are dying all around us from his mismanagement.

He also likes to pretend he is some populist voice-of-the-people, but look who he is talking to when he made this surprise recommendation.

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, wealthy privileged kook.

We should be saying, “Who the fuck cares what some uneducated jock with an online mob of sycophants thinks?” The answer, unfortunately, is our news media.

By the way, he said this in the context of not wanting to vote for Joe Biden. I agree with that — I think Biden will be a maintainer of the status quo, where the status quo is an ongoing catastrophe — but to then prefer an obvious con man and incompetent buffoon is worse. I have more respect for people who say they won’t vote at all than I do for anyone who votes for Trump.

As much coronavirus stuff as I can stand

Let’s get it all out of the way at once, OK? I’ll write a few things about the pandemic, and then anything else I write today will be exclusively non-plague related.

  • In David Brin’s The Postman (skip the movie, read the book), one of the things that struck me as true was that the thing you have to worry about most in the post-apocalypse is the people — especially the militias, the religious fanatics, the conspiracy theorists who make it their life’s mission to make the chaos worse. Well say hello to sick conspiracies endorsed by the likes of QAnon.

    A train engineer at the Port of Las Angeles was arrested on Tuesday after he deliberately derailed a train and crashed it near the Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy over his suspicions that the ship was part of a government takeover, according to a Justice Department statement about the incident.

    Or how about nurses being attacked by racists?

    “A man elbowed my rib, intentionally pushing me to the side, the female partner then shouted racial abuse saying: “at least we are whites you f***ing c***.”

    You might be wondering what the actual pseudo-military militias are thinking right now. It’s not good.

    If COVID-19 sticks around for a while maybe it will snap people out of this false sense of entitlement culture we live in, put your phones down and talk to one another, hold respectful interactions.. a real gut check into what is important, a snap away from our lemmings like existence on earth. a breath of fresh air amid the chaos.

    …

    There will definitely be pros to this experience in addition to the cons. There has certainly been another uptick in new members on here since this has begun.

    Yeah, because the real problem is people spending too much time on their phones, when they should be strutting around town with their AR-15.

  • Would you believe that conspiracy nuts in the UK are claiming that 5G wireless causes COVID-19, and that when that network is activated, everyone is going to die? People are attacking cell phone masts over these baseless fears.

  • Just a thought here. We’re currently seeing a total failure of the supply chain producing PPE gear, and Boy Wonder Jared Kushner is making it worse with his penchant for grabbing at anything not nailed down, or things that are nailed down and committed to other buyers, and hoarding it and saying “mine!” He doesn’t seem to understand how to do the job at all.

    But wait a moment, I thought, I wouldn’t know how to do that job, either. For decades, Republicans have touted the virtues of electing people with business experience, and for once, I can see where someone who was familiar with the principles of keeping goods flowing in an efficient supply chain would be perfect to manage that kind of job, and ought to be appointed there.

    Except — and this is not something I often think about — “businessperson” is not a catch-all occupation. There are diverse roles within a business. And some roles are not at all useful in most situations. A slumlord doesn’t work with supply chains. Neither does a guy who runs casinos into bankruptcy. Neither do Wall Street bankers and insurance company executives. Those are actually the most useless possible qualifications for anybody to do anything other than leech off other people’s money. And who are we putting in positions of power in our country? You guessed it, the leeches and parasites.

  • Don’t read this story. A woman can’t see her dying husband in quarantine, so she has to watch him die over FaceTime. She plays their wedding song to him as he goes. He was only 42.
    And this is where we are.

  • Trump is still president.

I’m done for the day. I’m going to grade exams and listen to the birds sing outside my window.

The whole US system of government is broken

We know who to blame as the story gets worse and worse.

Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.

The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

He’s been wrecking important prevention and detection programs.

He’s incompetent and has been spewing dangerously bad medical advice, like that we don’t need N95 masks because in many cases the scarf is better, it’s thicker. It’s nonsense.

Trump has appointed a slumlord who happens to be his son-in-law to head the coronavirus task force. He knows nothing. This is blatant nepotism.

He has been biasing the delivery of medical supplies to the states in order to assist his re-election bid. He only wants to be president of the red states.

The country is run by an incompetent, greedy, corrupt, and useless president in a time of national crisis, and nothing can be done about it, apparently. Nothing. One impeachment got squelched by the greedy, corrupt nest of snakes in the senate, so I guess we’re just going to muddle on, with people dying while a mob of rich fucks look on and use the chaos as an excuse to shovel more money at Wall Street.

But we’re not supposed to worry, be content, Joe Biden is waiting in the wings to take over next January, so the system “works”.

For who? Insurance companies?

Oh, it’s ironic union-busting

Chris Smalls has been organizing workers at an Amazon facility in Staten Island. His goal has been to get the company to provide better safety protections.

“Amazon would rather fire workers than face up to its total failure to do what it should to keep us, our families, and our communities safe,” said Smalls.

“I am outraged and disappointed, but I’m not shocked. As usual, Amazon would rather sweep a problem under the rug than act to keep workers and working communities safe. Today, I stood with my co-workers because conditions at JFK8 are legitimately dangerous for workers and the public. Amazon thinks this might shut me up, but I’m going to keep speaking up. My colleagues in New York and all around the country are going to keep speaking up. We won’t stop until Amazon provides real protections for our health and safety and clarity for everybody about what it is doing to keep people safe in the middle of the worst pandemic of our lifetimes,” he added.

Multiple workers have recently contracted the coronavirus, and they were justifiably increasingly concerned that the pandemic was going to sweep through the facility. Amazon’s explanation for why Smalls was fired was charmingly Orwellian.

Amazon (AMZN) confirmed the firing Monday night, telling CNN Business in a statement that the employee, Christian Smalls, was supposed to be under quarantine.

“Mr. Smalls was found to have had close contact with a diagnosed associate with a confirmed case of COVID-19 and was asked to remain home with pay for 14 days, which is a measure we’re taking at sites around the world,” said Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish. “Despite that instruction to stay home with pay, he came onsite today, March 30, putting the teams at risk.”

The richest man in the world is going to find a way to use the pandemic to oppress workers further and get richer, isn’t he?

Lawyers and self-importance go together like a slime & maggot sandwich

This New Yorker interview with “legal scholar Richard Epstein” is one of the most amazing exhibitions of arrogance I’ve read lately…and I’m living in the age of Donald Trump. Epstein earlier wrote an essay for his home base, the right-wing think tank the Hoover Institution, in which he predicted that the coronavirus pandemic was over-exaggerated, that it would peak with about 500 deaths and then fade away. His work was widely cited by conservatives, claiming that it showed that the cure was worse than the disease. His estimate was passed within a week, and the death toll is still rising. He’s wrong, definitively, and his prediction was quickly falsified. But he’s still defending it!

Most galling, his defense is that his prediction is supported by evolutionary theory. I know a little bit about evolution, so that was a startling claim. He’s a lawyer, not a biologist. He tries to explain his justification in this interview, and it turns out to be built on wishful thinking and faulty beliefs in how evolution works.

Here’s why he thinks the pandemic wouldn’t be as bad as the experts say.

But then adaptation starts to set in. And, in my view, adaptation is a co-evolutionary process in which things change, not only in human behavior but also change in genetic viral behavior.

OK, sure, humans are evolving, the virus is evolving, but how does that support the notion that the virus will kill 500 and not 100,000 people? There’s a leap there that emerges murkily.

…as the virus becomes more apparent, adaptive responses long before government gets involved become clear.

Wait, so his argument is that the virus will adapt to become relatively harmless before any public health work can take effect? I seem to recall that this viral adaptation to become weaker didn’t happen with, say, polio. He’s making assumptions about the rate of change.

Well, what happens is it’s an evolutionary tendency.

Also assumptions about a “tendency”. How does this work? He explains that. It’s jaw-droppingly stupid.

So the mechanism is you start with people, some of whom have a very strong version of the virus, and some of whom have a very weak version of the virus. If the strong-version-of-the-virus people are in contact with other people before they die, it will pass on. But, if it turns out that you slow the time of interaction down, either in an individual case or in the aggregate, these people are more likely to die before they could transfer the virus off to everybody else.

So his idea of why slow-the-spread works is not that it gives health services time to treat severe cases, it’s that he imagines there is this substantial variation in lethality of the virus, and that isolation allows people carrying strong strains to die, eliminating those variants, giving weak strains a selective edge. This ruthless Darwinian winnowing of viral strains will occur over the course of a few weeks.

He’s postulating a hyper-evolutionary acceleration; it’s very similar to the arguments of creationists who think all the vast amount of variation in species emerged from a few kinds preserved from the Flood 4000 years ago. Good evolutionary biology does not treat selection as a god-like force that instantly generates an optimal solution — we’re entirely aware of the limitations and how fast it can potentially work. We can use math. Epstein’s mechanism might work…over a few hundred thousand generations, which I suspect is even slower than our dilatory president’s response to the crisis.

And you’re not an epidemiologist, correct?

No, I’m trained in all of these things. I’ve done a lot of work in these particular areas. And one of the things that is most annoying about this debate is you see all sorts of people putting up expertise on these subjects, but they won’t let anybody question their particular judgment.

No, he’s not trained in those particular areas. He’s a lawyer. They work contrary to how scientists work. Lawyers start with the conclusion that they want to reach, and then select evidence that fits that conclusion.

That comment is particularly ironic because it applies spectacularly well to him. He’s claiming expertise he doesn’t have. You know, as I said, I actually do have some training in evolutionary biology, but I understand the limitations of what I know. I understand general principles and basic rules, but I also know that there are domains of specialization, like epidemiology, that I know very little about. I wouldn’t try to trump an epidemiologist’s detailed understanding of pandemics with my general knowledge of evolution of fish and spiders and cephalopods. Yet here’s Epstein, asserting that his legal training qualifies him to know better than epidemiologists.

I also wouldn’t declare that my knowledge of biology means I know better than Epstein how the law works.

What I’m doing here is nothing exotic. I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case.

There is actually a field of Darwinian economics. It’s mostly a bunch of economists who are smart enough to know that biologists have built up a lot of theory about how evolutionary biology works, and they’re trying to apply biological principles to economics. That’s not what Epstein is doing. He’s trying to jigger his fantasy Libertarian notions of economics to fit biology, and throwing a snit because biology is not obliging.

Oh yes, a snit. The following exchange is a stunning demonstration of how thin-skinned Richard Epstein is.

I was just asking about—

I’m saying what I think to be the truth. I mean, I just find it incredible—

I know, but these are scientific issues here.

You know nothing about the subject but are so confident that you’re going to say that I’m a crackpot.

No. Richard—

That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying?

I’m not saying anything of the sort.

Admit to it. You’re saying I’m a crackpot.

I’m not saying anything of the—

Well, what am I then? I’m an amateur? You’re the great scholar on this?

No, no. I’m not a great scholar on this.

Tell me what you think about the quality of the work!

O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.

What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.

O.K. Can I ask you one more question?

You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?

Wow. Like, wow. I’m speechless. A bit touchy, isn’t he?

Richard Epstein, you are an amateur and a crackpot, and also arrogant and ignorant. I hope this interview follows you for the rest of your days and demolishes your credibility in all scholarly things.

Billionaires. Christ.

$3.7 million.

Net worth: $100,000 million.

Just his house alone is worth $147 million. He pays a million a year in property taxes.

$25 million.

Net worth: $58,000 million.

He recently spent $60 million to buy two houses in Lake Tahoe. When he buys a house (he owns 10 of them), he also buys up adjacent properties just “for privacy”.

These parasites aren’t making any sacrifices, they aren’t making a serious investment in scientific research. They are buying PR for cheap, and the media is so innumerate that they fall for it. Fuck these motherfucking fuckers. Bring on the guillotines…or at least, the punitive tax rates and the forfeitures and the corruption trials.

Also, fire all journalists who can’t do basic math.