Bay of Piglets

Lost in the other news is this story of a group of Americans who apparently tried to launch an attack on Venezuela’s government but the plot was foiled even before it got off the ground and the plotters, that included two former members of the US Special Forces, were captured by Venezuelan fishing villagers and handed over to the authorities. The similarities of this botched attempt at overthrowing the Venezuelan government to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba during the Kennedy administration in 1962 has led to the label ‘Bay of Piglets’ for this one.
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Covid-19 trends for the US and UK are not encouraging

I have been keeping tabs on this excellent site that tells you the growth over time of confirmed covid-19 cases in each country. You can pick which countries you want to display using the menu at the bottom right. It is plotted so that the x-axis gives the total cumulative number of cases while the y-axis gives the number of new cases over the previous seven days. (You can also choose to plot deaths.) The graph is log-log so that a straight upward line means the growth of cases is exponential, with the steepness of the slope intercept indicating the doubling time for the number of cases. It is obviously not good to be lying on that straight line or on a line that curves upward. What you want to see is the curve turning down sharply. (You can also choose to have the data displayed on a linear scale but that is not so helpful when one is dealing with a huge variation in numbers country by country.)
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Trump is desperately trying to hide his failures

Rick Bright, a government scientist who was director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, had warned early on that trying to prevent the coronavirus from coming here was futile and that instead the country needed to quickly start taking steps to meet the inevitable challenge by ordering the necessary supplies to test for and treat the disease. The administration did not like what he was saying and he was reassigned to a different area that did not require his expertise. So he became a whistleblower and his lawyer Debra Katz describes what happened.
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The criminal US criminal (in)justice system

One of the things that the current pandemic has done is strip away the veneer that enabled people to think that things were generally going well in this country except for a few areas that needed work. What has been revealed is that the very fabric holding the society together is highly frayed and needs major repairs. The most obvious deficiency is one that I have been repeatedly hammering on and that is the rotten health care system. Another is the lack of an adequate social safety net for people who find themselves suddenly out of work.
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The dark side of coffee

I wrote recently about an interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his latest book on how coffee works on the body and produces the addiction that so many of us have that makes need to have a cup first thing in the morning and for some of us to drink it throughout the day. In the April 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviews several books that paint a somewhat darker picture of coffee as a tool of global capitalism.
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The white supremacist coup of 1898

It is one thing to know in a general way that slavery was cruel and that even after its formal ending following the end of the Civil War, black people continued to be oppressed, with the former slave states creating laws that systematically deprived their black citizens of the rights that they thought they now had. Historian Eric Foner has documented that process masterfully in his book Reconstruction. But it is still shocking to read about individual instances where there was such a flagrant disregard for basic constitutional processes in the effort of whites to shut blacks out of civil life altogether and drive them away.
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Anti-China rhetoric escalates

The Trump administration has done a remarkable about face in its attitude towards China during the current pandemic. After initially praising that nation and its president fulsomely for the way they handled the crisis, it is now harshly criticizing them, starting with insisting on calling covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’ and accusing them of covering up the emergence of the virus. The motivation for this shift is quite transparent. As it became increasingly clear how badly Trump has bungled this issue, he very likely seeks to distract people from the administration’s woefully incompetent response .
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