We really need to take social distancing seriously

Starting at midnight last night, the ‘shelter in place’ order has been extended to Monterey county where I live due to two cases of Covid-19 being detected here. Since I have been voluntarily doing it already, this will not cause any change for me but it is going to be disruptive and costly for workers who lose their jobs and wages, parents with young children, businesses, and a whole host of others for whom the impact is not yet clear.

As I wrote before, there is something strange about this crisis because even though it is serious on a large scale, for most people things in their immediate surroundings seem so normal. This can cause people to minimize the danger and think it is overblown and thus ignore the recommendations. That would be very unwise. One woman, who describes herself as a “healthy 48 year old with no underlying conditions”, came down with the disease and had to be treated in the emergency room said that after her recovery, she was so irritated by all the comments that she read on various sites dismissing the threat that she decided to describe her “brutal” ordeal in order to let others know what it is really like and warn them not to take things lightly.
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Watching Bizet’s Carmen while ‘sheltering in place’

I am not a fan of opera, having seen only one live performance in my life. It was a long time ago when I was in Germany and we were taken as a group to see Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. My reaction? Kind of meh. But I decided to take advantage of the New York Metropolitan Opera’s decision, during the time when they are shut down due to the pandemic, to broadcast recordings of their past live streams of operas for free with a new one every night. (See this post for details).
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Crises will be exploited by the wealthy and powerful unless we defy them

In this excellent short video below titled Coronavirus Capitalism, Naomi Klein reminds us that past crises such as 9/11, the financial collapse of 2008, and natural disasters are often used by governments to ram through laws and other actions that benefit corporate and oligarchic interests at the expense of the rest of us, taking advantage of the fact that the public is too alarmed to pay close attention to what is going on.

Klein says that these times call for extreme vigilance and mass mobilization to prevent the power structure in the US using the pandemic to provide yet more giveaways to the wealthy, and instead use the moment to enact progressive legislation, as occurred with the New Deal in the 1930s after the Great Depression. She says that victory will go to those who are willing to fight harder.

Primary election chaos in Ohio

Today is primary day in Ohio (in addition to Florida, Arizona, and Illinois). Or is it? Voters in Ohio would be justified in being confused but the answer is that there will definitely not be any voting in that state today.

Yesterday Ohio governor Mike DeWine asked a judge to delay the election to June 2 with early voting to be allowed up until June 1 because of the pandemic but the judge refused. Later last night, DeWine ordered the closing of the polling places anyway creating a legal and constitutional controversy.
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Great moments in capitalism

Two brothers in Tennessee were found to have hoarded over 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer. How did they manage to acquire that many, you ask?

[Matt] Colvin and his brother Noah became the subject of national scorn after the New York Times published a story about how they cleaned out stores of sanitizer and wipes in an attempt to profit off the public’s panic over the coronavirus pandemic.
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Noah Colvin, of Hixson took a 1,300-mile road trip in early March across Tennessee and Kentucky, racking up thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer to resell online.

Meanwhile, Matt [described as an Amazon seller, whatever that is-MS] stayed at home, waiting for pallets of antibacterial wipes and even more sanitizer to be shipped, according to a New York Times article.
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The Colvins told the New York Times that Noah Colvin hit “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods. The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need the products more than others, he said to the Times, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.

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John Oliver on the coronavirus

It turns out that the building that his studio and offices are in has been shut down because some people tested positive for the virus and so he had to tape this week’s show in a different room without an audience. He has good advice for people about what sources of information to trust about the virus and what to do (Infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC) and what not to trust (Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh) and not to pass on unverified information on social media. Jane Lytvynenko is maintaining a running link of all the fake stories that are circulating on the internet.
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Bernie Sanders had a great debate

There was a lot to like about the Democratic debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden last night. Because there were only two people, it allowed for a lot of direct back and forth, with each actually asking the other questions, and the moderators let them do so. The moderators deserve some credit for not interrupting and making it all about them. In general the questions were decent and some important issues were discussed. Of course the pandemic and how to deal with it dominated the discussion, especially at the beginning, but there was a lot of discussion on topics that earlier debates had largely ignored, such as immigration reform and climate change. But the very fact that considerable time was given to these topics meant that other important topics did not get a hearing. I also thought that the lack of an audience in the room was a good thing and they should be dispensed with in future debates.
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Afghan government talks with Taliban stalled

The deal announced on February 29th by the Trump administration with the Taliban had as a major feature that in return for the US withdrawing all its troops from that country in 14 months, the Afghan government would release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban would issue ‘security guarantees’ (whatever that means) and pledge to begin talks with the Afghan government (whatever that means). But the US did not include the Afghan government in the negotiations and now it looks like there is a problem that has prevented the talks from beginning on March 10th.
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The pandemic will dominate the Democratic debate tonight

There will be a debate today between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden starting at 8:00pm ET and moderated by CNN. It will be held in a studio in Washington DC without an audience instead of the original location in Phoenix in a large auditorium. One thing that you can be sure of is that the coronavirus is going to be the main topic of discussion. Both Sanders and Biden will deservedly blast Donald Trump for his administration’s catastrophically bad response. Another thing that you can be sure is that Sanders will hammer home the undeniable fact, now increasingly being realized, that the single-payer health care system like Medicare For All that he has been pushing for and which Biden has dismissed, would have been far better placed to respond to this pandemic that the rotten system that we now have in the US. I do not expect Biden to have a coherent response despite all the time he has had to prepare one.
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Normal, yet not normal

We have been fortunate not to have experienced a global pandemic before in our lifetimes. The previous global epidemics that threatened to become one, (SARS, MERS, swine flu (aka H1N1), and bird flu) did not pan out (Ha!) so it is hard to know what would constitute a normal state of events during one. So I am not surprised to find that things seem to me to feel a little strange.

I went to the supermarket today to buy a couple of potatoes for a recipe but there were no potatoes. It is a very large supermarket so at first I thought that they had moved it to another location, something they do from time to time but no, they were out of potatoes, something that had never happened before. I then realized that there had been a run on potatoes because people were stocking up on food. Why potatoes? I don’t know. I was about to leave when I thought I would wander around a few aisles to see what else was gone. The shelves were mostly full and by no means bare, unlike in the Latvian town where Andreas Avester lives, but some shelf sections were empty, especially those that should have had cleaning products. [Update: See correction from Andreas.] This article describes what people are NOT buying, as evidenced by the things still on the shelves of denuded grocery stores: pasta made from chick peas, chocolate hummus, Dasani brand bottled water while all other brands are gone, pork, kidney beans, vegan food, and obscure canned vegetables.
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