The ‘nobody knew’ and ‘everybody believed’ phase of evading responsibility

We have been warned by the US Surgeon General that this might be the worst week of the pandemic in the US and that we should brace for it. The time-lapse graph of world wide infections shows today that the US is still on the rising part of the curve while there are hopeful signs that Italy and Spain, two hard hit countries, are starting to show signs of stabilization by veering away off the exponential growth line.

The Trump administration bears responsibility for its late, inadequate, and confused response to the pandemic but as with all things Trump, it seeks to avoid any responsibility or blame. Governments tend to duck responsibility by making sweeping claims, such as “every believed” or “nobody knew” to imply that they alone should not be held responsible. The “everybody believed” excuse was trotted out after they lied about Iraq having WMDs prior to invading that country. In fact, people knew and said at that time that the evidence produced by the US was false or faulty and should not be believed.
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Jared Kushner, slumlord millionaire

Netflix has just released the six episodes of the second season of its excellent Dirty Money series that looks at all the corruption that is around. It focuses on the wealthy and big businesses that are corrupt and get rich at the expense of poor and vulnerable people. Back in 2019, I wrote about one episode in the first series that looked at the corrupt practices of the giant bank HSBC that was enabling the laundering of drug cartel money. In the second series they focus on Wells Fargo bank, the incredibly corrupt prime minister of Malaysia, ‘dirty gold’ that is produced using illegal mining and environmental destruction, abuse and exploitation of the elderly, and companies that pollute the environments of small towns. They are truly the scum of the Earth.
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Europe was central to the spread of Covid-19

One of the features of the current pandemic is that the more developed countries especially in Europe seem to have been hit the hardest in terms of the current number of cases. Joe Penney writes that Europe was also the hub from which cases spread to the rest of the world.

As Covid-19 cripples the U.S. and ravages many countries in the world, politicians are battling to craft a narrative of who is to blame for its damage. The virus started in China, of course, but narratives of how it went from epidemic to global pandemic often leave out a crucial element: the role of Europe.
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Trump fires inspector general who passed whistleblower complaint on to Congress

Late on Friday night, Donald Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, whom he chose for the post in 2017. The inspector general’s position is supposed to be to act as a kind of ombudsman and guardian to ensure that the government agency that they monitor is being true to its mission. Atkinson, a 15-year veteran of the justice department, was the person who received the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s extortion phone call to the Ukrainian president and thought it merited being passed on to Congress. All this was standard procedure.
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There is no vaccine or cure for willful ignorance and stupidity

The New York Times has published a map based on cell phone tracking data that shows how different regions compare in terms of the daily distance traveled during this period of people being asked to stay at home as much as possible. The overall average has dropped from five miles per day to less than a mile a day, which is a huge drop. But the drop has not been uniform. At a casual glance it looks like the southern regions have people traveling more.
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Zoom bombing: Another example of why we cannot have nice things

The use of Zoom videoconferencing technology has exploded now that people have to stay at home but still need to communicate with people as part of their work or to stay connected with friends and family. Educational institutions especially have begun to use Zoom extensively to teach online. But along with that new popularity, Zoom has also become the target of hackers who are exploiting its security flaws and taken up the practice now being called ‘Zoom bombing’.
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Life in China during the quarantine

Peter Hessler is an American with a wife and two young children who has been living in China for a few decades as a college teacher of English. In a very long article in The New Yorker, he describes his experience with how the Chinese authorities reacted after realizing the danger of what was going on, and what measures were put in place during 45 days of the lockdown that is still in place, though it is being relaxed. It was a massive operation that depended on many people implementing and monitoring the measures as well as a high level of compliance by the general public.
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