Co-host of On The Media Bob Garfield has a sardonic sense of humor and on the show this week he takes aim at celebrities who are using their fame to pontificate on the coronavirus to their millions of followers on social media.
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.
[Read more…]
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.
[Read more…]
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’.
[Read more…]
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.
[Read more…]
One of the things about national or even global crises is that initially there is an upsurge of individualistic thinking by some people as they rush out and hoard vast quantities of stuff, thus denying them to others, even to those in greater need. Then we have the backlash with appeals for solidarity and sharing, that we are all in this together and that we need to be kind to others and cooperate. But as the crisis drags on, people’s patience and sense of good will may tend to wear thin and they start looking out again for just themselves or their immediate community.
[Read more…]
The stock market has been on a roller coaster ride these last few weeks as downward pressure due to fears of the negative global impact of the pandemic competes with governmental policies to boost the economy, with the former seeming to be winning, resulting in a net steep plunge since mid-February as the reality of the situation sank in.
Back on March 18, Jon Schwarz speculated as to whether the economic crisis might finally rid us of the fantasy that the stock market tells us something real and useful about the nature of the economy.
[Read more…]