The story behind a viral photograph

I am not a fan of the horror film genre and so give a wide berth to those that feature zombies or vampires or otherwise promise gruesome scenes of blood, death, and dismemberment. But I am a fan of comedies and this poses a dilemma for me about whether to watch comedies that are based on the zombie and vampire genre. So far I have seen just three such comedies: Shaun of the Dead, What We Do In The Shadows, and the much older Love at First Bite.

When I first saw this now viral photograph of people, responding to Trump’s instigations, protesting against state governments and demanding that the social distancing rules that have crippled businesses be relaxed, it immediately reminded me of the scene from Shaun of the Dead where people have barricaded themselves inside a pub and the zombies are at the window demanding to be let in. I am not the only one to see such a similarity.
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The rich are different from you and me

The title of this post is a commonly used paraphrase of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1926 short story Rich Boy.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

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Making a face mask at home

Earlier people were told that ordinary facemasks were only effective at preventing those who were infected from spreading it, but did not do anything for those who were not already infected from getting infected. For that one needed the more sophisticated N95 masks. We were also told that we should reserve the existing supply of facemasks for those in the medical profession and other essential service personnel. That sounded reasonable and so I did not try to get any masks for myself

That advice seems to be changing. Now all people in certain areas are being urged to wear facemasks when they go outside. But how does one get hold of one now? I have not been inside a pharmacy or any other store for a month. Do they now have masks on the shelves?

For those who want one and can’t get one, there are various do-it-yourself options. This one (via Carla Sinclair) seems pretty straightforward to make though I have not tried it. I will do so if it becomes absolutely necessary.

Sri Lanka goes back to the future

I have been getting occasional reports from friends and family about how Sri Lanka is dealing with Covid-19. In their efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus caused to some extent by some people irresponsibly flouting the self-quarantine and social distancing rules, the government had instituted a strict curfew and people who are found violating it in those areas where it is in force are promptly taken into custody. But that policy meant that people were without access to food and other basic items. When the government tried lifting the curfew for a few hours to allow them to shop, that had the predictable result of huge crowds trying to buy things and many of them being turned away empty handed.
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False negatives in coronavirus testing

When I last checked the Covid-19 trend line, it showed an encouraging flattening in the rate of growth of new cases in the US. China and South Korea had brought things under control much earlier and it looks like Hong Kong and Australia are also doing well. France, Italy, and Germany are definitely showing signs that they have passed the peak and slowing down the rate of growth.

But one of the concerns with the US data is that due to the massive incompetence of the Trump administration in rolling out testing and collecting data, testing is nowhere near a widespread as it should be.
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How specialized supply chains are resulting in shortages

I wrote earlier that one reason for the toilet paper shortage is that there are different manufacturers and different supply chains for suppliers for commercial and residential use that have different specifications. The supply side for each sector is carefully balanced to meet the demand side of that sector and under normal circumstances, the system works very smoothly. But when people started staying home in large numbers, the demand side shifted from commercial to residential, and that upset the balance.
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Arguments for and against free will

I came across this interesting debate between two professors of philosophy Gregg Caruso and Daniel Dennett on the endlessly fascinating and controversial question of whether we have free will or not. The topic is fascinating because what exactly we mean by the term ‘free will’ is difficult to pin down and controversial because many people find it hard to give up the idea that they have free will and respond very strongly against arguments that deny it exists. (For those who want to go into it in some detail, back in 2010 I wrote a multipart series of blog posts on this very topic. It is better to read them in sequence but do not follow the links at the top of each post to ‘previous posts’ because that link takes you to when the posts were published on a site before I moved to FtB and that site no longer exists.)
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Trump is increasingly behaving like a cornered wild animal

At the best of times Donald Trump does not present a picture of coherence and maturity. But lately he seems to have plumbed even greater depths of irrationality and I think that it is because his dysfunctional White House and his utter lack of a measured response to the Covid-19 crisis is being recognized and he is being called out on it. So far he has been able to overcome the dysfunctional nature of his administration by sheer bombast and demagoguery but in this virus he has met something that does not care about him in the least, affects everyone, and cannot be ignored or belittled, and he does not know how to respond.

Trump is a narcissist and is utterly incapable of taking responsibility for anything bad that happens but in this crisis, his patented efforts to lash out at critics and blame others are looking increasingly desperate. He is clearly looking like a cornered wild animal and losing it, though he never had much of it to lose. So we see him lashing out at one target after another. His favorite targets are of course the media, the Democratic party, and the ‘deep state’, all of whom he thinks are trying to discredit him.
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