Category: Current Events

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Why We Can't Build

Ezra Klein, writing at Vox, on Marc Andreeson's "It's Time to Build" call to arms:

Which goes to a problem that afflicts governance at all levels of America: If you live in a vetocracy and one of your two political parties actively wants the government to work poorly, the government will work poorly. And so it does.

I don't think that'll be enough. So let me end with my answer to Andreessen's question: What should we build? We should build institutions biased toward action and ambition, rather than inaction and incrementalism. […] At the federal level, I'd get rid of the filibuster, simplify the committee system, democratize elections, and make sure majorities could implement their agendas once elected. As I've argued for years, we should prefer the problems of a system where elected majorities can fulfill the promises that got them elected to one where elected majorities cannot deliver on the promises that the American people voted for. The latter system, which is the one Americans live in now, drives frustration and dysfunction.

Full-throttled endorsement for this basic notion from me—knowing full well that political tides ebb and flow. Let the party in power try new things. If they turn out to be unpopular, the tide will change and so too will the laws and policies. Conduct politics more like we do science: try new ideas and see what happens.

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Fuckwits



Fuckwits with firearms

Fuckwits with flags

Fuckwits in pickups with Confederate  flags

Gov. Whitmer's order for Michigan citizens to stay home, they said, was tyranny (SPOILER: if you can gather in public and accuse the government of tyranny without fear of arrest, it's not tyranny). 

They repeated Ben Franklin's claim that 'security without liberty is called prison' (SPOILER: if you can drive your pickup to Lansing, Michigan, you're not in prison and you have liberty). 

They chanted "Lock her up!" and "Keep America Great!" (SPOILER: if your nation was warned a pandemic was coming and didn't bother to prepare for it, your country isn't all that great, and a populace that wants to lock up a governor for trying to mitigate that pandemic isn't particularly great either).

They also gathered to block traffic in front of a hospital. Seriously, during a goddamn pandemic, these fuckwits thought it was cute to block the emergency entrance to a hospital. 

Jesus suffering fuck. —gregfallis.com

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Malignant Normality

A recent profile in the New Yorker of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quoted a staffer as claiming that behind closed doors McConnell has described Trump as "nuts." Democrats should demand to know if the Republican Senate mastermind truly believes that the president is impaired, and force McConnell to choose between yet more lies and the future of his country.

Democrats should also get over their concerns about angering Trump supporters. Anyone who continues to applaud Trump's weird and reckless disregard for humanity at this point is beyond the limit of rational persuasion. Trump supporters live in a hallucinatory dreamscape under the authority of a maniac. Let them have their anti-social distancing rallies, and allow them to believe that Barack Obama invented COVID-19 shortly after he was born in Kenya.

Rational Americans need to stop enabling this abusive and deranged presidency. Declare Donald Trump insane and, at long last, bring an end to our era of malignant normality.

Trump's lies are so brazen that it is now common for politicians and the media to talk about him lying, a word that would not have been used in days gone by but replaced by euphemisms. Is it only a matter of time before they start openly questioning his sanity instead of just whispering it behind closed doors? – Mano Singham/Freethought Blogs

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All This Has Happened Before…

…and is, unfortunately, happening again.

From I Should Be Laughing:

We've been here before, you know, and clearly, we have learned nothing.

Picture it. America, 1918. The first World War was winding down and officials across the country were under enormous pressure to sell war bonds. But how do you attract attention to your bonds? Hold a parade in major cities to rally the public behind the war bond effort.

Trouble is, or was, America was in the throes of a pandemic—the Spanish Flu—and people were dying all over the place; when it was all said and done 675,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu—50 million people globally—compared to 116,708 Americans killed in World War I.

Doctors were at a loss as to what to recommend to their patients; many urged people to avoid crowded places or simply other people, and also told people to keep their mouths and noses covered in public.

Sounds vaguely familiar, no? That September 1918, in Philadelphia, 600 sailors and 47 civilians had been diagnosed with the flu, and some had already perished. But, hey, there were bonds to sell the fund the war, and on September 28, 1918, Philadelphia held a parade to sell war bonds.

On the 28th, a line of Boy Scouts, marching bands, women's auxiliary groups, and troops 2 miles long wound its way up Broad Street in front of a crowd of over 200,000 people. Within three days, every bed in Phil­a­del­phia's 31 hospitals was occupied. Within a week, 45,000 citizens were infected, and the entire city had shut down. By the second week in November, 12,000 Phila­del­phians were dead, and the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood" had become commonplace among the survivors. Within six months, 16,000 were dead, and 500,000 Phil­a­del­phians had fallen ill with the flu.

Now, I don't wanna bash Philadelphia, because that wasn't the only city to hold a parade or to urge citizens to come out in droves and mingle with one another, but …

Take Milwaukee, for example; they had the lowest death rate of any large city in America during the pandemic, because the city's health commissioner, Dr. George Ruhland, had ordered schools closed, saloons and public spaces shut down, and told people to stay home.

And yet here we are again, in the midst of a pandemic where we are told that social distancing, self-isolating, will stop the spread of COVID-19 and we have not learned one goddamned thing.

[continue reading]

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Not a Good Day

Being a cancer survivor, I'd always believed that I could handle pretty much anything life was going to throw at me after that ordeal. Yes, it completely upended my life in ways that wouldn't be immediately obvious for years, but as I've written several times before, I came through it a better person than I had been going in.

That's why the current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown me for a loop. I'm not handling it well. The quarantine, the lifestyle changes came fast and furious and I was not mentally prepared for this nearly as much as I'd believed I would be when all this started last month.

Yeah, I'm adapting, but it's not pretty. I'm swinging from emotional highs to lows on an almost daily basis; something I most certainly do not remember going through seventeen years ago. Today, after getting up to let the dogs out and feed them, I went back to bed and slept—if you could call it that—until nearly 11. When I finally got moving, Ben and I headed out in search of lunch, settling on take-out from Chili's. We pulled into a shady spot after picking up the food, but it became quickly apparent that eating in the car wasn't going to work. We deemed to take it home, knowing full well the fries would be mush by the time we got there.

This was a minor inconvenience, but it was also one. more. thing. assaulting my already frazzled emotional state. I apologized to Ben for my distance today, and he asked what's wrong. "Everything," I said. "Just everything."

We got home, tossed the fries in the toaster oven, and even though we had selected a conservative time and temp to reheat them, they ended up burning.

I didn't openly cry, but I was stifling the feelings of absolute helplessness welling up inside me, and I realized just how different this is from what I'd gone through while battling cancer.

In 2003, all I had to concern myself with was the cancer; I could focus all my attention on wiping it from my body. Sure, I'd simultaneously lost my job—that ironically allowed me to qualify for Medicaid and have all my medical expenses covered—and was scraping by on unemployment insurance and the kindness of friends and family, but not even that caused the level of anxiety and the helplessness I'm feeling right now.

And that's because I knew my care was in good hands; I had competent people guiding my treatment and recovery.

The US in 2020 has no competent people in charge. As Karen Black famously screamed in Airplane 1975, "There's no one flying the plane!" And if anything, the people in the highest echelons of government seem to be going out of their way to burn the country to the ground. The abject ignorance, selfishness, and insouciance displayed by the Orange Caligula's followers is even more alarming. If they were only going to infect themselves and die off I'd be happy to be rid of them, but their callous, uncaring attitude is going to end up killing a lot more people than just their red-hat wearing bretheren.

AND THIS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN! If we didn't have a narcissistic sociopath occupying the Oval Office, this would not have happened.

And there's nothing I can do about it until November. The 25th Amendment will never be invoked; the Republican Senate will never impeach the bastard. He literally could stand in the middle of Fidth Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it as he so famously bragged. This is why I'm feeling so helpless right now.

The infection curve was starting to flatten, but because of these knuckle-dragging Trumpsters demanding that the country open back up, we're probably looking at an even longer lockdown that we were facing before. (And BTW, have you noticed how many of these assholes are wearing masks to these protests? If the virus isn't a threat any longer, why do you need masks?)

The level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts.

I'm so thankful that Ben and I are together at this point in history to give each other the distance, or the encouragement, or the hugs we both need when we need them during this insanity.

I take some solace in knowing I'm far from being the only one experiencing these emotions right now, and the optimist in me is telling me we'll make it through this, but it doesn't do much for days like today when I just can't.

UPDATE: After initially posting this I was nodding off at my desk and that, combined with the deep funk I was in lead to an afternoon-long nap with the doggies. While not a perfect cure, it definitely helped on many levels and I'm feeling much better now.

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A Month In to this Nightmare, and it's STILL True

Of course, it doesn't help that our I.T. Security group decided to roll out a brand new VPN client, rendering everything else obsolete and locking out anyone using a personal device to connect to the corporate network…

And no, I am not kidding.

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What a Tragedy

From Wil Wheaton:

America had come together, setting aside all of our own wants and needs, to engage in the single greatest act of human kindness in history. We all stayed home, at great expense and inconvenience, so the most vulnerable among us wouldn't die a preventable death.

I want you to think about this for a moment, before I continue: there is someone you love, who is at risk of serious infection and death,right now. I am staying home for that person, so you don't lose someone you love. I am not the only person doing this. You're doing this. Your family and your neighbors are doing this. We are, all of us, doing this, together, even though it is hard, it is scary, it is frustrating.

But we are doing it, together, because we care about our fellow humans.

A strong, moral, ethical, worthy leader will look at this tremendous sacrifice and ask themselves how they can honor it, how can they keep this going as long as possible, so the sacrifices we've made for a few weeks can be extended into months. We are doing this so people do not die.

That bears repeating: we are doing this so people we love do not die a preventable death.

America has the resources to ensure that staying home does not financially ruin anyone who is making this incredible, unprecedented, unselfish sacrifice right now. What America does not have, is the leadership to use those resources.

What America has is a vicious, selfish, incompetent, cruel, abusive, autocratic, impeached president who looked at all this sacrifice, who looked at Americans of all demographics and political beliefs, and saw an entire country setting aside its differences to work together so innocent people — people we love — do not die.

This man looked at that, and saw that it was a threat to his ambitions. Forget for a moment that it is entirely his fault that thousands of preventable deaths have occurred, and just reflect that his impulse is NOT to encourage and comfort millions of people who are scared and stressed out, but to hurt us, to abuse us, to risk our lives and the lives of our loved ones, because that man has no empathy, no compassion, no morality of any kind.

Thirty-three thousand humans have died in America since this pandemic hit our shores. According to scientists, 90% NINETY PERCENT of those deaths would not have happened, if only Trump had listened to experts and taken this seriously. If only Trump was a real leader, with compassion, empathy, and competence, tens of thousands of families would not be mourning the loss of a loved one.

America had come together to fight this. We mustered ourselves quickly and we were ready for a leader to help us take this commitment to join together and focus it, so we could get through this crisis as quickly as possible, with minimal disruption.

But the impeached president and his allies failed us. As they have done all along, they have put their narrow self interests ahead of the interests of the country, and ahead of the value of your life.

He is, right now, celebrating a fake "protest" that was organized and paid for by a right-wing organization controlled by the DeVos family. Right now, he is taking people's fears and anxieties, and instead of using both the bully pulpit and a working relationship with congress to reassure and help them, he's pouring gasoline on a fire.

And he is doing it because it's all he knows how to do. This man doesn't know how to be a leader. He doesn't know how to be a human being who cares about others. He looked at an entire country coming together, and his impulse was to tear it apart.

Donald Trump looked at the single greatest act of human kindness in the history of our species, and he felt threatened by it. So he is doing everything he can to destroy it, to destroy us.

And for what? To consolidate his own money and his own power.

Rick Wilson says "everything Trump touches dies". For tens of thousands of innocent Americans, he's right.

A leader looks at the best impulses of their people in a crisis, and they celebrate, encourage, and support those impulses. A president cares about protecting their citizens above all else.

Trump is neither of those things. Trump is an abusive despot, out of his depth, incompetent and unqualified.

May history record that, when millions of Americans came together, unselfishly, in the greatest act of human kindness in history, Trump saw a threat to be destroyed.

We are nowhere near the end of this. We are probably not even at the end of the beginning of this. Trump, his fearful supporters, and his angry cultists, are going to make things so much worse than they would have been, because it's all they know how to do.

What a tragedy.