Once you take their bribe they own you

Last week’s Gaslit Nation episode is titled Blood Money Brigade. Here’s some of what hosts Sarah talked about.

Kendzior first talks about the uses of the offspring of an authoritarian ruler, such as the pandemic prince and princess. They’re trustworthy confidants in regimes high in paranoia. They’re good for laundering money. They tend to have a warmer public profile. In a kleptocracy (government by theft) they are a way to keep stolen assets in the family and the leader can legitimize them as successors. And they’re not going to turn on the despot.

And in the current regime the prince and princess have been busy running all the deals with world despots, an integral part of the Trump Crime Family. Their crimes, committed now and through history, are well documented. So if the nasty guy is defeated in November, it won’t be the end of Trumpism. The kids will still be active.

Chalupa said that when we feel hopeless, art matters, because when the justice system fail, art can rise up and demand justice. Art therapy can help heal. Art, such as writing a short play in which the prince and princess are brought to justice, allows us to go to the darkest, worst possible outcomes. We tend to think if we imagine something bad it means we want it. But imagining it is to prevent it.

About ten days ago (days before this episode was posted a week ago) the price of oil went negative. That happened because of the drop in demand and there is no place to store what is being pumped out of the ground. Which means there is a greater possibility of an oil spill. This could cause an environmental disaster. Even without it the economic disaster could be worse with a thousand oil companies going bankrupt. That would set off a massive chain reaction. That would include devastation to Ukraine’s economy to the delight of Putin.

A lot of analysts of the oil industry are worried about what the drop in prices will do to Russia. It gets nearly 40% of its budget revenue from oil and gas. Plummeting prices would supposedly stop Russia from invading its neighbors. But Putin is the richest person in the world and the rich oligarchs are subject to Putin’s bidding (or they or their fortunes get liquidated). So Putin and his money won’t be harmed. He’ll still be able to meddle in world affairs and gamble with national revenue. The ones who will suffer are the Russian people. The gamble is they can bankrupt the US oil industry.

Many times I’ve called the nasty guy a Russian asset. Kendzior said that Russia controls him through debt, by bailing him out and buying his properties.

When US oil companies go bankrupt, and many will over the next year, they could go in a fire sale. One person or group able to buy them will be Russian oligarchs. Germany might be seen as the leader of the free world right now, but Germany’s gas comes from Russia. And a business lobby puts strong pressure on the German government to keep them from putting sanctions on Russia. Which is why Germany hasn’t helped Ukraine. Russia could have that same leverage over the US.

Oklahoma is the biggest inland oil distribution center. The oil collapse plus the pandemic could cause 10K jobs in just the oil industry. Senator James Inhofe from OK, one of the worst of the GOP, is now begging his mafia boss, the nasty guy, to stand up to Putin. At least Inhofe recognizes that the Saudis and Russians are trying to crush American oil and American oil independence. So please put tariffs on their oil.

Ah, Senator, your trying to talk to the guy you just acquitted. Chalupa said:

Now he's screwing you just like he's screwing the brown people and the black people that you can't stand. Welcome to the club of pain and anxiety and helplessness. You're in the club now. He doesn't care.

Kendzior adds: good luck trying to make a deal with the proxy of the Russian Mafia. Everyone in the GOP, well, every American, is a pawn. That includes Moscow Mitch and others who are getting rich by being a pawn. But it’s golden handcuffs. Once you take their bribe they own you. The only out is to retire or resign, as several GOP Congressmen have, though Kendzior notes they did not condemn the nasty guy or Russia on their way out.

And the ones who will hurt the most are the common people.

The threat of Russian takeover of US oil would be a fine time to reduce our fossil fuel dependency and pass the Green New Deal. But our time to be able to do that is short.

The episode turned to those protesting the virus lockdowns. They are also pawns. The game is to let the virus spread, to create a permanent crisis. It’s extremely hard to combat this crisis with the normal methods of combating an autocracy. The corporate media are also pawns. They help the nasty guy’s propaganda spread. So many people wanted to cover the protesters there were more media requests than actual protesters. Yet they’ve ignored the protests against the nasty guy – the largest protests in American history.

A propaganda tactic is projection – describing your opponents doing things you would be doing if it wasn’t for societal constraints. That’s the foundation for the next step, which is putting that narrative out there in advance so when you raise the actual subject your sound insane. Example: declaring the Democratic governors and their lockdowns are trying to take our freedom and destroy our economy. Which is what the Trump Crime Family is doing – but when Kendzior says so she can be dismissed with, “You sound like those protest lunatics.”

Blood money (in the title of this episode) is a part of most of the topics in this episode, but isn’t actually mentioned until the end when they discuss the rumor that Paul Manafort might be pardoned. Chalupa describes what Manafort has done and that if he is released she and her sister are in danger. Her sister had tried to warn people about who Manafort is and has been threatened.

Nothing about keeping workers safe

For a while this afternoon I wondered is today Tuesday or Wednesday? Do I set the trash out tonight or tomorrow night? I checked the date on my computer – the 29th – and checked the calendar. Yup, Wednesday. I set the trash bin near the street. It will be emptied about 7:45 tomorrow morning.

I worked in my garage much of the day. Quite a bit of rain so there was little incentive to go anywhere. I did a lot of sanding. Then I cut pieces of drywall to fit into some of the holes. Then applied mud to hold those pieces in place. Then more general mudding and sanding. The forecast for tomorrow is more rain. So, for me, more playing in the mud.



This morning’s news talked about the nasty guy finally using the Defense Production Act, the law that allows the federal government take control of the production of certain products. We’ve been waiting a month for him to use that power to secure enough medical masks and ventilators.

But that’s not what he used it for. He used it to reopen meat processing plants.

There has also been a lot of news about some big meat processing plants being shut down because the virus had infected a large number of the workers. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports the nasty guy now requires them to reopen. And that requires workers to return. But his order says nothing about keeping the workers safe. And those safety regulations have become suggestions. And we know what corporations who want to suck up every penny do with suggestions.

Tom Philpott of Mother Jones adds a bit more. One plant workers has filed suit claiming management didn’t protect workers from the virus and demanded that the workplace be made safe. By issuing the executive order to reopen meat plants the nasty guy is essentially shielding meatpackers from lawsuits.

Hunter of Kos says the nasty guy and the GOP are thinking about spreading that liability shield more generally. One little problem: That would transfer the liability to the government.

It would also cause a huge increase in the number of sick and dead, but we know the nasty guy thinks that’s a feature, not a flaw.

Given immunity from liability how many of those safety measures and enhanced cleanings will be quickly dropped? And once they’re gone Sumner says workers have a dilemma – keep showing up for work knowing they’ll likely get the virus and possibly die or cause the death of grandma living with them or not show up. If they don’t show up the company can declare they’ve voluntarily quit. And that would mean they don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. From the GOP perspective, what’s not to love?

Sumner wrote that in a post commenting on the protesters demanding the stay at home orders be ended.

Republicans have demonstrated, again, just how easily they can convince a handful of low-wage workers to become the face of their own destruction. And how easily they can get the media to report tiny groups as though there is a huge “movement” eager to do corporate bidding. In the process, everyone will ignore polls showing overwhelming opposition to reopening too soon and never mention just how puny these protests really are.

Joan McCarter of Kos adds the Moscow Mitch has declared a general liability shield a “red line” – he requires it to be in any new rescue law to pass the Senate. Democrats dismissed it.



McCarter wrote another post about all the ways the nasty guy and his minions have botched the various provisions in the various financial rescue laws. From his point of view it was all intentional.

Both rollouts of the Paycheck Protection Program started with system crashes, though big business leader could call his buddy at the big bank and get right in. The $1200 stimulus checks aren’t getting to those who need it most and to try they have to jump through ridiculous hoops. Hospitals are to receive money, but it isn’t showing up at the hospitals that need it most. Too many people were simply left out. And this article doesn’t go into how racist the process has been (which I’ve mentioned before).

A stadium full of Americans

Leah McElrath tweeted this along with a picture (you’ll have to follow the link to see it):

If a stadium full of Americans had been bombed and killed, people would understand the urgency of the need to respond to the threat, right?

Well, this is Dodger Stadium in LA on opening day in 2017.

That’s how many people have died in the US from COVID19.

So far.

Dodger Stadium seats 56,000 people. McElrath tweeted that a couple days ago. The US death toll has passed 57,000. And that’s the people we know died of the virus. There are likely thousands more who died of the virus but, because they weren’t tested, aren’t a part of the official count.

Replying to someone else McElrath noted this is the number dead in three months and is almost the number of US soldiers who died in Vietnam over ten years.

This number of dead doesn’t make sense to some people – why would the nasty guy cause a mass casualty event – including in his own base – just before an election? Sarah Kendzior replied:

He never intended to be re-elected; he intends to be reinstalled. Trump and his backers never sought a free and fair election, so they don't have the normal concerns that come with one -- like winning people over, or not killing your own potential voters.

Karine Jeah-Pierre, chief public affairs officer for Move On, tweeted a quote from a CBS News article:

Roughly 95% of Black-owned businesses, 91% of Latino-owned businesses, 91% of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander-owned businesses, & 75% of Asian-owned businesses stand close to no chance of receiving a PPP loan through a mainstream bank or credit union.

Samuel Sinyangwe reinforces the point:

The PPP program is going to produce one of the most severe expansions of the racial wealth gap in history. A $660,000,000,000 wealth transfer to a privileged class of white-owned businesses while black and brown businesses are left struggling.

More about Moscow Mitch and his insistence on no blue state bailouts. Various red state officials are are also saying such things as why should someone on Dodge City, KS pay more in taxes to bail out NY and NJ?

Because, says Kos of Kos, blue states bail out red states every year. Red states got bailed out after long term flooding last spring. Then there are those bailouts to red state Florida after every hurricane. And red states get a budget bailout every year. Kentucky (Moscow Mitch’s state) is at the top of that windfall. And Florida and Kansas get a sweet bonus too. Nearly all of the top states who get more from the feds than they pay in taxes were red in the 2016 election.

Wrote Kos:

Red states clearly think they can keep up this bullcrap—pretending to be budgetary stalwarts in the face of profligate Democratic spending, claiming that it’s Democratic states and cities (i.e. Black Americans), that are sucking the budget dry. Yet the reality is the exact opposite.

And yet Democrats, with their desire to help people, were far too tolerant of this misinformation. No more.

Republicans don’t want disaster relief for the states hit hardest by the virus? Then no more disaster relief for states hit with hurricanes and floods and droughts.

Republicans want to shrink the budget deficit, and don’t want to raise taxes on the rich? Fine. Kentucky, you go first.

And…

A day later several red states are asking for bailouts, money to fix their budget holes caused by the virus.

Kos asks why don’t we start acting like the United States and stop with this red/blue stuff? Kos then shared a couple maps, saying they show what the country could become if it splits. I had written about the first map, the West Coast Pact and the pact of states around NYC, at about the time Michigan and neighboring states were forming a pact.

The second map shows similar coordination efforts and agreements along the Missouri River, around Arizona, among the central mountain states, between six states in the south, North Carolina to Maryland, and in New England. I think I count about ten of these agreements, some overlapping. There are even pacts between counties and between cities. And Washington State is also working with British Columbia.

Sarah Parcak, who wrote Archaeology from Space, also tweeted this second map and notes this same rise of regional power centers happened when the Old Kingdom of Egypt collapse about 4,000 years ago.

Never let a good crisis go to waste

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer suddenly has national recognition! This Sunday’s Detroit Free Press has a big story on the Whitmer moment (which I haven’t read yet). She is now famous enough that Saturday Night Live did a skit in which “Whitmer” has a few things to say. Such as: “Stay home. I promise you can call me a bitch from your couch. It’s called Twitter.” And if outside, stay six feet apart, so “if the tip of your AK-47 can touch the tip of your buddy’s AK, back up.”

So, yeah, SNL is airing fresh material while keeping social distancing. Which looks like it might be a lot of one person skits.



I’ve mentioned that Moscow Mitch didn’t want to do a blue state bailout, that he would rather let blue states go bankrupt than to approve any more rescue money.

David Frum of The Atlantic reviews what Mitch said and why the choice of the word “bankrupt” is important.

States, unlike cities, can default. The state can decide which payments they will honor, which they will pay in part, and which they will not pay. It has happened, though Frum lists only a couple cases in our national history.

But bankruptcy happens in federal court with federal laws. And it is a way for federal officials to have their way with pension debt, meaning “shift hardship onto pensioners while protecting bondholders.” That’s another attempt to bring more hardship to the less well off while protecting the rich. That “pension” debt is mostly because of rapid increases in healthcare costs.

Frum then talked about another aspect of fiscal federalism.

United States senators from smaller, poorer red states do not only represent their states. Often, they do not even primarily represent their states. They represent, more often, the richest people in bigger, richer blue States who find it more economical to invest in less expensive small-state races.

Frum then reviews Moscow Mitch’s top campaign contributors. None of them are from Kentucky.

A federal bankruptcy process for state finances could thus enable wealthy individuals and interest groups in rich states to leverage their clout in the anti-majoritarian federal system to reverse political defeats in the more majoritarian political systems of big, rich states like California, New York, and Illinois.

Anti-majoritarian federal system? As in Hillary Clinton is not president even though she got nearly 3 million more votes. As in two-thirds of the states combined have one-third of the population. So two-thirds of the senators are elected by one-third of the population.

Frum concludes:

But McConnell seems to be following the rule “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He’s realistic enough to recognize that the pandemic probably means the end not only of the Trump presidency, but of his own majority leadership. He’s got until January to refashion the federal government in ways that will constrain his successors. That’s what the state-bankruptcy plan is all about.

Carry out your duties as background prop

My hands get quite dry, especially in winter. So I use hand lotion. The version I buy is for “sensitive skin” and contains no fragrances. I needed more but the store was out of that version. So I got the “advance therapy” version. The first time I used it I thought, oh yeah, smells like hand lotion. It has fragrances. But then I got to be thinking. The makers are capable of a lotion without fragrance. So when they add fragrance why do they choose for it to smell like that?



Until about five weeks ago I got very little email spam. Now I’m getting a great deal (at least from my perspective). Did one of the sites I visited for coronavirus news or a site I used for takeout food or garage paint supplies sell my email address? Or are these people more bold because they know most people are at home and thus more likely sitting at their computer and also feeling more desperate?



Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community notes that shortly after the stay at home orders started TV commercials for companies such as Walmart quickly began showing commercials for “these uncertain times” showcasing their workers (or actors) as heroes doing heroic things to keep us all content while we stay at home.

When the workers are asked they say they don’t feel heroic. And didn’t sign up for selfless heroism. They don’t have a higher purpose other than to do their job, which they can’t afford to lose. They work because they have to. And they frequently do in conditions that might sicken and kill them.

Why are corporations so quick to portray these people as heroes? So we forget they’re victims. They’re in a system that aggressively suppresses their wages, benefits, rights, and protections. If the corporation thinks they’re heroes they should be paid and treated as such. Perhaps we should note which corporations put their workers at risk for their own profit and shop elsewhere.



Hunter of Kos wrote because of the pandemic the cadets of West Point have been sent home. But the nasty guy isn’t getting the love he craves that he used to get from rallies. So he’s manufacturing a rally – he’ll give the commencement address at West Point in June. As commander in chief he can order attendance. He can also order they not boo and that they sit close together to look impressive for the cameras.

From the cadet’s side of things it requires a trip to New York, the virus hotspot, a virus test (and perhaps quarantine if positive), then a trip home where they’ll have to self-quarantine. Hunter wrote:

Thanks for joining our military, kids. Let this be your initiation into the world of Republican leaders not giving a flying damn about your actual welfare, so long as you are properly able to carry out your duties as background prop.

In another post Dartagnan, discussing an article in the New York Times, looks at the way the rest of the world currently looks at America. It’s easy for them to look – our situation is on Google News so they only have to scroll on their phones. When they do they see: Amazingly high infection and death rates. An incompetent leader who can’t get supplies where needed and who hawks phony cures like a snake-oil salesman. A country that can’t test its citizens, that has a healthcare system tied to employment when people are becoming unemployed, that has a shredded social safety net. A Senate leader who declares no more aid so blue states can go bankrupt. They wonder what is wrong with us to elect such people. It’s easy for the world to contrast the nasty guy with Angela Merkel of Germany, who really can safely reopen her country.

The rest of the world uses words such as “sadness” and “disbelief.” This is what democracy gets you? And in this world crisis the rest of the world is not looking to America for help, advice, and leadership. They are doing their best social distancing. How long will it take to earn the world's trust again?

Marie Antoinette of the Senate

Yesterday I wrote that Moscow Mitch said he didn’t want to do a blue state bailout and states should be allowed to declare bankruptcy. A couple GOP governors are calling that statement “shameful and infefensible” (Hogan of MD) and “a dangerous statement” (Sununu of NH). Pete King, a GOP Rep. from NY, called Mitch the “Marie Antoinette of the Senate.”



As part of the $349 billion loan program to small businesses banks processed the forms and turned them over to the Small Business Administration. They didn’t have to do nearly as much vetting as they would if they were guaranteeing the loan themselves. They also don’t have any liability. And with that not much work they pulled in fees worth $10 billion.

Of course, the SBA could have handled it all themselves, but administering the program through banks allows them to get their cut.



The coronavirus is causing delays in conducting the 2020 census. The Census bureau is asking that they be allowed to release their data at the end of July 2021 rather than end of March. Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections says that could wreak havoc in next year’s redistricting. After every census the states have to rebalance their districts for equal population. The delay means various state deadlines may not be met.

Another redistricting issue is how to treat prisons and how to avoid prison gerrymandering. This becomes more of an issue as more prisons are built in rural white areas to house black inmates. These inmates aren’t allowed to vote, but the way they are counted in the population affects districts. Count them where they are incarcerated and the white district gets an increased population without an increase in voters while the communities the inmates came from get a decrease in population. Those black communities, now with fewer resources, also must handle the cost of reintegration once inmates are released.

Some states, including Michigan, require that an inmate be counted at their last address before incarceration. Will the 2020 census data help or hinder that?



Candidate Joe Biden said something many of us fear:

Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can't be held.

Laura Clawson of Kos reminds us the law doesn’t give the nasty guy the power to delay an election. He’ll likely try anyway. And he has the Senate GOP and all those judges he’s appointed to back him up.

They did plan for the pandemic

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued revised executive orders. The stay at home order continues to May 15. One should wear a mask in an enclosed public building (like a grocery store). On the other hand, garden stores may reopen and lawn services may resume work (I won’t tell her my lawn service came on Monday). Golf courses may also open, though a golfer is not allowed to rent a cart.

In response the GOP majority legislature hastily met to pass a couple bills on party line votes. One was to rescind the law that gives the governor emergency powers. The other was to create a COVID-19 oversight committee. Both bills will, of course, be vetoed by Whitmer. The GOP doesn’t have enough votes to override. So, good job guys, in getting all these legislators together so they can infect each other and send the virus back to their home districts.

Michigan’s official death count from COVID-19 has now passed 3,000.



I did a grocery run today, mask in place. I guess uneventful. The weather was warm enough I could do some work in my garage.



Moscow Mitch got his Senate to pas another rescue bill. It was necessary because the $350 billion in the previous bill to provide loans to small businesses ran out of money in two weeks. It probably has goodies for rich people even as Democrats got help for hospitals. The House has now passed it and it’s on to the nasty guy.

Shortly after the Senate passed it Moscow Mitch started saying, that’s it. No more rescue bills. The federal deficit is getting too big. Democrats and business leaders said that a great deal more money is needed to keep the economy going.

Hey, Mitch, the deficit is bothering you? Gosh, this is certainly a curious time for your sense of bother to kick in. There’s an easy fix. Rescind that tax scam bill you pushed through a couple years ago.

But Moscow Mitch, senator from Kentucky, didn’t stop there. He started talking about no longer wanting to fund a “Blue State Bailout.”

Nikki Haley of South Carolina piled on tweeting that states should have planned for a rainy day such as this. She disagreed that states should be bailed out. Taxpayers shouldn’t pay for mismanaged states.

That prompted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (and many others) to observe:

Let’s talk about fairness, Mitch.

NYS puts $116 billion more into the federal pot than we take out.

Kentucky TAKES $148 billion more from the federal pot than they put in.

But we don't deserve help now because the 15,000 people who died here were predominately democrats?

So in normal times blue states are bailing out red states. And when the crunch comes in a few blue states, red states refuse to help them out. Thanks for the explanation.



Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports that Bill Barr, head of the department formerly known as justice (I like Sumner’s phrase!) has said that if states don’t relax public restrictions on the nasty guy’s timeline Barr will take them to court.



Back in 2016 a group of students in the Detroit Public School Community District sued the state saying they have a right to a basic minimum education. Which they were not getting. At the time the state controlled the district through a financial manager.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has finally heard and ruled on the case. Yes, students do have a right to a basic minimum education. It will be interesting to see what the GOP state legislature does with that ruling.



Jenn Budd is a Senior Border Patrol Agent turned immigrant rights activist. She tweeted:

Don’t think for one moment this Administration did not prepare for a pandemic. They did, just not the way you think they should have. They planned how to eliminate immigration, bankrupt the states, line their pockets and usurp the Constitution. THAT’S THE PANDEMIC PLAN!

If it was incompetence or error, they would have changed course by now. They have not. This is the plan. It is exactly what they want to happen. Including sending more of your tax dollars to their rich friends, letting those in detention and prison die of #COVID19, etc.

When challenged that the nasty guy didn’t want to have an economic depression Budd added:

I don’t think Trump did, but he is not running most of this show. The intent is to dismantle the institutions, which is what they are doing. Trump is not smart enough to do any of this on his own.

Helen of 5Calls tweeted in response to a comment that the poor, mostly people of color, are hurt more by this combination of pandemic and economic collapse:

Yes! To accomplish these objectives, it will take all of us/citizens working alongside the Democratic leaders. We must work diligently (& now) to end citizen united, break up our state's ALEC groups, educate voters about AND eradicate ALL KOCH network ppl from every level of gov.

Then she quotes from How to Sweep Dark Money Out of Politics:

The right recognizes something that few on the left recognize: that campaign finance law underlies all other substantive law. In other words, no matter what you care about – climate, women’s rights, abortion, taxes, healthcare – it all comes back to who pays for elections.

Helen then tweeted tips for resisting the Trump regime:

* Stay aware and engaged. Don’t wait until events directly affect you. They will.

* Stay united. Don’t turn on other Americans, avoid Us v. Them. Ally with other groups.

* Keep recording and sharing facts. Don’t let reality be rewritten. Share, save, and archive.

* Join a group or movement. Show that we outnumber them.

* Keep going. They will keep going to wear us down and convince us they are the good guys. Don’t give up or give in.



The nasty guy is making sure there aren’t enough tests for the virus to allow reopening public events. Testing is *much* worse in Brazil. That prompted David Perry to quote from a Washington Post article and comment on it:

“The ones who know the truth are the gravediggers.”
Well that is going to reverberate in my ears for a while.

Some good news: Publix grocery store chain has pledged to step in to help the food supply chain mismatch. Many food producers are geared to selling to restaurants which aren’t buying much anymore. Shifting to sell to grocery stores and food pantries is difficult. So many farmers are using milk as fertilizer and not harvesting crops. Publix has promised to step between farmers and food banks in a big way – helping with 43,000 gallons of milk and 150,000 pounds of produce in the first week.



And a laugh:
The governor of Georgia says restaurants will reopen next week. So here’s a brief video of a waitress practicing the skills she’ll need in this time of distancing.

Chain reaction

The Ohio Department of Health created an ad that is quite good at explaining why social distancing is important (though I think physical distancing is a better term). A commenter explained a chain reaction such as this is how nuclear bombs work.



A couple days ago a group of researchers in California released a study saying many more of us are infected with the coronavirus, and that it is much less deadly than originally believed. Great news! But Mark Sumner of Daily Kos doesn’t believe it. He gives several reasons why. One is that to match the number of dead in New York City requires that the number of infected be pretty much all of NYC.

A day later Sumner reported Andrew Gelman of Columbia University pointed out the statistical anomalies of that California study. He also says it was pushed onto the public before peer review.



Another study, which received a much favorable nod from Sumner, looked at the average rate of death in various places around the world to the rate of death this year. The study suggests the difference is due to the virus even though that difference is much larger than the official virus death counts. So, yeah, in contrast to the study above, the death rate is much higher than currently stated. The study says there are 25,000 more deaths that should be attributed to the virus. I think that number is for worldwide deaths.

For example, Indonesia says they’ve had 84 deaths due to COVID-19 in Jakarta. This study suggests there were actually 1,500.

Reasons for the undercount, besides governments not wanting to admit the seriousness of the problem (see: nasty guy), is a victim wasn’t tested, simply didn’t get medical attention, or medical examiners were overloaded. This underreporting is another reason we should not downplay the seriousness of the situation and relax physical distancing too soon. It also means we’ll never know the full virus death count.



Kurt Andersen tweeted a quote from an article in Politico:

11,000 more Republicans than Democrats 65 and older could die before the election in both Michigan and North Carolina. Pennsylvania could lose 13,000 more Republican than Democratic voters in that age category.

It reminds me of the quote a few days ago asking why the nasty guy doesn’t care if his base is killed off.



This is both scary and not surprising. Leah McElrath tweeted:

Trump’s acting director of the Office of Personnel Management challenges the Constitutionality of an act mandating MERIT as a basis of hire, says all hires should be POLITICAL.

I had written about the primary election in Wisconsin which was, sheesh!, two weeks ago. The GOP refused to postpone it in hopes it would drive down turnout and their candidate for the state supreme court would keep his seat. The Democrat won anyway. There was a lot of pushback against the requirement of in-person voting in the midst of the pandemic.

And, indeed, a couple days ago health officials confirmed at least seven cases of COVID-19 linked to the election. And today the number of election related cases has grown to 19. A democracy does not ask their citizens to risk their lives to vote.



Today we got the report for the number of people who filed for unemployment in the last week. It’s another 4.4 million, for a total of over 26 million in five weeks. This is the number who actually filed. It doesn’t include those who didn’t make it through the overloaded state unemployment systems.

Bobby Allyn of NPR spoke to Bill Hinshaw of COBOL Cowboys. One reason why these unemployment systems are having a hard time is because they’re still running on antique computers using the antique programming language of COBOL. Sheesh, COBOL was considered old fashioned when I learned programming in the 1970s. But if you’re one of those old timers who knows COBOL or a younger guy willing to learn it, you’re in great demand these days.



Someone with the Twitter handle TheTweetOfGod offered this one for Earth Day, which marked its 50th anniversary yesterday:

The next time I create mankind I'll conduct an environmental impact study first.

Misadventures in love

A short post this evening. About 7:30, just after I turned on today’s opera I had a misadventure with my browser and had to do some restoration work. And I had to do some searching to find out how to do that restoration work.

When I shut down my browser for the evening I usually have lots of tabs open. When I start it up the next morning all the tabs reappear. That method of operation is why I sometimes talk of working through accumulated browser tabs. It was all these tabs I wanted to restore.

When I don’t do what I want to do with a tab withing a day or so it tends to stick around. And they accumulate. During the restoration I saw that I had close to 190 tabs. Some of them dated back at least two years. So after restoration I went through and deleted more than 50 of them.

I recently learned that the browser has a maximum number of tabs, but doesn’t tell me when it deletes old ones to make room for new ones. Some of the really old ones I liked (though probably hadn’t looked at in two years) are no longer there.



This evening’s opera is The Tales of Hoffman by Jacques Offenbach. Because of my restoration work I only had time for the lengthy prologue (why didn’t they just call it Act 1?) and Act 1. Hoffman is a writer and he recounts three misadventures in love. Act 1 is his love for Olympia who is a mechanical doll, what we now call a robot. She sings an amazing aria, one that is a benchmark for high, florid singing. While she sings it she has to act like a doll. Kathleen Kim did an excellent job.

When do we call it treason?

The forsythia around my house is in bloom! It has been for more than a week. I’ve got five bushes around the grounds, positioned so it is possible to see a big cloud of yellow from many windows.

Here’s the biggest bush with another bush behind it.

And here’s the same big bush seen from the kitchen window last Friday.

I did very little work in the garage today, it was too cold and windy. Tomorrow is forecast to be cold as well. Thursday should be warmer, above 50F.

The Sunday newspaper has a chart of daily temperatures for the previous eight days and the forecast of the next seven. Included in the chart are lines for average highs and lows. From that it looks like if I’m going to wait until the minimum temperature for the day stays above 55F before I apply any drywall mud I may wait another 3-4 weeks. It’s only April. And this is Michigan. Where it sometimes snows in May.



On to the news of the day.

The nasty guy is enacting another ban on immigration. Either he’s using the virus as a cover while enacting more immigration restrictions or he’s using these restrictions and the related us v. them mentality to distract us from how badly he’s handling the virus. I’ve heard both.



David Lilienfeld wrote that death is the most severe outcome of the virus, but it isn’t the only serious one. Damaged lungs can take 15-20 years to heal. There could also be joint inflammation and liver damage. Some people report the loss of taste and smell. That is likely not the only neurological damage. So kids who are affected may be affected for a really long time.



Robert Garcia, Mayor of Long Beach tweeted a chart comparing the deaths per million people of COVID-19 with flu, car crashes, heart disease, and cancer. COVID-19 just beat them all to become the greatest cause of death in America.



Matt Stieb of New York Magazine comments that the nasty guy wants to reopen the country but the GOP doesn’t want to pay for the testing that would allow reopening to happen. It’s all about their effort to keep government small (and small government means it can’t protect the little guy from the big guy).

Some GOP lawmakers argue that private companies can find innovative solutions to testing and the federal government can’t. Sure let them innovate, but the money has to come from somewhere and the only place that can is the federal government. And while those companies innovate – and pull in a profit at taxpayer expense – the feds need to keep the testing programs going.

Then they said previous relief packages already had money for spending. Let’s see the results of that before spending more. So what “results” are you looking for? A flattening of the number of cases that can’t happen because there isn’t enough testing? And how many people will you allow to die while waiting for “results” that please you?

Sheesh.

I’ve commented before that the GOP is no longer (if they ever had been) the party of life they claim to be and used to accuse the Dems of not being. Kos of Daily Koso gives several examples:

Bill O’Reilly said: “Many people who are dying, both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway.” Skylar Herbert has become the youngest, at age 5, to die from COVID-19 in Michigan. Was she on her last legs?

Dr. Oz said that opening schools now would only cost us 2 to 3% in total mortality. Kos reminds us that 2-3% of the US population is 6.6 to 9.8 million.

Candace Owens grumbled that the 2009 swine flu infected 1.4 billion and killed 575,000 and there was no media panic. A month later we see COVID-19 transmits much more easily and is 175 times more deadly.

Kos wrote:

One party is getting people killed by the tens of thousands; the other is desperately trying to save everyone’s lives. Because, believe it or not, death is now a partisan issue, as Republicans make common cause with a deadly pathogen ravaging our population.

Kos includes a tweet from Bill Marx, running for Congress in Pennsylvania:

I mean you have to admit it's hilarious that the people who have spent their entire lives stockpiling beans & ammo and publishing newsletters about preparing to shelter in place during a global crisis are the ones having meltdowns because they can't go to the cheesecake factory.

Kos concludes:

Skylar Herbert, 5, died because Donald Trump didn’t prepare for a crisis everyone (including his own government) saw coming when it was still months away. Unfortunately for her, she was already born, and that means conservatives don’t need to pretend to care about her life anymore.

After describing incidents where the nasty guy and his minions prevent hospitals from getting masks and gowns Joan McCarter of Kos asks, “When do we call it treason?”



With so much less travel and industry belching out pollutants the air is noticeably clearer. Others have noted less smog in Los Angeles. Now the residents of Jalandhar, India can see the Himalayas, which hasn’t been possible in decades. Leah McElrath notes that happened after only one month. We really can save the planet. It’s not too late.



Axios reported (with pictures):

Approximately 2,000 Israelis stood six feet apart in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to protest what they consider the erosion of democracy under the coronavirus-era government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

I’ve written that the protests against the stay at home orders are funded by conservative organizations. Just like the Tea Party was a decade ago. Leah Greenberg tweeted:

Friendly reminders:

1. The Tea Party was a white backlash movement

2. Every fight about the deficit is actually a proxy fight about the scope and role of government in our society

3. Rs will rediscover their deep concerns about the deficit exactly 24 hours after Ds beat Trump

I add: and every fight about the scope and role of the government is a fight about how much the government should protect and help the little guy from the predations of the big guy.



The wealthy like to talk about allowing the poor do this or that as a moral hazard. Something about letting them do it they’ll keep doing it. Abigail Disney, yes the privileged granddaughter of that Disney though she is aware of her privilege, tweeted a long thread about the real moral hazard. Here are excerpts:

The problem with extreme wealth inequality was never just about how bad life had become for those at the bottom of the pyramid, although that is the problem of priority for sure. But the shadow problem is the moral hazard that wealth represents to the people who have it and the moral hazard those people, with all their access to power and limited ability to see other human beings with less as their own equals, present in a democratic society. Because if you really are incapable of understanding why no one is too good to scrub a toilet, how can you possibly not, as Steve Mnuchin did last week, sit on live television and talk about how families can subsist on 1,200 dollars for ten weeks no problem. He clearly hasn't asked someone in that position what their reality is. Because why would he?
…
This is all the long way around to saying that our inequality is socially, spiritually and morally corrosive to everyone involved. Obviously it is difficult for those not blessed with ample resources and even if not resources, head starts like education and race and geography that will all eventually add up to resources unless you are too stupid and self destructive to play your cards right. More, it is morally corrosive to the people that seem to be the lucky ones. Because at a certain point money makes you stupid and it makes you mean and it disables your capacity to fully and completely empathize with people who are dealing with less than you are. It just does. And that is the real reason that wealthy people are so often politically conservative. Yes they intend to protect advantages, that's part of it for sure. But deep down they don't believe the people with less can really be trusted with the important decisions.
…
The corollary to believing you deserve advantages you have not earned or have only partially earned is believing that those who do not share your advantages somehow deserve the worse fate. Only with the a radical practice of solidarity can any of this change. People who are raised in wealth need to break this hypnotic cycle. They need to ask hard questions about their resources, not just slouch into them like big comfy couches. The more you have the more you better work. The more you are flattered the harder you must resist. The more you see a gulf between you and others, the more adamantly you must defy it. The world will not change until America lives up to its egalitarian promise that everyone should have a fair start, that no one should be left behind, that we are all connected in our fates, and that we left dynasties behind when we got on the Mayflower and must fight them wherever they sneak back into this lovely garden, with law, with attitudes, with social norms, with media, with every damn tool in our toolbox.

Oliver Willis tweeted that he will give titles to news stories as they would read in a liberal tabloid. Examples (which I think are more accurate than many):

Top Docs Warn America: Test Or Die
subhead: Experts Prove Trump's Kooky Reopen Plan A Recipe For Disaster

Mad Don Pushes China Virus Conspiracy ... While Bodies Pile Up Behind Him

Wall Street Fat Cats Bankroll Desperate Campaign vs AOC

Right Wing Virus Zombies Follow Don’s Orders, Endanger Kids

Hero Gov Won't Let GOP's Virus Goons Stop Her From Saving Families

Trump Pooch Mnuch Takes The Fall For Mad Don's Virus Check Scheme

A few more are here. They include the phrase “Son of a Mitch!”



The wonderful Chef José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen has another idea. They will pay as many as 400 small restaurants across the US to reopen and prepare hundreds of meals daily for a total of one million meals for families in need. They can rehire staff to make it happen. WCK will then handle logistics to deliver the meals.



Need to stay isolated and still need exercise? Try rooftop tennis – as in the two players are each on separate roofs on the opposite sides of the street. Here’s an example from Finale, Italy.

The cage bars that trap any hope for democracy

I read through the transcript of another episode of the podcast Gaslit Nation by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Corporate Manslaughter and discusses (among other things) the “Council to Reopen America.” This council includes key members of the Trump Crime Cult – the pandemic prince, Ivanka (nasty princess for now, I’ll come up with something), Steve Mnuchen of Treasury, Wilbur Ross of Commerce, Larry Kudlow, Mark Meadows, and Robert Lighthizer. All of these people have a long history with various criminal characters, such as corporate raider Carl Icahn, or are GOP strategists dating back to Ronald Reagan, or were associated with primary GOP donor Sheldon Adelson who was behind the move to get the US embassy moved to Jerusalem, which put Palestinians off any possible peace deal.

Meadows, like Mike Pompeo and the vice nasty guy, believes the Biblical end times are here and they are basing policy on trying to make all those end of the Bible prophesies come true. Those prophesies are about disasters, so their policies are designed to make disasters happen.

Back in 2016 the nasty guy asked Russia for Hillary Clinton’s emails and was sued for child rape by a woman who said she was a victim of a global trafficking network. He checked every box of classic tabloid fodder – mafia ties, sex crimes, spies, secret meeting with global elites. Stories that would be ratings gold. So why did most of the press work against its own financial interests and not bite?

Roy Cohn was a political operative who died of AIDS in 1986. The nasty guy was his protégé who dumped Cohn when he became ill. But in that time the nasty guy learned key skills: how to swindle money, how to marry for maximum benefit, and how to cozy up to America’s enemies – the Soviets at the time. And “how to construct a new American reality out of the wreckage of the American Dream.”

Chalupa said:

So on recent call with business leaders, just to give an example of how dictatorship works, Dictatorship 101, on a recent call with business leaders, Trump claimed Ivanka created 10% of all jobs in the United States. This is known as the Big Lie, a lie so colossal and brazen that how dare you even challenge it? It's just so absurd. But repeated often enough, it becomes part of the mythology of a dictatorship, and this is all according to a famous psychological profile of Adolf Hitler from a 1943 book, and I'm quoting this book now: "Never admit a fault or wrong, never to accept blame. Concentrate on one enemy at a time. Blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong. Take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind." That is what Trump does. That is what he's known for doing.

According to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, Trump studied the speeches of Hitler, Trump studied Hitler. That is why we're seeing, right in front of us before our eyes, Trump in his Hitler cosplay.

For those who haven’t been a teenager in a long time or don’t follow comic book superheroes, “cosplay” is costume play. A person dresses up in the costume of the hero and acts out scenes or scenarios of being that hero. An example of that is the nasty guy’s daily press conferences to talk about what he’s done about the virus, which are really propaganda rallies.

One of the nasty guy enemies is the press, shown through his constant attacks. When asked about it he said he does it to demean and discredit them so no one will believe their negative stories. That’s in the dictator handbook.

The GOP has been united around corruption, around making sure people can’t thrive, around destroying the environment, and around blood money. In a sense we’re still fighting the Confederacy (155 years after its first defeat it is winning), though slavery has transformed into the prison industrial complex, including border detention centers, where these people make money off denying rights and freedoms.

FEMA normally would distribute aid, in this case protective gear for hospital workers in harm’s way. But under the Trump Crime Cult FEMA is distributing only 50% of those supplies to the states. The rest they’re turning over to private companies, who allow states to bid for them. And where one of the bidders is FEMA with the financial pockets of the federal government.

And those private companies? One is owned by Mike Gula, who was a big GOP fundraiser until this opportunity to profit off medical supplies came along. Ivanka claimed to create 10% of jobs, a Big Lie. She is creating jobs – blood money jobs.

As for the rest of us, Kendzior said the goal of the GOP …

is strip this country down and sell it for parts. And a broken down country is a lot easier to manage. A country of terrified people, 30% of whom are now unemployed, are easier to manage, and eventually, the fear that we're all facing turns to scapegoating, turns to panic, turns to blame, and it leads to a lot of simplifications about what kind of state has what kind of governance and so forth.

So go ahead and let the blue states secede? There’s a problem, the blue areas in red states, such as St. Louis are heavily black areas. And black people in a country controlled by the nasty guy would have terrible lives, even worse than now.

The nasty guy has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, even though it is unproven to help the disease and has deadly side effects. I had earlier written that the nasty guy has a small stake in the company that makes it. So do many of his cronies. One, who runs an investment portfolio says they have only a 0.7% stake in the company. Of no consequence. But a 0.7% stake is worth about $775 million.

But this is a small crime to get the media focused on it so the nasty guy can commit big crimes in secret. Well, actually, out in the open with very few people paying attention.

One of the things he’s doing, while not criminal in the legal sense, is pack the courts with the most reliably conservative people. They will push American law to the right even if we defeat the nasty guy in November. Because the Supreme Court hears so few cases the Courts of Appeal are the final word in most cases. And already one quarter of Appeals judges are nasty guy appointees, all of them selected by the highly conservative lawyers of the Federalist Society. These judges will be able to sabotage a Democratic president’s agenda. The nasty guy has built a monument to himself in the judicial system. In an authoritarian regime the judicial system is the cage bars that trap any hope for democracy.

Defeating such a judicial system – one as corrupt as the guy who implemented it – would require a popular uprising with deadly results. These popular uprisings rarely succeed. See: Hong Kong.

Want to keep our youth from needing to protest? Vote Blue, no matter who. Though that doesn’t mean you don’t critique the candidates hoping to make them better. Are you able to do something for someone you don’t know? Vote Blue, even if your own candidate is no longer in the race. Have you been saying Bernie or Bust? We’re already at bust, have been for a long time, and are on our way to hell.

The single greatest act of human kindness in history

Yup, talking about the virus again today.

A couple days ago NPR host Alisa Chang talked with Scott Greer. He’s a political scientist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. So the school of public health needs a staff political scientist.

They played excerpts of various governors complaining about how little help they are getting from the federal government. Then Greer talks about the playbooks for public health – who does what at the local, state, and federal levels. And then the nasty guy and his minions ignored those playbooks. Said Greer, “You can't just shake it all up and expect everything to be fine.”

Local and state governments simply don’t have the resources for something this big. And federal leadership depends on someone in charge to make sure everyone is speaking with one voice, who can give authoritative guidance, who can back up governors for taking risky action, who can deploy federal resources. That federal leadership is missing.

So governors are freelancing. They’re also working together with other states in the West Coast Pact and the New England association – which means they’re recreating federalism. These pacts became united states.

When the vaccine is available are we going to have this procurement mess all over again?



Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports that doctors still have a lot to learn about COVID-19. They know what to do when a patient has Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome – put the patient on a ventilator. But they’re finding that may not be the best solution when a COVID patient has ARDS. One doctor said it’s more like high-altitude sickness than pneumonia. So they’re trying other treatments. For example, have the patient lie on their stomach.



I visit the 91-divoc data most evenings to see charts showing what the virus has been doing to us. This evening I looked at the cases by country. I chose the US to be highlighted and asked for New Deaths/Day and a one week trendline. And the US has a flat trendline! (Well, it did for April 18 data) The country has been hovering around 2000 deaths a day for perhaps a week and a half. That’s still a lot of dying, but the daily tally isn’t increasing. But don’t grab your friends hand had dash to a restaurant. A few days ago the tally was almost 5000 deaths. And the total number of cases in the US is still rising

Mark Sumner of Kos has also noticed the flattening lines. But he says that the number of cases doesn’t match the reported deaths. Which means:

All the evidence indicates that the number of cases of COVID-19 in the United States has not plateaued. But the rate of testing has.

In particular our ability to test has flattened. We’re still only testing those who already have symptoms (sometimes only when symptoms are severe). We’re not testing the general public. Inadequate testing “generates a false sense of progress. And that’s deadly.”



There was a lot of news about COVID-19 aboard the US Aircraft Carrier Theodore Roosevelt. The captain pleaded for help and was removed. The ship docked in Guam where the whole crew could be evaluated. 600 sailors tested positive for the virus – and what is alarming is that 60% had no symptoms. That’s far higher than previous estimates. Keep this in mind. For every 100 people who get the virus, 60 of them may show no symptoms at all while still being contagious and may wonder why they have to stay home. And two will die in agony.



About those 60 people: There have been armed protests against the stay at home orders, one right here in Michigan. Laura Clawson of Kos reports these protests are not grass-roots. They have big pockets behind them. For example, says Clawson, the protest at the state capitol was organized and funded by the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is backed by the billionaire DeVos family (as in Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education).

Then Clawson reminds us that only 20% of people would return to normal activities immediately after the lifting of government restrictions.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer didn’t budge, saying, “It's better to be six feet apart right now than six feet under.”

In response to the protests Susan Demas of the Michigan Advance wrote:

For a party that’s ostensibly dedicated to the sanctity of life, Republicans have repeatedly and flagrantly demonstrated how little they care about their neighbors dying of an excruciating disease that can feel like shards of glass have filled your lungs.

Where is the humanity?

Her whole article is a strong critique of the GOP in Michigan. As is this one, which also explores the contradictions in the GOP supposed claim of sanctity of life.

Randy Bryce tweeted:

Imagine all those guys protesting in Minnesota today being upset about the government telling them what they can do with their bodies.
Bless their hearts.

CleverNickName of the Kos community wrote:

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.
…
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.

Mark Sumner suggests ways that life after the virus will be different.

Since so many people are getting used to working from home it is unlikely cities will need so much office space. Those office buildings can be converted to condos and apartments, which could solve our homeless problems.

Managers are seeing that workers are sufficiently productive without being at desks where managers can frequently check on them. They are also seeing a lot of those meetings don’t need to happen. Many companies will see they need fewer managers.

We’re now seeing who the real “essential” employees are. And it isn’t the CEO. Perhaps they’ll start being paid according to how essential they are.

Everything associated with the virus is an argument for the progressive agenda, such as universal health care, universal basic income, and the Green New Deal.

I was meant to be a brand name

I went to Home Depot today to pick up my supplies for my work in repairing the drywall in my garage. I had ordered the stuff eight days ago. When I ordered all but one item was listed as in stock at the store. That one item arrived at the store before the in stock stuff was assembled – at least according to my online account.

I waited outside for 20 minutes because they were allowing only so many people into the store at once. Once in I went to the customer service desk. They handed me the piece that had arrived. I asked about the rest. It took a while for the associate to find it. She didn’t have to assemble the order because a couple of the items had my name on them. So someone had gathered the stuff, but didn’t tell the website. But there was one item missing and it took a while to get it. Had someone raided my order as it sat?

From the time I pulled into the parking lot until I pulled out was about 50 minutes. Given the circumstances, not bad.

Alas, there is a second item missing. I had ordered two electrical plates, one of them was the special order. Today I was told the special order bag contained both plates. It does not. A couple days ago I tried calling the store and each time I was routed to a phone that no one answered. Perhaps I now call the national office. Tomorrow.

From there I went to a big box store for groceries. There was no line even though the place is about the same size as Home Depot. Then onward to the medium size specialty grocery store. They had a sign that only 50 people were allowed in at any one time. But nobody was checking the entrance. I also doubt there were 50 people inside. I got what I needed and went on to the small store. This had a big line and I didn’t want to wait again, so I skipped it.



Instead of more virus news today I’m going back to Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man. A week ago I wrote about men at work, contrasting the Long Beach Naval Shipyard with McDonnell Douglas. This time I’ll look at sexual dominance.

This chapter deals with men who were the sons of the McDonnell Douglas workers and of similar age, late teens and early 20s at the time. Again, there are two contrasting groups. The first group is the young men who were in the Spur Posse scandal. The second were the cadets at the Citadel, an all male school with a military feel at the time they were forced to admit the first female cadet.

The young men of Lakewood, California watched their fathers being laid off from the various aerospace companies and not finding work. A big question for them is, so what do I have to look forward to? Menial jobs? Some of them formed the Spur Posse, which had a point system – a point for each different woman they had sex with. Some of it was consensual, some of it was assault.

Even as they were asserting their dominance over women they though they were the victims. They were afraid of being accused of rape and the authorities would believe the woman’s story over theirs.

Yes, the #MeToo movement is all about how the men are believed and the women aren’t. However, for the moment we’re looking at it from the male perspective.

Faludi figured out what the boys were really after: fame.

She says it started with the Pop Warner football leagues for kids. The young men who went through that systems say it isn’t so much about how to play football, something to do, as it is how to be – how to stand out, how to get people to notice you, how to get attention.

Meaning the goal of the exercise – the goal of life – is fame.

Media culture, not so different now than the early 1990s, gave these young men a platform for a brief time. The men were upset because they though it would propel them to higher fame. It didn’t. And once back home their sour reputation followed them and finding work became hard.

One of them, Billy, talked to Faludi a few times after her regular interviews. After an encounter with the police he said:

I’d rather be known than be some random nobody. That’s my worse fear, that I’ll die a nothing. I know that can’t happen. I know I was meant to be a brand name. But a very small part of me say, What if nothing happens? What if I’m a common person?
…
You know, everybody says boys control girls, but it’s the other way around. Girls have it a lot easier. They get the jobs easier. Because the jobs now are all about presenting yourself. It’s all presentation. Girls have it made.

We’re in a tough place if the meaning of manhood, the meaning of being human, is becoming a brand.



I won’t repeat the story of Shannon Faulkner’s short and hellish attempt at being the first female cadet at the Citadel. Instead, I’ll focus on what Faludi says about Citadel culture and why Faulkner didn’t last long.

In contrast to the young men of the Spur Posse the cadets of the Citadel did not want fame. They wanted a place where they could avoid the female gaze, where the could be themselves. They said that if women came to the school they would feel ashamed. But about what? Something repellent to public morality? Something perverted in the American male?

What they had behind closed doors was the ability to have an intimate (which doesn’t mean sexual) relationship between men. They were allowed to care for and nurture each other. They were allowed to be a family. They could hug each other. They could care for each other. They could try “feminine” roles without ridicule. But to feel comfortable being intimate society demanded they denounce it at the same time. Thus they they readily denounced any hint as homosexuality. They could experience male intimacy and conceal it at the same time. They made sure their intimacy was shielded from the gaze of women. They felt the strict masculine roles were enforced by women.

In my reading and blogging over the last dozen years I’ve found that enforcement comes from other men, intent on preserving the social hierarchy, not women. But these cadets felt it came from women.

This paragraph caught my attention:

“The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence,” Dr. James Gilligan, the former mental-health director of the Massachusetts prison system, concluded in Violence, a thoughtful consideration of the origins of violent male behavior in America. “The purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride, thus preventing the individual from being overwhelmed by the feeling of shame.” The major source of shame for American men, Gilligan’s examination found, were downward social mobility and unemployment, circumstances that reveal a helpless core, showcasing an emasculating dependency. More generally, he wrote, male shame comes from the suspicion that the world discredits your claim to manhood, finds it useless, even risible. The violent response to this knowledge serves as a kind of tortoiseshell to armor and conceal its vulnerable occupant, a shield to deflect further humiliating internal inspection. It is a reaction to being caught out, exposed as weak and insufficient.

I understand that shame as men not being able to fulfill the place in the hierarchy that society forced them into.

Understanding that shame is important in the current time (the early 1990s when Faludi was researching the book) because graduation from the Citadel no longer automatically opened doors into great jobs and leadership positions as it used to.

Faludi ends the section on the Citidel with talking to the drag queens of a nearby bar, the Treehouse. Nearly all of them had dated cadets. They offer some insights. The cadets have “feminine” tasks they need to perform – laundry, ironing, shoe polishing. But they don’t talk of doing womanly things. They talk about being a whole man. Lownie, one of the queens said the Citadel is a refuge from social expectations:

You don’t have to be a breadwinner. You don’t have to be a leader. You can play backseat. It’s a great relief … You can act like a human being and not have to act like a man.

Faludi wrote:

I found myself imagining what it would be like if the cadets could have adopted from the Treehouse illusionists the art of self-transformation, could have learned to play the gender game without the war game, could have embraced the nurturing camaraderie that they craved, the physical care and domestic intimacy, without compensating shows of belligerence and brutality.

Why are gravediggers working around the clock?

Today was a day when I wanted to whine, “Mommy, I’m bored!” A big reason was that snow fell all day (until just after supper). It was too cold to work in the garage. With falling snow I didn’t want to stand outside stores while they limited the number of people who could enter. As for my perennial projects – scanning Dad’s slides, genealogy, and composing – after about an hour of each I didn’t want to do that anymore. I did spend an hour on the exercise bike, but beyond that I walked from the desk in the living room to the kitchen and back.

Even with that want to whine I’m not sick, I’m not broke, I’m not homeless. Boring is OK.



While Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson is recovering from a case of COVID-19, the temporary PM Dominic Raab issued guidelines on how Britain might reopen. Make sure the health system won’t be overloaded. Demonstrate the decline in cases is sustained. Broad testing that shows declining cases. Protective gear is available. Opening up won’t cause a second wave. Pretty good, science based plan.

The nasty guy also issued a plan. It sounds good. But Mark Sumner of Kos says it’s a list of nice things to have, but no actual plan.

Unsurprisingly, what Trump actually provided was more of a campaign platform than a plan for the nation. Going forward, Trump can always talk about how “my plan calls for...” (insert something great here) while those pitiful governors are just not getting it done. So vote out those governors and replace them with someone who will deliver Trump’s plan! And just because Trump backed off his threats to punish states that weren’t following his cues on Thursday, doesn’t mean the threats won’t be back on Friday.

Translation: If things improve the nasty guy gets the credit. If things don’t the governors get the blame.



Still reluctant to vote for a woman for higher office? Laura Clawson of Kos brings us a few women leaders who are doing a great job dealing with the virus. They are Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Angela Merkel of Germany, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, and Katrin Jakobsdóttir of Iceland. Clawson warns that the sample size is way to small for us to say women leaders are better.

Also too small is the sample size of authoritarian men who are the worst at dealing with the virus. Though Mark Sumner gives a convincing rundown. The nasty guy is at the top of the list. Also setting their countries up for a great deal of pain and grief are Putin of Russia, Bolsonaro of Brazil, and Boris Johnson of Britain (that plan above about how to reopen probably didn’t get Johnson’s approval). Lower down on the list are Lukashenko of Belarus, Netanyahu of Israel, Erdogan of Turkey, and Löfven of Sweden (Sweden?!).

A special mention goes to Orban of Hungary, who used the virus disaster to convince Parliament to give him unlimited power, then promptly said: Virus? What virus?

All of these men have been making sure tests for the virus aren’t being done (certainly not enough) or lying about the number of confirmed cases, or both. Sumner says the first casualty in bad leadership is human lives. The second is democracy.

Some of those numbers out of the just-named countries, when compared against democracies, show that democracies aren’t doing well. That prompted Bakhti Nishanov to tweet:

Authoritarian governments with no accountability and transparency enforcement mechanisms routinely falsify their economic data. It's a fact. They are more than likely also falsifying their COVID numbers. So please stop the "democracies have failed in fighting COVID" arguments.

If your only argument for why you think a dictatorship X is doing better in fighting COVID than a democracy Y are the X's COVID numbers, you have lost that debate even before starting it.

Sumner discusses Brazil in more detail here. If their numbers are so low why are gravediggers working around the clock?



A bunch of conservatives were upset that California Gov. Gavin Newsom offered stimulus check to undocumented workers. So they started tweeting with the hashtag #RecallGavinNewson. It didn’t go well. It prompted tweets like this one from Hysterical Raisins:

You don't have to remind me to recall Gavin Newsom. I recall him very well. He's that smart and handsome governor who kept the California death toll much lower than expected.

Big surprise (not). Joan McCarter of Kos reports that the small business loan money in the last stimulus package has already been spent and most of it went to red states. Nebraska got nearly 75% of loans requested. California got 24% and New York got 23%. So, yeah, the Dems should keep up the pressure to not just dump another quarter trillion into that program.


McCarter also reports the money in the Paycheck Protection Program didn’t go to just small businesses as it was supposed to. Some not small companies were faster with the application process because they have the accountants and lawyers on staff and already have relationships with the banks administering the program.




From the Kos Cheers and Jeers Friday collection of late night snark:

The federal government's big idea for obtaining critical medical supplies is to find out when states are buying stuff and then go take it. When the president says 'I'm behind you on this, governors,' he means it like in the form of a stickup.
—Rachel Maddow

Kevin Mitchell Mercer is a history professor. He tweeted:

I asked my students (for extra credit) to select one COVID-19 artifact that they would suggest to a historian 100 years from now for an exhibit. The results are moving and heartbreaking. The only rule was they couldn't say anything medical since that would be easy (masks etc).

The students proposed such things as half-empty course notebooks, a glass door to see loved ones without infecting them, and items left behind in dorm rooms.

The response to the tweet was mostly from other history professors saying it was a wonderful idea. And even the Washington Post wrote about it.

I believe in evidence

In response to my writing yesterday about Senator Cornyn and his idiotic views on modeling, my friend and debate partner replied:

Senator Cornyn fails to understand that every single concept and understanding in his brain is in fact a model... we never have complete knowledge of anything, only models. And his model of the scientific method is highly faulty. Making assumptions (hypotheses), testing them via data and reasoning, examining the results vs reality and then evaluating the hypotheses accordingly -- that's exactly the scientific method. Well, ok... that's my model of the scientific method.

The quote of the day fits right in with that:

Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy?—in ancient astronauts?—in the Bermuda triangle?—in life after death? ‘No,’ I reply. ‘No, no, no, no, and again no.’ One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out ‘Don't you believe in anything?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be’.
~~Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind, 1983

I mentioned yesterday that the nasty guy was trying to get business leaders to buy into his plan to reopen the economy by May 1. There is now a business council with leaders across a wide number of industries. But they’re not wiling to be the scapegoats. To support his plan to reopen they say he must vastly increase testing. Which for two months the nasty guy has been making sure doesn’t go well.

As for all that required testing. One way to do it is to say it’s been done. Like announcing numbers of tests a lot higher than actual. As in: lie. Which the nasty guy is very good at. Just keep in mind if testing was sufficient hospitals would see a reduction in admissions and morgues would see a lot fewer dead.

Then there’s the problem that test equipment is hard to get.

The nasty guy knows how to threaten. He threatened any state that doesn’t reopen with a “close-down” – whatever that means. And for all that testing to make a safe reopen happen, it’s up to the states. And they pay for it too.

There is a faction of citizens, about 20%, who say the economy should reopen now. Some of them were around Michigan’s Capitol yesterday. The rest of us are willing to wait it out.



Another 5.2 million people filed for unemployment this past week. And, of course, there were a lot more who wanted to, but their state system was overloaded. So in the last four weeks 22 million people have applied for unemployment.



A joke for today from Twitter user Blank:

odysseus: we now set out on our odyssey.

sailor: [raising hand] what's an odyssey?

odysseus: a long journey named after the only survivor.

sailor: oh ok wait what.

This evening’s opera is The Count Ory by Rossini. While most of the men are away at the Crusades Ory, a young and lecherous Count has the field to himself to woo Countess Adele. Yes, a comedy. He first tries to get into her castle dressed as a holy man. Then he tries dressed as a holy woman.

This production shows the stage of the Met which contains the stage of a 17th Century theater. We see all the stage mechanics, such as the scenery being shifted on and off. At the side of the stage, visible to the audience is the stage manager, cuing people to come on and for scenery to fly. He even shakes the metal sheet to imitate thunder during the storm.

Towards the end Ory, pretending to be a nun (though without the habit because it is dark), and his page Isolier who is also in love with Adele, end up with Adele’s bedchamber. And all three sing the love trio … er threesome … from the bed. The stage manager turns the crank to raise the head of the bed so we can see all that’s going on.

During the intermission the broadcast host talked to Juan Diego Flórez, who sang Ory. On the day of this broadcast back in 2011 his son was born at home at 12:30 pm. He arrived at the theater at 1:00 for the 1:00 show. He was ready for his first entrance and sang and acted marvelously.

A free gallon of tar and a bag of feathers

If you filed taxes and at some point gave the IRS a way to direct deposit the money, you may soon (or may have already gotten) the $1,200 rescue money from the last virus relief bill. For those of us who don’t want to tell the feds where our money is, we’ll have to wait for a paper check.

And that wait will have to be a little longer. The nasty guy insisted each check display his name. Which means Department of Treasury programmers are scrambling to to make that happen. Should only take a few days. That prompted Mark Sumner of Daily Kos to write that nobody gets paid until his ego is stroked.

Of course, by the time the checks actually arrive, it may be too late for that rent or food or medicine you had planned for that money. Leaving your family with a real puzzle over how to spend all those Trumpbucks.

That’s why we’re opening a special pop-up store to sell a $1,200 pitchfork and box of torches special. Act quickly to receive a free gallon of tar and a bag of feathers. And believe me, it all has Trump’s name on it.

Now that white-collar workers – salespeople, corporate lawyers, even healthcare accountants – are becoming unemployed due to no customers, perhaps the next rescue package will be a bit more generous. Not only are these people likely to have a higher income, needing more than a solitary $1200 check to see them through the mess, but lawmakers are more likely to know these kinds of people. And, yes, I know that a single $1200 check for restaurant workers is woefully inadequate.



In another post Mark Sumner reports that new studies and new modeling show that if stay at home orders had been issued two weeks earlier – and had been issued by the nasty guy to take effect across the country – then 90% of the projected deaths could have been prevented. He includes a graph that Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding posted from the New York Times. The current projection is about 60,000 deaths. If the shutdown happened two weeks earlier, the projection came to 6,000 deaths.



My friend and debate partner spent his career as a mathematician doing all sorts of modeling. He and I have talked many times about looking at this thing or that in terms of a model. He will find this next bit either highly comical or extremely and annoyingly stupid. Texas Senator John Cornyn tweeted:

After #COVID–19 crisis passes, could we have a good faith discussion about the uses and abuses of "modeling" to predict the future? Everything from public health, to economic to climate predictions. It isn't the scientific method, folks.

The nasty guy is now insisting that the economy should be reopened on May 1. The attempt at opening on Easter went so well. Kerry Eleveld of Kos says this time he seems to be more stubborn. So his staff is working to get lots of people to agree, like business leaders and the US Chamber of Commerce. Eleveld calls this effort Operation Scapegoat. When this effort results in more deaths – and it will, if enacted – then the nasty guy has someone to blame.

Eleveld says the nasty guy chose May 1 because many election strategists say voters base a big part of the decision on the state of the economy and their perception of the economy is based on what was going on at the end of the second quarter, or end of June. So this gives the economy two months to get humming again.

I add: What will influence the decision more: the perhaps functioning economy, or a million dead? Are they going to be influenced more by their empty bank accounts or by grandma, or even dad dead because the nasty guy screwed up?



Speaking of scapegoats… The nasty guy did indeed declare he is halting payment to the World Health Organization. Something about them not doing things they don’t do, like demand UN members gang up on China (another UN member) by stopping all flights to and from there. Nothing like cutting funding to a world wide health organization during a pandemic. Is he not satisfied with the level of killing in America and wants to boost the death count worldwide? Mark Sumner says that the nasty guy is doing this to say the huge number of deaths in America is the fault of the WHO.



California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of those governors actually working to protect his citizens tweeted:

When it comes to re-opening, SCIENCE -- not politics -- must be California's guide.

CA has developed 6 indicators that will help guide how and when we decide to re-open our economy. This isn’t about an on/off switch. This will be a thoughtful process -- led by public health...

He then lists those six indicators. They include: Ability to monitor and protect our communities through testing, contact tracing, isolating, and supporting those who are positive or exposed. Ability of hospitals and health systems to handle surges.



Sarah Kendzior tweeted about a new episode of her Gaslit Nation podcast. I’ll wait a few days to work from the transcript. Here are a couple of quotes:

There's no official national mourning. There's no recognition of the grief we all feel, no matter who we voted for. The Trump admin won't even lower the flag to half-staff to commemorate the dead, including those who died saving lives.
…
The reason we don't have the flag lowered or a national recognition of mourning is because Trump must make everything revolve around Trump. It's about only him and his emotional state. He takes this moment of vulnerability and turns it into theft.

Jared Yates Sexton, a political analyst from Indiana, tweeted a thread:

I hate to tell you, but as somebody from rural America, there are going to be so many uncounted deaths during this pandemic. Poor Americans are taught not to get medical care, are riddled with preexisting conditions, and local journalism has been absolutely destroyed.

He adds that the media isn’t going to notice, Fox News has told them it’s a political hoax, hospitals are outdated and unprepared, and most don’t have health insurance.

In another tweet he wrote:

I grew up in a small town. My family is sick, riddled with preexisting conditions, have been taught not to get medical help, trained not to trust science or experts, and their town's medical infrastructure is virtually nonexistent.

Tragedy is inevitable.

In the comments to this tweet is this one from N6:

This is what I don't get...
Isn't the Trump-regime basically going to decimate it's own support-base?

Yes, it'll hurt everyone - but nationally; it will hurt Trump voters MORE. They're older. More often male. More likely to LISTEN to that idiot. Less likely to take precautions.

To which Eric Lippert replied:

Rephrase your question as: under what circumstances do you not care that you're killing your own voters? The answer is pretty clear when you phrase it like that.

Robert Klemko tweeted:

Last month was the first March without a school shooting in the United States since 2002.

One person, intent on confusing causation with correlation, replied:

It happened to coincide with record gun sales across the nation. It's almost as if guns aren't the problem, bad people intent on causing harm are.

Klemko set him straight quickly:

Nah. It coincided with schools not being open to students.