Fear that they got away with it

Last evening I watched the movie And Then We Danced. It was suggested by GLAAD media awards, so going in I knew it was an LGBT story. The story takes place in Georgia – not the one next to Alabama, the one next to Russia. Merab is a dancer training in the folk dance traditions (somewhat similar to the Cossack style of Ukraine). He’s been partnered with Mary since he was a pre-teen. They’re good friends, but it doesn’t go any further than that. The dance instructor complains that Merab’s dancing is too soft. It needs to be more masculine. Irakli joins the class and he is quite good. Soon after he arrives the instructor announces the professional showcase company has lost a male dancer and auditions would be held soon. We see a lot of Merab’s home life – he lives with his mother and grandmother, his father has his own place. His brother comes home drunk at dawn and misses dance rehearsals. With Mary and friends he has a good social life. At one of their away weekends he falls in love with Irakli. The brother seems to be doing all the wrong things, so a tender moment between him and Merab towards the end seems both a bit off and quite welcome. I enjoyed the film. While watching the film and seeing the quickness of the dance steps I wondered whether they director looked for dancers he hoped could act or actors he hoped could dance (though now that I write it that seems improbable). It seems he was able to find a few who could do both. Since this is Merab’s story the combination would be much more critical for that role than for the others. Spoiler alert (this paragraph): Both Irakli and Merab are among those invited to audition. When the day comes Irakli declines. Merab dons the traditional tunic (that nicely flares at the waist when he spins) for the audition. Once he works through the standard steps he ups the difficulty and intentionally does the “soft” had gestures, disgusting one of the judges. On his way to the exit he takes off the tunic. I read the transcript of another Gaslit Nation episode by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This one is titled Texas Republican Massacre. Chalupa began by stressing in dark times – such as during a pandemic and after an insurrection – one should make art. Any kind of art. It doesn’t have to be good art. Just making art is therapeutic. Chalupa then recounted what Taylor Swift and an ancient Mesopotamian Goddess had to do with the making of her film Mr. Jones. Kendzior reminded us we’ve been through a lot as a nation and a world. There is a lot to grieve and we haven’t done it yet. People feel guilty about not feeling optimistic about the future. To many people want us to pretend to be optimistic and if we aren’t we might be replaced with a team player. The rest of the world is watching us plaster on a happy face in fear of not being happy. But why should we need that mask? Grieving is normal, even if it is for people you don’t know. Kendzior said:

And I think while everyone knows this—they see the senseless brutality of this, they know how many of these deaths could have been prevented—the gut reaction deep inside is just astounding fear; fear that people can be that cruel and that powerful at the same time; fear that they got away with it, which so far, they have; and fear, of course, that they're going to come back …

Even though Biden has shown his empathy, Kendzior is troubled. Will those in office now not punish the perpetrators? She again laments the two Georgia senators campaigned on $2000 relief checks, yet the checks coming out are only $1400 – yeah one is supposed to remember to add in the $600 checks authorized in December. Besides, these should be monthly relief checks. She said:

I'm sorry, $1,400 is not $2,000 any more than two plus two is five. This is gas lighting, and it's abusive, and it shows how disconnected our officials are from the reality of everyday life. … I'll just say, everyone will remember how they felt when they saw Democratic candidates come in and tell them that they were going to get a $2,000 check, and everyone is going to remember how they felt when that check did not come and then, assuming it does come, was actually for $1,400. They're going to remember that $600 and it's beyond just an election mistake or a partisan mistake. It's a moral mistake. It's breaking a promise.

As for the valued unity – that starts with trust. And this breaks that trust. Chalupa said that in a manner similar to Putin in Russia the GOP is trying to rewrite history. The half million dead was deliberate, as was turning masks into a culture war. The nasty guy incited mass murder. And the GOP is trying to say it was an amorphous phenomenon. Kendzior repeats a long list of people who should be prosecuted. People are going after Andrew Cuomo for some of his mistakes, such as policies contributing to deaths in nursing homes. If you can go after Cuomo, why aren’t you going after the pandemic prince and princess and all these other people? They are much worse than Cuomo. On to Texas. It’s understandable residents there haven’t insulated their homes or have few winter clothes. They’re not at fault. It is the fault of the government of Texas. Kendzior said Sen. Ted Cruz is trapped. He was a holdout in 2016 but has thoroughly joined the Trump train, fully contaminated. Perhaps he thought he would be rewarded. But he’s now tainted as an accomplice to the Capitol attack and to organized crime. Perhaps he’s now trying to implode? In contrast to Cruz, Beto O’Rourke, who lost to Cruz, worked to organize a variety of grassroots effort to help out Texans. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, even though she represents New York, also went to Texas, raising five million in aid. And she was attacked from all sides. However, helping each other is how we should view ourselves. Both Texas and New York are part of the same country. This is how we unite. The Sunday new shows had on a string of Republicans still pushing the Big Lie. They weren’t challenged. Kendzior concluded:

Those shows are just PR operations for organized crime and for white supremacy and white supremacist violent groups at this point. So you should absolutely not be watching them.

The reaction to suffering Texans was you voted for it, you deserve it. Kendzior said no. There was rampant voter suppression. And no one deserves to freeze to death, no matter who they voted for. That should not be a controversial view. Chalupa said there should be many lawsuits over every death. As a way to help, tackle the corruption in your own city and state. Because of climate change we’re entering a time of pandemics and increased deadly weather. We need good public servants to make government work for all of us. We need people who understand why we need government and why it is important to civilization. We need to flush out the people who keep creating humanitarian crises by destroying government from within. Kendzior said the younger generation of Democrats need more support. They and their ideas are not on the fringe. Their ideas are mainstream, ideas like Green New Deal and healthcare for all. Why are people like convicted felon Michael Cohen welcomed on TV to spew what they want and AOC is treated like the wild and crazy one? They’re treated that way because media sees it as a horse race. But this isn’t for our entertainment. Lives depend on what our leaders do (see Texas). Because media normalizes bad GOP behavior they are complicit in the humanitarian crises and in mass murder. One way to stop that is to diversify newsrooms. Kendzior has hope that Merrick Garland, in the approval process for Attorney General, will properly investigate the Capitol attack and the people (all the people) who were responsible for it. Her hope is tempered by the whole system that for over 40 years of attorney generals has turned a blind eye to organized crime and white supremacy. And now we have the collision of those things in the nasty guy. Cy Vance is Manhattan District Attorney and just got the nasty guy’s tax returns. Vance hired the prosecutor who brought down John Gotti, so a lot of people are hopeful. Chalupa says don’t expect much. Vance has a Democratic primary coming up in June. His campaign bank account is down, though he could refill it overnight by calling a select few people – such as people who want his investigation into the nasty guy to disappear. What Vance is doing now is teasing us with the prospect of justice to get reelected, even though he has an abysmal track record and is very much part of the problem. Kendzior adds details about their disappointment in Vance. He has failed to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (all sexual predators), and also the princess and Don Jr. Is Vance brave enough to take on a transnational crime syndicate? History says no. In addition, Vance is getting the tax returns since 2011 and the ones from his years in the Oval Office will be nicely doctored. The really interesting returns will be from the 1980s and ‘90s. One more disappointment is that Vance is showing no inclination to release those returns to the public. Vance isn’t going to save us. We’re going to save ourselves.

A world leader in converting its citizens into coronavirus deaths

I downloaded Michigan coronavirus data this morning. I am usually skeptical of the last couple weeks of data because it gets revised, usually upward. Even so, the last week of data is troubling. The peak in this week was 1231 new cases in a day and is already higher than last week’s peak of 1081 new cases in a day. The last time one week’s peak was higher than the previous week was back at the end of December. This rise (thankfully small so far) is likely because restaurants in Michigan resumed in-person dining a couple weeks ago, though at a quarter capacity. A year ago I had lunch with friends after the morning church service. We would rotate through a few favorite restaurants. It has been a year since we’ve been together, though I did have lunch in a park with two of them last summer. The organizer of our group called this week, saying now that her church is back to in-person services the group would be going out to lunch. Would I like to come along? I declined. They are all older than I am and a couple, perhaps all of them, have had at least one dose of the vaccine. I haven’t. I’m not yet eligible and I’m content to wait my turn. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on the state of the pandemic.

At the moment, the United States appears to have reached another of those case-count plateaus, this one at around 70,000 new cases per day. Next to the point where the seven-day moving average exceeded 250,000 cases a day on Jan. 11, that may seem fantastic, but it is still astoundingly awful. It’s also a sign that the United States, despite everything, has not broken out of the pattern that has made this nation a world leader in converting its citizens into coronavirus deaths. The first spike of the virus in the early spring of 2020 saw daily cases exceed 30,000, before settling back to a long period around 20,000 cases a day. The second spike that summer took cases to near 70,000, after which they retreated to several months of around 40,000 cases a day. Finally, the big spike at the end of winter took cases over 250,000, and now they’ve retreated … but only to a point. Each new spike of cases has seen the United States fall back, not anything like safety, but to a level that exceeds the worst of the previous spike. That still appears to be the case.

Sometimes I wonder about Democrats. They seem to be afraid to use their power. I’m not the only one to notice this. The current example is about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of the big virus relief package. Joan McCarter of Kos reports on the current efforts. Her story was posted yesterday noon as the House was preparing to vote on the package (which was passed yesterday evening). The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that raising the minimum wage doesn’t belong in a budget bill – a budget bill is being used to prevent a filibuster. Several Democrats are crying foul because of some things that have been included in previous budget bills. Many of them ran on raising the minimum wage This evening Michel Martin of NPR spoke to Democratic advisors Maria Cardona and David Sirota. Early in the 11 minute segment Sirota described what the Senate could do next. VP Kamala Harris could overrule the parliamentarian and when the GOP challenges her they would be required to get 60 votes. But back to being wimpy. Yesterday morning President Biden withdrew Harris from the process. Is he concerned about the two conservative Democrats Manchen of WV and Sinema of AZ? Do those two senators believe that some Americans don’t deserve a living wage? Larua Clawson of Kos added that Sinema and Manchen had declared if the parliamentarian said no they would vote no. So … Onward to Plan B. Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Finance Committee has created a plan to penalize big corporations that don’t pay workers at least $15 an hour. The plan would also give a tax credit to small business if they raise the pay of their workers. This plan would replace the minimum wage part of the relief package. Since it directly affects taxes and tax credits it should pass the parliamentarian. Clawson mentioned several GOP senators who are lying about the minimum wage. Here’s one of several examples:

Sen. Roger Marshall would like us to know that he paid for college and graduated debt-free by working minimum wage. He did that at a time when it took 343 hours of minimum wage work to pay the tuition at Kansas State University, which he attended. Today it would take an average of 1,214 hours of minimum wage work to pay tuition at a state university. That’s the difference between working less than seven hours a week year-round and having your college tuition and working more than 23 hours a week year-round.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post also has more examples with analysis. An example of someone who thinks the Dems are wimpy: Jessica Byrd tweeted:

The GOP tried to kill you all and everyone is suffering. Howwwwwwwww is grief and rage not fueling Democratic leaders? HOW. There is a lack of courage in the Democratic Party. No amount of diversity programming or well crafted tweets will change that. Its not “strategy” or “process” that we don’t understand. You are not willing to be uncomfortable. And that’s why we don’t trust you. I mean they tried to kill you. Let alone have been killing all of us for generations. And you’re “disappointed” that people starving won’t get more help AND YOU HAVE THE POWER TO LEAD.

Bree Newsome tweeted about the minimum wage:

People seem to forget that, outside of the real limits on earth’s natural resources, “the economy” is a completely human-made invention that we constantly structure & re-structure. The idea that we can’t have a functioning economy & pay living wages is false & makes no sense. To say people can’t operate small businesses & pay their employees livable wages is the clearest indication of a broken, dysfunctional economy. It means the business isn’t truly solvent & can’t afford its employees. The entire capitalist economy is constantly choked by wealth hoarding of billionaire class & multinational corporations. This prevents equitable flow of capital to 99% of the population, leaving small businesses & their employees overworked, underpaid & unable to compete. Beyond that, the debate against livable wages is just another reminder this society began in slavery. Many wld’ve gladly maintained it, wld gladly return to it now if they cld. Since they can’t, they actively work to keep people as close to a condition of slavery as possible.

And:

Capitalist logic says minimum wage hurts small businesses because the original capitalist model for starting a small business was to kidnap people & force them & all of their descendants to work for free for generations.

Hostile to accountability

Yesterday I wrote:

Sarah Kendzior has lamented that Democrats promised to investigate the nasty guy administration as part of the 2018 campaign. Kendzior has also said the failure to do that (the first impeachment trial could have been about so much more) was a big reason why Democrats lost seats last November.

My friend and debate partner sent an email objecting to the second sentence. He makes an important point. He’s drilled this point into me several times, and I’ve caught others at it several times. I missed this one.

Sarah Kendzior gets a flagrant foul for violating "correlation is not causation". Yes, Democrats set out to investigate many dimensions of Trump's perfidy and in fact investigated few of them (for many reasons, foremost among them Trump's unprecedented obstruction of all Congressional oversight). And this all happened in the same time frame in which they lost seats in the House of Representatives. We have reasonable time-correlation. She presents (you describe) no evidence that the lack of effective oversight is to any degree the cause of the electoral loss. She may "lament" (as you write) all she wishes about nearly anything -- she has freedom of speech. But lacks credibility.

A couple points from me: My friend is right. I did not include any of Kendzior’s evidence that because the Democrats did not investigate and prosecute the nasty guy’s crimes they lost seats in the House. I do not know whether Kendzior actually has evidence. The evidence could be such things as voter polls linking disgust at the lack of investigation with a choice of candidate. I don’t remember Kendzior saying such evidence exists. Though Kendzior, or maybe I, lack credibility on this one point, I will continue to quote from her Twitter feed and Gaslit Nation podcasts as I feel appropriate because to me she has a proven record of correctly predicting and identifying aspects of the nasty guy and the GOP well before others do. Though she may not have mastered correlation/causation, she has mastered how authoritarian regimes work. Hami, a multi-disciplined graphic designer, tweeted about CPAC, the conservative political conference about to start:

Having worked with Norse and Elder Futhark iconography for years, I’m quite alert to the glyph shapes and their associations in the modern world and history. So, why is the #CPAC2021 stage an Odal rune, and specifically one with serifs (or wings) that was used by the SS?

Hami’s tweet includes a photo. The first reply to Hami’s post included a photo of a Nazi SS officer with the Odal rune on his collar. A reply from BlaqkPhoenix quoted from Wikipedia:

In November 2016, the leadership of the National Socialist Movement announced their intention to replace the Nazi-pattern swastika with the Odal rune on their uniforms and party regalia in an attempt to enter mainstream politics.

In a post from a week ago David Neiwert of Daily Kos discussed a conundrum over right-wing violence after the Capitol attack:

How can law enforcement effectively curtail the illegal activities of right-wing extremists when so many officers are themselves participants in these movements? The answer—which is that it cannot—suggests that effectively confronting far-right extremism must begin with police reform, and particularly the task of weeding extremists out of our police forces. The public cannot expect agencies tasked with enforcing the laws that prohibit extremist violence to do so seriously when those same extremists permeate their ranks. … The most difficult aspect of the problem for police is the extent to which far-right views have been normalized within the mainstream, and particularly within the ranks of police officers. The issue gets to the heart of a police culture that has become increasingly politicized by right-wing politics and is simultaneously hostile to accountability for its own behavior. When cops are also far-right extremists who engage in discriminatory policing, American police officials have a history of closing ranks and defending the status quo. … Extremism within the ranks of law enforcement, however, is not just a community relations problem. Much more broadly, it also affects what laws are enforced and how. And it has a direct impact on the broader national effort to push back the incoming tide of white nationalist and other far-right extremist violence. The primary problem with domestic terrorism in America is that our law-enforcement apparatus at every level—federal, state, and local—has failed to enforce the laws already on the books that provide them with more than enough ability to confront it. The ongoing presence of officers sympathetic to their cause—and for whom, in fact, their radical extremism is invisible—is one of the major proximate causes of this failure. … [Georgetown Law professor Vida Johnson] observed to the [LA] Times it should be a cause for concern when officers become followers of such conspiracy theories as QAnon, or the claim that COVID-19 is a hoax, or theories that Trump’s reelection was fraudulently stolen from him. “People who can’t separate fact from fiction probably shouldn’t be the ones enforcing laws with guns,” Johnson said. Johnson has a roadmap for rooting extremists out of police departments: stricter and more diligent hiring practices, social media checks that could reveal extremist beliefs or organizational membership, periodic background checkups for all police veterans, and a review apparatus that is fully independent. “They’re supposed to be protecting and serving us,” Johnson told Mother Jones. “But unfortunately it seems like a lot of departments see themselves at odds with or even at war with the rest of the community. That’s a culture within policing that needs to change.”

I’ve been hearing the term “cancel culture” a lot lately. It has been hard for me to figure out what it exactly means, and that’s probably because it means different things depending on who is saying it. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board, which tries to explain politics in plain English, discussed it. I see a basic definition now. Conservatives accuse liberals of using cancel culture to cancel them, to erase what conservatives are saying.

Critics of “cancel culture” are doing the same thing critics of liberalism have done since forever. While liberals complain about problems, critics complain about liberals. And they go to great lengths to get the liberals to shut the hell up. While “cancel culture” is a fiction invented by critics of liberalization for the purpose of attacking liberals, there is such a thing as cancel culture. We just don’t call it that, because real cancel culture has plagued human relations since the dawn of human history—it’s when the politically powerful stomp the politically weak. Maltreatment on such a vast and historical scale is so normal, pervasive and ubiquitous that it’s almost entirely invisible to those of us lucky enough to have been born on the giving end of it. Those of us unlucky enough to have been born on the receiving end of it, however, can see real cancel culture quite clearly. Again, the difference should be a familiar one. Those with the power to name, name. Those without the power to name, don’t name. Those with the power call it “cancel culture.” Those without the power sit in silence.

Stoehr told the story of a black student claiming to be the target of discrimination. White people claimed cancel culture. Stoehr wrote:

The problem for critics of “cancel culture” was not, however, the abuse of power. … It was the abuse of power by a Black person who isn’t supposed to have any power to abuse.

Promised to investigate

Bree Newsome tweeted:

The left actually does decent job of mobilizing around talking points & challenging false narratives, just doesn’t have same access to major media outlets as right wing. That’s why platforms like Twitter become the primary medium & also why Twitter sparks such consternation. The right wing is able to spew BS unfiltered on networks they control but aren’t able to do it on platforms like this one without sparking an equal pushback from the left that then influences the way things are reported in the news.

Dominique Mosbergen of HuffPost reported that the Equality Act has passed the House. This is the second time the House has passed it, the first time two years ago. The act bans discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity by extending the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also overrides the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which conservatives have been using to claim religious freedom (to discriminate) is more important than LGBTQ rights. Because the Equality Act is not part of budget reconciliation it can be subjected to a Senate filibuster. So far Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has given support – she was a co-sponsor in 2019 – so we need another nine Republicans. And, alas, we know how likely that is. Sarah Kendzior has lamented that Democrats promised to investigate the nasty guy administration as part of the 2018 campaign. Kendzior has also said the failure to do that (the first impeachment trial could have been about so much more) was a big reason why Democrats lost seats last November. To make her case Kendzior reposted a tweet from December 2019 linking to a HuffPost article of August 2018 listing the 52 things Democrats said they would investigate. The HuffPost article groups the items into broad categories: The nasty guy’s corruption. The pandemic prince’s conflicts of interest. Government business done through private email accounts (the thing they kept nagging Hillary Clinton about). Michael Flynn’s contacts with foreign governments. The 2016 campaign. The failure to produce requested documents. The citizenship question in the 2020 census (thankfully kept off). Issuing security clearances to questionable people (such as the pandemic prince). Plans to gut government agencies. And a general category of waste, fraud, and abuse, which included the botched response to hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico. The Muslim ban. Politicized hiring of immigrant judges. Loyalty tests in the State Department. And much more. By Kendzior’s reposting that tweet I suspect this was a campaign promise that was not at all met. The list is longer now and still isn’t being met. Which leads to an important question: Why?

It’s someone else’s fault

I’ve written about how the Senate can have a GOP majority that represents a minority of Americans. Here’s another take on it by Stephen Wolf and Daily Kos Elections. Wolf discussed a spreadsheet the team made showing that since 1990 only one election cycle – those elected in 1996 – did Republican senators represent a majority of the population. The rest of the time there were more Democratic votes for senators, even when the GOP was in the majority in the chamber. It got as high as 58% of voters voting for Democrats yet the GOP has a one vote majority. Wolf discussed some of this history, such as splitting the Dakota Territory into two states back around 1890. He also discussed some ways out of the situation (though he didn’t mention my favorite of separating senate districts from state boundaries). One of them is to admit Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states. All the other ideas (including my favorite) require a change to the Constitution, which the GOP would oppose and could prevent. Dominion is a company that makes vote tabulation machines. The Big Lie accused Dominion machines of switching votes for Biden when they are more secure than their competitor and it was harder to make black votes disappear. Dominion has filed suit against Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, who has urged the nasty guy to overturn the election and claim the win. Laura Clawson of Kos filled in the details of the $1.3 billion suit of voting machines v. pillows that isn’t as strange as it sounds. Dartagnan of the Kos community lists the latest examples of conservatives always declaring it’s someone else’s fault. This from the party that spends so much time talking about personal responsibility. GOP leaders in Texas blamed the Texas freeze and blackout on the Green New Deal (which is not law). The Capitol attack was blamed on Antifa. The nasty guy blamed his election loss on fraud. The lack of federal response to the pandemic through all last year and the current half million dead was blamed on China and the World Health Organization. The sagging economy was blamed on Democratic governors who insisted on lockdowns to protect citizens. Black Lives Matter protests are blamed on black people. And there is so much more. Dartagnan concluded:

Just once, I’d like to hear a conservative say, “Man, we really f*cked up,” or “Totally our fault, folks,” or “We made a big mistake here.” But that may never happen. Because being a member of the “personal responsibility” party means you’re never, ever responsible for anything.

Clawson reported that Biden’s Cabinet nominees who aren’t white men are having a tough time in Congress. That includes some Democrats who have “remaining questions” even though those same senators voted for some despicable nominees from the nasty guy. The nominees being held up are Deb Haaland (native and female) for Interior, Xavier Becerra (Latino) for Health and Human Services, Vanita Gupta (Indian American) for associate attorney general, and Kristen Clarke (black and female) to head the civil rights division at Justice. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the Supreme Court, whom the nasty guy helped to stack, refused to hear his case to keep his tax returns out of the hands of investigators, such as Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance. The nasty guy is, of course, infuriated and their refusal. He will likely file more suits, though with this refusal he’s less likely to get his way in lower courts. Sumner reviews how much of a crook the nasty guy is and has been. Then he wrote:

So, the Supreme Court allowing this to move forward does seem like the opening day of Justice Season. Only, before visions of Trump wearing clothing even more orange than his bronzer start dancing through anyone’s head, there are a few things to remember. Trump has already been “caught” over and over. See above where Trump was found to have swindled retired couples out of their last dimes, used money that was supposed to go to disabled vets to commission self-portraits, and was convicted of money laundering 106 times. Finding that Donald Trump has committed a crime is the legal equivalent of discovering that there is a “y” in the word “day.” It would be nice to think that Vance, or New York Attorney General Letitia James, were going to grab Trump by his ludicrous comb-over and drag him straight to a cell in some state prison that does not even have a putting green. But it’s extremely unlikely. Because the laws really are set up so that Trump’s 500 legal fictions provide a buffer between his actions and consequences. Should it turn out that Trump Airline’s Moving and Storage Leasing Agency has stolen millions in taxpayer funds by claiming false deductions and purposefully misreporting values of everything from helicopters to helipad-topped skyscrapers, the likely outcome is that one of these fictional entities will pay a fine. Should Trump be charged in connection with the crimes committed by Cohen, expect the worst outcome to be a flood of fundraising emails. “Help me fight off my Democratic enemies in the greatest Political Witch Hunt Ever in the History of …” Etc.

There are a lot of tweets aimed at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Just as Texas was freezing over he was spotted going to Cancún. Lately, he was seen doing things on his phone as the former chief of the Capitol Police testified about the attack. I’ll link to only one such tweet, at the end of this thread, Strangely, Twitter has declared it to be “sensitive.”

Half million

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos posted a photo and video of President Biden’s memorial moment marking a half million dead from COVID-19. Biden commented this is the same number of dead as from WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War combined. I am thankful he did this, even if it was just a 10 minute speech and a moment of silence in an outdoor display of lots of candles. It was only a month ago, on the eve of his inauguration, he marked 400,000 dead. Artur Galoncha and Bonnie Berkowitz of the Washington Post offered a few ways to think about 500,000 dead. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/500000-covid-deaths-visualized/ A motor coach – most of us call it a bus – that one can take from one city to another holds 50 people plus a driver. A bus is about 45 feet long. If the buses are spaced six feet apart, the 9,804 buses to hold a half million would stretch 94.7 miles, the distance from Philadelphia to New York. The Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington holds more than 58,000 names. It is 493 feet long and the center of it is just over ten feet high. To hold the names of those who had died of the virus it would need to be 87 feet tall. Arlington Cemetery covers one square mile. Troops from every major conflict dating back to the Revolutionary War are buried there. There are also national dignitaries there, for more than 400,000 graves. There is room for about 95,000 more. The people who have died from the virus would fill another Arlington. Brittany Packnett Cunningham tweeted:

I really get confused when folks say America is “more polarized” than ever before. Like...ever?! EVER?!? Also is polarization our WORST problem because I am perfectly fine being polarized *by white supremacy.* We’ve framed this entire conversation wrong. When “division” is framed as the root issue, people will make perverse decisions in the name of “unity.” They’ll have us all singing Hands Across America, meanwhile few material circumstances have actually changed. “Division” isn’t the virus-its a symptom of injustice. That’s at the root. And folks fighting said injustice isn’t “division,” it’s a freedom struggle. Just cause we now see the “division” on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s new or novel. Guarantee you: equity, justice and liberation...a country where all people can *thrive*...you won’t have to worry about “division.” … Just a reminder that we had a WHOLE CIVIL WAR in this country. *Pretty sure* we were divided. More importantly: when DIVISION, and not INJUSTICE became the most important enemy, “unity” cost Black folks Reconstruction and Jefferson Davis never stood trial. All the confederate soldiers were pardoned, enslavers got to keep their property and forced a bunch of our ancestors into sharecropping, and the American institutions that built their foundations on enslaved labor kept their $$. “We are more divided than ever” ain’t as far from “make America great again” as you might think. Both are completely ahistorical, and are weaponized against marginalized people. We we’re never unified. You just want us to be quiet. … Don’t be more committed to order than you are to justice.

Bill Potter replied:

I’ve learned that “we’re more polarized” just means “oppressed people have more power.” Y’all taught me that.

A couple days ago Kate Starbird tweeted a thread:

The “big lie” (claiming massive voter fraud in 2020 election) has multiple features of a classic disinfo campaign, including: designed to sow doubt (rather than convince of a single explanation), pushes multiple (even conflicting) narratives, functions to undermine democracy. Mail-in votes. Ballot harvesting. Dead voters. Sharpie pens. Ballots lost, ballots found. Suitcases of ballots. Voting machines. Voting machine software. This isn’t about finding a coherent narrative. It’s about creating doubt via throwing voter fraud spaghetti at the wall. And quite unsurprisingly, the next move is to use these same false and misleading narratives for future voter suppression, making it harder for people to vote next time (and the time after that and the time after that…)

John McLaughlin replied with an important question:

When will there be a price for pushing the big lie?

Leah McElrath responded to Starbird:

And EVERY major network and cable “news” show gave air time to this Big Lie today, in the supposed name of balance. We simply will not make it as a democracy if news media continue to fail us this way. This isn’t “news”—it’s dissemination of the Big Lie:

She then quoted Matt Negrin on MSNBC who noted the Big Lie was pushed on ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. The attack on the Capitol was seven weeks ago (tomorrow), Biden’s inauguration was five weeks ago, and they’re still pushing this Big Lie. Looking at a similar video on CNN, A. R. Moxon tweeted a suggestion and included an example:

Make public the list of people who have betrayed the public trust, how they betrayed the public trust, and what the result was. If you must bring them on, lead with those facts, then state the reason you're platforming them anyway. Otherwise you're laundering lies. "My guest today is Henry Kissinger, who worked as Secretary of State for disgraced former President Nixon, for whom he ran a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia that was both unconstitutional and a war crime, and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians. Mr. Kissinger, hello." "Mr. Kissinger, we're having you on today because you have some opinions about Syrian President Assad, and we want the perspective of somebody who has also murdered untold thousands of people." "A reminder: Mr. Kissenger is a known and unrepentant liar. Sir, my first question... … You might say, "But if they knew they'd face such an accurate and devastating framing of themselves and their past offenses, why would known liars agree to make any appearances? They'd stop going on the air altogether!" Yep.

Here come the claims that Texas was hit by fake snow. A tweet from McElrath, which farther down the thread includes videos of what she described.

I watched two videos on TikTok by a mom with her very young daughter. The first video showed her holding a lighter to snow and saying how it “proves” it’s fake because she interpreted the black soot from the lighter as burning of alleged non-snow. She was gleeful about it. The next video showed her holding her daughter on her hip as they put a bowl of snow in the microwave to prove it supposedly isn’t snow because they think it won’t melt. Of course, the snow melts. Nonetheless, she and her daughter both say they still “know” it’s “fake.”

Greg Dworkin in his pundit roundup for Kos quoted Naomi Klein of the New York Times:

For decades, the Republicans have met every disaster with a credo I have described as “the shock doctrine.” When disaster strikes, people are frightened and dislocated. They focus on handling the emergencies of daily life, like boiling snow for drinking water. They have less time to engage in politics and a reduced capacity to protect their rights. They often regress, deferring to strong and decisive leaders — think of New York’s ill-fated love affairs with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Large-scale shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist attacks — become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else’s expense. Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying drivers of crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis.

Scott Huffman, who ran for Congress, tweeted a jab at Texas and their blaming the electrical collapse on green energy.

It's -454F degrees in space and the solar panels on the International Space station are working fine. Nasa has been using the Green New Deal for 23 years.

Nefarious Newt added solar power has been a staple of NASA spacecraft since the 1950s, so 70 years. McElrath tweeted the video of the press conference at NASA that included video of the landing of the Perseverance Rover. It’s cool because they included cameras on the skycrane and rover so we could see what happened. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Nzambi Matee of Kenya is a Young Champions of the Earth winner selected by the United Nations Environment Program. Her company, Gjenge Makers, takes used plastic, adds sand, and turns the mix into building materials. The product is stronger and lighter weight than concrete. Enjoy the video at the end.

You are living in the political version of a slasher movie

I read through the transcript of another Gaslit Nation episode. This podcast is created by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Where is Christopher Wray? and was posted February 17th. Kendzior began by reviewing some of the good and bad in the impeachment trial. On the good side the prosecutors did prove the nasty guy incited the violent insurrection. On the bad side, they did not call witnesses and did not explain how the inner circle served as a bridge between the nasty guy and the various groups who were the major force behind the attack. Kendzior listed that inner circle. Roger Stone coined “Stop the Steal” back in 2016. That’s when the Big Lie began and has been a guiding principle ever since. Michael Flynn was the QAnon hype man. Steve Bannon, in his podcast, hyped and guided the attack and instructed the attackers. That should have been played in the Senate chamber. Lin Wood, the nasty guy lawyer, recruited and instructed insurrectionists. Why are they not being investigated now? Yeah, they’ve been pardoned, but we still need to know what went on. They and Rudy Giuliani have been pushing the Big Lie for a long time. Rep. Bennie Thompson filed a suit against the nasty guy, Giuliani, and the lead insurrectionists of conspiring to incite violence and violating the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. Chalupa said a lot of people should bring lawsuits against the Trump Crime Family, such as a class action suit for inflicting mass trauma. Why has Sen. Lindsay Graham become a loyal lapdog? Back in 2016, when Graham was critical of the nasty guy, he gave out Graham’s phone number at a rally in a speech filled with hate. We should praise Republicans for doing the right thing, so Chalupa read Lisa Murkowski’s statement on why she voted to convict. It was thorough in its reasonings. Kendzior said such statements should not be so rare. “Clearly, running around threatening to assassinate people is not something that should ever be accepted in our Capitol.” Georgia, recently voting blue but still with the GOP in major offices, is investigating the call from Graham to the Georgia Sec. of State trying to get him to find extra votes. Georgia seems more willing to investigate the nasty guy than Congress is. Kendzior said:

… Georgia is also corrupt. Georgia is corrupt in a different way. Georgia is corrupt in a neo-confederate way and within that is a certain kind of pride. They don't appreciate being treated as pawns of the Trump machine, a machine that will take away their vote, a machine that will threaten them if they don't instantly obey. So, I think that is something to watch.

The talk turned to the power outages in Texas, which also affected Kendzior’s sister. Chalupa said:

John Tedesco, an investigative reporter for The Houston Chronicle, tweeted out a story: "The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union. It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances. That's how the state's power grid failed millions of Texans." Annise Parker, the former Houston mayor, shared that story with her own addition writing, "25 years of total Republican control of the state of Texas." That's what it got voters, a Soviet Union like failure at a time when they need basic services the most. You might be wondering, why would voters go against their own interests election cycle after election cycle? Because the power of losing your inhibitions is extremely strong and intoxicating. … With all the cost associated with that being shouldered by the poor and the shrinking middle class and vote against a reduction in basic services—like maintaining roads and a power grid—because they want to be able to live free of accountability. They don't want to have to do all of that heavy work of being empathetic towards the needs of a changing society. They don't want to have to be "politically correct" towards women wanting equal rights and an equal representation in the world, towards people of color, towards transgender people. They want to be able to have the freedom of essentially being bigoted and openly racist and having this "freedom." When they talk about freedom on the Republican side, what they really mean is freedom from accountability, freedom from empathy, freedom having to deal with sharing this world with anybody else. That's why you always have these Republicans come into power with some belligerent foreign policy, which is a reflection of their belligerent domestic policy. This is what Republicans get us—a Soviet failed state in the making.

Kendzior added:

This whole thing where they pretend to not believe in climate change and not believe in science, what they want, as Andrea just said, they don't want to be accountable to that. They don't want to make actual policy decisions about that. They don't want to do things for the benefit of ordinary people and not for the benefit of fossil fuel companies or large corporations that make up their donor base. And then, of course, on top of that, you have just plain old sadism, as demonstrated with Trump, who was very content to let a pandemic ravage this country.

Back to discussing the attack, Kendzior said:

Where's the FBI? This is something I've been wondering now for over a month. Why does it seem that the FBI is not investigating people like Flynn and Stone and Bannon and Lin Wood, even though they blatantly helped organize and participate in these attacks, putting their words and their endorsement in the public domain? Where is Christopher Wray? Why has he not held press conferences on the attacks? Why are we not getting regular updates from our government on an investigation of our own Capitol? If you were old enough for 9/11, you may remember not a day went by day for like a year where we didn't hear of some development in the investigation of the 9/11 attacks. It was just constant. Here, we actually had a breach of our Capitol, with five people dead and people threatening to assassinate our representatives, and they are quiet. If I were Biden, I would fire Wray, so I wonder, why is Biden keeping him on and what exactly is the FBI doing?

Kendzior discussed deep institutional rot at the FBI going back 30 years. It seems it continues with Wray. One way in which it continues is the high level leaders of the attack are not being held accountable. No one is talking about them in the same way no one is talking about Stone and Flynn. There is a crisis of normalization. If the FBI has been corrupted, somebody would have done something, right? If the nasty guy was really that dependent on dirty Russian money to get elected, somebody would have done something. Chalupa said:

That's what happens is failed coups come first and then they learn, and they spruce up their tactics and they wear down their opposition. And they steamroll over any accountability and they normalize those tactics. The next thing you know, they're in power. Once they're in power, they're extremely difficult to get out of power. You see examples of this everywhere. The decline of democracy is a worldwide problem.

Chalupa mentioned Myanmar, whose coup was successful. There is Bolsonaro in Brazil. She said:

Hate speech is not protected speech. Hate speech is a weapon in the playbook used by dictators, used by strong men like Bolsonaro, like Trump. Hate speech is an extremely reliable weapon.

Kendzior listed types of things that have been normalized: hate speech, the president being a Kremlin asset and being named in a federal probe, and mass death due to a pandemic. It should not need to be said: don’t normalize the coup. Normalizing a coup may happen because there is a lack of urgency and lack of action. That’s in contrast to the urgency expressed when progressives do something. But when Republicans act … Both women get into discussing the demise of the Lincoln Project. It made a big show of being conservatives producing TV commercials opposing the nasty guy. Kendzior and Chalupa warned against them, knowing who some of the players were. And they were right. The head was accused of soliciting underage boys. The income was much greater than the cost of airing the videos, meaning it went into member pockets, meaning it was a scam hiding behind fighting against the nasty guy. Democrats embraced them because it seemed Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate were not in that fight. Chalupa talked about the need for Democrats to hold hearings to investigate the nasty guy and his inner circle. She said:

By not wheeling out all these whole colorful cast of characters and then bringing them out there, not necessarily forcing them to testify, but giving each of these guys their own investigation in Congress, you would turn C-SPAN into the new Fox News. People would be watching this and devouring this scandal. … In this reality TV climate, the best reality TV right now is to come after Trump and investigate him. People will eat that up. And the fact that Democrats are being timid and containing their power there is extremely infuriating. And the prospects for that for the upcoming election in 2022, it makes me worried. It makes me worry that they're missing such a major opportunity and Republicans are just going to clobber them into 2022, because the independent votes they need in these swing districts don't understand the urgency. Because if there was an urgency, surely somebody would be doing something about it, surely Christopher Wray would be testifying before Congress, surely all of these characters or adjacent characters to Bannon and Flynn and others would be forced to testify before Congress, surely they would be gripping testimony for the next two years. And instead, we're getting it swept under the rug. We're getting it rammed through. Nancy Pelosi wants to dust her hands of this, and we cannot emphasize to you how dangerous this is.

Chalupa then turned to Republicans.

They were humiliated in front of all the world when they lost the 2020 election. So you know they're going to come and prove something to us next time. Ivanka Trump has a chip on her shoulder now from the 2020 election. She is going to come and prove something to us next time, and they're not going to give up power so easily next time. I'm really fearful of the Democrats' response in giving them the opportunity to do that.

Kendzior added:

It takes a toll on your heart. What I want people to do—this is why we call the show Gaslit Nation—is don't doubt yourself here. Don't doubt your perception. Don't doubt your frustration. Don't doubt your fear of the situation. It is normal to feel afraid about what is happening right now. And when you see people blowing off a violent insurrectionist coup led by the president on the Capitol, it is a big deal that that happened. It's also a big deal that they're blowing it off. You should be outraged. You should never, never let it go. … You are living in the political version of a slasher movie. The villain is not actually defeated. He's out there lurking in the background. And just like in a slasher series, the sequels get worse and worse and worse each time until they are utterly unwatchable.

Every disaster is an opportunity for a fat payday

I checked Michigan coronavirus data today, data as of yesterday. The number of cases per day is about 1000, deaths per day is about 25. The downward trend from early January continues. We’re down to the plateau levels of July and August. The electricity is back on in Texas. Advisories to boil water continue. It will be a while before stores and restaurants can restock. Plumbers to fix split pipes are in short supply. And the weather isn’t so frigid. The worst is over, though getting back to “normal” will take a while. Even so, some are explaining what happened. Mark Sumner is doing that for Daily Kos in a post about disaster capitalism. He wrote:

When Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine in 2007, she described a system of “disaster capitalism” in which neoconservative free markets exploited extraordinary situations. Using excuses ranging from hurricanes to government overthrows, systems were instituted on “Chicago school” economics, with a laissez-faire anything goes policy for the wealthy, and a strict insistence that the government do nothing to help the poor. The forces behind this movement are well aware that neither nations nor individuals in the midst of crisis are equipped to negotiate fair long-term solutions. The whole point is. That can be people hawking water for 10 times its normal price. That can be companies selling electricity for 27,000% its usual rate. Those who impose neoconservative market systems are simply at the top of the scam artist food chain. Such systems insist on “austerity” when it comes to social programs designed to lift people out of poverty or buffer them from the next disaster. That’s because these buffers make people less vulnerable, and so less likely to agree to the conditions imposed by the disaster capitalists when the screws get turned again. These systems also insist that the other end—the end where billionaires play with options and financial instruments—has to be essentially unlimited. That makes every disaster an opportunity for a fat payday. … The incentives of that market are intended to keep the difference between supply and demand in Texas razor thin. The way that pricing is conducted under ERCOT means that the price of electricity can fluctuate wildly in a very short period on very small changes in the available supply. Those “spikes” in prices are the primary means by which the system incentivizes expansion of the electricity supply. And it really does provide incentive. It provides incentive to generate more spikes. This doesn’t require that electricity providers be “evil.” It only requires that they mirror the economist’s ideal of a “rational actor” when confronted with a system where limiting supply generates increased profit. After all, when providing less power generates more money … why not?

Everyone remaining is now an accomplice

Audie Cornish of NPR talked to Thomas Kean who was co-chair of the 9/11 Commission. I am relying on memory for this one (though I heard the segment less than an hour ago) because the transcript is not out yet. Kean made a few important points: Yes, the attack on the Capitol must be investigated through a commission. The membership of the Commission must be bipartisan “right down the middle” or the public won’t trust the results. Those chosen to serve on the commission must demonstrate they put country over party. Hunter of Daily Kos, who wrote this post a day before Cornish talked to Kean, said a bipartisan commission is not likely to work.

We know this: The crowd had been incited with many weeks of repeated but fraudulent claims that the election was "stolen" from Trump, a hoax propagated by Trump himself, his allies, his campaign, his lawyers, Republican senators, Republican members of Congress, state Republican Party offices, multiple far-right propaganda outlets, Republican pundits, and Fox News. It was an organized campaign of false propaganda intended to discredit the election results and the election itself, a hoax then perpetuated by Republican lawmakers who used the same false claims in a Jan. 6 attempt to themselves nullify the election results by erasing the electoral votes cast by multiple Biden-won states. How, then, will a bipartisan commission tackle a propaganda effort planned and executed by all levels of the Republican Party itself?

Why was the mob so easily able to breach Capitol security? Why does it seem the Capitol Police, supposedly non partisan have trouble with investigation sabotage in its own ranks? Why was the National Guard delayed for hours?

What we have here is a national security crisis caused by a planned and furiously promoted hoax propagated by top Republican officials for the explicit purpose of nullifying a U.S. election, which led to a violent attack on lawmakers by Republican supporters on behalf of the Republican president who gathered them on that day and hour in a premeditated effort to sabotage the vote count and declare himself the true winner. The 9/11 Commission may have been flawed, but it was not constructed with the "bipartisan" goal of including Al Qaeda's input on what should happen next. It does not take a cynic to suspect that what will happen with any appointed commission, bipartisan or not, is that it will face relentless attacks by those partisans most responsible for the hoax that now comes with a death toll.

Sens. Cruz and Hawley, among others, will attack the commission at every turn. So will Fox News. Remember how the Mueller Report was spun even before it was released?

As long as Republican officials and officeholders have the power to immunize themselves from the consequences of even an attempted coup, there will be no reason not to go that far again, and farther. … [The work of a non partisan commission] will be a tough haul. Bipartisanship, however, will not enter into it. Anyone in the Republican Party unwilling to tarnish their names by associating with those who would attempt even to nullify an election rather than accept its outcome has already left the party. Everyone remaining is now an accomplice.

There is no remaining Republican who will put country before party. David Neiwert of Kos reported on what the MAGA crowd has to say now that they are facing criminal charges for their actions during the Capitol attack. They have two main points. One: Billy Chrestman of Olanthe, Kansas. Neiwert wrote:

“It is an astounding thing to imagine storming the United States Capitol with sticks and flags and bear spray, arrayed against armed and highly trained law enforcement,” Chrestman’s attorneys said in a court filing this week. “Only someone who thought that they had an official endorsement would even attempt such a thing. And a Proud Boy who had been paying attention would very much believe he did.”

Two:

The movement’s true believers who participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege and are now facing federal charges are similarly perplexed and outraged by the large numbers of fellow MAGA “patriots” who are now claiming that the insurrection actually was the work of violent “antifa” leftists. This fraudulent claim—promulgated not just by conspiracy theorists and fringe partisans, but by elected Republican officials, including members of Congress—has spread so widely that one poll found that a full half of all Republicans believe it. This infuriates the people who participated and now face charges, because they all are ardent Trump supporters who believed then that they were participating in a nation-saving act of patriotism—and many still believe it now. They can’t fathom how quickly their fellow “patriots” have thrown them under the bus and are now depicting them as actually acting on behalf of their hated enemies.

Today I heard from a nephew who lives in Texas. He and his family are doing OK. He is impressed at how well Texans are caring for each other, how much generosity he’s been seeing. Stores without power are telling shoppers to leave with what they had without paying. Elie Mystal, a justice correspondent for The Nation, tweeted:

How come @BetoORourke and @AOC work to raise money for struggling Texans, many of whom didn't vote for Beto and think AOC is a she-witch, doesn't count as a UNITY story? How come the media isn't spinning it that way? How come "unity" can only mean "giving the GOP what it wants"?

The Recount tweeted:

Last month, Texas resident Royce Peirce paid $387.70 to heat his two-story house. This month, he owes $8,162.73 — and counting. Amid freezing temperatures and another looming winter storm, Texans are facing a second crisis: astronomical power bills. … Amid freezing temperatures, the imbalance between Texas’s staggering electricity demand and its limited supply caused prices to skyrocket from $20 per megawatt hour to $9,000 per megawatt hour.

In a post from ten days ago Dorothy He of Kos reported that Gabe Ortiz, the immigration reporter for Kos was on the Michelangelo Signorile show to talk about undoing the damage to immigrant communities inflicted by the nasty guy. One major problem is ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and related agencies have been accountable to no one and now have a deep and toxic culture. Biden’s executive orders on immigration have been blocked by nasty guy judges. Ortiz thinks ICE is testing Biden, to see how far they can defy his orders. In a post from yesterday Gabe Ortiz looked at the short history of ICE (created as part of the Department of Homeland Security only seventeen years ago). When the agency was created lawmakers knew they would have to revisit the agency to get it right. Over the last four years ICE has been defying Congress and violating court orders. Lately, it has been targeting black immigrants for deportation and torture. Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and New York Rep. Richie Torres are now calling on Biden to clean out that agency and a few more. In another post from last week Meteor Blades of Kos reported on the large number of bills being introduced by GOP state lawmakers to increase voter suppression. Blades also reported the large number of bills being introduced by Democrats to expand voter access. He then suggests for each suppression bill that’s filed Democrats should also file an expansion bill.

Ineptitude, bigotry, and corruption. Disasters in their own right.

Rule of Claw of the Daily Kos community commented on the shoddy construction of many Texas homes. That included putting water pipes in exterior walls … where they can freeze. Then the advice is to open the wall and expose the pipes to the heat of the room. Except if the power is out and the room is cold. Even gas heat required electric starters. So … when you call the insurance company about the burst pipes and water damage, they’ll ask if you took “reasonable” efforts to maintain the temperature inside the house. Who gets to define “reasonable” … hmm? They’ll be searching for every loophole because they’re facing two million claims. A lot of homes in Texas may soon be worthless. Marissa Higgins of Kos gathered together tweets and videos of life in Texas. They show the damaged homes, people in huge lines at grocery stores, and complaints about the GOP controlled state government. That last category includes Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She tweeted in response to Gov. Greg Abbott blaming the situation on the Green New Deal. That’s a strange comment because the GND is a proposal, not law.

The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal.

K. Murray responded:

Remember when they said food lines and power outages would come because of "socialism"? It actually just took Republican leadership in Texas.

In another tweet AOC wrote:

Republicans could trip over their own shoelaces and they’d still find a way to blame me, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the Green New Deal, BLM, anything but accept responsibility for their own actions and dealings. Ineptitude, bigotry, and corruption. Disasters in their own right.

Meteor Blades, in an Earth Matters column for Kos included an excerpt from a New York Times article:

As the deep freeze that has sparked rolling power blackouts to 4 million Texans continues, experts point out that the first to have their electricity cut off are marginalized communities.

They’ll also be the last to be reconnected. They don’t have the money to retreat to somewhere warm. The crazy way Texas charges for power means the poor will not be able to afford next month’s bill. Beto O’Rourke tweeted a thread, beginning with:

Texans are suffering without power because those in power have failed us. As with Covid, a natural disaster has become far deadlier due to the inaction & ineptitude of Abbott and Texas’ Republican leadership. This didn’t have to happen and doesn’t have to continue.

O’Rourke included a map from PowerOutage.US showing scattered places, a line from Louisiana to West Virginia (probably following a storm), an area in Virginia, another in Oregon, … and Texas. Pretty much all of it that is served by the state power grid shows significant power outages. I’ve read (though don’t have a link) that Texas has its own separate power grid because they didn’t want to play by national rules, those pesky things that protect the customer. I just looked at that Power Outage website specifically for Texas. It looks a lot better than the image in O’Rourke’s tweet. Mark Sumner of Kos reported Tim Boyd, GOP mayor of Colorado City, Texas, summarized the GOP position quite well in a Facebook post:

No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice! … Only the strong will survive and the week [weak] will perish. ... I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn hand out! If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family. ... This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW work and others will become dependent for handouts.

Boyd was back with another post in which he resigned. I’ve posted about Leah McElrath in Houston and her dire situation without power. She reported yesterday evening her power came back on. In Germany they celebrate Carnival in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday (which was yesterday) and the start of Lent. In the two years I lived there this seemed to be a reason to drink a lot for several days, which didn’t appeal to me. However, I did attend the Carnival parade in Cologne one year and was a bit surprised at how rude the floats could be in skewering the politicians of the day. I heard the Dusseldorf floats tended to be even more rude. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a photo from this year’s Dusseldorf event. It wasn’t a parade, but there were a few floats. One of them shows the nasty guy has been skewered – and that’s definitely the right word. See here for the rest.

Cults, not political parties, attack the heretic

Leah McElrath in Houston still doesn’t have power. It’s been two days. The mayor’s office says it could be “another few days” before power returns. Her food has spoiled so she and her daughter are eating crackers and peanut butter. Pipes are freezing and bursting (though not in her apartment) and renters are finding all their stuff ruined. Sewage lines have frozen. Water lines, when not frozen, are at low pressure due to failures of pumping equipment. Houston is under a boil water advisory (not that anyone has a way to boil it, sure hope you have bottled). The temps are dropping and it’s snowing again.

Houston, we have a problem.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on the situation in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott (with help from Fox News) is attacking the use of wind energy, saying green energy is “deadly” and Texas would be better off burning more fossil fuels. Sumner added the reality. The wind turbines in Texas are cranking out energy just fine, thank you. The cold doesn’t bother them – there are turbines working well in Antartica and northern Norway, even in North Dakota. What can’t stand the cold is fossil fuels, at least those above ground and uninsulated. That includes natural gas lines between storage facilities and power plants. They have enough moisture that what’s in the pipes turns to sludge when cold. Coal is stored outside and when frozen is hard to move around. Coal plants also need lots of water, which is frozen. Insulating the pipes and making the plants run in cold weather would reduce profits. Their ability to produce electricity has gone down while demand has gone up. Abbott and Fox are blaming green energy because the current system is operating as designed and is a showcase for GOP plans for deregulation and “free markets.” What’s “deadly” is GOP policy. Stephen King (yeah, the author) tweeted:

Hey, Texas! Keep voting for officials who don’t believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid! Maybe in 4 years you can vote for Trump again. He believes in the latter but not the former. Perfect.

Samantha Montaro, who has a PhD in emergency management and calls herself a disasterologist, responded:

A common genre of disaster tweet is someone making a snarky comment that blames disaster survivors for the disaster because of their state’s political affiliation. This is a problem for several reasons but the big one is that generally the same communities that tend to be most impacted by disasters are the same ones that are most likely to be kept from voting.

FishOutofWater of the Kos community wrote about the polar vortex freezing Texas and its consequences for weather for the next couple of months. I’ll leave that to the weather forecasters. I mention it because he included a world temperature map from early this morning showing deviations from average. There’s a big cold splotch covering America from the southern tip of Texas to Alabama up to eastern Pennsylvania, through Kansas and the Dakotas, and up into Canada. There’s an even bigger cold splotch covering the European part of Russia. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are having a comparable heat wave, as is the Arctic. In another post Sumner discussed a good side effect of this cold snap. It’s keeping people home. As in not out socializing and spreading the virus. Sumner also discussed several other bits of virus news. There’s been a lot of talk about the UK variant of the virus (which is in Michigan), known to spread faster. It is now known to also make people sicker. Vaccines are getting into arms at a faster rate, but still not fast enough. Testing levels are declining, which is bad. Keep wearing a mask in public. And we’re getting close to a half million dead. Congressional rules for how bills get passed can be confusing. An example is the “budget reconciliation” process that prevents the GOP from using the filibuster in the Senate. David Nir of Kos explained how that affects the attempt to raise the minimum wage. Does that have anything to do with the federal budget? The Congressional Budget Office has now declared it does. It made the same declaration when the GOP added to their tax bill the elimination of the penalty for not maintaining health insurance (that individual mandate thing) and allowing oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If there’s still doubt whether a particular provision fits the budget resolution the Senate parliamentarian is asked for a recommendation. That opinion can be overruled by the presiding officer, usually VP Harris, but any senator will do. And that can be overridden by a vote of 60 senators. Meaning the GOP would need ten Dem votes to keep the minimum wage part out of the package. A sort of filibuster in reverse. Nice when the rules work out in our favor. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, has a few items of interest. I had reported that Moscow Mitch voted to acquit the nasty guy then blasted him saying he was indeed responsible for inciting the attack on the Capitol. The nasty guy broke is silence to issue a statement firing back at Mitch, then hinting he will recruit someone to run in the GOP primary against Mitch. Bill Scher tweeted:

Assuming Trump means it, this is the important part of the statement. A bunch of Republican primary battles could greatly complicate their attempt to win back the Senate. This is where McConnell’s decisions on impeachment befuddle me. If you’re going to pick a fight with Trump, why not go all the way, convict him, disqualify him and excommunicate him?

Daniel Goldman of the Washington Post wrote about witnesses at the impeachment trial:

Instead, the problem is what the decision highlighted: that witness intimidation was yet again a factor in a proceeding intended to hold Trump accountable for his misconduct. Trump had tried to influence potential witnesses during the special counsel’s investigation; he had intimidated witnesses in his first impeachment; and at least one surrogate appeared to be engaged in witness intimidation this time around. Given this track record, it’s reasonable to worry that such intimidation will come into play in the various investigations now circling Trump.

From the New York Times:

In Michigan, one of the key battleground states Mr. Trump lost in the November election — and home to two of the 10 House Republicans who supported impeaching him — there are growing signs of a party not in flux, but united in doubling down on the same themes that defined Mr. Trump’s political style: conspiracy theories, fealty to the leader, a web of misinformation and intolerance.

David Drucker of the Washington Examiner:

The wave of party-sponsored censures greeting Republicans who cross former President Donald Trump reveals a GOP interested in pushing out heretics whose lone political sin is disloyalty to the vanquished party leader. More than a dozen prominent Republicans have been slapped with censure resolutions by state or county parties this year. Most were rebuked for voting to impeach Trump or to convict the former president at trial in the Senate because they hold him responsible for the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol by his grassroots supporters. Some Republicans were censured because party activists decided they ignored Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed a recent poll showing the effect the nasty guy is having on the GOP.

What's both striking and problematic about recent polling among Republicans is that while Trump remains the most dominant figure in the GOP, he also divides conservative voters. For instance, while 57% of GOP voters wanted a major role for Trump, 17% favored a minor role for him, and 18% wanted no role for Trump at all. That's a deep split. The latest Civiqs polling notes a similar phenomenon. Of the 43% of respondents who said they voted for Trump, about two-thirds (28%) said they think of themselves as "Trump supporters" while the other third considers themselves "Republican Party supporters." So while Trump is bound to continue his role as a dominant force in the Republican Party, he’s also bound to divide the party amongst itself.

Dartagnan of the Kos community told the story of Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. He is one of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment. One of his cousins wrote a letter condemning him for the vote, saying such things as “What a disappointment you are to us and to God!” The letter intentionally pulls in the idea that Kinzinger has violated whatever God commanded. Dartagnan wrote:

If the reflexive censure of those senators—a punishment normally reserved by a political party for its most errant members—was insufficient evidence of the GOP’s transformation into an out-and-out cult, then the “shunning” of Congressman Kinzinger by his own family members should put any doubts to rest. … At the outset, it should be emphasized that the imposition of such mass censuring is not “typical” behavior for a political party or its adherents in addressing dissident voices within their ranks, nor is it at all typical for a politician’s own family to “disown” him. Rather, this is more akin to what cults do when faced with an “apostate” who questions the cult—or worse, seeks to leave. Cults, not political parties, close ranks and attack the person they perceive as the heretic. Cults, not political parties, attempt to isolate the offender, in order to make an example of him/her to the rest of the cult. … With shockingly few exceptions, members of the Republican Party have allowed themselves to be co-opted by a toxic cult mentality that is now dictating the actions of the party itself. The fact that this mentality is being driven by a powerful but largely unexamined religious fervor in our society makes it even more dangerous.

David Neiwert of Kos discussed an article by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post about the destabilizing social effects of pandemics. In general, more people are susceptible to the extreme ideas of supremacist movements. Neiwert concluded:

“Pandemics create insecurity, while extremism offers a kind of certainty,” University of Maryland social psychologist Arie Kruglanski told the Post. “Especially now, when trust is low in government, in Congress, in science, in medicine, the church—there’s nobody you can trust, so you trust your friends, your tribe. Extremists offer a black-and-white view,” he said. “There’s a culprit responsible for some evil plan to destroy the nation, and they have a plan for restoration that will bring back greatness.”

Lauren Floyd of Kos reported that now the impeachment trial is over and the nasty guy is no longer protected by being in office, Democrats are filing lawsuits against him. Floyd discussed one alleging that the nasty guy, personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and hate groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers “conspired to incite” the Capitol attack.

Come at them with unconditional love, as hard as that is

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter to her colleagues calling for the formation of a commission to investigate what happened during the attack on the Capitol. This will require legislation in the same way the 9/11 Commission was formed. There is a danger the outcome won’t be holding people responsible, but only recommending how to make the Capitol building more defensible. One thing the GOP wants investigated is how Pelosi hobbled the National Guard response. Laura Clawson of Kos reported the GOP is on board … sorta.

Lawmakers from both parties have called for a 9/11-type investigatory panel, but some of the Republicans are likely to either push for tight limits on what can be investigated or entirely back off those calls as impeachment—and the need to distract from it by acting very serious about some form of response to the attack—recedes into the past.

Translation: The GOP is making sure they’re a part of the commission so that they can control that it doesn’t investigate too much, as in the GOP. Clawson lists a few things that need to be investigated: Why were the Capitol Police unprepared? Why was the National Guard deployment delayed? Things to watch for: What investigative questions are off limits? What witnesses should not be called? Hunter of Kos reviewed a lot of things that show the GOP has fully embraced fascism. Along the way he discussed that if the GOP had convicted the nasty guy …

The message would have been clear: Violence as political tool is disqualifying. Forever. Not violence as political tool is unfortunate. Not violence as political tool is unseemly, but due to various technicalities and the current schedule cannot be responded to. Violence as political tool is an unforgivable act, whether such support is tacit or explicit, whether it was planned or it was spontaneous, and we will all stand united to declare that no matter what your political ambitions may be you are not allowed to do that.

Nick Anderson of Kos has a cartoon of GOP legislators on January 6th and today. Kalle Nemvalts tweeted:

When nearly half the jury is afraid of the mob, or actually members of the mob, you don’t expect a conviction of the mob boss.

Ben Franklin tweeted:

When the major ringleaders of an attack on the capitol like Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, Baked Alaska, N*ck Fuentes, etc are not even bothered by the FBI in the wake of an event that left several people dead I am left to conclude they are being protected by the FBI. … So either these guys are under the protection of the security apparatus, or the entire January 6th attack was being conducted by FBI informants, and these two things are more or less the same. Which means the security apparatus used them to attack the elected part of govt. The security apparatus left the doors wide open for a mob to attack on January 6th and almost kill members of congress, just like they let trump into power despite his ties to organized crime, foreign powers, and Epstein. The security apparatus is attacking democracy. The events of the last five years have largely been an exercise of all the governments and non governmental institutions which we were told to trust working together to allow an authoritarian movement to consolidate power all while keeping the truth from the public by distraction.

Sydette, who uses the handle Black Amazon, tweeted:

If you want to know what publishing/media is like … People are circulating my articles to find (white) writers LIKE me or get current “hot” writers to write like me But not talking to me.

I shoveled four inches of snow from my driveway today. Along with the three inches from last week the snow berm between my driveway and the neighbor’s is getting tall. The snow I got last night was the same storm that hit Texas – I followed its progress north on the weather map. I have family in Texas, so I’m concerned. I haven’t heard from them, perhaps because their power is out. Leah McElrath is in Houston and her power has been off for about 24 hours now. Here’s her description from this morning. Mark Sumner of Kos, who used to work in the energy industry (coal), explained why the Texas power grid collapsed. It was built around maximizing profit (never a good sign) and couldn’t handle the combination of cold and increased demands. In addition, the Texas grid is mostly isolated from the national grid so it isn’t easy for them to accept power from outside power companies. This one has been sitting in my browser tabs for a month. I spent all my blogging time writing about the impeachment trial and didn’t get to it. Audie Cornish of NPR talked with Dannagal Young, professor of communications at the University of Delaware, about how to mend family relationships after one member has been sucked into the QAnon conspiracy. People who are not sucked in try to lead their parent, child, or sibling away from the nonsense, try to say that Joe Biden really did win the presidency and did so fairly. That rarely goes well. Young said:

Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.

To get back to reality they need help in the same manner as someone recovering from addiction or from a cult.

Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned. No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc. … Come at them with unconditional love, as hard as that is, reminding them of the preexisting bonds that you have. If it's a brother or sister, how about talking about old stories and just texting them and saying, oh, my gosh, I remembered that fishing trip that we had back when we were 5 and you fell in the lake, right? Because now you're asking them to tap into an identity that they haven't tapped into in a while, and that is their identity as a brother or a sister. … My sense is that if your goal is to bring them back in and to reconnect that accountability is something that should be put aside for a while until much later.

Accountability for family members is later. Accountability for those who perpetrated these conspiracies for political gain is now. Laurie Voss tweeted:

It's Presidents Day in the US and once upon a time I read a biography of every single US president so I may as well make use of that useless knowledge. Here is a thread of the wildest tweet-sized fact I know about each president:

That is indeed followed by a thread where all the presidents get a tweet of their own. Read the post-scripts for corrections. Every so often I look over the Twitter feeds of Amazing Maps (no updates since June) and Terrible Maps, which I haven’t looked at in a couple years. So a couple tweets from Terrible Maps: The earth, if we put New Zealand in the middle. A map showing the 23 states with a total of 40 million people who get 46 senators and the 40 million people in California who get two senators. The caption is “Maybe a bunch of white slave owners from the 1700s did not come up with the best government ever.” There are a lot of comments saying this is the worst terrible map.

They've already compromised their positions

Aldous J Pennyfarthing of Daily Kos listed several GOP leaders who were humiliated by the nasty guy – plus Mike Pence whom the nasty guy attempted to murder – yet they still stand by him.

Do Republicans feel some weird frisson of excitement when Trump brutally attacks or betrays them? Is this something we mere mortals simply can’t understand? Because if any of my bosses had ever treated me this disrespectfully, I’d have immediately FedEx’d them my company-issued gimp costume (without dry-cleaning it first!) and never spoken to them again. But Republicans keep coming back for more. Why?

As an example of the candidates for most gutless toady…

Despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump is the human equivalent of dumpster sushi, Mitch McConnell gladly wolfed down every rancid, mealy bite for years.

Kos of Kos added that some of those toadies want us to forget they’re toadies. But …

I don’t think anyone doubts that Trump would be convicted by the Senate in a secret vote. The fact that Republicans couldn’t publicly pull the trigger is all the evidence you need that the Republican Party hasn’t moved past Trump or his supporters. They remain held in thrall by them. ... So yeah: Good luck, GQP, trying to pretend that they can move on and pretend Trump is irrelevant, and that their own actions enabling him to the very end should be shrugged off. No one is ready to move on.

As mentioned above Moscow Mitch is one of those toadies, though a bit more calculating than the rest, trying to have both sides. Hunter of Kos reported Mitch voted to acquit, then gave a big speech declaring the nasty guy was indeed guilty of all the things prosecutors said in the trial. Great speech, except for that vote to acquit and all that maneuvering to delay the trial until the nasty guy was out of office so being out of office could be used as an excuse not to convict. If you thought he’s guilty you should vote him guilty. But this type of action isn’t new. Hunter wrote:

This is the part of the well-worn program where Sen. Mitch McConnell knows a member of his party has done an unforgivable and evil thing, and thus prepares his dual defenses. To preserve party power and cultivate a base that has grown ever more willing to accept any crime in service to their cause, McConnell maneuvers to sabotage whatever accountability is being attempted. To preserve the money flow from donors horrified that the party would go so far—but who still count tax breaks and corporate deregulation as more urgent needs than flushing out white supremacist-laced, propaganda-fueled fascism—McConnell seeds stories about his personal frustration with the behavior, assures the donor class that he is absolutely not on board with the new horror he himself worked to protect.

Michel Martin of NPR talked to Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Part of their discussion was that the impeachment trial showed evidence on how close many senators were to danger during the attack on the Capitol. Martin asked:

So how, then, do you understand the fact that all of these people were witnesses and all of these people were in harm's way and that wasn't enough?

Stanley replied:

So Trump has been laying the basis for political violence for weeks, months and years. We know from the past that it doesn't happen immediately. It takes a while to happen. What we saw with the Republican Party is we saw this fealty to a leader. Everyone is talking about this. How could people whose very lives were placed in danger by the rhetoric of the commander in chief still shows such fealty to him? That's because they've already compromised their positions. And this is how a cult of the leader works. This is why we've gone beyond the ordinary Republican Party and we can start talking about something like fascism, because there's a cult of the leader, where even those who follow are so in thrall to the leader. And they've made so many compromises already, these kinds of loyalty compromises of accepting the lie, that they've themselves become compromised. And so they have to go down with the leader.

Jessica Sutherland of Kos gathered several tweets in reaction to the trial’s verdict. Here’s a few of them: From Irishrygirl:

House Managers did an amazing job proving Trump’s guilt. Republicans did an amazing job proving that they don’t care.

From Robert Reich:

To: President Joseph Biden From: Every American who saw what the GOP did today. Forget unity. Forget bipartisanship. Forget compromise. This is Trump's mob. Eliminate the filibuster and get everything America needs done now.

Joe Scarborough of NBC tweeted:

Donald Trump destroyed the Republican majority in the House, Senate, and their control of the White House. The vote to turn a blind eye to the instigation of sedition, cop killing, and treason will forever haunt their party and lead to their collapse. Remember this day.

To which Bree Newsome replied:

Ppl saying this are overlooking how Republicans are already at work to prevent next election. Y’all think you’re going to defeat them electorally because Americans are outraged but they’re not trying to win electorally. It’s going to be a raw power grab w/ more political violence.

Limericking tweeted:

Republicans, making their pick, Concluded acquitting him quick. They have no dispute They kneel at his boot; They want to continue to lick.

As several of my posts have shown I regularly, almost daily, read the Twitter feeds of Sarah Kendzior and Leah McElrath. I read Ben Franklin’s feed only occasionally, and when I do I usually want to quote a whole bunch of them. So, here we go. One: Franklin quoted Bree Newsome:

A lot of people still not ready to confront how the mob that attacked the Capitol included police officers, military members, folks with high security clearance & FBI informants, so there’s no way this was an intelligence “failure”. But I’m sure we’ll cross that bridge soon.

Then he replied:

I feel that the fact that the attack could not have happened without the help of the security apparatus is being lost in the court drama - our government is essentially in a civil war with itself. Certain factions within the government working directly with the GOP in an effort to kill democratically elected politicians who got in the way is too big a pill for most to swallow, in part because it’s precisely the mirror image of the GOP’s animating ideology. Yet, the facts.

Two:

Let me state the implications of Epstein, Craig Spence, and Larry King bluntly - the GOP establishment is filled with people who have been caught on tape committing sex crimes against kids, and the people in control of those tapes control those people. Just the facts. Everyone tries to quarantine these scandals from our discourse for misguided reasons but there are real consequences to it, beyond just the victims. These fully owned people aren’t free to do the right thing even in the most extreme circumstances. Some voted to acquit Trump today. These blackmail operations have been going on for decades which means that some of the people who have been caught up in have risen to the highest levels of power. To say this is a fringe statement is to reject all reporting and victim testimony. Illogical and wrong.

Three:

our greatest enemies at this point are not the republicans, but the fools and cowards who maintain the fiction that there is some sort of inevitable accountability coming to trump et al at the hands of a constantly shifting enforcer which has not yet appeared … as long as we continue to underestimate the will to power, the willingness and ability of our opponents to wield violence and lawlessness in service to their agenda, we will be like dodo birds waiting to be clubbed to death. in the end, all politics is physical. … the lesson should not be that somewhere in the wings there are heroes waiting to save us, the lesson is that we should recognize that we are in a moment of crisis and act - to become the heroes, not as superhumans but as ordinary humans doing our best under crisis circumstances

Four:

We are guaranteed another physical assault on the government now that it’s clear there were no consequences for the first one.

Five:

This is a government that is going to get overthrown, it's just a question of who does it.

Six:

Doesn’t matter if you catch them lying. Doesn’t matter if the truth is on your side. Doesn’t matter if you expose them. Only matters if you can hurt them. Otherwise it’s all just a joke to them, a joke on you for thinking otherwise.

Ari Berman, who speaks on voting rights, tweeted:

Shocking stat: 57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 MILLION more Americans than 43 senators who voted to acquit Senators voting to impeach represent 61.6% of Americans (202 million) Senators voting to acquit represent 38.2% of Americans (125 million) Via @atausanovitch

Alas, that’s still not 2/3. Now to relax. Eric Whitacre is a contemporary choral composer and he writes some gorgeous stuff! He has also been doing virtual choirs and did so way before the pandemic. For each he sent out the music and asked each participant to video themselves singing their part as they listen to a guide track and watch him direct. He and his team then combined the audio into a massive choir that sounds like they’re in a cathedral and the video into a massive Zoom grid (though Zoom wasn’t a thing when he started). The first one was ten years ago (!) and featured 185 singers from 12 countries. They sang his piece “Lux Arumque” (light of gold). It’s gotten 6.6 million views. I had seen and heard this particular video before. I enjoyed hearing it again. The second one was the following year. It had 2052 participants from 58 countries. They sang his piece “Sleep.” It’s a nice piece, but I don’t think it’s as good as some of this other pieces. The last four minutes of the video are the credits, listing all the singers. I had heard the piece, but not in this format. The third was “Water Night” and included 3736 singers from 73 countries. This one was from 2012. The credits take six minutes. I hadn’t heard this one before and didn’t enjoy it as much as the others. The fourth was “Fly to Paradise” sung by 5,905 singers from 101 countries. This one featured animation and had a bit of story to go with it. That made it more interesting. There were also soloists and instruments, more of a pop feel. It’s had almost 2.5 million views. I had seen this one before. Credits took 8 minutes. The fifth was done in 2018 and is titled “Deep Field, the Impossible Magnitude of Our Universe.” This begins as an orchestral piece with video of stars, including the Milky Way, moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, sun, various nebulas, and galaxies, all beautiful images. The choir comes in at minute 19, singing without words as we see Earth from space. The music is 23 minutes, then six minutes of credits. There are more than 8,000 singers from 120 countries. This one was a lot more ambitious in the music (full orchestra and longer) and in the imagery. I hadn’t seen it before. Now to the reason why I delved into all this. Virtual Choir 6 came out last July. This one is “Sing Gently” (full words are in one of the comments). The choir is 17,572 people from 129 countries. The music is wonderful and the imagery is critically important for this time. I encountered it yesterday and knew I had to share. In this one they even credit ASL interpreters, though they’re not always visible. I’ve watched the video, then played again, not watching, just to listen to the music. Just … relax.