Felt like the outsider

The House is about to vote on a $3 trillion virus rescue package. This package is for the people and the post office, not big business. It was developed by Democrats. Even so, it doesn’t contain everything that progressives wanted in the bill. It will likely pass, maybe tomorrow. And Moscow Mitch has said it is dead on arrival in the Senate. The GOP doesn’t want us to recover.



The pandemic prince was asked whether the presidential election will be held as scheduled on November 3. Laura Clawson of Kos says the answer should be obvious: “Of course it will. Elections are the foundation of our democracy and the date of the election is set by law.” It is upsetting that that a reporter feels the need to ask the question. Though I’m glad it was asked. Because the pandemic prince answered:

That’s too far in the future to tell. Nothing that I’m aware of now. … It’s not my decision to make. I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan. … I have not been involved in, nor am I aware of any discussions about trying to change the date of the Presidential election.

Clawson says the answer implies the prince thought the date was up for debate, he just hadn’t yet been included in the discussion. But it shows the Boy Wonder doesn’t know politics well enough to say, regardless of what the nasty guy is planning, of course the election will be held on the day designated by law.



Tonight’s opera was Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten. I first got to know the music through four of the orchestral interludes, frequently played separately as the Four Sea Interludes. Grimes is a fisherman off the eastern coast of England (where Britten lived for many years). The opening scene is a trial. His apprentice died on a fishing trip. The death is ruled as accidental, but Grimes knows he will still be judged as guilty by the townspeople.

Britten was gay and frequently felt like the outsider, one who didn’t fit into society. Several of Britten’s operas are about outsiders. His partner Peter Pears was an accomplished singer and Britten often wrote for Pears, including the role of Grimes. This opera is about how the conservative townspeople, not the court, determine Grimes’ fate through gossip. Then again, Grimes’ demeanor doesn’t help him.

One character is Auntie. She runs the pub. Two women are known only as the nieces. They’re for the pub’s patrons to kiss.

At that opening trial Grimes is told he should not have another apprentice. But a couple scenes later, several people are working out how to deliver another apprentice. It doesn’t end well. Grimes has a mad scene which is famous because the accompaniment is a tuba imitating a foghorn and an offstage a cappella chorus.

A tempest in an opera house

Last night’s opera was The Tempest, story by Shakespeare, music by Thomas Adés. There is a librettist (don’t remember the name) involved because (1) to turn a play into an opera one must throw out about 2/3 of the words, (2) the words have to be singable, and (3) in this case they decided to make the love between Ferdinand and Miranda directly stated rather than implied.

Prospero was supposed to be Duke of Milan, but scheming by his brother and the King of Naples exiled Prospero to an island, where he developed some magical powers. On the island with him is Ariel, a spirit of the air, Caliban, who I think is the island’s original owner, and Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Caliban has his eyes on Miranda.

Prospero causes a tempest, a storm at sea, so that a party ship with the King of Naples, his family including son Ferdinand, Prospero’s brother, and lots of nobility is sunk. Ariel makes sure everyone gets to shore safely. Prospero does this so that he can get his revenge. His revenge, not what he expected, is … his daughter will become Queen of Naples.

As spirit of the air, Ariel was rarely on the stage, she’s usually hanging from something. Her singing was also high. Most sopranos have a few high notes at key emotional moments. Ariel’s part was all high notes through the first two acts.

The set was unusual – it portrayed the inside of a grand old opera house. In one act the backdrop is the auditorium with the footlights and prompter’s box facing the audience. In the next we see the backstage scaffolding. In the last we see a side cutaway – rows of seating rising to the right facing a stage on the left with the machinery and half a prompter’s box and with the boxes behind. I don’t remember what the director said about this being just the thing, though the composer said, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense.

I’ve mentioned the prompter’s box. It’s a small raised area in the center of the foot of the stage in opera houses. There really is a person inside ready to remind singers of what they’re supposed to be singing. As I said, in this case the box was at the back of the stage facing the audience or in a cutaway side view. And that allowed a few entrances and exits be done through the prompter’s box.

Adés is a modern composer. The opera was premiered in 2004 – this Met production was from 2012 and I saw it when it was broadcast to area movie theaters. The composer used the language of modern music. Which means there was rarely a tune and some would call the harmony “thorny.” Even so, I enjoyed it both times.

The riskiest places

Dr. Erin Bromage is a professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In his own blog he wrote an essay about keeping yourself safe from the coronavirus. Thank you to my friend and debate partner for sending me the link. Here’s some of what he wrote about:

The deaths from the virus follow a predictable shape – the daily death count rises, then declines slowly. If there were 70,000 (now 82,000) on the upslope, there are likely as many on the downslope.

If the lockdown is maintained.

New York is on the downslope (and it looks like Michigan is too). But America as a whole is still on the upslope.

It takes about 1,000 viruses to infect someone. A cough or sneeze can release 200,000,000 viruses into the environment and the force of the sneeze can shoot them across the room where they float in moisture droplets for a while. Breathing out can release perhaps 20 viruses a minute.

If you’re in a room when an infected person sneezes you can easily get one dose right there. If you’re in a room near them breathing it could take 50 minutes before being infected.

A mask will cut down the risk, both preventing the virus escaping into the room and preventing you from breathing a lot of it in.

The riskiest places are those that are enclosed, with poor air circulation, and with a high density of people. Examples: meat packing plants, parties such as weddings and funerals, face-to-face business networking, public transport, offices with people crowded in one large open room, …

and restaurants.

However, grocery stores tend to be much larger spaces, the number of people is restricted, and the customer is usually there for only a short period (it’s another matter for workers there all day).

Generally, the bigger the space and the fewer and more spread out the people the safer it is. The best place (other than your own home by yourself) is outside. That jogger passing you, even if releasing viruses, won’t be a risk. However, outside in a crowd is still a risk.



Jim Roberts tweeted that in a luxury restaurant is embracing social distancing. Half of the tables will have mannequins dressed in 1940s attire.

Cool? Or creepy?

Jordan Weissmann’s opinion: “This is going to feel like a horror movie.”

Robert Frick says just wait until Disney animates them.

She didn’t set out to be a hero

A few years ago Aimee Stephens told her employer she was transitioning from male to female. She was fired. I’ve heard a lot about this case because her employer is a funeral home less than five miles from my house. The local gay newspaper Between the Lines covered every step of the case. Stephens’ case has been heard by the Supreme Court. A ruling is expected by the end of June.

Alas, Stephens won’t see it. She died today. She was 59. We honor her as a trailblazer. She didn’t set out to be a hero. She just wanted it known that what happened to her was wrong.



Jenn Budd tweeted a thread about what she, as a woman, went through when she applied to serve in the Border Patrol. It was a hellish experience. I won’t repeat here all she had to go through. She is now an immigrant rights activist.

I mention it as a way to show the Border Patrol is a supremacist organization. They act supremacist against women, inflicting harsh oppression. So they act supremacist against immigrants, inflict harsh oppression. They are likely attracted to the job so they could inflict that oppression.

I’m aware this was the case well before the nasty guy was their boss, though he is encouraging it through his example.



Every so often someone on Twitter comes up with a game. I’ve reported on some of these. The one for today was proposed by Alexandra Erin and is simple: “Add ‘Except at Waffle House.’ to the opening of a book.”

The one I immediately thought of and a couple people offered: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Except at Waffle House.”

A couple more…

Michael F: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Except at Waffle House.”

The Hero of Tomorrow: “Call me Ishmael. Except at Waffle House.”

ValarMorDollars:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Execpt at Waffle House.

Real life on stage

At the end of yesterday’s post I didn’t write about the operas on the free Metropolitan Opera streaming service. Yes, two of them. I left them out because I saved the second one for this afternoon.

There were two operas because both are short – about 75 to 90 minutes each. Because of that they are frequently offered together.

The two operas are similar. Both deal with tragic consequences to infidelity. And though by different composers, they were part of a revolution in opera called *verismo*. This was a shift to stories about regular people rather than gods and dukes.

The first was Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni. The title translates as “Rustic Chivalry.” The Intermezzo, an orchestral interlude, has become famous beyond the opera. I didn’t completely follow the plot. It’s something about Turiddu, the tenor, who has seduced Santuzza, the soprano. She feels disgraced. Turiddu is now moving on to Lola, wife of Alfio. There’s a lot of singing about who is in love with who and whose ardor has faded. Alfio challenges Turiddu to a duel, which happens offstage, though there are cries that Turiddu didn’t survive.

The action takes place in Sicily. All the characters were dressed in a dark gray, reminding me of a conservative religious culture.

The second opera was Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo, his only opera still performed. The title translates as “Clowns” and is about a traveling troupe of Commedia dell’arte clowns, which uses stock characters and physical comedy to tell its stories.

There is a prologue, in which we are told to not think of the people on stage as characters, but as real people who think and feel as we do. The troupe arrives in town (the same Sicily, 50 years later) and they say there will be a show at sunset. Canio, the tenor, is married to Nedda, the soprano (an us baritones are annoyed that the tenor always gets the girl). He is deeply in love with her, but the reverse isn’t true.

There is Tonio, the baritone of the troupe. When Canio goes off to drink, Tonio tries to seduce Nedda. She drives him off. Silvio arrives. He’s Nedda’s lover, though not of the troupe. He wants her to leave with him after that night’s performance. Tonio catches their hot embrace and gets Canio to see it too. Canio threatens Nedda. Then we get Canio’s famous big aria (so famous that Spike Jones did a parody) as he begins to put on his makeup. How can he make other people laugh while he’s filled with rage and crying inside?

In the second act the clown troupe plays out the same love complications as we saw in the first act. The whole thing gets turned in on itself. Tonio’s clown longs for Nedda’s clown. Another clown, representing Silvio, also pursues Nedda. Then Canio’s clown appears when he should, but soon goes off script, accusing Nedda of infidelity. The audience praises the actors for the realism of their acting. Nedda tries to ad lib a few lines, then Canio attacks her. That’s when the audience sees this wasn’t acting.

Cast doubts on all virus death numbers

A couple of Native American tribes in South Dakota set up checkpoints going into their reservations. These traffic stops on US and state roads require tests for the coronavirus before proceeding. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) demanded that if the checkpoints weren’t removed in 48 hours there would be legal action.

The tribes declined her request, saying it interfered with their efforts to protect those who live on the reservation. There is quite a concern already – the Navajo nation in Arizona has been hard hit by the virus compounded by most homes not having running water and the health system for natives being seriously underfunded for decades.



Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community talks about a Washington Post article about how desperate the nasty guy is to reopen the economy. He then discusses the corporate view of things. They’re not worried about the safety of workers – the workers whose physical distance needs will be compromised by showing up (and that doesn’t include the management making these decisions). Besides, with unemployment this high there will be others willing to take the job if existing workers refuse to come in or get sick.

What they’re worried about is legal liability, of being sued by workers who get sick. I’ve mentioned this before. Dartagnan sees one way out of the problem – follow guidelines on how to keep workers safe. These used to come from the CDC, but the nasty guy squashed their report. I thought of another solution – don’t open until it’s safe.



Laurie Garrett, who has written about plagues, tweeted her White House contacts say there will be two tactics used to reopen America and get the nasty guy reelected.

1. Cast doubts on all virus death numbers and try to get Americans to disbelieve their health departments and the CDC reports.

This is top level gaslighting. Some in the virus task force are already starting to do this. Yeah, declare the count too high when many people see evidence the count is too low.

2. Use Executive Orders to “create demand” for certain manufactured good by outlawing some products and mandating the purchase of replacements.

An example is to ban truck rigs more than ten years old, forcing truckers to buy new rigs. Another is to ban electrical equipment from “foreign adversaries.”



The blog Calculated Risk discusses finance and economics. After the jobs numbers for April were posted last Friday this blog displayed four charts showing the economy collapsing.

One of those charts is one I saw after the Great Recession. In its new form it gives an indication of what we’re in for. The chart shows a dozen recessions starting with the one in 1948. For each one it shows the percent of job loss from the previous employment peak and continues the line until the job numbers finally match and exceed the peak before the recession.

The shortest return to pre-recession levels was the one in 1980, which was about 10 months. Alas, there was another recession in 1981 and that one took about 2½ years to rebuild the workforce. The 2001 recession took four years to rebuild, the Great Recession took more than six years. The chart only shows the huge drop in this year’s employment, down 14% in two months, more than twice the drop of the Great Recession and significantly faster than any of the other recessions.

This is going to take a while.



Quote of the day:

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
~~Herman Melville, Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs (1854)

Hyunsu Yim tweeted about the success that South Korea has had controlling the virus. But there was a new cluster of cases traced to a gay nightclub. There isn’t much LGBT visibility in the country (meaning it isn’t very welcoming of LGBT people). So this news means gays are being threatened and it could become deadly.



Joan McCarter of Kos reports that when the Senate created the CARES Act, in which a half-trillion went to bail out corporations and $300 billion when to “small business” loans (much gobbled up by not small businesses) the GOP senators did not ask how to pay for it. But now that the House is writing a bailout for the people – direct payments, unemployment help, rental and mortgage help, and student loan help, at least – those GOP senators are suddenly screaming about how to pay for it and the need to cut Social Security. Of course they did. We knew this was coming.



Walter Einenkel of Kos reports on a new study showing all the money the Gates Foundation spent on education reform was a bust.

One of the myriad problems with billionaires like Bill Gates pouring tons of money into reshaping our education system is that people like Bill Gates are not educators. They rarely have even a small amount of education in what education is and should be.

The Gates Foundation money was spent mostly to force legislation to force taxpayer money away from traditional public schools. In that effort was to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students.

The Foundation spent $215 million and required school systems (taxpayers) to spend $575 million more. Short answer: It didn’t work. Slightly longer answer: This wasn’t philanthropy because Gates was making the world better for rich people.

Total dismissal of the humanity of people

Today I’m working through another episode of the Gaslit Nation podcast, hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This one is titled Hiding in Plain Sight and is an hour discussion of the background and contents of her book by the same name. The book explains the rise of the nasty guy. The episode is Chalupa interviewing Kendzior about the book.

Kendzior’s first book is The View from Flyover Country, which is about the deep social inequalities that made the rise of a fake populist like the nasty guy possible. This is a deep wound of pain. He is the culmination of broad social, political, and economy trends that include the internal collapse of the US, external forces, and the nasty guy’s own ambition.

The nasty guy’s crimes were documented in real time when newspapers actually did journalism. Even so, starting in 2015 Kendzior would tell about these crimes. Journalists would say the story is too dark, then ask for her sources. She would reply: from your paper. Yes, there were other sources. But if Kendzior could dig them out, why didn’t the FBI, among others, not do the same? Why didn’t they create a coherent narrative and share it with the impeachment hearings?

Now that Kendzior had written the book describing all of the nasty guy crimes – and it has become a best seller – people should no longer be allowed to say no one could have seen it coming. Even Congress should be getting word of the book and it should be their job to read it. It could serve as the basis of Congressional hearings – if representatives were brave enough to call them.

Kendzior lives in Missouri, which she considers a bellwether of the country. The first chapter of the book talks about the state.

They see Missouri as inconsequential, but one of the reasons for that is that Missouri, for the last 50 or so years but in particular since 2008, was the bellwether of extremely negative conditions of American life, of dark money, unfettered in elections, of deep corruption, of fractious hyper-partisan movements, the Tea Party in particular, but it was also a civil rights landmark spot.

Kendzoir was born about the time this crime spree began. She has been living with the consequences, the crimes – Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the War in Iraq based on false arguments, the 2008 financial collapse – have never been investigated, the perpetrators not held accountable. It is hard to raise children when leaders don’t have any respect for humanity and there is no organized opposition. Leaders don’t call the nasty guy a liar, racist, or criminal, all of which he is. Beyond that, nobody is acknowledging the emotional burden of living in through all that. That burden is the core of the book.

Elijah Lovejoy was an abolitionist who was murdered about the time of an election in the 1830s. There are many others fighting for what they believe in. In the same way Kendzior wanted to make sure all this was out in the public in case something happened to her. She has had death threats. She wants her children to know why she put herself at risk. Truth matters or they wouldn’t put so much effort into keeping people from telling it.

There is benefit in telling the truth. Though Lovejoy was dead, Abraham Lincoln read his influential works.

Chapter 3 of the book is about Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking. He is one reason why the nasty guy has not be deposed and others around him have not been indicted because of the possibility of blackmail from Epstein’s connections – including Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian Mafia. In 2016 women began to come forward and people like the nasty guy knew there might be trouble.

That trouble included a woman coming forward accusing the nasty guy of rape when she was 13 back in 1994. Her lawyer was about to do a press conference a week before the 2016 election. But the story disappeared. Media wouldn’t touch it even though the Access Hollywood scandal had already come out. People like Bill Barr, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone get involved in the story (see the book for details). There is

this enormous group of complicit actors working to basically infiltrate governments at the highest level, possessing an enormous amount of blackmail, and no resolution, no clarity. … I do know that all of these people wanted this story buried as much as it could be buried and that if it were to go to court, it would reappear again. A lot of secrets about the most powerful and elite people, including Donald Trump, would be revealed.

So Epstein “committed suicide.” And when he died the court cases went away and the coverage went away. Even a couple decades ago media knew Epstein trafficked young girls and became rich for it. He was convicted over a decade ago and court documents are public. But he was portrayed as “financier” or a “philanthropist” who gave “splendid parties.”

This network of Epstein clients – the huge size of his crime – is much wider than Kendzior could tell in her book. But there are victims of these crimes who are still living with the pain. Other people have tried and their efforts were censored from the top.

The Epstein ring is so important because it wasn’t just a sex trafficking ring. It’s one that has its hooks into governments throughout the West. It is connected to the most powerful people in the world.

It's a lot to take in psychologically, but I think that there is an incentive at the top runs of media, not so much on the individual reporter level, but at the CEO level, to suppress all of this both in order to maintain their access to the rich and powerful, but also because, as I describe in the book, media became the playground of the rich and powerful.

The people who are covering these stories are often the sons and daughters of other media and political elites. The New York Times itself is an amazing example of this. And that's why you get puff pieces about people like Ivanka and Jared where they're just presented as normal figures in the White House and not as obviously a kleptocratic dynasty with mafia ties.

As for the girls who were trafficked…

They really do view them as trash. I think they may view most Americans as trash. Most victims of the Trump administration and of these elite mafia syndicates posing as governments, posing as corporations, as trash. That level of exploitation, of total dismissal of the humanity of so many people, that is one of the greatest crises we face as Americans.

It's this utter lack of empathy, this utter lack of concern, for justice. It doesn't even occur to them that this is something that should be covered not just on a political or a national security level, but on a human level because there are real victims here.

Since the nasty guy regime is known for hating and persecuting journalists what is a media company giving up by not telling these victims’ stories? It would be in their own interest to fight back, yet they silence themselves.

The material is juicy. It would be a ratings bonanza (see O. J. Simpson). Running this stuff would be in the financial, political, and moral interest of media companies. They should be jumping all over this. And they’re not. This lack of scrutiny allows the nasty guy to commit crimes in plain sight.

This criminal network is good at trying to destroy the careers of journalists.

I think what kind of journalists you are and what your ultimate ambition is makes you more or less susceptible to their tactics. If you're a careerist, if your goal is to just ascend a traditional ladder and you're not that concerned with the quality of your work, then you're a great target. You're a great mark for the Trump machine because your goal is to just get front-page bylines. It doesn't matter if the story under the byline is accurate. It doesn't matter if the story is detrimental to democracy. You just need to have your name there. You need to continue to ascend that ladder, get whatever kind of institutional approval you want. If you have a conformist mindset, then they will use you. They will manipulate you. I think they're good at spotting people like that, and the people who have been willing to branch out a bit and tell other parts of the story don’t really care that much.

But if you’re interested in the truth you have a lot of resources. They leave clues. They regularly confess to crimes. But you lack an outlet that will let you say it to the broader public. So Kendzior and Chalupa created a podcast.

The current state of the crime family …

This idea that if somehow Trump is removed, things just revert to normal, it's absurd on a number of levels in part because of the Republican Party, but also because this is a dynastic kleptocracy in the making. For Trump to be able to preserve his money, his power, his immunity from prosecution, which is important, and also to preserve Ivanka and Jared and Don Junior's immunity from prosecution because they've been implicated in various crimes as well, they need to stay there as a family.
…
Ivanka and Don Junior and the rest of them grew up in a very, very corrupt environment. I don't know whether this is as true for Tiffany, and Barron, I just feel sorry for him. But they grew up surrounded by sex traffickers, money launderers, white-collar criminals, the Russian mafia. They were groomed to inherit those roles. They talked a bit about Ivanka's work on The Apprentice where there were properties like Trump SoHo that she was involved in that were just mafia fronts. They were money-laundering fronts.

The pandemic prince was involved enough that one reason why several people wanted the nasty guy in the White House is the prince would get there too. The prince was already a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel because he is a part of the Kushner crime family. His marriage to the princess seems to be arranged between two criminal families.

The princess could easily be marketed as the cool, calm version of her father to become the first woman president.

Don’t judge based on how grand a stage

Aston Pittman tweeted a thread in response to someone tweeting there is no meaningful religious left and there won’t be one in the USA. Pittman first lists a couple of the accomplishments of the religious left: the Civil Rights Movement and LGBT religious leaders. The Pittman gets into crucial differences between the religious left and right.

The right is a top-down organization. It dominates from the top. It seeks to wield its influence in the government. It is driven by a few loud voices (mostly white men). They tell congregations their identity is under attack. They ask their people to vote for those who respect them and frame elections as referendums on “Christianity” (theirs) v. the world.

The left is a bottom-up movement, building influence with those of common cause. Their “Christian” part is not trumpeted, but implied by values and the work they do. Their leaders don’t demand recognition and control as end goals. They aren’t concerned whether the religious part is credited. They don’t frame opposition as “an attack on Christianity!” and don’t see elections as referendums on their religion. They don’t try to supplant government with religion. They do want government to further religious goals: civil rights, helping the sick, poor, immigrants, prisoners, etc.

That doesn't mean the Christian left isn't significant or effective. Its effects just aren't as obviously tied to it, & it doesn't tend to make capturing the White House with one of its own acolytes a goal (electing ppl w/similar values matters more than shared religion).

If you don't think the Christian left is real, go to a US immigrants rights group's meeting. You'll often find priests & other Xian devotees in their ranks. You'll also find people who are driven to stand up for immigrants by deep religious convictions they rarely speak of.

Once you stop judging the significance and size of religious social movements by how powerful an office and grand a stage their leaders have obtained, and by how loudly their adherents proclaim that faith instead of the work they do, you'll discover you've missed *a lot.*

D. Carlisle replied:

I've mentioned to people on the left that we lefty Christians do exist. Almost every time I get comments back that amount to "Why aren't you organizing to compete for power like the Christian right?!" …angry with me, even. What the Christian right is doing is antithetical to my faith. I don't want to mimic it to "compete."

My summary: The Christian right is about supremacy. The Christian left, like Jesus, isn’t.

Politics that forgives cruelty as the price of profit

I didn’t post anything last night. I had posted something for 57 straight days (it’s been eight weeks already?). I tag my posts with topics (which doesn’t show up when posts are sent by email) and the “coronavirus” tag has been used on 51 posts. I’m sure that is the fastest rise of any tag in my blog’s twelve year history.

So after all that as I reviewed news stories yesterday I kept thinking each one was another example of something I’ve already written about.

So I didn’t.

However, there are things to write about today.



Spoon & Tamago tweeted about an experiment done by NHK. They applied fluorescent paint to the hands of one person, then had ten people dine at a cruise buffet.

In 30 min the paint had transferred to every individual and was on the faces of 3.

The tweet has a short video showing what happened.



The drug remdesivir is showing promise as a way to treat people with COVID-19 and got approval from the Food and Drug Administration for distribution as fast as it can be produced. Doctors complain that the distribution is being botched. And Gilead, the company that makes it, is estimated to spend $1 for a one day dose, yet will probably charge $450 for that dose.

So don’t trust the nasty guy and his minions to smoothly make a vaccine available that everyone can afford.



G. Elliott Morris tweeted a chart of the monthly change in people on payrolls. Prior to the April numbers released yesterday, the biggest changes were a drop of 2 million in Sept. 1945 and a rise of 1.1 million in Sept. 1983. In April (actually, mid March to mid April) the number of people on payrolls dropped by 20.5 million.

So what happened at the end of WWII to cause such a sharp drop in employment? Soldiers and sailors leaving the military? Rosie the Riveter going home?

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos has more details of the April jobs report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.



Kerry Eleveld of Kos says the nasty guy had stopped bothering with phase I of his coronavirus respose – pretending to care that the death toll keeps rising at alarming rates. On to phase II! Wrote Eleveld:

After thoroughly hobbling the entire U.S. pandemic response in the first phase and then feigning concern, Trump's second phase is all about leading a completely unprepared country into the buzz saw of an economic reopening.

Naturally, Trump has laid no actual groundwork to avoid a public health calamity, he's simply greased the skids to shirk responsibility for the mounting death toll. Governors will be on hook for the potentially catastrophic consequences of his reckless push to reopen the economy; and a skyrocketing American death toll is simply the price that must be paid in order for Trump to maintain his grip on power.
...
But epic stories never involve just two acts. In the final months leading up to the November election, Trump will roll out Phase III, a fantastical effort to gaslight America about the trauma it continues to endure, who's really at fault (not Trump—China, the governors, Obama!), and whether it's even real (the body count's fake news!).

Worldometer reports today that the US total cases is above 1.3 million and the total deaths has topped 80 thousand. The numbers worldwide are 4 million cases, 280 thousand deaths, 1.4 million recovered.



With a death count that high Matthew Dowd tweeted:

Exactly what can the incumbent President run on? He can’t run on the economy. He can’t run on healthcare. He can’t run as a moral leader. He can’t run on bring the country together. He can’t run on leaders he put in power. He can’t run on justice. Exactly what can he run on?

Agent NDN replied:

Hate.

Worked well the first time.

Others add: voter suppression.

Lean McElrath retweeted from Marc Elias who commented on a story in Politico:

@RNC says it is doubling its budget to oppose voting rights in court to $20,000,000.

Republican spox: RNC is prepared to sue Democrats "into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary."

Which is why I’m not paying as much attention to the polls as my friend and debate partner.



The Department formerly known as Justice has dropped its case against Michael Flynn. I don’t remember what he did, only that he’s a nasty guy crony. That prompted Garry Kasparov to tweet:

Corrupt regimes don’t fight crime, they legalize it. They don’t chase the crooks, they hire them. They don’t stop lying, they tell you the truth is whatever they say.

A quote of the day:

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
~~Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)

And another. This one from Evan Osnos of the New Yorker

On the ground where I grew up, some of America’s powerful people have championed a version of capitalism that liberates wealth from responsibility. They embraced a fable of self-reliance (except when the fable is untenable), a philosophy of business that leaches more wealth from the real economy than it creates, and a vision of politics that forgives cruelty as the price of profit. In the long battle between the self and service, we have, for the moment, settled firmly on the self. To borrow a phrase from a neighbor in disgrace, we stopped worrying about “the moral issue here.”

Max Berger tweeted:

Who is @TheDemocrats spokesperson on Trump’s failures that led to the Great Depression and mass death?

Why isn’t there one?

Why aren’t Biden and Nancy Pelosi (or someone they deputize) on TV every day explaining what Trump and the GOP did wrong and what Democrats are going to do to fix it?

I feel like I’m going insane.

We are witnessing a social collapse the scale of which we haven't seen, at least since the Great Depression. The Trump admin is destroying our democracy in broad daylight.

And it feels like we don't have an opposition party that's offering an alternative program or vision.

Heathter Havrilesky also tweeted her complaints of the Dems:

For the stretch of my entire life, I've watched Democrats lose sleep over how the GOP would spin their story. The insecurity of that. It's just baffling.

Tell your own story without cringing! You don't even have to be a storyteller anymore! Open your f***ing eyes and reflect what we're all seeing. If this isn't a time for Democrats to make a scene, they're not even alive in there.

… I want to see your red, sweating face on my tv screen or it didn't happen.

Thousands of students jumped on the idea of having Barack and Michelle Obama speak at a virtual commencement for the Class of 2020. Aysha Qamar of *Kos* noted, “Within five hours, the tweet was retweeted over 40,000 times with almost 200,000 likes, and even celebrities reposted it, Business Insider reported.” The Obamas accepted the invitation and will take part in several virtual events. Cool!



Leah McElrath is asking people to observe a memorial moment every evening. We must remember the dead. Today’s stats:
280,000+ dead worldwide
4,200+ deaths today
80,036 dead in the US
1,421 deaths today

McElrath wrote:

We must never become desensitized to mass death happening in our communities and around the world.

One million dead is not a fixable problem

If you don’t like Michigan weather wait a bit and it will change. Last Sunday the Detroit area set a record high of about 75F. Tonight or tomorrow night we might set a record low, into the 30s. So I was playing in the mud in the garage today, but it probably won’t be warm enough to do so tomorrow and Saturday.



I’ve written that the US Postal Service will likely run out of money in June. I’m sure this will help (NOT!). The nasty guy has appointed a new postmaster general. He is the finance chair of the Republican National Convention and has donated $2 million to GOP causes, including the nasty guy campaign, since 2016. Donate $2 million and you get to help wreck the government. I don’t want to see how much damage this guy could do from the inside.



The Department of Labor announced another 3.2 million people filed for unemployment over the last week. For eight weeks that’s 33.4 million.



Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has reopened his state. Cell phone data says that 62,000 people are visiting Georgia every day from neighboring states that still are in lockdown. Tired of takeout meals? There’s a restaurant just across the border. A good way to spread the virus in both directions.



Kos of Kos reported that Sweden hasn’t done a lockdown. Which makes for a nice control group. Yeah, their death count is rising. But they saved their economy, right?

No. Their economic contraction is expected to be about the same or worse compared to the countries around it that did a lockdown.



Bethany Mandel has gotten some internet infamy when she tweeted a thread complaining about being locked down and declaring “I am done.” A small part of what she wrote was the sentence, “You can call me a Grandma killer.” That prompted a great deal of derision.

Hunter of Daily Kos takes her seriously and explains what’s wrong with her reasoning.

The idea of the lockdown was to “flatten the curve” – which we’ve all heard about. And that was to give us time to ramp up testing and develop all the other protocols that other nations used successfully to curtail the spread of the virus.

Which didn’t happen. We still don’t have those tools.

We were told the lockdown would be only a few weeks. Now that it has been longer businesses are afraid they can’t survive. And their employees need those paychecks to maintain food and shelter. We need to reopen the economy.

Hunter wrote:

That would be terrible, but "businesses can't survive" is, in the end, a fixable problem. "One million Americans are dead" is not a fixable problem.

We can bring businesses back to life. The actual doctors, therapists, nurses, hairdressers, and day care workers—not so much. That is a magic not presently available to us.

Keeping those businesses on life support, however, would be (will be?) insanely expensive. Staggeringly. A true "survival" plan would be to pay all workers, pay businesses to stay closed, and make sure every small business can pay their bills until the reopening can happen. That would have been a superb—and even a relatively easy to accomplish—plan in March. With every passing week and month of screwuppery, however, it becomes exponentially more difficult and more expensive.

Americans have every right to be angry about that. The entire point of the shelter-in-place orders—the entire purpose behind shuttering businesses for weeks—was to limit the damage while the government bought a bit of time to react.
…
No? That didn't happen? Damn. Well, we're all out of ideas. Sucks to be you, everybody.
…
If people like Mandel were under the impression that the "lockdown" was going to last only a few weeks, they were lied to and need to take that out on the dishonest near-criminals who lied to them. If people like Mandel are angry that it was not handled "responsibly," then they should demand the appropriate penalties for the people who were irresponsible and get responsible people installed in their places.

But "I am done" does not result in a reopened economy that saves jobs and businesses and everybody lives happily ever after except for the human sacrifices piled up in the economy's various closets and spare rooms.

Meteor Blades tweeted:

Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Larry Kudlow should be handed shovels and forced to dig some of the graves they made inevitable by their rotten ongoing coronavirus response.

YS tweeted:

Pro Tip: If your state signals the end of stay-at-home orders; it doesn’t mean the pandemic is over, it just means they currently have room for you in the ICU.

Blythe and Dogs added:

... it also means there's room in the morgue.

Malkazoid replied:

They have room for you in the ICU for now. If you want that bed, you might want to get your covid19 early and beat the rush.

And Paulus V:

Not necessarily. What it does mean is that your government thinks that reopening the economy will get them more votes than the ones they lose as a result of the increase in COVID-19 deaths.

It’s been a few years since we’ve had a president with a sense of humor. Joe Biden shows he has one (yes, this is a campaign ad).

Let’s not let them take our compassion or our humanity

Today’s topic is death tolls. You’ve been warned. Skip it completely or skip to the quote at the end if you don’t want to read about it.

After hearing and writing about what the nasty guy is doing to make the coronavirus pandemic worse and hearing the death toll has passed 75,000 and could end up above a million I wondered how the nasty guy would rank among world leaders who caused mass death. Fortunately, he doesn’t. Yet.

I first went to the site What Culture, which listed eight deadly despots. Then I visited the site Pop Ten for their list. I’m not linking to either of those sites because I found one that documents sources. This is Wikipedia and its list of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll. There are several lists on these pages, starting with what looks like every war ever fought by humans ordered by the number dead. And WWII, with at least 60 million is at the top of the list (the number depends on whether indirect deaths are included).

A list of more interest is the Anthropogenically exacerbated outbreaks of disease and famine. That is defined as “famines and disease outbreaks that were caused or exacerbated by human action.” Most of the entries in this list are famine, though a few include disease. At the top of the list is the Great Chinese Famine that was a part of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. The death count is somewhere between 12 million and 55 million.

We could already add the coronavirus in the US to this list because the event with the fewest deaths is 50,000 and we’re now past 75,000. However, this could take a consensus that the actions of the nasty guy were either malicious or incompetent (either qualifies as human action), which this country may not be ready to do (though some of us are quite ready!).

There is also the list of political leaders and regimes by death toll. The top entries:

Mao Zedong of China, perhaps 50-70 million.

Genghis Khan, Timur, and Kublai Khan, three in the Khan dynasty that ruled much of Asia and invaded Europe. Their rule and conquest resulted in 20-40 million dead.

Adolph Hitler, up to 26 million dead.

Chaing Kai-Shek of the Republic of China (ousted by Mao), 18 million dead.

Joseph Stalin, perhaps up to 15 million dead.

Hirohito Emperor of Japan during WWII, up to 15 million dead. Other lists attribute maybe 5 million dead to Hideki Tojo, the head of the Japanese military.

I’m a bit puzzled by the totals for Hitler and Hirohito. Their dead add up to 41 million and WWII cost 60 million lives. I would think the two of them would be responsible for nearly all of them (Mussolini’s contribution is comparatively small and doesn’t make up the difference).

Leopold II of Belgium forcibly colonized the Congo in the last 1800s to extract its rubber and minerals, perhaps up to 13 million dead.

Ranavalona I of Madagascar, the first (only?) woman in the list. Her forced labor policies and military campaigns killed about 2.5 million.

Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge killed up to 3 million in Cambodia.

Wikipedia list the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire, though other sources say one of them, Ismail Enver Pasha, did most of the killing. It was for this guy’s actions that the term “genocide” was created. The best known is the Armenian Genocide, though there were also Assyrian and Greek genocides. About 2.5 million dead.

Kim Il-Sung, his son and grandson, of North Korea, up to 3.5 million dead.

Also in the list causing at least a million deaths are Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Suharto of Indonesia, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong. Other names that are familiar are Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, and Henry VIII. Towards the bottom of the list are Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Claudius.

The US is in some of these lists for Indian massacres, 16 thousand, and the dead in the American Indian Wars, perhaps up to 60 thousand. There is also the genocide of the native Americans (both North and South) mostly due to disease, though also forced labor, wars, and massacres. This total is perhaps 138 million for both continents.

I don’t want to see the nasty guy added to these lists (though I believe he already qualifies for one of them) because I don’t want to see that many dead.



Leah McElrath tweeted a thread that seems appropriate after all that.

I can’t be the only one who is preoccupied by the fact that patients with #COVID19 are having to die alone.

(I know healthcare workers are doing what they can with FaceTime and everything, but it’s simply not the same as having your loved ones with you.)

I can’t be the only one who is gobsmacked by the absence of empathy or even any recognition at all with regard to the ill and their loved ones.

No national mourning, no flags at half staff, no proclamations by politicians in their memory. Nothing. Just...nothing.

We are being intentionally desensitized to mass death happening within our own communities.

We’ve previously been intentionally desensitized to mass death happening elsewhere (like Iraq).

Expanding the desensitization to include our own neighbors?

That’s a VERY dangerous step.

This [an image of a sign saying "Open”] is the message from the Trump administration.

No deference to the loss of approximately 75,000 Americans so far or to the mourning of our people.

This is ghoulish.
...
This virus and the disease it causes have taken enough from us.

So has Trump, his administration, his enablers, and his supporters.

Let’s not let them take our compassion or our humanity.

Broadly desensitized to mass death

Today I learned: The day after “May the Forth be With You” is “Revenge of the Fifth.”



The nasty guy is known for crowing about how successful he’s been at combating the coronavirus, though what he considers a “win” keeps rising. Now that we’ve passed the 60,000 deaths that he thought was a win, and have crossed 70,000 deaths, he now thinks 90,000 deaths is a win.

Which prompted Alan Austin of the Daily Kos community to ask, “If this is a success, what does failure look like?” Austin also posted a chart with the number of active cases per country or region as of yesterday. The United States has about six times the number of active cases than the next highest country, Britain.

I’ve mentioned before the nasty guy, and the GOP as a whole, appear to want us dead. So perhaps he isn’t saying: See what a great job I’m doing – I’ve kept deaths from rising above 70,000! I think instead he’s saying: See what a great job I’m doing – I’ve already killed off 70,000 people!



danield90909 of the Kos community takes a look at the number of COVID cases in Wisconsin after their in-person primary on April 6. The number of people who got infected as a result of the vote is officially 50. But daniel looks at the number of new cases per day. Starting about a week before the vote the number of new cases a day was 160 and trending downward. Two weeks after the election – accounting for an incubation period of about two weeks – the trend switched to up and is at 279 new cases a day. Meaning the election resulted in not 50 cases, but over 1400. Thank the Wisconsin GOP for demanding this vote. We should not have to risk death to vote.

daniel is also annoyed with the Supreme Court, which allowed this in-person vote to proceed. That same Supreme Court didn’t hold oral arguments in April and is now conducting them by conference call.



Kristin Rawls tweeted:

It's very weird how there's been no collective mourning for all the dead. No television specials honoring them, almost no mention of them, nothing at all.

She describes a couple ways this could be done even with physical distancing.

People are pushing to reopen things as quickly as possible. Democratic and Republican governors are happily going along with it. The only way this is even thinkable is that we've refused to grapple with the losses. Tens of thousands more will die as a result.

I'm a little disgusted with all the people telling me this is because Trump has no empathy.

It follows that no one else can have empathy how, exactly?
…
A polity very broadly desensitized to mass death, one that refuses to acknowledge let alone mourn it, would be very useful to a fascist tyrant.

We are showing what we will tolerate right now.

The racial disparities of those affected by this virus continue to be discussed in social media. I’ve mentioned it a few times. Those disparities include who tends to catch it, who tends to die from it, who tends to have to work those “essential” jobs without sufficient protections, and who tends to not get government relief money. Those inequalities prompted Marco Rogers to tweet:

One thing you learn as you study the history of white supremacy is how policy has always been *in service* of maintaining inequality. These programs are *designed* such that they can applied unevenly. For some in govt, that is the express goal.

What follows from this analysis is even less obvious. This is the real impact when we talk about Democrats making "concessions" on these bills. Those who say "it's better than nothing" are saying they accept the continued oppression of black ppl and others so a few can survive.

Jenn Budd, a former Senior Border Patrol Agent turned immigrant rights activist, tweeted:

There is no excuse for any political leader to not be calling for the removal of Trump. They should all be on every radio, tv and streaming service demanding this. He is responsible for the death of over 50,000 Americans and likely thousands more not counted.
…
The Trump #coronavirus response plan is about stealing as much as they can, destroying as many American institutions as possible while the gettin’ is good. This is a criminal organization destroying our country and the best our leaders can say is, “Let’s vote in November.”

How many Americans will be dead in November? 100,000? 200,000? How many hospitals will still be functioning by then? How many people will be unemployed and homeless by then? And all they can say is wait until November?
...
You need to say that we have enough of Trump killing Americans, that we have had enough of the grifting and corporate theft, that he is a danger to this country and the millions of people in it. This is your job as elected leaders...to lead, to protect your nation and your people.

Anything less than an aggressive, boisterous unified demand that Trump be removed from office immediately is an indictment of your failure as a leader in this moment. No more dealing, no more begging for scraps from this man. Remove him!

The wonderful chef José Andrés compared two pictures. One is of mountains of potatoes dumped in Idaho because the processing plants are closed. The other is of 10,000 cars waiting outside the San Antonio Food Bank.

How is it possible these two photos exist at the same time, in the most prosperous and technologically advanced moment in our history?

Andrés and his team are doing all they can to get food to people who need it. But we all need leadership from the top – the nasty guy, Moscow Mitch, Speaker Pelosi, Congress, US Department of Agriculture (which has been mighty slow to respond), FEMA, the national guard, governors and mayors. So call them!

It's the income lost from unemployment

About ten days ago I had written about a study that compared the usual death rate to the number of deaths over the last few months. This was done for several places around the world. The discrepancy was taken to be the number of deaths due to COVID-19 though it was frequently much higher than official reports. That report found at that time an additional 25,000 deaths worldwide that should be contributed to the virus.

Kombiz Lavasany tweeted similar analysis for America done by the Washington Post. The analysis suggests there are actually over 100,000 deaths attributed to the virus rather than the official 67,700.

Steve Cordero replied:

US counts flu deaths by including confirmed & attributable, but US is only counting confirmed for COVID19. So already COVID19 confirmed deaths blows away confirmed flu deaths. If we use the same methodology for flu, we're over 100K easy as article notes.

Anoa Changa of Prism and posted on Daily Kos talks about voter fraud. She starts by saying the GOP is conflating election fraud with voter fraud. Voter fraud is when a person tries to vote twice, tries to vote when not allowed (such as a non citizen), or tries to impersonate another person to vote (or vote again). Voter fraud is quite rare. Election fraud is trying to steal the election through various tactics to suppress the vote. The GOP is doing all they can to commit this sort of fraud. They’re trying to discredit vote by mail. And, according to Laura Williamson, a policy analyst of Demos, the GOP is weaponizing voter fraud claims to suppress the vote.

My friend and debate partner doesn’t see election fraud as likely as I do this November. However, a point that Changa is making, is that the GOP doesn’t have to commit election fraud, it only has to suggest it in enough ways that citizens no longer trust the outcome. If that is successful and the nasty guy doesn’t get enough votes the groundwork will have been laid for him to believably claim fraud. Even if there is none.

Another goal is to make voters feel the outcome is already rigged, so why vote?

Though voter fraud is quite rare various GOP governors or secretaries of state are creating ballot fraud task forces. These groups do two things. One is to justify voter intimidation on election day. The other is to perpetuate the myth of voter fraud.



Last Saturday on All Things Considered on NPR host Michel Martin talked to two economists, Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economics at The New School of New York, and James Broughel, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, about balancing the economy and public safety. The opening exchange pretty much sums it up:

MARTIN: So, professor Broughel, I'll start with you. Is there an actual trade-off in your view between saving lives and saving jobs?

BROUGHEL: A pandemic is somewhat different than a typical situation the government might deal with. If you looked at, like, for example, the 1918 Spanish flu, that pandemic hit working-age people very hard. And so those cities that shut down earlier tended to have faster economic recoveries in the longer run.

The current situation is a little bit different because it's primarily the elderly who are most at risk from the virus, so not necessarily young, healthy workers. So there is clearly some trade-off going on right now between the economy and lives, but it's not really black and white.

MARTIN: OK. Professor Ghilarducci, how do you answer that question? Do you think this is a trade-off between jobs and lives?

GHILDARDUCCI: No, not at all, actually. The shutdown has saved lives. And it also has caused unemployment. But the unemployment itself is not a problem. It's the income lost from unemployment. So as long as the Fed and Congress replaces that income from unemployment, then the loss to the economy will look a lot less than right now, when we have 30 million unemployed. Thirty million unemployed is very different when there's no income replacement, but now there is.

I totally reject the idea that we should count the value of lives of the elderly as somehow much less than the lives of healthy workers. I mean, I see where he's going there. But that's not the calculation that most countries or most governors are even making.

It's the income lost from unemployment… If the GOP wanted to protect the economy here’s how to do it.



In honor of Star Wars Day – May the Fourth be With You – the people at Biocomicals created a cartoon of two medical researchers wielding light sabers against the virus.

Ways to quash liberal thinking

A beautiful day today with a high above 70F. The newspaper forecast for the week says the highs for much of the week will be about 50F and below. So today was a good day for playing in the mud in the garage because much of the week will be too cold for it.



If someone were to write a book on how we as a country got to where we are now – with one major party interested only in power and never governing and a president doing all he can to kill us off as he tries to be a dictator – with what pivotal moment should the book begin?

That moment was long before the nasty guy took the oath of office – Merritt Garland (remember him?) is not on the Supreme Court. I was writing about the current trajectory way back in 2009 when the Tea Party was in full swing. I wrote a post titled Who needs democracy? I worded it that way because our first black president had been installed in office a bit more than six months before.

Was that pivotal event the election of the black president?

When the Supreme Court installed Bush II in the White House?

When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994 with his Contract with America that was more about purging the GOP of moderates than about governing?

When, during the GOP convention of 1992, one of the speakers said something nasty about LGBT people? Even though I wasn’t out yet my sister heard that and commented, “Well, they just lost my vote.” Mine too.

Was it when Ronald Reagan, early in his first term as president, fired all the air traffic controllers? I’m sure there are several other events in his occupation of the White House in the 1980s that could be considered that pivotal moment.

Was it the Powell Memorandum? This was written by Lewis Powell Jr. in 1971. Shortly after he wrote it Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. This memo became a blueprint for conservative interests in America.

I’ve seen the short version of the documentary The Heist that talked about the major points of the memo. That was back in 2012 when the Occupy Wall Street movement was active and I attended a training session in the Detroit area about getting involved. The movie said there were three main components to the memo: Attack unions and workers, attack democracy (in all the ways we see the GOP operating today), and divide and conquer by convincing workers that immigrants are taking their jobs. We’ve been seeing the GOP follow this playbook since it was written.

Was the Powell Memo actually in response to some other pivotal moment? The Voting Rights Act? The Civil Rights Act? The New Deal?

Was it the Southern Strategy employed during the Nixon campaigns in 1968 and 1972? This was a racist appeal to white voters. It worked.

Sarah Kendzior has written a book, titled Hiding in Plain Sight. It came out about a month ago and is on best seller lists. However, this is more about the history of the nasty guy, than the GOP – though the GOP and its takeover by the Russian Mafia are certainly part of the story. I haven’t bought it (yet) because I’ve already been following Kendzior for a while and have heard some of what’s in the book through her Twitter feed and Gaslit Nation podcasts. Though I haven’t read it I am recommending it.

The best choice of where to begin such a book (one that I’m very interested in reading) I’ll leave to the person writing it and to historians in general.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer offers a candidate for that pivotal moment – the Kent State shooting in 1970, the 50th anniversary of which is tomorrow.

There had been Vietnam protests for a couple years by that point. Nixon had vaguely promised to get out, then a few days before the shooting announced he was expanding the war into Cambodia. There were protests at Ivy League schools, where the rich kids went. But Kent State was a school for working class kids. It was to this school the national guard was sent. The students protested, though there were a lot of students just observing. The national guard tried to disperse them with tear gas, then with bullets. Four dead, nine wounded. Millions of students, full of rage, went on strikes.

Bunch wrote:

But in many ways, the gunshots still echo in 2020. It’s no accident that in the months immediately after Kent State, business leaders and other conservatives began looking for ways to quash liberal thinking on campus and counteract it with the conservative web of noise that became talk radio and Fox News. Right-wing pols cut funding for public universities like Kent State, helping to send tuition skyrocketing and making college more about careerism and less about such dangerous ideas. And a dog-eat-dog economy forced young America to comply with that.

But the greatest impact was largely psychic — the shock and cynicism that the government was capable of gunning down its own youth. And that no one — not the Guardsman or their higher-ups — would ever be held to account for the massacre.

This is what prompted the Powell Memo. And all the rest.

Why don’t we see much campus protest these days (before the coronavirus)? Because students, when they aren’t studying, are too busy working to pay tuition – which this shooting prompted the GOP to raise out of the reach of poor students.

They’re coming for all workers

While working in my garage this afternoon I felt something I hadn’t felt since I started working at the end of March – warm. I actually sweated a bit. Today got up to 75F. In the house I could open the doors (with screens) because outside was warmer than inside.



There was another protest against stay at home restrictions at the Michigan Capitol this week. Noah Berlatsky, a writer for NBCNewsTHINK and The Verge, tweeted:

At the independent, I wrote about the anti-lockdown protests. They aren't inspired by economic anxiety. They're designed to build fascist power.
…
They aren't agitating for economic relief. Demanding that workers be forced to risk their lives is not a movement for workers.

The protests are designed to help Trump, and to encourage expressions of rage towards the right's enemies. Policy free outbursts of anger and rage designed to boost the right, supported by militias—that's a good thumbnail description of fascism.

Nicole Hammer tweeted a thread:

People have chosen to radically alter their lives both to avoid getting sick and to save other people's lives.

That is a significant political act, and there is enormous support for it. But it doesn't fit conventional political scripts so it's not understood as political. At least, it's not understood as political in the way the lockdown protests are, even though the protests are much, much smaller and have very little public support. The closest we get to a political understanding of the choice to stay home (for those who have that choice) is when we talk about the partisan divide in support for restrictive measures. So the lockdown protests are treated — and legitimated — as a movement, while the much larger political action is not.

And I should add: the lockdown protests are *designed* to look like a traditional political event, and meant to draw exactly the kind of media attention they generate. (Although journalists have been pretty good about looking at the people and pocketbooks behind the protests.)

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reports on the pandemic prince saying that things are going great and we’re past the worst of the virus, then complaining that the good news isn’t being reported as it should be. Eleveld says it isn’t being told because it isn’t true. And people can see the disparity.

More of Eleveld’s reporting implies this question: If the pandemic news is as good as the prince says it is why does Moscow Mitch insist employers need protection from liability suits from workers who don’t have enough virus protection?

Eleveld concludes:

But make no mistake: What we are witnessing is a Republican party in the throes of an authoritarian spasm in which no one is indispensable. Republicans no longer work for the people; the people are simply pawns in their quest to retain power. As always, Republicans came after Black and brown people first; but here’s a news flash for white folks, now everyone’s on the chopping block. First they targeted the undocumented and migrants, forcibly separating parents and children and putting kids in cages. Then they told us white nationalists were “very fine people” with a legitimate political cause. Then they declared the elderly of every creed and color expendable in their fervor to reboot the economy. Now they’re coming for all the workers; Black, brown, white—anyone who doesn’t have enough of a nest egg to refuse work and still eat.

For the moment, only the very rich are being spared. But if Republicans succeed in retaining their grip on power, any semblance of rule of law as we know it will eventually break down as the GOP stacks the courts with ideologues and the Attorney General turns the Justice Department into a tool of political oppression. Eventually, young or old, rich or poor, Black or white, well-connected or not, only loyalists to the regime and their families will experience any semblance of safety. But it will come with conditions, grave and unconscionable conditions.

A rather vulgar way to explain why people should wear face masks.



A break for sanity: Playing a bit of Beethoven for an elephant. Just relax.

Their inhumanity becomes normal

I’ve written a few times about how the nasty guy and a good deal of the GOP seems intent on killing us off. SemDem of the Daily Kos community traces where that idea came from.

It started with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch – his theory of superhumans. That means for some to be super, others have to be declared inferior. And the inferior are left to fend for themselves.

Hitler used that theory to declare some people to be “unfit,” those not able to contribute to society. They included the infirm, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, those with learning disabilities, and those with alcohol issues. Though the article doesn’t say so, I’m well aware that LGBTQ people were part of the “unfit.” The Nazi campaign started slowly, first with mocking them and declaring them “useless eaters.” Then they started classifying people. Then they started killing them.

Along the way they conditioned the German people by getting a little bit worse every day so their inhumanity would become normal. People got so used to the cruelty that murder of “the weak” was the next logical step.

“Sacrifice the weak” has recently appeared on protest signs in Nashville.

Another to borrow heavily from Nietzsche was author Ayn Rand. In her novels she applied the Übermensch theory to capitalism. The strong are supposed to plunder the weak, it’s the natural order of things. So society should focus on the strong and allow the weak to suffer and die.

Her ideas were pulled into the GOP in the 1980s. A government to work towards the collective good was no longer the goal. Since then the party has retooled to serve the interests of only the ultra-rich. It is hard to find a Republican who doesn’t speak fondly of Rand. And the nasty guy – known for hating to read – said Rand’s The Fountainhead is his favorite book.

And now we get voices like this, actually saying these things out loud, from Dick Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo:

We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know.

And from Tom Golisano of Paychex, Inc.:

The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people.

Wrote SemDem:

Putting aside the immorality that making money for rich people should take precedence over a public health emergency, the very concept of allowing vast numbers of Americans to die to “save the economy” is completely illogical. By relaxing social restrictions too soon, the death rate will skyrocket. Our extremely fragile healthcare system will then collapse, and more businesses will crumble. Ironically, opening prematurely won't just kill more people, it will cause even more devastating economic harm.

I’m sure the smarter among them understand that irony. Which means this isn’t about restarting the economy. It’s about killing off more people. SemDem again:

For all of the screaming about individual freedom that the right does, including attacks on our party for being “socialist,” I find it ironic that the Trumpian right-wing is now demanding that people submit to death for the state: the expendable workers, the sick, the grandparents and great-grandparents who have already lived their lives. All should sacrifice to serve for Trump’s reelection bid.
…
Right now, the right is asking for voluntary sacrifices of the old and weak, but history shows it's just a few atrocities away from being made mandatory.

The “unfit” probably now includes the poor, those who work in menial jobs (now called “essential”), and anyone not ultra-rich.



Another week of the pandemic, another week of new unemployment claims. Yesterday’s number was 3.9 million, for a six week total of 30.1 million. That brings the unemployment level to about 23%. The peak of the unemployment rate in the Great Depression was 24.9%.



Cities and states are getting into deep financial trouble due to extra expenses of the pandemic and falling income and sales taxes. They’re starting to lay off workers. These workers are being held hostage by Moscow Mitch and his demand the next relief bill include a liability shield for companies that endanger their workers, which I discussed a couple days ago.

Those hostages include people such as police, firemen, teachers, garbage collectors, and water workers. Cuts would mean slower response for 911 calls.



Greg Dworkin sometimes compiles a pundit roundup for Kos. The one for today includes a paragraph from The Washington Post (author not listed) that implies “endanger your life or starve.”

The threats have been loudest among Republican leaders in recent days, reflecting their anxious attempts to jump-start local economic recovery roughly two months after most businesses shut their doors. In Iowa, for example, state officials even have posted a public call for companies to get in touch if an “employee refuses to return to work.”

In response to Elon Musk of Tesla tweeting “Free America Now,” Benjamin Franklin tweeted

The most powerful people in the country are now conspiring about how to convince you to die on the job without too much fuss.

The way they've chosen to do it is to convince enough of their followers that they're fighting overreaching bureaucrats or worse such that their followers will demand the economy reopen. Then enough people will go along with being forced back to work to fire anyone who won't go.

Alexandra Erin tweeted a thread in response to meat plants being ordered to reopen. She thinks we are only a few steps away from them becoming forced labor camps where prisoners are worked to death.

The nasty guy has declared these plants must operate. There is already a culture of prison labor for private companies, such as using immigrants in detention to harvest crops. We’ve also seen public indifference to incarcerated people dying of COVID-19 – if someone is locked up, they deserve it and whatever else happens, even if not a part of their sentence.

Companies would see that prison labor is cheaper and “safer” from a PR view. The companies would never spend to keep employees safe. Neither would the public – if it becomes normal quickly. Which means the virus would run freely. And a lot of deaths. It’s short steps from the plants must run to staffing with prison labor to keeping up the pool of prison labor. That’s a pretext for mass round-ups of immigrants with the excuse of “putting them to work for America.”



Sarah Kendzior tweeted about the nasty guy:

What he's trying to do is force officials in sanctuary cities to abuse their own residents. He wants to test them, see how low they'll go, what trades they'll make, then crow about their hypocrisy. To fight back, officials must be blunt and transparent with unyielding ethics.

He gets off on forcing people to compromise their values publicly. And he's been successful -- we see it with media and with officials. It's ritualized humiliation designed to hollow people out. But if you're honest about him *and* honest about institutional flaws, you can fight.

Once you take their bribe they own you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing about keeping workers safe

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

A stadium full of Americans

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

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

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

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

So far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Sinyangwe reinforces the point:

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

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

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

Wrote Kos:

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

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

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

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

And…

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

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

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

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