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.