Some fun for the stay-at-home period

Three news items:

1) The Atlantic online has a piece titled There’s One Big Reason the U.S. Economy Can’t Reopen. Now, the researchers (well, other researchers) have been able to pin down the government's drastic mishandling of the pandemic upon four people, and it's been written up in Rolling Stone. But after this mishandling, the further mishandling of the pandemic can be read as forming an indictment of the whole of the ruling class. So let's go, gang: we've got a ruling class to indict and some free testing to demand.

2) Secondly, we have this piece: "Biden attacks Trump for “hampering” the reopening of business." I guess Joe Biden wants to be known as an even bigger advocate of the premature and unprepared "reopening" than Donald Trump. This is an issue that is likely to persist until November.

3) Last, Our Revolution Los Angeles is now in "quit the Democrats" mode. I guess there's a conference call or something on Thursday 830pm EDT.

Have fun!

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Comments

sounds about right...

Ry Cooder says it best

How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI0BtL_6Y50]

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13 users have voted.
vtcc73's picture

printed this link today in a comment to a story on post lockdown rules that were just released. It's fairly consistent with what my ID internist friend has said as well as the rules for restaurants that are expected to go into effect fairly soon. What stood out to me was the insight offered by tracking infectious people and how important PPE and limiting exposure time to others is to reducing risk. Add the age and health risk considerations to the formula and we have the ability to develop a decent personal protocol for limiting risk. Lets face it. Our current lives depend on assessing risk because there are no hard and fast rules just like we still don't know enough about this thing to be sure of anything.

Of course our usual suspects, cranks and the delusional, were yelling about drinking cool aid and claiming they'd been right all along. sigh I sometimes think being an American is a symptom of mental defects.

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"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."

@vtcc73

more than a symptom of defective mental awareness
may also be a result of disruptive conditioning

Isn't it a pity

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11 users have voted.
Granma's picture

Oh my Lord!!!! I haven't finished reading it yet, but wanted to thank you for posting a link to it. I am both horrified and fascinated. I honestly believe there are high school biology students who could do a better job than the ones currently running things.

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12 users have voted.
Cassiodorus's picture

@Granma is right out of the neoliberal playbook. The "Two-Party System" has given them such impunity that they can come out, now, and say with one UNIFIED voice: "we don't give a damn if you get sick and die. Get back to work, assholes! Also, no testing!"

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6 users have voted.

'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill

magiamma's picture

From the Rolling Stone...

But on his visit to the CDC in Atlanta, Trump had made an extraordinary admission: That he did not want to let passengers from a cruise ship, then suffering an outbreak off the California coast, to come on shore because the tally of patients would rise. “I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said. Those comments hit Sebelius like a punch in the gut. Trump plainly saw effective testing as a threat to his political messaging that the administration was containing the virus. By standing at CDC headquarters to declare that the tests were “perfect” and that he didn’t want COVID-19 numbers going up, the president was doing the exact opposite of demanding a fix. For the president’s deputies, Sebelius says, “there couldn’t be a clearer signal.”

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12 users have voted.

Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

Cassiodorus's picture

@magiamma gets to take the fall for its failure to even fkn PROPOSE a decent regime of testing and isolation. Oooh let's blame China instead! Here's what I want to tell the elites: "Guess what, assholes? China has its problem under control. You don't. The numbers you'll be held responsible for are the death numbers and the poverty numbers."

If the elites were actually to oppose Donald Trump he'd look less like a useful idiot.

Hey I know! Let's spend our quarantine time thinking about what kind of public relations facade Bernie Sanders is cooking up for the Biden team! Or, y'know, we could join the conference call I suggested above...

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5 users have voted.

'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill

magiamma's picture

@Cassiodorus
You got that right. Best thing I could imagine. Hope to c u all there . Heh.

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3 users have voted.

Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

Granma's picture

@magiamma may have been clear, but those people understood doing as he wanted would have horrific results. Don't any of them have even a partial conscience? Obviously not.

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5 users have voted.

Grover Norquist gets C19 big time, and gets the full effect of a government reduced in size, and drowned in a bath tub.

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9 users have voted.
orlbucfan's picture

@Snode at Rush Gasballs. Supposedly suffering from stage 4 cancer, and still alive, kicking and belching even more hot air pollution. Rec’d!!

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5 users have voted.

Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.

boriscleto's picture

It will not be taken seriously. So open up those Golden Corral buffets and coffee shops. Pack those churches and beaches.

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8 users have voted.

" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

wendy davis's picture

No HEROES here: Democrats seek tax breaks for rich donors & lobbyists in $3 TRILLION Covid-19 wishlist bill ' 12 May, 2020, RT.com

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7 users have voted.

This Trump Pandemic has accomplished something Bernie Sanders could have never dreamed a year ago: cracked this rotten capitalist system wide open. Not in a good way, in any case, but "going back to normal" will never happen now. After the virus recedes, the homeless won't happily return to their roadside camps; the worker bees won't gleefully hop back into their cars and honk their way to their dead-end jobs to scrape together enough to pay their escalating rent. Nor will young people plunge back into lifelong debt in the hopes of getting a slightly better than minimum wage job upon graduating college.

Capitalism failed us long before the Trump Pandemic turned into the Trump Depression. But what will replace it? As Phil Ochs wrote, "Passion has led to chaos and now chaos will lead to order." We can't let the One Percent rebuild our dystopia.

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1 user has voted.