WHERE DID ALL THE MASKS GO: It’s Barack Obama’s Fault There’s a Shortage of N95 Respirator Masks, Here’s Why.
Archive for 2020
March 22, 2020
ITALIAN VIROLOGIST SAYS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DOOMED HIS COUNTRY’S CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE: Florence even launched a ‘Hug a Chinese’ Day initiative after Trump announced China travel restrictions.
Treacher was on that this past Monday: Watch: Chinese Government Encourages Italians to Fight Coronavirus Racism by Hugging Strangers.
KRYSTAL GOODMAN AND HANNAH ANN: Video: Snacks with my personal trainer.
Krystal is also the Insta-Wife’s personal trainer. And she has an online nutrition and training service if you’re interested. (Bumped).
I CERTAINLY HOPE THIS IS RIGHT, BECAUSE THE NUMBERS ARE HORRENDOUS: Why have so many coronavirus patients died in Italy? The country’s high death toll is due to an ageing population, overstretched health system and the way fatalities are reported. “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three.”
GOOD IDEA, FROM ALEX POURNELLE ON FACEBOOK: “Time for a new open source project: all the laws which have proven themselves unnecessary. We are going to need an actual stimulus, as compared to the one being considered. It should throw off the chains from entrepreneurs.”
It appears to work best in conjunction with azithromycin. Is anybody doing anything to boost supplies of that? It’s a common antibiotic, but not common enough to meet demand, probably.
WHY TEENS (REALLY) FIND THE END OF THE WORLD SO APPEALING:
National Public Radio has never really established an audience among teens. It is, overwhelmingly, the radio station that parents choose, and that they often inflict on their teenage children while driving them around—which is, of course, something the parents of teenagers do for several hours per day. The natural mistrust of All Things Considered, on the part of teenagers, is the reason I got very nervous when I saw that Google and Pocket were spotlighting an article from NPR entitled “Why Teens Find The End of the World So Appealing.” It’s a great question, but I wondered what the sonorous, mature reporters at NPR could possibly know about this. The answer turns out to be, nothing.
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But perhaps the most important reason why teenagers like dystopian novels is that they’re old enough to start thinking about the way societies are constructed. They begin to recognize political structures and social norms as contingent entities, subject to change and varying widely. What fascinates them about dystopian novels is the attempt to engineer better societies, and each novel’s judgments about the results of those experiments. They see and judge, for themselves, what Mustapha Mond and O’Brien are doing. They do so on an equal footing with adults, and that’s precious, because the alternative to speculative fiction (including dystopian fiction) is usually the dreaded coming-of-age novel. Those lead inevitably to lectures from adults about what it means to become an adult, a genre that has never been popular with adolescents, and never will be.
Ultimately, teenagers want what everyone else wants. They want to be heard. They want to be taken seriously. They want the chance to form their own opinions about the moral and ethical issues in the literature they read. As a body, they’re not cynical, isolated, or melodramatic. So we have to ask ourselves why, all of a sudden, we should be striving to explain what teenagers like so much about dystopias and the end of the world. The answer isn’t pretty. If we can fence off dystopian novels as so much adolescent melodrama, then we adults are protected from the questions those works of art were designed to ask. “These books offer a safety net,” writes Nadworny, quoting Steinberg to the effect that kids can “flirt with [different identities] without getting into trouble” by reading dystopian novels. Meanwhile the kids are walking a rope suspended above an abyss, thankful for the writers who dispense with the safety net altogether, and let the world burn, or freeze, or change.
But is it just teens? Americans love living in a disaster movie: “The only language we have to describe our present reality comes from referencing the Hollywood films our culture churns out. ‘I’m in Times Square and it’s like I Am Legend’, a friend texted me this week. ‘I wish it was always like this’.”
ALSO D.C. AND TEXAS. California, you can now get cocktails delivered to your home during shelter in place. This is a great idea, which will encourage people to stay home.
NEW YORK’S VENTILATOR RATIONING PLAN. “Cuomo could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece or a total of $576 million in 2015. It’s a lot of money but less than the $750 million he threw away on a boondoggle ‘Buffalo Billion’ solar panel factory. When it comes to state budget priorities, spending half a percent of the budget on ventilators is a no brainer.”
WILL THE RESPONSE TO COVID-19 BE CITED AS A PRECEDENT BY CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVISTS?: You bet it will. Indeed, it already has been. This is from a blog piece in the London Review of Books:
If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is what it might mean for the climate crisis. Not only have attempts to control the virus led to a reduction in carbon emissions, they have also led to a significant shift in the way individuals, institutions and politicians discuss our responsibility to protect vulnerable groups in our societies.
By late last year, it seemed clear that decades of attempts to coax governments and business leaders into taking seriously the risks posed by the climate crisis were leading nowhere. Yet faced with the far more immediate threats posed by a global pandemic, states that for decades had been committed to neoliberal thinking have slowly begun to embrace such radically old-fashioned ideas as planning for the future, relying on scientific expertise, or calling on their constituents to make sacrifices in order to protect vulnerable members of society. …
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… Perhaps, once the Covid-19 pandemic is finally over, governments may be ready to bring that wisdom to bear on the crisis of climate change.
I suspect we’ll be hearing this argument a lot.
WHITE HOUSE REPORT CARD: Zogby: Trump, like FDR, ‘has risen’ to the challenge.
MODEL: The last day each state can act before the point of no return. This seems overly negative to me, but I could be wrong.
HMM: Majority of NYC’s coronavirus cases are men between 18 and 49 years old. “The demographics, from the city’s Health Department, were determined from an analysis of 3,954 positive cases on March 19. . . . Women are underrepresented in the city’s tally while men account for 59% of infected people. Men are more than twice as likely as women to die from the pathogen, White House coronavirus expert, Dr. Deborah Birx, said Friday citing mortality rates from Italy.”
IT WORKS, AND IT WORKS WELL: Why Zoom has become the darling of remote workers during the COVID-19 crisis.
AT AMAZON, Stock up on KIND Bars, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, Gluten Free, Low Sugar, 1.4 Ounce, 12 Count.
JOE BIDEN PROTECTED BY SAME GUNS HE WANTS TO DENY AVERAGE AMERICANS: “Biden picked a Secret Service protective detail this week, which means he is now safe-guarded with some of the very guns he is fighting to prohibit the common man from possessing.”