Not only is the world living in the midst of a biological viral pandemic, but also in the midst of a cyber viral pandemic. If you’ve ever wanted to star in your own episode of Black Mirror, congratulations! Here we all are.
It’s sort of amusing to read people tweeting that the rest of us need to stop tweeting about the coronavirus so much. I mean, if you’re on Twitter, you’re already inside the bubble. The fact that you don’t appreciate learning updates about the virus is on you. If you truly want to stay oblivious to it, log off all social media.
Do these folks have a point, though? Only to a certain extent. We live in an age of faster than minute-by-minute updates, so that we’ll always know how many people have died up to the minute, and how many states now have the coronavirus (40 at last count), etc. The problem is not the information, though. The problem is with how Americans choose to react to it. And that’s entirely up to you.
As a healthy (last time I checked) male in his early 50s, I have no fear of the coronavirus. Of catching it? Perhaps. But no fear that I’ll die of it. And I imagine most of you reading this feel the same way. It’s a nuisance more than anything else. But I have the luxury of being under 70 years old and not having any serious health ailments. Many people do not.
The stock market plunge is multi-phased: 1) Hysteria and panic but also 2) Realistic understanding that the virus is going to create no economic growth this entire year coupled with the fact that the market was already at an all-time high. Deal with it.
And it’s not as if you can’t make money in the market. Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO), which we’ve written about before, finished up the day 48% higher. That’s pretty good, you know?
As for the sports arena closings, what have you, it seems like the prudent thing to do. Pay now or pay later. I’d rather pay now. And my bet is that the people who are complaining that all of this is an overreaction would be the same folks who’d ask after the fact how come nobody tried to warn them. We’ve all seen disaster films before. There’s always that rube, often played by Ernest Borgnine, who bitches that Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling but then when the sky actually does fall, he’s also the first to complain that no one alerted him to the danger.
The coronavirus is going to dominate March. The more we do to combat it this month, the less we’ll have to worry about next month. Whereas if we continue on the path the Oval Office would have us follow, we’d just be kicking the can down the road. This president does not have a good track record in life of facing obstacles head on. His M.O. is to pretend the obstacle does not exist, then to blame others on the existence of said obstacle, and then finally when all is lost to declare bankruptcy or file for divorce. At this very moment he’s probably asking Dr. Fauci to sign an NDA.
Keep calm. Carry on. Wash your hands. And listen to the doctors. They know what’s up.
At the time this is being written (late morning Wednesday), the College Sports Industrial Complex was at full production levels. That’s because it’s the third month of the year. It’s March Madness, dammit, and who cares if a panic over a pandemic has the libtards yelling at clouds. We must have our basketball.
By the time you read this, perhaps sanity and reality will have prevailed. COVID-19, thanks to President Mewling Quim (it’s Shakespeare; Google it for a giggle), is sweeping the country like the latest viral video. Spoiler alert: This is a viral VIRUS that could kill your older relatives.
Many medical experts have said that the disease spreads in crowds or where people are cooped up (cruise ships are petri dishes for the novel coronavirus). Dr. Anthony Fauci, the only member of the Trump administration* who is telling the truth, testified before Congress Wednesday. Among his comments : the virus is 10 times more lethal than the flu and that the NBA should be playing in empty arenas.
Governors in Washington and Ohio have asked that events that draw crowds be cancelled. There’s an NCAA regional scheduled for Spokane and two NCAA sites in Ohio. The Mid-American and Big West conference tournaments are being played sans-fans. But the big-time conferences –ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12, Big 12 – are conducting business as usual.
The Big 12 stages its men’s and women’s tournaments in downtown Kansas City. The men’s tourney, which starts tonight at the Sprint Center, will draw attendance that could reach 18,000 with fans from half-a-dozen states. Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, one of the fat cat CEOs of the CSIC, had this explanation for why the Big 12 was not playing in an empty arena: “I wouldn’t be attending if I felt it was unsafe.”
That is spectacular spinning. A comment like that evokes the image of fans being carried out of arenas or dropping dead because they breathed in air droplets infected with COVID-19. It’s, frankly, a shitty comment disconnected from reality. This is about another “s” word – spread. It can take five days to two weeks for symptoms to appear. Those who get sick likely won’t die. It’s more likely that those who contract it will have the worst case of the flu they’ve ever experienced, and many will require hospital care to help them breathe as they recover.
With COVID-19, we don’t know what we don’t know. Joe or Jane Citizen could have been in an elevator with someone who had the virus and perhaps was showing early stages of a “cold” – coughing, sneezing. Joe/Jane would have no way of knowing they had been exposed. And the lack of testing – a cover up that could wind up being one of the biggest medical crimes in American history – makes it impossible to know if you’ve got or if you don’t.
So, let’s say there are 10 Joes and 10 Janes who are carrying the coronavirus. They attend any conference or NCAA Tournament because they’re alums of Good Old State U or they love hoops. They each expose 10 more people. That’s 200. They attend other games or go back home – and each expose 10 more. It doesn’t require high-level math to understand the quantum leap of the spread.
The threat of an epidemic is that in two months our hospitals could be overflowing. That’s the case in Italy where doctors are having to triage patients; they’re having to decide who has the chance to live and not treating those who will likely die.
What follows is the rant of a 66-year-old curmudgeon: We are a soft, selfish, lazy, entitled country, a citizenry who is too lazy to go out for dinner, wants everything delivered hot and fresh and bitches when the spinning circle of internet access lasts more than five seconds. And we must have our March Madness, our bracket pools, our upsets, our dramatic buzzer beaters.
Dan Wolken of USA Today wrote Tuesday that the NCAA Tournament should be canceled because ofCOVID-19. He backed his opinion with reasonable arguments. Spoiler alert: His Twitter comments accused him of writing to get clicks. The mouth breathers with double-digit followers attacked the message, not the meaning of the message.
Canceling March Madness is probably an overreaction. Playing in empty arenas is not. Championship Week, the prelude to the NCAA Tournament, is apparently going to draw hundreds of thousands of fans to arenas between now and Sunday. It’s irresponsible and ignorant for the show to go on.
The College Sports Industrial Complex is often irresponsible and ignorant to reality when being responsible and intelligent interferes with its mission: making money.
— Tess 🦔 – fully vaccinated, rocks a mask. (@violetscrawley) March 11, 2020
Boss.
Biden, His Time
Step right on down, Jason Sudeikis, because it looks as if Saturday Night Live is gonna need you for the next seven months at least (excluding the four summer months when they won’t be taping). In a second not-as-Super Tuesday last night, Joe Biden won Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri and, most importantly, Michigan.
Bernie Sanders won North Dakota.
Washington is still too close to call.
Give President Trump this: He knew who the Democratic nominee was gonna be all along.
Mutha Tucker
Pardon me as I go ahead and dissect this comical Tucker Carlson open from Monday night:
:24…. “None of it was in anybody’s plan“
Actually, it was. The Obama administration created a Pandemic Preparedness office to specifically deal with situations such as this. Of course President Trump gutted it because the GOP can’t have any signs that Obama was ever president. Also, there’s this thing called the Center for Disease Control. This is precisely what they’re all about. But go on…
1:00 “Like all matters of life and death, it is beyond human powers to affect”
Cancel health care.
1:04 “The first step is to take the virus seriously and convince the public that you are”
This will be the first time, but not the last, that Carlson lectures the Trump administration about how it needs to improve its game. But he will not mention Trump by name here.
Spoiler alert: Carlson will not utter the name “Trump” until late in the eighth minute, and only then to fellate him.
3:28 “Is this really the right time to join the rest of the world in Medicare for all? Probably not. That idea was always stupid.”
If you ain’t rich, you got no reason to live. But we do have enough money in the budget to make all the Trump children multimillionaires dozens of times over, to pay for all of Donald’s golf weekends, and to over-fund the military by at least 100%.
3:36 “Saving American medicine from collapse must be our leader’s top priority right now”
“Our leader’s.” Oh, Tucker. You are precious.
4:16 “As of tonight more than 95% of all the antibiotics available in America are manufactured in communist China”
I’m sure he’ll find a way to blame this on liberals; I just can’t wait to hear how.
4:32 “Imagine one of your children dying from an infected cut. China has the power to make that happen.”
Considering his audience, what he really meant to say was “grandchildren” but that’s okay. Tucker’s logic here is that because China has a virtual monopoly on pharmaceutical production, it could simply choose to cut off that production and we’d all die. Except that China would lose billions in revenue and we’d soon just manufacture it over here. But there’s nothing like a little good xenophobic fear-mongering to keep the lights on at Fox.
5:02 “Nine years ago famously brilliant former president Barack Obama...
I think he’s being sarcastic. Really, Tucker? You wanna go there? You want to put Obama’s intelligence up against Trump’s? Or yours? Go ahead.
5:45 “The people in charge have no idea what they’re doing and to the extent that they do, they’re selling us out on purpose”
See what Tucker’s doing here? A minute ago he talked about China having a monopoly on antibiotics. And now he’s talking about how our leaders have sold us out to China to help a few rich moguls. But in between he inserted a clip of Barack Obama so that his AARP-addled retirees viewing in the Sun Belt would connect Obama to all of this. When it’s been going on for decades from the Bushes to Obama to yes, even, “our leader.” This is first-rate propaganda technique-ing going on here.
6:25 “Global warming isn’t the existential threat we face; extortion from China is.”
Viruses don’t have DNA. Its point of origin was on a landmass that geopolitical maps refer to as China. But it’s about as “Chinese” as the Sioux tribe is Indian.
7:26 “China did this to the world and we should not pretend otherwise. That’ not xenophobia; it’s true.”
With malice aforethought? Please, Tucker, explain what China’s intent was here? This was their master plan? Oh, it’s precisely xenophobia.
8:09 “The Chinese coronavirus isn’t just a fluke of globalization. It’s the inevitable byproduct of it.“
Hear, hear! We need to eliminate all globalization of business. I propose we begin with prohibiting Australian Aryans from purchasing U.S. cable news networks.
8:32 “This pandemic vindicates Donald Trump’s entire political thesis.”
Correct. If you keep your head in the sand long enough and ignore science, you really can nurture a pandemic.
9:02 “The White House reaction to coronavirus so far has been uneven and limp”
I’m sorry. The judges were looking for irresponsible and dangerous.
9:14 “Instead of focusing on ‘race politics,’ things that divide us.”
The country was so much better when darkies knew their place. Now they’re all uppity and it’s dividing ‘us.’ Love it.
9:34 “It is time to show the world that America is back, bigger and better and stronger than ever before“
Except that Italy and South Korea among other countries have demonstrated a much swifter and more efficient response to the coronavirus outbreak. Why is that, Tucker? We’re three years into “our leader’s” presidency. You can’t pin this response on Obama. But man, if this outbreak were taking place during his presidency, we know that you would.
“So wait? This virus is young and Asian? Why isn’t Woody Allen dating it?”
Team Coco with footage from the Grand Princess standup comic. Good bit.
“Ohhhh, Robbbbb!”
The New York City suburb of New Rochelle (Rochelle) is creating a one-mile containment radius around a synagogue that is seen as the epicenter of the coronavirus in the Empire State. Some 108 attendees of that synagogue have been diagnosed with the CV, which represents nearly two-thirds of the state’s cases.
Residents within the one-mile area will be allowed to move around within the area, but otherwise it’s basically gonna be like the Warsaw Ghetto (poor analogy?). How this will affect Rob and Laura Petrie, and whether Rob will have to write the Allan Brady Show from home or leave the heavy lifting to Buddy and Sally (yeah, right!) is still unresolved.
They are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming. I’m still betting Wyoming will report last, although Alaska may be a smart bet since the state is geographically self-quarantined.
This morning’s stateside totals: 31 deaths, more than 1,000 cases.
Quaranteenagers!
With all these school closures, etc., dad and mom still have to go to work. How will the teens spend their days? Reading classic novels? I think not. More like getting high and bingeing Fleabag again. We’re doomed, one way or the other.
Get Your Perv On
We were watching the first installment of the Netflix documentary “World War II in Colour” (yes, they used the “u”) last night cuz that’s how we chill. Near the end of the episode they went somewhere that completely surprised me: drugs.
It turns out that the Nazi blitzkrieg that helped overrun France at the start of Germany’s western advance was fueled by Pervitin, which was distributed to German soldiers as they advanced on the key town of Sedan and westward. And what was Pervitin? As one expert noted, it’s essentially crystal meth.
The French leadership was stunned by the German infantry’s ability to advance so quickly, basically going three consecutive nights without sleep. And now I know why. As one commentator being interviewed said, “Being on Pervitin for three straight days will produce some nasty side effects, all of which are better than being dead.”
He has a point there. It turns out the Nazis were Walter White Supremacists. “Yo, bitch, we’re advancing on Paris!”
The great Warren Buffet knows all about compound interest. That’s how you get rich. And that’s also the calculus of the coronavirus that far too few officials (e.g. Donald Trump and Mark Emmert) fully understand.
It goes like this. A checkerboard (or chess board, for you snooty coastal elites) has 64 squares. Put a penny on one square and the rule is that each day you double the penny and move it to another square. So that on the second day you have 2 cents, on the third 4 cents, on the 4th 8 cents, on the fifth 16 cents, on the sixth 32 cents (yes, this is just the power of 2 going nutty), on the 7th 64 cents and on the 8th $1.28.
By the time you get to that first row you have one dollar and 28 cents out of that penny. But you still have seven more rows.
By the time you get halfway through the board that penny has become more than $20 million. And we’re just getting started. Eventually you would actually have in the trillions of dollars. In just 64 days.
Now do the same thing with a virus and people. 64 days is nine weeks. Would the number of coronavirus patients double every day? Probably not, but the chances of that happening would be much higher if we all congregated in public places (sports events, concerts, etc.). So when we bitch and/or moan about basketball games being canceled or Pearl Jam’s tour being postponed, it might help to understand something about compound interest.
Because if all of us walked around as cavalierly spreading germs as our president and other CPAC attendees do, we’d go from Patient Zero to every human being on the planet in less than nine weeks. The thing to think about now is that this virus is warning shot for humanity. We’re lucky that it’s not more lethal. It’s dangerous, sure, but the mortality rate is very low. What if it weren’t?
We’re about 9 days away from the tipoff of the NCAA basketball tournament and thus far no indication from Mark Emmert that the coronavirus will stop them (whereas the Ivy League just announced that it would play its tourney sans fans). Is the NCAA tournament going to go an as if nothing is different? Oh, and why are we so fixated on that while NBA games continue apace, as do spring training MLB games?
Anyway, we conjured and NCAA tourney with no fans and how it might affect everyone’s favorite montage vehicle, “One Shining Moment.” Here are two openings, one from a Twitter friend and one from us:
