Monthly Archives: March 2020

PANDEMIC AND DEM PANIC

by John Walters | 2 Comments

Keep shaking hands, Donald

Random but related thoughts:

–On second thought, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to install Joseph Goebbels as the president’s speechwriter. Stephen Miller may be newly married, but that hasn’t softened his racist and xenophobic views. Last night he had Donald Trump referring to it as a “foreign virus,” blamed the European Union for accelerating its spread, congratulated himself for doing more than Europe or China, and then announced he was suspending flights to the U.S.A. from Europe for 30 days—but not from the U.K. (I would assume this exemption is due to the fact that Boris Johnson “treated me fairly”).

Also, you may remember that Miller’s bride is the one who scolded a reporter who tried to ask V.P. Pence earlier this week a question as he left by saying, “Raising your voice isn’t going to help.” Which the reporter would never have had to do if Pence had not ignored the question.

–If you’re a Ride-Or-Die Trump supporter, it may be time to think of yourself as a Ride-And-Die Trump supporter.

–It’s rather incredible, no, how all of the coronavirus news came to the forefront only after the impeachment trial ended. If there had been no impeachment trial might Americans have had their eyes on the ball sooner? Isn’t it ironic that Republicans had the opportunity and, more importantly, the evidence to pull the plug on this presidency, and opted to defy the facts? And I know that Mike Pence is a science denier, but he would’ve been far more malleable about this. The deaths of countless Americans will also be on the hands of Republican senators.

https://twitter.com/jdubs88/status/1238070348219920384?s=20

–It was about two weeks ago that CNBC’s Jim Cramer, a former newspaper reporter, opined that if he were a young and enterprising reporter right now, he’d head to JFK and interview passengers coming off flights from Milan to see if they’d been tested. I don’t know if anyone followed up on his suggestion, but anecdotal evidence from Twitter states that people were getting off planes from Italy and other European precincts and not being checked at all. Trump’s suspension of European flights last night is just another instance of his closing the barn door after every last horse has escaped.

–It’s cute how leagues or teams are taking incremental steps to block the virus. Like the fact that Notre Dame has told all of its students to stay away for the remainder of Lent (April 13) but that it plans to have the football team return for practice Sunday night. It’s Thursday morning as I write this and let me tell you, those practices ain’t happening.

—Remember how on Sunday I wrote that there were 17 states that had yet to test positive for the coronavirus? We’re down to six: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Montana and West Virginia (my Wyoming bet backfired). I don’t for a moment believe that those six states don’t have a coronavirus patient. They just don’t have the test kids or the people who will go and get tested.

–Let’s make this perfectly clear: Patient Zero in the United States, as far as history will mark it down, is Donald Trump. He’s the one who spread this disease more than any other person. And come election time this November I think a lot of Republicans are going to find out that their extended exposure to him over the past few years going to be equivalent to the plague as far as their political careers are concerned.

–A message to leagues, schools, churches, etc. Do NOT listen to the president. Suspend all activities immediately. Everything should cease through March 31. I hear that the PGA event still is scheduled to tee off today as are spring training games. Golfers and ball players, even if they must be individual renegades, simply should not appear. If people have learned anything in the past two weeks, you’d think they’d have learned not to downplay the gravity of this virus. I fear they haven’t.

–There are too many deniers on-air right now, particularly in financial news, who need to shut up. Joe Kernen of CNBC chief among them. It’s not about worrying about how to put a band-aid on the economy when the patient is bleeding out.

–You’d think Donald Trump’s most stalwart defender on the other side of The Pond would be smart enough to answer this question himself:

He’s not the first and he won’t be the last Donald Trump supporter to switch his allegiance. Just go away.

—The New York Times is now making its comprehensive coronavirus page free. Good move (but you should subscribe to The Times just the way you actually do pay for gas when you fill up your car).

–Donald Trump: “The virus will not have a chance against us.” It’s not ISIS, it’s VIRUS. This entire “the terrorists can’t win” mentality that has taken hold of red-cap America since 9/11 is frightfully dangerous because it encourages group-think, authoritarianism and blind patriotism in the face of reason and academic intelligence. And so now a bunch of soft-brained Americans are going to listen to a soft-brained president who think if we simply don’t kneel when the anthem is being played we’ll defeat the coronavirus. That’s not how it works, Stupid. And you’ll find out.

–We need testing kits. We need testing kits. We need them immediately.

–Last week I heard Donald Trump refer to Washington governor Jay Inslee as “a snake.” Two nights ago I watched him on Rachel Maddow and thought, Oh, this is how a president reacts to a crisis. I didn’t know much about Jay Inslee before that night. Right now I know he’s 100 times more qualified to be president than Donald Trump.

–Listen to this guy. This guy knows…

–From CNN, a compilation of all of President Trump’s lies or dishonest statements about the coronavirus.

–Moments such as this are why the Germans invented the word “zeitgeist.”

–At least Harvey Weinstein got what he deserves.

–Buried beneath all this coronavirus news? The Russian parliament tore off the band-aid, turned its back on its own Constitution, and installed Vladimir Putin as the nation’s leader until 2036. No more elections. Well, at least they’re being transparent now.

–I’m on a flight today so that should be interesting. Was headed to Arizona for a little R&R with our No. 1 reader (no, Susie B., you’re No. 2) but now we may have to re-brand it as self-quarantining in the desert. This will likely be our only post today (and I’ve got latex gloves for the flight).

–Be well, everyone.

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

by John Walters | Leave a comment

Within the past two hours, the NBA suspended its season and actor (Did I really need that modifier?) Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, have the coronavirus.

Does the coronavirus have your attention now?

Everything is about to change.

https://twitter.com/jdubs88/status/1237728999406796800?s=20

I typed that on Wednesday morning. Now, late Wednesday night, it feels inevitable. If the NBA suspended its season, would the NCAA tourney and Major League Baseball and the NHL and XFL continue on? It would seem folly.

Schools are closing. That marathon you signed up for? Ain’t happening. Nor is that concert you have tickets for. At least not this month. The reverberating effects on the economy, on your career or your academic career or your personal life, it’s way too early to even gauge those.

Just understand: things are about to change, and if it’s only for the rest of March we should consider ourselves fortunate.

And I haven’t even mentioned death yet.

The worst ever display of Jazz hands

— I thought about a pair of HBO programs that I’ve mentioned here before but don’t mind me if I do so again. The first is The Leftovers, where the premise is that an unexplained phenomenon results in 2% of the global population simply vanishing. The two main differences are that people of all ages vanish discriminately and that they indeed vanish, as opposed to die. No one knows where their bodies are.

Why did so many scenes from The Leftovers remind me of outtakes from Woodstock?

Still, 2% of the global population. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far. But if it did, that would mean—and I explicitly did not consult anyone from the New York Times to do this math for me—about 151 million people dying. And let’s say it’s not 2% but one-tenth that total. That’s still 15 million people. Basically the equivalent of the entire tri-state metropolitan area in New York City (which, if it were actually we who perished, would probably thrill Donald Trump and MAGA).

Anyway, that’s a significant number of humans. World War II killed an estimated 70 million people, but that was only the most catastrophic event in recent human history.

Wall Street is not reacting to the nearly 5,000 dead so far. It’s girding itself for days when the number of dead jumps by a thousand or two in one day.

Will it get that dire? I honestly don’t know. But I believe that the steps being taken now will curb the spread greatly. And I believe if today was not the day, then very soon everyone’s going to come around to realizing what the Dr. Fauci’s of the world already knew: that Donald Trump and his cronies have been attempting to bail out the Titanic using a measuring cup.

The other HBO program to watch is Chernobyl, particularly the first two episodes. It’s a nuclear meltdown, not a virus, but the parallels are striking: governmental leadership that is more interested than suppressing information than saving lives; leaders far more concerned about assessing blame than they are with solving the crisis; leaders who arrogantly disregard the dire warnings of scientists until it’s almost too late…in the meantime thousands of innocent people die.

Roughly 20,000 Soviets died in the wake of Chernobyl, as did the Soviet Union itself… which gave rise to a Wild West political vacuum in Russia… which opened the door for Vladimir Putin to come in and use threats and a secret police force to take power for himself.

How many Americans will die? I honestly don’t know. Let’s hope this is much ado about nothing. We’ll all know a lot more three weeks from now, when the calendar turns to April. But I think many Americans finally began taking this pandemic thing seriously today.

— By the way, President Trump neither looked or sounded good this evening on TV. Granted, it’s the most stressful time of his presidency. But what happens if one of these older Republican politicians who have been so cavalier about the coronavirus dies from this? Will it still just be the flu to them? Science and nature have a peculiar way of putting the folly and pride of man in its place, as anyone who’s ever tried to stand in front of a large wave and dared it to knock him down knows.

Also, something to think about: no one famous has died yet. And maybe no one will. But, sad as it is to say, this pandemic won’t be real to many Americans until someone who could conceivably appear on the cover of US Weekly perishes.

— I was thinking about Hillary Clinton today. Imagine if she’d won. First of all, America wouldn’t have squandered the last six months obsessing over impeachment (I imagine the chances of her being caught in flagrante delicto would be rather minute) and she probably would’ve been pro-active on this. Oh, to wonder…

–Finally, at least for this evening, I think time will demonstrat that the White House’s hubris and negligence are going to increase the death toll exponentially. And the irony here is that almost all of those casualties are going to be the elderly. And I’m going to wonder how just many of those people America will bury are avid Fox News viewers. At least two-thirds is my guess. A different president wouldn’t have stopped the coronavirus. But a different president would have been responsible for a much swifter response and a far smaller body count. And probably wouldn’t have used every single on-camera appearance to pat himself or herself on the back and reminding everyone what a good job they were doing.

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON–AND WASH YOUR HANDS

by John Walters | 3 Comments

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.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by Wendell Barnhouse

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.

STARTING FIVE

by John Walters | 1 Comment

Tweet Me Right

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.”

Wrong. Wrong? Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong.

7:12 “The Chinese coronavirus really is Chinese.”

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.

https://twitter.com/jdubs88/status/1237528686628229122?s=20

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.

Corona Countdown

On Sunday we had 17 states without coronavirus. We’re down to 12.

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.

https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1237393224714481667?s=20

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!”

Pandumbic