erinptah | Entries tagged with politics

August 11: "“What makes me the maddest,” one of my doctor friends told me, “is that these people will reject science right until the second they need everything I have to keep them alive, and then they feel that they can come to our door and be entitled to that help and that hard work.” "

September: "The generators held, but like Terrebonne General, the hospital lost water and air conditioning. As the storm raged, a bleeding man arrived to drop off his fiancée, who had been sucked out of their wrecked home a few blocks away. The emergency room staff got to work mending her wounds as water poured from the ceiling." COVID-choked hospitals weathering a hurricane.

September 8: "Getting the first dose of COVID-19 [vaccine] resulted in significant improvements in mental health, beyond improvements already achieved since mental distress peaked in the spring of 2020." One piece of good news! Not only do the vaccines fight off COVID, getting them right now will literally help with depression.

September 13: "My wife and I don’t get to see much of each other. [...] Right now shifts start at 8 a.m. and we are currently working 19 to 20 hours the first day of our two-day shifts. Then we’re back up after sleeping a few hours, and we don’t sleep that second night of work. Then I go home and either work other places in my town ― [...] or, if I am lucky, I will sleep 30 hours straight." This isn't an account from a doctor or nurse. He's an embalmer.

September 15: "The U.S. has recorded more than 41.4 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 665,800 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data." That's 1 in 500 of the entire US population. (And 2 in 125 of people who have gotten it.)

September 17: "On Thursday, shortly after Idaho enacted crisis standards of care statewide, Dr. Steven Nemerson with Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise said that to his knowledge, no patient in the state had been removed from life support in order to provide the equipment to someone else. But he warned it would happen."

September 18 (NYT): "Vaccine-resistant Americans are turning to [monoclonal antibodies] with a zeal that has, at times, mystified their doctors, chasing down lengthy infusions after rejecting vaccines that cost one-hundredth as much." This treatment isn't any older than the vaccines! It hasn't had longer to develop. It hasn't been tested more. The only difference is that it hasn't been brigaded by antivaxxers...oh, and that it doesn't last. Unlike the vaccine, which teaches your body to make its own antibodies.

September 21: "We're in the worst state that we ever have been in the pandemic, this surge has been back-breaking for our health care facilities," said Katherine Hoyer, a spokeswoman for Panhandle Health District that covers five northern counties in Idaho. "Our case investigators, they cannot keep up."

October 3: “I did not appreciate the intensity of support for a vaccine mandate that existed, because you hear that loud anti-vax voice a lot more than you hear the people that want it,” Kirby said. “But there are more of them. And they’re just as intense.”

October 13: "We’ve demonstrated conclusively that saving nearly everyone who dies of the flu is within our power. To do nothing now—to return to the roughly 30,000-deaths-a-year status quo without even trying to save some of those lives—would seem irresponsible. So what do we do? Which measures do we maintain and which do we let go?"

The Onion: "Astounded by the damning information, local anti-vaxxer Pete Dixon was reportedly horrified Thursday after discovering that every single American who got a smallpox vaccine in the 19th century was now deceased."

And: "We found that when presented with a counterfeit vaccination card, Covid-19 was unable to distinguish it from the real thing approximately 7 out of 10 times."

Meanwhile, a bit of history: "When news of a successful [polio] vaccine came in 1955, The Christian Century lavished praise on Dr. Jonas Salk and other scientists. “We hope,” the editors wrote that April, “that services of thanksgiving to God are being held in millions of homes and thousands of churches for this answer to prayer, this successful completion of a decade of intensive concentration on medical research.”"

Things to worry about:

June 12: “In 2016, Gun Violence Archive recorded that 241 people were shot and killed or wounded in a road rage incident; so far this year, as of June 7, that number is 212, the analysis found. ‘I don’t think we quite realized how dramatic the change was going to be.’”

“Customers trying to avoid online delivery platforms like Grubhub by calling restaurants directly might be dialing phone numbers generated and advertised by those very platforms — for which restaurants are charged fees that can sometimes exceed the income the order generates.”

“Magie filed a legal claim for her Landlord’s Game in 1903, more than three decades before Parker Brothers began manufacturing Monopoly. She actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time — people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. […] And yet it was the monopolist version of the game that caught on, with Darrow claiming a version of it as his own and selling it to Parker Brothers. While Darrow made millions and struck an agreement that ensured he would receive royalties, Magie’s income for her creation was reported to be a mere $500. ”

“What do you mean ‘text’? There’s obviously some math text on the blackboard on the right, just like there’s obviously a woman covering almost half of the photograph. Is that woman invisible? Why?” When neural nets try to auto-detect what’s in an image…and what kinds of things they miss.

The Onion, in “this isn’t even a joke”: “Promising to let him know as soon as something becomes available, nurse Janae Howager informed a man having a heart attack Thursday that there was about an hour wait until the next Covid-19 patient died.”

Things to make you smile:

“Despite being lauded by some of the right-wing media’s leading figures, though, the Freedom Phone’s buyers could be getting less than they expect for its $500 price tag. That’s because the Freedom Phone appears to be merely a more expensive rebranding of a budget Chinese phone available elsewhere for a fraction of the Freedom Phone’s price.” But hey, influencers get referral codes, so when their followers buy the phones they get a $50 cut. It’s grifters all the way down.

February 25: “The lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump administration reported Wednesday that they have found the parents of 105 children in the past month.” And that was just the Biden administration’s first month.

““We both started writing grants,” Dr. Weissman said. “We didn’t get most of them. People were not interested in mRNA. The people who reviewed the grants said mRNA will not be a good therapeutic, so don’t bother.’”” (There’s a happy ending! It’s the research that led to the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines.)

“A New York City pilot program that dispatches mental health specialists and paramedics instead of police for certain nonviolent emergency calls has resulted in more people accepting assistance and fewer people sent to the hospital, early data shows.” Don’t send cops to do non-cop jobs! It works!

“Cash transfers have arguably the strongest existing evidence base among anti-poverty tools, with dozens of high-quality evaluations of cash transfer programs spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America and including both unconditional and conditional cash transfer. These studies include many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and also include studies that measured impacts 4–5 years out,1,2 evidence which exists for hardly any other interventions.”

The Onion again: “Deeming the move unfortunate but necessary to keep his fledgling Silicon Valley dream alive, CEO Jason Ipser told reporters Tuesday that his struggling tech company was almost desperate enough to start making an actual product.“

Antivaxxer aunt posted a bunch of signs from protests she says she supports, and they all look like this:

Other rallies have signs that take stands — “Black Lives Matter,” “Justice for George Floyd,” “Gay Rights Are Human Rights,” “End Anti-Trans Discrimination.” These are just “Freedom! Freedom is good! Please assume without question that everyone here agrees perfectly with me about what we need to be Free from.”

Gotta wonder what % of the group says afterward “look how many of us aren’t into any CRAZY stuff, we just agree Big Pharma is faking everything” and what % says “look how many of us agree a secret cabal is kidnapping children to get high by snorting their ground-up bones.”

(…did you know that’s not a parody? Do you know that’s actual, totally-earnest QAnon lore? Was your mind as blown by that as mine was?)

In TWIV #720 (starts around 51:17), Paul Offit told a story that I’ve been meaning to write down.

So his wife’s a pediatrician. A 4-month-old comes into her office for a vaccination…and the kid has a seizure.

Child gets rushed to the hospital. Is diagnosed with a seizure disorder. Ends up having a chronic neurological condition. Offit doesn’t say what it was called, but the important part is — only a few years later, the child dies from it. They were 5.

And this is the kind of story antivaxxers love to tell as Proof that Vaccines are Harmful and Evil —

except —

the vaccination hadn‘t happened yet.

The seizure hit before the child got any shots. Like — moments before. “The doctor was drawing the vaccine into the syringe” before. And obviously they didn’t finish — when a baby is having a seizure, you get them the hell to a hospital, now! General preventative care can wait.

And Offit points out that if the timing had been five minutes different — if the appointment was a bit earlier, if the office moved a bit faster, maybe if the parents hit a few more green lights on the way there — the parents would’ve blamed the shots for all of it.

And who could talk them out of it? If you spent years trying to care for a child with a terrifying deadly disease, and the symptoms all started moments after a vaccine — how would anybody convince you that that was a coincidence?

Except here’s a case that was just as vanishingly unlikely, that we know was a coincidence.

It’s absolutely wild. One-in-a-million doesn’t even come close. If you wrote it in a novel, people would dunk you to the end of time for trying to make a serious point with such a transparent, exaggerated, anvilicious setup.

But sometimes, in medicine, in health, in real life, that’s just how it is.

And it’s not a “totally happened to my friend’s cousin’s barber!” urban legend. It’s from a specific doctor. You can listen to — or watch the video version of — a source, as told by her specific husband.

Virology and medical history links

The first images of a coronavirus were taken by June Almeida in the 1960’s. She was one of a group who submitted the findings to Science, which rejected the paper on the grounds of “that’s not a new discovery, that’s a flu virus and you took a bad picture.”

“In 1934, Wells and his wife, Mildred Weeks Wells, a physician, analyzed air samples and plotted a curve showing how the opposing forces of gravity and evaporation acted on respiratory particles. […] Randall paused at the curve they’d drawn. To her, it seemed to foreshadow the idea of a droplet-aerosol dichotomy, but one that should have pivoted around 100 microns, not 5. ”

“Those men you see interviewed, they were the first EMTs, the first paramedics. Not just in Pittsburgh, but anywhere. The first “ambulance” driver may have been some poor Spanish conscript back in the 15th century, but the men who made up the first-ever ambulance squad with trained paramedics? Those guys are still around.” A 1970s (!!) success story about taking a job out of the hands of police, and putting it in the hands of professionals with actual relevant training.

“The [measles] outbreak began that September, when an infected passenger is thought to have flown to [Samoa] from New Zealand. Infection quickly spread among the island’s by then substantial population of unvaccinated children. According to Dr Katherine Gibney of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, one in every 150 babies aged between six and 11 months died.” This is the future that antivaxxers want.

Virology and medical present-day links

“Early reports showed high mortality from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), while current United States data mortality rates are lower, raising hope that new treatments and management strategies have improved outcomes. For instance, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show that 6.7% of cases resulted in death in April, compared with 1.9% in September.”

“During the 2019 flu season from Sept. 29 to Dec. 28, the CDC reported more than 65,000 cases of influenza nationwide. During the same period this flu season, the agency reported 1,016 cases.” COVID keeps flourishing whenever we slack off on safety protocols, but hey, seems like even halfhearted anti-COVID measures can do a great job at blocking the flu.

“The strategy signals a shift from the past year, during which the Trump administration largely delegated responsibility for controlling the virus and reopening the economy to 50 governors, fracturing the nation’s response. Interviews with more than 100 health, political and community leaders around the country and a review of emails and other state government records offer a fuller picture of all that went wrong.”

“I am concerned that the underrepresentation of Black people among those who have received the vaccine so far will lead to a further widening of racial disparities in Covid-19 infection and death rates. And so I share my journey from “no” to “yes,” my own #BlackWhysMatter, with whoever will listen.”

“Oregon healthcare workers who were stranded in a snowstorm on Tuesday began administering leftover coronavirus vaccines to motorists on the side of the road rather than let the doses go to waste.” Heroes!

2015, and still relevant: The USPS isn't in financial trouble because people aren't using it enough. It's in "financial trouble" because Congress ordered it to stockpile enough cash to pre-fund all employee pension and health insurance costs for the next 75 years. Even if we all sent enough mail to cover that unnecessary liability, Congress could easily pass another law saddling it with another unnecessary liability. We fix this by yelling at our representatives to shape up, not by buying more stamps.

May 2020: "Despite her visible role in the fight against abortion, McCorvey [aka Jane Roe] says she was a mercenary, not a true believer. And Schenck, who has also distanced himself from the antiabortion movement, at least partially corroborates the allegations, saying that she was paid out of concern ;that she would go back to the other side,; he says in the film. 'There were times I wondered: Is she playing us? And what I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we were playing her.'"

May 2020: "Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached. The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise. The study was nationwide and selected recipients weren’t able to opt out, because the test was written into legislation. "

September 11: "Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on [plastic recycling] ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean. Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s."

September 30: "Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering." A game designer's analysis of QAnon.

October 23: "A rightwing extremist boasted of driving from Texas to Minneapolis to help set fire to a police precinct during the George Floyd protests, federal prosecutors said. US attorney Erica MacDonald said on Friday that she had charged Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old Texas resident, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. " (It's them. It's always them.)

December 9: "Last week, CMD obtained the 2019 tax records of two right-wing funders who donated to the FDRLST Media Foundation that year: GOP megadonor and shipping supply billionaire Richard Uihlein and DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund manager that has been dubbed “the dark money ATM” of the conservative movement." Looks like we can add Uline Shipping next to StickerMule on the list of "this company's owner will pass your money on to horrible causes."

December 17: "Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found. But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates."

January 20: "Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten."

January 29: "Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian."

February 18: "The Austin American-Statesman found a single, forgotten copy of that report on a Public Utilities Commission shelf in 2011. The paper went looking for it in 2011 because of the cold snap that hit Texas in February of that year. The state legislature held angry hearings, and later that spring Hegar introduced his bill to require the Public Service Commission to prepare a weatherization and preparedness report each year, an obligation that was later neglected." Texas utility companies vs. history, or Yes, We Need That Infrastructure Bill.

March 11: "It isn’t easy to figure out exactly how much electrical energy these ‘idling cars’ are consuming, but even the lowest estimates are eye-wateringly bad. Cambridge University seems to have done the most legwork in figuring this out, and at the moment, the annualised power consumption of bitcoin mining is 128 terawatt hours. In 2019-20, every single thing plugged into Australia’s largest main grid consumed 192. "

"Four years ago as a candidate, President Trump made more than 280 campaign promises. Let’s see how he did." A nice succinct roundup. (Takeaway: he succeeded at "appointing conservative judges," and with all the others he either did nothing, or did the exact opposite.)

June 3: "The Postal Service’s struggles began in the early 2000s. In 2005, Congress imposed an unprecedented austerity measure on the agency which required USPS to pre-fund retirement benefits 75 years in the future, including for employees who have not even been born yet. No other government agency or corporation operates in such a manner, and the move left the USPS woefully strapped for funding."

June 29: "Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials [...] that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States." I mean...this isn't news. But none of you could've brought this up at the [first] impeachment? Really?

Reinforced by this interview with Trump's first SecState, Rex Tillerson, January 11: "I used to go into meetings with a list of four to five things I needed to talk to him about, and I quickly learned that if I got to three, it was a home run, and I realized getting two that were meaningful was probably the best objective. So I began to adjust what I went into a meeting with and what I attempted to explain and describe, and then I started taking charts and pictures with me because I found that those seemed to hold his attention better. If I could put a photo or a picture in front of him or a map or a piece of paper that had two big bullet points on it, he would focus on that, and I could build on that. Just sitting and trying to have a conversation as you and I are having just doesn’t work."

September 30: "And that’s why, despite all the religious flourishes that Trump himself views as weird — the prayer, the God-talk, the laying-on of hands — Trump likes having them around. People like Paula White and Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress and Eric Metaxas reassure Trump that he’s right about the world — that everything is transactional, and competitive, and profit-seeking, and that anything else is merely a sucker’s dream."

November 17: "Neely Petrie-Blanchard, a Kentucky resident, had long ago lost custody of her daughters [...] she turned to Chris Hallett, an amateur legal expert who offered bogus court services through a company called “E-Clause,” and who promised Petrie-Blanchard she could win her daughters back through ludicrous courtroom tactics he borrowed from the anti-government sovereign citizen’s movement. [...] On Sunday night, Hallett was found face down in the kitchen of his central Florida home, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds to his back." A bit of QAnon intramural violence.

December 8: "After the boasting and gloating from Trump about the successes of Operation Warp Speed, his administration’s project to fastrack a Covid-19 vaccine, the failure to option enough of the vaccine, even after promising early results, is perplexing. It will also leave the U.S. short: 100 million doses, while significant, is only enough to immunize 50 million people, and with only one other vaccine at the regulatory stage of development in the U.S., developed by Moderna, supply will almost certainly outstrip demand as vaccination programs get underway."

Some of the inevitable fallout, January 15: "States were anticipating a windfall after federal officials said they would stop holding back second doses. But the approach had already changed, and no stockpile exists."

December 10: ""There are things we can do to prevent what we are seeing, and so many people believe this is a hoax and this is politically motivated," [the intensive care doctor with the Cleveland Clinic] said. "The truth is, I don't get to look away. Every day when I go to work, I know that I am going to have to put multiple patients on ventilators, and when I put those patients on ventilators, I am at risk every single time. I could also die from this.""

December 27: "Getty Images is a major photo agency that has worked hard to get its photographers into hospitals, with only rare success. “For every thousand calls or emails, you maybe get three yeses,” said Sandy Ciric, the agency’s director of photography. “Sometimes we even had the CEO say, ‘This is great, yes, we want coverage,’ and then someone tells them no and they change their mind.”" Why we've seen so few photos documenting the COVID crisis in hospitals.

Okay, one nice thing, they had a ceremony for Biden's dog: "People logged on from across the country to watch the “Indoguration,” which raised over $100,000 for the DHA, a nonprofit no-kill animal care and adoption center. Participants had the chance to nominate their own animals for a position in Major’s cabinet. Organizers collected over 700 nominations for the title of Secretary of Rescue Dogs."

NYT provides some fascinating perspective on who's tried to do this before, and for almost exactly the same reasons: "In the confusion that followed Wednesday’s desecration of the Capitol, it was widely reported that the last time the building was stormed was in 1814. That overlooked a desperate day in 1861, nearly as lethal to democracy. On Feb. 13, a mob gathered outside the Capitol and tried to force its way in to disrupt the counting of the electoral certificates that would confirm Abraham Lincoln’s election three months earlier."

There was at least one bit of sabotage done before the riots, which probably means there's more to be found: "As people rushed out of other buildings on the Capitol grounds, staffers in [Ayanna] Pressley’s office barricaded the entrance with furniture and water jugs that had piled up during the pandemic. [Her chief of staff] Groh pulled out gas masks and looked for the special panic buttons in the office. 'Every panic button in my office had been torn out — the whole unit.'"

Pramila Jayapal (D-WA): "The Capitol police with us seemed very confused about who had the key to the doors. They were closed, but we weren’t sure if they were locked, and we were yelling, “Lock the doors! Lock the doors!” We heard shots being fired, presumably into the chamber."

Jason Crow (D-CO, veteran): "I called my wife. I told her I loved her and told the kids I loved them and told my wife I might have to fight my way out. [...] I did a double-check of all the doors, made sure they were locked. Escorted the more senior members away from the doors, moving them into a defensive position. Asked folks to take off their member pins so that if the mobs break down the doors, the members would be harder to identify. I took a pen out of my pocket to possibly use as a weapon."

Nancy Pelosi talks about her young staffers, who knew what to do from their school active-shooter drills: "The staff went under the table, barricaded the door, turned out the lights, and were silent in the dark." "Under the table this whole--" "--under the table for two and a half hours."

"Moments later, there was yelling in the gallery, as staff and security details started to move around with a heightened sense of alarm. Inside the chamber, news photographers that Pelosi (D-Calif.) had allowed in to capture the historic electoral vote at the dais instead turned around and trained their cameras toward the doors in the back of the chamber."

Same article: "Capitol police had said previously they didn’t need help, but Bowdich decided he couldn’t wait for a formal invitation. [...] These teams typically gather at a staging area off-site to coordinate and plan, and then rush together to the area where they are needed. Bowdich told their commander there was no time."

Less-reported-on, ordinary people throughout the city also had to hide from rioters wreaking havoc: "[In DC], a city long shaped by hardworking Black Americans and immigrants, the terror unfolded at home, forcing residents to lock themselves behind closed doors or commute from work through downtown streets filled with throngs of white supremacists and law enforcement officials who have often been openly hostile toward their communities. "

Meanwhile: “As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.”

"BuzzFeed News spoke to two Black officers who described a harrowing day in which they were forced to endure racist abuse — including repeatedly being called the n-word — as they tried to do their job of protecting the Capitol building, and by extension the very functioning of American democracy. The officers said they were wrong-footed, fighting off an invading force that their managers had downplayed and not prepared them for. "

"The officer initially scopes out the door, sees it's not guarded, and tries to block the way. More rioters pour up the stairs after them, and the officer seems to go with a new strategy – he shoves the first rioter, pissing him off, and then leads the whole mob the other way." One specific black officer uses himself as bait for racists. Get this man a medal, please.

Not to forget the other cops whose behavior that day deserves to be recognized:"Two Capitol Police officers have been suspended and one has been arrested following the riots at the U.S. Capitol."

And: "As investigators seek to identify rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol, police departments in Virginia and Washington state have placed officers on leave as authorities examine whether they took part in unlawful acts while off-duty."

"hi mom remember the time you told me I shouldn't go to BLM protests bc they could get violent...this you?"

Some fallout:

At least one known-COVID-positive rioter identified among the chaotic and unmasked crowd. Inside, several Republicans sheltering-in-place refused to put masks on; presumably they aren't getting tested afterward, or won't reveal the results if they are. Meanwhile, Democrats who were forced to share the room with them are starting to report positive tests.

“Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Contains a few choice screenshots of Parler-hosted content, for anyone who's unclear about what Amazon considers a ToS violation.

"One member [of Congress, being briefed on plans for future riots] was explicit that these groups were trying to get journalists to report on their demonstrations. 'Some of their main communications to organize these have been cut off, so they’re purposely trying to get the media to report on this as a way to further disseminate information and to attract additional support for their attacks.'"

Sadly, the graphic about Olive Garden canceling Lifetime Pasta Passes for various rioters and their supporters turns out to be a joke.

As is this resignation letter from the Death Star: "Destroying planets and using fear of this battle station to keep the local systems in line was my No. 1 passion until — about 30 seconds ago, weirdly! That was when I saw the X-wings that had evaded our turbo-lasers and were proceeding down a trench toward our vulnerable thermal exhaust port — and realized I had to speak up. I thought: What if remorselessly destroying planets isn’t my passion? What if my real passion is staying alive and avoiding the consequences of my actions?"

On realizing that he might actually be forced to stop being President in a few weeks, Trump is in full-on extinction burst mode. Lucky us.

This article from Tuesday, in retrospect, is disorienting to read. It talks about the anticipation of violence around Congress's vote-certifying process, and the mobilization of security forces. Come Wednesday, it's all "of course there aren't enough security forces around, how could we have predicted any violence??"

The violence and looting sure did materialize, though: "Remarkable images show Donald Trump supporters looting the Capitol Building in Washington DC. Violent demonstrators stormed the iconic venue and ransacked offices, smashed windows and fought police after breaking through security lines and even walked into the floor of the Senate."

More looting, with major security implications: "'A laptop from a conference room was stolen,'Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff to Pelosi, tweeted Friday. 'It was a laptop that was only used for presentations.' [...] Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) tweeted out a video Wednesday night of the destruction to his office in which he noted that the rioters had 'stolen the laptop that was sitting on the table next to the telephone.'"

Multiple bombs were in play: "Amid DC rioting on Wednesday, a pipe bomb was found at the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters were evacuated over a suspicious package [...] Another pipe bomb was found and safely detonated in the Capitol complex."

So was...uh, grosser stuff: "Some of the unhinged pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday defecated inside the historic building and “tracked” their feces in several hallways, the Daily News has learned. A source close to Sen. Chuck Schumer said staffers to the New York Democrat found out about the fecal fiasco on Thursday."

And they showed up prepared to take...hostages? Prisoners? Murder victims who would need to be restrained first? "Photographs of the insurrectionist mob that stormed the Capitol showed several rioters ready with zip-tie handcuffs in the U.S. Senate chamber."

Scalzi sums things up nicely: "[Trump] absolutely pointed the mob at the Capitol. He absolutely intended to disrupt the electoral vote count. It’s my considered opinion he wouldn’t have been in the least bit upset if hostages had been taken and as such the vote count had been indefinitely postponed. In his mind, if the vote wasn’t counted, he’d still get to be President. "

The family of one of the deceased, Kevin Greeson, gave the media a statement that he totally didn't support any violence or rioting. Any news article that wants to repeat that should put it next to some quotes from Greeson's own social media: "Let’s give them a war ... Democrats don’t have guns ... we do ... bring your stick, I'm bringing MY GUNS!"

News so far is that 4 of the rioters and 1 police officer died. I can't find any verified sources on the "one guy accidentally tasered himself into a heart attack" story that's going around...but here's one about the woman carrying a "Don't Tread On Me" flag who was trampled to death. The officer was bludgeoned in the head with a fire extinguisher, and died in the hospital.

(Have any police officers died at a Black Lives Matter protest? Like, ever?)

The list of "people who take over as President if Trump is removed" at that point started with (1) VP Mike Pence, (2) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (3) Senate President Pro Tem Chuck Grassley. Which means all of the top three in the line of succession were in the building when it was attacked.

The number of different security/police/military agencies involved here is a little dizzying, but one key takeaway is that each state has a National Guard which reports to the governor, but DC has one that reports only to the president, and that one defied the pleas to show up. Can we have statehood for DC now?

Virginia and Maryland eventually sent their own National Guards in for backup, but only after being stonewalled: "House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called [MD governor Larry] Hogan from an “undisclosed bunker” and were “pleading” with him for assistance from his state and national forces, the governor said. However, Hogan, who requires the Department of Defense’s authority to mobilize his National Guard troops, said he was “repeatedly denied” approval to do so from the Pentagon despite being “ready, willing and able” to assist."

...and it looks like there's a good chance "military drags their feet on stopping the rioters" wasn't the worst possible path they could've taken. "[Fiona] Hill, who was an advisor on Russia from 2017 to 2019, suggested that an intervention from all 10 living former defence secretaries this week had prevented armed forces from becoming involved in a coup attempt."

It's also being widely reported that Pence, not Trump, was giving the DOD directions by the time its tide turned. Which, uh. Obviously Trump is dangerous and needs his power curbed as much as possible, but if the VP is going to take over the duties of Commander-in-Chief because POTUS is dangerously incompetent, that's what the 25th Amendment is for. We could do this in the legal-process way, or we could do it in the "high-level officials have secret closed-door discussions where they all agree to do the same illegal thing together" way.

The 25th Amendment can be invoked to declare a President unfit for office if a majority of the Cabinet votes on it. In the past few days a flurry of Trump's administration members have announced their resignations, including multiple Cabinet members. Huh. Wonder if they were suddenly confronted with the high probability of being forced to take sides on something they didn't want to face.

Pence is staying in place, but is, reportedly, shocked and baffled that the leopards are eating HIS face. "Trump's scapegoating of Pence was said to have deeply angered the normally even-keeled vice president. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma told the Tulsa World that he'd never seen the vice president so angry. "I had a long conversation with him," Inhofe said. "He said, 'After all the things I've done for him.'""

...honestly, I'm surprised. Trump is loyal to nobody. He betrays his own supporters constantly! His sphere has got to be full of people who know that perfectly well, and are making a calculated gambit to wring as much advantage out of him as possible. I always figured Pence was one of those. But, no? Apparently, at some point, he genuinely convinced himself that he was the exception, that he was special?

Anyway, Trump's desperate flailing for a way to ignore the election is not going to stop. Which is pretty obvious to anyone who...lives in reality. Remember how it was just this past Sunday when he called the Georgia Secretary of State and tried to threaten him into "finding" thousands of extra votes?

After the Wednesday attack fell through, he made one not-quite-concession speech, which was absolutely the result of people sitting him down and saying "you WILL go down in history as the first President to be declared incompetent by their own Cabinet, you will face actual consequences for once in your life, unless you get on camera and read this, exactly as written."

He couldn't resist going right back to instigating violence afterward, though. Prompting Twitter (in the wake of Facebook, and Facebook's subsidiary Instagram) to finally, finally perma-ban his account. It's so late in the game, and after so much damage has already been done, and I'll be disappointed-but-not-surprised if this is the most significant way he's held accountable for the week's events -- but better something than nothing. Better late than never.

It seems like a few of his supporters might have noticed that he was using them all along? But a lot of them are just doubling down and insisting that this is yet another Brilliant Chess Move in The Plan. "Trump's takeover Wednesday failed to materialize. After protesters were ousted from Capitol by a hugely reinforced police presence, many took to social media to question what went wrong — and asked what the president had in store to turn the tables. [QAnon] has been resilient in the past when its conspiracy theories were proved false, and Wednesday was no different."

(I caught a bit of the mainstream news coverage, and one reporter said "these people believe a criminal class is secretly controlling society." Which is so vague, I'd call it actively misleading. Don't softpedal it, come on! These people believe a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles is secretly controlling society.)

"More than 130 Secret Service officers who help protect the White House and the president when he travels have recently been ordered to isolate or quarantine because they tested positive for the coronavirus or had close contact with infected co-workers, according to three people familiar with agency staffing."

"A lot of times before they're intubated — which means put on a ventilator because they can't breathe on their own — when they're still struggling to breathe, and they're saying, 'Well, I didn't know COVID was real, and I wish I'd worn a mask.' And then it's already too late," she tells NPR's All Things Considered. "You can see the regret, as they're struggling to breathe and it's finally hitting them that this is real."

"...about five people have attempted to get inside [Utah Valley Hospital] because they question whether the ICU is as full as some say. [...] So far, it seems no one has been successful getting in. However, Hansen said what the conspiracy theorists did has forced the hospital to take extra precautions when it comes to visitors and people being admitted."

"Roughly 80 percent of Texas county jail inmates who have died after contracting COVID-19 were in pre-trial detention and had not been convicted of any crimes."

"...his administration has refused to launch the formal transition, depriving President-elect Joe Biden’s team of access to national security information. [...]The staffers recognize that Biden will be the next president, but they are 'not allowed to act like that will happen,' said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his current job did not permit him to speak publicly. Meantime, national security actions and requests for briefings from the president are drying up." (So, basically...US national security briefings are going to nobody right now.)

"Since 2000, I have participated in three presidential transitions from the vantage points of both the departing and the incoming administration. [...] In the week since Joe Biden’s victory became clear, President Trump and his administration have taken no steps toward starting the process of transition. The risks to our national security are mounting." Susan Rice gives a summary of the broader problem going on here.

"Senate Republicans are racing ahead with post-election judicial confirmations, breaking a 123-year tradition against voting on judicial nominees of an outgoing president of the defeated party during a lame duck session." This is my shocked face.

One bit of good news: "Postal workers doing final sweeps of their systems have found just a few ballots — in most cases, they number in the double digits — that were lost or left behind. [...] What made the difference, experts say, was enormous public pressure, multiple lawsuits, scrutiny from the courts, urgent efforts to urge voters to mail their ballots as early as possible, and extraordinary measures taken by the agency itself and its legions of dedicated postal workers."

Back to the bad, a warning to us from Sri Lanka: "The coup was a farce at the time but how soon it turned to tragedy. They called it a constitutional crisis, but how soon it became a real one. Right now, the same thing is happening to you. I’m trying to warn you America. It seems stupid now, but the consequences are not."

Welp, it's been a week since the election was called, and Trump's been wildly flinging himself from "if I don't concede that means I don't have to leave right??" to "file 100 lawsuits against whoever's handy, hope some evidence shows up later" to "flood my mailing list with begging emails, admit in the fine print that their $$$ will actually just be paying off my debts."

Also, blocking Biden's transition team from the access they need to handle things smoothly, and firing a bunch of his military leaders, apparently because they're trying to stop him from releasing intel about Russia that would harm national security. On top of the classified intel he's already blabbed with no regard for national security.

(But something something Hillary's emails, amirite)

Anyway, here's another pile of links I've been sitting on for too long, about gun control & police brutality. (The really old ones I just discovered recently, and am gonna link anyway because they're Still Relevant.)

2010: "Finally, he spoke to a departmental therapist, confessing all his concerns about the alleged stat fixing and about his declining health. The therapist's report had a result he didn't expect: He was stripped of his gun and badge and put on desk duty." (What happens to the "good cops" who try to call out the "bad apples.")

August 2015 (NYT): "In the protests that have followed police shootings, demonstrators have often asked why officers are so rarely punished for shootings that seem unwarranted. Dr. Lewinski is part of the answer."

December 2017: "Philip Mitchell Brailsford, 28, is now retired from the force with a tax-free pension worth $31,000 a year for life — and his attorney confirmed Friday that the settlement was a result of him suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the shooting involving Daniel Shaver of Texas. Shaver was seen on police bodycam video crawling on the floor of a Mesa hotel and sobbing for his life before he was shot — a case that drew national scrutiny over the use of deadly force." Justice for Daniel Shaver.

February 2018: "An elite Baltimore police task force spent years plundering the city and its residents for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, drugs, and jewelry. [...] The police officers in the unit set people up for baseless searches. They robbed people. They carried toy guns to plant as fake evidence in case they killed an unarmed person. They clocked overtime when they weren’t working at all."

Baltimore City funds, by agency. The police department dwarfs everything else put together.

June 1: "The officer seemed annoyed as he said, “Is that a Poodle?” I said yes and put Merlin back in the van. The officer seemed mad as he explained the impeding traffic law, like I tricked him somehow and was wasting his time." White woman figures out why she keeps getting pulled over while driving with a large curly-haired dog.

June 6: "This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me."

June 25: "Three staff members of a Michigan youth center have been charged in the death of a Black teenager who died while being restrained after throwing a sandwich." Justice for Cornelius Fredericks.

July 19: "[Navy veteran Christopher] David stood as solidly as a rock while federal officers pepper sprayed him twice and struck him at least five times with a baton during a rally outside the Hatfield Courthouse."

July 22: "State and local leaders have repeatedly called for federal agents to leave the city, arguing that their presence has made an already-tense environment worse."

July 24: “This is the kid’s big moment, the 20-year-olds’ big moment. When they ask for our help, it’s our job to come and be supportive and to help them do what they need to do.” The stories behind Portland's Wall of Moms.

We did it!

That viral "top 100 reasons to vote FOR Biden" list is now "top 100 reasons you're allowed to be happy about this, not just settle for it."

Republican lawsuits against counting legitimate votes keep getting thrown out. Although Mitch McConnell sounds like he's planning to try and Benghazi this -- where they just keep launching new hearings no matter how many times they find zero evidence of wrongdoing, so the average person will think "there must be something to it, or why would they be holding all these hearings?"

But yeah, the whole thing is just one more scam. As usual, the only cases of attempted voter fraud have been from the tiny sliver of Trump supporters who believe his claims that it's totally easy to get away with, and then, surprise surprise, do not get away with it.

Anyway, back to Reasons To Be Happy, all the memes have been a delight, but this is the art that hit me right in the feels:

We just got our first mixed-race Black + Indian + Jamaican woman elected to the White House. Nnnnnice. (One with a startlingly good record on trans rights, and a prosecutorial record that seems to be light on grand headline-grabbing progressive gestures, but heavy on slow concrete detail-oriented progress.)

Finally got it straightened out that her name is pronounced differently from Kamala Khan's, so now instead of pronouncing one of them wrong 100% of the time, I'll get both of them wrong about 50% of the time.

Also! It's not just candidates -- a whole bunch of progressive causes got voted into law last week. Some of my favorites:

Utah and Nebraska voted to remove pro-slavery provisions from their state constitutions
Rhode Island officially dropped the "Plantations" addendum to their name
Mississippi switched to a new state flag with no Confederate imagery
Colorado joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, so now the signatories have a combined 194 electoral votes, and need 74 more

And Puerto Rico cast their third non-binding referendum in favor of statehood. Which a Republican-controlled Senate will be happy to keep ignoring forever...but, thanks to Georgia...

...we might have a shot at getting back the Senate??

One person retired at an awkward time, so both GA senate seats are up for re-election this year. And both of them went into runoffs, to be held January 5, with one Democrat in the running for each.

Some of the groups that flipped the GA presidential race, who could use your support over the next 2 months:

Warnock for Georgia and Ossof for Senate - the campaigns of our two GA senate candidates
Fair Fight - Stacey Abrams' group for registering and mobilizing voters in GA
The New Georgia Project - more GA voter registration and encouragement
Organization for Human Rights and Democracy - grassroots support for issues centered on working-class POC (found through their Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund, specifically supporting POC impacted by COVID-19)

And while I'm at it, some groups that have been making those differences outside Georgia:

Lancaster Stands Up - mobilizing voters and supporting progressive candidates in PA
Southerners On New Ground - building community and supporting intersectional issues centered on LGBTQ people in the South
Four Directions - registering and supporting Native people, including in NV and AZ
Rural Organizing Project - LGBTQ rights, anti-racism, justice for immigrants, and more in OR
Arena - supporting the infrastructure and talent needed to run progressive candidates across the US
WisDems - the Democratic Party in Wisconsin

Gonna spend the rest of 2020 contributing to as many of these as possible. Got recommendations for other swing-state groups to support? Drop some links in the comments.

"This visualization documents cases of police brutality or misconduct during the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. This is not comprehensive — these are only a few hundred cases Tweeted by individuals and compiled by Greg Doucette."

Showing Up For Racial Justice, "part of a multi-racial movement is to undermine white support for white supremacy and to help build a racially-just society."

#8CantWait: "Data proves that together these eight policies can decrease police violence by 72%." Look up your city, find out which ones it's missing, call your reps. It's a project by Campaign Zero, an organization led by black activists that's been analyzing police departments and pushing for data-driven reform since 2015.

March 2016: "Americans are afraid of many threats to their lives – serial killers, crazed gunmen, gang bangers, and above all terrorists – but these threats are surprisingly unlikely. Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police."

And before diving into all the heavier articles from this month, here's a light one:

June 2: "Eight Viacom networks went off the air for eight minutes and 46 seconds on Monday night in a tribute to George Floyd [...] Nickelodeon took a more kid-friendly approach to the social justice campaign, using an orange background (the network’s signature shade) with the message: “Nickelodeon is going off the air for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in support of justice, equality, and human rights.”" (I keep seeing people summarize this as if Nick aired the horror-movie version. Nope, the kids' network aired a perfectly-appropriate kid-safe alternative.)

( Let my building burn, Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail. )

Since 2013, I've been adding to the "Justice for..." list of links in the sidebar of this blog.

A set of names, one article per person -- almost entirely black people who were killed by police, some people who were severely injured by police, some who were killed by other incidents of reckless violence. All of which got brushed off by a legal system that didn't think their lives mattered. (Sometimes it came back later and got around to giving them justice. Usually not.)

It's not comprehensive, and doesn't try to be. It's just the ones that I, personally, have read about, and want to be able to remember.

As of starting this post, it has 75 entries. (The sidebar only shows a random subset at a time -- you have to refresh for more.)

Here's some new additions.

"In February 1999, Diallo was returning to his building when four officers, dressed in plain clothes as part of the Street Crime Unit, approached him and fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times. The officers said they thought he had a gun, which later turned out to be his wallet, and that he fit the “general description” of a serial rapist." A civil suit was filed, and settled, but it looks like there were no criminal charges, ever. Justice for Amadou Diallo.

2012: "I must call the NYPD to task for the rapid public release of information regarding this victim, which may have taken place before notification of the shooting to her family. They should show greater care in the handling of a sensitive inquiry in its early stages, or at the least provide equity to the balance of facts being released; the record of the shooter, who reportedly has a number of outstanding civil rights complaints himself and carries an unfavorable reputation in the community, should be treated with the same level of consideration as the record of the deceased." Justice for Shantel Davis.

2016: "Danner discussed the need for more mental health training for police officers and described a deadly scenario with a cop that foreshadowed her final moments alive. 'We are all aware of the all too frequent news stories about the mentally ill who come up against law enforcement instead of mental health professionals and end up dead,' she wrote." Justice for Deborah Danner.

2019 (fallout of a 2016 shooting): "A jury found a gunshot fired by Ofc. Royce Ruby that killed Gaines and injured her then 5-year-old son, Kodi Gaines, was not reasonable. Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Mickey Norman dismissed the family's claim, writing in an opinion that Ruby was entitled to qualified immunity." Justice for Korryn Gaines. And for Kodi Gaines.

2019: "'He absolutely knew that Taser could not be fired again without her changing the cartridge,' Turner’s family’s attorney, Ben Crump, told Houston Public Media. 'And he did not have to use deadly force while she was laying on her back.'" Justice for Pamela Turner.

May 21: "The FBI has opened an investigation into the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, an EMT who was killed after officers forced their way inside her home." Justice for Breonna Taylor.

June 1: "He fed the police and didn't charge them nothing. My son was a good son. All he did on that barbecue corner is try to make a dollar for himself and his family. And they come along and they killed my son." Justice for David McAtee.

June 4: "Justin Howell, a 20-year-old political science student at Texas State, was critically injured after being shot with a bean bag round by a police officer during a protest in Austin on May 31. Howell is currently hospitalized and in critical condition after suffering a fractured skull as well as brain damage." Justice for Justin Howell.

June 5 (update on an April death): "[British Transport Police] said "there was insufficient evidence to support a prosecution based upon the allegation that the man spat deliberately on [railway worker] Mrs Mujinga or said that he had the virus'." Meanwhile, people who spit on cops get jailed, even when the officers don't die of COVID-19 a few weeks later. Justice for Belly Mujinga.

One of my relatives just shared a post that went "Trump had to be elected so we could really understand just how bad things were" and I wish I could throw it against a wall.

Things have been bad forever! All you had to do was pay attention and you would've understood that already! The (latest wave of) deaths are of real people with their own stories and identities and full complete lives, they're not some background plot device that only existed to advance your moral development!

...I've also seen people going "why can't all those rich celebrities and one-percenters who donated millions of dollars to Notre Dame send some of their money to ordinary people working for racial justice," and I just want you all to know...you're giving them too much credit. Millions of dollars were not actually donated to Notre Dame. The people who made the headline-grabbing pledges were "all press release and no cheque."

A further mix of links, some from the past few weeks, others from the past few years:

May 18: "'Threatening to shoot out the power at the hospital, to open the doors and demanding all the keys to the ambulances,'...Police were able to get control of McFadden, who faces four felonies, including transporting a loaded firearm in a vehicle and three resisting an officer charges....McFadden has been arraigned but was released from with the condition that he check into a hospital for treatment." This gun-toting, hospital-threatening, cop-fighting guy is white. Obviously.

May 2017: "'I don't believe it was a suicide,' the senior Crawford told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which first reported the death on Friday morning. It's not the first time a notable Ferguson protester has died from gunfire."

May 22 (NYT): an insider portrait of the crushing headache of trying to get Trump to pay attention at White House intelligence briefings. "...getting Mr. Trump to remember information, even if he seems to be listening, can be all but impossible, especially if it runs counter to his worldview. [...] Mr. Trump has also shown interest in foreign leaders, particularly autocrats like President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and Ms. Sanner mentions them to draw in the president on topics that he might otherwise tune out. While Mr. Trump does not appear to read the intelligence reports he is given, he will examine graphs, charts and tables. Satellite pictures clearly interest him, too: He tweeted one from his intelligence brief, revealing the capabilities of some of the government’s most classified spy assets."

August 2019: "It is not completely clear where the image Trump shared came from. Security experts told NPR that, given the image’s angle and the time at which it was taken, it could have been taken by the USA-224 American spy satellite. Other experts believe the image actually came from a military drone. Either way, such images are usually kept classified in order to occlude US intelligence gathering methods and capabilities."

May 28: "Democrats in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives on Thursday accused Republicans of keeping a lawmaker’s positive coronavirus test a secret to avoid political embarrassment, even at the risk of exposing their Democratic colleagues." Andrew Lewis has been vocally against shutdowns and health measures, but he did tell his Republican colleagues about his positive test, so they could quarantine and take precautions. He just...conveniently forgot to tell his political rivals.

October 2019: "'It is noteworthy and of concern that Hernandez was immunocompromised and ill' when ICE officers took custody of her and transferred her to two detention cites before arriving at Cibola, the report said, 'and by the time she reached CCCC, was so ill that a physician ordered her immediate transport to the emergency room.' Still, the detainee death review said there were no deficiencies in ICE Performance-Based National Detention Standards." And then they conveniently deleted the footage.

Finally managed to give blood on Sunday, after a few misfires earlier in the month. (For the first time, my pulse kept coming in high. This round I cut all caffeine for a week, recorded my own pulse a couple times a day to figure out the best strategy, and set the appointment for shortly after I woke up. Success!)

Other nice/heartwarming things:

April 14: "“I re-read ‘So Much Cooking,’” one of my friends said on social media, tagging me, “and realized I hadn’t stocked up coffee. Now I have. So, thanks.” Someone else bought two bottles of chocolate syrup, crediting my story. Another person bought themselves birthday cake ingredients. “I’m shopping based on what Natalie would want,” someone else told me."

May 16: "Buildings around Europe and beyond were lit up for Eurovision: Europe Shine A Light. Shine A Light was played by the Rotterdam Philharmonic, from home." Video that'll hit you right in the heart.

May 17: "A Roman Catholic priest in the Detroit area has taken aim at his parishioners in a bid to maintain social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, using a squirt gun to shoot holy water."

In less-heartwarming news, public-health data in the US is being skewed by people with a financial interest in reopening things, safety be damned. A few examples:

May 18, Florida: The data architect of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard: "As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it."

May 18, Georgia: "But on closer inspection, the dates on the chart showed a curious ordering: April 30 was followed by May 4; May 5 was followed by May 2, which was followed by May 7 — which in turn was followed by April 26. The dates had been re-sorted to create the illusion of a decline. The five counties were likewise re-sorted on each day to enhance the illusion."

May 21, the whole US, via the CDC: "The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same."

It's the one from Johns Hopkins University, for anyone who wants a good site to check in with. There's also good detailed graphs -- scroll down for links to all the options -- on this page by Worldometers.org. Other options: Links to a variety of COVID-19 maps & visuals.

Happy/reassuring/uplifting links:

Lockdown Omens, written by GNeil and performed by Sheen and Tennant -- in which Crowley isn't setting a bad example and Aziraphale is catching up on his reading.

April 22: What masks don't help with, what they're very good at, and why it makes a difference if you wear them: a lengthy and detailed breakdown.

May 4: "Staff working in a care home in France have kept their residents safe by locking down with them for 47 days and nights to wait out the coronavirus storm." And it worked -- not one of them died.

All the other virus links:

April 10: "A doctor who has been testing the homeless in downtown Miami for COVID-19, the deadly infection associated with the coronavirus, said he was handcuffed by police outside his Miami home Friday morning — for no reason that he can discern — while he was placing old boxes on the curbside for pickup."

April 24: Virus sweeps through Bible Belt evangelicals who won't stay home. "Bishop Gerald Glenn, founder and leader since 1995 of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Virginia, was the first black chaplain of the town's police. He had vowed to continue preaching 'unless I'm in jail or the hospital' before his death from coronavirus earlier this month."

April 28: "These numbers are preliminary because death certificates take time to be processed and collected, [...] In Connecticut, for example, where reported coronavirus deaths are high, the C.D.C. statistics include zero reported deaths from any cause since Feb. 1, because of reporting lags." And even with that -- the death counts are way up in places that are (a) hard-hit and (b) have numbers starting to come in. Like 120% of normal in MA, and 325% of normal in NYC.

May 7: "It’s not that the bathroom poses a more serious coronavirus risk than anything else you’re doing. (Workplace consultants believe the bottleneck on the return to downtown offices will be elevators.) But it does serve as a reminder that what we’re really talking about, when we talk about density as a factor in disease transmission, is particular spaces that a number of people have to share."

May 8: "I ended up in an isolation room in the antechamber of the intensive care department. You’re tired, so you’re resigned to your fate. You completely surrender to the nursing staff. You live in a routine from syringe to infusion and you hope you make it. I am usually quite proactive in the way I operate, but here I was 100% patient." A virologist's infection story.

May 9 (NYT): "Dr. Bright was largely sidelined by personal disputes with Dr. Kadlec and his aides, some of which long predated the coronavirus, the documents suggest. By the time the pandemic arrived in force, the relationship between them had become toxic, with Dr. Bright increasingly left out of key decisions. His ideas about battling the threat 'were met with skepticism,' the complaint says, 'and were clearly not welcome.'" Hey look, it's the scientist from the first act of Every Disaster Movie Ever.

May 10: "People disregarded a rule to order an hour before pickup and demanded their ice cream anyway, he wrote on [the Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour's' Facebook page. Customers took out their anger at delays on overwhelmed employees, including a teenage girl who quit, he said."

Ordered some art supplies online a few days ago, and ever since then I've had this weird anxious fixation on the package-tracking page. I guess it's being transposed from feelings about the stats on the COVID-tracking page?

Urgh. I just hope the arrival tricks my subconscious into thinking there's been a globally-significant drop in Things To Be Anxious About.

Anyway, links about gun violence and/or police brutality have still been piling up while I've been posting all-pandemic links, so here's some of those.

( Links behind the cut )

This CBS New York article lays out some specific criteria for Governor Cuomo starting to lift New York's lockdowns and relax its stay-at-home orders. In short:

Hospitalizations have been on the decline for 14 days

At least 30% of hospital beds and ICU beds available

Ready to do contact tracing, with 30 tracers per 100,000 people

Positive tests are on the decline even when a lot of testing (it doesn't say exactly how much) is being done

Each individual business that wants to reopen must present a plan to keep its workers safe, and industries with lower contact risks will reopen first

Different parts of the country are in all different places pandemic-wise, so you'd have to hold each state or city up to that list individually and see how it compares. Take this article about Texas' plans to enter the first stage of reopening on May 1:

Hospitalizations have "held steady" (for 17 days? It isn't clear)

Hospitals aren't filled to capacity (doesn't say how close they are)

Ready to do contact tracing, but even with the number of tracers they plan to add, it's only about 7 tracers per 100,000 people

Infection rate "has been on the decline for the past 17 days" (doesn't say how much testing there is)

First stage of reopening includes "restaurants, retail stores, movie theaters...museums and libraries", apparently all of them, limited to 25% capacity. State-licensed healthcare professionals, too, "can reopen offices with precautions." Childcare and summer camps are still closed; next phase of reopening can only begin after "two weeks of data to confirm no flare-up of Covid-19."

So...not as reckless as they could be, but not as cautious and well-prepared as you might hope for, either?

And the order of business reopening seems...odd. For another comparison, Ohio is doing non-urgent medical services first, followed quickly by manufacturing and construction; consumer retail will be held off for 2 weeks, presumably more if infections flare back up; and restaurants are being saved for even later. Libraries in particular are designing their own reopening timeline, where the first stage involves staff providing limited on-site services (e.g. reference calls, interlibrary loan, shelving returns from the drop box) without being open to the public at all.

Ugh. I really hope we can thread this needle, but it's not going to be easy.

Anyway, have some links. (I pulled out the good-for-the-soul ones and saved them for the end.)

[caption id="attachment_5350" align="aligncenter" width="714"]

Officials on the Council to Reopen Crystal Tokyo[/caption]

( so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? )

March 24: "According to the current research, the virus that causes COVID-19 has a low “error rate,” meaning that its pace of mutation remains slow despite its rapid spread. Because it remains more or less stable as it travels through hundreds of thousands of patients, researchers state that it is less likely to become more dangerous (or less) as it spreads."

March 26: "Landon Spradlin, a Virginia pastor who claimed the “mass hysteria” around the coronavirus pandemic was part of a media plot against Trump, has died from the virus."

March 28 (NYT): "In a matter of days, [New York] city’s 911 system has been overwhelmed by calls for medical distress apparently related to the virus. Typically, the system sees about 4,000 Emergency Medical Services calls a day. On [March 27], dispatchers took more than 7,000 calls — a volume not seen since the Sept. 11 attacks. The record for amount of calls in a day was broken three times in the last week."

March 30: "General Electric factory workers launched two separate protests demanding that the company convert its jet engine factories to make ventilators. At GE's Lynn, Massachusetts aviation facility, workers held a silent protest, standing six feet apart. Union members at the company’s Boston headquarters also marched six feet apart, calling on the company to use its factories to help the country close its ventilator shortage amid the coronavirus pandemic."

April 1: "It wasn’t government spending the Tea Party opposed, it was government spending on “losers,” imposed by the party that the “losers” had brought to power. That’s why a less-than-$1 trillion bill meant to stave off a depression garnered enough outrage from those on the right to start a movement, while a piece of legislation more than twice its size prompts celebration by those same people. The CARES Act, the largest spending bill in American history, sparked no Tea Party rebellions, no protesters in tricorne hats, no cries of “take our country back,” and no invocations of “Second Amendment remedies.” The illegitimacy of Democratic Party governance, not the size of the deficit, the reach of the federal government, or the fact of economic stimulus itself, was the problem."

April 2: "The new policy states that the [period of not being eligible to donate blood] for MSM will change from 12 months to 3 months. These guidelines also apply to female donors who would have been deferred for having a sex with a man who has sex with men, as well as individuals who have recently received a tattoo or piercing. The FDA has also revised their policy in regards to people who engage in commercial sex work (CSW) and injection drug use (IDU), changing their indefinite deferrals to 3-month deferrals." ...So now we know what it takes to make that happen, huh.

April 4 (NYT): "As Dr. Rosenberg walked down the corridor,

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Earlier this afternoon...a breakthrough.

I keep the fluff's brush on the couch, so when he comes close enough I can hold it out for him to sniff. Sometimes even get away with a light stroke -- not enough to actually reach any tangles, all it achieves is reassuring him that it's Not Dangerous -- before he darts away.

So he hops down from the windowsill, and I offer the brush for the usual investigation, and...

For a solid five minutes he just rolled around under the brush, twisting so I could get different angles, head butting up against my arm. There was, briefly but unmistakably, purring.

At first I was sure he'd lose his nerve if I reached for the phone to take any pictures. Then I risked it. He stuck around. I snapped these adorable shots. He kept it up.

It has been almost exactly 51 week since I brought him home. Just shy of a solid year. Six months ago, when people asked if he was letting me pet him yet, I told them it would be at least another six months -- well, look at him now.

I got a fair amount of loose fur out of his coat. Even managed to do a bit of bare-handed skritching, long enough for me to confirm that he is Very Soft, before I got a light swat to let me know he was Done. (He sat around on the couch with me for a while afterward, though, so it wasn't like he was mad about it.)

Wonder how long it'll take before he comes back for more. I guess we'll find out. Bet it won't be as long as 51 weeks this time, though.

...the rest of this is COVID-19 news links, ordered by date.

(So, a timeline of what it's like to live through the point in every disaster movie where the experts say "we've scienced up some great preventative measures here, but please, you have to do them Right Now or it'll be too late.")

March 11: "From a woman whose symptoms started with a fever, to a man who said he was an inch from death, coronavirus survivors have begun speaking out about the worldwide pandemic."

March 18: "Gen. Dave Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, confirmed that military cargo planes were moving coronavirus testing kits, but did not give specific details during a Wednesday briefing at the Pentagon. The general acknowledged that 'we’ve just made a pretty significant movement into Memphis.'" ...From Italy. You know, they need those in Italy.

March 22: "People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn't a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when." Interview with Dr. Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox.

March 23: "Product distributed by Diamond [i.e. comics, especially floppy single issues, to local comic shops] and slated for an on-sale date of April 1st or later will not be shipped to retailers until further notice."

March 24: "This particular group of Chicago workers was fed up with [Amazon] failing to provide paid time off or vacation it promised to part-time workers. They organized; Amazon resisted -- and at last, the coronavirus acted as tiebreaker." Good for them.

March 24 again: "'We saw his press conference. It was on a lot, actually,' she said. 'Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure.' [...] They mixed a small amount of the substance with liquid to drink. Within 20 minutes, both fell ill. Her husband could not be revived in hospital and she remains in critical care." It's been obvious for years that Trump is a compulsive liar, and everyone who's still ignoring that gets horrifically damaged by it eventually, but this must be some kind of record for the fastest trajectory from "trusting something he said" to "horrible consequences."

March 25: "A 52-year-old man [from Durban, South Africa] who allegedly tested positive for Covid-19 but went back to work, has been arrested for attempted murder. " Sounds right. If a country has specific bioterrorism laws, time to start charging people under those, too.

Various dates, on each individual photo: Reuters slideshow of the temporary hospitals and medical facilities being hastily set up around the world. It is tragic that we need these, but amazing to see the competence and dedication that's getting them up.

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humanist + humorist

THOR'S INSPIRATIONAL SPEECHES ARE NOT ADMISSIBLE IN COURT

Entries tagged with politics

"People will reject science right until the second they need everything I have to keep them alive"

I put all the nice links in the back half of the post (tech, grifting, COVID, economic boosts, etc)

No to Bad Things

Respiration in the ’30s, virus images in the ’60s, ambulances in the ’70s, vaccines in the now

Virology and medical history links

Virology and medical present-day links

a year's worth of bad things, political warnings, and lingering Trump links

Mostly Trump and COVID, but if you skip to the end there's a cute dog story

It's probably going to keep turning out that this attack was worse than we knew

Updates from our violent but still-mostly-stupid coup

Dispatches from our mid-pandemic stupid coup

If he can't stay, he's damn well gonna try to burn it all down before he goes

WE DID IT (what's next?)

Police violence & protest links

Adding to the justice blogroll

This is nothing new

Egg replacer, international light shows, holy squirt guns, and...data malpractice

When the globe hits 300K deaths, I'm closing this COVID-19 Dashboard tab

Gun violence links that turn into pandemic links

Health guidelines for reopening, and other April COVID links

Hospitals, politics, viral mutations, blood donations

A monumental Fluffdate before the solemn link roundup

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