This is what happens when a narcissist runs a crisis
Jennifer Senior at the New York Times:
Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats….
Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity….
Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can’t bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” During Friday’s news conference, he added the tests “we inherited were “broken, were obsolete,” when this form of coronavirus didn’t even exist under his predecessor.
This sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: “It was like that when I got here.”
White House creates ‘Team Telecom’ to probe whether foreign telcos should be allowed near US networks [Tom Claburn/The Register]
New Jersey seeks COBOL programmers to fix unemployment system: “… many of the state’s systems use older mainframes, and those systems are now seeing record demand for services as the coronavirus outbreak disrupts the economy.” [Kif Leswing/CNBC]
Cato Networks raises $77 million for cloud security platform that protects remote workforces
Cato Networks, which provides SD-WAN and other Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) connectivity, raises $77M additional funding, on top of $55M last year for a total of more than $200M. [Chris O’Brien/VentureBeat]
Cato securely connects remote workers and branch offices, which is of course kind of a big deal right now.
I’ve been doing a little work for Cato this year.
Cambridge Analytica and other abusers killed the open, collaborative, API-driven Web 2.0. “It’s amazing, in hindsight, just how naively open everything was back then.”
This Video Has 3,627,803 Views - YouTube
A delightful video that takes a surprisingly philosophical and optimistic turn.
Photos of a computer shop that’s been locked since 2001, when the store owner, who also owned the strip mall it sits in, went bankrupt. [Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic]
Gateway 2000 PCs, LCD displays, and big beige CPUs with big fans!
LA crime drops 23% during the pandemic, including an 11% drop in family violence crime, even though family tensions often rise during crises. [Madeline Holcombe/CNN]
This proves once again that in an emergency your neighbors will help you; it’s the elites you have to watch out for, notes Cory Doctorow.
The stimulus bill seems big – $2 trillion – but it’s just one week of median income for small businesses and families.
Cory Doctorow: “The crisis is already four times longer than that, depending on which city you live in. The end is not in sight.”
Umair Haque: “Coronavirus is an extinction level event for modern economies.” We are living through the complete collapse of the US economy. This is happening now, will play out over the summer and will take generations to recover.
The solution for Congress is to just spend money to keep the economy going – or, more precisely, put the economy in suspended animation. Whatever it takes. Fund businesses to pay employee salaries and meet other essential expenses while the employees stay home, so when the crisis passes the businesses can just reopen their doors, call the employees back in and get back to work.
Only essential employees should be working now, and the government should spend whatever it takes to pay them and be sure they have the best protection we can provide.
Whatever it takes. $2 trillion is inadequate. A thousand trillion is a quadrillion. A thousand times that is a quintillion. If that’s what it takes, so be it.
After a church pastor in California announced he would defy shelter in place orders and hold services, his landlord, the Bethel Open Bible Church, changed the locks. [Lisa Fernandez/KTUTV] Via Cory Doctorow
Reminds me that I’ve been looking for years for a word other than “Christian” to describe the folks like those idiot pastors who are keeping their churches open. I have Christian friends; they are lovely, SANE people.
I’ve come up with “Fox News Christians” but I don’t really care for that either.
New video technique lets you replace the background on videos without any greenscreen required.
Via Cory Doctorow who says it “really puts Zoom’s background switching in the shade."
My MacBook Pro processor is too weak to use Zoom’s background switching, so I was forced to clean out my office instead. Or at least clean out the part of my office visible from the webcam!
Why is Trump touting hydroxychloroquine? Follow the money
Trump and his cronies are investors in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine. Trump has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a possible coronavirus cure, despite lack of scientific evidence, and also despite significant risks to people who take it, and despite its being needed for legitimate, proven medical uses, such as treating lupus.
Peter Baker, Katie Rogers, David Enrich and Maggie Haberman report at The New York Times: Trump’s Aggressive Advocacy of Malaria Drug for Treating Coronavirus Divides Medical Community
Sanofi’s largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the investment company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans including Trump.
Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. Mr. Ross said in a statement Monday that he “was not aware that Invesco has any investments in companies producing” the drug, “nor do I have any involvement in the decision to explore this as a treatment.”
As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi….
Several generic drugmakers are gearing up to produce hydroxychloroquine pills, including Amneal Pharmaceuticals, whose co-founder Chirag Patel is a member of Trump National Golf Course Bedminster in New Jersey and has golfed with Mr. Trump at least twice since he became president, according to a person who saw them.
Andrew Cuomo is also touting the drug.
Dr. Daniel H. Sterman, the critical care director at NYU Langone Health, said doctors there are using hydroxychloroquine, but data about its effectiveness remained “weak and unsubstantiated” pending the study. “We do not know whether our patients are benefiting from hydroxychloroquine treatment at the present time,” he said.
On the other hand, many healthcare providers are advising use of the drug based on good preliminary results.
Dr. Roy M. Gulick, the chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, said hydroxychloroquine was given on a case-by-case basis. “We explain the pros and cons and explain that we don’t know if it works or not,” he said.
Doctors at Northwell Health and Mount Sinai Health System are using it as well. At the Mount Sinai South Nassau County branch on Long Island, doctors have employed a regimen of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin “pretty much since day one” with mixed results, said Dr. Adhi Sharma, its chief medical officer.
“We’ve been throwing the kitchen sink at these patients,” he said. “I can’t tell whether someone got better on their own or because of the medication.”
Most New York coronavirus deaths were among men and 86% were people with underlying illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes. [Joseph Spector/Rockland/Westchester Journal News/USAToday]
Irony: Calling someone stupid, naive or malicious for failing to anticipate a leak in a speech that you failed to anticipate leaking.
Like a good kleptocrat, Modly echoes the boss’s party line: It’s all the media and China’s fault. Like the way the media and China laid off the pandemic response team, took numerous golf breaks and campaign rallies while the pandemic spread, ignored warnings from the Obama White House, Department of Defense and other sources that a pandemic was imminent and said the seriousness of the pandemic is a Democratic Party hoax.
Why not the best? Red Hat vet Paul Cormier takes over as CEO
Red Hat’s new CEO and president has driven the company’s enterprise leadership for 20 years.
[Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols/ZDnet]
Jo Walton:
Cosy catastrophes are science fiction novels in which some bizarre calamity occurs that wipes out a large percentage of the population, but the protagonists survive and even thrive in the new world that follows. They are related to but distinct from the disaster novel where some relatively realistic disaster wipes out a large percentage of the population and the protagonists also have a horrible time. The name was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, and used by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by analogy to the cosy mystery, in which people die violently but there’s always tea and crumpets.
Cosy catastrophes were hugely popular after World War II in Britain, among people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading science fiction. They were a reaction (says Walton) to social programs that made life vastly better for working people, but somewhat less comfortable for the middle class, who could no longer afford servants, vacations to France, etc.
The social contract had been rewritten, and the richer really did suffer a little. I want to say “poor dears,” but I really do feel for them. Britain used to be a country with sharp class differences—how you spoke and your parents’ jobs affected your healthcare, your education, your employment opportunities. It had an empire it exploited to support its own standard of living. The situation of the thirties was horribly unfair and couldn’t have been allowed to go on, and democracy defeated it, but it wasn’t the fault of individuals. Britain was becoming a fairer society, with equal opportunities for everyone, and some people did suffer for it. They couldn’t have their foreign holidays and servants and way of life, because their way of life exploited other people. They had never given the working classes the respect due to human beings, and now they had to, and it really was hard for them. You can’t really blame them for wishing all those inconvenient people would…all be swallowed up by a volcano, or stung to death by triffids.
[Tor.com]
Bug bounty platforms buy researcher silence, violate labor laws, critics say
Bug bounty platforms were designed to provide support for researchers ethically disclosing security flaws, but instead they serve as slush funds for hush money to help businesses keep their security problems quiet
And the platforms may also violate labor law by exploiting researchers.
[J.M. Porup/CSO]
I have long thought that the two greatest threats the United States face are hyperpartisanship and the Republican Party.
It’s not lost on me that these two beliefs are contradictory.
A Recipe for Caesar [Common Sense With Dan Carlin] Either we find our way out of the current political tit for tat cycle, or we follow it to his logical conclusion: a Caesar
Frontier says insufficient fiber investment led to bankruptcy [Mike Robuck/FierceTelecom]