#ayyy Via
Yelp launched GoFundMe campaigns for small businesses without their permission, which is making the small business owners angry.
Fearsome Flush - Real Ghostbusters (Kenner) Via
Steve Ditko. Via
Opinion - The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response
Katherine Stewart at The New York Times: At a time when responsible people are practicing social distancing — if they can — the Religious Right is filling church pews and claiming coronavirus is a liberal conspiracy to remove Trump from office after the Mueller investigation and impeachment failed.
‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide
Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu writing at the New York Times:
… a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.
I have developed my own modification to the standard hand-washing technique you’ve seen on YouTube and in GIFs, which I believe will be beneficial (although I am not a medical professional):
In addition to turning off the faucets with the towel, to avoid contamination, also use the towel to open the bathroom door and turn out the lights. This further avoids touching contaminated surfaces.
Then go out in the living room and let the dog lick your hand.
Nurses Share Coronavirus Stories Anonymously in an Online Document - Edmund Lee - The New York Times
More than 1,200 health care workers have used a private online document to share their stories of fighting the coronavirus pandemic on the front lines.
In their accounts, they say the outbreak has turned American hospitals into “war zones.” They talk about being scared to go to work and anxious that they will become infected. They describe managers who seem to not care about their plight.
“But we show up and have to keep showing up,” one nurse wrote, “and we have to test ourselves.”
The document was created on March 19 by Sonja Schwartzbach, a nurse in New Jersey who is studying as a doctoral student. She said she started compiling the accounts after she determined that hospital conditions were “far worse” than most people realized and that her fellow health care workers needed a place to share what they were seeing.
One month ago today I took Minnie in to the vet for her bordatella and heartworm test.
Two years ago today I was on a train to LA for a conference.
Three years ago today one of my oldest friends was in town for a conference, and so he and another of my oldest friends got together for dinner.
So much activity involving being around people, at less than a 6' distance!
Coronavirus changes everything about the 2020 election. Trump is now the favorite to win. All he has to do is not fuck up egregiously.
People will continue to support Trump even in the face of normal incompetence from him – it will take outrageous incompetence to undercut Trump’s support.
On the other hand, outrageous incompetence is something that Trump regularly does. This is a man who went out bankrupt – repeatedly – running casinos, and whom no legitimate bank would do business with.
Cory Doctorow: San Francisco’s DNA Lounge is delivering cocktails in mason jars. A mason jar is three servings – or one if you really want to party like it’s 1999.
Cory Doctorow: “Reasonable covid food-safety advice: Sanitize your hands and your cart, practice social distancing, and…you’re done.”
This pretty much matches what I’ve read on Consumer Reports, and what I did when I went out grocery shopping Tuesday.
Also, I’m saving up grocery shopping for big runs. Normally, when I run out of something, I go out and get it. However, I’m running out of apples now and I’ll just do without apples a few days until I have a lot of stuff to buy.
Cory Doctorow: Right-wing extremists who denounce their opponents' incivility are using the same arguments as advocates of slavery in the antebellum US.
Cory Doctorow: Real-estate plutocrats are making a killing on the Senate stimulus. And guess what business Trump is in?
Cory Doctorow: [The US is now the epicenter of the pandemic] a: “Trump wants the country to go back to work by Easter, because in his version of the Trolley Problem, the most important thing is saving the trolley.”
In cruel irony, the bulk of the people who die will be older Americans – the Trump and Fox news demographic, Cory notes.
But so many people will die because of this. Old people. Young people. People with disabilities. People who just had very bad luck. Kids.
And that’s before you get to all the people who have car wrecks or heart attacks or slip-and-falls and can’t get treatment in overloaded hospitals.
When Hoover fucked up by giving in to plutes and crashed the economy, he got tent cities, or “Hoovervilles.”
Trump’s fuckup will end with mass graves. Trump Mausoleums? Mar-a-Plague-Pits?
We will get through this. But Trump will have murdered so many of us before it’s over.
Andrew Sullivan uses his memories of the AIDS epidemic to cast light on coronavirus and society.
It’s quite possible that by the end of all this, almost every American will know of someone who has died. A relative, a friend, an old high-school classmate … the names will pop up and migrate through Facebook as the weeks go by, and in a year’s time, Facebook will duly remind you of the grief or shock you experienced. The names of the sick will appear to be randomly selected — the ones you expected and the ones you really didn’t, the famous and the obscure, the vile and the virtuous. And you will feel the same pang of shock each time someone you know turns out to have fallen ill.
You’ll wake up each morning and check to see if you have a persistent cough, or a headache, or a tightness in the lungs. This is plague living: witnessing the sickness and death of others, knowing that you too could be next, even as you feel fine. The distancing things we reflexively do — “oh, well, he was a smoker”; “she was diabetic, you know”; “they were in Italy in February” — become a little bit harder as time goes by, and the numbers mount, and the randomness of it all sinks in. No, this is not under control. And no, we are not in control. Because we never are.
And this will change us. It must. All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is that at some point they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be then.
I know that I was a different man at the end of the plague of AIDS than I was at the beginning,
Sullivan says: The epidemic could bring out the best in us, and we could create a more fair and humane society. Or it could bring out our worst, and make us more socially isolated, xenophobic, and authoritarian.
I suspect that those who think COVID-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s reelection prospects are being, as usual, too optimistic. National crises, even when handled at this level of incompetence and deceit, can, over time, galvanize public support for a national leader. As Trump instinctually finds a way to identify the virus as “foreign,” he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses, and in a time of fear, offer the balm of certainty to his cult and beyond. It’s the final bonding: blind support for the leader even at the risk of your own sickness and death. And in emergencies, quibbling, persistent political opposition is always on the defense, and often unpopular. It requires pointing out bad news in desperate times; and that, though essential, is rarely popular.
Watching Fox News operate in real time in ways Orwell described so brilliantly in Nineteen Eighty-Four — compare “We had always been at war with Eastasia” with “I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” — you’d be a fool not to see the potential for the Republican right to use this plague for whatever end they want. If Trump moves to the left of the Democrats in handing out big non-means-tested cash payments, and provides a stimulus far bigger than Obama’s, no Republican will cavil. And since no sane person wants the war on COVID-19 to fail, we will have to wish that the president succeed. Pulling this off as an opposition party, while winning back the White House, will require a political deftness I don’t exactly see in abundance among today’s Democrats.
On the other hand, even further incompetence or failure on Trump’s part could finally, maybe, puncture the cult, and deliver the White House to Biden and the Congress to the Democrats. And the huge sums now being proposed by even the GOP to shore up the economy and the stock market at a time of massive debt, as well as the stark failures of our public-health planning, could make an activist government agenda much more politically palatable to Americans.