Monday Reads: Plagues, Isolation, Willful Incompetence
Posted: April 13, 2020 Filed under: morning reads 28 Comments
Bubonic plague Doctor
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Trump spent a lot of time troll tweeting Dr Fauci yesterday. Every one is fearful enough without him suggesting he wants to fire one of the few people in that administration any one believes! He’ll likely get an itchier tweeter finger given the incredible amount of news print today and yesterday about how exactly incompetent he’s been at tackling this pandemic.
What started this discussion is this very long, very well vetted, very well written NYT article: “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus. An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.”
Like any one couldn’t have seen this coming given Trump couldn’t even make a casino profitable.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.
What follows is a long, detailed list of inactions and actions basically motivated by nothing but Trump’s “great I am”. The story is also a character study of a terrifically flawed man.
The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.
But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
The original PPE of the Plague Doctors
The article continues like this. It’s long list of point by hapless point. More articles are following in that spirit like this one from The Rolling Stone and Andy Kroll: “‘Absolute Clusterf–k’: Inside the Denial and Dysfunction of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. Missed warnings, conflicting messages, and broken promises — how the White House fumbled its response to the worst pandemic in a century.”
If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020. The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.
There was confusion in the response from the start. In January, Trump picked HHS Secretary Alex Azar II, the former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, to lead his new Coronavirus Task Force. The problem was, there was already a senior official at HHS whose job was coordinating the federal government’s response to a nationwide pandemic, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec.
In late February, after it was clear that the virus had spread widely throughout the U.S., Trump reshuffled his task force. He replaced Azar with Vice President Mike Pence as the leader of the task force, and added Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department’s global AIDS director and an infectious-disease expert, who joined Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as the group’s scientific experts. But Trump also appointed administration loyalists like right-wing extremist Ken Cuccinelli and Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act.
Like so many things in Trumpland, the work of the task force has gotten mired in petty politics and internal turf wars. A “shadow” task force emerged, led by Jared Kushner. Officially, Kushner’s team of McKinsey consultants, financiers, and old buddies from his New York business days was meant to coordinate collaboration between the government and the private sector. But it soon devolved into a typical Trump boondoggle. A company Kushner had once invested in, Oscar Health, was tapped to build a government website that would speed up testing (the site was later scrapped). Kushner turned to his brother Josh’s father-in-law, Kurt Kloss, who was a doctor, for recommendations on how to deal with the crisis. That led to Kloss — the father of supermodel Karlie Kloss, Josh’s wife — posting on a Facebook group for emergency-room doctors that he was looking for smart ideas and had a “direct channel to [the] person now in charge at [the] White House.”
Federal agencies that normally play a central role in disaster-response efforts have found themselves left out of the action. Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Congress that his agency wasn’t invited to join the president’s Coronavirus Task Force until the week of March 16th — six weeks after the task force was created.
Other federal employees involved in the response effort have had to respond to different and sometimes competing requests and directives from Pence’s task force and Kushner’s task force. “All of those roles and responsibilities should be relatively well-established,” says one public-health official who’s dealt with the White House. “I’ve heard that people in HHS will get direction from Kushner’s team that directly contradicts what they’re getting from the White House task force, and then trying to deconflict those becomes a huge problem.”
This is from Tim Mak of WBUR: A Month After Emergency Declaration, Trump’s Promises Largely Unfulfilled04:32
“We’ve been working very hard on this. We’ve made tremendous progress,” Trump said. “When you compare what we’ve done to other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible.”
But few of the promises made that day have come to pass.
NPR’s Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts.
In some cases, no action was taken at all.
Target did not formally partner with the federal government, for example.
And a lauded Google project turned out not to be led by Google at all, and then once launched was limited to a smattering of counties in California.
The remarks in the Rose Garden highlighted the Trump administration’s strategic approach: a preference for public-private partnerships. But as the White House defined what those private companies were going to do, in many cases it promised more than they could pull off.
“What became clear in the days and weeks or even in some cases the hours following that event was that they had significantly over-promised what the private sector was ready to do,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development.
He’s not learning anything or improving. That’s certain truth.
Indeed, this criticism may be part of why he’s “lashing out” at Fauci via NYT and Peter Baker. “The president retweeted a post calling for the government’s top infectious disease specialist to be fired after the doctor acknowledged that shutting down the country earlier could have saved lives.”
By the third week of February, advisers had drafted a list of measures they believed would soon be necessary, like school closures, sports and concert cancellations and stay-at-home orders, but the president did not embrace them until mid-March.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said on Sunday that earlier imposition of such policies would have made a difference.
“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” he said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down.”
Dr. Fauci’s comments, and the president’s pushback, come at a critical time as Mr. Trump wrestles with how fast to begin reopening the country. Public health experts like Dr. Fauci have urged caution about resuming normal life too soon for fear of instigating another wave of illness and death, while the president’s economic advisers and others are anxious to restart businesses at a time when more than 16 million Americans have been put out of work.
Dr. Fauci and the president have publicly disagreed on several issues, including how long it will take to develop a vaccine and the president’s aggressive promotion of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effects are unproven against the coronavirus. At a coronavirus task force briefing last week, Mr. Trump stopped Dr. Fauci from answering a question on the drug.
Dr. Fauci has become a celebrated figure among much of the public, which trusts him far more than Mr. Trump, according to polls. A Quinnipiac University survey last week found that 78 percent of Americans approved of Dr. Fauci’s handling of the crisis compared with 46 percent who approved of the president’s response. That has prompted resentment among other government officials, some of whom have privately criticized Dr. Fauci for playing to the media and not always sending consistent messages.
Mr. Trump spent much of Easter Sunday deflecting criticism and finding other targets. “If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat,’ then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China?” he wrote. “They said ‘early & not necessary.’ Corrupt Media!”
Didn’t he tell us that Easter was very special to him? Why wasn’t he coloring eggs with Barron or admiring Melania’s Easter Bonnet while dutifully watching all those TV sermons an schlocky passion movies?
One of the more interesting reads today is at the New Yorker and penned by Jane Mayer: ” How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief. The Senate Majority Leader’s refusal to rein in the President is looking riskier than ever.”
Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart conservative who has become a leading Trump critic, describes McConnell as “a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump.” Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. “Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,” Kristol said. McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories. McConnell has also brought along the Party’s financial backers. “There’s been too much focus on the base, and not enough on business leaders, big donors, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page,” Kristol said, adding, “The Trump base would be there anyway, but the élites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead McConnell has kept the trains running.”
McConnell and the President are not a natural pair. A former Trump Administration official, who has also worked in the Senate, observed, “It would be hard to find two people less alike in temperament in the political arena. With Trump, there’s rarely an unspoken thought. McConnell is the opposite—he’s constantly thinking but says as little as possible.” The former Administration official went on, “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”
And, the hits just keep on coming from this deluded, incompetent, and intellectually weak administration.
Take Care! Be safe!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Frankly Over It All Friday Reads: Whistling Past the Graveyard
Posted: April 10, 2020 Filed under: just because 21 Comments
Skeleton Lord mask, Tibet, Citipati
Good Day Sky Dancers!
So, today I’m going to explore a few things since I’m down one of my usual rabbit holes. First, the art work today shows human skull/skeleton symbolism which is a form of artwork found in many religious and indigenous folk practices. The best known skull art in this part of the world are the Mexican “Day of the Dead” skulls and icons like Sainte Muerte. There is also much of the iconography in gravestones. I’m sharing information and links on some of these from all over.
I’m also going to focus on literature, authors, and books to read. So, if you want to join me down my rabbit hole! Enjoy!!!
So, my first offering of information on skeleton imagery is from The City of Boston where there are some wonderful imagines and examples of skeletons on grave stones. There are many examples of “Death’s head” there that date back as early as 1630.
The second type of decorative motif used on Boston’s seventeenth-century gravemarkers was the “death’s head.” A death’s head, often with wings or crossed bones, or both, was a stylized skull. Some have speculated that winged skulls were intended to symbolize a combination of physical death and spiritual regeneration. It is important to note that Boston-based Puritans did not advocate using religious symbols, such as cherubs, Christ figures, or crosses in their meetinghouses, on church silver, or on their gravestones. Puritans were adamantly against attributing human form to spiritual beings such as God, angels, or spirits.
Death’s Head from a Boston Cemetary circa 1600s
So, here’s one of my favorite authors discussing the women in his many books and this is an interview with a feminist author who discusses the characters with him. Really, he’s a wonderful read if you haven’t had the pleasure. Lit Hub: “A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself. Mieko Kawakami Interviews the Author of Killing Commendatore.” This book was gifted me on my birthday by my sister. She’s turned into an avid reader and I frequently get her book club’s selections in the mail after they’re done with them. I love his 1Q84,
Mieko Kawakami: I’m curious about the character Mariye Akigawa from Killing Commendatore. I could tell how stressed she was by the way that her identity is so connected to her breasts. This hasn’t been the case for the young women in your other novels. I can easily relate to characters like Yuki in Dance Dance Dance, or May Kasahara in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
I’m thinking of the scene where May Kasahara talks about “the lump of death…round and squishy, like a softball.” Discussion of the protagonist aside, May has these incredibly powerful lines throughout the novel, about the murky distinction between hurting yourself and hurting others, or your own death and the death of others. The prose is fantastic. It captures the spirit of exactly what it’s like to be a girl. I love those passages so much. Yuki and May don’t talk much about their breasts or their bodies. But Mariye in Killing Commendatore…
Haruki Murakami: She’s really fixated on them. It’s almost an obsession.
MK: Sure, but don’t you think she’s a little too fixated, though? The second she’s alone with the first-person narrator, this guy she’s never met before, the first words out of her mouth are something like, “My breasts are really small, don’t you think?” I found this pretty surprising. Where does this obsession with breasts come from?
HM: I wouldn’t really say it came from anywhere. I just imagine there are girls out there who feel this way.
https://twitter.com/morphonios/status/1248463314255933441
Chitipati/Shri Shmashana Adhipati (protector) , Tibet, D 1700 – 1799, Sakya
And now, about the Skeleton Lords from Tibetan Lore. This is from Himalayan Art Resources.
It is important not to confuse the protector deities Shri Shmashana Adhipati, Father & Mother, with the skeleton dancers found in the various systems of Tibetan religious Cham dance. Those skeleton dancers, sometimes categorized as having three types, are unrelated to the Secret Wheel Tantra and the practices of the Shri Shmashana Adhipati. So far all of the iconographic depictions in painting and sculpture of two skeletons dancing as a couple, with appropriate hand attributes, and standing atop a conch and cowrie shell, are Shmashana Adhipati as described in the Secret Wheel Tantra. It should also be understood that Shri Shmashana Adhipati are not worldly deities, but enlightened deities categorized as ‘Wisdom protectors.’ They are emanations of Chakrasamvara.
The skeleton figures, representing worldly spirits, in Tibetan Cham dance are often seen as jesters or servants for other minor worldly gods such as Yama. These Cham dancing skeletons, like the other characters found in dance such as the deer and yak headed servants of Yama, are generally only found in narrative vignettes if found at all in Tibetan paintings. The most common dance represented in painting is generally known descriptively as the Black Hat Dance, and specifically understood to be the Vajrakilaya Cham dance. There will of course be images or random skeletons found in wrathful deity paintings or in the many depictions of the charnal grounds where the relevant Sanskrit and Tibetan texts explicitly state that skeletons are found in cemeteries.
A survey of Vajrayogini paintings in the database finds 16 where Shmashana Adhipati is depicted in the composition as a protector.
Calavera of Francisco Madero by Jose Guadalupe Posada
So, if you ever wanted to know what a Nobel Prize winning economists reads and what he keeps on his night stand, you may check this out from the NYT Book Review: “Economist Who Wants You to Read More Fiction”. Even better, the economist is Joseph E. Stiglitz.
What books are on your nightstand?
Like everyone, I have a large and aspirational pile on my nightstand. In fact, my wife recently bought me a bigger nightstand so we’d have more room for the books I want to read. Right now I’ve got “A Moveable Feast,” by Ernest Hemingway, to remind me of Paris, which I fell even more in love with during my term teaching there. “The Ratline,” because the author, Philippe Sands, is married to my wife’s sister and he sent it to us. Jill Lepore’s “These Truths” and “The Light That Failed,” by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, because everywhere I go people are talking about those two books. Ian McEwan’s “The Cockroach,” because the person who runs the renowned bookstore in Schloss Elmau (Germany) thought I would like this Kafkaesque parable of Brexit, in which a cockroach becomes prime minister. A book that was on my nightstand, but I have since read, is Hannah Lillith Assadi’s beautiful “Sonora,” a novel about the Arizona desert, New York City and the coming-of-age of a young woman whose parents are Palestinian and Israeli Jewish.
Inside Higher Ed has a suggested reading list of information on Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte; The Lady of Love and Death. She is known as Santa Muerte and is considered an idol, female deity or folk saint in Mexican and Mexican-American folk Catholicism.
“Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living,” wrote Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude, his classic interpretation of Mexican history and culture. “The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets, and hopes which is the life of each of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end…. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.”
Paz does not explicitly refer to Posada’s work, but he captures its essence too precisely not to have been thinking of it. And both came to mind repeatedly as I read R. Andrew Chesnut’s Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press).
Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, set out some years ago to write a book on the Virgin of Guadalupe, only to find his enthusiasm fading after a while. He writes that he was fighting “research malaise” when, by chance, he learned of Santa Muerte, a Mexican “folk saint” known to her devotees by nicknames such as the Bony Lady, the Godmother, and the Angel of Death. She is, in effect the Virgin of Guadalupe’s dark cousin, if not her evil twin.
Santa Muerte’s history and role are complex and, in some ways, distinctly Mexican. But her power — like that of Posada’s artwork – is too great to contain within national borders.
She began to make the news in the 1990s — always (at least in the U.S. media) with reference to the Mexican drug cartels. When the police would raid a gangster’s home, they often found altars to a grim-reaper-like figure, presumably satanic in nature. By 2010, Santa Muerte entered norteamericano popular culture through “Breaking Bad,” a TV series that is about methamphetamine production in roughly the sense that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about having a bug problem.
Memento Mori, Pompeii, Artwork-location: Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Archaeological Museum)
So, another place you may find skull art is from the ruins of Pompeii. This is from the Pompeii tour guide.
The mosaic represents an allegorical and symbolic philosophical theme of the transience of life and death that eliminates disparities in social class and wealth. The summit of the composition is a level with his plumb line, a tool that was used by masons to control the levelling in construction.
The axis of the lead is the death (the skull), under a butterfly (the soul) balanced on a wheel (Fortune).
Under the arms of the level, and opposed in perfect balance, are the symbols of poverty on the right (a stick a beggar and a cape), and wealth to the left (the sceptre a purple cloth and the ribbon).
Popular belief says the phrase “Memento mori” originated in ancient Rome: as a Roman general was parading through the streets during a victory triumph, standing behind him was his slave, tasked with reminding the general that although at his peak today tomorrow he could fall or be brought down. The servant is thought to have conveyed this with the warning “Memento mori” that means “Remember that you will die”.
Remarkable photograph shows the Chimbu Skeleton Tribe of Papua New Guinea and were taken by amateur photographer Pongtharin Tanthasindhu who grew up in Thailand but now lives in Toronto, Canada.
New York Magazine asked 23 authors to recommend books to read during self-isolation. What are they reading to “escape the present moment?” I especially liked this suggestion.
“During this time of great uncertainty (and also, at least in my case, great cooking and cleaning) I recommend this book. It’s billed as a memoir with recipes, but Grant’s point of view is uniquely sensual and grounding. Think James Salter meets Ruth Reichl meets Marguerite Duras. Phyllis Grant was a promising ballerina who began her freshman year at Julliard in the 1990s. Lucky for us, she took a detour and discovered cooking with an intensity that rivals Anthony Bourdain. She writes with grace and passion not only about cooking but feasting, family, falling in love and falling apart. She also writes extremely well about healing. When I finished this book, I felt more alive. I can’t think of a better reason to read, in this strange moment and always.” —Joanna Hershon, author of St. Ivo
I found this read about the Skelton Tribue of Papua New Guinea fascinating. It’s from the Daily Mail.
‘The reason why they paint themselves as skeletons is to intimidate their enemy into believing that they are not human and have some source of supernatural power.’
Only first making contact with the Western world in 1934, the Chimbu tribe have largely remained a mystery-making their skeletal body paint even more fascinating.
Combined with dance, the paint jobs of Papua New Guinea’s Chimbu tribe were originally intended to intimidate enemies.
Go gaze at these amazing photographs and works of body art.
From the upshot at NYT: “Deaths in New York City Are More Than Double the Usual Total” By Josh Katz and
Over the 31 days ending April 4, more than twice the typical number of New Yorkers died.
That total for the city includes deaths directly linked to the novel coronavirus as well as those from other causes, like heart attacks and cancer. Even this is only a partial count; we expect this number to rise as more deaths are counted.
These numbers contradict the notion that many people who are dying from the new virus would have died anyway. And they suggest that the current coronavirus death figures understate the real toll of the virus, either because of undercounting of coronavirus deaths, increases in deaths that are normally preventable, or both.
So, I always loved this video with the switching between the band and skeleton puppets.
We will get by
We will get by
We will get by
We will survive
And I thank you for putting up with my very dark side with its even darker humor. Whistling past the graveyard is a very Buddhist and Brit thing to do of which I have roots in both.
And just so you know that I’m not just being morbid:
Respect Death and the Dead.
So, what’s on your reading and blogging and creating and whistling past the graveyard list today?
Monday Reads: Art in a Time of Covid #19
Posted: April 6, 2020 Filed under: just because | Tags: #IKeepMyselfSaneBy 32 Comments
New Orleans artist Terrance Osborne,“Front Line.” (you may order prints of these at his site}
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Last week, BB overwhelmed me with the art of three artists who expressed their grief and experience with the Spanish Flu of 1918. Two died from it. That and the death of Ellis Marsalis led me down a rabbit hole of finding what both performing and creative artists did at that point in time. The creative community always finds a way to express the culture as we deal with challenges as a nation and a planet. I’m trying to focus on that today as artists and performers deal with Art in the Time of Covid #19
One of the biggest expressions of our need for community is the incredible burst of mask makers providing for both the public and the front line businesses whose employees do not have the luxury or pain of staying home but must work through all of this. Fashion Designers, manufacturers, and kitchen tables with newly home schooled children are all practicing their sewing chops. CNBC has a focus on the fashion industry in New York City but I know plenty of local artists and kids doing the same thing here. Fierce Christian Siriano–who has a reputation for making fashion available to everyone–was one of the first who stepped up.
Designer Christian Siriano has started making masks for the city, and other companies have offered to help how they can.
Naeem Khan, a New York City-based fashion designer who has designed for the likes of Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton, announced on his fashion house’s Instagram page that he would start making masks.
“My team is ready to start sewing CDC approved masks from medically approved fabrics from their isolated homes,” the post read.
“I’m a designer. I know how to construct, how to design, so I decided to design my own mask,” Khan told CNBC. “I considered doing it in hemp fabric because it has antibacterial properties.”
Khan’s masks are lined with microfiber and contain a pocket into which a surgical mask can be inserted. While this offers an extra layer of protection, meaning they can be used by medical professionals, Khan noted that these masks are not meant to replace the much needed N95s used by front-line health-care workers.
“These are not designed for people in the forefront of the corona fight,” he said.
DCB Art Students Draw on Talent for COVID-19 Donations
I woke up to this treat today! It’s a zoombomb for a young girl who from the original cast of Hamilton!!!
After delighting the socks off everyone with a reunion of The Office last week, John Krasinski is back with the second episode of Some Good News.
The YouTube series, which Krasinski started to shine a light on good news around the world, featured a new two-second weather report this week from none other than Robert De Niro (who’s credited as SGN’s meteorologist).
But it gets even better. After bringing in his wife Emily Blunt to say hello, which we knew he would at some point, Krasinski got the original cast of Broadway’s Hamilton, including Lin Manuel Miranda, to perform Alexander Hamilton over Zoom.
Krasinski organized the performance for a young girl named Aubrey, who was supposed to see Hamilton for her 9th birthday, but instead stayed home to watch Mary Poppins Returns due to the coronavirus quarantine.
How the heck is Krasinski going to top this next episode?
So, Harper Gladow is one of the cutest little girls you could ever meet and has two of the most wonderful people for parents that I’ve ever met. Imagine being a kid and having a birthday during the stay at home orders. Mom Caitlin is super creative and here’s the result. Glad Harper had a great birthday!
Harper Gladow was excited about turning 5 on April 1. There would be sno-balls and presents, a bounce house and all her friends from school.
But then the coronavirus hit. Harper and her family — mom Caitrin, dad Dave, and siblings Olivia, 8, and Nathan, 6 — were isolated at home, like millions of other Americans.
There would be no bounce house. No sno-balls.
No friends.
“We had to sit down with all three of our kids, and we had to explain you are probably not going back to school this year,” said Caitrin Gladow, communications director for a local nonprofit.
“We tried to be candid. We said this is a big scary virus, and we had to stay home. She understood that we had to move her party. She was understandably very upset. There were some tears. But I think she understands that we don’t have a choice right now.”
Still, it was hard to see the disappointment in Harper’s face. So Gladow jumped on an idea she saw on Facebook: a “Group for Parents Navigating the New Norm,” launched by the NOLA Family magazine website. Families were offering to mark those special, shut-in kids’ birthdays for each other with a costumed parade.
With just a day or two’s notice, folks found bright tutus and colored wigs. Someone made a sign. Volunteer Ann Herren climbed into an inflatable T-rex costume, and her daughter Livvy, 12, dressed up as a princess.
“These kids need it. This is their (Hurricane) Katrina,” Herren said.
The Gladows called their children out to the porch on the pretext of coloring with chalk. And then came the marchers, down the root-rolled Uptown sidewalk, singing “Happy Birthday,” blowing horns and dancing — at a safe distance from each other, of course.
“She was shocked,” Caitrin Gladow said. And when she realized everyone was there to sing to her, she got a little shy.
Yamiche Alicindor, journalist #sketchbyJonLion
You’ll notice this is next level social distancing! And here are my Friends the Gladdow Family paying it forward! BTW, Cait’s birthday is coming up and she’s gathering up donations for Team Gleason as they fundraise to beat ALS. That’s another thing Cait and I share. Her father died of this horrid disease. A few years ago my closest cousin, Ruthie, lost her battle with it. Cait and another friend ran the marathon for Team Gleason and Team Ruthie that year. Please donate if you can!
It’s also an odd coincidence that my big smile from that Hamilton video also came via Cait so … anyway, Love you guys!!! I will owe you babysitting time!!!!
So, why can’t kids birthday parties be a fresh take on performance art in the time Covid #19?
As I said, I tend to go down rabbit holes once I get hold of something and Google is always there to indulge me. IT’s undoubtedly something that has to do with avoiding grading for me and what my ex used to call my incessant pencil sharpening. So, after a short search I stumbled on to this on The Conversation: “The importance of art in the time of coronavirus”. I have often told folks that after Hurricane Katrina I became obsessed with Survivor Series and Zombie and Disaster Movies. Well, I’m not the only one that retreats to books and movies with weird impossible themes.
This is from a Senior Lecturer in Illustration, University of Portsmouth.
In this time of restriction, TV, film, books and video games offer us a chance to be mobile. To move around freely in a fictional world in a way that is now impossible in reality. Art connects us to the foreign, the exotic and the impossible – but in our current context, it also connects us to a world where anything is possible. A world out of our grasp for now.
The world we wake up in is a counterfeit reality. Things look the same. Unlike those now familiar films, the descent of humanity is not apparent in the slow shuffle of moaning, glassy-eyed zombies. The threat we face feels like those clever horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and more recent films like The Quiet Place where we rarely see the source of horror. The current moment is best understood as a kind of low hum of anxiety, like the buzzing of a pylon in a field.
The best thing about this is actually that the artist had an opportunity to be in Africa during a study of what a virus outbreak would do if it hit this camp/village in Mukuru and also Nairobi, Kenya. His sketches are in the article so please be sure to check them all out.
A current trending tag under Covid-19 on Twitter is this: #IKeepMyselfSaneBy. There is quite a bit of this:
I have found my writer friends are writing. My painting friends are painting. And here I am with my Steinway and the guitar I had as a teen. I may not be Lin Manuel but I still have a few chops left in me and a lot of my friends are sharing theirs on a New Orleans Face Book page called the Quarantine Canteen. So, even performance artists have venues.
The coolest thing ever is the number of museums, ballet companies, opera companies, and theatres sharing their videos of past performances. This from Forbes.: “These Galleries, Arts Organizations And Museums Are Keeping Art Accessible During Covid-19.”
With art galleries and museums around the world closing because of Covid-19, artists, galleries and museums have turned to technology and social media to keep their doors open virtually so visitors from anywhere in the world can still interact with and view art.
From large international museums to galleries and arts organizations, the arts community is getting creative with how they share their collections with the world.
America’s Virtual Museums are on line and gearing up.
Without knowing it, or certainly asking for it, we have all become part of a giant social science experiment: can digital platforms offer a satisfactory alternative to experiencing art in the real world? Museums have created points of access to collection databases—some more easily navigable than others—allowing online visitors to look at and learn about specific objects of interest, as well as read blog postings from curators about current exhibitions or about pieces in the permanent collection and follow the institution on social media platforms, using the online world and virtual reality technology to replace or reproduce the feeling of viewing art and other objects in person. This is a process that has been developing at US museums for 20 years, although it has taken on greater significance as the Covid-19 outbreak has closed these institutions to the public for an indefinite period of time.
Michael Neault, the executive creative director for experience design at the Art Institute of Chicago, says that the museum is in the process of “launching a new interactive feature for online users of highly visual narratives about objects in the collection. We will be releasing several of these each week over the coming weeks.” These features will be two to three minutes in length and include 360-degree photography. One of the first of these focuses on El Greco’s 1577-79 painting The Assumption of the Virgin, a featured work in the museum’s El Greco: Ambition and Defiance exhibition that opened on 7 March and was to continue until 21 June, but is now in limbo as the institution is closed to the public.
The Smithsonian Museum of American Art has created several digital tours of its the facility, from a standalone exhibition that can be viewed in 360-degrees via an app, to a fully immersive virtual reality experience, that includes art historical information on the works in the collection. And the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, which is currently closed, offers a sometimes dizzying virtual tour of the entire museum, including the bookstore, exterior, fascinating staircase and the art in the collection, which is kept in a hermetically sealable third floor gallery in case of hurricane flooding.
In China, kids are selling their art as students of At Dulwich College Beijing (DCB) to help fund shipments of Medical Grade Masks. Some of the art you see here has come from their efforts. You can read more about it at the link.
If you want to delve in to the reality of it all, you can watch Into the Red Zone which documents the worst hit areas of Northern Italy. I watched it on MSBNC last night. It’s compelling and overwhelming.
So, I’m about to go do my remote teaching thing and my which box of what gets delivered when thing and my self comfort things which have always included my music, my water color paintings, and binging on escapist movies. Which is my answer to #IKeepMyselfSaneBy. What is yours?
I love you all. Be safe! Stay Home! And now, find yourself a few neato masks!
What’s on your reading, blogging and creating list today?
Friday Reads: The Trump Family Crime Syndicate Strikes Again and Again and Again!
Posted: April 3, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: #KushnerForPrison2021, Nepotism 15 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s very difficult to think about how much the current administration is doing wrong during this crisis because it is costing lives. Nepotism in the White House is as rampant and as insidious as the virus itself. It basically puts lives and treasure in the hands of those least prepared to do the right thing. As usual, the lack of basic human decency and character at the top has once again brought us into the cursed hands of Jared Kushner.
At one of the most perilous moments in modern American history, Mr. Kushner is trying in a disjointed White House to marshal the forces of government for the war his father-in-law says he is waging. A real estate developer with none of the medical expertise of a public health official nor the mobilization experience of a general, Mr. Kushner has nonetheless become a key player in the response to the pandemic.
Because of his unique status, he has made himself the point of contact for many agency officials who know that he can force action and issue decisions without going to the president. But while Mr. Kushner and his allies say that he has brought more order to the process, the government’s response remains fragmented and behind the curve.
Some officials said Mr. Kushner had mainly added another layer of confusion to that response, while taking credit for changes already in progress and failing to deliver on promised improvements. He promoted a nationwide screening website and a widespread network of drive-through testing sites. Neither materialized. He claimed to have helped narrow the rift between his father-in-law and General Motors in a presidential blowup over ventilator production, one administration official said, but the White House is still struggling to procure enough ventilators and other medical equipment.
Perhaps most critical, neither Mr. Kushner nor anyone else can control a president who offers the public radically different messages depending on the day or even the hour, complicating the White House’s effort to get ahead of the crisis. One moment Mr. Trump is talking about reopening the country by Easter, the next he is warning of more than 100,000 deaths. In the afternoon, he threatens to quarantine tens of millions of people in the Northeast, then in the evening he backs down.
In an interview, Mr. Kushner would not discuss the president’s actions but said he viewed himself as an enabler of government agencies to overcome obstacles. “From the White House, you can move a lot faster,” he said. “I’ve put members of my team into a lot of components. What we’ve been able to do is get people very quick answers.”
But to some in the agencies, his team’s arrival has only exacerbated an already dysfunctional situation. In recent days, administration officials said, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which traditionally coordinates the government’s responses to disasters, has received surprise directives from the White House — including to dispatch deliveries of medical equipment to states that had not even submitted formal requests based on which governor got Mr. Trump on the telephone.
Today, CREW announced an effort to shine light on Kushner’s activities and possible profiteering.
Kushner’s deep involvement in President Trump’s re-election campaign from the White House has been widely reported. Kushner reportedly is “positioning himself now as the person officially overseeing the entire [Trump] campaign from his office in the West Wing, organizing campaign meetings and making decisions about staffing and spending.” He also reportedly oversees several elements of the campaign, including fundraising, strategy and advertising. Kushner has not shied away from touting his involvement in President Trump’s re-election campaign over the past year. admitting to working “to set goals and objectives” for his father-in-law’s presidential campaign.
As recently as March 2020, Kushner was scheduling meetings alongside President Trump, Hope Hicks and campaign staff inside the White House on polling numbers. While the coronavirus crisis derailed the meeting before the presentation began, Kushner’s inclusion in the meeting indicates he continues to overlap his official and campaign duties.
“OSC needs to investigate Kushner’s behavior to ensure that he is complying with the Hatch Act,” said Bookbinder. “There is no room in our government for top officials who deliberately violate ethics laws.”
Michelle Goldberg is even more adept at explaining why Kushner is the last person you would want injected into this process.
Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.
According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)
Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”
Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.
Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
I don’t think the Kushners are going to be able to return to NYC ever frankly. Seth Meyers even got into the pile one (Via Vanity Fair).
White House senior advisor and President Donald Trump‘s son-in-law Jared Kushner made his first appearance at the White House coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, one day after Vanity Fair reported he had taken a larger role in the government response to the health crisis—with a particular interest in the supply of ventilators available to each state, and the federal government’s role in procuring more.
“The notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” Kushner said on Wednesday. He later added, “Some governors you speak to or senators, and they don’t know what’s in their state.” The comments were roundly criticized on social media, but kept consistent with what Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has reported about Kushner’s response to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has plead for more than 30,000 ventilators. (Dr. Anthony Fauci has confirmed that number as well). “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner reportedly said during a White House meeting, according to a person present.
On Thursday’s edition of Late Night, Seth Meyers provided a response to Kushner’s purported comment. “Oh, you’re doing your own projections? Did your parents just buy you a TI-84?” he asked. “You’re not qualified to do anything, let alone tell New York how many ventilators they need. You’re a nepotism case, and you only got the White House job because you married into the family, and because the security guards believed your fake ID.”
Meyers mocked Kushner relentlessly during the tail end of his latest A Closer Look segment, referring to him as the person in charge of “this shitshow” and joking that Kushner is “the guy Slenderman has nightmares about.”
Matt Johnson @HotPockets4All
And in an opinion from Lloyd Green writing for The Guardian: “Jared Kushner’s coronavirus overreach puts more American lives on the line.” No Shit Sherlock!!!
Jared Kushner is not a guy to turn to for sound political advice. Most recently, he reportedly told the president that Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, was being “alarmist” after he announced that his state required 30,000 ventilators to help get through the pandemic.
To add insult to injury, Kushner also bragged of his own wisdom and told those assembled that Cuomo was wrong. According to Vanity Fair, Kushner declared: “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.”
The princeling has helped place American lives and bodies on the line. New York’s hospitals have become combat zones, its morgues and funeral homes look like abattoirs. Meanwhile, the US is locked down and the administration is projecting up to a quarter-million dead even if everything goes right.
American carnage is now. We may witness more deaths in months than its troops suffered in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam after years of fighting.
When Mike Pence compares the US to Italy, we have a problem whose glaring scars will be felt long after Donald Trump leaves office. Coronavirus won’t be disappearing in a matter of days despite the president’s earlier assurances. Trump ignored the intelligence community and his national security staff, and now we must pay a collective price.
Unfortunately, Kushner doesn’t only suffer from intellectual overreach. Self-dealing may have made a cameo too in the middle of crisis, and we have seen this movie before. Earlier, the Kushners had attempted to attract capital from China, by touting EB-5 visas in exchange for investments and looked to Anbang, a Chinese conglomerate, to bail them out of their real estate positions.
When Kushner was boasting about data and Trump was going on about testing websites, they were probably referring to Oscar Health, an insurance company tied to the Kushner family. In turn, Oscar appears to have been involved in the government’s efforts to map the spread of the disease.
According to reports and filings, Josh Kushner, Jared’s brother, still owns a piece of Oscar, and Jared belatedly divested his interest after entering government. If the Trump Organization can bill the Secret Service when they guard the president at his personal properties, why can’t the Kushner kids make a few dimes off the taxpayer?
So, anyway, the shit show continues and we’re at the bottom of that slope it seems.
Please stay safe and check to let us know how you’re doing!!!
I’m sharing this link to Mister Roger’s Neighborhood because I’m still in shock about our city’s treasure and some one who always shared his music and talent with every one as a performer, father, and teacher. I was fortunate to hear him, known him and learn from him. You can also see part of that here in this tribute from Jazz from Lincoln Center with his very young sons that he taught very well.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Socially Distant Monday Reads
Posted: March 30, 2020 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Covid-19 36 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Well, one more week closer to the first wave of peak chaos. The US is expected to be at peak pandemic overload mode as a country some where around April 15 while each state is scattered around that. Dr. Daughter sent me this link I tweeted out this morning. You may find your state’s expected peak hospital use there as well as death projections. New York City is looking pretty grim today as the US Comfort pulled into port.
Louisiana is expected to be the next big”epicenter”. We continue to get worse press than NYC does to in terms of did we do things to deserve this? I just watched General Honore on MSNBC telling reporters to stay off the politics and get on the logistics. Actually, he was shouting so maybe some one would hear him.
The explosion of cases in New Orleans, Louisiana, has caught the attention of Covid watchers and doomsayers across the country. Less than two weeks ago, the Crescent City recorded less than 100 cases. By March 29 the number of infections in Orleans Parish reached 1,350, with 73 deaths. The fatalities per capita rivals that of New York City.
Though all eyes are on New Orleans, an equally alarming outbreak is occurring in a smaller city in the northwest of the state. Shreveport, near the border of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma — a region referred to locally as Ark-La-Tex (sorry, Oklahoma) — has about 200,000 people and sits across the Red River from Bossier City, with its population of 70,000. And right now, it is in the first stages of its own unique Covid-19 nightmare.
In recent days, the cases from these sister cities, which are in Caddo and Bossier parishes, have risen 30 or a 40 a day. As of March 29, the total for the two parishes sits at 275 overall, including five deaths. Incredibly, just a week ago, there were just 21 cases. Stated simply, this has the makings of serious trouble.
I’m staying home. I’m fortunate that I’ve found places that will deliver pet supplies and fresh food. I also joined a wine club. I’m going to be leaving presents for my all my delivery drivers.
Today’s vintage photos are of folks during the 1918 Spanish flu.
I’ve been watching the daily presser from NY and also the presser from my Governor and mayor. What worries me is this daily event (also from CNN): ‘Fact check: A breakdown of false and misleading statements at Trump’s Rose Garden briefing— Trump berates reporter for ‘threatening’ question during briefing.’
On two occasions during Sunday’s coronavirus briefing, President Donald Trump falsely denied he had said words he had said publicly last week.
When PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor noted that the President had said he did not believe that governors actually need all the equipment they claimed they did, Trump said, “I didn’t say that” — even though he said precisely that on Fox News on Thursday.
Later, when CNN White House Correspondent Jeremy Diamond noted that Trump had said he wanted governors to be “appreciative” of him, and that “if they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump said, “But I didn’t say that” — even though he said precisely that at the Friday briefing
It would be on thing if Trump was simply useless. However, Trump is toxic and every thing coming out of his mouth and the actions he takes puts us deeper into national strife. His first instinct was to grab hold of some whack ideas. This is elucidated by Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker: “The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration,”Chotiner interviewed the liberatarian (of course he is) that created this outrageous idea.
..“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” Trump said repeatedly that he wanted the country to reopen by Easter, April 12th, contradicting the advice of most health officials. (On Sunday, he backed down and extended federal social-distancing guidelines for at least another month.) According to the Washington Post, “Conservatives close to Trump and numerous administration officials have been circulating an article by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, titled ‘Coronavirus Perspective,’ which plays down the extent of the spread and the threat.”
Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law, published the article on the Web site of the Hoover Institution, on March 16th. In it, he questioned the World Health Organization’s decision to declare the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, said that “public officials have gone overboard,” and suggested that about five hundred people would die from covid-19 in the U.S. Epstein later updated his estimate to five thousand, saying that the previous number had been an error. So far, there have been more than two thousand coronavirus-related fatalities in America; epidemiologists’ projections of the total deaths range widely, depending on the success of social distancing and the availability of medical resources, but they tend to be much higher than Epstein’s. (On Sunday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, estimated that there could be between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand deaths in the U.S.) In a follow-up article, published on March 23rd and titled “Coronavirus Overreaction,” Epstein wrote, “Progressives think they can run everyone’s lives through central planning, but the state of the economy suggests otherwise. Looking at the costs, the public commands have led to a crash in the stock market, and may only save a small fraction of the lives that are at risk.”
Epstein has long been one of the most cited legal scholars in the country, and is known for his libertarian-minded reading of the Constitution, which envisions a restrained federal government that respects private property. He has also been known to engage with controversial subjects; last fall, he published an article on the Hoover Institution Web site that argued, “The professional skeptics are right: there is today no compelling evidence of an impending climate emergency.” Last Wednesday, I spoke by phone with Epstein about his views of the coronavirus pandemic. He was initially wary of talking, and asked to record his own version of the call, which I agreed to. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Epstein made a number of comments about viruses that have been strongly disputed by medical professionals. We have included factual corrections alongside those statements.
Which brings me to this:
Take a guess … or just look at the previous nonsense to find the answer.
Overall, the models could explain only a small amount of variability in how often people engaged in the recommended behaviors (approximately 6% of past behavior, 11% of future behavior). In both cases, only one variable stood out as predicting whether a person would engage in these behaviors more: faith in your own intuition. If you had more faith in your own intuition, you were more likely to follow the health recommendations both in the last week, and to say you would follow them in the next week.
Surprisingly, this trait beat out others like scientific literacy and a tendency to engage in cognitive reflection in terms of predictive power.
The researchers then estimated a second model that didn’t just use personal beliefs about science and truth generally, but also included political beliefs. This was based on people rating how much you agree with the statement “I identify myself as [liberal/conservative/libertarian].”
When political identity was added, the most important predictor became whether an individual was a libertarian. The more an individual identified as a libertarian, the less likely they were to follow the official recommendations for reducing the spread of COVID-19.
When political beliefs were included as predictors, the models were able to predict 17% of variability in past behavior and 29% of variability in intended future behaviors. That’s a pretty large jump in accuracy (from 6% and 11% for the non-political models).
Of course we know who combines that with a toxic form of Christianity. This is from Elizabeth Williamson writing for the NYT: “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus Fears, Too — The decision by the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., to partly reopen his evangelical university enraged residents of Lynchburg, Va. Then students started getting sick.
As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell Jr., its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.
“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas W. Eppes Jr. said he told Mr. Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Dr. Eppes said in an interview.
So Mr. Falwell — a staunch ally of President Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggested Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. An additional eight were told to self-isolate.
https://twitter.com/Zenman1550/status/1244650139878223873
Lucian K Truscott IV wrote this for Salon.
Trump won’t mourn for those suffering and dying from the virus, but he’ll accept the sympathies of the fawning suck-asses he surrounds himself with at the daily thank-a-thon that substitutes for the rallies he can no longer hold.
“Thanks to your leadership, Mr. President,” Vice President Mike Pence will typically begin, as he rolls out a list of dubious statistics for masks delivered or ventilators suddenly discovered hidden away in some warehouse. “Thank you, Mr. President … we all thank you … the nation thanks you,” another toady will parrot, likely some “acting” department head or secretary-of-something-or-another Trump’s thinking about going through the motions of nominating so he can keep another former lobbyist at the top of another important government agency.
Trump stands there, eyes unfocused, looking like he’d rather be on the 13th tee at Bedminster as he soaks in the praise. All of that praise is due him, he told said at the Wednesday thank-a-thon, because “we’re the ones that gave the great response, and we’re the ones that kept China out of here, and if I didn’t do it, you’d have thousands and thousands of people died — who would have died that are now living and happy.” The Wednesday thank-a-thon was filled with self-congratulation and chest-pounding, but it was no different from Tuesday’s, or Thursday’s for that matter. Trump spent 25 percent of the time he spoke in self-congratulation or blaming others for the difficulties he has faced, or the obstacles he has overcome, according to a study of his Wednesday remarks by the Washington Post. “These passages constituted about 25 percent of all the words Trump spoke — more than 1,500 words out of about 6,000 spoken. That is more time than he spent conveying details about the coronavirus response,” the Post reported.
When he wasn’t congratulating himself or accepting the thanks of the Suck-Ass Chorus, Trump was on Twitter lamenting the slings and arrows he suffers daily from his “nasty” enemies in the “media.” “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to MY election success,” he tweeted. “The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!”
Someone in the White House press corps should have asked Trump about the “real people” in overcrowded hospitals in New York, in understaffed clinics in New Orleans, in panicked waiting rooms in Detroit, and lying on soaked sheets in their own bedrooms in every state in the union. They aren’t lining up to go back to work. They’re dying in numbers that are doubling every 24 hours.
We are living through dark times with exactly the wrong person in the lead. He has surrounded himself with all the wrong people. Stay inside. This is going to get worse.
What is on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments