Mister Roboto
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Well, as for this glitch in Wisconsin, I’m going to have a hard to time giving the notion any credence as long as the places on the Internet I find talking about such a thing are right-wing cultist sites and “news” sources. Given the current political climate, it really sound as though “stolen election” claims are as much a bunch of sour grapes as the “RussiaRussiaRussia” gambit of Hillary Clinton’s partisans.
But even if the Democrats did steal the election this time, I really have to wonder why when Republicans steal national elections (2000 and 2004), it’s “You lost, get over it”, but when Democrats supposedly steal elections, it’s suddenly the apocalypse for constitutional representative government.
That said, I’ve thought for quite some time now that the USA really needs a nation-wide system of hand-counted paper-ballots. Because whether it’s actual election fraud or just allegations of fraud meant to undermine the legitimacy of the incoming administration, it ends up being a very unhealthy and corrosive thing to our body politic. Hand-counted paper ballots would do so much to forestall either situation.
There is part of me that agrees with USA Today columnist Christian Schneider that it may well be too late to get a handle on the pandemic in the USA. But there is another part of me that also hopes he’s wrong.
Well, not that anyone especially cares, but on Wednesday, I went and did the thing. I wrote in Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker of the Green Party/ Socialist Party ticket for president when I early-voted at city hall. Every other race on the ballot was pretty much what you would call a “shoo-in”, but on the Federal and state levels, I resolutely voted for neither Republicans nor Democrats.
Here’s a little something for you pandemic-deniers: Staff at overwhelmed Wisconsin hospital urge people to take coronavirus seriously
Your denial of the seriousness of this crisis while hospitals in my home state are being overwhelmed really reminds of high-school kids who think they have the world all figured out because they just read Atlas Shrugged.
@teri: It’s certainly not the most unappealing thing about Biden. The most unappealing thing about Biden is the policies he has promoted over the last four decades.
As I said on Kunstler’s blog yesterday, the establishment’s Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers in the wake of the Hunter Biden e-mails, are really starting to remind me of George W. Bush supporters when the realization was sinking in that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (“The WMDs were moved to Syria!”)
Among the prophesiers, there is clearly a kind of perverse psychic need for the Trump saga to end with a salaciously climatic conclusion. If you are so inclined — that is, if you are so blinkered by four years of mostly self-inflicted psychological turmoil — then Trump is always going to provide a daily deluge of material that could justify your angst. But a tempered and public-spirited media would have developed strategies by now, five years into the theatrical trolling, to avoid withering into a shrieking stupor every time Trump makes a purposefully-provocative offhand remark. If anything, this emotional fragility has only burnished Trump with an unearned mystique. Because by now, what he’s working with is mostly just schtick.
Michael Tracey can be very annoying and tiresome, and more often than not just plain old wrong, which is why I stopped following him on Twitter. But I think that here he gets it largely right.
@Bill7: There’s certainly a lot of reason to think that. For one thing, there’s the Democratic Party’s surrogates and advocates consistently sending out the message on the Internet that “we’re absolutely entitled to your vote no matter what, so fork over, peons!” How is that going to resonate with voters who are the least bit undecided? And for another thing, there’s the fact that Trump volunteers are going around knocking on doors to talk to voters, while the Democratic Party apparatus is doing…what, exactly?
But if this is what the donor class wants, why foment the civil unrest over it? I guess the Occam’s Razor answer to that question is so that the establishment can implement martial law. They certainly have been busy getting their snazzy, new surveillance-state apparatus all fired up and ready to go, so I’m sure they’re horny to start using it in an even bigger way.
I heard about the Biden campaign’s gloomy internal polling numbers. It’s not exactly shocking that voters aren’t responding well to the Democrats running the even-more-senile-than-Trump guy with a running mate (who is likely to be the real effective president at some point) who is an overambitious cop whom nobody likes.
@a kullervo: Fred Reed of “Fred On Everything” infamy iss of the opinion that men have a greater intellectual range while women have a greater emotional range. That means, according to his theory, that the smartest men tend to be smarter than the smartest women, and also the dumbest men tend to be dumber than the dumbest women. By emotional range, he means that woman can be a lot more caring and compassionate than men but are also a hell of a lot meaner than men when roused to long-term anger. YMMV
Funny how consistently it seems to be the case that one’s investment in being on the anti-Trump train seems to correspond rather neatly with one’s attachment to the interests of the professional-managerial class. I don’t like Trump at all, but I was never part of the “Orange Man Bad” crowd because right around the time Trump’s star was rising in 2015, I was starting to realize how sick I was of the PMC and all their self-serving BS.
{sigh} Libertarians will likely be the death of us all. But perhaps it’s what we deserve for constructing an entire society around the cult of the individual.
If you watch this video by Dr. Chris Martenson, you just might come away from it thinking that even if many Covid patients were masking, there might be a lot more Covid patients without masking policies. Remember, the idea behind masking is to afford a measure of protection not to yourself, but to the elderly and people with chronic conditions you encounter in public places.
Even if I’m wrong about face-masking, the only real harm it does is to the egos of right-wing special snowflakes. Compelling people to accept a jab of a vaccine that hasn’t been properly tested, however, is another matter entirely. In such a situation, the government doing the compelling very well could and very likely would be forcing people to take something into their bodies that has the potential do serious and egregious harm. There would be nothing rational whatsoever about such a policy.
Dr. Chris Martenson makes the case for face-mask wearing.
FWIW, here is political YouTuber Kyle Kulinski’s take on the 2020 horse-race. (It’s a nine-minute video.) According to the numbers, the only demographic in which Trump is retaining his dominance is working-class men, whom I am supposing are mostly white and mostly Boomer- and Xer-aged. My own personal gut instincts are telling me that it’s probably a mistake, as Kyle says, to expect 2020 to be 2016, because it’s just not. Back in 2016, I expected Hillary to win but realized Trump could possibly pull it off in an Electoral College “squeaker”, which he did. But the tea-leaves really don’t seem to indicate that sort of thing this time the way they did that time.
We live in a crazy age now, though, and I realize I could be eating these words with steak-sauce and a fine Merlot chaser on the night of November Third.
Political YouTuber Kyle Kulinski on Trump’s illness.
About the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons”, according to Wikipedia.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association founded in 1944. The group was reported to have about 5,000 members in 2014. The association has promoted a range of scientifically discredited hypotheses, including the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, that being gay reduces life expectancy, that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, and that there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism. It is opposed to the Affordable Care Act and other forms of universal health insurance.
So there’s that….
You should see the hatred on Facebook, soo many people hoping he doesn’t make it. I’m starting to think these people could be dangerous. They remind me of a parent at the soccer games you used to ref. They don’t know the rules, but its their damn kid and don’t you know they’re always right. Nothing stranger or more embarrassing for a child then to have to ask their parent to leave the park so the game can continue. People have no empathy or self respect anymore.
I pretty much agree. While I have a difficult time feeling especially sympathetic for oligarchs of any stripe, I just don’t see anything worthwhile about schadenfreude.
I do, however, think this is a good occasion to point out why I have such a strong opinion in favor of face-mask wearing and mandates. Yes, ordinary face-masks are more for protecting other people than protecting yourself. But I would point out that Donald Trump spent a lot of time around people who were not “masking”, while Joe Biden’s people have been very scrupulous about it. Biden and his running-mate Kamala Harris both continue to test negative for the virus.
I submit for your reading displeasure “Trump Infects America” in New York Magazine.
Nothing in this comment should be construed as an election endorsement.
Well, I’m sure the atheist-skeptics will just love one of my reasons for the SPD target-date. In the middle of December, the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto Conjunction in Capricorn will be pretty much over, and I’m wondering if maybe this conjunction is “building up a charge” that will be released at the end of it. I chose three months after mid-December because that is a quarter-turn of the wheel of the year, and it mostly covers the winter, when respiratory diseases are more of a problem.
I really do want to be wrong about the possibility of Covid-19 being another Spanish Flu, and I will be happy to discuss how it panned out over a green beer on Saint Patty’s Day. 🙂 [If we could post GIFs, here is where I would put one of Chief O’Hara from the old “Batman” show exclaiming, “Glory be and begorrah!”]
@Mr. House: My final evaluation of the pandemic will have to wait for until it has to wait, regardless of what anybody on any message-section on the Internet wants to or doesn’t want to hear. Roughly a year from the initial outbreak is not an unreasonable time to wait until making such an evaluation.
The lockdown was a misguided response, so don’t ask me to make heads or tails of it. 🙂
Amy Coney Barrett a feminist icon? Some folks on the Internet have nicknamed her “Aunt Lydia”.
Another note on whether or not Covid is the disaster it was originally forecast to be: It doesn’t appear to be now, but we’re still in the first wave. The Spanish Flu appeared to be the same way in its first wave, but its second wave revealed it to be a substantial pandemic. We have yet to see what Covid serves up for its second wave. The time to keep an eye on it will be between Christmas and Saint Patrick’s Day, IMHO.
I agree that the entire Democratic Party establishment should seriously be in jail right now for elder abuse.
Recently the Spirit spoke to my heart about the social and political climate in this country, and here is how my mind interpreted what They told me: “People’s positions, including yours, are hardening like concrete right now. Let not your heart be troubled nor your mind unfocused by any of it.”
I really think its says so much about the moral bankruptcy of our political divisions that we can’t use HCQ to alleviate coronavirus suffering because “orange man bad”. Though I suppose it also doesn’t help that Big Pharma wants us all to use something more expensive and with a patent on it. Ain’t it fun living in an empire in decline? :-/
A good way to put it is that Hillary Clinton’s partisans from the 2016 election would have us believe that Covid is some sort of civilization-leveling mini-apocalypse. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, would have us believe the whole thing is a “nothing-burger” despite a million dead worldwide after less than a year, with no signs of the death-toll appreciably slowing in countries where the contagion isn’t contained. The truth is somewhere in between those two extremes. While Covid is on track to kill more people than the influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1967, we still shouldn’t conclude at this time that Covid is worse than those. The world is more populous now than it was than by a factor of several billion people, and that a lot of those people are poor means more opportunities for deadly influenza or coronavirus strains to cause suffering and take lives. We’ll just have to see what happens, it would appear.
A good point was made about face-masks that bears repeating: A good, non-expired N-95 mask will protect you and other people (yes, n-95 masks expire at a certain point), but the regular cloth or disposable masks worn properly (no “dick-nose”!) are very helpful in protecting other people. Remember, it’s very possible to be an asymptomatic carrier with Covid. And I support face-mask mandates on the state level, because common face-masks work best for pandemic control when everybody is wearing them.
Lockdowns are risky because they carry risks and harms of their own, are highly questionable in their effectiveness as a long-term strategy, and should only be used locally when the local hospitals and clinics are in danger of being overwhelmed. But feeling harmed or threatened by being compelled to wear a face-mask in a crowded indoor setting or on public transportation suggests a sheer level of right-wing snowflakery that would put the most adenoidal purple-haired social justice warrior to shame.
I would just like to add that I regard Chris Martenson’s coronavirus video-series to be my “go-to” source of information on what’s true about this virus and what’s not. And he presents his thinking on the matter with less ideology than probably anybody else on the Internet.
As I said previously, I think lockdowns don’t really work in the long haul because Covid is so contagious that it’s very easy to lose whatever you gained by locking down once locking down has ended. Universal face-mask wearing (just as long as they are actual face-masks that were designed for that purpose, even cloth ones) are thought to have a lot to do with why Japan has been relatively successful in containing the virus.
I think that the reason the US has been so hard-hit is because economic neoliberalism has hollowed out our capacity for resiliency in the face of crises, and extreme wealth inequality has created a very large mass of people in very poor health. It also doesn’t help that as a society, we’re just not very good at all about taking care of ourselves in terms of health (both mental and physical).
To repeat, my thinking on Covid lockdowns is that they do their own brand of harm to the economy and to individual people, and they’re not effective at stopping Covid on account of the virus being so very airborne-contagious with such a long asymptomatic incubation period. In this world where people move around as much as they do, how do you stop Covid from reasserting itself once the lockdown ends? And considering the detrimental effects of lockdowns, they do have to end at some defined point. Lockdowns should only be used in cities/ counties where the hospital system is in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by real cases.
I think Tim Conway’s “old man” character from “The Carol Burnett Show” would have been a hilarious Joe Biden, but unfortunately, Mr. Conway died right around the time Joe Biden formally entered the presidential race.
I have noticed that Covid isn’t really quite as bad as so many feared back in March and April. For one thing, none of my co-workers at the grocery store or anybody in my smallish apartment building that I know of has become sick with it, and back in March, I really thought somebody would by now. One Facebook friend who was a school-acquaintance back in the eighties became ill with it while visiting DC, but she recovered as one might from a severe bought of the flu. As I said in another comment recently, its main manifestation in Milwaukee has been putting overweight, older (and presumably poor) black men in the hospital.
So here’s what I see right now: Covid seriously targets the elderly, poor people with co-morbidities, and people who live in cities with very polluted air. There is also a significant handful of younger and otherwise healthy people whose immunological allotment from the genetic lottery fails to protect them from getting severely walloped by Covid. Reading the accounts of their affliction with the virus on Twitter is…beyond harrowing. And also personally worrying to me as a 53YO type 2 diabetic. (I’m on oral meds which get a little boost in keeping my blood-sugar under control from a small amount of basal [once-a-day administered] insulin.) But I recognize at this point that it’s not the Spanish Flu.
However, because it targets poor people with health problems the way it does, it hits big industrialized countries with extreme wealth inequality (the United States, Brazil, India) especially hard. I think it really is an indictment of how America treats its people of least account that we have less than five percent of the worlds population but lead the world in actual cases per capita. And the ueber-capitalist way our society is set up really set us up for Covid catching us with our proverbial pants down around our ankles. As a knee-jerk bleeding-heart libtard cuck, this just makes me livid to even think about it too much. And as a former matter-of-faith Democratic voter, it makes me even more determined than ever to be “done with Dems” knowing full well they will never, ever to anything substantive to alleviate this utterly disgraceful situation.
So all we can do for now is wear face-masks in crowded indoor settings and public transportation in order to afford some measure of protection to the most vulnerable among us. Those who find this to be some measure of encroaching totalitarianism really need to get a grip and grow the fuck up.
I think the big central banks of the world are covertly on Trump’s side. For pity’s sake, starting the very afternoon after US Election Day 2016, they flooded the world’s financial markets with an overwhelming tsunami of printed money. Just look at a graph of any of the three major US stock-market indexes, and you will see it start to go steroidally up, up, up starting in exactly mid-November 2016. Why this would be so, I’m not sure. Perhaps these bankers understandably wish to see the horny-for-a-nuclear-war-with-Russia US Deep State reigned in. I’m pretty sure few of any of us would be here to talk about this topic if Hillary Clinton had won that election.
Well, since mail-in voting was brought up in today’s series of articles, I’ll describe my experience with mail-in voting during Wisconsin’s primary. To put it simply, I didn’t like it at all. For one thing, I needed a witness to filling out my ballot, and it would have to be someone not so nosy as to insist on knowing who I was voting for. My next-door neighbor in my apartment building is a nice person (despite bringing bed-bugs into this building, which isn’t entirely her fault, as Milwaukee has a hellacious bed-bug problem and this aging structure was probably going to get those critters sooner or later) and was glad to be my non-nosy witness. But being the self-sufficient loner I’ve always been, it was just awkward asking someone I didn’t really know for help with something as simple as voting.
What I really disliked was how very, very tiny you have to write on the front of the envelope for the ballot before you send it in. I had to practice pen-printing letters that very, very tiny on another piece of paper, or else I wouldn’t have been able to do so successfully.
But what really turned me off on mail-in voting was what happened with the mail-in votes here in Wisconsin. I know my vote was counted because our state’s “MyVote” website records me as having voted in the spring primary. (I made sure I got my mail-in voting done as early as I could manage.) But after the primary, whole big sacks of uncounted ballots were discovered after the primary at one or more Wisconsin post offices. And I don’t think it was any sort of political skullduggery. It was almost certainly just a case of the USPS being insufficiently competent to handle this new phenomenon of so very many people voting by mail on account of the pandemic. This would certainly qualify as a example of what people mean when they disparagingly say, “as efficient as the Post Office”.
So this general election, when I write-in vote for the Green Party candidates that state Democratic Party used political skullduggery to keep off the ballot, I will probably use the early voting method at City Hall that I have used since the 2004 election, back when I was still voting for Democrats as a matter of faith. I think that should be okay now that mask-wearing is widely accepted and mandated. The City Clerk’s office will probably also have sanitizer on hand for use before and after you fill out your ballot. I’m less keen on voting at polling stations on Election Day on account of so many poll-workers being senior citizens, many of them over 80.
Kendrick makes a good point, though it bears pointing out that the number of cases continues to rise in the US. I think there’s a very obvious explanation for that. The US, especially the hard-hit southeast, has a disproportionate number of poor people with co-morbidities than countries such as France and Sweden. And everything about the way our ueber-plutocratic society is set up makes us a lot less well-equipped to deal with a pandemic than countries such as France and Sweden.
I do think local lockdowns are justified when the hospital-system of a city is in danger of being overwhelmed. Yes, lockdowns have severe consequences of their own, but in that situation, it’s a lot like applying a tourniquet to a severely wounded limb. It certainly is dangerous to cut off circulation, but it’s even more dangerous not to take measures to stanch the bleeding. The sad thing is, we wouldn’t have so very much bleeding if we weren’t such a hopelessly dysfunctional society on so many levels!
I will believe it’s “over” for the US when our death-rate starts seriously dropping. Right now, it doesn’t even seem to be slowing down.
The main reason I’m skeptical of lockdowns these days is on account of how very contagious Covid is. It’s because of this extreme contagiousness that whatever you gain with an economically debilitating lockdown could be lost again very easily when the contagion comes roaring back out of seemingly nowhere. Covid might not be the apocalypse many of us feared it might be back in the middle of March, but it nonetheless poses a serious threat to those over 80, people who live in places with very bad air quality due to pollution (this is why NYC was hit so very hard by severe cases and fatalities back during spring of this year), and poor people with one or more co-morbidities. (In Milwaukee where I live, the people who were ending up in the hospital with severe Covid in March and April were very disproportionately older, overweight black men.) In fact, I think that a lifetime of dire, abject poverty should be thought of as a sociological co-morbidity if not a medical one.
Don’t know if it’s shoddy reporting or shoddy regulations, but “mask orders” or “mask mandates” are not terms anyone should use. After 9 months, it’s all turned into oppression.
That is just a stupid generalization. Mask-wearing is more about protecting other people (especially senior citizens and poor people with potential co-morbidities) than about protecting yourself, so it really only works when nearly everybody is wearing them. But we don’t think about other people in ‘murka because muh freedumb.
Okay, this is very tangential, but what I find weird about all the Russia hysteria is that to listen to it, you would think that the current Russian state is worse than the one that existed forty years ago at this time, when clearly and obviously the reverse is true. Though I suppose you could argue that the same Russian Deep State that was behind the previous one simply discarded an ideology that wasn’t working anymore (if it ever really did) in favor of something more modern and functional. I would certainly be hard-pressed to call the Russian Federation a real republic, but then again, the same thing could be said about the USA.
I really have to say, I had a lot more more respect for Paul Craig Roberts before his descent into bargain-basement neo-Confederate white nationalism.
Wearing standard face-masks is more about protecting other people than it is about protecting yourself, which is why they only work when everyone is wearing them. That won’t happen now that it’s become yet another thing in this country that’s about damn politics, so I’m glad that at the very least major stores are requiring that people wear them while on the premises. I’m considering ordering a mask I saw online that has inscribed on it: “Wearing a mask isn’t a political statement. It’s an IQ test.”
I would also add that a country that is the way the USA is, is of course going to be very poorly positioned to do a lockdown. For one thing, our culture is full of people who won’t accept or tolerate it and will do everything they can to try and defy it. More importantly, we expect our working class people to “sink or swim” without as little government help as possible, so the economic effects of any lockdown are going to be just as devastating as any virus for so many people here. Though for an airborne virus as super-contagious as Covid, I wonder if lockdowns really are a solution. After all, after the lockdown is ended, which it really has to be at some point, the contagion could just come roaring right back so easily.
