#WednesdayMood [DOT 5/8/20]


Halfway there guys. Hang in there!


This is evolving, but here’s the gist per WaPo:

At least two massive explosions shook Beirut on Tuesday, injuring and killing hundreds of people, strewing devastation across multiple neighborhoods and shattering windows for miles around.

The cause of the early-evening blasts was not immediately clear, but senior officials said it appeared that flammable materials stored in a warehouse in the port area had caught fire. An initial, smaller explosion had apparently ignited a fire. Then came two secondary blasts, propelling a vast mushroom cloud of pink and yellow smoke over the city.

Lebanese capital rocked by huge explosion
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/lebanon-beirut-explosion-live-updates-dle-intl/index.html

At least 63 people dead and more than 3,000 injured as explosions rock Beirut, Health Ministry says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/major-explosion-rocks-beirut/2020/08/04/53ff4dd6-d666-11ea-a788-2ce86ce81129_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_beirutstrip-201pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans


“It is what it is” is something you put on your corporate bingo card when you’re stuck in meetings all day, not what you want the President to say in light of over 157K American deaths from Covid.

Live updates: U.S. averages more than 1,000 coronavirus-related deaths for ninth day in a row
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/04/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_coronavirus-luf-1230am%3Aprime-time%2Fpromo


In case you forgot…

Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/04/rising-global-temperatures-death-toll-infectious-diseases-study


I, too, often confuse SUVs with motorcycles. /s

Colorado police apologize over viral video of officers handcuffing Black girls in a mistaken stop
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/04/aurora-pd-handcuffs-family-gunpoint/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-low_mm-colo-12pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans


Stonks!

Stock futures flat as investors await stimulus bill, more earnings
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/04/stock-futures-flat-as-investors-await-stimulus-bill.html


This seems sketchy af. How do you lose a whole King? Also, WaPo really missed an opportunity here to make the headline: “Where In The World is SpanishKingJuanCarlos?”

Spain’s former king fled the country, but where in the world did he go?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/08/04/spains-former-king-fled-country-where-world-did-he-go/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_spainjuancarlos-245pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans


Well this is adorable.


Here’s another good tweet; sound up! Additional memes here.

Go show your actual Wednesday who’s boss!

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34 Comments

  1. We lost power last night around 7. This morning the estimated time for restoration is still TBD. Fun times. 

    • …that sucks…hope they sort it sooner rather than later

    • I feel for you. Hope things get fixed soon. As a Floridian, this is my worst nightmare. Fortunately, we live relatively near (a couple miles) a transmission line (the giant poles and cables that carry hundreds of thousands of volts over long distances) and our subdivision has buried lines, which are key. Typically power companies triage by starting at the transmission towers and working outward to help the most people the fastest, so our power’s never been off for more than 10-12 hours, even after major hurricanes. 
       
      There are some rural communities around here that went without power for weeks after various hurricanes. I’d nope right out of there. Nothing is worth that. 

      • Can confirm this!^^
        I used to live in one of the two MN areas with a Nuke Plant,and a former neighbor worked for Excel (the owner).
        One time, we were talking about outages & I asked him how we always got so lucky, and were NEVER down for the amount of time we see folks having outages for across the country.
        He said something basically inline with what you mentioned on the “triage” thing, and explained that because we’re just off those main lines, and SO MANY main transmission lines ran out of our area, from the plant,  we’d pretty much ALWAYS be back up right away.

    • Ugh- might cost the GOP the race in Nov

      I shouldn’t type until I’ve had at least 2 cups of coffee.

      • Sounds like you need a coffee break lol. Hope you got going eventually!

         

        • There are some days where no amount of coffee seems to help. I’m having one of those. Nothing major, just lots of little screw ups and annoyances.😖

  2. There were a couple of interesting results in US House primaries last night. Rashida Tlaib won easily. She was running against Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, who had the backing of Detroit’s Black establishment, including the son of longtime mayor Coleman Young and the grand nephew of longtime Rep. John Conyers. Jones ran on a platform of softening opposition to Trump and dog whistle opposition to Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent unlike Jones and the majority of the district. Jones also courted conservative funders, and her loss is a warning sign for African American leaders about the risks of playing cute with right wingers.
     
    In Missouri, Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush beat longtime Rep. Lacy Clay, who is the son of Bill Clay, who represented the district for decades. Ironically, Lacy Clay worked with Republicans to gerrymander his own  district, drawing lines that destroyed another Democrat’s district to pack his own with Democratic votes. This is something that has happened in multiple states, most recently North Carolina, where African American politicians have cut deals with the GOP to boost the vote in their own districts in exchange for enabling GOP gerrymandering schemes statewide.
     
    This auto-gerrymandering may well have backfired in the primary by giving Bush the votes she needed for her challenge. With redistricting coming up in a couple of years, African American establishment politicians may think harder about deals with the devil, which younger African American voters may see for what they are.

    • We had a similar gerrymandering situation here in Florida, where former Democratic Rep. Corrine Brown fought a general redistricting because it would cost her her “safe” seat. Her district snaked through four or five counties targeting Black neighborhoods, ranging from Orlando to Jacksonville (approximately 140 miles long). It was identified as one of the most gerrymandered districts in the entire country. The Republicans, of course, were fine with this because it also guaranteed their districts while limiting the overall number of Democratic legislators. It’s the clearest example of “making a deal with the devil” that I’ve ever seen in politics. 
       
      Brown was subsequently arrested and convicted of 18 counts of fraud ranging from mail fraud to filing a false federal tax return. 

    • I was happy to see Tlaib won, was unaware of the Missouri BLM activist win. That’s excellent news.

    • Redistricting cost Barney Frank (preemptively) his seat in Massachusetts. After the 2010 census they lost a Congressional district. One of the 10 had to go.
       
      They were all Democrats, the Governor was a Democrat, the State legislature was Democratic, and they sacrificed Frank. I don’t know why. He was one of the most powerful, the smartest, and by far the most fun of the MA Congressional delegation. I bet the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill did him no favors.
       
      He retired rather than run again for 2012. He was pretty vocal about redistricting being the cause, but he never publicly speculated about who exactly put the knife in his back.
       
      In any event, guess who ran in the district in 2012 and won? Yes, Joseph P. Kennedy III. This righted a grievous wrong in the eyes of many because before this win there hadn’t been a Kennedy in Congress in a few years, four or five, which hadn’t been the case for pretty much the entire post-war period.
       
      I will never understand the Massachusetts primal need for a Kennedy. Whatever, I don’t live there, good luck to them.

    • I know a kid who went back to college to start the soccer season and already has Covid. 

      • Wow, thus ruining the health benefits of a physical activity. Learning!

    • Our school district was planning on a hybrid start, partial online/partial in school. Last night they voted to start with online only. It is a difficult choice.
      My brother-in-law’s step son goes to college the next county over from us on a football scholarship. He is doing the required two-week quarantine before starting practice. I am curious who the team will play, as the college a few block from us (in their league) has cancelled the season and is online only. I wonder how that will work with only partial league participation?

  3. it may have been mentioned yesterday, and I just missed it, but if not,
    A size comparison (because others may be like me, and find hard-ish numbers helpful, when trying to understand scale), on how big the port explosion was yesterday…
     
     
    If, as is suspected, the explosive material in Beirut was Ammonium Nitrate, it’s a fertilizer component, and one of the main components of the Ryder Truck bomb, that McVeigh & Nichols used on the Murrah Building in OKC.
    For scale, this is from the Wikipedia post, on the Oklahoma bombing; 
    “At 9:02 a.m. (14:02 UTC), the Ryder truck, containing over 4,800 pounds (2,200 kg)[66] of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, and diesel fuel mixture, detonated in front of the north side of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.”
    4,800 lbs is equal to 2.4 tons
    Evidently, the port’s warehouse held 2,750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate, siezed from that ship years ago…
    The crater left in OKC was 30′ wide, and 8′ deep… reports on the port today talk about 200m across, filled with seawater…
    For those of us who’re of an age to remember the OKC attack, this is so exponentially bigger💔💔💔
    Even though–thankfully–NOT an attack, it couldn’t be hitting at a worse time, or in much worse of a place, since Lebanon was already in such a crisis state…
    I know there was MUCH for many folks to be able to dislike about Tony Bourdain, and that YES, “The Beirut Episode” is controversial to some folks.
    But watching it–like it changed Tony in the making of it–DID change things for some of us.
     
    It took Beirut (and further, Lebanon as a country!) from a place where fighting, wars, & strife had gone on from the year before I was born, until I was in high school–to a place where people loved; struggled, yes; but where they also survived; and where they really, truly lived, and did so, so very, very deeply.
    Tony showed us that the people of Lebanon were people, folks just like us–with dreams, and plans, and hopes for the future. And that, just for the luck of having been born in a certain place, our fates were so very, very different back then. 
     
    The episode changed Bourdain, and it changed those of us who watched & loved his show. 
     
    After the first Beirut episode, Tony started to go DEEPER in the show. He was already good at making connections with people, but the later shows had SO MUCH more depth and heart. Some were controversial, like the Palestine one… because we here in the west often get fed one narrative or another, and as those of us who’ve grown up in the shadows of 1968, and everything that’s happened since know, Isreal/Palestine, and the Occupation of the settlements is a WHOLE, huge, mess & pallets-full of the proverbial “can(s) of worms”…
     
    Tony showed us the HUMANITY which still goes on living, within those areas where folks deal with war, strife, & struggle.
     
    He made us see ourselves in showing us what it was like for the folks who lived there, and showed us that the cliche “but for the grace of god…” was, frankly, true. That it was just sheer LUCK that those of us watching him on our TV’s were born *here* rather than somewhere else. That we got to have a comfortable and–even if we struggled–relatively easy existence in comparison.
     
    He helped us to see our fellow travelers on the tiny blue marble as humans, just like us, and ever since, I’m SURE I’m not the only one, whose heart has ached, as we heard the news, in the last few weeks…That Lebanin was struggling, and people were starting to go hungry. That inflation was starting to skyrocket, and the people there were beginning to struggle with hyperinflation, like years ago in Zimbabwe.
     
    That they were teetering on a hunger crisis, similar to what people are facing in Yemen.
     
    And now, guttingly, THIS.💔💔💔
     
    And my country, a country which SHOULD be stepping up & sending aid & humanitarian workers to help… probably won’t… or will much to late to be of much good, for the folks who need help, NOW.
     
    Because we’ve got the damn Orange Buffoon and his crooked bunch of conmen(and women), hench-people, and other-assorted-grifters, trying to steal everything they can from the federal coffers…
     
    And many Americans won’t care, both because over the last few decades, with both Populism & corporatism/capitalism, our society has dug HARD into crab (or crab-bucket) mentality… the notion that “if I can’t have it, neither can you!!!” Also known as the Republican/nominally Libertarian, “I got mine, fuck y’all!” mentality.
     
    When I heard about the explosion, even before I saw the video clips, I immediately thought of a truck bomb/fertilizer bomb… on the one hand, it’s a relief to know that *apparently* this wasn’t a purposeful action, or an attack… but it’s still heartbreaking, that folks who’ve gone through SO.DAMN.MUCH have to deal with *this, too.* 💔💔💔
    A GREAT article by Kim Ghattas, on Bourdain’s first Beirut Episode, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/how-lebanon-transformed-anthony-bourdain/562484/
    One of the many criticisms of the first episode; https://blogbaladi.com/anthony-bourdains-beirut-episode-is-even-worse-than-i-thought-it-would-be/
    A link–i think to the episode–on Vimeo, I haven’t watched all of it yet, but the length is about right;
    https://vimeo.com/209124416
    And a link to the UN’s donations page, for anyone who may be interested and/or able to help out (or who wants to link them for others!);
    https://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/how-donate-united-nations-system/
     
    Because the UN is going to be sending funds & trying to help out; https://apnews.com/12ea65fee7606260167af25156a7cacc
    https://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/how-donate-united-nations-system/
     

    • Excellent comment Emmer, thanks for this. I have the last episodes of Tony on my DVR that I STILL don’t have the heart to watch. 

      • I loved his shows (obviously!😉). He and Zimmern are two of my favorite people to watch, and imo they’re both 100% THE BEST, when it came to just hanging out in a place like someone’s grandma’s kitchen, just helping cook as the cook would let ’em, and then sitting around & learning the stories behind that family’s history with the food. And hearing about what their lives had been like.
        Tony was a GREAT storyteller (Kitchen Confidential is a GREAT read!), but he was *also* extremely talented & gifted, at listening, and getting other people to tell their best stories.💖

      • Many thanks, to YOU, too, my friend!💞

    • Seconding the great comment comment, Emmer. I’ve been reading The Guardian all day, and the reach of that explosion is mind-bending.
       

      ‘Do you really think Hiroshima could have been worse than this?’ asked one man on an agonising Lebanese day

       
       

      • On Twitter there’s a lot of before and after and drone footage. It’s crazy. Total devastation.

  4. He had been making enemies in the state legislature since the days he was chief of staff to the mayor of Boston in the 1960s. It was dumb for the state to drive him out, but that’s politics sometimes.
    Not that this is related, but there is funny scene in J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground about Boston during the era of busing. James Bown was coming to play in Boston and the mayor was worried the crowd was going to riot. Frank was confused because he only knew of the running back Jim Brown and wasn’t sure why Cleveland Browns fans in Boston would care.

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