…what it looks like [DOT 8/4/20]

…& I so wanted it to be a better day…but sometimes it’s like charlie says

…sucks when it goes like that
John Prine, Who Chronicled the Human Condition in Song, Dies at 73

…damn it

…good day or bad day after that it’s gonna be a sad day

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/08/john-prine-us-folk-and-country-songwriter-dies-aged-73

…but along with sad, I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending a fair chunk of it mad

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-m-fighting-coronavirus-frontlines-yet-i-ve-heard-pandemic-ncna1175426

…& where, we wonder (or at least I used to) could people possibly be getting information that bad, even at a time like this?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/08/trump-stokes-fresh-coronavirus-row-as-wuhan-reopens

…like that damn drug he won’t shut the fuck up about

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroquine-trump-coronavirus-drug

…call me a cynic but if money getting thrown at that in large doses doesn’t titrate its way to somewhere that benefits him personally in some fashion that’s obvious enough he understands it then I’m the pope out here shitting in the woods

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/07/trump-coronavirus-who-funding-deaths-briefing

…& I know it’s a tired old joke to say that the (D) establishment is too lenient with their colleagues across the aisle

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-coronavirus-errors-require-investigating-here-s-why-accountability-remains-ncna1177976

…but it’s hard not to be cynical when they aren’t out there in the face of a global pandemic slam dunking the case for healthcare being available to all being a manifest benefit to literally fucking everybody

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/his-achilles-heel-coronavirus-crisis-highlights-trump-s-lack-health-n1176496

…importantly not just a benefit to the people sick enough to qualify for above average spending on the part of a taxpayer-underwritten business model…because you’d have be a heartless, soulless, brain-dead fucking moron not to figure that shit out by now

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/defying-trump-talk-radio-keeps-downplaying-covid-19/609523/

…& speaking of doughnuts

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/amsterdam-doughnut-model-mend-post-coronavirus-economy

…& in other news…or possibly just as a collection of alternative sources of untapped resevoirs of boiling ire & righteous condemnation…honestly it’s all starting to blur together

…that said…I’m pretty sure moonshot used to be a metaphor…at least since they declared a winner in the space race

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/07/trump-mining-moon-executive-order

…but then sometimes shit doesn’t work as advertised

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/my-student-loan-payments-are-impossible-keep-which-was-kind-ncna1178336

…& sometimes it’s worse than that

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/wisconsin-primary-voting-during-coronavirus-should-be-2020-election-day-ncna1178526

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/coronavirus-has-ignited-battle-over-voting-my-mail-here-s-n1178531

…I mean, you’re dealing with the very definition of a cornered rat here…& however tinfoil-laminated-crazy it sounds I quite honestly can not shake the apparent certainty I feel that strenuous efforts are being made to warp the November elections more strenuously than the one that put that fat ass in the big chair…& there’s more than one set of people with an interest in contact tracing

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/nso-group-points-finger-at-state-clients-in-whatsapp-spying-case

…& even if this shit is true

…if only the virus returned the favor

…it doesn’t change this shit

Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States

…which makes this kind of thing a definite concern

The Pandemic’s Missing Data

…so…to harp back to that cynic thing…as I recall they (despite the desperate rhetoric on his part) didn’t really help scrape his ass through the electoral college that first time & he’s been about as useful to most of them as a hole in the head since he got installed as the orange man of the white house…there’s a legitimate possibility that between “re-invigorating the economy” & killing off a disproportionate number of people who mostly don’t vote for him he thinks getting people back out of the house & off to work is the proverbial win-win

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-lockdowns-have-sent-pollution-plummeting-environmentalists-worry-about-what-n1178326

…so apparently this qualifies as making it over the bar into good news territory these days

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/acting-navy-secretary-resigns-amid-flap-over-coronavirus-hit-ship-n1178576

…also…because it’s something altogether too many people these days are too old to remember…here’s a couple more reasons to remember why people find the phrase “charlie says” significant

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19 Comments

  1. These are days that test a pacifist’s commitment to nonviolence.

    I want to see how many people are willing to say “BLOOD ON TRUMP’S HAND” in public, in writing, or on billboards. If enough people get angry maybe we’d finally get shit done.

  2. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/defying-trump-talk-radio-keeps-downplaying-covid-19/609523/

    They are not doing it in :defiance,” it is all part of the plan and has been for a while. Before Trump, Republicans wouldn’t say things like Trump, so straight forward, they would Atwater it (words that mean racism that didn’t before…I am drawing a blank in my dumb brain but I hope most get it) it and then the Rush’s etc. would decipher it in “real” talk for the masses, this is basically that same play book.

    • …where most of the garbage he hawks is concerned I think that’s on the money…usually when he has to back down or off some hill of stupid as he careens about the newscycle like an overweight junkie jonesing for a fix he does still want to peddle his fiction hard among the ones who have that patented aversion to corroborated and accurate factual journalism

      …but this is a global public health issue & unlike uncle Vlad or that nice little man from China he was recently saying all sorts of nice things about until he needed all the whipping boys back at their posts…he can’t prevent broadly accurate data about patients & mortality rates from continuing to be widely available

      …to not be getting the word out to reel this shit in somebody somewhere with a half a brain & no fucking morals logically has to be calculating that losing (R) voters because people are dropping dead from following your advice is worth it for the added suppression of unwelcome (D) votes that can be spun as somehow appropriate under these pandemic-beset circumstances…particularly if statistically the ethnically diverse & economically disadvantaged demographics are going to bear the brunt of the loss

      …it’s not even a question of whether or not it goes that way…the calculation is still getting done & this is the side they’ve come down on

      ..& if the “advice” these morons are still churning out has that curve yo-yo-ing about through the rest of the year…his only out is to outright fuck with an election he can’t have by mail without losing by the landslide to end all landslides as he himself admitted just the other day

        • …I’m not sure there was a point so much as a comment & I doubt it really qualifies as smartened up to a standard that will survive dumbing down…but I guess the paraphrasing would go about like this?

          …usually that effect serves his interests because upping the ambient level of bullshit always plays in his favor because clarity & factual accuracy will skin him alive just as soon as either effectively pins him down on frankly any issue…but this goes differently in ways that you can’t hide unless you have the sorts of control over the “official” numbers that Russia & China can lay claim to, which he doesn’t…so it ought to make sense in this instance to see to it that the right people speak to the right people & this stuff stops being a drum they continue to beat…because it stands to lead to a statistically noticeable uptick in casualties among whom will be numbered the very faithful he considers integral to his much vaunted base

          …for someone somewhere that’s a dent they’re betting is more than offset by the disproportionate number of people the virus is subtracting from the other side of the ledger

          …which seems, statistically, like it might work out in their favor but risks there being a sine wave rather than a single peaking curve to flatten in terms of the virus

          …& since he’s made it clear that even he knows that a fully mailed-in ballot would flambé the chances of the (R) candidate that would seem to put the ballgame down to what “pandemic” measures could be concocted with which to fuck with the general election in his favor since a level playing field is a no-win scenario & he & the GOP know it?

      • Last time I saw him, about 18 months ago, he played the whole show without a break. He did an extended version of his Lake Marie dance and still came back for a second encore. I thought he’d be around for a long time. We were supposed to see him in May. RIP John, I hope you’re smoking that cigarette and drinking that cocktail with your mom and dad.

  3. As I wrote earlier. It’s almost the same goddamn map (healthcare, obesity, voting habits, guns, low education, fundamentalism (xtian) and now CoVID-19 restrictions or lack of them.)

    Uncanny.

    Based on the history of pandemics, the rural South (death toll) will rise again (and again and again) because it hits harder due to poor healthcare resources and CoVID-19’s love of people with chronic health issues and obesity.

    • There’s no doubt it’s going to get worse. The irony is that coronaviruses (in general, not necessarily but very possibly COVID-19) are extremely vulnerable to heat and humidity. In Florida, we recognize those terms as “today’s weather,” applicable to literally any day. So the South should, by rights, have lower transmission rates.

      Problem is, we have a LOT of climate controlled spaces that have traffic numbers in the hundreds of thousands (airports, convention centers, hotels, restaurants, theme parks, cruise ships, and, y’know, megachurches). My largely unscientific observations from news reports are that those places tend to be ground zero for infection (TSA agents, for example). Most of these places have shut down or vastly curtailed traffic.

      Idiot fundamentalist churches that insist on Easter services in their cavernous “sanctuaries” are going to transmit the disease on unprecedented levels. If they’d hold their services outside, they’d probably be pretty safe. But they won’t do that, because it was 91 degrees here yesterday. And they won’t cancel, because Jesus will protect them (and they need to pass that offering plate – another disease vector that WON’T get skipped). So we’ll see a flare-up among idiots. Another term for which is “evolution,” but the fundies don’t believe in that science bullshit.

      Good explanation of the seasonality of coronaviruses here:
      https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200323-coronavirus-will-hot-weather-kill-covid-19

        • Nah. Fundamental “evidence” is limited solely to “things that were written by baby Jesus when he dictated the Bible to the angels as interpreted by some schmuck who talks to us every Sunday.” If COVID-19 ain’t in the Good Book, it doesn’t exist. If Tyrannosaurus Rex was in the Book of Esther, they’d be worshipping at the Natural History Museum.

          I just hope it doesn’t kill a bunch of kids in these churches. Some of them grow up to discard the brainwashing and become moderately productive members of society. I speak from experience.

  4. 100% TRUE FACT: Trump’s only lines of inquiry into coronavirus have been a) what does Wall Street think? and b) are my voters dying? It’s easy to drag your feet when you don’t care who’s getting trampled.

  5. This article in the NY Times is the latest example of how vapid their political coverage is:

    Chin stoking thumbsucker Matt Flegenheimer writes an “analysis” to ask “What if the Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes Was the Last One?”

    What if? What If Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly? What If Spartacus Had a Piper Cub?

    First off, what does it matter? The line of argument is so convoluted that it makes no real sense, but it seems to boil down to this: Trump sure has done some bad things, but we at the Times don’t dare actually say so, so we’ll muddy the waters by doing this Jeopardy-style.

    But the even bigger problem is the typical myopic, patronizing, stupid attitude of the Times — the unspoken assumption that this is the bottom, and four more years of the GOP couldn’t possibly make a difference.

    Furthermore, it is the Times doing its usual bit of undercutting in advance the prospects of a Democratic president. We at the Times, Flegelheimer asserts, know right now that the Democrats will achieve nothing of consequence if they do win. But we’ll pose it as a question to fend off claims of our historic bias.

    What a bunch of idiots, from reporter to editor to bureau chief.

  6. Hi All – If you don’t see your comment right away hang tight. I’m pulling a bunch out of Spam because wordpress updated a plug in. Be patient and don’t worry about re-writing it as I’ll get to them but it might not be immediate. Thanks!!

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