While a lot of science is being curtailed due to COVID-19, the shelter in place and general shutdown of travel and commerce also makes for some unexpected science, such as this lovely measurement map from the European Space Agency (ESA):
Cool stuff. This is why we fund space agencies, folks. Subtle stuff like this can be very important to know.
In most nations, information about the coronavirus is seen as vital to saving lives.
Not in Turkmenistan, one of the world’s most closed countries. There, the government has banned the word “coronavirus” from the Turkmen vocabulary in a move to suppress all information about the pandemic, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday.
And that is placing its citizens in danger, the group said.
The state-controlled media in the autocratic nation, which borders Iran, is prohibited from using the word. You can no longer find “coronavirus” in health information brochures that have been distributed to hospitals, workplaces and schools, according to the Turkmenistan Chronicle, one of the few independent news outlets, whose website is blocked inside the country.
And what happens to Turkmenistan residents who decide to wear face masks or chat with their friends about the virus on the street or at bus stops? They could be arrested, according to local journalists who spoke with Reporters Without Borders. [WaPo]
And I’m not even sure why.
I don’t know why I get peeved at this, but I do:
Most deaths Tuesday were in New York, where 332 people were reported dead. Michigan reported 75 deaths, New Jersey reported 69 and Louisiana reported 54. Nationwide, there were more than 24,000 new confirmed cases reported Tuesday.
The new total did not include deaths from Washington, where officials are working to fix a glitch in the health department’s system for tracking the outbreak. The state, one of the country’s early epicenters, has been unable to provide updates on its figures since Saturday. [WaPo]
Is this a problem with a human process? If so, then no peeve. But it sounds to me like a bug in a software program. Software engineers, programmers, IT people, techies – these are not officials. They are, for want of a better word, techs.
Not officials. Stop that, WaPo. And everyone else.
Wow, being dead sure makes me hungry! Who’s on the menu today, honey?
Zombie Honeymoon. Zombie Honeymoon.
It sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?
It’s not.
Zombie Honeymoon (2004) addresses the unexpected implications of ‘until death do you part‘ when your spouse becomes a zombie, and it approaches them in a very somber, if frenetic, manner.
Denise and Danny are on their honeymoon on the beach in New Jersey when something staggers out of the surf, assaults Denise’s newly minted husband as he sleeps, and barfs on him before disappearing. As the emergency room doctor and nurse roll Danny into a room, he flatlines, and despite the doctor’s best efforts, he dies.
For about ten minutes.
Then he pops awake, proclaims himself fine and ready to return to the duties of honeymooning, and proves it in a most enthusiastic manner. But such activities can be quite energy intensive, and now the police are visiting, asking about a missing hospital roommate, and although the police leave empty-handed, soon enough Denise catches Danny dining, and it isn’t el fresco – it’s in the bathtub with intestines everywhere. Good thing the main course seemed to be on the edge of dying anyways, eh?
But Danny is remorseful, pleading with Denise, and she’s really got a problem here. Is Danny still her husband, having been dead ten minutes? Is she still required to be loyal and all that rot? Don’t forget the hormones and intense love she’s feeling, and she makes that choice that maybe most of us wouldn’t – but it isn’t unbelievable.
Sadly, Danny becomes less and less fun as the hunger increases, and the fact that he’s a vegetarian doesn’t really slow him down. We may cheer the loss of one really irritating friend – that character should have been rewritten – but, in general, this isn’t about the scant humor, but the loss of life brought on by Denise’s choice, the question of loyalty to one’s husband vs loyalty to society.
And, ultimately, whether Danny’s love for Denise will mean he’ll have her with a modicum of olive oil, or if the crazed monster he’s become still has a shred of humanity in it.
I mean, besides what he’s eaten.
Relentless and fast-paced, which overcomes some predictability, I did overly enjoy the candlelit dinner scene, which I think transforms the story from a somewhat predictable exploration of moral questions into something the next step up. This is better than it sounds, since I found the paranormal scene irritating and predictable. It’s a little hard to recommend it, as the violence is – unsurprisingly – unsparing, and the story doesn’t feel fully rounded, perhaps because we are talking about zombies, after all. But if you have a couple of hours to burn and enjoy a surreal situation explored by earnest storytellers, this might be right up your alley.
Patience, patience:
The UK may soon be getting tests for detecting COVID-19 antibodies:
The UK has ordered 3.5 million antibody tests designed to reveal whether people have been infected with the new coronavirus. The UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who today announced he himself has tested positive for the virus, has said these tests will be a “game changer”, but the reality is they might not have that much of an impact in the short term. …
Antibody tests, by contrast, detect the antibodies our bodies produce to kill the virus, which we keep producing even after the virus is eliminated. These tests can reveal who has been infected even after they have recovered. Handheld tests that require only a drop of blood can give results in 10 minutes, and can be mass produced quickly and cheaply. …
How accurate do the tests need to be? “It’s very difficult to say,” says Emily Adams at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK, who is helping assess the tests developed by Mologic, one of the companies supplying the UK. Part of that process will be working out what accuracy is required for different uses, says Adams. …
The antibody response to the coronavirus may be delayed compared with other infections. The tests can be used only 14 days or more after people develop symptoms, says Adams. [NewScientist]
My Arts Editor and I will be very interested in taking this test, if it ever makes its way to the United States, after the recent revelation – at least for us – that symptoms congruent with stomach flu have been associated with COVID-19, and, I’ll tell you, we each had one doozy of a dose of stomach flu, from roughly the last week of February to the end of the first week of March. Possibly the worst I’ve ever had.
It does cross my mind to wonder, given it’s been seen in a low percentage of cases, if it happened to be concurrent infections.
When you think you’re smarter than you are:
An Australian astrophysicist has been admitted to hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose in an attempt to invent a device that stops people touching their faces during the coronavirus outbreak.
Dr Daniel Reardon, a research fellow at a Melbourne university, was building a necklace that sounds an alarm on facial contact, when the mishap occurred on Thursday night.
The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets.
The rest, in The Guardian, is here.
No doubt some wealthy baron tried this. But the servant always got a bit twitchy.
It’s silky smooth, for all the raw personality flaws on display. Gosford Park (2001) covers the goings-on at the named British estate, sometime after World War I, where a collection of upper-class Brits, plus servants, plus an American film producer and his fairly cloddish servant have all gathered to eat, shoot pheasant, and gossip.
Their host is Sir William McCordle, wealthy factory owner, randy upper-class chap with that superiority complex that everyone hates, even his children, and especially those who need his support, financial or otherwise, to achieve their goals – or even stay afloat. And therein lies the rub, because virtually everyone who isn’t a servant, and perhaps one or two of them, might have a reason to do him in. Nearly everyone’s related to them, but he sees himself as king of the castle, not kindly benefactor – and that doesn’t play well in this landscape.
One attempt on his life goes awry, as someone – perhaps his son – appears to mistake Sir William for a peasant. Excuse me, pheasant. But, after much aggravation and an inadvertent admission of fooling around, eventually his body is found, both poisoned and stabbed, and now the plot may be afoot – but not necessarily for the killer. After all, the man had little in the way of ethics or morals, but plenty of energy for all those drab and dirty little pursuits for which the upper classes are most famous – taking advantage of everyone beneath them.
If you’re looking for a sharp whodunit, wend your way elsewhere, because the storytellers of Gosford Park are more interested in exploring how the superstructure of British society of the time is supported by all those folks underneath – even down at the police station. In a sense, the knife in the back of Sir William is emblematic of the knife of corruption and disconnectedness which has slowly been tearing apart and leveling British society ever since.
Oh so smoothly does Gosford Park do it in. No one, even those taking it between the shoulder blades, actually realizes it’s going in.
President Trump decided to further deflect blame for his vast incompetencies in connection with the COVID-19 outbreak this weekend by blaming … the medical profession and hospitals:
Trump’s boldest claim was about masks. He noted that current demand wasn’t commensurate with what hospitals typically use and suggested that masks were “going out the back door.”
“It’s a New York hospital, very — it’s packed all the time,” he said. “How do you go from 10 to 20 [thousand masks per week] to 300,000? Ten [thousand] to 20,000 masks, to 300,000 — even though this is different? Something is going on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Are they going out the back door?” [Aaron Blake, WaPo]
So let’s make some points about motivations, the first prior to the quote, and fallout.
I think we’re seeing some first-class projection here. That is, if Trump was a hospital administrator, he would be figuring cost vs price and trying to drive up the price by hoarding. Of course, that would be unethical, if not out and out illegal, so he would have to cover it up in order to preserve his reputation.
And, since the world is like Trump, or they’re suckers (see: Trump University), he assumes hospitals do this. Or, at least, are most likely to look like they do. Such is the Trump way when responsibility threatens to come a-calling.
And the fallout? The medical profession remains one of the most respected in society, which may reflect negatively; hospitals, however, are the entities that charge outrageous fees and resist publicizing prices, so they’re not so high on the list.
What would I like to see now? Undoubtedly, there are medical professionals in the Trump cult. I’d like one, or several, of them to step forward with evidence backing up Trump’s claim, OR step forward to say, No, there’s no evidence for this claim, and I’m no longer a Trump supporter.
It’s called having self-respect.
It would appear that North Korea is a little worried about COVID-19, according to an analysis by Benjamin Silberstein on 38 North:
The North Korean response to the global coronavirus outbreak has been uniquely strict by global standards. In late January, the country announced a complete suspension of foreign tourism and, soon thereafter, closed off its border almost entirely to all travel and the transport of goods. By early February, it appeared the border to China was practically shuttered, an extreme move given that China accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade. The government took even more drastic measures against smuggling operations along the border to China. Usually, the state turns a blind eye to much of this smuggling, and a great deal of it can occur relatively freely thanks to rife and institutionalized corruption. But in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, the state has announced harsh punishments against smugglers and stepped up monitoring operations along the border. Chinese authorities have warned residents on its side of the border that anyone who gets too close to the border risks getting shot by North Korean soldiers. Symbolically, the government even refused to take in over twenty defectors that the Chinese government was going to repatriate, in fear of the virus.
I am not aware that the North Korean medical sector has any particular strengths, and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong un must be terrified of President Trump gaining leverage over him, unless he thinks he can survive the loss of 1-2% of his population without a revolution.
And that’s certainly possible. Silberstein’s conclusion?
The North Korean government is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it lacks the tools to control and contain a virus outbreak inside the country. On the other hand, the measures meant to keep the virus out could also have disastrous consequences. A decision by the state, for example, to shut down the country’s marketplaces to stem the spread of the virus would deal a major blow to the public’s access to food. Depending on the situation in China, Beijing may provide aid to North Korea should the food situation become difficult—as it almost certainly did after last year’s poor harvest—but this cannot be taken for granted.
It’s not hard to see any cure or vaccine being withheld if it’s under the control of President Trump, while the rest of the West would probably deliver it on humanitarian grounds. The Chinese? I’m not sure.
Trying to keep it out until it burns out is the North Koreans’ best bet, probably. They are used to deprivation, and thus may not revolt.
Match-less:
Delightful attention to detail.
It’s a little sad that I must immediately be suspicious of the President when he says something, but when he voiced negative comments about the efforts of GM to produce ventilators on an emergency basis, the red flags went up:
“Our negotiations with GM regarding its ability to supply ventilators have been productive, but our fight against the virus is too urgent to allow the give-and-take of the contracting process to continue to run its normal course,” Trump said in a statement. “GM was wasting time. Today’s action will help ensure the quick production of ventilators that will save American lives.” [WaPo]
That action, taken on Friday, was Trump’s first invocation of the Defense Production Act., used to order GM to produce ventilators (in concert with Ventec Life Systems), but then he followed it up:
“As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out,” Trump tweeted. “They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, ‘very quickly’. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar.”
“Always a mess with Mary B.,” he added, referring to Barra, the company’s chief executive.
And CEO Barra’s response?
GM responded that i’ts been “working around the clock for weeks to meet this urgent need” and that its commitment to build the ventilators “has never wavered.”
“We are proud to stand with other American companies and our skilled employees to meet the needs of this global pandemic,” said Mary Barra, GM’s chairman and CEO.
At this juncture, independents are wondering what’s going on, while the Trump cultists will be stirred up since, well, their Great Leader doesn’t like GM. So what’s going on? Aaron Blake provides enlightenment the next day:
While discussing why he invoked the Defense Production Act on Friday to force General Motors to build ventilators, he acknowledged what has been a long-standing beef with the auto company: the closure of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Remarkably, Trump brought that up even as he was asked specifically why he had singled GM out for this step before any other company. He dismissed the idea that it was about cost and instead cited GM’s decisions on where to house its plants.
“We don’t want to think too much about cost when we’re talking about this. This is not cost,” Trump said. “I wasn’t happy where General Motors built plants in other locations over the years. . . . And so I didn’t go into it with a very favorable view. I was extremely unhappy with Lordstown, Ohio — where they left Lordstown, Ohio, in the middle of an auto boom because we had 17 car companies coming in and then they were leaving one plant in Ohio.” [WaPo]
Aaron has more, but it’s become clear this is a two-fer for President Trump.
First, he casts blame on someone else for his blundering response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every time a reporter brings it up, he’ll point at GM (and Ford, it turns out) and blame them for not supplying cheap ventilators.
And the reporters won’t just laugh at him and tell him to try again, which is the best course of action with an inveterate liar.
Second, he gets to cast GM and Big Auto as the enemies of the Trump cult. They take away their factories and thus Trump can hide his own failures and mistreatments of his own workers, including illegal immigrants, behind the big asses of GM and Ford.
He’ll try to pin blame – on a woman, too, from a known misogynist – on companies that don’t even normally make ventilators while refusing to accept one iota of blame for himself.
He’s quite the recalcitrant one.
A reader writes regarding the Philly’s need for a hospital and my suggested course of action:
Was the imminent domain Olen’s idea or yours? I wasn’t sure from the pull quotes and your comments. It’s a great idea. We should promote that kind of thinking among cities and counties.
Eminent domain was my idea.
The responsibility of government is safeguarding citizens and promoting the welfare of society as a whole – not ensuring companies get the profit they want. If the corporate entities refuse to participate as needed in the face of an emergency, they also do not get to profit when the emergency passes.
A client suggesting an alternative payment plan.
The Happytime Murders (2018) turns on a plot mechanism reminiscent of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): humanity has a companion intelligent race, the puppets. These are provided by The Jim Henson Company, and are generally well done.
But, this may involve the same puppeteers as your beloved Sesame Street used when you were a kid, but this isn’t for your kids. This is about a hard-boiled private eye puppet, Phil Phillips, a disgraced former cop accused of deliberately missing a shot on another puppet who had a gun to the head of his partner. Not only did his shot miss the criminal puppet, the ricochet hit and killed an innocent passing puppet. Meanwhile, his human partner, Connie Edwards, fights for her life and suffers a life-threatening injury to her liver, but survives.
Years later, he’s as seedy as Sam Spade, scraping by, when an old friend, actor and puppet Mr. Bumblypants of Happytime Gang fame, a TV show now years defunct, is killed in an apparent porn store robbery where Phillips was in the back room, examining records for a client. Into this walks his former partner, Edwards, full of bitter zingers and reproach for Phillips, and the LAPD decrees they shall work together on this case.
As they investigate, though, In rapid succession other members of the cast of Happytime Gang are murdered: Phillip’s brother, Larry, is torn apart, Lyle is caught in a gang-land style hit, Goofer, a smack addict, is found drowned in the surf at the beach, and Phillips’ old flame, the human Jenny, dies in a car bombing.
Phillips is nearby for all but Larry’s murder, and so the police pick him up for questioning.
The plot continues on and isn’t a bad little plot overall, although there were times when it should have been creative and, instead, relied on dropping F-bombs like a World War II bombing raid. It takes advantage of some of the inevitable differences between puppets and humans, has a lovely twist at the end, but it’s not quite compelling. I think the problem lies with the puppet Phillips, because, despite the skill of the puppeteers, he is just not quite good enough at portraying his inner turmoil. It may be the fact that he’s a puppet, it might even be the cultural contamination of the various Muppet creative efforts. Or it could have been a pacing problem. I’m just not sure.
But I shan’t condemn it like Hollywood did, where The Happytime Murders was nominated for several Golden Raspberry awards; it simply wasn’t that bad. Dialog is delivered crisply, the human actors reach just the right balance of unease with puppets, the expected bigotry comes through, as does the fury of those humans who have reason to respect their puppet counterparts. And the two sex scenes (not the hot tub scene, which is only so-so) were absolutely delightful, as my Arts Editor’s guffaws confirmed.
But the script didn’t deliver as much creativity as was required, substituting inadequate profanity, and Phillips just wasn’t quite compelling. It’s an interesting effort, if only for trying to understand why it doesn’t quite make the grade.
Gerund:
noun In Latin, a noun derived from a verb and having all case forms except the nominative.
noun In other languages, a verbal noun analogous to the Latin gerund, such as the English form ending in -ing when used as a noun, as in singing in We admired the choir’s singing.
[Wordnik (from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition)]
Used by my Arts Editor as she puzzled over dogging it, catting around, and fishing: why do fish not get the same treatment? she wonders. (I fear she did not use gerund properly, but don’t tell her that.) It also reminds me of the observation presented in Calvin and Hobbes,
Out of respect for author Mr. Watterson, I shall not steal the comic. Wherefore art thou, Bill?!
Judith Klausner is just the right amount of whimsy for me:
Yep, that’s praying mantises … mantisii … ummmm plural anyways … wearing those playing cards. There’s more of her work here. Enjoy! She’s also the artist responsible for the recent spate of Roman-Greco heads carved out of Oreo creamy centers.
Helaine Olen suggests that our ineffective governmental actions in the face of COVID-19 are not just the result of the Trump Administration’s chronic incompetence, but of a society which has been trained to be can’t-do:
Because the federal government refuses to step in and allocate ventilators to the areas with greatest need, state governors are being forced into a frantic bidding war, fighting one another for a chance at getting at least a small portion of the needed equipment for their residents. At New York Presbyterian Hospital, and no doubt others soon to come, one ventilator is simultaneously serving what’s been described as “multiple” patients.
Still, President Trump refused to trigger the Defense Production Act until Friday. Doing so earlier would have allowed him to demand that American industries manufacture needed medical equipment as a first priority, so that those who needed testing kits, ventilators and protective gear the most could have easily obtained them. Instead: “We’re getting what we need without the heavy hand of government,” the administration ludicrously claimed earlier this week.
The more likely reason? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful business lobbying group, didn’t want it to happen. So the powers that be decided it couldn’t be done.
Today, desperate for hospital beds — beds, it must be pointed out, that do not exist, in part, because of relentless cutbacks to improve hospital profits and operating margins — cities are taking over hotels, college dorms and even convention centers to care for the sick. But when city officials in Philadelphia tried to reopen Hahnemann Hospital, which closed last year, they hit a roadblock: the city couldn’t or wouldn’t come up with enough money to satisfy the private equity firm that shut the facility down. “We just think they’re unaware of the realities of the market,” a spokesman for the building’s owner told NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate.
And we can trace this to the pervasive presence of corporations in government. This is called capturing the agency in the lingo, and refers to the regulatory agency coming under the influence of the corporate entities it should be regulating. This is only exacerbated by the Republican religious that regulation is bad.
This is why one of my overarching themes is that the various sectors of society have differing goals, and mixing both methods and personnel between sectors – such as as a businessman into government – is often a toxic, not inspired, affair that should be avoided, unless the procedures have been sufficiently analyzed to understand the likely consequences, negative and positive, and the personnel have undergone the training to understand, oh, government doesn’t have a profit margin.
Oh, and my recommendation to Philly would be to take the damn hospital in an eminent domain proceeding, do it in a single afternoon meeting, even if you have to break the rules about public hearings and so forth, and if they scream and sue, tell them, Fine, scream and sue. We’re still using this building to save citizens. What the fuck are you doing to save citizens’ lives?
And if they dare to utter a single word, the response should be:
You dumb capitalists, you already had a chance to be a productive part of society. Cry & whine all you want, but we’re taking your hospital, we’re broadcasting your extremely poor response to all corners of thecountry so all know who is not a member in good standing of our society, and the names of all corporate officers will be part of that news blast. You had your chance, now FOAD. Seriously.
Yeah, reading Olen’s piece made me seriously crabby about capitalism tonight.
So are Iranians:
Standing over the still body of an intubated 5-year-old boy wearing nothing but a plastic diaper, an Iranian health care worker in a hazmat suit and mask begged the public for just one thing: Stop drinking industrial alcohol over fears about the new coronavirus.
The boy, now blind after his parents gave him toxic methanol in the mistaken belief it protects against the virus, is just one of hundreds of victims of an epidemic inside the pandemic now gripping Iran.
Iranian media report nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 1,000 sickened so far by ingesting methanol across the Islamic Republic, where drinking alcohol is banned and where those who do rely on bootleggers. An Iranian doctor helping the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Friday the problem was even greater, giving a death toll of around 480 with 2,850 people sickened. [AP]
The source? Well, at least their leaders don’t appear to be running their mouths irresponsibly:
The poisonings come as fake remedies spread across social media in Iran, where people remain deeply suspicious of the government after it downplayed the crisis for days before it overwhelmed the country.
We are so much more alike than different, but so many of us still bare our teeth at them. And, while I take news from the TehranTimes with a grain of salt, this is worth considering:
[Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria] Zakharova said the “unprecedented political and economic pressure” on Iran allowed the outbreak to take hold in the country.
Iran is unable to buy medicine and medical equipment due to the US economic sanctions which the Trump administration has been continuously tightening as part of “maximum pressure” on Tehran.
The coronavirus outbreak has prompted various international leaders, figures and groups to call for Washington to suspend its sanctions.
Earlier this week, eight countries sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, warning about the negative impact of unilateral sanctions on the international anti-coronavirus efforts.
The UN chief has said himself the sanctions are heightening the health risks for millions of people and weakening the global efforts to contain the spread of the pandemic.
In a tweet on Saturday, Iran’s Ambassador to France Bahram Qassemi said “those who still speak of sanctions and maximum pressure should accept responsibility for the death of thousands of people”.
Despite the international outcry, Washington imposed its latest round of coercive measures against Iran on Thursday.
It’s worth asking if the American sanctions strategy on Iran is responsible for part of the intensification of COVID-19. As of this writing, Iranian deaths due to COVID-19 are 2,517, with more than 35,400+ reported infected, out of a population of roughly 83 million. Of course, these numbers come with the usual data trustability caveats.
I am a little bewildered at the arguments presented to the SCOTUS for keeping the Federal Dreamers program (DACA – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) going:
Lawyers told the Supreme Court in a filing Friday that allowing termination of the program that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children could mean the loss of nearly 30,000 health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Supreme Court held arguments on the Trump administration’s desire to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in November, and the court’s conservative justices seemed ready to find the president has such authority. The court could rule at any time.
But lawyers for DACA recipients said this would be an especially bad time for such an outcome.
“Healthcare providers on the frontlines of our nation’s fight against COVID-19 rely significantly upon DACA recipients to perform essential work,” said the letter, filed by the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School. “Approximately 27,000 DACA recipients are healthcare workers — including nurses, dentists, pharmacists, physician assistants, home health aides, technicians, and other staff—and nearly 200 are medical students, residents, and physicians.”
The letter asked the justices to pay close attention to a brief in the case filed last year by the Association of American Medical Colleges and 32 allied organizations that “presciently identified” the current problem. The brief said the country is not prepared to “fill the loss that would result if DACA recipients were excluded from the health care workforce.” [WaPo]
This is, at it’s heart, a practicality argument, and the Court doesn’t usually address practicality. Even when it does, such as in Brown v Board of Education, they find a way to pin their decision to a bit of law or Constitution. And, I’ll note, deciding a decision on practicality comes close to legislating from the bench.
I don’t really see this as a matter for the courts, but a matter for Congress. They make the laws, and laws are often, even always, based on the practical needs of the citizens. In this particular case, I’m not talking about the needs of the so-called Dreamers, the illegal immigrants who arrived in this country as babies – too old for birthright citizenship, too young to even remember coming, much less their country-of-origin.
I’m talking the patient population of the United States. At the moment, the medical profession is under stress, and while not all specialties are seeing the same stress, it would certainly not do the profession, and the population it serves, any favors to dismiss 27,000+ healthcare workers.
So I think it is the duty of Congress to pass a law that defines healthcare worker and Dreamer, and then states
Any Dreamer who is a healthcare worker, as defined in this legislation, shall not be subject to deportation under any Federal law whatsoever; and, at the conclusion of this crisis, each healthcare Dreamer who has served selflessly and tirelessly shall receive expedited consideration for American citizenship.
I do believe the Democrats would find this an honorable law; and if the Republicans find it more palatable to embrace their xenophobia than the health of their friends and family, the Democrats can use that reprehensible decision to bash them again in the November elections.
I am going to write my Congressional representatives on the matter. And maybe Speaker Pelosi.
This caught me by surprise:
Ratings are way up for these old-school yet stalwart newscasts, helmed by the figurative descendants of Cronkite, Jennings and Brokaw, themselves descended from ancient anchors of television yore. Around 12 million viewers watched Lester Holt’s “NBC Nightly News” last week, reportedly the show’s best ratings in 15 years; Muir’s “World News Tonight” is seeing a similar big boost, with the coronavirus crisis delivering the show’s biggest ratings in two decades. CBS’s “Evening News” is way up too, with viewership last week that beat nearly all of its prime-time shows.
In two-plus weeks of staying home, I’ve renewed my faith in the broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts, perhaps out of some faintly nostalgic idea that watching it is what grown-ups do, come hell or high water. People who long ago gave up the habit — or never acquired it — are finding a similar solace at the end of the day with a half-hour of Muir or Holt or the “CBS Evening News’s” Norah O’Donnell. [Hank Stuever, TV Critic for WaPo]
If you’re a little confused about, as the young adults set tells me, that adulting thing, I can confirm, being aggressively middle-aged that, indeed, this is what adults of the previous generation would do: Tune that TV to one of the broadcast networks – there were only three, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and, yes, they’re still up and running, plus a few local independents who couldn’t do global news – and then …
>mutate voice into grating oldster tone< drag themselves back to their Barcalounger …
because remote controls didn’t exist back then, make themselves comfortable, and learn what was happening in the world. Topics depended on the time frame: the Cold War and its attendant incidents, such as the Bay Of Pigs, or the ongoing nuclear arms race; the Vietnam War, which was eventually broken wide open by Walter Cronkite’s reporting on the deceptions of American government regarding it; the latest earthquake in Chile; a plague somewhere else…
You get the point. Stuever continues:
In our binge-and-purge diet of ceaseless opinions, network news is almost shockingly neutral, the thing consumers keep saying they want from their news sources. They’d be even better if they had more time to do what they’re hopelessly trying to do, which is be all things to all viewers.
By design, they must inform everyone, from the dullest among us to the sharpest. Years ago, they determined (probably through dreadful focus-group consulting) that the news must always end on a positive word, the great giving-in to those dopes always complaining that there’s never any good news. It’s hard to tell if these segments work as the intended balm; very often they seem like a saccharine waste of crucial time.
It’s true: Fox News may be the worst, but CNN and MSNBC certainly have their points of view as well. The three broadcast networks have decades of experience, learning over and over that the facts come first, and then the opinion – if any. Only newspapers, now skeletons of their former selves for the most part, have more experience with the need for neutrality and accuracy. The self-centered obsession with finding opinions that fit our preconceptions may be the best description of our addiction to the cable- and Internet- associated news sources, as they all have their tinge – or, in so many cases, contamination – of under-the-covers inclination.
I’ll be interested to see if this is a temporary surge, or if people will decide their former favorite sources weren’t really all that good after all and stick with the networks.
And this may also play into the firing of Trish Regan, noted here last night. You can be subtly wrong for quite a while, especially when your audience views you with favor, but be shockingly wrong might damage the audience. Or, given the demographic Fox News attracts, kill them off.
It’s worth noting, as symbolic of the Fox News mission to shield the President from criticism, that Trish Regan, last seen authoring a rant claiming the COVID-19 pandemic was nothing more than a hoax concocted to damage the President’s credibility, has “parted ways” with Fox Business Network:
The Fox Business Network announced on Friday that it had parted ways with Trish Regan, the conservative news host who ignited controversy earlier this month when she dismissed the coronavirus pandemic as a conspiracy to throw President Trump out of office.
“We thank her for her contributions to the network over the years and wish her continued success in her future endeavors,” the network said in a statement to CNN Business. “We will continue our reduced live primetime schedule for the foreseeable future in an effort to allocate staff resources to continuous breaking news coverage on the Coronavirus crisis.”
The news of her departure was first reported by NBC News.
Regan faced fierce criticism earlier this month when she described the coronavirus to her viewers as an “impeachment scam.”
Regan claimed “many in the liberal media” were using the pandemic “in an attempt to demonize and destroy” Trump.
Regan appears to have become a burden to the Trump reelection effort, as her rant made her directly representative of Trump’s minimizing view of the COVID-19 pandemic, right up until he turned turtle and claimed he had seen it as a pandemic a month earlier, before almost anyone else. By dumping her, they can diminish the shadow she throws across the campaign, continue to refuse to acknowledge Trump was in denial and delayed starting up the emergency programs necessary to maximize survival odds.
Yes, that does mean lie right into the mouth of God, if necessary.
But this is what happens when you no longer benefit Trump. Right under the wheels, thump-thud-thump.
Stunning:
Frisson:
Noted in “What’s the Plan?” Ari Schulman, New Atlantis:
As a pandemic loomed, the country moved in remarkably short order from shrug to shutdown. Understandably, some are already questioning the wisdom of this move, noting how little information we’re acting on and the devastation the shutdown is already wreaking on the economy. The New York Times grants shutdown skepticism the frisson of “taboo.”
I thought it was a nice composition.
First of the season.
