Do we even deserve dogs?
He bought some McDonald’s for this stray good boy. Humanity.— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) April 29, 2020
Wait for it.
Dogs, bruh...💪🐶😍😇❤️😏pic.twitter.com/sXwJt0joxS
Apr 29, 2020
Today's Tweet
Do we even deserve dogs?
The Slump Has Begun
We're entering into an era of what promises to be a shit storm of really bad news - one that dwarfs the daily shit storm generated by Cult45 these last few years.
NYT: (pay wall)
America’s growth streak is over: The economy shrank 4.8 percent, and the worst is yet to come.
The coronavirus pandemic has officially snapped the United States’ economic growth streak.
The questions now are how extensive the damage will be — and how long the country will take to recover.
U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in the economy, fell at a 4.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That is the first decline since 2014, and the worst quarterly contraction since 2008, when the country was in a deep recession.
Things will get much worse. Widespread layoffs and business closings didn’t happen until late March, or the very end of the last quarter, in most of the country. Economists expect figures from the current quarter, which will capture the shutdown’s impact more fully, to show that G.D.P. contracted at an annual rate of 30 percent or more.
Coupla things:
NYT: (pay wall)
America’s growth streak is over: The economy shrank 4.8 percent, and the worst is yet to come.
The coronavirus pandemic has officially snapped the United States’ economic growth streak.
The questions now are how extensive the damage will be — and how long the country will take to recover.
U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in the economy, fell at a 4.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That is the first decline since 2014, and the worst quarterly contraction since 2008, when the country was in a deep recession.
Things will get much worse. Widespread layoffs and business closings didn’t happen until late March, or the very end of the last quarter, in most of the country. Economists expect figures from the current quarter, which will capture the shutdown’s impact more fully, to show that G.D.P. contracted at an annual rate of 30 percent or more.
Coupla things:
We're already hearing the externalizing excuses, ie: "COVID-19 caused all the problems, and China caused COVID-19".
I think the real story has everything to do with the bubble effect caused by the GOP's TaxScam17® - which drove hyper-inflation of Wall Street stock values because the companies spent their tax cut windfall on buybacks in order to boost their portfolios and capture more of the growth at the top of the earnings pyramid.
There was in fact some trickle-down (always is - that's what keeps that particularly monstrous "theory" alive), but for the most part, the bubble effect caused more immiseration of everybody earning below about $75K, and we're seeing what happens when the Consumer Demand which is the engine of the world economy, dries up.
I think the real story has everything to do with the bubble effect caused by the GOP's TaxScam17® - which drove hyper-inflation of Wall Street stock values because the companies spent their tax cut windfall on buybacks in order to boost their portfolios and capture more of the growth at the top of the earnings pyramid.
There was in fact some trickle-down (always is - that's what keeps that particularly monstrous "theory" alive), but for the most part, the bubble effect caused more immiseration of everybody earning below about $75K, and we're seeing what happens when the Consumer Demand which is the engine of the world economy, dries up.
COVID-19 has contributed to the downturn, and it's very likely to make things worse. But let's be clear - 45*'s failure to act quickly and decisively is what put us so deep in this fucking hole.
Irony is what happens when you make a desperate play to keep the economy propped up because that's the only thing that saves your re-election chances, but that play is precisely why you're about to get stomped on a scale of monumental proportions - even tho the GOP is working very very very hard to make sure it looks like a close one.
Don't get fooled - polling may show there's still some pretty strong support for 45*, but it's smoke and mirrors.
There's just no way it's real. You can't get a 45% overall approval rate for the guy when his numbers on handling of COVID-19 are in the shitter.
COVID-19 Update
There's some reporting that tells us the steep upward curve has been easing for several days, but we're still on track for 100,000 dead Americans by mid-May.
And the kind of shit Mike Pence pulled yesterday at the Mayo Clinic is not helpful.
First - optics, you stoopid fuck.
There are various probabilities here:
- "I'm just too strong for that silly old virus"
- "Wearing a mask would tell the world 45* is wrong about all of this"
- "I'm important - I get tested a lot - you don't because nobody gives a fuck about you"
None of this was good. Any benefit he might've gotten out of it was lost because the world only saw what a tone deaf dickhead he is.
Lastly - what was the subliminal message being transmitted by the hospital officials?
"C'mon in, Mr Veep. And no sir, you needn't bother protecting yourself by wearing a mask in a place where you're ten thousand times more likely to get infected. If you take this shit back to the White House with you, maybe somebody in President FUBAR's administration will start doing what we need 'em to do."
Apr 28, 2020
What They Don't Tell Us
No matter what happens, and no matter what the Press Poodles manage to dig up while it's happening, we never get to know everything we should know about any big event.
There's always a few details - usually a whole metric fuck ton of details - that we never get to see.
Once in a while, somebody cracks a little and we get The Pentagon Papers, but that's the exception instead of the rule. And given our commitment to "peaceful transition of power", we've evolved part of the system into a game of Stall 'Em.
Somebody shits the bed, and there's a bad reaction, and the people in power (some of them) get thrown out and new people come in, but the PR guys get to work and before ya know it, a few years have passed, and power has transitioned again, and deals are made and those details are lost until historians suss it out (sorta) and then we learn about some pretty fucking important stuff 30 years after it woulda made a real difference for us.
And here we are again.
WaPo:
In the early weeks of the coronavirus epidemic, the United States recorded an estimated 15,400 excess deaths, nearly two times as many as were publicly attributed to covid-19 at the time, according to an analysis of federal data conducted for The Washington Post by a research team led by the Yale School of Public Health.
The excess deaths — the number beyond what would normally be expected for that time of year — occurred during March and through April 4, a time when 8,128 coronavirus deaths were reported.
The excess deaths are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. They could include people who died because of the epidemic but not from the disease, such as those who were afraid to seek medical treatment for unrelated illnesses, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The count is also affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as suicides, homicides and motor vehicle accidents.
There's always a few details - usually a whole metric fuck ton of details - that we never get to see.
Once in a while, somebody cracks a little and we get The Pentagon Papers, but that's the exception instead of the rule. And given our commitment to "peaceful transition of power", we've evolved part of the system into a game of Stall 'Em.
Somebody shits the bed, and there's a bad reaction, and the people in power (some of them) get thrown out and new people come in, but the PR guys get to work and before ya know it, a few years have passed, and power has transitioned again, and deals are made and those details are lost until historians suss it out (sorta) and then we learn about some pretty fucking important stuff 30 years after it woulda made a real difference for us.
And here we are again.
WaPo:
U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19
An analysis of federal data for the first time estimates excess deaths - the number beyond what would normally be expected - during that period
The excess deaths — the number beyond what would normally be expected for that time of year — occurred during March and through April 4, a time when 8,128 coronavirus deaths were reported.
The excess deaths are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. They could include people who died because of the epidemic but not from the disease, such as those who were afraid to seek medical treatment for unrelated illnesses, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The count is also affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as suicides, homicides and motor vehicle accidents.
Is there terminology that's any creepier than "Excess Deaths"?
Anyway - yes, dammit, we have a right to know stuff. Most stuff. Certain stuff. Stuff that wouldn't get the good guys killed if it we knew about it - assuming of course the good guys are who we're told they are, and we're not just being sold another Vaporware upgrade, and only because I believe the guys in charge as long as they're my brand of guys and as long as I'm relatively sure they aren't just fuckin' with me, pretending to be my guys when they really aren't.
So that's clear, right?
Anyway also too, one of the really big things about our slide into this Daddy State authoritarian ocean of shit is the degradation of our official-government-supposed-to-be nonpartisan data gathering and reporting.
The Daddy State must control the flow of information if it's to have any chance of dictating reality to us.
That's why they insist on not properly funding the research at various entities to keep us informed on the public health aspects of guns and pollution and the other profit-over-people activities of this bullshit version of Capitalism that they're always pimping.
COVID-19 Update
A little delayed today.
And I've switched from the Johns Hopkins site to Worldometer, so there's a higher probability for discrepancies.
And I've switched from the Johns Hopkins site to Worldometer, so there's a higher probability for discrepancies.
Remember: since I don't go to these sites at exactly the same time every day, and since they each gather and report their data differently, there will be some fluctuations in my Calculator.
Today, it shows us hitting 100K dead Americans about mid-May. While this has been fairly consistent, over the last few weeks, that date has been slowly receding.
Apr 27, 2020
Today's Tweet
The best 55 seconds I've spent all day.
Indeed. Fuck Trump!pic.twitter.com/O5hEj5Vw4l— Private Joker, USMC (@Infantry0300) April 26, 2020
Overheard
2020 Stress Factor:
People locked down by themselves just want some company, while people locked down with others just wanna be left the fuck alone.
People locked down by themselves just want some company, while people locked down with others just wanna be left the fuck alone.
Lemme Just Say
...fuck John Bolton.
And fuck whoever lets him continue playing his stoopid little power games - never calling him on the bullshit he floats every time he opens his mouth.
Jeff Toobin gets most of it right, even though he bogs down a little, doing the lawyer thing where he concentrates on the law itself instead of the effects of the actions of the people who always think they have the right to fuck around with the law in order to get what they want at the expense of the greater good.
If there's no greater good being served by the law, then the law becomes a selective boutique serving only the interests of plutocrats.
And yes, you can argue that we have to test the law so we can tweak it, trying to make it work better. But that process itself gets hijacked on a regular basis, and we end up fighting about the wrong thing - we fight about whether or not someone has sufficient power to bend the law to his will, instead of addressing the fact that he broke the fucking law and he has to be held to account for it.
New Yorker:
During the impeachment investigation, John Bolton, President Trump’s onetime national-security adviser, played a cagey game with Congress. He dropped hints suggesting that he knew a great deal about the President’s dealings with Ukraine—information that would have been highly relevant to the investigation. He also had a big deal with Simon & Schuster for a tell-all about his time in the Trump Administration, and the book had a tantalizing title: “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” Bolton dodged testifying before either the House or the Senate, thus preserving his news-making disclosures for the book-buying public.
But Bolton may have outfoxed himself. Like anyone with access to classified information, he signed a prepublication-review agreement. Each government agency that allowed Bolton access to its information—and, in the case of a national-security adviser, that would have been virtually all of them—has the right to review his manuscript and to excise purportedly improper disclosures. Bolton left the government on bad terms with Trump, and it looks like the Administration may be taking revenge through the review process. Charles Cooper, Bolton’s lawyer, has already complained about how the Administration is delaying and revising Bolton’s book, and his publication date has already slipped from March to May. But there’s no guarantee that the review process will even be finished by May, either. (Cooper and a spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster declined to comment.)
And fuck whoever lets him continue playing his stoopid little power games - never calling him on the bullshit he floats every time he opens his mouth.
Jeff Toobin gets most of it right, even though he bogs down a little, doing the lawyer thing where he concentrates on the law itself instead of the effects of the actions of the people who always think they have the right to fuck around with the law in order to get what they want at the expense of the greater good.
If there's no greater good being served by the law, then the law becomes a selective boutique serving only the interests of plutocrats.
And yes, you can argue that we have to test the law so we can tweak it, trying to make it work better. But that process itself gets hijacked on a regular basis, and we end up fighting about the wrong thing - we fight about whether or not someone has sufficient power to bend the law to his will, instead of addressing the fact that he broke the fucking law and he has to be held to account for it.
New Yorker:
During the impeachment investigation, John Bolton, President Trump’s onetime national-security adviser, played a cagey game with Congress. He dropped hints suggesting that he knew a great deal about the President’s dealings with Ukraine—information that would have been highly relevant to the investigation. He also had a big deal with Simon & Schuster for a tell-all about his time in the Trump Administration, and the book had a tantalizing title: “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” Bolton dodged testifying before either the House or the Senate, thus preserving his news-making disclosures for the book-buying public.
But Bolton may have outfoxed himself. Like anyone with access to classified information, he signed a prepublication-review agreement. Each government agency that allowed Bolton access to its information—and, in the case of a national-security adviser, that would have been virtually all of them—has the right to review his manuscript and to excise purportedly improper disclosures. Bolton left the government on bad terms with Trump, and it looks like the Administration may be taking revenge through the review process. Charles Cooper, Bolton’s lawyer, has already complained about how the Administration is delaying and revising Bolton’s book, and his publication date has already slipped from March to May. But there’s no guarantee that the review process will even be finished by May, either. (Cooper and a spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster declined to comment.)
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