Jun 15, 2020

Starving The Beast

COVID-19 Update

"Only" about 300 deaths were reported in the US yesterday.




WaPo:

Ripple effects of downturn show pandemic’s early economic toll was just the beginning

Plunging consumer and business spending spreading across the economy
...

Sales have fallen because the town’s biggest employer, Howmet Aerospace, recently laid off nearly one-quarter of its 2,800 employees. Howmet’s commercial aerospace business is a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic that has grounded thousands of airplanes and cast into doubt air carriers’ hopes of quickly resuming normal operations.

Even as the White House celebrates tentative signs of a labor market rebound, the ripples from Howmet’s decision show that the pandemic’s imprint upon the U.S. economy is hardening into a scar. What began in China five months ago as a distant threat to U.S. factories’ supply chains has evolved into a mammoth shortfall in consumer and business spending that could hobble the economy for years.

- and -

More than $6.5 trillion in household wealth vanished during the first three months of this year as the pandemic tightened its hold on the global economy, the Federal Reserve said this week. That’s roughly equivalent to the economies of the United Kingdom and France combined.

“This is the biggest economic shock in the U.S. and in the world, really, in living memory,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said Wednesday. “We went from the lowest level of unemployment in 50 years to the highest level in close to 90 years, and we did it in two months.”

The piece goes on with practically nothing but bad news.

And we haven't been able to spare any Attention Span Bandwidth for the earthquakes and the tornadoes and dam collapses we've already seen in 2020.

And, we're just now coming up on Wild Fire Season.


Jun 14, 2020

Today's GIF

I'm an extraordinarily effective trainer.

There's Always A Tweet


COVID-19 Update

Growth Rates are steady at 1.01




NYT:

Coronavirus Cases Spike Across Sun Belt as Economy Lurches into Motion

The warning has echoed ominously for weeks from epidemiologists, small-town mayors and county health officials: Once states begin to reopen, a surge in coronavirus cases will follow.

That scenario is now playing out in states across the country, particularly in the Sun Belt and the West, as thousands of Americans have been sickened by the virus in new and alarming outbreaks.

Hospitals in Arizona have been urged to activate emergency plans to cope with a flood of coronavirus patients. On Saturday, Florida saw its largest single-day count of cases since the pandemic began. Oregon has failed to contain the spread of the virus in many places, leading the governor on Thursday to pause what had been a gradual reopening.

And in Texas, cases are rising swiftly around the largest cities, including Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.

Some of the bigger cities (Houston, Phoenix etc) are reporting their ICU beds as 80-90% filled, and the rise in hospitalizations continues to outpace capacity in several states.

Jun 13, 2020

Today's Lesson

A million years ago when I was in school, we weren't taught any of this. There was a vague (in retrospect, maybe deliberately nonspecific) sense of "black people used to be treated pretty bad way back in the day, but that amazing Mr Lincoln fixed it and blah blah blah."


Nobody ever told us about Columbia or Rosewood or Tulsa, or any of the others. And there was a lot of 'em.

I'm a little pissed off about that - I can imagine people with brown skin have to be thoroughly fed up with that shit.

I think I'm in love with Carol Anderson though.


She makes the case that the standard trope about how "Hillary was just a really bad candidate" is and always was a bullshit cover for voter suppression (and other fuckery as well, but yeah).

And what could more "conservative" than to blame the victim?

"I dunno if he raped her, but look at how she was dressed...how much she drank...how she was dancing...where she was walking after dark...is she stupid?" etc etc etc

Anyway - we've got some big fuckin' problems up in this joint and while we don't solve those problems just by voting, we sure as fuck don't solve one goddamned thing without voting - not in a democracy we don't.

Meanwhile - maybe you'd like to look into some of this. And notice the recurring themes, as noted by Prof Anderson:

Civil War Period: 1861–1865[edit]

Reconstruction Period: 1865–1877[edit]

Jim Crow Period: 1878–1914[edit]

War and inter-war period: 1914–1945[edit]

Postwar era: 1946–1954[edit]

Civil Rights and Black Power Movement's Period: 1955–1977[edit]

1978 to today[edit]

Today's Tweet


Incomparable and invaluable.

Podcast




Some really tasty morsels this week.

"There is great power in calling things by their true names."

"The south is no longer a region - it's a state of mind."



The 4 questions for Never-Trumper allies
  1. What do you think the problem is?
  2. What do you think the solution is?
  3. How do you think things got this way?
  4. What was your role in making it this way?
It's not "Trumpism".
Donald Trump did not remake the Republican party in his own image - he's the perfect reflection of what the GOP has become.

COVID-19 Update

Reuters:

Twenty-one U.S. states reported weekly increases in new cases of COVID-19, with Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posting rises of 40% or higher for the week ended June 7 compared with the prior seven days, according to a Reuters analysis.

The three southwestern states joined hot spots in the South to help push the national number of new infections in the first week of June up 3%, the first increase after five weeks of declines, according to the analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak.