Today's Tweet

Prophesy from someone who knows

Take 1-minute.

Tony Schwartz predicted exactly what Trump would do when he lost the election.

But THIS was before the 2016 election.

Every last word applicable now...pic.twitter.com/HJnEq2t7cm

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) December 19, 2020

COVID-19 Update

World

• New Cases:   451,608 (⬆︎ .56%)
• New Deaths:      7,144 (⬆︎ .41%)

USA

• New Cases:   160,604 (⬆︎ .84%)
• New Deaths:      1,408 (⬆︎ .42%)

One Dead American for every 3,300 in late May

One Dead American for every 1,650 in mid-September

One Dead American for every    970 as of today.

Here they come - get ready for "The Coronials".

It never fails. As soon as you take away the diversions, an awful lot of people seem to rediscover that what they really wanna do is fuck.

Not such a bad thing really.

WaPo:

Conceived in a pandemic, born in a pandemic: The first quarantine babies are arriving

Katy Dobson and her family have taken to calling her 2-week-old boy, Atlas, a “coronial.” Atlas’s time in his mother’s womb coincided almost perfectly with the nine months that the United States has spent battling the coronavirus pandemic. He was born Dec. 8 in Pensacola, Fla., 38 weeks into his mother’s pregnancy and almost 39 weeks after the surreal Wednesday in March when Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive, the NBA suspended its season because of transmission concerns, and the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

When shutdowns began in the United States back in March, almost immediately there were titters and murmurs of the baby boom that would materialize nine months later. All that free time for cohabitating couples to stay home alone together, surely, would result in overflowing maternity wards come December, the speculation went. At the same time, others wondered whether worries about the devastating effects of the pandemic would cause some couples to put their plans to conceive on hold, leading to a “baby bust” in December and January.

In some cases, like Dobson’s, the former is precisely what happened: Her husband, tattoo artist Aaron Walker, 31, went into self-quarantine several days before Florida’s stay-at-home orders went into effect March 30. He was suddenly home with Dobson all day every day, “and it happened, like, that week,” Dobson, 27, said with a laugh.

It’s still unclear what’s happening on a national scale. Some hospitals and midwife groups, such as Brigham and Women’s in Boston and Brooklyn Homebirth Midwifery in New York, have reported no notable change in numbers of patients expecting in December and January, while Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor has seen about a 10 percent decrease. The Birthing Gently doula collective, which has locations in New York City, Boston and Charlotte, has noticed a 30 percent increase over last year in clients due in December and January.

The National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doesn’t expect to release the nationwide birthrate data for late 2020 (and settle once and for all the whole “boom or bust” question) for another six months. But what’s clear now is that the first wave of pandemic babies — covid babies, coronials, pandemi-kids, whatever you want to call the micro-generation of children conceived, carried and born during the covid-19 crisis — is making its way into the world, and their parents have experienced pregnancy in a way that few others in modern history have. Their nine-month journeys toward parenthood have been lonelier and more dystopian but at the same time more private and physically comfortable than those of people who embarked on the same adventure as recently as last year.

Dobson had a feeling that trying for a baby in March might mean she’d still be living through a pandemic when her baby arrived. But having experienced a miscarriage in February and multiple others before that, she didn’t want to wait.

Dobson’s prior miscarriages, she said, meant her prenatal doctor visits were more frequent than most patients’; she saw her obstetrician every two weeks for her entire pregnancy. New covid-19-related policies meant her temperature was taken at three different checkpoints at each visit. Social distancing requirements and new occupancy limits meant Walker was able to attend almost none of her appointments.

“My husband had to stay in the car for every single one,” she said. “So he never really got to be there for me. And it was a very stressful time, because of our history.” She wasn’t allowed to record any videos in the office, and found FaceTime all but useless in transmitting the imagery of an ultrasound machine. So Dobson absorbed virtually all the progress updates and news about her pregnancy alone.

Dobson found pregnancy overall to be a more solitary experience than she would have liked. Her parents, who live 250 miles away in Birmingham, Ala., agreed to keep their distance out of caution — which caused heartache all around when Dobson briefly went on bed rest. “My husband was having to do everything,” she said.

Even Dobson’s brother, who lives in Pensacola, saw her only twice during her pregnancy. When she was 34 weeks pregnant, “he stood outside in my driveway with his mask on and he goes, ‘Man, you’re big!’”

Dobson was unable to attend any birthing classes before she delivered Atlas; they weren’t offered nearby during the pandemic, she said. She had no baby shower, no shopping trips for nursery supplies or baby clothes, no gender-reveal party. Her mother, she said, sent her friends and relatives a note requesting that in lieu of a shower, they send gifts and cards with a few words of parenting advice through the mail instead. (A Zoom shower, she said, was out of the question: “Our Internet’s not the greatest down here.”)

Dobson took a few photos of her growing belly along the way but didn’t share them on social media. Because of their past miscarriages, Dobson and Walker didn’t tell anyone they were expecting until her pregnancy reached about 20 weeks — and with no social engagements for most of the year, some of her acquaintances didn’t know she’d even been pregnant until she announced Atlas’s birth.

Many women have expressed amusement and bewilderment at the new possibility of a “secret pregnancy” while working from home during the pandemic. Although she doesn’t work, Dobson still enjoyed the extra privacy that lockdowns and social distancing measures provided. “It was pretty easy to hide it, you know, not being around other people,” she said. “I thought that was very nice.” Plus, “I didn’t have to go anywhere or entertain people while I was feeling, you know, down and sick,” she added. “And whenever I did go places, nobody tried to touch my belly.”

There were other upsides, too, to being pregnant in a time when few people were interacting with anyone outside their own homes. Had the world been normal, Dobson would have wanted to take a pre-baby vacation, for example. But the two months she and Walker spent mostly homebound before Walker returned to work in May provided a more substantive “babymoon” than they would have been able to achieve otherwise.

Like every new parent who has given birth in the past nine months, Dobson had to adjust her expectations for the day of delivery — and manage those of her family. Walker was allowed in the hospital delivery room the day Atlas was born, but no other visitors were permitted. Dobson’s mother was disappointed, Dobson said, but she herself was slightly relieved: At the time, multiple relatives were sick with covid-19.

As Dobson and her nationwide cohort of new moms transition from pandemic pregnancy into pandemic parenthood, some of their unique struggles will fade away and be replaced by the more ordinary challenges of raising kids. But the loneliness, the lack of emotional and practical support that characterized their pregnancies, will probably linger, at least until the vaccines become available to the public: Dobson will limit Atlas’s contact with people outside their household for at least another few months, and for as long as the country is still actively dealing with a pandemic, she said, “we don’t plan to take him anywhere.”

One day, Dobson imagines, she’ll explain to Atlas why for the first few months of his life, only two people — his parents — ever held him or fed him or rocked him to sleep. She will explain to him that he met his great-grandmother via FaceTime while she was in the hospital recovering from covid-19. She’ll tell him the story of Dobson’s parents driving for four hours to meet her in the parking lot of her brother’s apartment and spending an hour gazing at their new grandson through a car window before heading back home.

She’ll explain why his aunts and uncles and grandparents, at her request, sent over close-up pictures of their faces: “To be able to show him so he recognizes people without the mask on,” Dobson explained. But as he grows up, Dobson mused, perhaps Atlas won’t think anything of the masks that show up here and there in his baby pictures. “I think the mask thing is definitely going to start sticking around during the flu season,” she said.

Throughout her pregnancy, Dobson has kept a journal; in the future, she wants to be able remember in vivid, specific detail the conditions that will shape little Atlas’s early life. Because while it’s a strange, challenging time to be a parent, she said, it’s also “a weird time to be a baby.”

Modern Miracles

I've only done Ketamine twice. And I can say without fear of contradiction that they remain among my most pleasant memories of drug-induced euphoria - or they would be if I hadn't been blissfully asleep both times.

🎶 Deep and restful, sleep...sleep...sleep 🎶

PsyPost:

Ketamine may ease depression by restoring the brain’s sensitivity to prediction error, study suggests

New research suggests that electrophysiological brain signals associated with neural plasticity could help explain the rapid, antidepressant effects of the drug ketamine. The findings, European Neuropsychopharmacology, indicate that ketamine could reverse insensitivity to prediction error in depression.

In other words, the drug may help to alleviate depression by making it easier for patients to update their model of reality.

“Ketamine is exciting because of its potential to both treat, and better understand depression. This is largely because ketamine doesn’t work the way ordinary antidepressants do – its primary mechanism isn’t to increase monoamines in the brain like serotonin, and so ketamine gives us new insight into other potential mechanisms underlying depression,” said lead researcher Rachael Sumner, a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Auckland School of Pharmacy.

“One of the major candidates for the mechanisms underlying ketamine’s antidepressant properties is how it increases neural plasticity. Neural plasticity is the brain’s ability to form new connections between neurons and ultimately underlies learning and memory in the brain.”

“Rodent studies have consistently shown that ketamine increases neural plasticity within 24 hours,” Sumner said. “However, there are major challenges when attempting to translate what we know occurs in rodents to determine if it occurs in humans. Sensory processing mechanisms of plasticity, like the auditory process we examined in this study, provide an important means to meet this challenge of translation.”

The double-blind, placebo-controlled study included 30 participants with major depressive disorder who had not responded to at least 2 recognized treatments for depression. Seven in 10 participants demonstrated a 50% or greater decrease in their depression symptoms one day after receiving ketamine.

“In this case we used what’s called an ‘auditory mismatch negativity’ task to assess short-term plasticity and predictive coding, or the brains adaptability and tendency to try to predict what’s coming next,” Sumner said.

The researchers used electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to measure brain activity as the participants listened to a sequence of auditory tones that occasionally included an unexpected noise. The brain automatically generates a particular pattern of electrical brain activity called mismatch negativity (MMN) upon hearing an unexpected noise.

Sumner and her colleagues found that ketamine increased the amplitude of the MMN several hours post-infusion, suggesting that the drug increased sensitivity to prediction error.

“We found that just 3 hours after receiving ketamine the brains of people with moderate to severe depression became more sensitive to detecting errors in its predictions of incoming sensory information,” she told PsyPost.

“To provide context, the brain creates models or predictions about the world around it and what is most likely to come next. This is largely thought to be because it is an efficient way to deal with the massive amount of information hitting our senses every moment of the day. When something is constant and stable in the world these models can become very rigid. It has been suggested that these models can become too rigid and unchanging, underlying negative ruminations and self-belief that people with depression often report.”

“As an example of how this might look in depression — it is often easy for friends and family to point out to their loved one errors or the harm in their thought patterns,” Sumner explained. “A counsellor will often work with a person to change their harmful ruminations or beliefs, such as with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). However, the person experiencing depression may find this difficult to see, or to take on because of how rigid their models (belief about themselves, the world around them, their future) have become.”

The participants also completed a visual task to measure long-term potentiation (LTP), the ability of neurons to increase communication efficiency with other neurons. An analysis of that data, published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, found evidence that the antidepressant effects of ketamine were associated with enhanced LTP.

“Ketamine may be working by increasing plasticity (the ability to adapt and learn new things), as well as increasing the brain’s sensitivity to unexpected external input that is signaling errors in its own rigid expectations,” Sumner said.

The main limitations of the new research are the lack of a control group and relatively small sample size. But Sumner and her colleagues hope that their future research will shed more light on whether ketamine can help to defeat harmful cognitions.

“The task we used involves presenting beeps through some headphones, and while it provides a highly controlled way to measure plasticity and sensitivity to unexpected input, it is pretty far removed from the complexity of the experience of depression itself. The next study should replicate our finding, and aim target and relate the change in the mismatch response and connectivity to higher level brain functions,” Sumner told PsyPost.

“Building on this finding may help provide evidence for the use of ketamine to facilitate or enhance people’s ability to engage with and benefit from therapies like CBT, by putting the brain into a more plastic state, ready to update its models.”

The study, “Ketamine improves short-term plasticity in depression by enhancing sensitivity to prediction errors“, was authored by Rachael L. Sumner, Rebecca McMillan, Meg J. Spriggs, Doug Campbell, Gemma Malpas, Elizabeth Maxwell, Carolyn Deng, John Hay, Rhys Ponton, Frederick Sundram, and Suresh D. Muthukumaraswamy.

Maybe we should try putting this stuff in the public water supply - might could go a long way to fixing what's gone wrong with the MAGA QAnon bozos. Can you thinking of a more apt description of their moronic beliefs than "inaccurate models and predictions"?

I think it's worth a shot.

Today's Cultural Trend

Failures of leadership are made manifest in the grieving of everyday people.

LA Times:

When Pamela Caddell died of COVID-19 last month, there was no funeral — her family knew that, as a former nurse, she wouldn’t want anyone else to be exposed to the disease.

But there was still something her husband, Richard, wanted to say — needed to say — so he sat down in his empty house to write her obituary.

After honoring her decades in medicine and listing her surviving relatives, he included a plea to anyone who picked up the Courier & Press in Evansville, Ind.

“Pam died of Covid-19,” Richard wrote. “It was her fervent wish that everyone take this horrible disease seriously. This was her last wish to all people.”

Richard may not have known it, but the obituary for his wife belongs to a growing genre that dates to the summer. At the time, President Trump and his Republican allies were pushing to keep businesses open and downplaying the possibility of a deadly second wave of infections.

Now with a third wave overwhelming hospitals across the country, Americans are increasingly turning their private grief into public calls for action as the COVID-19 death toll grows by thousands each day.

Unlike Trump, the mourners do not have tens of millions of Twitter followers, nor do television cameras hang on their every word. Instead they’re buying obituaries in local newspapers, sometimes for several hundred dollars. There have been some efforts to turn the obituaries into a more coordinated activist campaign, but for many it’s a decision they reach on their own, a reflection of their own frustration, anger and pain.

“A lot of people knew my wife,” Richard said. “Her message was to take it seriously. Everybody. Take it seriously. And there’s a lot of people that I’m afraid that they don’t. They listen to the wrong person.”

Among the many things I will never forgive "conservatives" for is that they used "Culture Of Life" as a political weapon, only to turn this country into a Culture Of Death kinda place.

Today's Riddle

What do they call Karens in Europe?

Americans

Letters From The Real America

The National Review:

Operation Santa Is a Horror Story About American Poverty
Children have written requesting money for their parents, a bed to sleep in, and a better wheelchair to help them get around. There’s nothing feel-good about it.

On a cloudy Christmas Eve in 1907, Mary McGann, a 10-year-old Irish girl living in Hell’s Kitchen with her younger brother and mother, wrote a letter to Santa Claus. “I am very glad that you are coming around tonight. My little brother would like you to bring him a wagon which I know you cannot afford. I will ask you to bring him whatever you think…. Please bring me something nice (sic) what you think best,” she asked. “P.S. Please do not forget the poor.”

The letter never made it to Santa; it was discovered 90 years later stashed in between the bricks of the tenement’s fireplace. But that same year, the New York City branch of the USPS informally implemented “Operation Santa,” an unusually whimsical government program that allowed Postal Service employees (and volunteers with the “Santa Claus Association”) to respond, as Santa, to the thousands of New York children attempting to contact St. Nick. Postmaster Frank Hitchcock would integrate the program in 1912 to include the entirety of the Post Office, making “Operation Santa” an official government program. After 1940, the program allowed charitable organizations, private firms, and laypeople to “adopt” the letters of kids living in poverty and fulfill their Christmas wishes. The film Miracle on 34th Street references the endeavor, and Johnny Carson made a habit of reading some of the letters on The Tonight Show. The program has grown to the point where it connected 13,000 children to donors, a total that may well be doubled in 2020. This year, the letters have been digitized, and if you’re interested in adopting a letter, you can go to the Operation Santa website and browse through the hopes and desires of thousands of children across the country.

But what these letters demonstrate, far better than any PSA or statistical model, is how violent American poverty truly is. They also provide a counterbalance to the ways childhood poverty is depicted in popular media, where poor kids often serve as a way for a protagonist to demonstrate their generosity, from Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol to the demented poverty porn of the holiday pop hit “Christmas Shoes.”

Scrolling through the photocopied and slightly redacted letters—inscribed with the chunky block letters unique to children—one is confronted with brief yet startling descriptions of desperate need:

Dear Santa, I want one thing. (sic) I been a good girl and I want to ask you if you please get me a power wheelchair. My wheelchair is very old and it does not want to work. I am very sad. Please Santa, bring me a power wheelchair. I don’t want nothing else.

“Dear Santa ... My wish is money for my (sic) perents. $100 dollars would help us a lot. They are having a rough time with the bills.”

“Dear Santa, how are you and your reindeer? It must be cool riding a sled in the sky.... this year for Christmas I would really like a couch that is also a bed. The reason I would like a couch with a bed is because I have a[n] apartment that only has one room. My parents sleep in the living room on the couch and they always wake up with back pain. My dad works a lot, so his back pain stresses him out.”

Even prior to the pandemic, the United States lagged other developed nations in child poverty levels. More than one out of every five American children lives in poverty, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data. As the pandemic continues to exacerbate the underlying crisis of American poverty, 45 percent of all children now live in households that have recently struggled with routine expenses, according to a report out this month from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP. Black and Latino households have been especially impacted by the economic starvation that the mishandling of this pandemic has wrought, and these populations were already disproportionately likely to grow up poor.

But it’s long been easy for most upper middle-class people to ignore poverty, especially child poverty. Americans like to think of themselves as generous people; we don’t want to imagine that there are little girls writing to Santa for a new wheelchair.

When the political scientist and activist Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, his seminal 1962 study of American poverty, he intentionally undercounted the amount of poor citizens because he thought his readership would not accept such astonishing numbers. He couldn’t even believe it himself: “I had all the statistics down on paper. I had proved to my satisfaction that there were around 50,000,000 poor in this country. Yet, I realized I did not believe my own figures. The poor existed in Government reports; they were percentages and numbers in long, close columns, but they were not part of my experience. I could prove that the other America existed, but I had never been there.”

Operation Santa wasn’t intended as a means to expose people to the stark realities of material deprivation. But it’s unnerving to realize just how many of these letters there are. Each one represents a failure of the American system and a failure of the ideology that says that anyone who is poor has failed.

“We don’t want to be responsible for them. A very wise historian, Michael Katz, wrote that ‘poverty is the third rail of American politics.’ We don’t like to talk about poverty in America, and we don’t like to deal with it,” Jeff Madrick, a veteran journalist and author of Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Childhood Poverty, told me.

“And I’m including the Democrats here,” Katz continued. “Democrats hardly ever talked about child poverty until recently. And I include Hillary Clinton, in that she didn’t mention child poverty very much in her 2016 electoral campaign. The reason is not merely that they are insensitive, but they think it’s bad for electoral politics, because people don’t want to hear about it.”

The irony is that childhood poverty is expensive. For all the bipartisan efforts to reduce cash payments to poor families and the constant hand-wringing about federal deficits, chronic child impoverishment costs the United States a trillion dollars, or 5 percent of our GDP, annually. Madrick explains that the human and economic cost manifests in a variety of ways: lower high school and college graduation rates, lower productivity at work, higher healthcare costs and incarceration rates, and rampant mental health problems caused by the stress and trauma of impoverishment.

Thanks to Operation Santa, Vicky, the girl who asked for a new power wheelchair, may be connected with a charitable organization that can help her. Many thousands of poor people will be helped in this way by holiday-season generosity. But the needs of impoverished children can’t be met by charity alone; the scale of poverty is too massive. Even the Gates Foundation, a titan in the private philanthropy world, admits this. In All the Money in the World, a 2008 look at the 1 percent, Patty Stonesifer, a former chief of the foundation, is quoted as saying,“Our giving is a drop in the bucket compared to the government’s responsibility.”

The solutions to child poverty are not mysterious. Socialists, liberals, and leftists have long advocated for more generous benefits to families that would alleviate some of the financial burden many parents currently shoulder alone. Last year, Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project released “The Family Fun Pack,” a comprehensive family welfare plan that would dramatically supplement the immense costs of raising a family in the United States: material supplies and paid parental leave are paired with free pre-K, childcare, health care, and a $300 monthly allowance. “The easiest solution to the problems posed by family life under capitalism is to levy broad-based taxes and then use the revenues from those taxes to fund a set of benefits that provide resources to families with children,” Bruenig wrote.

Even more moderate Democrats have backed proposals that could radically reduce child poverty. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden endorsed expanding Section 8 housing vouchers to cover all families who qualify, which would effectively cut child poverty by a third. Kamala Harris’s LIFT the Middle Class Act would replace the Trump-era tax cuts with large tax credits to low- and middle-income households who work.

Other ideas include making the child tax credit fully refundable, which would help extremely low-income families, and boosting SNAP (commonly called food stamps), according to Danilo Trisi, the Director of Poverty and Inequality Research at CBPP, explained. “Expanding SNAP benefits will do a lot in terms of also reducing child poverty because the way that SNAP is structured, it does not reach those families with the lowest incomes,” Trisi said.“Between housing assistance, tax credits, and food assistance, any of those three things could really make a significant dent on poverty.”

America’s political and economic institutions have left children like Vicky in impossible conditions. What the Operation Santa letters show us is that not only is her struggle a common experience for millions of American children but that their circumstances are artificial. Poverty is not some abstraction or a phenomena only relevant during the holidays but rather a material consequence of deliberate policy choices. It would be possible for the government to make a serious effort to alleviate childhood poverty, but it’s a task far too big for Santa.

A few dozen American billionaires got almost a trillion dollars richer during the "economic crisis" caused by this pandemic, while another 8 million Americans fell below the poverty line.

-------

the word "Obscenity"

has lost its meaning. 

Ooh Baby

Slowly. Slowly. That's it.

COVID-19 Update

Whole big bunches of countries, and 23 US states didn't bother to report their New Cases or New Deaths for yesterday, and even though "Rona Takes A Holiday" is a pleasant enough fantasy, we all know the monster is a 24/7 thing and the full horror will be back soon enough.

So, such as they are, here are the numbers - without the grim little daily uptick percentages.

World

• New Cases:   472,452
• New Deaths:      8,419

USA

• New Cases:   98,840
• New Deaths:    1,197

I think it's worth noting that 98,840 new cases (per the reporting from only 46% of the states) would've qualified as a new record less than 2 months ago.

Some possible good news -

WaPo:

Coronavirus mutations identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Nigeria may be provoking alarm, but infectious-disease experts are optimistic the new variants are still vulnerable to newly authorized vaccines, which could be rapidly reprogrammed to remain effective.

And let's make sure we never ever forget - please raise your hand if you fucked up the pandemic response, contributing bigly to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and the immiseration of tens of millions more.

THIS GUY

WaPo:

The U.S. was supposed to be equipped to handle a pandemic. So what went wrong?

When a group of experts examined 195 countries last year on how well prepared they were for an outbreak of infectious disease, the United States ranked best in the world. Today, after being engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic, the United States is among the hardest-hit nations in the world, with more than 327,000 deaths, 18 million infected, the fourth-highest per capita mortality among nations and more suffering to come.

What went wrong?

The answer is, almost everything. President Trump is not responsible for how the outbreak began but bears a large burden for the catastrophic pandemic response. From the start, he squandered valuable time, silenced public health experts and scientists, politicized the regulatory agencies, abandoned a concerted federal response, botched diagnostic testing, lifted restrictions too early, and engaged in deception, illusion and confusion that left the American people fatigued and divided.

Before the coronavirus infected anyone, the world was not prepared. As the 2019 Global Health Security Index showed, most nations were unready for a pandemic. Public health systems have been chronically starved for resources here and abroad. Mr. Trump closed the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Warnings in several studies during 2019 were ignored. And when the outbreak began, China’s authoritarian party-state covered up the early signs of human transmission, delaying vital information — with devastating consequences.

But once the virus began spreading, Mr. Trump failed to adequately warn people, to take the threat seriously or to mount a pandemic response equivalent to the danger. Instead, he retreated to the realm of his own interests: his reelection campaign, his personal grievances, his misguided instincts and magical thinking.

The result was a presidency of delusion and deception. Mr. Trump deliberately lied to the public about the grave dangers they faced. In an interview with The Post’s Bob Woodward on Feb. 7, the president said he knew the virus could be more lethal than the flu and that it spread through the air. “This is deadly stuff,” he said. But he told the nation Feb. 25, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” On March 9, he said the “common flu” was worse than covid. On March 19, he told Mr. Woodward he did not want to be honest with the American people about the severity. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said. “I still like playing it down.” On June 20, he said, “Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu, what difference?”

This mind-set led to cascading policy failures. The Trump administration was caught off guard when global supply chains broke down for personal protective equipment such as face masks and chemical reagents for testing kits — shortages that lasted for months. Mr. Trump boasted of his orders to ban travel from China and Europe, which at best may have slowed the viral spread, but he then neglected to exploit the gains for better preparation. Rather than launch a concerted, federal response that could marshal supplies, Mr. Trump left it to overwhelmed states, cities, hospitals, universities and others to compete against each other. The result was chaos. Meanwhile, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, oversaw a group of young consultants from the private sector who volunteered to work on the supply chain bottlenecks. They were in way over their heads, were not supplied government emails or laptops, and were swamped by tips and requests from celebrities. Jeanine Pirro, a Trump booster who hosts a Fox News show, repeatedly called and emailed until 100,000 masks were sent to a hospital she favored.

When the virus broke out in February at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., where 37 people died over four weeks, it should have set off alarms. Nursing homes lacked sufficient diagnostic testing kits. They isolated residents with symptoms, while asymptomatic residents and staff moved about — spreading more virus. “Nursing homes were left chasing their tails,” Morgan Katz of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine told the AARP. When she set out to check Baltimore nursing homes using a Hopkins test, she was astounded to find more than 38 percent of residents were positive, the majority of them asymptomatic. Nursing home residents account for about 40 percent of all U.S. deaths through early December.

Diagnostic testing is vital for finding who is sick and isolating them. Some countries, such as South Korea, used testing to rapidly trace and contain outbreaks, keeping overall disease and deaths low. But the United States suffered a testing debacle. The Trump administration struggled to ramp up the number of tests, always behind what was necessary to get a handle on the pandemic. The president announced a grand plan for drive-through testing sites at CVS, Target, Walmart and Walgreens parking lots, but in the end only 78 sites materialized. Mr. Trump even suggested at one point “Slow the testing down, please” because he didn’t like the rising case counts. Slowing the testing was the opposite of what the nation needed.

For political reasons, the White House muzzled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s premier source of public health guidance and crisis management expertise. On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned of massive disruption from the oncoming pandemic, saying it was not a question of whether it would happen but when. Mr. Trump was enraged — and the agency was stifled. The CDC had given 13 news conferences in one month during the West Africa Ebola outbreak six years ago, but during the coronarivus pandemic, it didn’t conduct a single news conference in four separate months. Even worse, the White House began to meddle with CDC guidance documents, editing what scientists had written on such matters as the dangers of spreading the virus by singing in church choirs, and on requirements for social distancing in bars and restaurants. The edits favored Mr. Trump’s political message not to restrict activity. Kyle McGowan, former CDC chief of staff, told the New York Times recently, “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won.”

Mr. Trump took to the White House podium to advertise a “game changer” medicine, the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which studies have shown is useless in treating the virus. The Food and Drug Administration was bullied into approving an Emergency Use Authorization for the drug, which it later withdrew. It was a sorry spectacle, squandering valuable presidential time and leadership, erroding trust in the FDA, and wrongly raising expectations of a quick and easy cure. So much else could have been done. A plan to purchase and deliver 650 million three-ply cotton face masks by U.S. mail to every household reached the White House, but then was killed because aides thought Mr. Trump didn’t trust the U.S. Postal Service. The president politicized wearing face masks and ridiculed those who wore them.

After properly urging Americans to “flatten the curve” with shutdowns in March, Mr. Trump pivoted to a campaign to “liberate” states, as he put it, and open up — abandoning the gating criteria and metrics for opening that the White House itself had announced and established. Vice President Pence took the media to task for worrying about a second wave. “Such panic is overblown,” Mr. Pence said. Then it came: The virus surged into the Sun Belt in the summer and into the Midwest in the autumn. The viral tsunamis swamped any hope of a more precise test-and-trace strategy. Mr. Trump stumped for reelection with a misleading claim the United States was “rounding the corner” on the virus. He pulled out of the World Health Organization amid the worst health crisis of a century. On top of all this, Mr. Trump then hired as a White House adviser the Hoover Institution senior fellow Scott W. Atlas, a neuroradiologist without experience in infectious diseases, who advocated an approach of natural “herd immunity,” avoiding lockdowns while trying to protect the vulnerable and letting the virus run free among everyone else. It was madness then, and still is.

Fighting a pandemic is treacherous and challenging. This particular virus harbored some unexpected tricks that took time to detect, such as the large share of asymptomatic cases. It was always going to be hard. But the worst did not have to happen. It happened because Mr. Trump failed to respect science, meet the virus head-on and be honest with the American people.

The death and misery of 2020 should be taught to future generations as a lesson. What went wrong, making this the deadliest year in U.S. history, must not happen again.

COVID-19 Update

World

• New Cases:   673,260 (⬆︎ .85%)
• New Deaths:    11,836 (⬆︎ .68%)

USA

• New Cases:   193,080 (⬆︎ 1.02%)
• New Deaths       2,835 (⬆︎   .85%)

Christmas morning, and the first thing I do is check the numbers at Worldometer - like it's just another shift down at the mill.

I really hate this pandemic shit. And I really hate Qult45. Their completely fucked up response to this monster has ruined lives (purposefully, IMO), and it's ruined this Christmas for millions of Americans, by marking Christmas 2020 as a time of mourning and ill will - turning the season of love to one of despair for many, and hatred of our own neighbors - in some cases, hatred of our friends and family.

I love Christmas. Christmas is my jam. My favorite holiday. I love the idealism of thinking there's such a thing as redemption, and a belief that we can be better people, living better lives.

I guess the thing I can hold onto is that I'm atheist, and so I don't have to feel at all compelled to forgive these assholes for fucking it up for me.

But the hangup is that I don't want to go along with some jerk like 45*, who deliberately foments discord and seems to believe he's well within his rights to make everybody feel like shit just because he's such a shitty person himself.

He wants me to hate, but I don't want to hate, so I won't. I'll never give that prick the satisfaction of thinking he's bent me to his will. Ever.

Hatred is poison. And while I can't say I'll ever be able to bring myself to love people who seem to go out of their way to prove themselves unworthy of anything but contempt and loathing, I can try not to play their game by their rules.

I can reject their notions of divide-n-conquer. I can hold them in very low esteem, and I can voice my disdain for them and their shitty plans to put democracy in chains.

I can stay vigilant and keep my fire stoked - I've got my thesaurus handy, and I can come up with a thousand ways to despise them, and to never ever ever forgive them - I just choose not to hate them. Cuz that's actually what they want, and withholding it from them is what's really gonna piss 'em off.

Today's Today

Merry Christmas, everybody.