Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Celerity
Celerity's Journal
Celerity's Journal
July 17, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/laura-ingrahams-descent-into-despair/614245/
“It was cocktail hour on the opening day of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill.” That was the opening sentence, in 1995, of a New York Times Magazine cover story called “The Counter Counterculture.” The author was the late James Atlas, and one by one, he introduced a series of characters. There was young David Brooks, then of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. There was Brock himself, best known at the time for his vicious investigations into the personal affairs of President Bill Clinton. There was David Frum—now a writer for The Atlantic—and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, with whom, years later, I co-wrote a Polish cookbook.
There are amusing details—expensive Georgetown restaurants where educated conservative elites pour scorn upon educated liberal elites—but the tone of the article was not negative. It included a parade of other names and short profiles: Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza. I knew most of them at the time the article appeared. I was then working in London for The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, and my relationship to this group was that of a foreign cousin who visited from time to time and inspired mild interest, but never quite made it to the inner circle. I wrote occasionally for The Weekly Standard, edited by Kristol; for The New Criterion, edited by Kimball; and once for the Independent Women’s Quarterly, then edited by, among others, Crittenden.
I also knew, slightly, a woman whose appearance, in a leopard-skin miniskirt, was the most notable thing about the magazine’s cover photograph: Laura Ingraham, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and was then an attorney at a tony law firm. In the penultimate paragraph Atlas finds himself, near midnight, “careering through the streets of downtown Washington with Brock in Ingraham’s military-green Land Rover at 60 miles an hour looking for an open bar while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo.” As the Fox News presenter whose career is most closely tied to President Donald Trump, Ingraham is now far more famous than she was back then. She spoke for Trump at the Republican convention, in 2016; during the coronavirus pandemic, she has risen to prominence once again, not just supporting him but pushing him to “reopen” the country with maniacal fervor, accusing those who urge caution of having a political bias.
Nevertheless, she still occasionally reconfirms, on her television programs or in public speeches, the main thing I associated her with in the 1990s: a devotion to Ronald Reagan and Reaganism, the same devotion that would have been shared, back then, by all of those people at Brock’s cocktail party. Or perhaps devotion to Reagan is a bit too specific. What really held that group together—and what drew me to it as well—was a kind of post–Cold War optimism, a belief that “we had won,” that the democratic revolution would now continue, that more good things would follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. This wasn’t the nostalgic conservatism of the English, or the hard-right nationalism found elsewhere in Europe; this was something more buoyant, more American—an optimistic conservatism that wasn’t backward-looking at all. Although there were darker versions, at its best it was energetic, reformist, and generous, predicated on faith in the United States, a belief in the greatness of American democracy, and an ambition to share that democracy with the rest of the world.
snip
Laura Ingraham's Descent Into Despair
At some point, her Reaganite optimism slowly hardened into something better described as a form of apocalyptic pessimism.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/laura-ingrahams-descent-into-despair/614245/
“It was cocktail hour on the opening day of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill.” That was the opening sentence, in 1995, of a New York Times Magazine cover story called “The Counter Counterculture.” The author was the late James Atlas, and one by one, he introduced a series of characters. There was young David Brooks, then of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. There was Brock himself, best known at the time for his vicious investigations into the personal affairs of President Bill Clinton. There was David Frum—now a writer for The Atlantic—and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, with whom, years later, I co-wrote a Polish cookbook.
There are amusing details—expensive Georgetown restaurants where educated conservative elites pour scorn upon educated liberal elites—but the tone of the article was not negative. It included a parade of other names and short profiles: Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza. I knew most of them at the time the article appeared. I was then working in London for The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, and my relationship to this group was that of a foreign cousin who visited from time to time and inspired mild interest, but never quite made it to the inner circle. I wrote occasionally for The Weekly Standard, edited by Kristol; for The New Criterion, edited by Kimball; and once for the Independent Women’s Quarterly, then edited by, among others, Crittenden.
I also knew, slightly, a woman whose appearance, in a leopard-skin miniskirt, was the most notable thing about the magazine’s cover photograph: Laura Ingraham, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and was then an attorney at a tony law firm. In the penultimate paragraph Atlas finds himself, near midnight, “careering through the streets of downtown Washington with Brock in Ingraham’s military-green Land Rover at 60 miles an hour looking for an open bar while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo.” As the Fox News presenter whose career is most closely tied to President Donald Trump, Ingraham is now far more famous than she was back then. She spoke for Trump at the Republican convention, in 2016; during the coronavirus pandemic, she has risen to prominence once again, not just supporting him but pushing him to “reopen” the country with maniacal fervor, accusing those who urge caution of having a political bias.
Nevertheless, she still occasionally reconfirms, on her television programs or in public speeches, the main thing I associated her with in the 1990s: a devotion to Ronald Reagan and Reaganism, the same devotion that would have been shared, back then, by all of those people at Brock’s cocktail party. Or perhaps devotion to Reagan is a bit too specific. What really held that group together—and what drew me to it as well—was a kind of post–Cold War optimism, a belief that “we had won,” that the democratic revolution would now continue, that more good things would follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. This wasn’t the nostalgic conservatism of the English, or the hard-right nationalism found elsewhere in Europe; this was something more buoyant, more American—an optimistic conservatism that wasn’t backward-looking at all. Although there were darker versions, at its best it was energetic, reformist, and generous, predicated on faith in the United States, a belief in the greatness of American democracy, and an ambition to share that democracy with the rest of the world.
snip
July 17, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/
I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had. I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites. Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think.
Reading White Fragility is rather like attending a diversity seminar. DiAngelo patiently lays out a rationale for white readers to engage in a self-examination that, she notes, will be awkward and painful. Her chapters are shortish, as if each were a 45-minute session. DiAngelo seeks to instruct. She operates from the now-familiar concern with white privilege, aware of the unintentional racism ever lurking inside of her that was inculcated from birth by the white supremacy on which America was founded. To atone for this original sin, she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist. As such, a major bugbear for DiAngelo is the white American, often of modest education, who makes statements like I don’t see color or asks questions like How dare you call me “racist”? Her assumption that all people have a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it. DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer.
When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from the book’s numerous obvious flaws. For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality. Exactly who comes away from the saga of Jackie Robinson thinking he was the first Black baseball player good enough to compete with whites? “Imagine if instead the story,” DiAngelo writes, “went something like this: ‘Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.’” But no one need imagine this scenario, as others have pointed out, because it is something every baseball fan already knows. Later in the book, DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim? An especially weird passage is where DiAngelo breezily decries the American higher-education system, in which, she says, no one ever talks about racism. “I can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism,” she writes. “I can graduate from law school without ever discussing racism. I can get through a teacher-education program without ever discussing racism.” I am mystified that DiAngelo thinks this laughably antique depiction reflects any period after roughly 1985. For example, an education-school curriculum neglecting racism in our times would be about as common as a home unwired for electricity.
DiAngelo’s depiction of white psychology shape-shifts according to what her dogma requires. On the one hand, she argues in Chapter 1 that white people do not see themselves in racial terms; therefore, they must be taught by experts like her of their whiteness. But for individuals who harbor so little sense of themselves as a group, the white people whom DiAngelo describes are oddly tribalist when it suits her narrative. “White solidarity,” she writes in Chapter 4, “requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white population and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy.” But if these people don’t even know whiteness is a category, just what are they now suddenly defending? Diangelo also writes as if certain shibboleths of the Black left—for instance, that all disparities between white and Black people are due to racism of some kind—represent the incontestable truth. This ideological bias is hardly unique to DiAngelo, and a reader could look past it, along with the other lapses in argumentation I have noted, if she offered some kind of higher wisdom. The problem is that White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.
snip
The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility
The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/
I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had. I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites. Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think.
Reading White Fragility is rather like attending a diversity seminar. DiAngelo patiently lays out a rationale for white readers to engage in a self-examination that, she notes, will be awkward and painful. Her chapters are shortish, as if each were a 45-minute session. DiAngelo seeks to instruct. She operates from the now-familiar concern with white privilege, aware of the unintentional racism ever lurking inside of her that was inculcated from birth by the white supremacy on which America was founded. To atone for this original sin, she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist. As such, a major bugbear for DiAngelo is the white American, often of modest education, who makes statements like I don’t see color or asks questions like How dare you call me “racist”? Her assumption that all people have a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it. DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer.
When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from the book’s numerous obvious flaws. For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality. Exactly who comes away from the saga of Jackie Robinson thinking he was the first Black baseball player good enough to compete with whites? “Imagine if instead the story,” DiAngelo writes, “went something like this: ‘Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.’” But no one need imagine this scenario, as others have pointed out, because it is something every baseball fan already knows. Later in the book, DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim? An especially weird passage is where DiAngelo breezily decries the American higher-education system, in which, she says, no one ever talks about racism. “I can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism,” she writes. “I can graduate from law school without ever discussing racism. I can get through a teacher-education program without ever discussing racism.” I am mystified that DiAngelo thinks this laughably antique depiction reflects any period after roughly 1985. For example, an education-school curriculum neglecting racism in our times would be about as common as a home unwired for electricity.
DiAngelo’s depiction of white psychology shape-shifts according to what her dogma requires. On the one hand, she argues in Chapter 1 that white people do not see themselves in racial terms; therefore, they must be taught by experts like her of their whiteness. But for individuals who harbor so little sense of themselves as a group, the white people whom DiAngelo describes are oddly tribalist when it suits her narrative. “White solidarity,” she writes in Chapter 4, “requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white population and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy.” But if these people don’t even know whiteness is a category, just what are they now suddenly defending? Diangelo also writes as if certain shibboleths of the Black left—for instance, that all disparities between white and Black people are due to racism of some kind—represent the incontestable truth. This ideological bias is hardly unique to DiAngelo, and a reader could look past it, along with the other lapses in argumentation I have noted, if she offered some kind of higher wisdom. The problem is that White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.
snip
July 17, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/mary-trump-donald-trump-and-american-psyche/614251/
Here is part of an email alert that The New York Times sent to its readers over the weekend: “Breaking News: President Trump wore a mask publicly for the first time.” The announcement would not seem, at first glance, to merit the urgency. Breaking news is typically the stuff of shock, its revelations suggesting a rupture in the assumed order of things—and this was, after all, an update about face fabric. But the sad truth was that the bit of news, for all its absurdity, also deserved the designation. After months of resistance—the seeming result of vanity and spite and stubbornness—Donald Trump, on Saturday, had finally deigned to model the simple public-health protocol proven to halt the spread of a virus that has killed more than 129,000 Americans. Changing Trump’s mind—the result, reportedly, of negotiation and “pleading” on the part of his aides—wasn’t just an exercise in optics; it would save lives. The belated development could not qualify as good news. But it was news.
And it was a type of news that is, more than three years into the Trump era, all too familiar. Americans’ awareness of their president exists, now, at almost the cellular level: Never has the public been so intimately acquainted with the body of the executive, its impulses and its fickle humors. The 5 a.m. tweets tell us when he has awakened. Their tone tells us when he is angry, or indignant. Their ellipses invite us to fill in the blanks: What did he mean? What will he do next? Presidents, traditionally, have operated at a public remove; Trump, by contrast, is inescapable. News stories regularly report on his funks and his furies, turning what was once merely the subtext of national news events—the president’s feelings—into the text. The reporting is rational: Trump’s wayward whims are matters of national security. His rage can threaten. His pride can harm. That grim knowledge has turned Americans, over time, into a nation of armchair psychologists, struggling to understand the workings of one particular psyche. The efforts are fruitless, but they continue all the same. The public—both in spite of Donald Trump’s ubiquity, and because of it—remains ever tuned to his frequency.
Around the time that trump’s aides were finding ways to cajole their charge into putting on his mask, a book began to make its way around American media outlets. Too Much and Never Enough, by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is both a memoir and a manifesto. One of its theses is that the mind of the president, the subject of so much fixation, is beyond fixing. Donald Trump, she suggests, is not a riddle to be answered or a mystery to be solved; he is what he is, full stop. He is a tautology wrapped in a spray tan. And he has been what he is now, really, all along. Mary Trump, chastened by her own, earlier silence about her uncle’s unfitness for office, is sounding a belated alarm. People have suffered, she writes, because her uncle is incapable of understanding other people’s suffering. People have died because her uncle cares more about the illusion of competence than its realization. “His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating,” she writes—a power he has relied on throughout his life—“has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing.”
With this psychographic reading of the president, Mary Trump is doing the work many other Americans have been: analyzing, decoding, explaining. She is, however, uniquely qualified for that effort. In addition to her membership in the Trump family, Mary Trump holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology. (She also has a master’s degree in comparative literature: As political tell-alls go, her book is remarkably well written.) The author’s assessment of her uncle is both hedged and blunt. “I have no problem,” she writes, “calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.” She adds that Trump likely has dependent personality disorder, an undiagnosed learning disability (making it difficult for him to process and retain new information about the world), and sleep disorders (likely related to his habit of ingesting some 12 Diet Cokes a day), and that he is also, very possibly, a sociopath. That helps to explain why the Trump family tried, and failed, to halt the book’s publication. And why the White House responded to the book’s claims using the familiar rhetoric of “fake news.” (The president’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said of the book last week, “It’s ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolutely no bearing in truth.” She added: “I have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods.”)
snip
How Americans Became Part of the Trump Family
The president’s dark emotional inheritance has become the nation’s.https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/mary-trump-donald-trump-and-american-psyche/614251/
Here is part of an email alert that The New York Times sent to its readers over the weekend: “Breaking News: President Trump wore a mask publicly for the first time.” The announcement would not seem, at first glance, to merit the urgency. Breaking news is typically the stuff of shock, its revelations suggesting a rupture in the assumed order of things—and this was, after all, an update about face fabric. But the sad truth was that the bit of news, for all its absurdity, also deserved the designation. After months of resistance—the seeming result of vanity and spite and stubbornness—Donald Trump, on Saturday, had finally deigned to model the simple public-health protocol proven to halt the spread of a virus that has killed more than 129,000 Americans. Changing Trump’s mind—the result, reportedly, of negotiation and “pleading” on the part of his aides—wasn’t just an exercise in optics; it would save lives. The belated development could not qualify as good news. But it was news.
And it was a type of news that is, more than three years into the Trump era, all too familiar. Americans’ awareness of their president exists, now, at almost the cellular level: Never has the public been so intimately acquainted with the body of the executive, its impulses and its fickle humors. The 5 a.m. tweets tell us when he has awakened. Their tone tells us when he is angry, or indignant. Their ellipses invite us to fill in the blanks: What did he mean? What will he do next? Presidents, traditionally, have operated at a public remove; Trump, by contrast, is inescapable. News stories regularly report on his funks and his furies, turning what was once merely the subtext of national news events—the president’s feelings—into the text. The reporting is rational: Trump’s wayward whims are matters of national security. His rage can threaten. His pride can harm. That grim knowledge has turned Americans, over time, into a nation of armchair psychologists, struggling to understand the workings of one particular psyche. The efforts are fruitless, but they continue all the same. The public—both in spite of Donald Trump’s ubiquity, and because of it—remains ever tuned to his frequency.
Around the time that trump’s aides were finding ways to cajole their charge into putting on his mask, a book began to make its way around American media outlets. Too Much and Never Enough, by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is both a memoir and a manifesto. One of its theses is that the mind of the president, the subject of so much fixation, is beyond fixing. Donald Trump, she suggests, is not a riddle to be answered or a mystery to be solved; he is what he is, full stop. He is a tautology wrapped in a spray tan. And he has been what he is now, really, all along. Mary Trump, chastened by her own, earlier silence about her uncle’s unfitness for office, is sounding a belated alarm. People have suffered, she writes, because her uncle is incapable of understanding other people’s suffering. People have died because her uncle cares more about the illusion of competence than its realization. “His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating,” she writes—a power he has relied on throughout his life—“has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing.”
With this psychographic reading of the president, Mary Trump is doing the work many other Americans have been: analyzing, decoding, explaining. She is, however, uniquely qualified for that effort. In addition to her membership in the Trump family, Mary Trump holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology. (She also has a master’s degree in comparative literature: As political tell-alls go, her book is remarkably well written.) The author’s assessment of her uncle is both hedged and blunt. “I have no problem,” she writes, “calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.” She adds that Trump likely has dependent personality disorder, an undiagnosed learning disability (making it difficult for him to process and retain new information about the world), and sleep disorders (likely related to his habit of ingesting some 12 Diet Cokes a day), and that he is also, very possibly, a sociopath. That helps to explain why the Trump family tried, and failed, to halt the book’s publication. And why the White House responded to the book’s claims using the familiar rhetoric of “fake news.” (The president’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said of the book last week, “It’s ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolutely no bearing in truth.” She added: “I have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods.”)
snip
July 17, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/double-pandemic-covid-flu/614152/
Seven years ago, the White House was bracing itself for not one pandemic, but two. In the spring of 2013, several people in China fell sick with a new and lethal strain of H7N9 bird flu, while an outbreak of MERS—a disease caused by a coronavirus—had spread from Saudi Arabia to several other countries. “We were dealing with the potential for both of those things to become a pandemic,” says Beth Cameron, who was on the National Security Council at the time. Neither did, thankfully, but we shouldn’t mistake historical luck for future security. Viruses aren’t sporting. They will not refrain from kicking you just because another virus has already knocked you to the floor. And pandemics are capricious. Despite a lot of research, “we haven’t found a way to predict when a new one will arrive,” says Nídia Trovão, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health. As new diseases emerge at a quickening pace, the only certainty is that pandemics are inevitable. So it is only a matter of time before two emerge at once. “We have to prepare for a pandemic to happen at any time, and ‘any time’ can be when we’re already dealing with one pandemic,” Cameron told me.
I first worried about the possibility of a double pandemic in March. Four months ago, it felt needlessly alarmist to fret about two rare events happening simultaneously. But since then, federal fecklessness and rushed reopenings have wasted the benefits of months of social distancing. About 60,000 new cases of COVID-19 are being confirmed every day, and death rates are rising. My worry from March feels less far-fetched. If America could underperform so badly against one rapidly spreading virus, how would it fare against two? COVID-19 has made clear what happens when even powerful, wealthy countries are inadequately prepared for rare but ruinous events. Months into the pandemic, international alliances are strained, resources are diminished, and experts are demoralized. The longer this fiasco drags on, the more vulnerable America becomes to further disasters: inbound hurricanes, wildfires, and many other viruses that lie in wait.
Sars-cov-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is just one of many coronaviruses that exist in bats and other wild animals. Several strains of influenza with pandemic potential are lurking in pigs and poultry, and some have repeatedly infected farmers over the past decade. Wild mammals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could conceivably jump into humans. Changing climate and shrinking habitats have brought those viruses into closer contact with people and livestock, while crowded cities and air travel hasten their spread. “If another pandemic happens, it will follow the same path the first one took, carved out by the world we created,” says Jessica Metcalf, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton. Certain traits increase a pathogen’s pandemic potential. Those that spread via bodily fluids (Ebola), contaminated food and water (norovirus), or insect bites (Zika) are slower to spread around the world. By contrast, respiratory viruses like flu, which spread through coughs, sneezes, and exhalations, could conceivably travel fast enough to overlap with COVID-19.
Many countries are on high alert for such viruses, primed by their COVID-19 ordeal in the same way that East Asian countries were primed at the start of this pandemic by their previous run-ins with SARS and MERS. But waning global solidarity is a problem. “Our international laws are based on a bargain that countries will rapidly notify each other [about emerging diseases] and, in exchange, they’ll have protection against the economic impacts of sharing that info,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases. That compact was violated during COVID-19, after China suppressed information about the outbreak and other countries quickly implemented travel bans.
The U.S. is now on the receiving end of many such bans. Having failed to lead the best-prepared nation in the world against one pandemic, Donald Trump has made it more vulnerable to another. He has, for example, frayed international bonds further by trying to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization. Whether he has the legal authority to do so is still unclear, but even if the threat is empty, “some of the effects will be immediate,” says Loyce Pace, the president of the Global Health Council. U.S. officials and experts will start disengaging from international institutions, and that might encourage other nations to follow suit. This won’t just harm the WHO at the time when it is most needed, but will also further diminish America’s already damaged international standing. A country that has badly mishandled its own outbreak, that has bought up the world’s stock of important drugs, and that has petulantly withdrawn from global alliances is less likely to receive warnings or support if a new crisis emerges.
snip
America Should Prepare for a Double Pandemic
COVID-19 has steamrolled the country. What happens if another pandemic starts before this one is over?https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/double-pandemic-covid-flu/614152/
Seven years ago, the White House was bracing itself for not one pandemic, but two. In the spring of 2013, several people in China fell sick with a new and lethal strain of H7N9 bird flu, while an outbreak of MERS—a disease caused by a coronavirus—had spread from Saudi Arabia to several other countries. “We were dealing with the potential for both of those things to become a pandemic,” says Beth Cameron, who was on the National Security Council at the time. Neither did, thankfully, but we shouldn’t mistake historical luck for future security. Viruses aren’t sporting. They will not refrain from kicking you just because another virus has already knocked you to the floor. And pandemics are capricious. Despite a lot of research, “we haven’t found a way to predict when a new one will arrive,” says Nídia Trovão, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health. As new diseases emerge at a quickening pace, the only certainty is that pandemics are inevitable. So it is only a matter of time before two emerge at once. “We have to prepare for a pandemic to happen at any time, and ‘any time’ can be when we’re already dealing with one pandemic,” Cameron told me.
I first worried about the possibility of a double pandemic in March. Four months ago, it felt needlessly alarmist to fret about two rare events happening simultaneously. But since then, federal fecklessness and rushed reopenings have wasted the benefits of months of social distancing. About 60,000 new cases of COVID-19 are being confirmed every day, and death rates are rising. My worry from March feels less far-fetched. If America could underperform so badly against one rapidly spreading virus, how would it fare against two? COVID-19 has made clear what happens when even powerful, wealthy countries are inadequately prepared for rare but ruinous events. Months into the pandemic, international alliances are strained, resources are diminished, and experts are demoralized. The longer this fiasco drags on, the more vulnerable America becomes to further disasters: inbound hurricanes, wildfires, and many other viruses that lie in wait.
Sars-cov-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is just one of many coronaviruses that exist in bats and other wild animals. Several strains of influenza with pandemic potential are lurking in pigs and poultry, and some have repeatedly infected farmers over the past decade. Wild mammals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could conceivably jump into humans. Changing climate and shrinking habitats have brought those viruses into closer contact with people and livestock, while crowded cities and air travel hasten their spread. “If another pandemic happens, it will follow the same path the first one took, carved out by the world we created,” says Jessica Metcalf, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton. Certain traits increase a pathogen’s pandemic potential. Those that spread via bodily fluids (Ebola), contaminated food and water (norovirus), or insect bites (Zika) are slower to spread around the world. By contrast, respiratory viruses like flu, which spread through coughs, sneezes, and exhalations, could conceivably travel fast enough to overlap with COVID-19.
Many countries are on high alert for such viruses, primed by their COVID-19 ordeal in the same way that East Asian countries were primed at the start of this pandemic by their previous run-ins with SARS and MERS. But waning global solidarity is a problem. “Our international laws are based on a bargain that countries will rapidly notify each other [about emerging diseases] and, in exchange, they’ll have protection against the economic impacts of sharing that info,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases. That compact was violated during COVID-19, after China suppressed information about the outbreak and other countries quickly implemented travel bans.
The U.S. is now on the receiving end of many such bans. Having failed to lead the best-prepared nation in the world against one pandemic, Donald Trump has made it more vulnerable to another. He has, for example, frayed international bonds further by trying to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization. Whether he has the legal authority to do so is still unclear, but even if the threat is empty, “some of the effects will be immediate,” says Loyce Pace, the president of the Global Health Council. U.S. officials and experts will start disengaging from international institutions, and that might encourage other nations to follow suit. This won’t just harm the WHO at the time when it is most needed, but will also further diminish America’s already damaged international standing. A country that has badly mishandled its own outbreak, that has bought up the world’s stock of important drugs, and that has petulantly withdrawn from global alliances is less likely to receive warnings or support if a new crisis emerges.
snip
July 17, 2020
The U.S. prioritized the economy over public health—and got the worst of both worlds.
Failed businesses and lost loved ones, empty theme parks and socially distanced funerals, a struggling economy and an unmitigated public-health disaster: This is the worst-of-both-worlds equilibrium the United States finds itself in. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has railed against shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, tweeting in all caps that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” and pushing for employees to get back to work and businesses to get back to business. But the country has failed to get the virus under control, through masks, contact tracing, mass testing, or any of the other strategies other countries have tried and found successful. That has kneecapped the nascent recovery, and raised the possibility that the unemployment rate, which eased in May and June after nearly reaching 15 percent in April, could spike again later this year.
The economy seized in unprecedented terms this spring as states and cities mandated lockdowns. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed, and millions of workers were furloughed or laid off. But instead of setting up a national viral-control strategy during this time, as other rich countries did, the United States did close to nothing. Congress underfunded disease research and contact-tracing efforts. No federal agency coordinated the procurement of personal protective equipment. Months into the pandemic, health professionals were still reusing masks for days at a time. The Trump administration punted responsibility for public-health management to the states, each tipping into a budgetary crisis. After a springtime peak, caseloads declined only modestly. Outbreaks seeded across the country. States reopened, and counts exploded again.
Now the economy is traveling sideways, as business failures mount and the virus continues to maim and kill. New applications for unemployment insurance, for instance, are leveling off at more than 1 million a week—more than double the highest rate reached during the Great Recession, a sign that more job losses are becoming permanent. After rising when the government sent stimulus checks and expanded unemployment-insurance payments, consumer spending is falling again, down 10 percent from where it was a year ago. Homebase, a provider of human-resources software, says that the rebound has hit a “plateau,” in terms of hours worked, share of employees working, and number of businesses open. The next, terrifying phase of the coronavirus recession is here: a damaged economy, a virus spreading faster than it was in March. The disease itself continues to take a bloody, direct toll on workers, with more than 60,000 Americans testing positive a day and tens of thousands suffering from extended illness. The statistical value of American lives already lost to the disease is something like $675 billion. The current phase of the pandemic is also taking an enormous secondary toll. States with unmitigated outbreaks have been forced to go back into lockdown, or to pause their reopening, killing weakened businesses and roiling the labor market. Where the virus spreads, the economy stops.
That is not just due to government edicts, either. Some consumers have rushed back to bars and restaurants, and resumed shopping and traveling. Young people, who tend to get less sick from the coronavirus than the elderly, appear to be driving today’s pandemic. But millions more are making it clear that they will not risk their life or the life of others in their community to go out. Avoidance of the virus, more so than shutdown orders, seems to be affecting consumer behavior. Places without official lockdowns have seen similar financial collapses to those with them, and a study by University of Chicago economists showed that decreases in economic activity are closely tied to “fears of infection” and are “highly influenced by the number of COVID deaths reported” in a given county. In other ways, the spread of COVID-19 is keeping Americans from going back to work. The perception of public transit as unsafe, for example, makes it expensive and tough for commuters to get to their jobs. Schools and day-care centers are struggling to figure out how to reopen safely, meaning millions of parents are facing a fall juggling work and child care. This is a disaster. “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance,” the former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem has argued in The Atlantic. “Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself.”
snip
The Terrifying Next Phase of the Coronavirus Recession
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/terrifying-next-phase-coronavirus-recession/614140/The U.S. prioritized the economy over public health—and got the worst of both worlds.
Failed businesses and lost loved ones, empty theme parks and socially distanced funerals, a struggling economy and an unmitigated public-health disaster: This is the worst-of-both-worlds equilibrium the United States finds itself in. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has railed against shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, tweeting in all caps that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” and pushing for employees to get back to work and businesses to get back to business. But the country has failed to get the virus under control, through masks, contact tracing, mass testing, or any of the other strategies other countries have tried and found successful. That has kneecapped the nascent recovery, and raised the possibility that the unemployment rate, which eased in May and June after nearly reaching 15 percent in April, could spike again later this year.
The economy seized in unprecedented terms this spring as states and cities mandated lockdowns. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed, and millions of workers were furloughed or laid off. But instead of setting up a national viral-control strategy during this time, as other rich countries did, the United States did close to nothing. Congress underfunded disease research and contact-tracing efforts. No federal agency coordinated the procurement of personal protective equipment. Months into the pandemic, health professionals were still reusing masks for days at a time. The Trump administration punted responsibility for public-health management to the states, each tipping into a budgetary crisis. After a springtime peak, caseloads declined only modestly. Outbreaks seeded across the country. States reopened, and counts exploded again.
Now the economy is traveling sideways, as business failures mount and the virus continues to maim and kill. New applications for unemployment insurance, for instance, are leveling off at more than 1 million a week—more than double the highest rate reached during the Great Recession, a sign that more job losses are becoming permanent. After rising when the government sent stimulus checks and expanded unemployment-insurance payments, consumer spending is falling again, down 10 percent from where it was a year ago. Homebase, a provider of human-resources software, says that the rebound has hit a “plateau,” in terms of hours worked, share of employees working, and number of businesses open. The next, terrifying phase of the coronavirus recession is here: a damaged economy, a virus spreading faster than it was in March. The disease itself continues to take a bloody, direct toll on workers, with more than 60,000 Americans testing positive a day and tens of thousands suffering from extended illness. The statistical value of American lives already lost to the disease is something like $675 billion. The current phase of the pandemic is also taking an enormous secondary toll. States with unmitigated outbreaks have been forced to go back into lockdown, or to pause their reopening, killing weakened businesses and roiling the labor market. Where the virus spreads, the economy stops.
That is not just due to government edicts, either. Some consumers have rushed back to bars and restaurants, and resumed shopping and traveling. Young people, who tend to get less sick from the coronavirus than the elderly, appear to be driving today’s pandemic. But millions more are making it clear that they will not risk their life or the life of others in their community to go out. Avoidance of the virus, more so than shutdown orders, seems to be affecting consumer behavior. Places without official lockdowns have seen similar financial collapses to those with them, and a study by University of Chicago economists showed that decreases in economic activity are closely tied to “fears of infection” and are “highly influenced by the number of COVID deaths reported” in a given county. In other ways, the spread of COVID-19 is keeping Americans from going back to work. The perception of public transit as unsafe, for example, makes it expensive and tough for commuters to get to their jobs. Schools and day-care centers are struggling to figure out how to reopen safely, meaning millions of parents are facing a fall juggling work and child care. This is a disaster. “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance,” the former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem has argued in The Atlantic. “Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself.”
snip
July 17, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/second-coronavirus-death-surge/614122/
There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19. Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July. The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up. The deaths are also not happening in an unpredictable amount of time after the new outbreaks emerged. Simply look at the curves yourself. Cases began to rise on June 16; a week later, hospitalizations began to rise. Two weeks after that—21 days after cases rose—states began to report more deaths. That’s the exact number of days that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated from the onset of symptoms to the reporting of a death.
Many people who don’t want COVID-19 to be the terrible crisis that it is have clung to the idea that more cases won’t mean more deaths. Some Americans have been perplexed by a downward trend of national deaths, even as cases exploded in the Sun Belt region. But given the policy choices that state and federal officials have made, the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected. When states reopened in late April and May with plenty of infected people within their borders, cases began to grow. COVID-19 is highly transmissible, makes a large subset of people who catch it seriously ill, and kills many more people than the flu or any other infectious disease circulating in the country. The likelihood that more cases of COVID-19 would mean that more people would die from the disease has always been very high. Even at the low point for deaths in the U.S., roughly 500 people died each day, on average. Now, with the national death numbers rising once again, there’s simply no argument that America can sustain coronavirus outbreaks while somehow escaping fatalities. America’s deadly summer coronavirus surge is undeniable. And it was predictable this whole time by looking honestly at the data. In the United States, the rising severity of the current moment was obscured for several weeks by the downward drift of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths resulting from the spring outbreak in northeastern states. Even though deaths have been rising in the hardest-hit states of the Sun Belt surge, falling deaths in the Northeast disguised the trend.
It is true that the proportion of infections in younger people increased in June and July compared with March and April. And young people have a much lower risk of dying than people in their 60s and older. But, at least in Florida, where the best age data are available, early evidence suggests that the virus is already spreading to older people. Additionally, analysis of CDC data by The New York Times has found that younger Black and Latino people have a much higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than white people the same age. According to the racial data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project in concert with the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, Latinos in Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas are 1.3 to 1.6 times more likely to be infected than their proportion of the population would suggest. It is telling that despite outbreaks all over Texas in recent weeks, the border region has been leading the state in deaths per capita. Even with cases surging, if hospitalizations were not rising, that might suggest that this outbreak might be less deadly than the spring’s. But hospitalization data maintained by the COVID Tracking Project suggested otherwise as early as June 23. On that date, hospitalizations began to tick up across the South and West, and they have not stopped. It’s possible we’ll match the national peak number of hospitalizations from the spring outbreak over the next week.
Even if better knowledge of the disease and new treatments have improved outcomes by 25 or even 50 percent, so many people are now in the hospital that some of them will almost certainly die. There was always a logical, simple explanation for why cases and hospitalizations rose through the end of June while deaths did not: It takes a while for people to die of COVID-19 and for those deaths to be reported to authorities. So why has there been so much confusion about the COVID-19 death toll? The second surge is inconvenient for the Trump administration and the Republican governors who followed its lead, as well as for Mike Pence, the head of the coronavirus task force, who declared victory in a spectacularly incorrect Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” “Cases have stabilized over the past two weeks, with the daily average case rate across the U.S. dropping to 20,000—down from 30,000 in April and 25,000 in May,” Pence wrote. In the month since Pence made this assertion, the seven-day average of cases has tripled. Several individual states have reported more than 10,000 cases in a day, and Florida alone reported 15,000 cases, more than any state had before, on an absolute or per capita basis.
snip
much more at the top link
A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming
There was always a logical explanation for why cases rose through the end of June while deaths did not.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/second-coronavirus-death-surge/614122/
There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19. Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July. The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up. The deaths are also not happening in an unpredictable amount of time after the new outbreaks emerged. Simply look at the curves yourself. Cases began to rise on June 16; a week later, hospitalizations began to rise. Two weeks after that—21 days after cases rose—states began to report more deaths. That’s the exact number of days that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated from the onset of symptoms to the reporting of a death.
Many people who don’t want COVID-19 to be the terrible crisis that it is have clung to the idea that more cases won’t mean more deaths. Some Americans have been perplexed by a downward trend of national deaths, even as cases exploded in the Sun Belt region. But given the policy choices that state and federal officials have made, the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected. When states reopened in late April and May with plenty of infected people within their borders, cases began to grow. COVID-19 is highly transmissible, makes a large subset of people who catch it seriously ill, and kills many more people than the flu or any other infectious disease circulating in the country. The likelihood that more cases of COVID-19 would mean that more people would die from the disease has always been very high. Even at the low point for deaths in the U.S., roughly 500 people died each day, on average. Now, with the national death numbers rising once again, there’s simply no argument that America can sustain coronavirus outbreaks while somehow escaping fatalities. America’s deadly summer coronavirus surge is undeniable. And it was predictable this whole time by looking honestly at the data. In the United States, the rising severity of the current moment was obscured for several weeks by the downward drift of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths resulting from the spring outbreak in northeastern states. Even though deaths have been rising in the hardest-hit states of the Sun Belt surge, falling deaths in the Northeast disguised the trend.
It is true that the proportion of infections in younger people increased in June and July compared with March and April. And young people have a much lower risk of dying than people in their 60s and older. But, at least in Florida, where the best age data are available, early evidence suggests that the virus is already spreading to older people. Additionally, analysis of CDC data by The New York Times has found that younger Black and Latino people have a much higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than white people the same age. According to the racial data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project in concert with the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, Latinos in Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas are 1.3 to 1.6 times more likely to be infected than their proportion of the population would suggest. It is telling that despite outbreaks all over Texas in recent weeks, the border region has been leading the state in deaths per capita. Even with cases surging, if hospitalizations were not rising, that might suggest that this outbreak might be less deadly than the spring’s. But hospitalization data maintained by the COVID Tracking Project suggested otherwise as early as June 23. On that date, hospitalizations began to tick up across the South and West, and they have not stopped. It’s possible we’ll match the national peak number of hospitalizations from the spring outbreak over the next week.
Even if better knowledge of the disease and new treatments have improved outcomes by 25 or even 50 percent, so many people are now in the hospital that some of them will almost certainly die. There was always a logical, simple explanation for why cases and hospitalizations rose through the end of June while deaths did not: It takes a while for people to die of COVID-19 and for those deaths to be reported to authorities. So why has there been so much confusion about the COVID-19 death toll? The second surge is inconvenient for the Trump administration and the Republican governors who followed its lead, as well as for Mike Pence, the head of the coronavirus task force, who declared victory in a spectacularly incorrect Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” “Cases have stabilized over the past two weeks, with the daily average case rate across the U.S. dropping to 20,000—down from 30,000 in April and 25,000 in May,” Pence wrote. In the month since Pence made this assertion, the seven-day average of cases has tripled. Several individual states have reported more than 10,000 cases in a day, and Florida alone reported 15,000 cases, more than any state had before, on an absolute or per capita basis.
snip
much more at the top link
July 16, 2020
https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-wont-go-to-war-against-china
WASHINGTON, DC -- Once again, Donald Trump blurted two scary-sounding things this week and I’m not sure whether to take him seriously. I mean, he’s the world’s most shameless bullshitter, so when he says anything, no matter how serious, my first reaction is that he’s lying. It’s a safe bet given his track record of mendacity stretching back more than three years -- three decades, if you include all of the bullshitting he used to do in Manhattan. Nevertheless, it’s a smart idea to at least acknowledge what he’s saying in case he wasn’t just doing his usual shrieking eel impression. During an interview with CBS News the other day, Trump, drenched in sweat mixed with foundation makeup, threatened some form of retaliation against China. Why? Obviously because China deliberately “hit us with the plague.” "Look, we made a great trade deal but as soon as the deal was done,” the president began, “The ink wasn't even dry and they hit us with the plague. So right now I'm not interested in talking to China about another deal. I'm interested in doing other things with China." When asked how specifically he’s planning to hold China accountable, Trump replied, “You’ll see. You’ll see.”
First of all, and to be clear, the Chinese government didn’t “hit us with the plague.” There’s no evidence for this ridiculousness, only the wacky-shack street corner rantings of professional sideshow geeks like Alex Jones and the rejected mutants from the slagheap who inaccurately call themselves news reporters for the OAN network. Indeed, the vast majority of the infections in the United States were a consequence of people traveling from Europe. Likewise, if King Joffrey shut down travel from China with tremendous whatever, how could the virus have made it here at all, according to him? There was widespread concern on social media this week about whether this means some sort of military confrontation with China, or another “fire and fury” bluff like he so transparently employed against North Korea. I don’t think it’s that, specifically. But shortly after Trump gave the interview with CBS, he napped his way through an announcement about new sanctions against China, all contained within the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, signed into law by Trump on Tuesday. The legislation punishes China for its crackdown on Hong Kong protesters. Meanwhile, the Trump State Department issued sanctions against a number of Chinese tech companies. So, that’s already underway.
In response to all of this, China’s foreign ministry threatened retaliatory sanctions against Americans and American corporations. Is this the extent of it, or is Trump planning additional sanctions? Perhaps new tariffs, too? Who the hell knows for sure. I don’t think Trump knows. But in terms of the “fire and fury” thing, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about Trump launching an attack. He’s proved himself to be a bulbous sack of cowardice when it comes to war, thankfully. Again, a ton of macho talk but not much action to back it up. The Trump thing I’m much more concerned about is his willingness to go to war against his own people. During an Oval Office presentation this week, which included Bill Barr, who still hasn’t resigned yet after threatening to do so as a result of the Roger Stone commutation, Trump threatened to send federal troops into cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Seattle. His move here is obviously to further electrify his Red Hat disciples with military occupations of “Democrat run” cities. But, to repeat, I have no idea whether he’s serious or whether he’s going to forget that he mentioned this.
Apparently, though, we’ll find out next week when he plans to announce something during another non-press conference press conference. Once again, who knows whether he’s bluffing, lying or both. My guess is that he’s threatening these actions in order to coerce mayors and governors to deploy their respective National Guard units. But I’m not entirely ruling out federal troops, either. Trump’s entire re-election campaign is being Tinker-Toyed around the notion of “law and order,” so these kinds of actions -- sending in the military to beat up liberals and Black Lives Matter activists -- fit within the campaign strategy. As Rachel Maddow says: watch this space. The overall impact of this unstable, slobbery little homunculus and his constant threats of military and law enforcement violence is to manifest more chaos while keeping us all off balance, amplifying our stress. At the same time, however, more and more Americans are fed up with this constant instability from the White House, especially in the face of the worst healthcare crisis since polio was a thing. Based on the polling averages, Trump’s old tricks aren’t working like they used to and voters are increasingly leaning in the direction of the Democrat’s answer to Eisenhower, former Vice President Biden. Trump could be, at long last, completely out of stock when it comes to fire and/or fury. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Trump Won't Go To War Against China, But He Might Go To War Against America
"The Trump thing I’m much more concerned about is his willingness to go to war against his own people."https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-wont-go-to-war-against-china
WASHINGTON, DC -- Once again, Donald Trump blurted two scary-sounding things this week and I’m not sure whether to take him seriously. I mean, he’s the world’s most shameless bullshitter, so when he says anything, no matter how serious, my first reaction is that he’s lying. It’s a safe bet given his track record of mendacity stretching back more than three years -- three decades, if you include all of the bullshitting he used to do in Manhattan. Nevertheless, it’s a smart idea to at least acknowledge what he’s saying in case he wasn’t just doing his usual shrieking eel impression. During an interview with CBS News the other day, Trump, drenched in sweat mixed with foundation makeup, threatened some form of retaliation against China. Why? Obviously because China deliberately “hit us with the plague.” "Look, we made a great trade deal but as soon as the deal was done,” the president began, “The ink wasn't even dry and they hit us with the plague. So right now I'm not interested in talking to China about another deal. I'm interested in doing other things with China." When asked how specifically he’s planning to hold China accountable, Trump replied, “You’ll see. You’ll see.”
First of all, and to be clear, the Chinese government didn’t “hit us with the plague.” There’s no evidence for this ridiculousness, only the wacky-shack street corner rantings of professional sideshow geeks like Alex Jones and the rejected mutants from the slagheap who inaccurately call themselves news reporters for the OAN network. Indeed, the vast majority of the infections in the United States were a consequence of people traveling from Europe. Likewise, if King Joffrey shut down travel from China with tremendous whatever, how could the virus have made it here at all, according to him? There was widespread concern on social media this week about whether this means some sort of military confrontation with China, or another “fire and fury” bluff like he so transparently employed against North Korea. I don’t think it’s that, specifically. But shortly after Trump gave the interview with CBS, he napped his way through an announcement about new sanctions against China, all contained within the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, signed into law by Trump on Tuesday. The legislation punishes China for its crackdown on Hong Kong protesters. Meanwhile, the Trump State Department issued sanctions against a number of Chinese tech companies. So, that’s already underway.
In response to all of this, China’s foreign ministry threatened retaliatory sanctions against Americans and American corporations. Is this the extent of it, or is Trump planning additional sanctions? Perhaps new tariffs, too? Who the hell knows for sure. I don’t think Trump knows. But in terms of the “fire and fury” thing, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about Trump launching an attack. He’s proved himself to be a bulbous sack of cowardice when it comes to war, thankfully. Again, a ton of macho talk but not much action to back it up. The Trump thing I’m much more concerned about is his willingness to go to war against his own people. During an Oval Office presentation this week, which included Bill Barr, who still hasn’t resigned yet after threatening to do so as a result of the Roger Stone commutation, Trump threatened to send federal troops into cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Seattle. His move here is obviously to further electrify his Red Hat disciples with military occupations of “Democrat run” cities. But, to repeat, I have no idea whether he’s serious or whether he’s going to forget that he mentioned this.
Apparently, though, we’ll find out next week when he plans to announce something during another non-press conference press conference. Once again, who knows whether he’s bluffing, lying or both. My guess is that he’s threatening these actions in order to coerce mayors and governors to deploy their respective National Guard units. But I’m not entirely ruling out federal troops, either. Trump’s entire re-election campaign is being Tinker-Toyed around the notion of “law and order,” so these kinds of actions -- sending in the military to beat up liberals and Black Lives Matter activists -- fit within the campaign strategy. As Rachel Maddow says: watch this space. The overall impact of this unstable, slobbery little homunculus and his constant threats of military and law enforcement violence is to manifest more chaos while keeping us all off balance, amplifying our stress. At the same time, however, more and more Americans are fed up with this constant instability from the White House, especially in the face of the worst healthcare crisis since polio was a thing. Based on the polling averages, Trump’s old tricks aren’t working like they used to and voters are increasingly leaning in the direction of the Democrat’s answer to Eisenhower, former Vice President Biden. Trump could be, at long last, completely out of stock when it comes to fire and/or fury. Let’s hope it stays that way.
July 16, 2020
November's presidential election is now just 16 weeks away. In the primaries we saw all sorts of chaos and mayhem — long lines, few polling places, few polling workers — and the worst is yet to come.
Brian Ross interviews investigative reporter Greg Palast about his new book How Trump Stole 202, which reveals how the fix is in to steal the election — and how we can unfix it.
* * * * *
How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanishing Voters — OUT NOW!
Order it TODAY so we can immediately get on the bestseller lists. The publicity will help us expose how the election is being stolen — and help us get the word out about how we can steal it back. Buy it from:
How Trump Stole 2020
THE HUNT FOR AMERICA'S VANISHED VOTERS
By GREG PALAST
Illustrated by TED RALL
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/659618/how-trump-stole-2020-by-greg-palast/
Live: Today, Thur July 16, FB, Time: 7pm ET Greg Palast, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman discuss
Palast's new book, How Trump Stole 2020 : THE HUNT FOR AMERICA'S VANISHED VOTERS. Get ready to learn how to steal it back.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1183083712045140
https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/
Brian Ross Investigates: How Trump Stole 2020 with Greg Palast
November's presidential election is now just 16 weeks away. In the primaries we saw all sorts of chaos and mayhem — long lines, few polling places, few polling workers — and the worst is yet to come.
Brian Ross interviews investigative reporter Greg Palast about his new book How Trump Stole 202, which reveals how the fix is in to steal the election — and how we can unfix it.
* * * * *
How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanishing Voters — OUT NOW!
Order it TODAY so we can immediately get on the bestseller lists. The publicity will help us expose how the election is being stolen — and help us get the word out about how we can steal it back. Buy it from:
How Trump Stole 2020
THE HUNT FOR AMERICA'S VANISHED VOTERS
By GREG PALAST
Illustrated by TED RALL
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/659618/how-trump-stole-2020-by-greg-palast/
July 16, 2020
Label:
Bemisbrain Records ?– BB 123/124
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album, Compilation
Country:
US
Released:
Nov 1981
Genre:
Rock
Style:
Punk, Hardcore, Goth Rock, Deathrock, New Wave
1. Social Distortion - Lude Boy
2. Social Distortion - Telling Them
3. Legal Weapon - Daddy's Gone Mad
4. Redd Kross - Puss 'n' Boots
5. Modern Warfare - Out Of My Head
6. Modern Warfare - Street Fightin' Man
7. Secret Hate - Deception
8. Secret Hate - New Routine/Suicide
9. The Conservatives - Suburban Bitch
10. The Conservatives - Just Cuz/Jealous
11. 45 Grave - Evil
12. 45 Grave - Concerned Citizen
13. 45 Grave - 45 Grave
14. Christian Death - Dogs
15. 100 Flowers - Reject Yourself
16. Rhino 39 - Marry It
17. Super Heroines - Death On The Elevator
18. Super Heroines - Embalmed Love
Full Album
Social Distortion - Telling Them (Hell Comes To Your House Vol 1 + Full Album)
Label:
Bemisbrain Records ?– BB 123/124
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album, Compilation
Country:
US
Released:
Nov 1981
Genre:
Rock
Style:
Punk, Hardcore, Goth Rock, Deathrock, New Wave
1. Social Distortion - Lude Boy
2. Social Distortion - Telling Them
3. Legal Weapon - Daddy's Gone Mad
4. Redd Kross - Puss 'n' Boots
5. Modern Warfare - Out Of My Head
6. Modern Warfare - Street Fightin' Man
7. Secret Hate - Deception
8. Secret Hate - New Routine/Suicide
9. The Conservatives - Suburban Bitch
10. The Conservatives - Just Cuz/Jealous
11. 45 Grave - Evil
12. 45 Grave - Concerned Citizen
13. 45 Grave - 45 Grave
14. Christian Death - Dogs
15. 100 Flowers - Reject Yourself
16. Rhino 39 - Marry It
17. Super Heroines - Death On The Elevator
18. Super Heroines - Embalmed Love
Full Album
July 16, 2020
https://www.thrillist.com/shopping/nation/best-ice-cream-delivery-from-goldbelly
We independently source all of the awesome products and experiences that we feature on Thrillist. If you buy or book from the links on our site, we may receive an affiliate commission — which in turn supports our work.
People like to say that nothing in life is certain. However, we beg to differ. One thing is definitely certain, and it is the fact that ice cream makes everything better. Sorry, we don't make the rules. Of course, not all ice cream is created equal. There are certain brands, flavors, and scoop shops that we all have a certain affinity for, whether it's because we find them nostalgic, particularly interesting, or simply because they're so damn delicious. Whatever the case may be, if you've been jonesing to expand your world of frozen treats, we've got you covered. We tracked down a dozen beloved ice cream makers from across the country that ship their goods frozen nationwide so you can keep your freezer stocked with and your stomach full of the good stuff all summer long. Just be careful with the brain freezes.
Ice & Vice Signature Collection
New York's Ice & Vice has cultivated a serious following thanks to its roster of "edgy" handcrafted and customized ice cream flavors, and now you can easily get its Signature Collection delivered frozen directly to your door. This pack includes six pints, each filled with one of its most popular offerings: Opium Den (white sesame/poppy seed/lemon bread croutons), 9AM Vietnamese Coffee, Basic B (Mexican vanilla with black lava sea salt), Milk Money (dulce de leche base with sea salt and dark chocolate ganache), Shade (smoked dark chocolate with caramelized white chocolate ganache), and Tea Dance (nilgiri black tea ice cream with lemon charcoal caramel).
The Baked Bear's Build Your Own Ice Cream Sandwich Kit
Forget the ice cream sandwiches you can buy from the grocery freezer. This summer, it's all about DIY ice cream sando kits from San Diego's The Baked Bear. This pack includes everything you'll need to make nine giant ice cream sandwiches, including three pints of ice cream of your choice (from a dozen different flavors), and 18 two-ounce 3.5-inch baked fresh cookies of your choice (from a selection of 10 delicious options).
Anderson's Frozen Custard Choose Your Own 6-Pack
Anderson's Frozen Custard has been a Buffalo, New York institution basically since it opened in the '40s, but you don't have to live in the area to get your hands on the good stuff. This pack includes six pints of custard in the flavors of your choosing from a selection of 24 standout year-round and seasonal flavors. Plus, it comes with an ice cream scoop!
Crank & Boom Craft Ice Cream
Crank & Boom started as a food truck operation in 2013, but has quickly grown into a mini empire thanks to its focus on using fresh ingredients and going all-in interesting flavors. This pack, like many others on this list, comes with six pints of ice cream in flavors of your choosing from 15 options lie Blueberry Lime Cheesecake, Strawberry Balsamic Sorbet, Bourbon and Honey, and Coffee Stout (made with a "secret" iced coffee recipe and oatmeal stout from Lexington, Kentucky's Ethereal Brewing).
snip
12 Mind-Numbingly Good Ice Cream Brands That Will Ship Direct to Your Door
Cool off with frozen deliciousness from some of the country's most beloved, iconic, and creative ice cream brands, all of which can be shipped direct to your door via Goldbelly.https://www.thrillist.com/shopping/nation/best-ice-cream-delivery-from-goldbelly
We independently source all of the awesome products and experiences that we feature on Thrillist. If you buy or book from the links on our site, we may receive an affiliate commission — which in turn supports our work.
People like to say that nothing in life is certain. However, we beg to differ. One thing is definitely certain, and it is the fact that ice cream makes everything better. Sorry, we don't make the rules. Of course, not all ice cream is created equal. There are certain brands, flavors, and scoop shops that we all have a certain affinity for, whether it's because we find them nostalgic, particularly interesting, or simply because they're so damn delicious. Whatever the case may be, if you've been jonesing to expand your world of frozen treats, we've got you covered. We tracked down a dozen beloved ice cream makers from across the country that ship their goods frozen nationwide so you can keep your freezer stocked with and your stomach full of the good stuff all summer long. Just be careful with the brain freezes.
Ice & Vice Signature Collection
New York's Ice & Vice has cultivated a serious following thanks to its roster of "edgy" handcrafted and customized ice cream flavors, and now you can easily get its Signature Collection delivered frozen directly to your door. This pack includes six pints, each filled with one of its most popular offerings: Opium Den (white sesame/poppy seed/lemon bread croutons), 9AM Vietnamese Coffee, Basic B (Mexican vanilla with black lava sea salt), Milk Money (dulce de leche base with sea salt and dark chocolate ganache), Shade (smoked dark chocolate with caramelized white chocolate ganache), and Tea Dance (nilgiri black tea ice cream with lemon charcoal caramel).
The Baked Bear's Build Your Own Ice Cream Sandwich Kit
Forget the ice cream sandwiches you can buy from the grocery freezer. This summer, it's all about DIY ice cream sando kits from San Diego's The Baked Bear. This pack includes everything you'll need to make nine giant ice cream sandwiches, including three pints of ice cream of your choice (from a dozen different flavors), and 18 two-ounce 3.5-inch baked fresh cookies of your choice (from a selection of 10 delicious options).
Anderson's Frozen Custard Choose Your Own 6-Pack
Anderson's Frozen Custard has been a Buffalo, New York institution basically since it opened in the '40s, but you don't have to live in the area to get your hands on the good stuff. This pack includes six pints of custard in the flavors of your choosing from a selection of 24 standout year-round and seasonal flavors. Plus, it comes with an ice cream scoop!
Crank & Boom Craft Ice Cream
Crank & Boom started as a food truck operation in 2013, but has quickly grown into a mini empire thanks to its focus on using fresh ingredients and going all-in interesting flavors. This pack, like many others on this list, comes with six pints of ice cream in flavors of your choosing from 15 options lie Blueberry Lime Cheesecake, Strawberry Balsamic Sorbet, Bourbon and Honey, and Coffee Stout (made with a "secret" iced coffee recipe and oatmeal stout from Lexington, Kentucky's Ethereal Brewing).
snip
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: London
Home country: US/UK/Sweden
Current location: Stockholm, Sweden
Member since: Sun Jul 1, 2018, 07:25 PM
Number of posts: 43,286
