1/ Here's the latest assault on reality from Fox News....
Photo: Fox News
Last night Tucker Carlson shared with his audience the blinding revelation that social-distancing measures have proven completely unnecessary. The basis for his conclusion, which has eluded public-health authorities in the Trump administration, elsewhere in the United States, and across the world, is simple: Fewer people have died than authorities said would die in the absence of stay-at-home orders. Therefore, the orders were unnecessary:
2/ Brad Pitt as Dr. Fauci with the SNL cold open.....very amusing and moving too.....four minutes....
3/ If you watched "Planet Of The Humans" about the environmental movement and alternative energy, the movie has pissed off the entire climate community - not a surprise. Yes there are some exaggerations of the truth, but it also shows how money corrupts everything, even the people protecting our future....
The movie is definitely worth watching.....free on YouTube for another two weeks or so.....
A new Michael Moore-produced documentary that takes aim at the supposed hypocrisy of the green movement is “dangerous, misleading and destructive” and should be removed from public viewing, according to an assortment of climate scientists and environmental campaigners.
The film, Planet of the Humans, was released on the eve of Earth Day last week by its producer, Michael Moore, the baseball cap-wearing documentarian known for Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine.
4/ Randy Rainbow with a lovely song - "A Spoonful Of Clorox Makes The Temperature Go Down".....amusing, cleverly done and he really can sing!
Two minutes.....
5/ I have put the text version of this in because the Irish Times charges if you read their stories.....
But this Dublin paper says it all.....note they quote the next article.....
The U.S. no longer is the world leader it was before Trump. See how the Irish Times views us...
Irish Times 25/04/2020
US president Donald Trump has claimed he was being sarcastic and testing the media when he raised the idea that injecting disinfectant or irradiating the body with ultraviolet light might kill coronavirus.
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
>
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
There is, as the demonstrations in US cities show, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
>
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
There is, as the demonstrations in US cities show, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
6/ A powerful Bill Maher "New Rules", where he takes on American factory farming and Tiger King too....
Comedic reporting, a dark Maher for a change....five minutes....
7/ I just read this again, and it really sinks in the second time how serious a situation we are in. You should also read it again....
George Packer in The Atlantic - "We Are Living In A Failed State"....either a sobering or an
inspirational or depressing message - your choice....
8/ Bill Maher interviews Dr. David Katz, who has a controversial but [to me at least] reasonable sounding way out of this crisis. We don't hear many intelligent discussions about where are we going and how to get back to a semblance of normality that's devoid of politics.
A rare instance of Maher doing comedic reporting, and doing it well. A worthwhile 15 minutes....
See what you think.....
9/ David Wallace-Wells interviews Thomas Piketty, the French economist who first focused on wealth inequality.....excellent interview....
Long but you have the time, don't you!
10/ Miley Cyrus with an acoustic version of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here"....she's really good....
11/ Umair on our economic disaster looming.....
This week, another 5 million Americans filed for unemployment. Five million. Let’s put that number in context. At the beginning of this crisis, I predicted a rate of 3% unemployment growing per week. The US labour force is 165 million people. The total now filing for unemployment is 26 million and counting. That’s 16% of the labor force which is now unemployed.
Over just five weeks. Which is a rate of almost exactly three percent per week. That’s not to toot my own horn. It’s to point out a grim but inescapable conclusion.
This is how an economy dies.... https://eand.co/this-is-what-
12/ We watched one episode of this, "Babylon Berlin", and it's really interesting. Set in 1929 Berlin, with the rise of the Reich in the background.
Dubbed, with some subtitles....
13/ Quarantine viewing from Rolling Stone.....
14/ We are also watching this HBO series "My Brilliant Friend", and it's amazing. Here's a review from the Atlantic...
Todays classic video - have another look at the Jimmy Fallon/Emma Stone LipSync contest......still a wow......
Todays little Johnny joke
A teacher asks the kids in her 3rd grade class: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Little Johnny says: "I wanna start out as a Fighter Pilot, then be a billionaire, go to the most expensive clubs, find me the finest whore, give her a Ferrari worth over a million bucks, an apartment in Copacabana, a mansion in Paris, a jet to travel throughout Europe, an Infinite Visa Card, and all the while banging her like a loose screen door in a hurricane."
The teacher, shocked, and not knowing what to do with this horrible response from little Johnny,
decides not to acknowledge what he said and simply tries to continue with the lesson.
decides not to acknowledge what he said and simply tries to continue with the lesson.
"And how about you, Sarah?"
"I wanna be Johnny’s whore.
Todays Chinese joke
While in China, an Australian man is very sexually promiscuous and does not use a condom the entire time he is there.
A week after arriving back home in Melbourne, he wakes one morning to find his penis covered with bright green and purple spots.
Horrified, he immediately goes to see a doctor.
The doctor, never having seen anything like this before, orders some tests and tells the man to return in two days for the results.
The man returns a couple of days later and the doctor says, "I've got bad news, you have contracted Mongolian VD. It's very rare and almost unheard of here in this country, we know very little about it. "The man looks a little perplexed and says, "Well, give me a shot or something and fix me up, Doc."The doctor answers, "I'm sorry, there's no known cure. We are going to have to amputate your penis."
The man screams in horror, "Absolutely not! I want a second opinion!!! "
The doctor replies, "It is your choice. Go ahead if you want, but surgery is your only option."The next day, the man seeks out a Chinese doctor in Little Bourke Street, figuring that he'll know more about the disease.
The Chinese doctor examines his penis and proclaims, "Ah, yes, Mongolian VD. Vewy ware disease."The guy says to the doctor, "Yeah, yeah, I already know that, but what can we do? My local GP wants to cut off my penis!"
The Chinese doctor shakes his head and laughs. "Stupid local docttah, always want opawate. Make more money dat way. No need amputate!"
"Oh, thank God!" the man exclaims."Yes," says the Chinese doctor. "Wait two week. Fall off by itself!"
Todays blonde joke.....our favorite
"An old, blind cowboy wanders into an all-girl biker bar by mistake...
He finds his way to a bar stool and orders a shot of Jack Daniels.
After sitting there for a while, he yells to the bartender, 'Hey, you wanna hear a blonde joke?'
The bar immediately falls absolutely silent.
In a very deep, husky voice, the woman next to him says, 'Before you tell that joke, Cowboy, I think it is only fair, given that you are blind,
that you should know five things:
1. The bartender is a blonde girl with a baseball bat.
2. The bouncer is a blonde girl with a 'Billy-Club'.
3. I'm a 6-foot tall, 175-pound blonde woman with a black belt in karate.
4. The woman sitting next to me is blonde and a professional weight lifter.
5. The lady to your right is blonde and a professional wrestler.
'Now, think about it seriously, Cowboy ... do you still wanna tell that blonde joke?'
The blind cowboy thinks for a second, shakes his head and mutters, 'No ... not if I'm gonna have to explain it five times"...
