COTW: Devil in the Details

Look, as everyone is wont to say nowadays, at these charts, especially you Ann Coulter since you got it wrong again:

It shows that COVID-10 is deadlier than the flu for all age categories.  The COVID data is based on the Chinese experience with the disease.  The influenza numbers come from our own CDC.  The corona virus is as much as ten times deadlier than flu viruses.  In January China informed the WHO of an outbreak of a novel repiratory disease and released the SERS CoV-2 genome to the world.  South Korea heeded the warning, and missed the bullet thanks to comprehensive and swift testing that allowed isolation of infected individuals.

The US never had a chance to emulate the Korean performance because socialism, and because it never had enough working testing equipment to begin with.  That's just the facts, m'am.  It does not have enough spare hospital capacity, either.  According to the OECD the US has 2.8 beds per 1000 compared to Germany's 8 and China's 4.3.  We also do not have enough medical equipment to contain a pandemic.  When Russia has to airlift to the US medical supplies, something is amiss in the system.  As Norm Chomsky said in an interview, "...there is no profit in preventing a future catastrophe."  The US has passed 200,000 confirmed infections, the most on Earth.

Now here is the economic flip side of this catastrophe.  It is pretty clear that a near national shutdown will cost US a recession.  The economic signals are flashing red, and the stock market tanked 800 points when Don Douche and his red state side-kicks stopped denying pandemic reality this week.  This chart is from the great state of Texas, a bastion of free market ju-ju (keep in mind the service sector comprises 70% of the GDP):

The chart shows an all-time low. Figures for the Texas retail sector are similar.  No light at the end of this tunnel.  The impact on Texas employment figures is equally catastrophic.  Now why should commie hot-head US Person care about the collapse of the capitalists?  Because the plutocrats are being hoisted out of their own "sh*thole" again by that most reliable handmaiden, Uncle Samuel.  This final chart tells the tale:

Since 2012 says Wolf Richter, corps have bought back $4.6 trillion worth of their own shares.  This financial activity, which does not benefit the larger economy but does enrich corporate executives, is what has driven the bull market since the Great Recession.  It boggles the mind to think that until 1982, stock buybacks were considered illegal manipulation of the market when the SEC issued Rule 10b-18.  Thank you, Ronald Regan.  This money was literally burned to enrich the 1% instead of paying down debt in the companies they own to keep people working in bad times, like now.  Instead they run to their overindulgent Uncle, crying "Mana, Mana".  Because the latest emergency bailout was passed in a hurry, no one will be able to know how the latest half trillion in free money will be spent.  US Person thinks it is almost certain it will not be spent to help the rest of US.

Creature Feature: Peacock Spiders

This Australian spider looks like it got caught in several jars of psychedelic poster paints. What it actually is, is a peacock spider of the genus Marata. Even someone with a spider phobia has to admit this male's color scheme is pretty spectacular. As with most bright coloration in nature, his coat of many colors is a mating display. If the display was not dazzling enough, Marata azureus also wave their third legs in a mating dance. There are eighty-five species in the genus; seven new ones have been described in the journal Zootaxa. These spiders are tiny, about the size of a grain of rice, and only males are brightly colored. Some have fans they can extend like a peacock's feathers Males have to be very careful though when pursuing a female, since they kill males that fail to impress them. Talk about pressure!

Judge Blocks Dakota Pipeline Project

Standing Rock Sioux have steadfast in their resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline both in and out of court.  On Wednesday of last week, the tribe was rewarded with a decision in Federal District Court that found the pipeline project in violation of key environmental laws.  District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote the US Corp of Engineers environmental assessment was inadequate.  He wrote, "The many commenters in this case pointed to serious gaps in crucial parts of the Corps’ analysis—to name a few, that the pipeline’s leak-detection system was unlikely to work, that it was not designed to catch slow spills, that the operator’s serious history of incidents had not been taken into account, and that the worst-case scenario used by the Corps of Engineers was potentially only a fraction of what a realistic figure would be—and the Corps was not able to fill any of them."

Even though oil is flowing through pipe the judge stripped the pipeline of federal permits and directed a full environmental impact statement be undertaken for the entire length of the 1,172 mile pipe, which could take years.  The regime is unrelenting hostile to environmental review of federal projects except for the most cursory assessments that reach a foregone conclusion.  When the election of 2016 was decided, Don Douche set about steamrolling the project to completion without a full environmental impact statement being completed.  The case is not over, and will undoubtedly be appealed by the owners.  But the Standing Rock tribe chairperson said the legal win was "humbling" despite the fact it took four years to convince authorities to respect the tribe's defense of their water and earth.

Tamarins Die of Human Disease

The known hothead, US Person, intends this post to take your mind off the coronavirus plague because as you know, misery loves company. Golden-maned tamarins, Leontopithecus rosalia, are beautiful monkeys that live in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. [photo below] As their name describes, adults have luxurious, colored manes surrounding their faces. [photo left] Their populations have suffered drastic declines due to fragmentation of their disappearing forest habitat and extreme poaching; they were down to just a few hundred in the 1980's.  Thanks to intensive conservation efforts that included reintroduction of zoo reared tamarins into the wild, the population was raised to 3700 by 2014.

A new, more insidious threat to the tamarins was discovered in May, 2018.  The first confirmed death of a tamarin due to yellow fever, a human disease, occurred.  Brazil had suffered a major yellow fever epidemic, the largest since vaccinations began in the late '40s; hundreds of people were killed by the mosquito borne disease in the populous southern states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.  Thousands more were infected.  The pathogen made the inter-species jump to tamarins, killing an estimated 30% of the species that was already endangered according to the IUCN.  Predictably, panicked humans contributed to the death rate by killing all monkeys because they believed yellow fever could be directly transmitted by  monkeys to humans.  More bad news was the fact that another primate species, the woolly spider monkey, was also decimated by the contagion.

a mother with two infants, credit: A. Martens

Yellow fever is believed to have been transmitted to the Americas by transported slaves from Africa.  The disease first appeared in Recife, Brazil 1685.  Since it is pathogen not endemic to the Americas, native monkeys have no natural resistance to the disease. A combination of climate change and deforestation in areas that serve as buffer zones between tropical forest and urban areas has allowed yellow fever to spread.  Scientists worry that yellow fever outbreaks may become a regular occurance in the Atlantic Forest remnants where the tamarins now hang on to survival.  It once stretched along South America's Atlantic coast from Venezuela to Argentina, now because of logging, charcoal production, agriculture and urbanization it is now just 2% of its original extent, chopped up into fragments.  But it is home to 22 of Brazil's 77 primate species.

There is some hope for the tamarin, if it recovers from the latest onslaught.  A vaccine for monkeys has been developed based on the human yellow fever vaccine.  No one has vaccinated wild primates before, so the effort to protect  surviving tamarins is fraught with challenges.  No licenses or permissions exist to conduct such a vaccination program in Brazil, and the ethical question of un- vaccinated humans remains.  Administering the vaccine to five hundred wild tamarins in a cost effective way has also not been determined.

EPA Stops Environmental Regulation Because Coronavirus

More: Something equally cynical is being done to Social Security.  Corporations will be allowed to suspend their contributions to the trust fund for the rest of the year as part of the $2 trillion, mostly corporate bail out..  The fact is that the market idolators who control the Senate and Executive will use any excuse they can, including a dangerous pandemic, to undermine any laws they consider to be 'socialistic'.  They want to return to an America before the New Deal.

How much more cynical and manipulative can this neo-facist regime become?  Apparently much more, as the EPA announced it will "temporarily" stop enforcement of its regulations on business and industry during the crisis and rely on self-regulating--an invitation to ignore pollution laws retroactive to March 13th. Companies violating pollution regulations will not be cited by the agency and monitoring will cease for an indefinite period. The EPA, now headed by a coal lobbyist, has become a ghost agency overrun by anti-regulation politicos.

The oil industry aggressively lobbied for this abdication of governmental oversight. American Petroleum Institute (API) executives wrote to both the Antichrist and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asking that they temporarily waive “non-essential compliance obligations”.  These include in the industry's jaundiced view delaying requirements for greenhouse gas reporting, providing flexibility on monitoring sampling and analysis required for drinking water permits and add certain delays or deferrals to pollution monitoring including reporting and repair of leaks. It is blatantly obvious these requests have nothing to do with the epidemic, but represent another cynical attempt to dismantle environmental protection laws polluting industries consider burdensome. 

I have not spoken from hiding

nor from a dark place of the Earth,

And I have not said to the descendants of Jacob,

"Look for me in an empty waste...." 

--Isaiah 45, 19 

 

'Toontime: White Wash

Still more: More evidence of the Antichrist's denial of reality and sociopathic impulses.There were classified intelligence reports in January and February warning of a possible pandemic. The intelligence reports tracked the spread of the disease in China and that governments attempts to minimize the problem.  The regime took no action to prepare for an eventual outbreak in the US.

credit: Christopher Weyant, Boston Globe
Wackydoodle sez: Spreads fast too! 

More: Rationing of ventilators has already begun in Michigan.  In 2003 the GAO warned, “few hospitals have adequate medical equipment, such as ventilators, that are often needed for respiratory infections.” In 2017 the CDC repeated a similar warning: “Substantial concern exists that intensive care units (ICUs) might have insufficient resources to treat all persons requiring ventilator support."  A 2015 study by the CDC found a severe flu epidemic would require 60,000 additional ventilators. When approached by the regime to produce more ventilators, the profiteers at GM demanded hundreds of millions up front and a price tag of about $18,000 per ventilator.  The 'great deal maker' balked at the price; the total bill of $1.5 billion is comparable to 18 F-35s, the Pentagon's infamously over-budget, advanced fighter.  Eventually GM came round when the regime threatened to use the Defense Production Act to force the company to comply with the demand.  None of the expected ventilators will be available for use until early summer, too late for the expected surge in demand in the next two months. Currently GM factories are idle in response to the pandemic. Last year GM posted $6.5 billion in profits.  Medicare for All too expensive?  You decide.

{27.03.20} Don Douche has been absolving himself of responsibility his entire life.  You cannot expect him to change just because he sits in the room without corners; after all, privilege bestowed by inherited wealth has worked for him in the past.

The ugly, whispered truth of the current regime has now been confirmed in writing: lives are less important than profits in an end-stage capitalist economy. Last Sunday, Donald Trump declared on Twitter: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”  It was another well known authoritarian, Joseph Stalin, who allegedly said,  “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”  In the view of the neo-fascistic Trumpists who embrace a cult of death (remember the Tottenkopf insignia?), if you are over seventy, you are expendable. 


Keeping the goon in office is necessary for continuing the legalized looting by corporations and their fat cat enablers.  Thus, this piece of screed from the midnight tweeter: "The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP.  We will be stronger than ever before!"  Notice that if you want to protect your health and your family's health and spare the country a worsening epidemic, you are not "real people" but a good for nothing, lazy, socialist freeloader.

And you Mr. & Mrs. 'Merica made a big mistake when you voted against Bernie Sanders, who has spent his life attempting to save you from yourself.  Remember this fact, folks: the death corps will receive $500 billion in another massive bailout to further enrich their stock-owning executives--you get $1200 to pay your mounting bills, while you beg for lesser work.  Does that sound like a democratic society to you?  No, it is predatory, gangster capitalism and it is coming after you and your family*.

credit: C. Weyant, Boston Globe

*Question: Do you know why the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, which killed nearly 700,000 in the United States, was called the "Spanish Flu"?  Answer: No, it was not a racist slur, but reflected the fact that Spain was neutral in World War I, and its press was therefore largely uncensored.  The combatant countries in Europe and the US censored stories about the Pandemic for fear of undermining their war effort.  Spanish newspapers were full of stories about the rapid, global spread of the swine flu and its potency--some patients would turn blue from lack of oxygen before dying--hence, the misnomer, "Spanish" flu.  One resident doctor described the current situation at New York's public Elmhurst Hospital in Queens as "apocalyptic". Meanwhiile, social distancing at the VWH by a group of GOP:

Don Douche Cannot Even Follow Pandemic Playbook

The incompetent poser in office, Don Trumpillini, was briefed in 2017 by the National Security Counsel of the existence of a "pandemic playbook" providing a step by step checklist of actions to take in the event of a "high consequence infectious disease threat".  Because he is a science denying fool enslaved to the plutocrats of Wall Street, he choose to deal with the pandemic by parading a rotating circus of clowns before the corporate mass media to deny the seriousness, or extent of the emerging threat.  Politico reports that the sixty-nine page white paper lays out hundreds of strategies and tactics to use in combating a pandemic like the one the world is experiencing right now.  The paper includes consideration of using executive powers under the Defense Production Act to insure adequate supplies of medical equipment and PPE, a move the magical thinkers of capitalism have resisted on the grounds: "socialism".  Perhaps "positive thinking" will suffice to end the pandemic.  NOT!  So far, the regime, at the behest of its capitalist owners, has lagged behind the timelines for action contained in the NSC playbook.

Solely out of concern for declining profits, the Antichrist in Office wants to pack the churches by Easter.  In other words public health is to take a risky back seat to propping up the bottom lines of corporations.  The pandemic did not take the regime by surprise, just one of the many lies Don Trumpillini has used to misinform the public.  The regime was warned by the outgoing administration to be prepared for a potential pandemic, as well as a precautionary exercise that health officials undertook to model a global infectious disease threat, called "Crimson Contagion".  The NSC playbook is even color coded so an idiot like Don Trumpillini can follow it--green for normal operations, yellow for elevated threat, orange for credible threat, and red once a public health emergency is declared.

The playbook details steps to take if there’s evidence that the virus is spreading among humans, which the World Health Organization concluded by Jan. 22, or the U.S. government declares a public health emergency, which HHS Secretary Alex Azar did on Jan. 31. Officials now privately concede that the administration’s well-documented testing problems have contributed to the outbreak’s silent spread across the United States. Instead of taking decisive actions that would have saved lives, the modern-day Nero twitted away, exhibiting his sociopath tendencies for the world to see*.  US Cases: 125,161.  US Deaths: 2,194 (1.8%)

*Compare the regime's fumbling efforts to contain SARS CoV-2 the previous government's response to the H1N1 swine flue epidemic of 2009.  This from Pro Publica: Almost from the day the H1N1 strain of flu was identified, researchers set out to develop a vaccine for it. Six days after the first case was identified in April 2009, the CDC began working to develop a candidate vaccine virus. Clinical trials began in July. And on Sept. 15, the Food and Drug Administration approved four 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccines. The first doses of the vaccine were available in October, and by December, 100 million doses were available to be ordered...about 81 million U.S. residents were vaccinated  Granted, this virus is novel, so a vaccine will not be as quickly available, but the testing failure and attempts to mislead the public is the regime's responsibility.  They know that the current broken health care system in the US cannot handle a high infection rate of a disease that has ten time the lethality of the flu; so there is no motivation to provide wide-spread, free testing. Do the math: at 40% infection rate there would be 120 million cases and approximately 2.4 million deaths, an unprecedented number.  What you are witnessing is simply an intentional policy of social Darwinism