We Blow and Suck (and not in a good way)

I have from day one never understood the response and the way the Covid pandemic was handled. From massive closures to testing and vaccine requirements we really fucked this up but good. True you could say I am not a Scientist nor expert in any field related to this; however, no one was. And yes I include Fauci in this as his conflicts of interest, his mishandling of AIDS and his constant fluid responses that veered on hilarious and fueled the distrust on the part of the right that leads to today is all part of the problem. Messaging was a true failure and yes we can blame Trump and company. I want to point out that Kushner and Pence were utterly in over their heads and were heads of said “task force.” Let me assure you living in a Kushner owned building tells me quite a bit about that family and their management practices.

As I finish the book, A Premonition, one of the best and earliest ways we could have controlled, studied and understood Covid was when we quarantined Americans in Oklahoma. They could have been tested, monitored and taken samples of the virus to compare to the ones taken in already diagnosed cases in the states, namely the patient in Seattle who had returned from Wuhan and contrast that with the teenager who had not and lived miles away. But nope we did nothing valid or even remotely essential in which to manage a pandemic and its origins. Again you can come to your own conclusions about all of this but folks a lot of this shit was random from the get go, including how the virus was transmitted and how long it sheds before it is no longer contagious to any and all of symptoms and other issues regarding Covid that might have enabled hospitals to better prepare. But nope. We fucked it big time.

I have posted below another excellent editorial about the failures of our Government, both federal and local, in which they handled and mismanaged the virus. Look locally to your own Mayors, your Governors and their Health Department Agents who seemed to contradict, misinform and of course outright lie when it came to facts and knowledge about the virus. See Andrew Cuomo on that one, but he is not alone. The federal agencies were not much better and yes the mainstream media seized on the click bait, the talking points and laid it on thick like cream cheese to a bagel in which to reiterate the lack facts and misinformation they peddled to somehow scoop the competition. Is a fucking pandemic a competition now? Well in ways it was as America endlessly compared itself to China, to Sweden to any other country and its pos rates, its death rates, its testing capabilities and of course vaccine rollouts. It fucked that up too. And the lack of ability to do math helped enable the fear to keep coming and the rage to keep rising.

The debate of origin is still ongoing and I must read day after day how a place found “Patient Zero” in their community who was the first to contract Covid. Believe it or not they are finally coming to terms with that in China, where they have bent over backwards like an Olympic gymnast to hide those facts. The confusion about the origin has led to interesting showdowns in Congress with Rand Paul challenging Fauci about the NIH and their funding of the Wuhan lab and their role in this outbreak, including what is called “gain of function” research in said lab. Read what that is and realize how insane that is. Wow, I agree with Rand Paul on something. But this again is about politics and not about transparency and ethics. Sadly that is the lost message in that debate.

Another is the lab leak theory which will never be resolved unless a Deep Throat comes forward. Scary thought there but in reality early on the supposed signed document by dozens of Scientists disclaiming that has since been amended. And the origin of that is from Zoologist, Peter Dasak, who has many a conflict of interest and competing interests in his role at EcoHealth. He has since amended many an accusation but questions remain and always will. I feel this article in Vanity Fair explains much of the challenges of the issue and Covid’s origin. The journal, Lancet, that it was first published in has its own issues as it was the same journal that published the now false study about how vaccines cause Autism. And we come full circle to that and again the role of politics and vaccines. Just ask Robert Kennedy Jr, a total idiot, on that one. (Bobby turns in grave going but the Ivy League is so great!!)

As I smash liberal icons and totems right and left I cannot stress enough that the GOP and their odd rhetoric is disturbing given that many of them also attended an Ivy League or prestigious institution in which to gain a degree or two and yet they espouse values and thoughts that seemingly contradict facts, knowledge about basic science and any logic or truth about well anything. This too has led to many a fight and more misinformation to dominate the social media landscape. Again, I utterly find social media a morass of morons but hey you be you and go for it. Every book, every journal and every newspaper that goes unread, a smart butterfly earns its wings and will fly away leaving less beauty in its place.

I will one day stress that despite it all somethings good came out of this pandemic and then in turn was lost thanks to the endless violence and guns that resulted washing away any good that may have finally led to real change when it comes to the Militarized Police and their own role in contributing to said violence. But there is the role of the worker, the push and pull of unionizing, raising wages and benefits and other issues surrounding health care and access to it. Even drawing attention to the role of public education and its overwhelming challenges has been something I am thrilled to see. Will it last? Fuck no. But hey you never know. I also think work will change, to perhaps the four day week, to less bullshit about hours and time spent in office and the role of Women, People of Color and the issues about diversity may change that dynamic. So yes some good things did come out of it. But as for a Renaissance no, I have seen little creativity or imagination that supports that. Really Taylor Swift remakes a decade old album and it is highly acclaimed and received? And Travis Scott a Kardashian baby daddy is a superstar? Have you listened to him? But I do think we are moving into a revitalization of an Industrial age where we return to manufacturing and building our own materials and goods. That supply chain block may do some good after all.

So read this essay and ask yourself, could we build back better? I fucking hope so as we really fucked up this pandemic.

After a Pandemic Failure, the U.S. Needs a New Public Spirit

Nov. 18, 2021 The New York Times

By Zeynep Tufekci

No one knows when the pandemic will end. But the worst of it may be over for the United States after this winter. For good reasons — growing vaccine eligibility, boosters and new antiviral treatments — and bad — high levels of prior infections — it’s possible the ongoing Delta surge could be the last major spike in hospitalizations and deaths for the United States.

That does not mean Covid-19 is going away. Cases will likely increase in the winter, when more people are gathered indoors, and persist wherever there are pockets of unvaccinated people who had not been exposed. While there will continue to be spikes and drops — cases are beginning to tick back up — the pandemic in the United States will eventually peter out, possibly in the spring or early summer, its long-term fate subject to viral evolution.

But right now, in the United States over 1,000 people continue to die each day, and over 750,000 American lives have been lost so far — one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.

Americans are sharply divided on how to act. There are highly vaccinated areas with few cases where some people remain unsure if they can let down their guard at all and other areas with low vaccination rates and high community transmission where people are living as if it were 2019.

The pandemic has proved to be a nearly two-year stress test that the United States flunked, with an already distrustful populace exposed to a level of institutional failure that added fuel to the angry battles over how to respond. Dr. Martin Cetron, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention veteran of battles against Ebola in Africa, described people’s losing confidence during an epidemic as a “bankruptcy of trust.” Right now, America is bankrupt.

It once seemed that if the United States ever faced a viral pandemic, it would be more than up to the challenge. Just weeks before the first Covid-19 cases were reported in China, the United States was ranked No. 1 out of 195 countries in pandemic preparedness by experts convened by Johns Hopkins University, The Economist and others. After all, the C.D.C. is one of the most respected public health institutions in the world, and the United States is home to many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and academic research institutions.

The fact that the United States fared so poorly, despite all the seeming advantages that dazzled those experts, is a profound sign of how decayed our institutions and capacity have become. To understand how we fell so far short and to navigate a second full Covid winter and future pandemics and challenges requiring collective action, it’s important to review the outbreak’s early days to see why the United States — once considered the global leader in public health — is floundering in mistrust, paranoia and exhaustion.

One of the most dangerous things about Covid-19 is not necessarily what it does to any given person who is infected by the coronavirus but that someone can be contagious and not even know about it for days — if at all. The disease can spread before symptoms start and sometimes even without any ever appearing.

At the start of the pandemic, this meant that the number of people who needed to be tested would be far, far greater than the number of people who were visibly sick after suspecting that they came into contact with the virus. This was the first major test for the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. — develop a test and deploy it at scale — and it was one they resoundingly failed.

Their delay in developing a sufficient number of reliable tests and in systematically collecting surveillance data meant that health responders didn’t have a clear sense of where the virus was spreading as it started to rip across the country. But even if they didn’t necessarily know where the virus was, there were simple precautions that officials could advise anyone to take, such as wearing masks. This was another critical test the United States failed. The C.D.C. didn’t advise people to wear masks until April 2020, when more than a thousand people a day were dying from Covid and many thousands more were infected.

Yet another failure is America’s approach to rapid at-home tests. Here, they are expensive, the supply is fickle, and the public remains confused about their use. The home tests can’t detect the minute levels of virus that the lab tests can find but do return positives when viral loads are high. That means they can alert people within minutes when they are likely to be most infectious. With frequent and widespread use, they can help dampen spread. While many countries have embraced at-home tests as a way to have a more normal daily life — in Britain you can get a pack of tests free, and other countries sell them in vending machines — the United States only recently started increasing their availability and working to reduce their costs.

For too long, F.D.A. officials authorized only a few tests and required a prescription for them. Experts argued tests that failed to detect all infections would give people a false sense of confidence. It was similar to the argument made by officials who initially said masks would make people ignore other public safety measures: The public wasn’t to be trusted. Instead, regulators denied people crucial, if imperfect, tools rather than educate and empower them.

That distrust of the public could not have enhanced the public’s trust in officials, which was so vital, and so lacking, when the government urged people to get vaccinated. This is true across the political spectrum. When it was reported in September 2020 that some vaccines might be available by early November, it was often Democrats and liberals who expressed great skepticism about the speed and suspected the Trump administration was pressuring regulatory agencies to take shortcuts with safety.

Nonetheless, the vaccines were approved in record time, produced on a significant scale and distributed via a sizable public-private effort that included everything from sprawling National Guard sites to the aisles of pharmacies.

But despite having one of the earliest and most abundant supplies of vaccines, the United States has a vaccination rate that isn’t in the top 50 in the world — lower than many, many other countries that started much later.

Some of the reasons for our relatively low vaccination coverage trace back to the dysfunctions of our medical system. The United States is the only developed nation without universal health coverage, and our medical system continues to disproportionately fail people from minority backgrounds; such shortcomings don’t help develop the necessary trust.

But there is another dynamic. Many Republican politicians and pundits have chosen to pump hostility to vaccines and public health institutions as a platform for their supporters to rally around. Some of their claims are outright false or wildly misleading, but as with such demagogy historically, sometimes they capitalize on existing failures.

All this finds a ready home on online platforms designed to optimize for how much time and effort we spend on them. Even before the pandemic, doctors were begging tech platforms like Facebook and YouTube to take action about the rampant vaccine misinformation on their sites that not only existed but thrived. Leaked internal documents show that Facebook’s own researchers were worried about how rampant vaccine misinformation was on the platform during the pandemic. The public has even less insight into YouTube, but it only recently pledged to ban all vaccine misinformation on its platform — a step taken almost two years into the pandemic. This information environment fuels tribalization and demagogy the way warm water intensifies a hurricane. This, in turn, further degrades the capacity for mending our dysfunctional governance.

Given all the missteps and whiplash, it’s no wonder so many Americans are frustrated and confused — even the ones who have been doing their best to follow official guidelines.

So what now?

In the absence of trust in their leaders and peers, people will likely continue to deal with the virus the way they have been, by keeping themselves bubbled or ignoring it altogether. Even within my social circle, which is fully vaccinated, some people’s dispositions toward the virus remain unchanged from the summer or even before, no matter their personal risk level or changing conditions. Some remain highly cautious, while others have practically tuned out the pandemic.

Such constancy despite changing circumstances is not necessarily a good sign. While certain precautions need to remain, especially when transmission is high, it’s reasonable for fully vaccinated Americans to stop living as if they were in a prevaccine era (but also be ready to adjust if the conditions change). But such flexibility requires deep trust in timely guidance.

Meanwhile, not even a rate of 1,000 deaths a day has been enough to motivate all eligible people in high transmission areas to get vaccinated and stop arguing over simple courtesies like wearing a mask indoors in public places. More should also be done to protect employees who cannot work from home; vaccine mandates have been effective, and measures such as free workplace testing, better ventilation standards and paid sick leave can help.

I’ve made peace with the idea of getting an eventual breakthrough infection myself — my risk for severe outcomes seems low and similar to other things I do in life — but I would hate to pass Covid-19 to someone else. I’ve been using rapid tests, especially before meeting people to spend time with them indoors, despite their outrageous price of around $12 or more a pop. I’ve urged everyone I know who is higher risk to get a booster. My workplace mandates vaccines for everyone working in the office without an exemption, and masks indoors where social distancing is not possible. I wear surgical masks in offices, stores and restaurants nowadays, but if I felt spooked about conditions somewhere, I’d put on my N95.

So Thanksgiving is on, and this year even the youngest at the table will have had a first shot, and the few higher risk people have had a booster. Yes, I’ll be breaking out the rapid tests, and I have an appropriate-size HEPA filter in my house.

But you can see how individualized this all is. It’s based on my working conditions, the tests I can afford, HEPA filters I know how to buy and can pay for and vaccines abundant in the country where I live.

My household may be the exception, not the norm.

When the pandemic is finally over, what will remain is not only 800,000 or more Americans dead but also a country too riven to appreciate our survival and a world where even the more privileged are surrounded by avoidable death and suffering.

In her book “March of Folly,” the historian Barbara Tuchman describes civilizations that collapsed not because of insurmountable challenges but because “wooden-headedness” took over: Those in charge were unable to muster the will and vision to make the necessary course corrections in the face of difficulties.

But that’s not the only possibility.

After the horrors of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression between them, there was rebuilding of democracies, including constructing a public sphere geared toward preventing the rise of fascism, an expanded safety net and great reductions in income inequality. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t what you’d guess would come next, looking at the smoldering ruins of 1945.

Arguably, it’s our successes that have lulled us. Few remember all that or what it was like to fear polio or smallpox. Covid-19 was a reminder that humanity’s upper hand on infectious diseases was an illusion.

Fixing all this requires an interconnected effort that unleashes a virtuous cycle. Rebuilding the public health infrastructure and creating a sane, sensible health care system in which we don’t keep spending more than any other developed nation for poorer results will help restore trust and improve our lives. Fair taxation policies would reduce income inequality and generate resources to execute these measures. We can investigate what went wrong, with an eye to actually fixing it instead of simply finding scapegoats. Regulation and oversight can better align the incentives of social media platforms with that of a healthier public sphere. We’ve done that before with transformative technologies.

There’s been significant underfunding of public health in the United States, along with other parts of our national infrastructure, but the problem is deeper than just lack of resources. Former officials frequently end up working for the very companies they oversaw, often helping them stave off regulation or acting as lobbyists writing laws to benefit their companies.

Many politicians from both parties are unwilling or incapable of reining in this process; it’s reasonable to assume that’s at least partly because they are cozy with powerful interests that help them get elected.

Beyond this bipartisan back-scratching, Republicans, who are particularly averse to regulatory oversight and strong government spending, currently wield power disproportionate to their share of voters. Cushioned from electoral accountability, some Republican politicians have taken an attitude toward the pandemic that borders on nihilism: whatever fuels or entrenches the tribal anger.

So necessary ambitions can likely be blocked by those in power who prioritize their short-term interests. Maybe they will think their wealth will let them live out their lives in compounds, isolated from the deterioration around them.

But they will soon realize that even a first-class ticket on the Titanic is still a ticket on the Titanic.

We need a new public spirit: more people willing to recognize things aren’t going to get better unless we fight for it. It’s not easy, but we have nothing to lose but a lot of wooden-headedness and the next catastrophic failure. If this path could be taken, we already have everything we need — wealth, science, technology, know-how. It might not mean the end of pandemics, but it could mean there’s not another one like this.

The Void

I used to be a voracious blogger often writing numerous posts a day and since my switch to Word Press I feel less inclined if not annoyed by writing to a void. That is what blogging has become, writing to an empty space that rarely allows anything but the opportunity to vent or rant about an issue of the day. Like all forms of Social Media that is the reality of this landscape, a place to simply be that tree that falls without a sound made or does it? Again, we are engaged in a conversation of one and that is a reflection of larger society.

This week I watched the final press conference, well no, not watched, listened to Andrew Cuomo, the soon to be former Governor of New York, explain away and somehow justify or try to his behavior towards women on his staff and in his presence, aura or vision, as just those whom he was trying to make feel welcome, special and seen. Yes touching a man on the stomach is something I do as a sign of recognition, grabbing them on the arm when I really want to make a point and of course rubbing hands along backs, shoulders and asses are again just friendly gestures. I mean really did I shove my tongue down their throats? No. So, see just misunderstood communication really.

I have been in a form of isolation long before quarantine and when that began I thrived as it enabled me to be left alone without guilt or shame. I did not worry about anyone but myself and wandered freely among a largely deserted city where the dueling banjos of Mayor and Governor spent their days making declarations and scolding those who refused to follow orders. My Governor just followed their lead and admonished us calling us knuckleheads when he had to take away a privilege or a right just to make sure we were doing our part to STOP THE SPREAD. I guess the Governor did not want to totally stop the spread just of Covid but some spreading was on his agenda as he daily took to the airwaves as the idiots stuck inside swooned as the Big Daddy Governor shared his personal fears all while harassing women, intimidating staff, having them write his book for him while fudging Covid death numbers and basically bullying anyone who had the audacity to ask a legit question or wonder why their were priority tests being made as his Brother recovered then covered the Governor as just another member of the press or was he? Again progeny and family are not lost on this crew of douches but the early days of Covid between Trump’s crazy and the false patriarchy of the New York crew I see why some truly wanted to believe that anyone gave a damn, a shit or at all.

As I write this again knowing that few read or do give a damn a shit or at all, I wonder why we bother writing and doing all this bullshit that endlessly is supposed to build a platform, find an audience, get a career or income when we all do the same thing just differently. I am seriously thinking of closing this blog out and going back to blogger as Word Press just doesn’t do much for me professionally or personally and the idea that it matters as I work on a book seems pointless. I read the Facebook groups and have read more pathetic posts and query’s never ones from actual published writers who went through the conventional routes, found an agent then a publisher then went to press and on tour. NOT ONE. The ones peddling classes and workshops supposedly have but that seems to be their single source of income, selling classes to those who can learn this once and find out that again you have to have money and a reliable source of others who can assist you all with hands out and more checks to be written. Seriously, who the fuck on all the social media platforms can say they found real work, real agents, real sources of help? No one. Unless you seeking a White Supremacist group they seem to have zero problems. Try Reddit? Try Instagram? Tik Tok and on and on and again what is the point? Who and why are there social influencers? Are people that stupid that some moron on YouTube is actually providing something of value?

We are not a happy lot. Covid exposed that and with that came the woke crowd who suddenly discovered that for years Black Americans were being murdered by Police. Then came White Supremacists who attempted to destroy Democracy with a President in office, encouraging if not attempting it himself through varying efforts at the state and federal level to remain in said gig. Wow, just wow, and we have now arguments over masks and vaccines and here we are over 517 days since this began “officially” and we have learned not one fucking thing. So yes we are living in a void of our own making. The same people screaming of personal liberty and freedom are the same people wanting to stop women from having personal freedom of their own body and choice and condemn others who also have the freedom to change their bodily identity. Go figure.

I have never understood the quarantine thing and had testing been up and running the way vaccines are we could have tested large portions of individuals and isolated only those at risk or who were testing positive at the time. We could have made times to commute differ and accommodated a shift in thinking about how we work, where and more importantly the importance of ventilation and air circulation in all buildings. We have done none of that on any level and the CDC continues to be a useless tool of communication and contradiction. They know so little now much as they did then we are on our own with a vaccine that may or may not work and may be at least a marginal preventative drug that enables the body to contract Covid but not suffer its most detrimental affects. What.ever. Who the fuck knows as they change that daily too. For the love of all things holy Dr. Fauci please retire, we don’t need another hero. See what happened to Cuomo, and as for pretty boy Gavin Newsom, he is facing recall. Even some crazed up Governors are starting to shout for vaccines, well not the dueling white evils of Abbot and DiSantis of Texas and Florida, respectively, as they are like the Deliverance hillbilly’s, determined to establish power and control through humiliation and degradation. No wonder Mississippi Governor is in hiding. Again, they were elected and yet we don’t question those, why is that?

Remember the histrionics about Sweden and their herd immunity project? How’s that going? As for their vaccine rates, well does 23 bucks interest you?

And the endless hot vaxx summer seems to be well just hot. Record heat wave across the country and it seemingly has no end date. Schools are going back in the South already and of course they are fighting mask mandates, critical race theory in education and well just fighting as the violence and rage of the South is a tradition passed on through legacy and policy. Bring your son or daughter to work and bring your gun too!

When all else fails music and the house of music, the Church is there to comfort you or at least enable you to continue to live a lie. Praise Be! It is damned if you damned if you don’t and many just don’t. Again the idea that vaccine resisters are all Q’Anon’ers and Trumpsters are not so, the Black and Brown community are not exactly akin to a Trump superspreader event, some of it is fear of Government, poor education, poor healthcare and well just being poor which makes it challenging to navigate and communicate with regards to the safety of vaccines and of course overall public health and well being. When you ignore and marginalize a community for decades, imprison and kill the males in said community and in turn find ways to further segregate them from decent jobs and homes do you really think they are going to jump on a needle in the arm and go, “Thanks big white daddy for my free shot!” No hablo espanol!

I live in a Kusher owned and managed building here in Jersey City, it is is overpriced dump. The trash collector has been broken of and on for weeks and they have a blower in the lobby to mask the smell. They never notified residents but locked the trash chute and garbage stacked high in the refuse room. Ya think they would have stepped up collection in lieu of that and with the heat wave at least told us that this was happening. No they just send out the renewals of leases with a rent increase. For what? The cost of the building you are building down the street with a 1000 units? So you are competing with you? The amenity prices went up with no explanation and no upgrades so again why? Why not send a letter explaining the overall costs have gone up and that any offers or incentives during the pandemic to new tenants or to us to find new tenants failed and is costing the building more to operate and in turn they would extend leases for 90 days to allow more flexibility to find a new residence or offer said incentives to current tenants to remain in place for a year. Nope. Instead we get an email Friday at 5 pm asking us to pull all entry floor mats, shoes, umbrella and anything left in a common area inside our unit as of Monday they were doing a walk through and confiscating any items left with the ability to get a return the next day with a warning. Okay, Monday came and went so on Tuesday I put my floor mat out with my drying shoe rack next to it and on Tuesday night the floor mat was gone, the shoes and rack untouched. The confusion reigned with no further communication but we were told we can leave our unit number at the front desk and it would be returned but we are never to put it out again. More confusion as some knew and asked others did not. I did not bother as frankly the mat was an old teak bath mat and I just threw it out there my good one is in storage and I don’t care. The reason they delayed it was because they did not think anyone had read it over the weekend. Okay, then why say Monday and why send it on a Friday at 5pm. This is a standard procedure with my building they sent my lease renewal at Friday at 5 and when I asked for an extension with a rental incentive of staying at the same rent for only six months they agreed, sent it the next day at 5 pm with no actual change in rent in fact a rise in it.. Not what I agreed to and again I sent it back with a nasty note and the request that all communication be done between 9 am and Noon as I am not available at anytime thereafter and cannot return said communication until the following day effective at 9 am. They got back to me at 11 am with the corrected documents and I returned them at 9 am the next day. Game on.

This is why I am done with compromise and bullshit of disrespect. The reality is like vaccinations, like Trump and company, we have a failure to communicate. We have a Governor like Cuomo under the guise of extending women and gay rights is also a serial pervert and predator and despite being the father of three girls has bullied, intimidated and harassed women to make him feel like he is not just having a big dick but is one. It doesn’t explain, however, why many of his enablers remained on staff or even after leaving his domain continued to support his floundering efforts to disgrace and demean accusers. Wow this is Deliverance 2021. We don’t need to just win, we need to humiliate as it makes the win sweeter I guess.

Well off to write another void.

Lost Year

We all had a lost year and in that there were some major setbacks and for others major successes as they found new businesses, found new perspectives and thrived. For others there was the loss of employment, loss of a business, family members, illness and overall stress of coping through what has been like nothing we have ever experienced in living on earth and may never again.

I fall somewhere in the middle of how I feel about the year, there were times I thrived and others that the sensation of being trapped in my hamster cage has taken a toll. Of late it has been more about the endless weather, the cold the rain and it’s challenge on my willingness to look past it and do things that give me pleasure. But the sun is out, my second vaxx is done and in two weeks I will have 95% or so immunity. And yes folks we are going to need a booster as the Nurse I met yesterday believes that is the next step given what he knows about the longevity of the current one. With that he shared his story of working in Miami during the peak of the pandemic. Shocking or not, the hospital he was at disregarded much of the protocols in place, including masks and distancing, and a seeming amusement over the hyper-vigilence that was demanded over care. This of course contradicts what was read in the papers but also was illustrated by the behaviors in the street by residents and visitors alike, so I suspect that his experience was in fact true and again much of a reflection of the overall composition of life in Florida, pandemic or not. Florida, the State of Idiocy should be its tourism slogan. (Trump, Gaetz and others who live there says it all) And as we enter the era of vaccines we are seeing true problems in Michigan and there the Governor has elected to not change the move forward, and do you blame her as the last time she mandated a lockdown a group of Militia crackpots planned to kidnap her. California is also doing so, as Newsom is pending a recall and the reality is that across the country there is little support for going back to the quarantine mentality that frankly did nothing from changing the course of the virus. Everywhere across the globe has found themselves dancing that ever changing seesaw where numbers decline during a lockdown only to rise again once lifted. So in other words we are right where we are in the beginning only now we have vaccines. With a mass vaccination program the reality is then the virus can actually be studied, tracked and traced in real time environments instead of theoretical ones. I recall in the beginning so many absurd studies, beliefs and other theories that have been either rescinded or ignored as time passed. Whatever happened to the South Korea restaurant where a person sitting 27 feet away contracted the virus from a positive patron. Or the gyms that were studied in July with maskless trainers and clients in a high intensity classes? Has that been studied since now gyms have begun to increase capacity? Then the Covid Theater of package transmission that only just was retracted by the CDC. I recall Fauci endorsing that despite the man having the credentials he possesses advocating such idiocy. But then again I had long thought he and the CDC under the leadership team of Evangelicals are not ones to follow. I turned to many other sources of information and used them to guide and inform me with regards to my behavior and safety. But then again I have the time and the desire for knowledge and truth. Funny that Governors and Presidents seemed to not do so and often disregarded and ignored many public health professionals who may have found better ways to manage the way the disease was tested, tracked, traced and isolated. They chose to go their own way and in a haphazard chaos was the result. It shows itself again with vaccine distribution and opening of industry. We are still very fucked folks .

So the lost year is another phrase that is used to demonize, demoralize Teachers and Students as if any of the efforts made to work with kids online to educate and accommodate the demands of families to meet their expectations and hopes to further them along the ladder. Well like the public health issues we found that we are also drastically underfunded when it comes to public education. Supplies are non-existent, consistency in leadership and organization when it comes to moving quickly into a new manner of business is not lost. Like Hospitals overrun and ill prepared to handle a new virus from PPE to treatment, our schools quickly had to become online facilities and still provide the services that a physical entity provides – from food to books/computers. And with that open and close doors as if it was a revolving one to meet the arbitrary and ever changing metrics of what defines risk. Private schools never did and does that make them better or just different because families pay money in which to make sure that they have all they need. Just like private hospitals. You get what you pay for in America when it comes to health and education. And that lost year will also be one of debate for it will be as unequal as our economy is.

To understand how or why medical care was the true reason we were forced into lockdown versus the endless competing models of expected deaths should we not, read ProPublica’s article on these front line EMT workers and how broken that line is. You will see hospitals without oxygen, space and staff able to care for the numbers that came and keep coming despite lockdown. So did quarantine accomplish what we heard endlessly, “slowing the curve”. I it did only partially as we have come to realize that we are not being told the correct numbers and demographic breakdowns of the victims. We know Nursing Homes, Hospital workers, Meat processors, usually essential workers, and others trapped in poorly ventilated confined working spaces. Every story I hear of a wealthy person contracting Covid they seem to not know how they got it but they recovered. Access and availability to early care may be the reason. Again we don’t understand the virus but we know it is prolonged exposure usually low ventilation. So are you really going to enter a restaurant or a gym when we know that they are the lowest to fix that issue. I went repeatedly to Home Depot a large space, with fewer customers and well I am fine. Without contact tracking and tracing we cannot know if the workers and customers there were exposed there or from another family member who worked at the Grocery Store and they brought it home and passed it onto other workers/customers. So here is the plan we won’t test them every day/week and monitor them as a test/lab case and then just hope people do their own version of it. That is not working out. Hunting something invisible is impossible without a big team and commitment. So why not have staggered work times, better health care and paid leave when sick. Try that one.

Which also brings me to the lost year for women. It will undoubtedly affect women in ways we will see in decades to come. The career and education loss is already begun. Despite that it was a woman, Kari Kariko, behind the RNA use in vaccines, she spent years trying to fund and support her theories and without a “beard” to help get this work done we may be still in lockdown. So go figure it would be a woman, but she is like many Scientists of that same gender who will be further marginalized in their work despite it all. And that is crossing the lines of all professions, white, blue or pink.

And lastly to vaccines itself. The Johnson & Johnson pause is not in response to the six blood clots, no, it is because of the scandal at the lab contracted to manufacture their vaccine. Had the New York Times not exposed the endless errors of a facility known to be shoddy, the lack of training and clear oversight I am sure the vaccine side effects would have been passed over. The sheer number of percent of those with the side effect versus the number of vaccines given, again is a confusing thing with folks, like Covid, where there is less than 10% of cases making it to ICU’s. But that is a big number when there are 1000’s of cases and just 100 overwhelm a poorly equipped ER. Did I say we are still fucked?

With that we have the issue of race and class. I am done with my rounds of shots. I am pushy and aggressive and of course lied. I learned early on to do that with this bullshit. My neighbor who I talked into getting one called the City hotline was honest and was declined. Her co-worker shamed her, she called Walgreen’s and lied and was given one that afternoon. They cannot ask for medical records, did we not learn anything here people? This is an honor system and I have long lost my honor with this. I talked another friend into a shot and he got it the next day as I found the loophole that anyone working in “essential” services regardless of where they live gets one. He lives in New York but works here, was shot up the next day. And the last was the young Black man who was my Barista. I have spoken about him and walked out on that one. And I read this editorial in The New York Times and the reality is that this is America, where lies, conspiracy’s and cabals rule the thoughts of many regardless of color. We love our lies they make us feel superior or inferior.

Racism Makes Me Question Everything. I Got the Vaccine Anyway.

Surviving in an anti-Black society requires some personal negotiations. This was one of them.

By Damon Young

Mr. Young is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays.”

April 9, 2021

Last summer, when Covid-19 vaccines were in development, friends on text threads and Zoom calls asked if I’d get one. My response was always the same: Sure, I’ll be right in line — after 100 million of y’all go first. I told them I’d seen too many zombie movies. But my hesitancy was actually grounded in a less cinematic reality: I just don’t trust America enough.

This mistrust comes from an awareness of the ubiquity of American anti-Blackness — a dynamic that can, um, modify your sense of reality. That’s what happened, for instance, with the persistent myth of Tommy Hilfiger’s racist comments.

In 1996, owning a Tommy Hilfiger shirt was everything to 17-year-old me. But a year later, I’d completely extracted Hilfiger fits from my rotation. Word had spread that Tommy Hilfiger, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, had complained about Black people wearing his clothes. The shirts, windbreakers and parka I owned were immediately relegated to the deepest parts of my closet.

Mr. Hilfiger never actually made those racist comments. In fact, he hadn’t even been a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” when the rumors started. But the myth wouldn’t die because it felt so true that to question it felt like gaslighting your own Blackness. Of course this white man with aggressively preppy oxfords and an American flag aesthetic would believe that people like me sullied his brand. It just fit.

The same way, a story about Dorothy Dandridge and a pool just fits: As the urban legend goes, the movie star was visiting a hotel in Las Vegas in the 1950s, and she dipped a single toe into the all-white swimming pool. This so disgusted the hotel’s management that they drained the entire thing. This story, which was also depicted in the HBO biopic about her life, has never actually been confirmed. But to anyone familiar with the history of America’s relationship with its Black citizens, the anecdote is believable. Maybe it ain’t true, but it also ain’t exactly a lie.

To question whether this bottomless skepticism is justified is like asking whether a cow has cause to be wary of butchers. From redlining and gerrymandering to the Tuskegee experiment and Cointelpro, the proven conspiracies against Black Americans are so devious, so deep and so absurd that they blast open pathways for true-sounding non-truths to enter, too.

The terrible spoken word poems I wrote in college (“We’ll never get justice, because justice for just-us just-aint-for-us”) habitually referenced the so-called Willie Lynch letter — an instruction manual for controlling Black slaves that I, along with many others, believed was written by a slave owner in 1712 and contained deep insights into modern race relations. The truth: Willie Lynch never existed and the document was forged. I believed that the government conspired to track my thoughts and movements — as if my flaccid stanzas and banded collar Wilsons Leather biker jackets were a threat to the state. I even once allowed myself to entertain an argument that the natural color of milk is not white, but brown. (Don’t ask.)

The term “hotep” has become a catchall among Black people to describe other Black people who still believe some of these easily debunked stories — but the reality is that most of us have some hotep in us. And not because we don’t know how America really works, but because we know too much. The lack of trust in our nation’s systems and structures is a force field; a bulwark shielding us from the lie of the American dream. And nowhere is this skepticism more justified than with the institution of medicine.

I don’t trust doctors, nurses, physician assistants, hospitals, emergency rooms, waiting rooms, surgeries, prescriptions, X-rays, MRIs, medical bills, insurance companies or even the food from hospital cafeterias. My awareness of the pronounced racial disparities in our health care system strips me of any confidence I would have otherwise had in it. As critics of a recent Saturday Night Live skit suggesting that Black people are illogically set against getting vaccinated pointed out, the vaccine hesitancy isn’t due to some uniquely Black pathology. It’s a direct response to centuries of anecdote, experience and data. (Also, the demographic among the least likely to get a vaccine? White evangelicals.)

Despite all this, in March, I stood in a long line to receive my first dose of a vaccine to prevent me from becoming seriously ill from a virus that I had no idea even existed 14 months ago.

My journey from “I don’t even eat hospital pizza” to “voluntary Pfizer guinea pig” is complicated, but not singular. Existing in America while Black requires a ceaseless assemblage of negotiations and compromises. Even while recognizing the anti-Blackness embedded in society, participation is still necessary to survive.

For instance, I am dubious that American schools are able to sufficiently nurture and prepare Black children for 21st-century life. But my interest in home-schooling my kids is the same as my interest in letting them attend school on Neptune. So my compromise is to allow them to attend school, but then to also fortify them with as many academic, social, and political supplements as possible.

Sometimes the negotiation is just the choice to participate: My parents were two of the tens of thousands of Black victims in the subprime lending crisis. I watched them be evicted from their home after loan terms they just couldn’t meet kept multiplying. But when I was ready to buy a house, the gateway to homeownership was through those same banks.

The trust still isn’t there. Will never be there. But the negotiation that placed me in that vaccination line last month required me to weigh that distrust against all that I miss. I miss the year we just lost. I miss playing basketball. I miss watching it with my dad. I miss barbecues. Malls. Movie theaters. Restaurants. Cities other than Pittsburgh. I miss only needing to be hypervigilant about racism and gluten, and not whether the air inside of a Giant Eagle supermarket might kill me too. And I know other people miss their years and their hobbies and their dads and their homies. With the disproportionate havoc this plague has wreaked on Black and brown people, my desire to return to some semblance of normalcy and prevent more death is a force greater than my cynicism.

I’ve already begun to fantasize about the cookout I’ll host after I get my second shot, and each of my equally-suspicious-about-America family members and homies get their shots, and enough time has passed to feel safe gathering. Maybe we’ll laugh about how us seeing each other was only possible because we trusted an institution that has been pathologically untrustworthy. Or maybe we won’t. Because that’s not actually funny.

The Apology Tour

You have seen and heard this numerous times from celebrities to politicians who have done, said or were seen to have crossed the line into what is defined as “Bad Behavior.” The door is so wide open on what is defined as such, a tornado could blow through and back out without doing much damage. We have become of late a diligent crew in which to seek out sleights, oversights, and full-blown idiocy committed by anyone. Anyone and that means you. So that drunken debacle or nasty exchange be sure that has been documented by someone somewhere who will hold onto that forever in case they need leverage. Then after that fault is exposed you are to apologize, quit your job and go and die somewhere as clearly not having a life, source of income or work in which to exonerate and move past is not possible. Just die.

And in that case, that would work but every dog deserves a new day. How many times do we hear that one has “evolved” their views on subjects as time has passed? Hillary Clinton and the super predator and Barack Obama and Gay Marriage. Is that an act of intelligent thought, compassion, and true misgivings or a political endgame? I go with the latter. And we have that with Biden now and in fact, he is really moving into a whole new world with much of his policies and actions that have transpired since he nearly lost the primary but as most pols do they immediately court the one group who understand the forgiveness more than most – the Black community. You thought I would go the Evangelicals? Are you fucking kidding?

We are seeing this now with the Andrew Cuomo debacle in New York and we saw that in fact in Virginia, Governor Northam, who at first apologized for a photo that appeared with what was believed was him in blackface. He later denied that it was him and he is still in office. And his largely Black constituents moved on and he proved them right in doing so and Virginia is now the first Southern state to end the death penalty. Maybe we need to learn forgiveness and compassion and maybe sometimes not, like Evangelicals who seem to think they are exempt from the process of redemption as they love recrimination and blame. No wonder they love Trump.

As we move along in the Covid Pandemonium we are still finding massive positive cases despite the roll out of vaccines with the goal post moving out further pretty much allowing anyone and their dog to register. There may or may not be actually vaccines available but hey whatever looks good. And then people wonder why you lie, push your way into a line, never stop using whatever contacts or sources you have to get the shot. Hamilton was right. You have one shot, so don’t throw it away.

Even the founding fathers were not that interesting nor infallible as we know Hamilton not exactly innocent when it comes to slavery or infidelity. So what are we asking here when the redemption tour begins? Hell if I know but there are some who I never want to hear or see again. The crew that made up the Pandemic Squad consisting of Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, Alex Azar, Robert Redfield, and my personal favorite, scarf maven, Deborah Birx. They can go into the wnds and blow me.

I knew Birx was an Evangelical in the mode of Pence but what I did not know was Redfield was as well with a history of controversial statements and positions with regards to HIV/AIDS of which he was involved with during his own military medical service. He is a douche. I share this article on Redfield which provides insight into his history and background that does little to inspire confidence when heading a major agency during a pandemic.

So now CNN home to Cuomo 2, the other white meat has been doing a look back on something that is still ongoing, Covid. Much like the brother who wrote a book during the middle of his bizarre arrogant daddy scolds decided he knew the ultimate final solution. as In hiding numbers of deaths and lying about them. What else, oh year prioritizing testing and I assume vaccinations as well. The family is now into the Bush category of please go away.

And we have Birx. Evangelical. Need I say more? And hence that may explain that the trifecta of power players on this squad were just that. They are unable to put aside their personal beliefs for the sake of science despite that they seem to say the contrary, they are in fact I suspect using their ability to be missionaries for the God they serve over that of country. As why would anyone who doesn’t believe in the rights of the Gay Community be involved with one of the most significant plagues to harm that community unless you are doing your best to convert them? I just have never bought into in and never will.

Then we have WHO and who in the fuck is allowing them to say anything about this Virus and its origins? A joint World Health Organization-China report on the origins of the coronavirus says it most probably jumped from animals to humans via an intermediate animal host, downplays the possibility it leaked from a lab and suggests next steps in a complex search mired in controversy, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. The Atlantic last year did a comprehensive analysis of this subject and I lean to the well, Scientists, and the conclusion that we may never know. So any of this premature Covid team lookback seem well, premature. There are many facts we will never know, the true number of Covid victims and the number of deaths and many that had hospitals been better funded or prepared might have treated more successfully.

I am over the beating a dead horse when it comes to Trump and his idiocy. The endless scold, the hypotheticals and conjectures by many of those who were there day one have no business now 400 some days in to comment on any of it. I have a policy, if you are going to point out a wrong, then I suggest you point out a way to right it. I watched perhaps the most unfunny episode of Saturday Night Live and the truly funny Bowen Yang did a bit where he commented on the Update section of the show about us as people doing better for the Asian lives lost of late and the uptick of hate crimes on that community. Yeah, we were asked that same question just nearly a year ago and his trial started Monday. So again, we take to the streets and it will all be alright? Faces of color were dying at 1000 a clip annually for five years BEFORE George Floyd and that number stayed the same. The number for last year of death by cop AFTER George Floyd, 985. See we did do something, 15 people didn’t die. So apologize, I mean it.

Covid Chronicles – The Holiday Edition

With about two weeks left to Christmas and the inevitable third wave or fourth depending on who is counting.. again we had Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Thanksgiving. We we warned repeatedly during each to stay long and distant and while Covid spiked in some places it declined in others and round and round we went bringing us all back to ground zero with the same hysterical warnings, the same threats, the increasing numbers of hospitalizations and deaths which have never stopped while all the world’s a stage and we are all players in this macabre scenario that reminds me of the Jerry Lewis telethon of my youth, with the never ending pleading, begging, and tears just to remember the ones being lost to a disease that could be cured. That is what we need America, a COVID telethon! Dolly Parton would be the perfect host as she is already a winner in the Covid Chronicles donating a cool Million to Vanderbilt one of the hospitals working with Big Pharma on the vaccine.

And that is where we are America the roll out of vaccine number one to hot spots in America. Undoubtedly Jared Kushner who really showed his talents and gifts for crisis management during the nascent days with the PPE and Ventilator distribution issues will perhaps hopefully take a backseat on this one and let professionals take over to distribute the drugs to those in need. Remember those days with naval ships arriving in ports, field hospitals being erected in convention centers and the charity tents in public parks? Good times folks as those numbers of cases handled and the outcomes are still in question and the costs have yet to be fully explained on how and why many hospitals remained under utilized while others were maxed out with portable tents in parking lots and refrigerator trucks for the dead left on side streets by dumpsters which became a rather significant marker to explain how we were handling Covid in Phase One.

We have had several months to improve and centralize communications, to figure out how to educate and operate schools, how to handle crowd control and compliance and yet we have done fuck all nothing other than posture and threaten. It is working out great, or not.

The issues of self responsibility continue as now violence has begun on the streets over the failed re-election of the Dr. Frankenstein who has no interest in the continuing crisis and once again Governors are assuming control, co-opting Igor for their own agenda and like the media whore he is he simply pipes in supportive yet cautious remarks which mean nothing except to remind everyone to mask up. I recall that same messaging from him back in the 80’s, no love without a glove or something like that. While I do respect Fauci I feel he is not who we need to reach a younger and more diverse audience especially faces of color and those who are not well into Science. This has been another of the more insidious issues using Fauci and Birx two white Seniors to somehow communicate to the Tik Tok age and find a voice in those larger at-risk groups that are not old folks. Fauci’s recent affirmation with Big Daddy Bully Cuomo to close restaurants with no data to back this up is again another issue across the country in California that evoked the same mandate. There is so little real contact tracing and tracking that few believe indoor dining is the cause and reason behind the uptick when the last stat mentioned by Cuomo was that 76% of the cases were tied to “small gatherings.” Okay so they were where? Homes or in a public place or again the big perp – Churches – where they can no longer mandate closures on thanks to the Supreme Court. Again, here is where religious leaders would be an effective messengers to talk to those about how one can still be a participant in a religious community without the need to congregate in a specific place. But nope, crickets.

So we can keep schools open despite the fact that few educators wish to keep open but the consultants and policy wonks and those parents who hate caring for their kids see otherwise. The constant citing of statements like “falling behind” or the “lost generation” have been used to somehow validate that opening schools and allowing full attendance is the key to something, that something again seems economic in value and not about health and safety of those who work inside said buildings, you know the Teachers and Admins as well as all the other back of the house players who keep schools operating. You know that village thing.

I have always thought it was odd that the only data we ever hear are the positive cases, the number of hospitalizations and deaths. We have no idea how many are tested a day, what the status of thier case was/is and the number of recovered. Europe does provide that but even ages, gender race are not given. If we had a robust contract tracking and tracing we would but we don’t. Jared get on that you must have time on your hands.

The overwhelming failure by our Government be it on the Federal or State level is quite clear and it is why there is little compliance and at times sheer confusion as to what the current protocol is to be on a daily basis with now the incoming Administration adding their two cents further confusing and infuriating the Trumptards.

As for the media they do their best to further lend a voice not needed to the din with their endless stating conflicting studies and data that have not been vetted and tested to the level that should be before reporting. Facts matter and the most bizarre story was one in The Washington Post about South Korea finding a patron who contracted Covid in a restaurant with limited exposure of a scant 5 minutes from another seated over 23 feet away. Really? Of course that story was a rewrite of an LA Times story. No mention in either about possible extenuating circumstances or full examination of the strain verifying it through DNA testing and complete tracking/tracing of all the participants movements, their exposures to others? Wow that South Korea is amazing that is K Pop level shit right there. Or not. The article had no South Korean sources other than a person NOT involved in the study.. okay then. As for the American scientists and doctors contacted had doubt, one saying this:

“The problem that you tend to have is one of missing information,” says Richard Martinello, an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine and a specialist in adult and pediatric infectious diseases.“They may know well what happened within that restaurant,” Martinello adds, “but they don’t know what happened on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. They don’t know what happened back in the kitchen at the restaurant. There are so many other aspects,” including the fact that one in five people infected with the coronavirus will experience no symptoms, but may still spread the virus. But then again there is a story there that will scare the shit out of everyone and in turn validate the latest round of closing just restaurants, but not anything else. I see said the reporter who upon examining his credentials I see his was one with regards to restaurant reviews not science or foreign reporting including failing to list the CDC’s findings on indoor dining. Good job, I like BimBap too!

And if you question any of this you are labeled “histrionic” as that is the man’s way of saying to a woman, “I don’t like what you have to say, it confuses me.” Ah yes my menses is the problem, shame I don’t have menses anymore. The lack of true effective communication is a bigger problem than Covid at this point and it contributes to why few are truly grasping the urgency. And that many rely upon “social” media for information, shame that social distancing can’t be applied to that as well.

I read this report in of all things USA Today about the failures of the U.S. Government from the very early stages of this disease and how the haphazard manner of coordination and control led to what we are now dealing with. There is no way of knowing if better management could of stopped or offset this entirely but there are valid issues surrounding the death toll that clearly is related to this issue.

This says it all:

The virus shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the United States. The world’s most powerful nation, historically among the most successful at stymieing infectious illnesses, had ample lead time during which the deadly pandemic was rampaging through Asia, and then Europe.

But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.

The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.

I have written much about Covid and kept up with many studies, theories and stories about the virus, its transmission and the issues about vaccines and efficacy. I am over Fauci but I have been for a long time frankly and would like to see new faces (not celebrities there Cuomo but actual medical professionals) who could message more effectively than another aging white man, second wave fast approaching, January 20th. I also would like real information, better and more comprehensive data in which to understand the who/what/where/when/why. Shouting out numbers like I am in Vegas is not working for me and it is not improving my histrionics in the least. There is no cure for that apparently either.

Martyr or Victim

We are at the stage now in the pandemic and the post-election process to find ourselves on two sides of one argument. The belief that Covid is a serious contagious illness and that being proactive and personally responsible for behavior and actions can reduce the likelihood of contracting the virus and that Trump lost the election and his pouting and antics have done little to resolve, remedy or alleviate the fears about said disease before or since the election. Covid is the cause and the disease. of it all right now in America, the immense divisiveness and the fear and rage that are all the results not of Trump but of Covid ironically masked as political beliefs. I read one more article about how red states and blue states managed the virus I will cough in someone’s face, they all handled it badly and the virus doesn’t give a shit about your politics, your lungs however it can’t wait to attach itself to. Be it red or blue there are many questions about Covid that demand straight answers and true facts and that we will never get. But if you live in Florida that is coming faster than later as they are already finding out that their Governor, Trump diSantis, did in fact lie. Gosh no!

Because Trump downplayed the virus including his own contraction of it and its continued spread throughout the White House and in Congress, he was the archetype and originator of the bullshit peddled and in turn misled many Americans about the severity of Covid and the ultimate reality of how limited our fragile medical care system was prepared to handle any crisis of any kind. As a result, it became a game of chess between States to see which could in fact provide leadership and information to their constituents with the media donning one Governor over another as the bestest ever leading that asshole Cuomo to actually write a book in the middle of the pandemic about how well he handled it. Sure timing is everything and that was some kind of timing as round two, the second wave or the never ending one is back with a vengeance. So the daily scolds, the reprimands and the shouting of lottery numbers have returned to scare folks all under the guise of inspiration and encouraging cooperation. That is working out well… not really.

Despite the promise of vaccines there are still major hurdles to overcome and once again little Igor put his foot in the deep recesses of his mouth criticizing Britain’s approval of one and then only to retract that the next day. Kinda like many of those he did before, from masks to manner of contagion (he was one who said the virus lives on packages) that has done little to endear him to other than screaming liberals who are begging for some leadership that does not come from an elected official. Well good luck with that. And when January comes don’t expect that to change as the obsession with Trump will continue and th media will slavishly devote hours to his post-Presidency and outrageous tweets and posts that will rage on until he dies. And to think Covid is bad. And Fauci like a weed will be there with the new Administration once again warning and waxing on the dangers of Covid while the Bride has perhaps moved into a new lab by then but her scarf collection was pretty fab.

Even the CDC that were slow to the starting block are now free to actually do their job and today insisted that masks indoors when not at home are critical. Wow thanks. Didn’t the Karate Kid have to deal with that? Mask on, Mask Off. Oh wax, whatever same thing. But the reality is that we don’t even get what we are to do with masks when to wear them, how to and what type. This article in the Washington Post explains the Ps and Qs of mask wear, which again explains that they are not perfect but they are part of our new pandemic chic.

That said when you are walking outside it is perfectly good habit but there is little indication that you alone walking on a city street are likely to get infected nor infect others unless you get close, start talking to them and spreading droplets so in other words keep to yourself, mind yourself and in turn those who are not following the protocol means you keep moving on. Actually trying to engage in conversation over this with a scofflaw is putting you at risk and wasting time. When I see someone on public transport spare the face covering I GET OFF and not in fun way. And yesterday the mask debate began with me earlier in the day at the High Line where I asked if I could sit on a bench, drink coffee and have some food and they said yes but once up and walking mask on and try regardless to keep physically distant when both seated and standing. Makes sense and is what I have been doing all this time so I found a sunny spot, sat down with my coffee and my paper and began to read as the walkers kept passing me by until one didn’t. The male version of Karen stops directly in front of me and asks, “Did you forget a mask today?” Okay the patronizing and condescension aside, the park does not allow you in without one, so how did I get there? Then standing less than six feet from the unmasked woman is another odd choice and I responded, “I am drinking coffee is that alright with you?” “Oh I did not see that.” And I said, “well had you you would have seen my mask right alongside it and I will now put it on as it has a special message for you, it says, KINDLY FUCK OFF.” He and his companion with whom he was walking stood there and were of course shocked for a moment as I don’t fit the profile of a white woman with privilege who is not accommodating and apologetic was a new one clearly and he finally responded, “Well I hope you have a better day.” I go, “I will once you fuck off.” Would he have said this if I was a face of color or a man? No. As a woman I am the last bastion of safety for these people to scold, reprimand and verbally abuse. And as I walked out of the park I saw three people a few feet down from where I was unmasked and eating and I wondered if he spoke to them the same way? No, but again safety in numbers perhaps.White men are insatiably hungry for the attention and respect of white women to validate their dick size and place in society it is why the put on the adornments of flack jackets and MAGA hats and accessorize with M-16 as a surrogate symbol of their cock to remind you how much power and authority they have. The problem is that no one ever assumed power that way that was sane.

Covid fear is the new agita and that has enabled many to scream out as if the Zombie Apocalypse is upon them. The woman who verbally abused and targeted me last week was sure I had Covid, carried on and informed the staff of this then came out to wear I was sitting to somehow generate conflict and then furthered her angst by complaining more in the full coffee shop and writing the ultimate in the last word, the YELP review. As a quick review of her few reviews one included and owner berating her for her behavior in her store and informing her to never come back. To YELP she is the bread and butter of their existence and further explains why I have never used the service as there is no point. Can you not do anything anymore independently?

This is now where we are – victim or martyr with many actually pushing boundaries to somehow contract Covid as a right of passage, a symbol of toughness and those who on their dying breaths still tell hospital folks that they did not believe. Okay Santa I get but a fucking virus that is affecting the globe? Are you that ignorant? Yes as many folks don’t read actual news or listen to it, they rely on Facebook or some site that has little journalistic cred but hey whatever the great unwashed are doing I am too, I am special, unique and different, just like everyone else!

As we enter the big kahuna of holiday seasons I suspect this behavior will worsen. I was chatting with the PATH train conductor yesterday about the current situation and we both loved the early days of the pandemic, the streets were clear, the trains empty and people out were behaving well, as in cautious and proactive. Today not so much. He shared with me two tales of recent outbursts, where one man in shorts and flip flops, tan and young wearing a MAGA hat boarded without a mask, was asked to put one on and he refused informing him that the Governor is not the leader of America and cannot order such compliance. (Something tells me, however, when the issue of states rights comes up he is all there in a biscuit) And then proceeded to berate the passengers, many who exited the train as he ran between cars as then the Port Authority had arrived and he was attempting to well avoid them finally requiring them to tackle him to get him out of there. Wow I missed that? Then another man who walks between cars and Lysol sprays anyone not wearing a mask. Well how thoughtful. Sort of like a Priest and the washing of the feet. I wonder if he will molest you later or is that extra?

Martyr or Victim and then when you choose not what do you have? We are society that loves victims and we use their stories and statements in court to further generate sympathy and in turn generate a longer sentence and harder punishment on one who inflicts us pain. And we see Covid that way only that means it comes from a human, a family member, a co-worker or on a package apparently or by someone minding their own business sitting in a park drinking coffee not talking/spreading the virus, or from cats/dogs/tigers or whatever the media has today informed us that is danger danger Paul Revere Covid is coming. It is a virus. Close contact, under ventilated areas or confined areas, failing to follow protocols for safety when handling viruses (yes labs are the ones and hospitals for not actually doing just that) and working with patients and people who work with patients. We are clueless, directionless and we are all just in this alone despite the statements otherwise. I chose to thrive and anyone who comes in six feet of me fear my wrath more than Covid, as I bite.

Friday. Okay, whatever

I am still on unofficial lockdown as the area begins to open up to Stage 2, 3, 16, whatever at this point it is all just smoke, mirrors, games and bullshit.  That said I have no interest in contacting, speaking or giving a shit as these next two weeks will be game changers.

Today in the Washington Post there was considerable alarm at the way we as a country have emerged from our cocoon but rather than a butterfly we are some type of moth that will race to the flame and ultimately die.  Yes folks, while I have long been calling bullshit on all of this I was always sure there was a serious virus, it was and is killing people but what was being done, what is being done and will be done will continue to allow this to happen. At this point they have run out of cards and have nothing left to even bluff with.  The overwhelming failure of all countries regarding Covid other than a few, New Zealand, Iceland to name those with land in their names have done not just a stop the spread but made it literally a flatline.  Why? Each had very unique strategies and of course they were countries run by women, go figure. Women can rule just not in America. What? Ever.

The New Yorker does an excellent piece on why Iceland was a success story despite the numbers that in the U.S. was akin to a death sentence and in turn why Europe is working so well to stem the tide that they are now laughing while secretly being received that Britain did BREXIT given the state of that country’s fiasco handling Covid, as Boris and Trump are two strands alike and both fatal to their country’s well being.   This is an article about the horrific contact tracking/tracing Britain has assembled and it only beats the U.S. in that there is one. No State has taken that on and I just received an email that they are looking for an appropriate administrator of such a program here and will be letting us know soon. In other words they are just hoping numbers go down enough to make that moot and they can move on.  What? Ever.

The posturing today in Cuomo’s last state of the state of covid speech veered to tears as he of course takes no responsibilities for the numerous fiascos of any of it, while DiBlasio is still trying to figure out how to run the city during a pandemic and civil unrest.  It is clear he could barely manage in the best of times so why do it any differently.  And here the third amigo of the posse of stupid, Murphy, once again bores us to the point that there is no point except to remind us that we have a lot of malls here and they need to be open. Okay, then. What? Ever.

Covid is quite serious and every day between protest stories another runs about a drug that is working or failing or how it is spread or not spread, to mask or not and basically how no one is social distancing and Fauci is now backtracking on the second wave and capitulating to the moron in charge who is having a racist rally and whining about Bolton as if he was shocked that an asshole would turn on him. Well had he given him a war to keep him busy then no he wouldn’t but hey what? Ever.

Everyday is another story about Covid, how asymptomatic people spread or don’t spread the virus. **note the constant corrections, contradictions and oxymorons when it comes to this.*** Again I think it is like Herpes and in the first few days, 3 or so, the virus sheds and goes dormant until it leaves the body and again we believe that is after 14 days.  Apparently because no disease actually manifested no antibodies are found meaning there is no immunity but that also may apply to those with Covid as many are coming back testing positive and getting sick. Meaning it is dormant like Herpes and then it flairs up.  Funny that it is steroids that are having the strongest affect as that is often the same treatment for what? Herpes.  (tricked you there, just like herpes)  I may not be a Doctor but watching this and remembering Herpes and AIDS,  the parallels are not lost it is just the transmission that is different.  And again we are being warned that the phase one is getting worse.  Or is that the first wave is now just kinda bigger and longer.  Really or is that NOT a second wave? So is there a third? Folks we are confused about what waves mean and this is now into full blown Tsunami versus Hurricane.  And the difference is that Tsunami starts with an earthquake under water that is stage one then it turns the water into tidal waves which bash the shore with force that comes from the quake A Hurricane is a water gathering wind that passes over land so the first wave is damage via wind and its second wave is the water that follows.  Okay they are kinda the same. Like Covid only not. Okay, then. What?Ever.

We don’t know shit and the CDC has deferred much of the prognostication and projection onto two schools of thought and they are east versus west and it appears that the are dueling it out for who kills more.  Okay, then.  But one thing is certain Covid ain’t leaving anytime soon, like Herpes it is the guest for life. They have never found a cure for it either.

Today is Juneteenth and I found this opinion in the Times much like I too learned of it when I was teaching, like Kwanza I had no real traction on it but it has gained a strong hold of positive energy and for that let’s end on it.

Why Juneteenth Matters

It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
The New York Times
June 18 2020

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

When secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”

All of this is apropos of Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region. This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Jamelle Bouie’s Newsletter: Discover overlooked writing from around the internet, and get exclusive thoughts, photos and reading recommendations from Jamelle.

Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.

There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes, “denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”

By pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha Jones details in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial, legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”

After the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy. They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public schools and made them available to all children. They stood against racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

That Covid thing?

We are still in the throes of a pandemic, despite that the Covid Task Force has been disbanded and the daily lottery numbers have given way to proclamations that are pro protest, amidst the calls to being the phase one openings of New York City and most of New Jersey.  For the states that began this phase weeks ago they are finding slight upticks in the numbers that have little to do with the ongoing protests and other incidents that have placed people into close contact with Police contributing to the chaos with tear gas and flash bombs that lead to coughing and spewing droplets all over the place. Talk about stopping the spread, really?

Covid, I believe, is what led to the protests. Frankly the deaths of black men and others at the hands of Police have been topping 1,000 (3 a day ) for the past five years since The Washington Post and Guardian began to tally the deaths they tracked across the country after Ferguson.  I am sure much like Covid those numbers are largely skewed and incorrect in light that we really don’t have any way of tracking deaths that occurred later out of custody due from injuries sustained or even suicide the result of PTSD when once experiences serious trauma.

But Covid is here and it is not going anywhere as long as it has a lung to attach itself to and spread that virus like bad case of herpes.  We all remember that one? You don’t?  Well incurable disease and fear of contagion has been around a long time, so welcome to the club.  But we really get our knickers in a twist when its about sex and how its transmitted. Remember AIDS?   Starting to see similarities between them all?  EBOLA, ZIKA, H1N1.  Then we have a return of Polio, and my personal favorite Measles and Whooping Cough, all preventable but not to the Anti Vaxx crowd.

One of the most important tool in understanding contagion and transmission is contact tracing and it has a long history from Smallpox to AIDS. Irony that now States are trying to enter that phase is of course a little to late and utterly without any true training or plan in place it will be as effective as the lockdown was to stopping the spread, as well cases are still there so that worked out well, didn’t it?  Economic destruction and social unrest are equal tradeoffs for the failures of our Government, both federal and state, to have any type of coherent and consistent pandemic response.

This is where we are with regards to Contract Tracing and it will be as fucked up as all the rest so don’t throw out those masks and gloves quite yet.

Contact tracing is ‘best’ tool we have until there’s a vaccine, say health experts

By Frances Stead Sellers and Ben Guarino
The Washington Post
June 14, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

It has quelled outbreaks of Ebola, allowed smallpox to be corralled before being vanquished by a vaccine, and helped turn HIV into a survivable illness. And whenever a new infectious disease emerges, contact tracing is public health’s most powerful weapon for tracking transmission and figuring out how best to protect the population.

But now, as coronavirus cases are surging in hot spots across the country, the proven strategy’s efficacy is in doubt: Contact tracing failed to stanch the first wave of coronavirus infections, and today’s far more extensive undertaking will require 100,000 or more trained tracers to delve into strangers’ personal lives and persuade even some without symptoms to stay home. Health departments in many of the worst-affected communities are way behind in hiring and training those people. The effort may also be hobbled by the long-standing distrust among minorities of public health officials, as well as worries about promising new technologies that pit privacy against the public good.

“We don’t have a great track record in the United States of trust in the public health system,” said David C. Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. Ever since the 40-year Tuskegee experiment, which withheld treatment for syphilis from poor black men, officials have had to make special efforts, he said, to reach those now “disproportionately impacted by covid who are African Americans and Latinos.”

Still, as states relax restrictions, public health experts believe wide-scale contact tracing is the price that must be paid to reopen safely without reverting to the blanket lockdown that put nearly 40 million Americans out of work. Time is of the essence, they say, taking advantage of the drop in cases resulting from the shutdowns.

“Contact tracing is finding the next generation before they happen, getting ahead of that transmission cycle to stop it,” said Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the instructor of the school’s new six-hour online contact-tracing course. Gurley doesn’t believe the strategy will stop transmission, but that in concert with testing and other measures, it can prevent the disease from spreading exponentially.

Right now, though, the virus is showing signs of taking the lead again. As states have lifted restrictions on retail and large gatherings, more than a dozen are facing new heights in cases or hospitalizations, according to Washington Post data.

In Arizona, for example, the governor reopened before local health departments had hired and trained its new army of contact tracers, said Will Humble, former director of the state’s health department.

“We flattened the curve. Then, by the time we ended, the contact tracers weren’t up and running yet,” said Humble, who described case investigation and contact tracing as key elements of a multipronged response, including mask-wearing and social distancing. The health departments in the state’s hard-hit urban counties have been repurposing staff, in addition to making new hires, he said, using federal dollars and support from an Arizona-based nonprofit group, the Crisis Response Network.

Incentives could have been built in, tying each region’s reopening to its hiring of adequate contact tracers, Humble said.

“We didn’t do that here,” he said. “Now we have to ramp up a contact-tracing workforce that isn’t going to get to everything probably.”

Texas, also seeing a dramatic surge, has relaxed restrictions after hiring about 3,000 of the 4,000 contact tracers Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in April he planned to have in place as part of his reopening strategy.

“Both we and the local health departments continue to add staff,” said Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “We can scale up further if that becomes necessary.”

Michael Sweat, director of the Center for Global Health at the Medical University of South Carolina, said the state health department, which has suffered from long-term underfunding, was trying hard to ramp up contact tracing as parts of the state suffer “worrisome micro-epidemics.”

“There’s a lot of effort going into training and deploying people, and working on technology to help. But they are still getting their footing,” Sweat said, as the infection growth rate in Charleston suddenly doubled.

In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded $631 million from the Cares Act to state and local health departments for surveillance, including contact tracing, even as a report from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated 100,000 new hires will be needed to trace all contacts, safely isolate the sick and quarantine those exposed, at a cost of $3.6 billion.

Across the country, the efforts to ramp up are vast and varied.

The University of California at San Francisco has been tapped by the state to create a Pandemic Workforce Training Academy that will train as many as 3,000 people for the state’s 58 county health departments, many of them focusing on low-income communities where requests to quarantine can be financially devastating.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, the county health department has subcontracted to a private company, GattiHR, to create a 400-strong, largely remote contact-tracing team, looking for people with “empathy, attention to detail, resilience [and] investigative skills,” and finding successful applicants among those furloughed from the hospitality industry.

In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo (D) unveiled a free voluntary app that health officials hope will prove more reliable than people’s memories in re-creating their recent contacts — one of numerous cellphone tracking innovations, including the Apple-Google exposure notification system, that have prompted privacy concerns from civil libertarians.

And in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been working urgently with Doctors Without Borders to win the confidence of migrant workers, where 37 percent of those tested at pop-up clinics were positive. Their goal is to slow the virus’s spread before farmworkers leave for summer jobs in Georgia, South Carolina and beyond.

“We have a window of opportunity,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker, who said that as people have become sick, they have worried they might lose their jobs. “They are having to weigh what is scarier for them — to know they have the disease or not.”

But several people like Chavez who work with immigrant groups said people have grown more willing to respond to contact tracers as the virus has sickened more people, giving them concerns about infecting their own family members.

In San Francisco, librarian Ramses Escobedo, who became a contact tracer after two weeks of training, said the health department gave out a 60-page instruction document. “It has information from the scripts you’re supposed to follow, the questions you’re supposed to ask.” (Escobedo, who speaks Spanish, noticed some errors in the Spanish translations and said he had them fixed.)

Of the 30 people Escobedo spoke to in his first three weeks as a contact tracer, only one refused to answer his questions.

Susie Welty, a Spanish-speaking contact tracer who joined the UCSF effort after her own overseas research on HIV was suspended by the pandemic, also said people have largely been responsive. Getting them to agree to voluntarily self-isolate is far easier when resources are available to provide food and other out-of-pocket payments during the 14-day period.

Welty described a conversation with a pastor whose wife had tested positive. When the pastor explained he did not want his congregation to know and so did not want them bringing food during their quarantine, Welty was able to refer them to SNAP, the food supplement program.

“San Francisco has resources,” Welty said. “That is not the case in many jurisdictions,” she added, saying it is particularly hard for undocumented workers to comply if they are unable to feed their families.

“They’re scared,” said Venus Ginés, founder of the Latino community health organization Dia de la Mujer Latina, which operates in Houston and other cities.

After the Houston health department asked Ginés to help fill contact-tracing positions, her organization supplied 200 résumés of Spanish-speaking applicants within 24 hours, and Ginés said the health department told her that hires will be made from that pool.

Kirstin Short, Houston Health Department bureau chief of epidemiology, said her agency relies on Dia de la Mujer Latina and other organizations to “speak as that trusted authority within that community to vouch for us as a government entity.”

But the possibility of data falling into hostile hands worries representatives of immigrant groups.

“There’s always that fear if I say something, and this person is undocumented and the government finds out about it, then that person could be deported,” Ginés said. “We don’t know if this information is going to get hacked or how it is going to be utilized.”

Using cellphone location data or Bluetooth to determine proximity, as has been done successfully in Singapore and South Korea, increases those concerns.

The app rolled out in Rhode Island is voluntary — an effort to walk a line between digital data collection and protecting civil liberties.

“Privacy and data protection are paramount,” Raimondo said in an interview. “Which means I need to give you confidence that if you opt in, your data is safe.”

But privacy advocate Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, which owns the Firefox Web browser, said it’s easy for data to be misused.

“How do citizens know what is actually happening? What data are you collecting, where is it going, how is it used, and when and how is it destroyed?” she asked.

Not everyone owns a smartphone. And many experts believe conversations with a contact tracer are preferable for other reasons, too. When a disease so disproportionately affects marginalized populations, it’s important to build trust, said Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer of the international medical nonprofit Partners in Health, which works with the Massachusetts contact-tracing program, as well as numerous vulnerable communities across the country.

“This is a terrifying time. You need some level of human contact,” Mukherjee said. “If I were exposed, I would want to know to protect my mother’s life.”

Even when people do comply — in person, on the phone or online — the novel coronavirus is proving to be an exceptionally wily foe.

Unlike a blood-borne or sexually transmitted disease, or one such as smallpox or measles that scars its victims, the coronavirus moves invisibly on people’s breath, meaning they may have no idea they’ve recently spent time with somebody who is infected.

Because people can become contagious in just a few days — as opposed to two weeks for syphilis, for example — contact tracers have limited time to reach them before the virus moves on, leading some epidemiologists to believe digital technologies are key to stopping it.

And the microscopic bug moves so stealthily — before symptoms show up, or without them ever appearing — that it confounded the earliest attempts to corner it, according to a recent CDC report. This past week, after a World Health Organization official cast doubt on whether the virus could spread asymptomatically and then revised her position, doctors called for more clarity on an issue with such profound implications for how they practice medicine.

The best way to establish the truth, infectious disease specialists say, is to use contact tracing to build a fuller picture of the virus’s habits and preferences, including information about people who for some reason escape infection.

“It’s not a silver bullet: It won’t reach everyone; not everybody will comply.” Welty said. “But it’s the best we have now, the best we will have until we have a vaccine.”

So as we move forward with no General leading the march we are heading into a battle that I suspect will end like Gettysburg only that there will be no winner in this one.

The Wall Street Journal did an outstanding job investigating the failures of the two stooges in New York, Cuomo and DiBlasio (Murphy proves that with three you get egg roll and the two’s company and three’s a crowd but he follows the Italian Stallion’s lead) and how they continued throughout the crisis to mishandle the Covid outbreak in the region.  

Many of the things that I have long suspected and commented on was the bizarre assignments of hospitals as the primary facilities to receive Covid patients without sufficient funding and materials to handle the influx they were clearly overwhelmed early. Then we have the transferring of patients that never made sense and now we see this may have contributed to their deaths as they were simply too ill to be moved.  As for the crazy Naval ship and the Javitz Center those two bullshit facilities were dog and pony shows to prove to the President we were in serious shit.  Again the WSJ does not discuss the crazy fucking tent of Evangelical gay hater but that too I have never thought necessary nor actually useful.  And I have long said the never ending bizarre communication that had the goal posts moved endlessly often with conflicting if not contradicting information.

Here are some of the most salient point the Journal made:

• Insufficient isolation protocols, mixing pos with not pos patients (and later this includes the returning of the elderly to nursing homes while still ill and in turn contributing to the rising death tolls) 
• Inadequate staff planning especially trained staff to handle patients including allowing many to die alone
• Mixed messages. Shifting guidelines about when exposed workers return to work along with incomplete staff protection policies
• Over reliance on government sources for key equipment, much inadequate or faulty
• Procurement planning gaps, focusing on ventilators while ignoring other key supplies and medical needs including PPE and testing materials

One of the many issues that has come out of this was the excessive use of ventilators as the key to treatment, but since that we have learned that many other less intrusive and dangerous methods (the issue of droplets spread as well as patient overall success ratio) have been more useful. And this of course comes from Oxygen treatment as well as monitors observe patients, as well as the ability   to suction mucus from lungs to facilitate breathing.  Of course add to this,  few experienced available medically trained individuals placed in hospitals, and this led many to die alone if needlessly since they had no one to oversee the cases.   In fact, the dated and faulty equipment may have contributed to the deaths of patients, including some ventilators that led to collapsing patients lungs.  In addition  the lack of coordinated information on treatments  that led to many patients to develop deadly blood clots and die from that as well as kidney failure.  All treatable.

Then of course the testing failures and chaos that led many to be returned to their communities to infect more and the patients and staff exposed to medical waste thrown about, the lack of isolated chambers to place patients and in turn transferring them without proper protocol to stop spread.  And the lack of communication between hospital systems leading them to be returned as their was no available space.

And lastly the amount of spread to health care was largely due to a failure to have proper PPE equipment, to have a policy that was consistently in place with regards to when an ill staff member could return and that too has been obvious with the whole mask debacle as one where just a bandana will suffice. Really?

This is why when I shop I wear a very secure mask, gloves and am careful on public transport. I move if someone sits to close and frankly I walk about keeping my distance even when outside.  I shudder to think when schools begin how in the flying fuck they are going to do any of this as again there is no clear leadership let alone science to explain what to do.  There is no money and no materials or again protective equipment in place for Teachers and Staff to use, for students who cannot afford to have the proper masks etc and let alone who or how this will be enforced. I walked by the bars and restaurants open yesterday along the harbor and they were packed arm in arm so social distancing has gone right out the window with little regard to the reality that there is still a major health crisis in place and why?  George Floyd.

Again to not dismiss the reality of that fact but Mr. Floyd was positive for Covid.  It does not excuse that Chauvin kneed him for over 8 minutes and in turn the other two officers were also placed on top of his body to reduce movement (nor the other standing there like some sort of Scarecrow in place to scare off any potential film makers of this encounter); however, it may have been a contribution to his death.  As Police are currently running amok in the streets gassing, bean bagging and going nuts with largely peaceful protesters are possibly contributing to further spreading of a fatal disease (and that may be the point saves the whole other way of killing) and that cannot be overlooked.   Covid affects the ability to breathe and that is essential to understand and acknowledge too that Mr. Floyd may not even have known he was ill, that he needed medical attention and in turn would have never led him to go out that day. Again that is hindsight but Covid and its decimation in the black community cannot be overlooked or forgotten either.

The Collective

I feel we have become the Borg, a collective mind unit that is also much like the robots of Westworld, programmed to think and behave in a manner that is about preserving the status quo, pleasing the men who control the world and in turn follow our roles and parts to ensure preservation.  Sounds great.

Again my conversations are limited of late to a small microcosm of individuals within walking distance and despite my ability to walk great distances there is little dialog to be found when everyone is afraid.  Few read, few choose knowledge and few even ask questions as they fear being exposed as the idiot they are.  Funny I have never in my life thought anyone who asked questions was an idiot, in fact just the opposite. But then again this is now and now we are all experts on whatever we want to be experts on.

Today after a quick trip to a Whole Foods in Tribeca I was amazed at how there was not a single cleaning product or paper one on the shelves, but yes there was meat, chicken and tons of other food products, so much for shortages.  But again I find that here in Jersey City the same but I just wanted to ride the ferry and walk in the early fog for a change of pace.  There is only so much walking one can do looking at the same scenery day after day.

The news is of course bleak, stupid and useless but then buried in the headlines was Fauci declaring that a second wave is not inevitable. Funny yesterday I just saw a headline saying that a second bump was happening in States that had reopened. Sure since most of them had few cases to begin with, even less testing and now finally people are actually getting tested to be able to join the living it would be expected.   As for me I have steadfastly refused to test for a disease I have never had any symptoms of nor for antibodies as that would be well odd and it meant I was a carrier, how charming a thought.  Then again….

Today the dueling banjos of Cuomo and DiBlasio are playing the same song with oddly a different tune and Murphy the tres of the amigos is of course saying Jersey is the one state that will have the biggest second wave ever.  Pull out that dick there and brandish it about Murphy, show us what a man you are!

Meanwhile men need to prove their manhood by beating, killing and shooting people as that is how men do it.  The Cops in Minnesota decided to just kneel on the supine black man, George Floyd, as he suffocated to death.  (And again not a new or unfamiliar story here)  I saw that mode of death on Killing Eve, but Eve could not go through with it and the woman was Russian!  The same day was the infamous “Karen” story of the week where a woman calls the cops on a Black Man bird watcher.  The dude looked like Van Jones and just that hobby alone pretty much confirmed that he went to the Ivy League so this was not Bone Thugs and Harmony smoking a spliff in a wooded dense area.  And again if I stumbled on either I would wonder what world I had entered to find this.    It was broad daylight and she had a dog, run bitch run or not.  But I want to point out that a few months earlier a young woman had been killed by “thugs” in Morningside Park and they were minors who stabbed her death which led to much consternation here given that again it was young black males and the Central Park Jogger is a story that lives on in the great film, Then They See Us.

I am not sure how I would confuse an attractive bespectacled black man for “wilding youths” but okay and then if he is kindly asking me to leash my dog not shouting, “Hey whitey I’ll cut a bitch” or whatever the youth are saying now, and offering a treat to my dog, at this point I would be right there trying to figure out if he was single.  Then likely I would be the one he would be calling the Cops on as I was not “socially distancing.”  Its been a long quarantine.

I do think he was right to film her as well being a black man doing well anything is a red flag to be killed so he did the right thing.  But that was the end. No one was harmed nor any reason to continue this but nope it gets put on social media and “Karen” was outed.  She is clearly a troubled woman and I want to thank the media for endlessly covering crimes on young white women by black men and of course the endless police violence on the same does make one wonder what do you do anymore to resolve fear. Well try just getting the fuck out of there. This is personal responsibility folks pre-pandemic.

The end result is she now is unemployed, her dog has gone back to the rescue organization and what does any of this do.  She needs counseling and support and a job where she has no customer contact, her company could put on her on leave, get her the counseling she needs and in turn enable her to perhaps move to a less urban area where there are black people who she fears.  I hear Wyoming is nice.  Even the gentleman is regretting that it went that far, yes he should as well as that boomerang will come back in his direction and it will not be good.

Then later coming into my building the Concierge informed me that the second round of stimulus checks are coming and when would they be arriving? What? Uh no. Two of the workers have told him repeatedly that this is true and again this is not new here as another one told me that his friends had received “Trump Checks” even before the stimulus had been approved.  I again did the same thing, printed up the news stories from the Washington Post and the New York Times that discusses the second stimulus and the Republican position on that which is negative so where they are getting this shit is beyond me.  I am fucking sick and fucking tired of being the go to for people who simply refuse to hear truth.  The two workers walked out before I finished explaining this so I knew that they did not want to be shown up by a woman who actually knows something and that is why men sit in bushes and do more than watch birds.   Again, I get the fear but what that woman did was insane, falsifying a police report and the next time a sinister character is lurking in the park bushes the likelihood of someone coming in response drops.   Thanks “Karen.”

And of course this all goes back to why having clear leadership, someone to explain facts, discuss fear in a productive way and enable people to be heard and try to reconcile the confusion that we face when a conflict, situation or individual confuses us in ways that do not allow us to respond in rational manners.  This pandemic is such a situation where people are so fucking confused they simply refuse to bother to learn facts, like the two workers here.  And today I read another historian who wrote a book on the 1918 Flu Pandemic and has two words about our Governments response:  Incomprehensibly incoherent 

That, I am afraid is a larger problem than Covid.

Going Somewhere?

That was once a literal inquiry if someone was planning to go on holiday, leave a room or just plain leave.  Now today it is the million dollar question as many of us sit in wait wondering what is next and what will happen when we finally get somewhere.

The reality is no one knows anything about anything and that includes the virus we have come to know as Covid.   That much is clear as many man hours and labor has been spent on when did it get here and how did we know it did and more importantly who brought it here.  In other words, the elusive Patient Zero which means a whole hell lot of nothing frankly as this is now and now what do we do?

Much is made of the decision to NOT shut the country down sooner, or how it was done and the reality of the disease and its travels Asia, to Europe, to America and elsewhere as it travails across the globe leaving a wake of decimation be it physical  or economical as at this point it is hard to grieve as the losses are so great in both.

The New York Times posted a 1000 names of the dead taken from the random of 100K and climbing since Covid hit the shores sometime in 2019 – 2020. Again who the fuck cares as they are still dead and still dying.   Normally I love a good obituary but this time I passed as this is beyond even my level of empathy and compassion, I am just too angry to be anything else.

Then we had the Memorial Day holiday which I believed would lead to chaos if the powers that be did not lessen the leash we have been on these near three months and it shows that some of the pups are not well trained as they flocked to public places and ran amok.  This did not surprise me; however, I was surprised how the tri-state area seemed quite contrite and complacent but that may have been due to weather as it was not clear until the afternoon and for many it is just exhausting to think about doing more than organizing once again the shopping, the laundry and the rest of daily life to add a day/weekend trip to go somewhere else only to do the same there. Remember no restaurants nor shops are open for regular traffic/business so is that not the point of getting away, to get away from the routine?

Now was I shocked that in Arkansas a pool party went amok? That in the Ozarks it was a crazy ass party of drunks?  That in South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida shit and crazy hit the fan? No.  Have you been there, no wait, lived there?  After living in Nashville and traveling in the region no I wasn’t and again these are areas that have not been as heavily affected by the virus and they are sure this is all bullshit and somehow about Trump.  If you met the great unwashed as I have you would realize they are just not screaming hillbilly racists.. well that they are.. but they are just like any part of America that has been relegated to the discount heap pile.  They are sorted over, picked apart and neglected and that rage has to be released in ways that have led to mass shootings, opioid addiction, violence and of course Trump.  To think that is exclusive to the region, think again and check the story about the Staten Island Shop Rite shoppers abusing a patron for not wearing a mask or anything in Jersey with regards to the Orthodox sect.

Again the idea that in bleak times we look to leadership to define heroism and in turn guidance we have somehow latched onto Cuomo who for whatever reason thinks he is the Big Covid Daddy of us all, regaling us stories about his daughters, their boyfriends and his brother and mother as if we too are all one family fighting the virus together. No we are not and shut the fuck up.  I have written about the Three Stooges here before and once again want to highlight that as Cuomo feigns dismay over the dead he carefully placed in the budget an amendment  absolving legal responsibility for those in the medical industry (the same ones he sent many Covid patients back to to their ultimate deaths as well as infecting others) was due to the one factor that explains it all money.  

And as New York tries to figure it out the expression goes: As goes California there goes the nation. If that is so then guess what we are fucked. The States have these odd panels comprised of former Feds, Private Industry and of course Billionaires who will do what I have no clue but the idea that private industry can rescue America is another one of the many bullshit screeds that have been exposed behind the pandemic curtain.  Americans have been slowly eroding their faith in Government (and this has not changed) but have been stable with regards to the State and Municipal entities and we can say well hello to the flying monkeys on that as well.

No one, I repeat, no one has the Magic Crystal Ball in which to figure this out.  There can be all the speculating, posturing and of course my personal favorite, modeling on how and if and when and why if that is this then that could be this but if that x is not y then it becomes z and then all hell breaks loose.   I never want to see/hear/know about another model for anything, including homes, tops, bottoms, super or otherwise.   I love that if and or but somehow magically is able to predict and tell us what may, could of, might of and if or nor had this been done then, or maybe then or this time for sure.  Okay, thanks.

What we are seeing is fear and that is not measurable nor predictable.  We have people running amok here in two different directions.  One heading to the beach and beer ponging until Covid kills them or the ones running screaming that Covid is coming, Covid is coming in their best Paul Revere until that versus Covid makes them hoarse.  Either/or, Neither/Nor I am done with the daily digests of someone told me that I know of their friend on Facebook who told them about a BBQ with 13 families and they all work in a prison and then they all will go back to work at the prison and then more shit will hit the fan or not.  So do you know them and are they at your house? Did you go to the BBQ? To the prison? Do you live in the City? The State? Work with them or their family? No. Then why do you give a flying fuck? This is personal responsibility have some.

And that is why once again as we watch another Black person being killed as if it is okay to follow them, tape them and then wait and turn over the video to the Police but accept no responsibility as you watch men chase and gun him down sure what is the problem. Or the girl calling the Police as she was walking her dog off leash in an area where it is required and a man asked her to do so,  I see the sense of urgency.  Or the black man standing on the corner waiting for a bus is an issue as well the buses aren’t coming as often so he is waiting longer than usual and therefore your fucking problem. Wow, just wow.  I don’t give a flying fuck unless you come into my personal space and that is three feet, not even six and so when you are on the bus/train/rail don’t but here is what I do, I MOVE.  Gosh that is not hard.  Well I can now call 1-844-WYT-FEAR and all will be solved.

No one knows shit so the prognosticating, the predicting, the forecasting is all for nothing or not as they get paid for their performance, like monkeys. Do they fly too?

No One Knows What’s Going to Happen
Stop asking pundits to predict the future after the coronavirus. It doesn’t exist.

The New York Times
Sunday Review
May 24, 2020

By Dr. Mark Lilla; Professor of humanities at Columbia.

The best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t.

But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty. Rousseau exaggerated only slightly when he said that when things are truly important, we prefer to be wrong than to believe nothing at all.

The history of humanity is the history of impatience. Not only do we want knowledge of the future, we want it when we want it. The Book of Job condemns as prideful this desire for immediate attention. Speaking out of the whirlwind, God makes it clear that he is not a vending machine. He shows his face and reveals his plans when the time is ripe, not when the mood strikes us. We must learn to wait upon the Lord, the Bible tells us. Good luck with that, Job no doubt grumbled.

When the gods are silent, human beings take things into their own hands. In religions where the divine was thought to inscribe its messages in the natural world, specialists were taught to take auspices from the disposition of stars in the sky, from decks of cards, dice, a pile of sticks, a candle flame, a bowl of oily water, or the liver of some poor sheep. With these materials, battles could be planned, plagues predicted and bad marriages avoided.

In those places where the gods were thought to communicate verbally with humans, oracles and prophets were designated to provide answers on demand. The most highly revered oracles in the ancient Greek world were the high priestesses at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. When it came time to respond to a petitioner who had placed a question before her, the priestess would enter the inner sanctum and seat herself on a tripod erected over a crevice in the ground, out of which inebriating gases were thought to rise.

These fumes paralyzed her rational faculties and put her in a trance of receptivity that allowed the god Apollo to speak through her in cryptic remarks and riddles. These would be interpreted by a second figure, the prophet, who answered the grateful petitioner in poetry or prose. It was a very successful start-up and made Delphi a wealthy town.

Prophets today are less flamboyant. Former prime ministers do not, as a rule, sniff drugs before appearing on CNN. They sit meekly in the green room sipping mineral water before being called on to announce our fate. Augurs have given up on sheep livers and replaced them with big data and statistical modeling. The wonder is that we still cry out for their help, given that the future is full of surprises.

Professional forecasters know this about the future, which is why in the small print of their reports they lay out all the assumptions that went into the forecast and the degree of statistical confidence one might have in particular estimates, given the data and research methods used. But harried journalists and public officials don’t read or comprehend the footnotes, and with the public baying for information, they understandably pass on the most striking estimates just to get through the day.

Ancient augurs and prophets were in high-risk professions. When their predictions failed to materialize, many were executed by sovereigns or pulled apart by mobs. We see a

Take a banal example: snowstorms and school closings. A half century ago, when meteorological forecasting was less sophisticated, parents and children would not learn that classes were canceled until the storm began and it was announced on radio and television that very morning. We lived in harmless uncertainty, which for kids was thrilling. When snowflakes fell they even looked like manna from heaven.

Today, mayors and school superintendents, putting their faith in the meteorologists, routinely announce closings a day or more in advance. If the storm fails to arrive, though, they are sharply criticized by parents who lost a day of work or had to find day care. And if an unforeseen storm paralyzes the city, leaving streets unsalted and children stranded at school, the reaction is far worse. More than one mayor has lost a re-election bid because of failed prophecies, victim of our collective overconfidence in human foresight.

Our addiction to economic forecasting is far more consequential. Here the footnotes really do matter but politicians and the press encourage magical thinking.

The candidate declares, My plan will create 205,000 new jobs, raise the Dow 317 points and lower the price of gasoline 15 cents. Two years later, the gloating headline reads: The President’s Unkept Promises. Stagnant growth, a bear market and war in the Middle East make re-election unlikely.

Never mind that declining global demand slowed growth, that Wall Street is a drama queen and that a freakish tanker collision set off the war. A failed presidency is declared. And so the press and the public turn to fresher faces — who of course offer the same absurdly precise predictions. Not for nothing did Gore Vidal call us the United States of Amnesia.

The public square is thick today with augurs and prophets claiming to foresee the post-Covid world to come. I, myself, who find sundown something of a surprise every evening, have been pursued by foreign journalists asking what the pandemic will mean for the American presidential election, populism, the prospects of socialism, race relations, economic growth, higher education, New York City politics and more. And they seem awfully put out when I say I have no idea. You know your lines, just say them.

I understand their position. With daily life frozen, there are fewer newsworthy events to be reported on and debated. Yet columns must be written, and the 24/7 cable news machine must be fed. Only so much time can be spent on the day’s (hair-raising) news conferences or laying blame for decisions made in the past or sentimental stories on how people are coping. So journalists’ attention turns toward the future.

But the post-Covid future doesn’t exist. It will exist only after we have made it. Religious prophecy is rational, on the assumption that the future is in the gods’ hands, not ours. Believers can be confident that what the gods say through the oracles’ mouth or inscribe in offal will come to pass, independent of our actions. But if we don’t believe in such deities, we have no reason to ask what will happen to us. We should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment.

Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus — which we are only beginning to understand — nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine.

The result of those decisions will then limit the choices about reopening that employers, mayors, university presidents and sports club owners are facing. Their decisions will then feed back into our own decisions, including whom we choose for president this November. And the results of that election will have the largest impact on what the next four years will hold.

The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences. Perhaps that is why our prophets and augurs can’t keep up with the demand for foresight.

At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.

A dose of humility would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living. Let us retire our prophets and augurs. And let us stop asking health specialists and public officials for confident projections they are in no position to make — and stop being disappointed when the ones we force out of them turn out to be wrong. (A shift from daily to weekly news conferences and reports would be a small step toward sobriety.)

It is bad enough living with a president who refuses to recognize reality. We worsen the situation by focusing our attention on litigating the past and demanding certainty about the future. We must accept what we are, in any case, condemned to do in life: tap and step, tap and step, tap and step ….