This kid ...

 ... always gets it right. I listened to his podcast excerpts last summer from "Catch & Kill". Now I think I'll buy it. He mentions Zuckerberg's FBook directly as a tool of online radicalizing. He won more awards for journalism by the time he was 20 then all the journalists I've ever worked with.

Filmmaker Matthew Cooke

 

Tragedy explained

 

The bullhorn

 

Agent Chaos still working for Putin

 

Civil War Reboot ?

 

Covita

Believing absurdities

Mary Trump on Trump

Possibly the BEST podcast interview. Ever.

Wise words

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -- John Kenneth Galbraith, Wealth and Poverty, 1963

Buddy, can you spare some time?

Looking for readers/reviewers for this short story. It's loosely based on a story a dear friend told me in 2008 a few months before he died from MS. Please give it a read.

"United"

I disagree with this Op/Ed from May 2020. This isn't years away.

Mango Mussolini wants it right now.

Hear that sound? That's Putin clapping. His fomenting of divisiveness via his Useful Idiot has exceeded his wildest dreams. That other sound is the Right's Saint Reagan spinning in his grave.

A poem about quiet

This has never seemed more appropriate:

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still

for once on the face of the earth,

let's not speak in any language;

let's stop for a second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

- Pablo Neruda, from Extravagaria

Malcom Nance: The Plot to Betray America

Not only is Malcolm Nance a former Naval Intelligence officer, not only can he speak five or is it six languages (including Russian) but he was driving to the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 the day the terrorist attacks happened.

I got chills at the 30 minute mark.

Just the fact, ma'am

Morbidity and mortality are NOT the same thing. Not even close. It's used in medicine and economics. There's morbidly obese and there are comorbidities. For example, a patient can have cancer and heart disease at the same time. The morbidity rate in a population is NOT the same thing as the mortality rate aka the rate of death.

 The greatest fear the CDC and WHO have is because we have no national healthcare in America (unlike every single post-industrial nation on earth, including Mexico and Costa Rica) there are a lot of Americans with comorbidities. We have for-profit healthcare just like we have for-profit education. Americans are expected to pay for everything from congenital heart disease to a fractured leg, even if it bankrupts them.

Viral load refers to the amount of viruses needed to infect someone. Simply put, the more you are around someone who has an active case of Coronavirus, the more likely you are to develop it. SARS, which sickened 5,300 people in China in 2002-2003 had an extremely low viral load. Viral load has been the focus of hundreds of medical papers over the years.

Novel. In virology the most frightening word is novel. In medicine novel means new. It means: we don't know what it will do inside the human body. Virologists don't yet understand why some patients who never smoke, are 30 years old, jog five times a week, eat healthy food, etc. may develop pneumonia and die from Covid-19 but a 50 year old who is sedentary never does. Novel is scary. Novel means, despite initial gene mapping, they still don't know why children under 12 are highly unlikely to develop any symptoms at all.

Recently, our Orange Führer allowed his boyfriend, Vladimir Putin to perform a publicity stunt ... in the middle of a pandemic. Putin sent a cargo jet of "supplies" to Kennedy International. A Russian oligarch who has bragged about poisoning and murdering people sent us "supplies". This same Russian mobster sent members of his FSB to "help" Italy while they suffer through a plague that has killed 16,400 Italians so far. In case you don't know, FSB is the re-incarnation of the KGB. FSB sent money to Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and a bunch of other GOP jackasses via the NRA. That's right, money travelled from Russian mobsters through the National Rifle Association directly to elected American politicians.

So two things are really scary right now. One is the word novel. The second is Russia. If you think the Cold War is over then you have never heard of Richard Preston or read The Demon in the Freezer. 

Hoarding guns, bombing down the street in your gas sucker, and hating your neighbor because he's brown is exactly what Vladimir wants you to do right now. Now you're truly vulnerable.

May you live in interesting times

We now know there is no bottom in the despair and stupidity generated by Comb Over Caligula. This failed reality TV host knew the epidemic was coming as far back as December 2019 but he was too busy playing golf at his shitty resort in Florida to care. The head of the Seattle Flu Study knew it was here.

It didn't matter because the current GOP administration in their mad rush to "make federal government small enough to drown in a bathtub" had fired the Pandemic Response Team in 2018. Specifically, John Bolton did this at Trump's behest.

This isn't our Orange Führer's Hurricane Katrina, it's the death of whatever sort of middle class might have still existed in our broken land. There is no Houston Astrodome big enough to save us.

We are all living in Calcutta now. There are only rich Brahmans in limousines and desperate poor people in depressing tenements and cardboard boxes begging for change.

 Never has so much fear, absolute selfishness, and bigotry existed in one morbidly obese rapist. He has told the poor, uneducated whites of America what they wanted to hear so often he's deified in fundamentalist Christian circles.

We are the country that puts 12-year-old children from El Salvador in cages because they dared come here seeking what every single Irish, Italian, Dutch -- pick a European ethnicity -- came here for in the 1800s and early 1900s: asylum.

In a matter of days we will be the country that allows the elderly, people with MS, the disabled, disabled veterans, anyone unlucky, to die. All for our pointless unregulated capitalism and it's eternal state of flux between boom and bust.

The last time I took a gander at the Big Red Map of Death the world had exceeded a half million confirmed cases. We're set to double that by the end of next week and America is the new Italy.

Italy has over 92,000 confirmed cases as of today. And over 10,000 dead thanks to a mortality rate between 4 and 6-percent. A lot of them are not elderly men who smoked. Quite a few were 20-50 year olds in moderate-to-good health.

We.

Are.

The.

New.

Italy.

Defining women

Defining a woman becomes complicated when one ceases to define her on the basis of gender assigned at birth. When experience varies so much from woman to woman, blanket statements fail. Though I am not an expert on gender studies -- and I hope to keep my opinions fluid -- I arrive at a definition of womanhood by looking at men: what they do, what they have, and whom they prevent from doing and having. I define womanhood by who suffers for not identifying or presenting as male, and why.  -- Hari Nef, Twitter, Dec 2015

The Potato State

Like I always said, nothing in the Potato State except skinheads-n-inbreds.

The bastion of White Flight looks extra stupid these days.

St. George, Part 2

My friend George lost his housing in Houston, Texas last year in July after an extended hospital stay. After several months in and out of the VA Hospital, getting robbed of his phone, nearly losing what little he had left after his eviction, George landed in a "long-term" transitional housing place.

George got his heart medication and head medication (he is bipolar) straightened out and was teaching himself code writing online at the housing place.

Abruptly, one month away from getting a housing voucher for a one bedroom, he was told to leave the transitional housing place no explanation given.

Right now George is bouncing around in some emergency shelters, which are crowded, noisy, not always safe and impossible to sleep in.

George is three months younger than me and will be 54 in September. He suffered a half dozen heart attacks several years back, partly due to inherited heart disease and even with a positive attitude he is physically fragile.

Like me, George's parents and most of his relatives are dead and he also has no spouse.

This is what America is like for those of us singletons who are sole bread winners. Zero safety net.

Please donate to George on his PayPal site here.

Two Thirds

Oh, why does this not even surprise me a teeny tiny bit?

How Student Debt is Worsening Gender & Racial Injustice