You know what you call alternative medicine that works?

Medicine.

Just a nerdy PSA for those of you out there who think Vitamin C and D or garlic is going to keep coronavirus from killing you. I’ve heard this stuff from friends and colleagues. If you take this holistic concoction, it will lessen the symptoms. If you take Airborne, it will boost your immune system and the virus will have to look elsewhere for a victim. If you take garlic, wait, I don’t know what’s supposed to happen with garlic. Maybe it has something to do with bat viruses and Dracula.

The evidence that any of these things will help is sketchy. The vitamin C thing has been touted for years as a treatment for colds but personally? I’ve never found that it helped very much if at all.

None of these things are necessarily bad for you, though you might want to go easy with the vitamin D. Garlic is supposed to be good for your cardiovascular system so eat as much of that as you like. But for most holistic and Ayurvedic alternative medicines, the concentrations of the active ingredient is low or the ability of that active ingredient to get into your system via your stomach or gut is low. If that weren’t the case, you’d have to have a prescription to buy garlic.

Sure there are a lot of potent natural products. Don’t eat foxglove. It’s just that natural doesn’t mean effective in this case. And as far as the body goes, it can’t tell the difference between a “natural” source of a molecule and a synthetic one.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I hear you. I hear the frustration of not being able to go anywhere, of being cooped up in the house all the time, of not seeing your family or friends. Of eating at Chez Vous for the last 5 months. Don’t they ever change the menu?

It’s a pain to remember to wear a mask, to disinfect every surface everyone has touched. To wash your hands until their chapped.

But there is no cure.

So, the best way to stay alive and prevent the spread is to do what you’re already doing. Take it seriously. Don’t let your guard down. I know young people in their 20s who had a brief encounter with a spreader in the first days of reopening and this virus kicked their asses.

Eventually, it’s up to you how you treat yourself. There just isn’t a cure on the horizon in the next few months, if then.

Be careful.

Too many titles for this one

Such as:

Person Woman Man Camera TV

Who’s a good boy?!?

Europe vows to NEVER let us back in.

Really?? Not like, “What is the 4th amendment to the Constitution?”

See Sara Cooper:

Is this some kind of bizarre strategy to get Floridian seniors back on his side? That’s the only way it makes any sense to keep on flogging this. Maybe there are seniors down there fuming that their kids are trying to get guardianship of the family wealth because dad is running around The Villages in a golf cart shrieking about “white power!!”.

Is it code for something? Person Woman Man CAMERA TV. Maybe it’s a Fox News trigger word sequence that will activate a hypnotic suggestion.

If he’s repeating this because he’s trying to reassure us that he’s not stupid or infirm, well, it’s not working.

Let all the worms that lie in the mud hatch out.

The Miami Herald reports that the records associated with a civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, including allegations and evidence against Jeffrey Epstein, will be released as ordered by a NY judge in the matter:

A federal judge in New York on Thursday ordered the unsealing of key documents from a settled civil lawsuit involving Ghislaine Maxwell and victims alleging sex abuse and trafficking by the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Senior District Judge Loretta Preska ruled from the bench in a telephonic hearing that the public interest in the matter outweighed Maxwell’s claims that the documents, including depositions of central players in the Epstein saga, would prove embarrassing or interfere with ongoing legal matters.

OooOoooo! In the “public interest”. That’s intriguing. Of course, it could mean nothing, except that the judge thinks Floridians should see how recidivist sex offenders cut a secret deal with prosecutors unbeknownst to the victims and decent citizens of Florida.

Or it could mean that someone important is mentioned in the evidence and it’s in the public interest to know that, whoever(s) that is.

We simply have no way of knowing and it would be improper to speculate. 😏

How much do you want to bet that there will be an emergency appeal filed momentarily?

I don’t know Donald personally. I’ve never been to Palm Beach. But I wish him well.

Change is going to come

And now a word from one of our troops about masks

“7-11 requires you to wear a shirt!!” #WearAMask 💥💥💥

https://t.co/k904XH1cPM

— Jay Arnold (@jayfarnold) July 21, 2020

He nailed it with “beta bitches”. Isn’t that what grievance culture is all about? Rush Limbaugh types make you feel bad about yourself, emasculate you, reinforce it over and over again, undermine your self esteem.

Then he tells you who did this to you: feminazis, black people, immigrants.

Liberals.

Then he sells you a handful of beans.

He did this to himself

Let’s get one thing clear about the left supposedly hatin’ on Donald:

There are many, many reasons why Donald should never have been approved by the Electoral College, inaugurated, occupied the Oval Office. Legitimate reasons. His actions and behavior since taking office are exactly what Hillary Clinton predicted during the campaign and have violated every norm and sense of decency that Americans used to value. His devaluation of the Department of Justice is alarming and horrific. It’s typical of how dictators take control of their countries. And once an autocrat gets control of the judges and prosecutors, it is extremely difficult to either hold him accountable or prevent him from abusing his office in the worst ways possible.

But with all that, if Donald had done one thing, ONE THING, right with respect to the Covid 19 pandemic and effectively managed the federal response, I believe that no matter how awful he is with respect to everything else, he would have been re-elected.

What is happening to him now was completely self-inflicted. He didn’t have to politicize the blue state responses. He didn’t have to profiteer the personal protection equipment. He didn’t have to act like wearing a mask was an infringement on our constitutional freedoms. He didn’t have to hold rallies in Tulsa and Phoenix where his advance team made sure that no one had to social distance. He didn’t have to shove school reopenings down everyone’s throats.

All he had to do was delegate his authority to his federal departments and test, test, test.

He didn’t do this.

We know why he didn’t do this. It’s not a secret. Nevertheless, he screwed up and now the pandemic is taking over in the red states where the governors followed his lead, mocked the rest of the country and inexplicably denied that the virus could ever impact THEM the way it impacted NYC or Detroit. It’s hard to find politicians that are this stupid but by golly, residents in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia have managed to do it and signed their own death certificates in the process.

Saying, “we told you so” is not helpful at this point. Because when we said in the beginning that “we are all in this together”, well, that wasn’t just a slogan. It was recognition that nature will do what nature does. Nature doesn’t care whether you’re a democrat or republican. It doesn’t care if you live in Pennsylvania or Florida. It doesn’t care if you’re an American or a New Zealander. Viruses go EVERYWHERE and no one was immune to this one. Any politician who thought that the outbreak could be used to make his opponents look bad is criminally stupid. We all rise and fall together with this pandemic and the innocent and responsible are just as likely to suffer as the maliciously divisive.

I’m not going to apologize for calling Trump criminally stupid and I’m not going to put up with anyone telling me this is due to Trump derangement syndrome, especially not people who think the Clintons were responsible for the deaths of dozens of people and were involved in a child sex ring headquartered in a pizza parlor.

None of us should take the blame for Trump’s incredible irresponsibility and incompetence. He acted badly even when he didn’t have to.

It’s his fault.

Let him eat it.

By the way, it looks like the party has pulled Donald up by the short hairs and made him slap on a mask and read from a teleprompter that everyone should be wearing one because it’s patriotic. It’s not going to change the outcome, which is taking on a life of its own. But it is extremely gratifying to watch this “strongman” crumple when the party tells him that if he doesn’t, his show will be cancelled.

Makes him look soft as well as criminally stupid.

*************

In Portland, the Moms have been joined by the Dads with leaf blowers and hockey sticks. The hockey sticks are used to send the tear gas canisters back at the stormtroopers while the leaf blowers are used to blow the tear gas away from the moms.

It’s becoming irritating to the DHS secret police. Butcha know:

https://twitter.com/beardedstoner/status/1285401396183957504?s=21

Said one dad:

“Honestly, I think you’d need scores of leaf blowers with a phalanx of dads holding their ground under pretty perfect conditions to use them effectively in the dispersal of chemical agents,” he said. “But they are an iconic symbol of a tool dads use to clean up messes.”

Who wants to bet there will be a back order on leaf blowers in the next couple of days.

Sometimes malice, sometimes stupidity, sometimes incompetence

James Fallow tweets:

https://twitter.com/jamesfallows/status/1285384629189586944?s=21

Many people seem fixated on the cognition test. I don’t know how well Trump did on it but I’m guessing he passed it with a normal score.

If you want to know why Trump looks like he’s got dementia, read Mary Trump’s book. It’s not that he’s got a physical issue with his brain, except for the analytical parts have probably atrophied over the decades due to disuse. The reason he looks like he has dementia is because compared to all the presidents who have preceded him in the television age, he doesn’t have any practical experience analyzing and solving problems. George W. Bush also had that problem of falling up but at least he had the family training to know when things are going pear shaped and how to make it look like someone was in charge.

Trump doesn’t have this training. Mary describes Donald’s professional life as a kind of institutionalization. He made up for Fred Trump’s PR deficits and in turn, Fred made sure that Donald was protected from his worst instincts by appointing real professionals to do the actual work at Trump Management. That left Trump to promote the brand without doing any harm to the day to day business. All they had to do was pat Donald on the head and tell him he was doing great and no one got hurt. In other words, he’s never had to do any work for which he’s gotten credit as a businessman and when he’s not being watched, he gets himself into trouble financially.

He carried his “work ethic” to the White House. He doesn’t really do anything except sit behind the desk, watch TV and tweet. Because he’s so unpracticed as an analytical problem solver or leader, he just hasn’t done it. And he won’t do it at this late period of his life. He doesn’t have the mental discipline.

That doesn’t make him demented. It just means that he will continue to reach for the low hanging fruit and act like an autocrat and a bully who expects people to jump when he says jump. Someone will tell him he’s perfect because they don’t want to cross him.

Personally, I’d rather have a president who is suffering from dementia. You can wrap that person in cotton wool and remove all the sharp objects. But incompetence doesn’t give you the same opportunities. We’re just supposed to wait it out until we can vote.

For what it’s worth, Donald is probably perfectly capable of recognizing the elephant on the quiz. It’s the elephant in the room that he has no clue about.

Republicans move in for the kill

I suspected that they had a reason for enabling Donald. Now, we may find out what it is. And the first clue comes from that original Great Depression state – Oklahoma.

WaPo has a piece today about the unemployed in Oklahoma. Many have applied for unemployment benefits that they paid into for years. Many of those unemployment benefits are stalled while the applicants exhaust their savings, lose their cars and sell their houses. They get up in the middle of the night to get a ticket for an appointment with a state bureaucrat. There’s a limit on the number of tickets. If you miss that limit, you have to come back the next day.

Let’s put aside for a moment that this inadequate system is by design. The red states have shown themselves to be deliberately and intentionally unresponsive to the plight of the unemployed. In normal times, the idea is for the applicant to just give up and take any job even if it results in long term negative consequences for the worker. For example, if you have to take a low minimum wage job to exist, you can’t spend your time on a real job search for something more appropriate. But it doesn’t matter. In this country, not being self sufficient even for a few months is tantamount to a cardinal sin.

So, states like Florida, North Carolina and Oklahoma have made getting the benefits the worker paid for very difficult and time consuming. Eventually, desperation sets in and you go work at McDonald’s or some meat processing plant without any osha protections or benefits. Ta-da!

But what if there actually aren’t any jobs because of a pandemic? Then what do you do? Then you’re not getting unemployment AND there are no other jobs. Back in the 30s, Okies loaded up the truck and headed for California. But what if that’s not an option any more? What if there is literally nothing left to fall back on?

I think this is the moment Mitch McConnell has been waiting for. Because there is a fall back. It’s your social security benefits. Yep, why not make it easier for people to tap into their social security accounts? It’s a giant pool of money. Just take a loan. Heck, we won’t even make you pay it back when the crisis is over. You just agree to take a cut when retirement age rolls along.

Plus, we’ll cut your payroll taxes. Nevermind that the payroll tax cut doesn’t benefit you if you aren’t on a payroll. OTHER people can use the money. So what if the congressional budget office says it will have minimal impact on spending now. That’s not really the point is it? It just means that the social security trust fund that has been struggling because we won’t raise the payroll tax on higher income workers is going to be a lot less reliable.

Then, when retirements start happening in earnest, there won’t be enough money to go along. Then we can institute a means test. And there goes the whole thing.

Well, it’s about time, say their ultra wealthy backers. None of us signed on to Social Security back in 1935. Most of us weren’t even born, say the owners of the ownership society.

They’ve been so effective about eliminating pensions they didn’t sign on to when they bought the companies. Or the benefits they didn’t sign on to. Or the salaries. Social Security and Medicare are the final frontiers. They are so close to shrugging off the weight of the world they were burdened with during much of the 20th century. This pandemic was timed perfectly for them to clean up and make their exit.

No more unions. No more pensions. No more health care benefits. No more social security. And they’ve stacked the courts with the judges appointed by one of their own. A guy whose never met a tax or obligation he’s felt a duty to pay. They’re finally free! Liberty! Is this country great or what??

Too bad for you, you clueless whipkisser who bought their con for 4 decades. Too bad for you who didn’t. They don’t care about you. They got theirs and they got yours.

Bye-bye, suckers.

That’s why Mitch has stood by and done nothing. We just weren’t desperate enough. And now, we are.

I blame the Electoral College

The country wouldn’t be falling apart right now if not for the electoral college. Oh, sure, the media would have hounded Hillary irresponsibly for years. But I have no doubt that she would have handled the pandemic about as well as Angela Merkel and possibly Jacinda Ahern.

There wouldn’t be an American TonTon Macoute taking shape in Portland.

I’ll bet even George Floyd would still be alive.

The rapacious tax cuts wouldn’t have been signed into law.

The ACA wouldn’t be hanging on by a thread.

And the Republicans wouldn’t be licking their chops over the prospect of a payroll tax cut as just another weapon in their arsenal to kill Social Security and raid the trust fund.

The world would still respect us.

We’d be able to buy and install solar panels on our roofs without a lot of expense and trouble.

Might not be perfect.

I’m betting the people waiting at food banks and unemployment offices would be ok with a little less perfection and a lot more efficiency and concern.

It all comes down to that electoral college, overriding the majority vote and subjecting us to the tyranny of the small minded. oh, they’re not opposed to equality, justice and fairness. But that’s not their problem. If we want all of that, we have to take the country from them. And they aren’t going to relax their stranglehold on it one second sooner than they have to. If they have to.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what the framers had in mind. You’d think that with all the crap they had to put up with as colonists, as well as watching what happened to British colonies in other parts of the world, that they would have been a lot more careful about evil idiots taking charge.

Vaccines and Covid

The BBC just announced this:

Coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University appears safe and trains the immune system, key early trials show https://t.co/vXdDZlqZ2r

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) July 20, 2020

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline is working on a review of the announcements. One thing I’d like to point out is the word “early” in BBC blurb. I’d love to get out of the house too but we need to be very patient so that the world doesn’t suffer a relapse.

On the personal front, my friend who has Covid is entering her third week of symptoms. She’s 27, very healthy, no underlying conditions and she has been leveled by this.

We need to take this seriously, friends. The only known treatments for this disease are Remdesivir and dexamethasone. They are only moderately effective. If you get it and you are one of the unfortunate people who get symptoms, it is not just a case of the “sniffles”. It’s debilitating for longer than you’d like.

Don’t let your guard down. Wear your masks, take disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer with you everywhere, wipe down every public surface before you touch it, keep your distance, limit your time to a bare minimum in any space that has a ceiling. I don’t have to tell any of you this but I’m starting to notice that people are getting lax out there and that’s a bad sign. It makes our chances of contracting this scourge even higher.