A Little Piece of Good News

Did you hear that ICANN (the organization that manages the top-level domain names we all use, like .com, .net, .edu, .gov, and so on) was going to sell .org to a private equity firm?

It almost sounded like an Onion headline, but it turned out to be true.

Well, thank the internet gods, ICANN has decided not to sell .org after all.

This rejection didn't come from nowhere. Over a thousand organizations and 50,000 people submitted comments in opposition to the sale, including me.

But still. Why do we have to spend our time signing petitions and sending in comments on obviously ridiculous things like this? As one person asked, in response to the linked Twitter post, the thing that I wondered:

Why were they able to sell it in the first place? It should be owned by the public.

Columbo Catches a Sociopath, Too Bad We Can't

Tomorrow may be Twitter round up day (if I have time), but before that, there's a thread that must be shared in full from a guy named John Rogers:

I can't sleep. because a scene from one of the first Columbo TV movies keeps running my head, and it explains everything about America right now.

So in "Ransom for a Dead Man," available on our friend IMDbTV,
the cunning lawyer Lee Grant murders her husband, dumps his body, then fakes a kidnapping so she can hijack the ransom and deprive the stepdaughter of her inheritance.

The stepdaughterr figures it out, and offers to disappear for a nice bribe. Lee Grant agrees, pays her off — but TWIST! Columbo set it up so he could prove she has the ransom money.

The scene that’s killing me is the reveal scene, in the airport bar, where Columbo explains why he knew this plan would work. I’m going to quote at length, and really, Falk in this scene *chef’s kiss*:

“Because, Mrs. Williams, you have no conscience. And that’s your weakness. Did it ever occur to you that there are VERY few people who would take money to forget about a murder? It didn’t, did it. I knew it wouldn’t.”

“No conscience - limits your imagination. You can’t conceive of anybody being any different that what you are. And you’re *greedy*”.

That’s who’s running giant chunks of the country. People with a complete lack of imagination, unable to conceive of anything more important than shoving money upwards, or becoming powerful because that’s what’s important to them. Even *virtuous* to them.

When Lindsey Graham whines that you can’t be too generous with unemployment, because people will take advantage of it, it’s because he can’t imagine somebody who wouldn’t exploit the system. Because HE WOULD.

Trump can’t imagine anyone who’s not try ing to cheat the system, or fuck other people. Kushner can’t imagine anything but exercising power. An entire political movement incapable of imagining any virtue than work and obedience to your betters.

So governors like Abbot and Reynolds can’t imagine a solution *other than* “get back to work!” To do anything less than the most extreme version of capitalism is to invite the most nightmarish version of socialism. To do less than force people to work would invite ruin.

What are we supposed to do — help people? With TAX MONEY? That money’s for bailing out respectable rich people, who we know are virtuous, because they are rich. Saving corporations. Money flows UPWARD, not OUT.

What’s crazy is other countries said “Let’s use our national resources to cover everybody for two months, and we’ll go from there once we think it’s safe.” But *even with the examples*, they STILL couldn’t wrap their head around the idea. Impossible. UN-possible.

To a great degree, it’s to be expected — we’re a half century into a long memetic war waged by plutocrats to transform the virtue of hard work into a fetish of servitude.

But in a rapidly changing world full of unprecedented challenges, we are burdened with close to half of the ruling class laboring with imaginations limited by their greed. They cannot imagine a better world, because *they cannot imagine better people.*

Luckily, there *are* better people. And they’re the majority. But they didn’t spend the last fifty years trying to figure out how to hack the system. And so they are in a shitload of trouble right now.

A little while ago I grabbed another tweet where the original poster, an account called @duty2warn, wondered about the original motivations of Trumpism in the Republican party, and a bunch of people responded with their hypotheses. I never got around to posting it, but it seems to fit with this thread:

Seems statistically inconceivable that an entire political party would effectively forsake oath, conscience, and country simultaneously over this flawed a guy. 90%? Maybe. 100% (x Mitt)? No. The core fear can't be getting primaried or insulted on twitter. So what is it, really?
@duty2warn

I have been saying this more years, when millionaires started running for offices at all levels 20 years ago and now billionaires: unfettered access to inside information. As if these rich people suddenly felt the need to serve the good of the people or country.
@robertgg85

I think it is getting primaried and/or booted from office. Being in the house or senate is a lot more lucrative than the $175k/year we know about. See Loeffler and Burr as exhibits a and b.
Christopher Hopper

They are getting everything they want. A Christian White Racist Rich Male Hyper-Conservative Government. The American Dream for them.
@EhWOL

It's a cause. Trump doesn't give direction; he takes it. He is a hired suit to the highest bidder, in this case the GOP. The GOP wants to decentralize government, have one party rule and remove all social safety nets; they see Trump as the vehicle to get them there.
@SamSanderson123

Once you join the Mafia, there is no leaving the Mob. They resisted the Devil, but finally chose to accept and support him. The longer he served as president, the more compromised they became. Now they have to hang together, or they will all hang separately.
NameNoWithMan

They were each informed about it by Trump et al and bought in to keep silent about it to save their political careers and stay in power. And that is part of the compliment. That they were told what happened and they didn’t whistleblow.
@kidsneedheroes2

Racism and grift. Confidence that the media will enable them to frame the election on their terms no matter the fallout so long as they stick together. Fear that once they lose, they won't be in power for a long time because of demographic change.
@blankslate2017

John Rogers has it right, that Republican power-brokers time and time again show that ascribe their actions or what would be their actions to everyone else and lack any kind of empathy. Mike Pence, maskless at the Mayo Clinic yesterday, is the exemplar of this. A person who says he's a Christian parading through a hospital in a pandemic without a mask even though he was asked to wear one.

It's sociopathy, pure and simple. (And they're racists, too, of course.) We are a country being run by sociopaths.

This Is the Guy

Today I learned that a man named John Forester was, in many ways, responsible for what is called "vehicular cycling." He died earlier in April at the age of 90. As Dan Herriges writes for Strong Towns, Forester thought bicyclists should somehow behave just like car drivers and then they would be treated like car drivers by car drivers.

We now have 40+ years of evidence that Forester's idea does not work. I know vehicular cyclists who are perfectly capable of "taking the lane" and yet who have their lives threatened by car drivers on the regular.

As Herriges puts it,

Forester's problem was that it turns out no amount of education with regard to rules is enough to prevent all drivers, all of the time, from behaving aggressively, or from simply making deadly mistakes. And as a result, the vehicular approach to cycling only works if you're a confident cyclist who is very physically fit and comfortable going somewhat close to the speed of traffic—15 miles per hour and up—so that you can respond quickly to any risks you detect.

Vehicular cycling fails for huge numbers of other people, including children; older and less fit adults; novice cyclists; and anyone just looking to ride at a casual pace and not break a sweat. Forester was consistently dismissive of this point: citing positive safety outcomes for those already out cycling in the absence of bike lanes, his blind spot was the much larger number of people who would like to cycle but are afraid to.

The people who aren't there at all are never going to show up in the statistics. To the extent you can argue a four lane death road with no bike facilities is "safe" because few bicyclists have been hit or killed on it, it's comparable to arguing an alligator-filled moat in which people don't dare swim is "safe" for swimming because no swimmers have been eaten this year.

This guy makes me angry and I don't even know him. And I'm annoyed that he died thinking he was right.

A Weed that Goes a Long Way

Today I learned that the pollen from ragweed can travel up to 400 miles on the wind. 400 miles!

Do you know what ragweed flowers look like? I think it's pretty unlikely, since even many experienced gardeners tend to not know, in my experience.

And many people think goldenrod is ragweed and/or they think they are allergic to goldenrod, even if they know goldenrod is goldenrod and not ragweed. Because goldenrod is colorful and noticeable and blooms at the same time as ragweed, and ragweed has boring flowers that don't look like flowers to humans.


Common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisifolia). Ironically, when I did an image search for the word ragweed, about two-thirds of the images were pictures of...goldenrod.

Here's another way that common ragweed differs from goldenrod: the former is a true annual while the latter is a perennial. One thing they have in common is that both are native to North America.

(By the way, did you know it's is very easy to misspell ragweed as rageweed? That seems appropriate.)

Next Stop: Galaxy Brain?

Today — well, really this whole weekend — I could almost feel my brain adding neurons.

I had to do about 17 things I don't know how to do, and I did them, and now I am mentally exhausted and it's time to go to bed.

Stay Home

I guess about 60 Trump-flag-wavers were out in front of our governors' mansion again today demanding "freedom" to be infected.

Meanwhile, 4,500 handmade masks were dropped off by people to fire stations (in Saint Paul alone) so they could be given to elderly people in nursing homes and other vulnerable people who need masks. Many more were dropped off at stations across the state.

Who's the real majority? But who gets the news coverage?


These masks were made by graphic designer Carolyn Porter, who is also the author of Marcel's Letters, a book everyone should read.

Following Up on the Disinfectant

As predicted, the gaslighter-in-chief has tried to say his completely bonkers comments from yesterday about injecting disinfectants into our bodies, our lungs, to cure COVID-19 were sarcastic.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes grows clearer and clearer in his withering analysis of all this each night, it seems:

This is all happening on a day when the death toll from this virus has reached more than 51,000. He said the cases would go down to zero in February. We're heading toward a million cases. 26 million people have lost their jobs. And day after day after day we're seeing there's no plan, there's no real plan or solutions coming from the White House. Instead there is, every night, carried on this network and others, a two-hour pathological narcissistic propaganda show in which the president feels some fleeting sense of satisfaction because people are watching him. And then he goes back to watching more TV.

In contrast, Minnesota's governor has these reasonable press conferences where reality exists. I happened to hear part of one today and it's startling to hear someone so lucid who's in charge. What a concept!

This May Be the Headline

I  know there's a lot of competition, and if I thought about it harder, I'm sure there are other equally valid contenders. But Rachel Maddow may have been correct tonight when she said:

If you could go back in time to November 2016 and show the American public one headline that was real and from the future and it would make clear the stakes of their vote for president in November 2016, this is a good candidate. This Reuters headline today might be a contender:

This was also the day that the president of our country said we should try injecting disinfectants into people's lungs and shining lights on our skins and inside our bodies to cure COVID-19.

Maybe tomorrow he will suggest taking a doggy trimmer to our various parts to see if that has effect. He has the staff with the right skill set for that approach.

Food Co-ops, 50 Years

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, but 1970 was also the beginning of the second wave of food co-ops in Minnesota.

Earlier this month, the City Pages ran an article by Craig Upright, a sociology professor at Winona State, on the early history of our local food co-ops. Craig's dissertation was about the co-ops and this is a glimpse of that work, which I assume is at least partially being transformed into his soon-to-be-published book Grocery Activism: The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota.

I'm looking forward to the book, and will put it on the shelf with Craig Cox's Storefront Revolution and my copy of Seward Co-op's 40th anniversary history.


March 1972 photo by Mary Lee Shettehaughe/Minnesota Daily. Taken at Saint Anthony Park Foods, then on Cleveland Avenue at Buford Avenue, next to the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota.

Straw-Bale Houses

And now, a moment away from it all: A selection of straw-bale houses from the Utopian Encyclopedia.

They start out like this:


And end up like this:


The outsides vary a lot:










I don't know much about how these sustainably built houses are made but I've always found them interesting.

Tea Party 2.0, Same as It Ever Was

Remember Reagan using Springsteen's "Born in the USA" back in the ’80s? Aaagh.


The thing that gets me the most about these astroturf protests, though, is the coverage of them.

More people turned out for every one of the Protect Mueller and Impeach Trump protests (in the dead of winter) — let alone all of the huge climate, science, gun sanity, women's, etc. marches that have happened since Mafia Mulligan took office — but the coverage of these small "liberate" rallies makes them seem more important than any of those except maybe the Women's March.

At this point, I don't know if the media are letting themselves be manipulated or are part of it. They sure let themselves be played, if it's the former.

Aerosols, Too Close

I woke up this morning to a tweet from Zeynep Tufekci, who earlier pointed me to the efficacy of mask-wearing in the pandemic, talking about a study from China on droplet transmission in a restaurant. As she put it, the study supports the finding of "droplet (rather than aerosol) as key means of transmission. One asymptomatic person infected 10 (out of 91) at restaurant—but *only* if they were in direct line of air pushed by the air conditioning. (Aerosol would have infected others, too)."

The study is summarized on the CDC's website, with this as the main illustration.



The infected person is A1, highlighted in yellow. They are known to have infected the other people at their table, plus the noted people at tables B and C. The air conditioning was blowing from the vent to the right of table C, across table A toward B, with an exhaust fan then blowing the air back from B toward C.

None of the restaurant staff, notably, caught the virus from the hour or so person A1 spent in the restaurant. 

The paper discusses whether the virus would be considered as aerosolized vs. droplets (which matters a lot in the world of infectious disease), and comes to the conclusion that these were droplets. Which is good news. Distancing between tables, improvements in ventilation, and masks worn by people who think they're well (not to mention people who think they're sick, of course) would all make a difference.

A Story About the Supply Chain

This Bloomberg story about the global supply chain for cut flowers shows one piece of the disruption that's happening and that may not get repaired, depending on whether we see a long-term trend toward localization, as Jason Szegedy thinks we will. From a climate crisis perspective, that would be good, but the real people shown in the story will clearly suffer.

It's not just flowers, and it's not even just global supply chains, of course. Regional and local supply chains are also in disarray, with food for restaurants in oversupply and all sorts of home-used goods in undersupply. There's a good likelihood there will be a shortage of plants for vegetable gardening this summer as well, as people stay home and want the security of their own food.

Interesting times.

A View from Ohio

It's hard not to become obsessed with thinking about how society will act when (if?) the coronavirus pandemic eases, or even if it doesn't ease, if some people get their way and try to force things to reopen. Barring a magically effective treatment or a quickly developed, highly effective vaccine, it's hard to see how anything will happen very soon. I've already discussed this somewhat, and today I have some thoughts to share from another writer, Jason Szegedy, who's a planner for the city of Akron, Ohio.

The word "crisis" is one that is prone to abuse and overuse.... With the onset of this global pandemic, and the untold number of severe social and economic disruptions that are sure to follow in its wake, it is almost certain that we have entered into such an era — a Crisis — with a capital "C".

Crises of this sort ... are world-altering events that reshape and refocus all of society's institutions. They change the balance of power between the rights of the individual and the well-being of the group. They have life-changing and lifelong effects on every person....

The only world those of us born after 1960 have known is one in which individualism has grown progressively stronger, while institutions (of every kind) have grown progressively weaker. There are reasons for this (and pros and cons) but they aren't worth dwelling upon here.

It is a world in which ever-worsening social, political, and economic problems have been ignored and kicked further and further down the road. These are problems which, by their very nature, require collective sacrifice and strong institutions to address.

Ours is a society where institutions are weak; where people are used to a high degree of personal autonomy; and where the well-being of the individual is valued far above that of the group. There are pros and cons to having such a society.

One of the major cons of that type of society is that it is extremely vulnerable and unprepared for an unforeseeable and catastrophic event — an event like a global pandemic of uncertain duration. An event where strong institutions and decisive, collective action matter a lot.

At another time and in another place, the pandemic would have been an equally terrible and tragic event, but one that occurred in a place that was up to the task of taking the collective actions to manage it in a much more capable and competent way.

But we don't live in that time and place....

If you had asked me "A global pandemic of novel virus of uncertain duration will occur in your lifetime. At which social, economic, and political point in time would you have chosen for it to occur?"

I can't possibly imagine having it happen at a worse time.

Within the scope of my (not so short lifetime) this is the time of maximum political strife and dysfunction; maximum economic instability and inequality; and maximum levels of narcissistic individualism. You can fill in the blanks with who you blame the most for it.

But I'm not interested in blaming anyone for it. I'm interested in describing what is happening, and in thinking about what is likely to happen next, so that I can have some degree of understanding about where events are going to be taking us, and what might possibly be done.

Crises of the sort that we are now embarking upon tend to stop previous and familiar trends (an all-consuming individualism, a dearth of social cohesion, pervasive and profound institutional rot) in their tracks. Now the demand for order is high, but the supply of it is low.

Things that were previously celebrated or at least tolerated as normal (greed, corruption, rampant economic inequality) may increasingly begin to be viewed by the public as grotesque or even perverse — relics of a recent, but now dead an irrelevant past.

Trends that pundits, prognosticators, political scientists, economists, and urban planners were sure of continuing indefinitely six short weeks ago could be a dead letter. Social and economic forces thought to be unstoppable could reverse at an astonishing speed.

Ideas and public policies that were once considered unthinkable (both good and bad — I'll let you decide what those are) will now not only be thinkable, but will be actively pursued and implemented, with rapidly increasing public support, in the face of hardship.

I have no idea what the future holds. But it is possible to make some educated guesses.

I am guessing that we are going to see less globalization and more nationalism.

I would bet on more collectivism and less individualism.

I am guessing that however disruptive you imagine this pandemic will be to our way of life, you are still probably underestimating it. There will be dozens of social and economic dominoes yet to fall that we cannot envision yet.

That there will be much hardship and human suffering probably goes without saying. In the long-run, there may even be good that comes out of all of this disruption and heartache, but what that might look like is impossible to know right now.

The ability to adjust one's expectations to the realities of this crisis will become increasingly important as each day passes. People who are unable to think different thoughts from the ones that they thought six weeks ago are likely to be at a distinct disadvantage.

Life will go on, and we will get through this, but it is going to be very different for a long time. You and I are living through a world-altering event of the highest magnitude.

In terms of the urban planning and policy implications of what we are living through, I think we are going to be having a depression, not a recession. How that plays out in our cities and what that means for the urban policy issues that we debate — no one knows. Not yet.

I believe that under any possible scenario a lot of people in this country are going to be a lot poorer. And a lot of people who have never been poor before will be now.

I think that any urban policy work that does not assume this to be the case is missing the plot.

I will be happy to be wrong about all of this.

When everything gets back to normal, just like it was, I look forward to you quote tweeting it and calling me an idiot.

Finally

As a child in rural New York, I learned about recursion from the Land O Lakes box. That's the only good thing I can say about the package design, which focused on an extraneous Native woman.


What did anyone at the time ever think she had to do with the cow's milk they used to make butter?

The truth, of course, is they never thought about it at all. She was just a mascot to the illustrator at the ad agency who, according to the Pioneer Press, designed the original box in 1928. And the people at the company who commissioned him.

Now, she's gone, replaced by a lake, as in the company's name — how appropriate!, more trees, and a prominent mention of the fact that the company is farmer-owned. (Land O Lakes is, in fact, a farmer-owned co-op.)


I like this new look.


This is the back of the box now, showing some of the actual people who bring the product into existence, instead of an imaginary person presenting the offering of a butter box with her own image on it, receding into recursive infinity.

The Stupid, It Burns

When you believe your religion will protect you from a virus...


...and you don't know the difference between plague and plaque.

Or maybe the sign just means the subjects' mouths are safe from periodontal disease?

No Good Options

Okay, yesterday's blog post was a day off. Today I'm back on the COVID horse with this from Ezra Klein at Vox.

Klein recaps several of the recently promulgated plans that have been put out to describe how our country could start to get back to a functioning economy. The plans he covers come from liberals, conservatives, and public health folks. He highlights the particular problems that the various plans would face in a country like ours, but even more than that, he points out this reality check:

I’m not here to say that this, or anything else, is impossible. But it is light-years beyond the kind of political leadership and public-private coordination we’ve seen thus far. Who is going to spearhead the effort? President Donald Trump? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Bill Gates? Who is trusted enough, in this country in this moment, to shape this? And even if they could pass it, can we build it, and do so quickly?

After discussing some of the various details, he wraps up with this:

And even if the political hurdles could be cleared, it’s obvious...that there’ll be no “V-shaped recovery” of the economy. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who helped craft the plan, says he thinks something like 80 percent of the economy will return — that may sound like a lot, but it’s an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.

I don’t want anyone to mistake this as an argument for surrendering to the disease. As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do-nothing argument is even less plausible: It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans, hospitalize tens of millions more, and crush the health system, while the rest of us go about our daily economic and social business. That is, in my view, far less likely than the construction of a huge digital surveillance state. I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.

My point isn’t to criticize these plans when I have nothing better to offer. Indeed, my point isn’t to criticize them at all. It’s simply to note that these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal. They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.

What’s even scarier to consider is that the debate between these plans is far beyond the political debate we’re actually having. As of now, the White House has neither chosen nor begun executing on a plan of its own. That’s a terrible abdication of leadership, but reading through the various proposals, you can see why it’s happened. Imagine you’re the president of the United States in an election year. Which of these futures, with all its costs and risks and pain, would you want to try and sell to the American people?

I guess that's why Doug Mulder at The Weekly Sift said this was the speech a great president would give. If a sitting president wasn't running, s/he could do what needs to be done.

We won't get that out of this president, of course.

Paperback Paradise

Today I found out about Paperback Paradise... a Twitter account run by a person who somehow recreates (or creates?) paperback covers from around the era when I was a youngish person, using new words (often rude words), always in a completely deadpan way and era-perfect typography.

I've weeded through the really rude examples (which I usually don't find all that funny) to find a few that give the best idea of this person's skills both graphically and verbally:






That blocky sans serif type is such a look from fantasy and science fiction in cheap paperbacks of the 1960s.

Then there's this twist on a juvenile title look:




With its nice combination of ITC Benguiat and Korinna, it's very 1970s.

Just when you need a break from our current maelstrom, you run across something like this and you get a break for a few minutes. Thank you, Paperback Paradise!

Rebirth

Today is Easter for mainstream Christians, a holiday auspiciously timed to coincide with when the northern parts of our planet start to wake up from winter. Rebirth.

Holy Saturday, in the Christ story, is the day he spent dead in the tomb before being resurrected. I spent part of yesterday reading this story on Medium, which I saw pretty widely shared in my friends circle. It's about the rebirth we will experience as the COVID-19 pandemic ends. The writer is worried — and rightly so — that all the forces of corporate capitalism will be brought to bear to restore everything to "normal" instead of recognizing all the good parts and truths we've seen in this Great Pause.

As he says, we don't want to get back to the way things were. Instead, what we're looking for is

the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis. I urge you to be well aware of what is coming.

But we shouldn't forget what we've been through, he says:

What the trauma has shown us, though, cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet. What’s not fit for a postcard are the other scenes we have witnessed: a health care system that cannot provide basic protective equipment for its frontline; small businesses — and very large ones — that do not have enough cash to pay their rent or workers, sending over 16 million people to seek unemployment benefits; a government that has so severely damaged the credibility of our media that 300 million people don’t know who to listen to for basic facts that can save their lives.

The cat is out of the bag. We, as a nation, have deeply disturbing problems.

When we come out of the pandemic, that is our moment:

If we want to create a better country and a better world for our kids, and if we want to make sure we are even sustainable as a nation and as a democracy, we have to pay attention to how we feel right now.

The writer of the Medium piece begs us all to steel ourselves for the onslaught of marketing messages and government pressure we will face to buy-buy-buy and forget what happened:

From one citizen to another, I beg of you: Take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all. ... We are a good people. And as a good people, we want to define — on our own terms — what this country looks like in five, 10, 50 years. This is our chance to do that, the biggest one we have ever gotten. And the best one we’ll ever get.

Minnesota's governor, Tim Walz, used a different metaphor in his moving State of the State address last weekend. He talked about the pandemic as winter, and how we as people who live in a winter state know how to survive that, and that we will be able to come out of it in the spring.

Rebirth.

That's certainly what our society and the wider world needs, and I hope the pandemic can be made into a catalyst for us to bring about the kind of change we need. Not just from the climate crisis, but from the deep inequities that shape our power relations and therefore our resource allocations. These things are related.

Other writers who have made similar points:

• A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy (a petition)
• The world after this (from Vice)
• Coronavirus may get America to pass its biggest climate bill yet (from Quartz)
• Here’s what a coronavirus-like response to the climate crisis would look like (from the Los Angeles Times)
• Even Dave Roberts' late-January article called Social tipping points are the only hope for climate relates. It wasn't his intention at the time, but I think it fits in.

And here are some visions:

• How to align economy and ecology (an open collaboration connected with the Transition Town movement)
• Elizabeth Sawin (whom I've written about before) is collecting examples from around the world that show this kind of rebirth.

I'm staying hopeful that this pandemic is a big enough lever to fundamentally shift the layers of concrete and steel that have been laid on top of our humanity over the past two centuries of industrialism.

Another Way COVID Kills

When we tally up the lives lost to the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, I doubt anyone will include the added deaths from motor vehicle crashes, but they are related nonetheless.

Here are Minnesota's deaths from the last half of March 2020, compared with the same time period in the previous five Marches:


As you can see, we were on a downward trend for deaths, but we've suddenly seen a doubling in the number. This is, in all likelihood, attributed to the drivers picking up speed as they feel safer on empty roads, possibly combined with the stress of the world's situation.

Maybe these deaths will balance out with or even be outweighed by decreases in deaths worldwide from fewer internal combustion cars on the road, lowered pollution because of closed factories, and fewer two-stroke engines in use. Who knows.

Succulent Trolls

Now I have to go get some old troll dolls.


From the hands of Chyenne Rotsch, who posted it to Weird Secondhand Finds that Just Need to Be Shared on Facebook. I saw it shared in the Minnesota Houseplant Community group.

A Small Break

It has been too long a day of Zoom meetings and crises, but I have one thing to say:

Curse you, Twitter, for every changing to show "top tweets" as the default. No one wants that. Why? Why?

__

(There, wasn't it nice to have a small moment of what used to be normal whining?)

A Silver Lining of the Pandemic

I have to keep track of the few good things to come out of the pandemic, like the decrease in air pollution. Here's another one:

Airbnb's landlords who have converted their rental housing to short-term rentals are being crushed by the pandemic. As a result, they have to convert their units back to real housing that normal people can afford to pay for and live in year round!

So sad.

Originally, Airbnb seemed like a good idea. As Peter Harrison, a New York City-based housing activist put it in the linked article, "It’s a very good small idea and a terrible big idea. The idea that you have an extra bedroom you occasionally put on Airbnb—that’s fine, but of course it quickly manifests into professional landlords."

The pandemic, of course, affects the extra-bedroom-providers even more than it does the professional landlords. But the big dent in travel caused by the pandemic is affecting the pros, too.

May they all sign leases with permanent residents soon.

Obscene

The "election" held in Wisconsin today is something that this country will never live down. It was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, even though that body will not meet together for its own safety, but decided in a partisan 5-4 that voters must come out and vote.


Wisconsin voters waiting in line outside their polling place, maintaining spatial distance and wearing masks. Some of them had an opinion on the fact that the election was being held during the pandemic.

One of the "highlights" of this election:

• Milwaukee (population 595,000, about 40% Black) had — get this — FIVE polling places.
• Madison (population 258,000, 7% Black) had 66 polling places.

Gee, I wonder what that discrepancy was about? Whatever could it be, when Republicans control the decision on how many polling places to have?

Why was it so important for the election to be held in the middle of this pandemic? Because Wisconsin Republicans want to be sure their State Supreme Court stays in Republican hands, and the only way they can be sure that happens is through a low turnout election. After they lost the governorship in 2018, they know that high turnout = a loss for them.

If we ever get rid of Mafia Mulligan and (re)build democracy in this country, we have to go beyond restoring the Voting Rights Act. Wisconsin needs the VRA too. We need national voting rights with preclearance, automatic voter registration, and vote by mail.

___

Chris Hayes was pretty scathing about the decision to hold the election in Wisconsin. Apoplectic might describe it. And oh. my. god. The interview with election expert Mark Elias is so frightening. He analogizes how Republicans and the administration may approach the November election to the way they appear to be approaching the Census: you can't stop it, but because you're in charge of it, you can monkeywrench until it's ineffective at counting the people you don't want to count.

Keeping Busy in Business Town

I'm not sure how I've missed Business Town — a deadpan dead-wringer for Richard Scarry's Busy Busy Town — until now, but I did. Their most recent graphics about What Value-Creating Winners Do All Day are scenes from the pandemic:




Thanks to Jason Kottke for pointing the way once again.

A Stupid Design Misrepresented with a Visual Lie

This might be the worst house design of all time in the Star Tribune Homes section. It looks innocuous at first:


The first thing I noticed was that the living area for cars (see floor plan) is as large as the main living area for humans. Then it registered that this gigantic garage is not shown accurately in the 3D rendering above: that version shows only a one-car garage, because the creators know that a three-car garage is ugly and out of balance with the rest of the house.


Once you get into the details of the floor plan, it gets even stranger. Starting from top left, we have two bedroom "suites," each with its own powder room and a shared something that must have a shower in it but it's hard to tell. You access these rooms past a series of lockers through a Mudroom, past the garage entry. Very homey.

Switching to the main part of the house, you enter through the front door via an open porch and into a foyer with a coat closet (pretty typical), but that's when it gets weird. To the right of the foyer is the laundry room. The Laundry Room! Right in a public part of the house, with its window overlooking the front porch.

And that laundry room and the other rooms across the front of the house appear to be arrayed along a wide hallway or gallery, which is basically a waste of space. Why is it there?

The master suite wing on the right side of the house also includes a space-wasting hallway (with two shallow closets along it), leading past a giant bathroom on its way to the Master Bedroom in the back corner of the house. At the opposite end of the wing, through the bathroom (as is all-too-typical in these megamansion houses), sits the the Master Closet, also with a window overlooking the front yard. And the Master Closet, get this, has its own closet. Probably for shoes? I don't know. There appears to be a secret door from the Master Closet to the hallway where the Laundry Room is.

This is where the sentence goes about how this house is a metaphor for everything that's wrong with our culture, yada yada, but after last night's Twitter post, I don't have the energy for it.

__

So many past posts about the Star Tribune Homes section. So much to love to hate.

Twitter, March 2020: After the First Death, There Is No Other (But There Is Also Nothing Else)

March 2020: I guess this will go down in history as the month of the coronavirus and COVID-19, or at least of its most obvious beginning. I mentioned it in my Twitter round-up from February, but things were just getting started then, as we now know. While February was a short month, March was about 72 years long. And I'm posting this a few days late because I just have not had time until the weekend to compile all the tweets. I'm sure you were pining for it.

As always, the tweets are in reverse-chronological order, so it's more shocking than even usual to feel time and perspective changing as I go back, through these words, to the beginning of the month. There were still jokes about the virus then. And other topics that weren't related to it in any way.

I think March 2020 is going to be a B.C. (before corona virus) and A.C. turning point for this country, and maybe the whole world, though it may be in a different month for some places. My only hope is that whenever this ends, if it does in any way that can be recognized as an ending, we use it to transform at least some of the things that were wrong, instead of becoming obsessed with "recovery" to re-create the dysfunctional way things used to be.

The pandemic tweets had their own subsections (Mafia Mulligan's malfeasance, the economic devastation it has wrought, and general political commentary on its implications). But first, there are the general ones about all things corona, including social distancing, testing, stay-at-home orders, and medical workers:

April is going to make March look like fucking Sesame Street.
Don Winslow

I feel bad for the folks stuck on this ship—and they should get all the help in the world—but I'm astonished anyone would hop on a cruise on March 7, weeks after we learned of other cruise ship deaths. It's also proof that corporations can't be trusted to self-regulate.
Tony Webster

In the future, can we please take public heath seriously?! Even though -- ew! -- the field primarily employs women?
Angie Schmitt

Since city dwellers are admonished from escaping to their cabins to ride out the ’rona, shouldn’t suburbanites be asked to stop coming in to congregate at the lakes?
Tana Hargest

The battle to keep Americans from understanding what went on January to March is going to be one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in modern US history. Precisely because so much of it is public, confusion has to be made massive.
Jay Rosen

Someone from the CDC called it “Corona Winter.” That’s how I’m thinking about it now
thot leedurr @DocDre

My mom is a 69 year old nurse and her hospital is deploying to her the front lines next week She called me to tell me where important documents are, if ‘something happens because this virus kills and kills quick. Now I know how if it feels to have a loved one to go to war
Roland Scahill

USA is dealing with two crises at the same time: global pandemic and the total collapse of our federal government.
Adam McKay @GhostPanther

Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have thirty-one, Except March which has 8000
@LeBearGirdle

As a hospital aide who can’t afford my work insurance, it all feels like a big slap in the face. We aren’t just self-sacrificing but BEING sacrificed. Glorifying us as selfless angels so deeply ignores that we are being thrown into a burning house with LESS support than usual.
@thatsoftboy

The coronavirus crisis isn't separate from the 2008 financial crisis: it's the continuation of that crisis. The 2008 crisis and its finance-friendly, people-destroying bailout led to the election of idiotic strongmen who are totally incapable of containing it. And it also triggered waves of austerity that starved public coffers of the resources that produce resilience to subsequent crises, as we've seen in 10+ years of inadequate response to climate crises like floods, hurricanes and fires. Austerity also stole our pandemic preparedness. California dismantled all three of its 200-bed mobile hospitals and its emergency medical stockpiles in 2011, flushing the $200m investment for want of $5.8m/year for upkeep Gone: 50m N95 respirators, 2400 portable ventilators, and "kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed." They were jettisoned to help Jerry Brown balance the $26b deficit he inherited after the 2008 crisis, largely given away, then sold overseas.
@doctorow

God wants us to be clearer on the other side of “stay in place” that it is not rugged individualism that is the key to life and love and liberation; it is not me, myself and mine that makes the world work, but rather understanding how our individuality is a part of the whole.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

Keyworker (noun), definition: A person whose work is overlooked and undervalued, until the shit hits the fan.
George Monbiot

My babies are too young to read this now. And they’d barely recognize me in my gear. But if they lose me to COVID I want them to know Mommy tried really hard to do her job. #GetMePPE


Cornelia Griggs, MD

When health care workers say there’s a ventilator shortage, what they mean is there’s an abundance of people about to die by drowning inside their own lungs.
feminist next door @emrazz

Horrific that a death is pounced upon with a “ah but they had a pre-existing condition!” EIGHTY TWO MILLION AMERICANS have pre-existing conditions - and that’s just the people with employer-based insurance coverage, per CMS.
@CaroMT

Whenever someone tweets about a person under 40 dying due to CV, there are replies from folks accusing them of leaving out that the person had underlying health condition. Yeah, I want to know that too but a 28-year-old with asthma shouldn't die because they shook someone's hand
Yashar Ali

BREAKING: Jerry Falwell Jr. tests negative for Christianity.
Travis Akers

So Hobby Lobby waits til yesterday to close, continually exposing employees and others because “it’s in the hands of god.” Today, they fire people by email. No severance. No insurance. Apparently, God doesn’t want the Greens to use their billions to help their laborers. Grace
Cory Williams @WilliamsforOK

PORTUGAL JUST LEGALIZED ALL THEIR IMMIGRANTS, INCLUDING ASYLUM SEEKERS, and gave them access to public services. So proud of my parents’ country, every other nation should follow suit
Erika, Esq. @eeerox

Hi. I designed some coronavirus travel posters for you. Stay the F* home. Love you all.


Jennifer Baer

Just in case anyone was wondering, "I hope you don't die before you write that book I want to read" isn't actually a compliment.
Pat Rothfuss

Goodnight everyone. It’s ok if you cry yourself to sleep. Many tears will be shed before it’s all over with and crying doesn’t make you weak. It means you are human.
ProfB @AntheaButler

The doctors who refused to treat a 17-year-old boy for his severe coronavirus symptoms because he had no health insurance, and then sent him to a far away emergency room where he had a heart attack on the way and died, should be named and shamed for their utterly evil behavior.
Eugene Gu, MD

Last night EMS in New York took 6,406 medical 911 calls, the highest volume ever, surpassing 9/11/01.
Michael Brendan Dougherty

It's genuinely insane that from country to country, and now from state to state, every single hotspot says "We should have acted earlier" while every place that hasn't been hit yet says, "But we don't have to act now because it's not a problem here."
Daniel Radosh

is it just me or .... has there not been a ton of reporting on what's actually going on *on the ground* in the US with the virus
Liz Franczak

I called it The Rona on a conference call yesterday and all the white people laughed. I didn’t understand why. Then I remembered it’s not called The Rona. I hate y’all.
@JasmynBeKnowing [a member of Black Twitter]

Britain is a country where you can get tested in a pandemic if you have no symptoms but emerged from a “royal” womb, but can’t get tested if you are a nurse risking your life to treat very ill people. We have to build a better country than this
Johann Hari

Would you be willing to stay in your home for two months only being allowed to leave for medical appointments (food would be delivered to you) if it meant that the coronavirus would be completely eradicated? You can't leave your house or have visitors but it's gone after 8 weeks:
Yes 92.3%
No 7.7%
Yashar Ali 118,957 votes cast

The H1N1 swine flu pandemic that infected up to 1.4 billion people and killed up to 575,000 originated in factory farmed pigs in the United States. Yet nobody ever calls it the “American Pig Flu.” Let’s stop calling the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus.” We’re all in this together.
Eugene Gu, MD

Dear everyone, can we please stop using war metaphors for this outbreak? I mean, it works to a point but it feels like an unhealthy mindset. I prefer to think of this as weathering a storm together.We’re not fighting an enemy; we are helping each other through a natural disaster.
Arie Coleman @ariearieinfree

no atheists in a foxhole; no libertarians in a pandemic
Patrick Reynolds

Attention World: We don’t need Social Distancing. We need Spatial Distancing, and Social Bridging. Keep physical distance from others, but do all you can to stay socially connected to friends, family and your communities. Spread the word. Language matters.
Brent Toderian

H/T @ColaptesAuratus:


@BreeMinneapolis

Social distancing slogan: Better six feet apart than six feet under.
Steven Greenhouse

My daughter asked, "Is this what 9/11 felt like?"
I think no. This is far, far bigger.
9/11 was pure insanity for a day and it reshaped life in a million little ways.
This is pure insanity for days on end, and is completely changing how we live.
Joseph N. Cohen

I've noticed local smaller groceries in older neighbourhoods didn’t get cleaned out. Costo and Superstore did. I wonder if it’s something about the existing hoarder mentality of those shoppers. Also. If people have room for 200 rolls of toilet paper, our houses are way too big.
Brent Bellamy

I feel like 1/3 of the country is buying ammo, 1/3 of the country is buying toilet paper and 1/3 of the country is French kissing strangers while swimming naked in the Atlantic Ocean.
Crystal Fleming @alwaystheself

Figures indicated 34,000 had been swabbed for the pathogen across Canada, compared to 23,000 tests in the U.S., which has 10 times the population and number of COVID-19 cases
@LuluTheCalm

Taking an unavoidable subway trip to/from Brooklyn, good news my trains are nice and empty, bad news rats are out on the platform like "OUR TIME HAS COME BROTHERS"
Jay Smooth

I’ve seen people comparing the impact of this to 9/11. I think the impact will be more like a world war
Angie Schmitt

I have never felt so much like that boiling frog in my entire fucking life and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say NOT A FAN.
Sarah Mackey

Imagine if Bloomberg had spent that $500 million on ventilators.
Noah Shachtman

Crazy how grocery store workers had no idea they signed up for the draft
Blair Socci

People respond to the coronavirus crisis with explicit denial (it's a conspiracy), implicit denial (I'll go to the party even though I shouldn't), or action (extreme social distancing). You can imagine how the climate crisis feels to people who have long been ready for action.
flyingless

U.S. hospital beds: 924,000
U.S. prison beds: 2,300,000+
Angelo Guisado @VoltaireLaFlare

Biggest reason people are still gathering and partying and spreading the virus is because most American leaders haven’t had the guts to tell them the truth about the severity of the situation.
Jason Kander

it has been so long since anyone asked americans to collectively sacrifice anything that they’ve forgotten how to do it
@jbouie

What will go down as the biggest breakdown in the US response to #COVID19 is the lack of test kits. South Korea and the US had their 1st patients on Jan 20 and Jan 21, respectively. Look at the difference in daily testing. By March 4th, SK was ~18,000 per day:


Eric Topol

One way to think about social distancing is that to contribute to a great national cause in World War II you had to, like, die face down in the muck on some tiny pacific island, now you can literally stay at home, watch the sopranos or that Netflix dating show and be a hero
Matthew Zeitlin

Honestly, I would have rather had aliens like Independence Day instead of a virus
ProfB @AntheaButler

Again, can’t overstate how much the lack of testing has hamstrung everyone. Localities are flying blind and trying to use alternate data to figure out what’s going on, like local influenza data. Clinicians are running lung CT scans as an end-around testing bottlenecks. Disaster.
Chris Hayes

There was a (non-NCAA) national college wrestling championship held over the weekend. Hundreds of people. The "competition mats were sanitized only three times per day." Liberty University was involved. Because of course it was.
Hemant Mehta

Americans for Prosperity, the Koch dark money pressure group that has spent several hundred million electing Republicans, compiled a list of programs they wanted Congress to cut, which includes CDC funding for global pandemic response and disease prevention
Lee Fang

I guess writers of dystopian fiction need to add a toilet paper sub plot
Jennifer Gunter

Coronavirus behavior will reveal how much humans love their elders
David M. Levinson @trnsprtst

It’s a hoax till it kills you
Alexis Goldstein

This is the medical team from Wuhan responsible for recovering 50K+ patients in just a few months. They're now risking their lives again to help out Italy. Rag on China all you want for the mishandlings early on but you can't deny that these people are true selfless heroes.
@heylauragao

It costs on average of $1300 bucks for full Corona Virus testing. At a time when 40% of Americans have less than $400 in their savings, this means millions of Americans will go untested.
@WaywardWinifred

By the way, as someone who's worked the climate emergency for three decades, I can fully recommend gallows humor as a survival tool in times like these. Whistling past the graveyard may be harder when you're wearing a N95 mask, but with practice anyone can get the hang of it.
Alex Steffen

Hi media friends, can we please stop saying things are closing “amid fears of coronavirus” when it’s actually “amid rational, well-intended and well-studied efforts to slow the spread of infection?” The frame of fear is helping no one.
Emily Withrow

I used to be the editor of an LGBT newspaper. We had print archives going back to 1976. The reporting during the early 80s when gay people were suddenly dying and people didn’t yet know why was very chilling and felt like this, with the addition of hate crimes.
@ituzzip

A tip for professors who may be moving to online classes: Feature your pets & kids prominently especially if they are doing dumb things. Don’t stop the lecture when your husband yells MOTHAFUCKA in the background cuz he dropped his drink.
Professor Ravioli

It's less of a "news cycle" these days and more of that Battlestar Galactica episode where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes.
Matt Ford

Just talked to family in Canada. Everyone with coronavirus symptoms getting tested. No wait period. Seems to be less crazy than here. They still have toilet paper and Purell. Oh. And the tests for the virus are free.
Jillian Barberie

Because some nitwit thought they would roll their own test and sell it to make a fortune. They could have simply accepted primers from WHO that every other developed nation used, but... corruption at the highest levels of government kept us down, and sick, and dying/dead.
Bryan William Jones

We are seeing the next 80 years of the climate emergency, playing out over 8 weeks. At the end of the day, all we have is our values. How we care for each other, how we decide what really matters, what we decide to do to help in our time of shared need. These are our choices.
Eric Holthaus

Why are famous people getting COVID-19? BECAUSE WE ONLY HAVE ENOUGH TESTS FOR FAMOUS PEOPLE.
@ASlavitt

We need more testing for coronavirus, less standardized testing for students. #priorities
Diane Ravitch

In the richest country the world has ever known, everything is broken and everyone is on their own.
David Wallace-Wells

You know shit is getting serious when they are preventing white people from entering America.
Jeet Heer

Are anti-vaxxers going to decline a coronavirus vaccine once it's developed?
David Roberts

I know you are all concerned about the extra work arising from suddenly moving classes online. Thankfully, now that we've canceled all faculty conference travel effective immediately, you'll have plenty of time to spare.
Associate Deans @ass_deans

People who have been extremely worried about COVID-19 for the past few weeks now know how millions of teenagers and scientists across the world have been feeling about the climate crisis for years.
@edgarrmcgregor

I haven't been on Twitter all day so maybe lots of people have already thought of this. Maybe the coronavirus will keep Joe Biden from touching women without their permission.
@pattho

“To be clear: MDs per 1,000: Italy 4.0, USA 2.6
Hospital beds per 1,000: Italy 3.2, USA 2.8
The problem is surge of COVID19 has overwhelmed northern Italian hospitals. This can happen here.”
- @ashishkjha (Director of Harvard’s @HarvardGH, incoming Dean @HealthyBrown
Ryan Goodman

I really didn't want to live through an historical moment, but here we are.
Blue Mudder

Maybe a good time to remind everyone that it is often we who keep each other safe and who band together in times of crisis when agencies and officials fail us. We’ll likely need to summon that energy in the months ahead.
Bree Newsome Bass

“Virus ship” and “virus cruise” — this industry has some marketing issues ahead of it:


Brian Bakst @Stowydad

To the people who have bought 27 bottles of soap leaving none on the shop shelves for others, you do realise that to stop getting coronavirus, you need other people to wash their hands too, you great thundering walloper.
GlennyRodge

Another wrinkle in the pandemic of our late-capitalist world: not enough ports for all the cruise ships to dock at once.
@pattho

Speaking of dumb...


Brent Toderian

Our country is like "have a job if you want to have health care" whereas jobs are like "don't get sick if you want to work here"
Raju Narisetti

Just got an email from UCONN saying that if you get the coronavirus and exhaust your 3 sick days per semester you have to use vacation days or personal leave days to recover. This is how you get people to come back to work when they are still contagious.
Lydia Kiesling

That point probably came earlier, but definitely as of today: An important step in preparing for a pandemic is knowing when to stop making jokes
Chris Steller (March 7)

It’s so fascinating to me that in all the ways we’re more interconnected to each other than ever before, all the ways in which people move around the world, the thing driving the spread of this in the US is a cruise ship, a bizarre relic of an archaic means of transportation.
bag of moons

Epidemiologist tweetstorms are life-changing. Not in a good way.
Chris Steller

Health care, MAGA style: If we don't test, our numbers of confirmed cases stay low! We can *pretend* outbreaks are contained even as they run rampant unchecked! Numbers & optics over human lives, FTW!
N. K. Jemisin

I'm old enough to remember when community transmission meant a local volunteer radio station
Chris Steller

The coronavirus is coming straight at our fragile, confusing, unfair, greed-driven and cruel health care system. We need Medicare4All.
Zephyr Teachout

Next, there were many on Mafia Mulligan's buggering of the pandemic (for fun and profit!) specifically:

Trump compared coronavirus to the flu. He said it was a hoax. Told people it would pass without anyone dying. Now he's saying there were others calling it a hoax, saying it was just the flu. And he's bragging that he'll only oversee 250,000 dead. Never. Forget. What. He's. Done.
Jared Yates Sexton

4 Americans tragically lost lives in Benghazi attack and the GOP held 33 hearings on it. Trump is now saying 100-200,000 dead Americans would be considered a success
Ari Berman

Accusing nurses and doctors of stealing protective gear during a pandemic as they’re trying to save lives would ruin the chance of a re-election in a normal world.
Erick Fernandez

Coronavirus arrived in Canada same time and so far 63 died. The US equivalent would be 630. Instead, US is at 2,413 – 4X the Canadian rate. Why? Testing at 3X the US rate. Isolation. Healthcare. A Prime Minister who has told the truth. Premiers & mayors who told the truth. No FoxNews.
@BowmanNancy

He sacrificed the Puerto Ricans and you didn't resist. He sacrificed the children, you didn't resist. He sacrificed the Kurds, you turned your backs. Noe he is sacrificing YOU. The best time to start resisting was 3 years ago. The second best time is NOW.
yobaba

During her testimony at the impeachment hearings, Prof. Karlan predicted Trump extorting U.S. governors over disaster relief — this is exactly what he is doing with Coronavirus aid.
Kaivan Shroff

You'd think a President openly treating the treasury as his personal slush fund to give to states that are "nice" to him would be something those with the power to remove him could stand together against and give him an ultimatum. What mice they are.
Schooley

There is no excuse whatsoever for the media’s failure to do better after four years of this. The abject failure to accurately report the truth rather than just regurgitate whatever Trump said like brainless stenographers is now getting people killed. Inexcusable. Utter failure.
The Hoarse Whisperer

If Trump plays games with relief funds for New York, the city should seize his hotels by eminent domain and use them as hospitals.
@tomtomorrow

Trump argues he alone is synonymous with the state, that there’s no authority or judgment above his. He does this repeatedly. This wk he & his supporters made eugenics-based arguments about letting ppl w disabilities & other conditions die preventable deaths 4 the sake of the state
Bree Newsome Bass

Question: If the US President, backed by the Republican Party, takes punitive action against Democratic-governed states, knowing full well it will kill a lot of people in those states - is that not Civil War by another name?
@mateosfo

Y’all need to promise me that if we live through this you will never, ever forgive a single person who had the constitutional ability to do something to remove this madman from office and chose not to do it.
Jamison Foser

The leader is urging his followers to die for him to keep him from having to admit fallibility and it's not some tiny cult but half the country and it's being broadcast on many channels live daily and nobody with the power to stop him is even hinting that they might use it.
Schooley

Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse.
Hillary Clinton

Our shitprez is bitching about how invasive the Covid test is and excuse me, I've had multiple hands shoved up my vagina to try to pull out a a single damn baby - and you are bitching about a swab up your fucking nose that could save millions of lives FUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUU
Sarah Thyre

Hillary Clinton could be President right now. Hillary Clinton. Say what you want about her but I cannot even conceptualize the gap between how Donald Trump has handled this crisis, and how Hillary Clinton would have done it.
@csilverandgold

Today Pence said directives would go out tomorrow that only inpatient persons can be tested. He wants people passing this virus until they are so sick they must be hospitalized before they can even get a test. That’s insane and being done to keep numbers of positives down.
@PhoenixGirl73

What if the National Governors Association organized a briefing every day at the same time as the WH briefing, and a few governors each day could describe what their states are doing, what lessons they’ve learned, what they need from citizens and the feds. And networks covered that instead.
Seth Masket @smotus

Azar learns of the risk Jan 3; he can’t get time with the president till Jan 18; “When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market.” Ugh.
Lessig

“Hillary Clinton was at times, you could argue, over-prepared.” - Chuck Todd, three years before a buffoon refused to prepare for a pandemic.
The Hoarse Whisperer

Thinking about how the pandemic will obviously be worst in big cities, and how in 2 weeks the line from conservative media will be that the president handled this perfectly and it's the Democratic mayors and blue state governors that screwed it up.
@JonIsAwesomest

"Believing and selling other people on your own BS is an adaptive trait in a real estate developer, but literally the worst trait in public health. You couldn't find a bigger personality and worldview mismatch than that." -Chris Hayes
@pattho

Fox News before: “Pandemic” is an impeachment plot
Fox News now: Dear Leader has always saved us from this dread pandemic that only he foresaw
Jesse Eisinger

wish there were some way to transfer my many coronavirus anxiety dreams to the senators who voted against impeaching this motherfucker
Nicole Chung

Here is Pres Trump in his own words (and tweets) as compiled by the @NBCNews White House Unit. Read them, save them and don’t forget them so when he says “I’ve always known this is a real pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” you can actually call him out on it
Ayman Mohyeldin

What does it say about our country that we replaced a constitutional scholar who was a faithful husband and good father with a reality TV show host--who had a failed casino, failed university, failed airline and has cheated on all his wives?
Daryl Sturgis

I see how hard I am working, and my husband is working, and my kids’ teachers are working, and my partners are working, and so many people are working to keep things running as best we can, and how Trump’s cronies continue to protect him in his ineptitude, and it kills me.
Daniel Summers @WFKARS

racism and ecocide in one tweet. incredible
Eric Holthaus, quoting a Mafia Mulligan tweet that supported the airlines and referred to the "Chinese Virus"

It appears to me that the Trump administration and @GOP moved *extremely* quickly to erect concentration camps for children seeking asylum, but I see no evidence of any effort to use Army Corps to set up temporary ICU and hospital units.
@jljacobson

In January, German scientists developed the first test for COVID-19 and the World Health Organization offered the test to countries around the world and 60 countries accepted. We were not one of them.
Charles P. Pierce

When Jonas Salk invented the (unpatented) polio vaccine, President Eisenhower offered it to “every country that welcomed the knowledge, including the Soviet Union.” Now we’ve got this asshole.
Jennifer Wright

Trump tried to poach German scientists working on a cure for coronavirus and offered cash so the vaccine would be exclusive to the USA
Business Insider

He really can’t do anything but congratulate himself. He can’t speak coherently. He can’t do anything but prioritize the economy and politics over human lives. He can’t stop lying. It’s just so horrible.
roxane gay

Since the coronavirus test involves literally sticking a swab up someone’s nose, I will strongly doubt Trump took it, unless there are photos of that swab going right up the schnoz. He lies about everything. Everything.
Amanda Marcotte

What if you put all the worst students and the biggest assholes you remember from high school together and let them be in charge of the country at a moment that could mean life or death to millions? It's not, sadly, a thought experiment. We're here and it's going as you'd expect.
David Rothkopf

Two things hurting America right now:
* Coronavirus
* Dunning-Kruger effect
@ryanbeckwith

I’ve been thinking whether in American presidential history there’s ever been an act of cowardice and impotence as brazen as Donald Trump's “I don’t take responsibility at all” comment, followed by his efforts — 3+ years into his term — to blame his predecessors.
Jack Goldsmith

Just a thought, but maybe any journalist who ever covered Trump from the point of view of, "you may not agree with him, but you gotta love his shoot-from-the-hip style" should be mandatorily infected with the coronavirus?
Frank Conniff

"I don't take responsibility at all" is perhaps the most honest thing Trump has ever said.
Matthew Yglesias

If you’re a journalist in today’s press conference with Donald Trump, press him to promise he’s committed to holding free and fair elections in November. This has to start happening immediately and it has to coincide with any emergency measures. There’s no time to waste.... Listen. just mentioning the possibility of canceling elections isn't going to give Trump the idea. TRUMP HAS THE IDEA ALREADY. The Right Wing media has already been floating this. His advisers are talking about this. This is about constructing a defense.
Jared Yates Sexton

I feel like it should be bigger news that the President of the United States was willing to kill large numbers of Americans in order to boost his re-election campaign. A previous tweet of this quote did not make it adequately clear that it is Trump who did not push for adequate testing, not Secretary of Health and Human Services Azar.
@ddiamond

I honestly think if Trump resigned there would be a rebound in the markets. A big one.
Jennifer Rubin

I keep thinking about all the Republicans and staff members who kept telling me off the record they knew Trump was dangerous and incompetent but they were afraid of mean tweets. Mean. Tweets.
Jared Yates Sexton

A reminder that before the Trump administration was mishandling a pandemic, its priority was purging civil servants insufficiently loyal to Trump, rather than ensuring the federal government was competently staffed in the event of a catastrophe.
Adam Serwer

That man is an abuser using abusive tactics on an entire country. On the world even. This is a nightmare.
@NaniCoolJ

Since Trump first showed up his public has been forced to weigh his bigotry against his incompetence. They liked the former more than they worried about the latter. We’re now seeing (yet another) consequence of that disastrous decision.
jelani cobb

I just feel like "Trump presidency / coronavirus pandemic / climate change / global white supremacy" is not the existence that I ordered. I'm pretty sure I asked for something better than this. I'd like to speak to the manager to request a refund for this matrix . . .
Crystal Fleming @alwaystheself

it's like mom always said, electing a degenerate narcissist in cognitive decline is all fun and games until there's a global pandemic
@tomtomorrow

Jared Kushner is watching old episodes of House and taking notes. Everything is under control.
@BobbyBigWheel

There is literally nothing coronavirus-related that Mike Pence is better qualified to do than calling Rush Limbaugh and telling him to stop using his show to tell millions of people that the virus is not a big deal.
Matthew Gertz

"When presented with a list of descriptions about how Trump might handle coronavirus, 56% do not trust Trump to tell Americans the truth about the outbreak, and the same number (56%) do not trust Trump to worry about the country more than himself."
David Roberts

I mean is there anything more poetic than Trump being taken out by a Chinese Flu named after a Mexican beer?
@ImpeachmentHour

I just enjoy how you can read “white washing” over Pence’s shoulder during this #caronavirus press briefing:


Kent @windsorknot

What’s shocking is that Donald Trump and Trumpworld still seem to think they can just Mueller Report or Impeachment away #Coronavirus - falling to realize that it’s an entirely unfamiliar set of rules that they can’t bend to their will.
Jon Reinish

On top of all the things brought up in this piece, the president wore a campaign hat to tour the CDC. Incredible.
AJ Vicens

Trump’s entire life has taught him that he can say whatever bullshit he needs to say to get through the day, and no one - not the press, not law enforcement nor anyone else - will eve really catch up with him. Now he’s trying to bullshit his way through a global pandemic.
Adam Jentleson

Trump’s gonna get people killed, out of ego and incompetence, and the New York Times *does not give a fuck.* If we found out at lunch Hillary Clinton had gone two days without updating the apps on her phone, there’d have been six NYT articles online before dinner.
Jamison Foser

This presidency is like if a small town made a joke out of electing a dog mayor who routinely got into trash and then a major disaster hit and for some reason everyone just expected the dog to make decisions.
Jared Yates Sexton

More broadly, there was a lot of commentary on the political aspects of the pandemic, including how it highlights the way our lack of movement toward action on the climate crisis is a failure of political will more than anything else, and how it reveals the lack of resilience and justice in our society:

The fact that Republicans are trying to ban abortion during the pandemic but gun stores are considered essential businesses tells you exactly how “pro-life” these people are.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

American deaths from the coronavirus now exceed American deaths from 9/11. This is no big deal, according to the people who spent every day since 9/11 exploiting it for their purposes while being contemptuous for the communities directly affected by it.
Adam Serwer

The air is clear, fresh, and decarbonized. Now is time to collect data and stories: emissions, noise, traffic, who is commuting and how, who is not and why, who is delivering, who is receiving. This must be documented. The pandemic will last years AND the climate crisis is now:


Jason Henderson @StreetFightSF

Conservatives now: “Actually, compared to the number of annual deaths from flu...”
Conservatives in six months: “Actually, compared to the number of deaths in all of human history...”
Sam Freedman @pixelatedboat

I think one of the reasons we can’t bring ourselves to take the action we need on climate is because we can’t hold or process the grief, and it makes us run from the problem. We can’t run from this problem [the pandemic]. How will it force us to change?
ashley fairbanks

Foreigners are wondering how the US response to the virus can be so poor and the simple issue is this--a large segment of our government officials deeply resent black and brown Americans and only want to support policies that will not aid us as effectively as the rest of America.
Cheryl Lynn Eaton

For months Buttigieg and Biden blatantly lied that Medicare For All would "flip a switch" and "kick millions off their healthcare plans" while cynically omitting the years-long phase in period. Well, this week their lie became a reality, not because of M4A but because we don't have M4A
Adam H. Johnson

Turns out that “death panels” were just another conservative projection. But it’s sweet that so far, they prefer a volunteer coronavirus army.
Charlie Quimby

I'm sure there are people who still believe we need to look for "common ground" with the people who voted for him, and I just think if we ever find that ground we should probably set it on fire
Nicole Chung

We are releasing people from jail who are there for misdemeanors, we are preventing families from being evicted, we are sending people checks for food, we are giving the homeless places to live. We don’t have to wait for a pandemic to do these things, we should always do them.
Clint Smith

Can you change your Zoom background to a world where we listened to science, took care of each other, and made good decisions? Asking for a friend.
Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy

I'd like to think americans have a breaking point for the amount of abuse they're willing to endure from the ruling class. perhaps being ordered to return to work with hospitals and eventually entire streets overflowing with the sick & dying will be that point! we'll see I guess.
@robrousseau

Republicans are working overtime to make you think we have just two options: people either die from the virus, or the economy crashes and they die from poverty. There's still a third option: pay everyone to stay at home. The billionaires get a little poorer, but everyone lives.
Desirina Boskovich

COVID-19 has taught us that what matters most in life is good health, our loved ones, and community. In the wake of this mess, let's build an economy that's organized around human well-being and ecological stability instead of endless capital accumulation.
Jason Hickel

Genocidal oligarch party?
@ravikanodia

The Republican idea that you have to sacrifice the lives of older people and disabled people for the good of the fatherland, the dear leader, and the economy, is not a new one.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

The current situation has revealed deep cracks in our system: replacing public transit with gig economy drivers who don't get health care or sick leave; the gig economy itself; the lethal inadequacy of private-sector broadband and private-sector health-care, and beyond.
@doctorow

Sen McConnell and other Senate Republicans have been reaching out to fed judges nominated by Presidents Reagan and Bush I and II to say if you are going to retire, the next few months would be a good time to do it.
Carl Hulse

This crisis starkly shows how we're all in this together. It's time to retire "rugged individualism," always an excuse for systemic inequity, and embrace compassionate socialism as we create a society that works for us all and can more robustly weather the climate storms ahead.
ClimateHuman

Young people ignoring COVID-19 and going out to bars, clubs, and theme parks is the same energy as boomers ignoring the climate crisis. Our belief that bad things only happen to other people is alive and well. We have to end that belief before climate change becomes unsolvable.
Edgar McGregor

It's really important to remember that there's no separating the climate emergency from the global health crisis from inequality and racism and capitalism. These crises don't just happen by chance, they are a product of a failed system, and we can choose a different system.
Eric Holthaus

In the United States, one political party does everything it can to undermine, underfund and generally undo government for ideological and greed reasons. Then when an emergency happens where competent government is badly needed, they cry “See, you can’t count on government.” #GOP
Brent Toderian

Society has been organized for decades around treating people less than human, denying them dignity, denying them essential services and medical care, denying a better world could be had if only we deemphasized profit and strived for something decent. That’s how we got here.
Jared Yates Sexton

Will the cult of corporate greed continue its death march in BOTH major parties???!
Will contemplating their own mortality force neoliberals to finally realize that a safety net is ..... A GOOD THING?!?
Stay tuned for the next episode of “The Final Days of Our Lives”...
Crystal Fleming @alwaystheself

Totally random and unexpected that the three biggest US stock market collapses in our time —1987, 2008, 2020—occurred in the last years of an economically incompetent, fiscally reckless GOP Presidency.
Nikhil Pal Singh

“Schools are closing? Where do I send my children?”
“How do I afford healthcare?”
“I can’t afford to take off work!”
“I don’t have guaranteed housing if I leave school!”
The issues the virus is causing are literally everything progressives have been trying to fix for years.
Skyler Johnson

Every other major democracy in the world doesn't have to worry about anything on that list. They also don't have to worry about getting shot whenever they go outside. Because they don't have a Republican Party.
laura olin

nice country you've got there, would be a shame if a pandemic laid bare the cruelty inherent in its very structure
Nathan Goldman

This virus is exposing two fundamental flaws in our society: children's nutrition being tied to public schools and healthcare being tied to employment.
@Kaos_Vs_Control

The two biggest obstacles to an actually effective coronavirus response are 1) the Trump White House, and 2) the GOP Senate. They are — and this isn't hyperbole! — incapable of doing anything other than trying to give rich people and corporations even more tax cuts.
Matt O'Brien @ObsoleteDogma

Hey everyone, I was reading through the libertarian handbook and for some reason, I can’t find anything on how to handle a deadly pandemic. What am I missing? What is the Libertarian solution here?
Nick Hanauer

Libertarians: Government sucks, let's hollow out the civil service
*Pandemic comes, hollowed-out civil service is unable to respond effectively*
Libertarians: See, told you government sucks
@Noahpinion

Need I remind you, the classic DC definition of a Keynesian is a Republican in a recession with their party in the White House.
Jared Bernstein

late-stage capitalism put under even the slightest stress looks exactly what capitalists claim socialism looks like:


@ChairmanSolo

Which segues into the economic devastation caused by the pandemic and the various state and federal government responses to it:

It's amazing, the airline application for billions in assistance is 'what's your name and where can I send the check?' The application for food stamps requires ten pages of detailed personal financial records.
Matt Stoller

Zoom is now valued at 50% more than all the US airlines put together.
pixelatedboat

Just about everyone is saying that they can't live on $1200. Wanna know how they got $1200? The fed. min. wage is $7.25 x 40hr/week, so for 4 weeks thats $1160 a month. That's rounded up to $1200. Think about that next time you say min. wage workers don't deserve a livable wage
@BrownSugaSaraah

Without a complete rent freeze a $1,200 check is just a landlord direct deposit. This entire stimulus package is nothing but a bailout for corporations, landlords, and members of Congress themselves — even the bare scraps offered to workers aren’t really our own money.
@redpomgranat

Just remember, folks. The world you want after this is all over is the world you're supporting now. Order everything from Amazon and that's what will take over. Support your local businesses and you help them be part of The After.
Frances Bula @fabulavancouver

The biggest U.S. airlines spent 96% of free cash flow over the last decade to buy back shares of their own stock in order to boost executive bonuses and please wealthy investors. Now, taxpayers are bailing them out to the tune of $50 billion. It's the same old story.
Robert Reich

Let cruise ships die. Let’s just have a world where they just aren’t there. Let em start from scratch again.
@TomBasgen

For the love of god... give every American $2000/month to consume digitally, use the national guard to distribute food, at shut this country down before we don’t have a country left to rebuild.
Benjamin Dixon

Everyone arguing that we should go back to work without containing the pandemic because the economy is too important should be tried in The Hague
Kath Barbadoro

basically i think they're afraid to send everyone checks not because of the immediate cost, but because they realized people would start to wonder why they aren't getting decent governmentt benefits all the time
mark @kept_simple

Just a quick little reminder: the economy exists for the wellbeing of humans. If humans are suffering or dying to preserve said economy it isn't working.
Anna Jane Joyner

I hope the term "key workers" remains in place long after this crisis. We are now learning how important "low skilled" workers really are.
Darren McGarvey @lokiscottishrap

As a former secretary of labor, I can tell you that the airlines don't deserve a $50 billion bailout. In the last 10 years, they spent 96% of their cash flow to buy back shares of their own stock in order to boost executive bonuses. They shouldn't see a dime of taxpayer money.
Robert Reich

i'm sure i'm not the first person to point out the irony of America being bankrupted by an illness
blaine capatch

I'm CEO of a small company that processes payments for other small biz. Our data shows 50% of small biz revenue is gone already. Meanwhile Walmart stock is at record high and Amazon is hiring 100k people. No joke: We're on a path toward small business extinction - swallowed whole
Dan Price

Today would be a good day for the Republicans to decide to help Democrats pass a massive federal response to the pandemic and economic disaster.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

$3000 to every person, every month, until one month after the crisis is over. In two months this amount will look like a steal at twice the price. This crisis requires us to be responsibly reckless with our spending.
Zachary Wefel

airlines: you wanna change your flight bc your "dad died?" lol ok $875
airlines: you're hungry? here's two crackers and a walnut $22
airlines: you want two seats TOGETHER? fuck you, asshole $150
airlines: you want internet that's faster than 1995 dial-up? $57
also airlines:


@hellolanemoore

It's the market's job to absorb losses at a time like this. You're an investor in stocks and bonds, you're taking risks. And the risk of a pandemic is one of the risks you're taking. You're part of the world's stock of loss-absorbing capital. That's what it means to have wealth.
Felix Salmon

Imagine if ahead of the 9-11 attacks Senators had been briefed exactly how it would happen, went out, sold all their stocks, put their money in companies with military contracts, then told Americans everything was fine. Same thing. Arguably worse.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat

Coronavirus was the spark of this crisis, inequality is making it spread. Making the wealthy bear the costs of recovery is the only way forward.
Eric Holthaus

There are two ways to solve this economic crisis. 1) Cancel the debts and rents of individuals and small businesses for the affected months; 2) Tax wealth and use the proceeds to cover those debts and rents.
Jason Hickel

It was nice living in a society where "don't eat your seed corn" was just a metaphor.
@pattho

Richard Burr withheld his knowledge of grave danger. He allowed the president to call it a hoax. Then he sold his stocks. Then he told his rich friends. Murder.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat

One of Elizabeth Warren's plans was banning individual stock ownership by members of Congress. Could see that one gaining momentum amid this sudden bipartisan explosion of coronavirus legislating.
Benjy Sarlin

We already have a structure that protects the wealthy and powerful, and that still isn’t enough for these people. They chose to violate the legal order that *already* protects them in order to raid the coffers even more as the world is in crisis. Stunning moral depravity.
Imani Perry

Reports of GOP officials dumping stock while staying publicly upbeat, warning donors of the COVID-19 threat while keeping silent otherwise: this is what it looks like when your rulers don’t care whether you and your family live or die.
Jedediah Britton-Purdy

“The risk is that even as the most acute phase of the coronavirus crisis hopefully abates, transit will enter a death spiral of lost revenue, service cuts, & ridership losses from which it’s incredibly difficult to recover.” America’s mass transit agencies need a bailout, too. Public transit is facing a possible death spiral if Congress doesn’t act.
Brent Toderian

There should only be two responses to a bailout request.
If it's a vital industry, nationalize it and keep the workers on the job.
If it's not a vital industry, guarantee income for the workers and let the investors eat the loss.
No cash for investors. Not one goddamn dime.
@carterforva

Older Millennials are so screwed. We entered the job market in a recession. Now we're entering the years when we should be moving up and our incomes should be increasing quickly toward their peak... and there are massive nationwide layoffs and the beginning of a second recession.
Jill Filipovic

Everyone with a fake job gets to stay home and get paid to drop funny gifs into Slack, everyone with a real job has to be a frontline pandemic worker or get fired.
@MikiZarzycki

It's astonishing how quickly the national economy has come to a screeching halt. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't a good idea to build an economy where most people can't afford to miss a single paycheck.
@RealBNewland

In a month, we will be laughing in disgust at the stimulus plans floated right now. Getting thru this crash will take so much more than we can currently imagine but it's also doable, if we can imagine. Write some big checks now. Pay people to stay home, businesses to shutter.
kar nels

If I were an airline going bankrupt I would simply stop getting a latte at Starbucks every day
@CrystalPepsi

No industry -- not airlines, not hotels, not cruise ships -- should be bailed out. They can stay in business by borrowing at rock-bottom rates, using their assets as collateral. Taxpayer money should be used to bail out people, not corporations.
Robert Reich

Funny how all the consumers/workers staying home brings the economy to its knees and the "job creators" aren't able to keep things running with their incredible boot straps. It's almost like the people at the bottom are the ones who actually create wealth.
Sergio Siano

It's starting to hit me what things will be like when the worst of this passes and we go outside again and half the small businesses are permanently shuttered, for reasons that would have been entirely preventable if we lived in a functioning society. None of the people who ran them or worked in them will have done anything wrong. I don't think anyone fully appreciates how much our government hates actual entrepreneurs, as opposed to faceless corporations, and how little we're prepared to do to save them.
David Klion

I know that nothing has ever "brought the revolution" in this country in the past few decades, but if Congress financially bails out banks, casinos, cruise ships, etc. instead of people, nonprofits, and small businesses... They are finally going to be in for it.
@pattho

Pretty weird seeing people scoff at the idea of paying artists relief funds during this shutdown while also answering every "what are you doing during quarantine" post with "binge-ing tv shows, movies, books, comics and podcasts."
@ZacharyJLuna

Bailouts are coming. I'd like to suggest one simple rule for Democrats to follow right now:
Bailout people, not corporations.
Not banks, not airlines, not cruises, not oil.
People.
Stephanie Taylor

Every system in the U.S. is about to fail because every system is built against caregiving. Caregiving was always supposed to exist outside of the workplace, handled by an army of unpaid women that no longer exists. This isn’t just a disaster of capitalism, it’s patriarchy.
Khara Jabola-Carolus @PolishedJaded

Can someone explain to me again why it's reasonable and fair to ask the lowest paid employees to save up enough to have a cushion for emergencies but it's unreasonable and unfair to ask wealthy organizations and corporations to save up enough to pay employees in emergencies?
@nnschiller

$1.5 trillion could be the spark that puts us on a path to a Green New Deal and a habitable planet, turning the tide of history away from our climate emergency. Injected into the markets, it barely lasted an hour.
Eric Holthaus

Coronavirus is cancelling everything but your student debt. But student debt relief would help tens of millions of people weather the coming economic storm. Italy is already suspending mortgage and debt payments. We need to demand the same approach here.
Astra Taylor

Instead of the panicking and reactively spending $1.5T to stop the Dow from crashing for 15 seconds, the Fed could have sent a $12.5k check to every family in America. That would actually allow many families to weather this storm for a while.
Saikat Chakrabarti

Can’t believe we forgot to stock up on a functioning social safety net
Anna Merlan

2008: Banks were run by incompetents (epicenter US) and they didn’t trust each other. Recipe for a financial crisis.
2020: Countries are run by incompetents (epicenter US) and they don’t trust each other. Recipe for...?
Jesse Eisinger

seems like a good time for the government to spend a few trillion interest-free dollars creating millions of well-paying union jobs building a green economy.
@SeanMcElwee

The U.S. is always included in lists of “developed nations,” but it’s not obvious to me that we should be. Our inability to manage COVID-19 in any way, for lack of national healthcare or paid sick leave, makes clear that we’re simply not in the same class as those nations.
Waldo Jaquith

The outraged question of cost arises for every $1 spent feeding a child.
But we’ll find $ to drug-test each parent, simply to establish worthiness to access that $1
Tired: making sure Americans have the resources they need to stay safe during a global pandemic
Wired: using a global pandemic as an excuse to bail out your hotels with taxpayer dollars
Ron Wyden

If any sentient being is around to assess the remains of our middling "civilization" years hence, the United States will be remembered as a society that demonstrated the inability of material domination and capitalist extremism to provide peace, well-being and shared prosperity.
Crystal Fleming @alwaystheself

Well, that's enough about the pandemic, right? Except as it will pop up in the context of other topics.

So let's talk about the election. Remember how there was a Democratic primary election night at the beginning of the month, when Biden won big and Black voters finally got to have a say and Warren lost a lot and Bernie didn't win enough? Remember that?

Is it too late for the next president to be an expert in bankruptcy law (instead of an expert in going bankrupt)?
@Fava

I just don't see "Biden flubs his lines too often" being a winning campaign theme for the guy who announced a shutdown of trade with Europe on live national television when that's not part of the actual policy.
Jacob T. Levy

The age split in Michigan is remarkable as is the absence of a split by more traditional demographic divides like race or education. All kinds of old people prefer Biden and all kinds of younger people prefer Bernie.
Matthew Yglesias

I can more easily imagine what it’s like to be a pufferfish than I can imagine being excited about Joe Biden.
Ben Ehrenreich

Contrary to what white people believe, there is no nationwide negro weekly conference call. I can’t understand why it seems unfathomable that black voters, for varied and separate reasons, came to the same conclusion. White voters do it ALL THE TIME. That’s how we got Trump
michaelharriot

So then the implication is that they voted for Biden because he has ties to the community similar to Jackson (not on the scale as Jackson but Biden has 30 years of favor in black southern communities Sanders doesn’t have) OR that they only voted for Biden because of Obama?
@AriBeyMunroe

You know what's unpleasant? Insulin that costs $300 a week and kids growing up without hope in a climate emergency. Biden feels like a death sentence to millions of people, that's why they are shouting.
Eric Holthaus

This seems like a great time to remind everyone that Ranked Choice Voting eliminates the need to vote strategically.
Doryen Edward Chin (they/them)

tired: getting pissed off at other voters for who they voted in the primary
wired: getting pissed off at the DNC for the 18-month scam of a primary where the rules keep changing every three weeks in their pursuit to suffocate grassroots advocacy of antipoverty policy
@girlziplocked

Understand this: It’s not that people simply mean “you were rude to me so I won’t vote for your guy.” It’s that people mean, “your movement doesn’t seem to want me, and your coalition doesn’t seem to be open to me. I’m worried the execution of your policy will be the same.”
@MsPackyetti

I keep hearing how dumb Black voters are for choosing Biden. Let's go to the tape, shall we? The majority of white voters picked Triple the deficit Reagan, Read my lips Poppy Bush, WMDs Dubya and the Trumpovirus we have now. Black voters ain't the problem, boo.
Daryl Sturgis

wild how "curing every major disease" is one of the only policy plans Biden talks about on the stump and how it gets zero attention whereas Medicare for All is subject to endless scrutiny
@lib_crusher

Stop telling your daughters they can be president when you are unwilling to vote for a woman president.
June Diane Raphael

After Biden’s upset last night, I am reminded of something James Baldwin said about Jimmy Carter’s election. “[I]f Carter is reelected, it will be by means of the black vote, and it will not be a vote for Carter. It will be a coldly calculated risk, A MEANS OF BUYING TIME.”
Jim Snell

The TOTAL contributions to EVERY Democrat running for state senate in AZ, CO, FL, GA, MI, NC, and PA equal 10% of what Bloomberg spent to win in... American Samoa.
He could have funded every Dem state leg candidate in seven key states... ten times over. Instead he won Samoa!
Charlotte Alter

I mean . . . Joe Biden? Joe fuggin Biden. Really. How is he even in the race? How is he even a politician? How are any of these people politicians? Joe Biden versus Trump? Those could be the choices in the year of our Lord 2020? What in the holographic universe is this bullshit?
Crystal Fleming @alwaystheself

Perhaps the biggest indictment of the Democratic party is that they can get the moderate candidates to drop out to coalesce around Biden (that's fine) but can't get Bloomberg out because he's got money and he's a donor and they can't stand up to those guys.
Wes Burdine

It’s so disempowering that folks keep saying we’re the base of the Democratic party and everyone panders to us in superficial ways, yet we’re still caught in cycle of responding to whatever white voters might do instead of pushing our own policy agenda and making white politicians capitulate to it.
Bree Newsome Bass

have yet to see a "wow we have to work harder to appeal to black boomers" take tonight by leftists on here. every single tweet I see is "wow black voters in SC are ignorant/have stockholm syndrome/are not representative of the country" which is racist erasure and not a way to win
josie duffy rice

And there were even a few on how to run an election in general:

The only reason we are not all already voting by mail is voter suppression
Laura Hudson

Yes. There are multiple ways to register and there’s no excuse to wait until the last minute. Kudos to these kids for hanging in line, but this was an avoidable problem.
@KevinAllenSmith

Shout out to the Natives in North Dakota for organizing powerfully...despite North Dakota's CONSTANT effort to suppress the Native Vote, those folks came thru and delivered. Incredible job family.
@BigIndianGyasi

centrists will always prefer to blame people for systemic failures rather than systems, because they’re, at their core, really just conservatives.
@isaiah_kb (responding to comments on long lines of voters at the polls)


Automatic vote by mail, meaning every registered voter is sent a ballot, is cheaper than operating thousands of polling places, data shows it increases voter participation & in a period of infectious disease risk its much safer. Not much of an excuse for states not embracing it.
Lee Fang

There were still tweets, especially earlier in the month, on my usual topics. Later in the month, they often overlapped with the pandemic, since it so clearly reveals our society's weaknesses and results of its oppressions.

First, there was racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:

I’ll tell you exactly why the country didn’t act. We saw Asian faces suffering and white people said cool, so it’s not hitting human beings yet. America’s racism is a national security weakness.
Xeni Jardin, #stayathome

My ten year old is not having it:


@Prof_RBW

“Racism means in this country Black children are treated like adults and Black adults are treated as children.” –Dr. Ibram
@Natalie_Zwerger

“Lighter-skinned players were more likely to be described for their performance and mental abilities. Darker-skinned players were more likely to be described for their physical characteristics.”
Howard Henderson (citing research on March Madness)

Racism and sexism are measured not just by intent but most importantly by impact. And the myth of meritocracy tells us that a system is meritorious as long as the pool is diverse even if it never or rarely chooses one of the diverse candidates. And that is utter bullshit.
Brittney Cooper

There is simply no way to reconcile the idea that the criminal justice system is racist and classist with the idea that people in prison shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you know this system disproportionately harms brown black and poor people, how can you keep them from voting?
josie duffy rice

We need to talk about whiteness being largely a form of socialization in this society that instructs you to feel entitled to every space, thing and person you encounter.
Bree Newsome Bass

Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:

Imagine if only women were in charge of this pandemic.
amandarama

Would like to try it without the "of this pandemic" part too.
James @eBikeSTP

Women can be killed for:
Having too much sex
Too little sex
Being too pretty
Rejecting the wrong man
Accepting the wrong man
These are things that happen regularly. Because boys are taught that access to women's bodies is a God-given right. From their very first fairy tale through a lifetime of entertainment media, boys are taught that women are wages earned for work done. We are taught that there IS a woman for us and that human history dictates that. Having sex with a woman is a rite of passage to becoming a "real man." Without having sex, a boy is denied his birthright -- his manhood. Sexual rejection is existential rejection. Women hold the keys to our masculinity. Hence the fear and resentment. Toxic masculinity teaches that men cannot assert their manhood absent sex with a women that they alone possess. So our relationship with women is set from the start as a paradoxical tug of war. We need them to be ourselves. It would make so much more sense to recognize that sexuality is something sought in equal measure by all genders across a gradient. Women don't want sex...Men need sex...But no. We set up a false and binary conflict.
5'7" Black Male @absurdistwords

There *remains* an unnoticed army of unpaid women doing the community work necessary where capitalists have failed to engage. Non-profit founders, community organizers, other women doing important work without pay because it needs doing. This is also a disaster of patriarchy.
julie kearns

It matters immensely that powerful men are being held accountable, but it matters just as much that the women who come forward to name them are still treated by too many people as the villains of the story.
@andizeisler

Losing an hour of International Women's Day because of Daylight Saving Time is the perfect metaphor for being a woman.
Sophie Vershbow

Oh, hey International Women's Day. Here are my wishes, based on a lifetime:
No one is defined, constrained, controlled, marginalized, humiliated ever again because of their sex or gender;
And:
Dudes gracefully accept sharing (and sometimes losing) power because of it.
Amen.
Mary Morse Marti

Sexism impacts everything except, of course, American presidential elections, where the only problem is bad female candidates.
@doctorow (commenting on a survey that found nine out of 10 people, across 75 countries, found to be biased against women)

The climate crisis and renewable energy:

To the people pointing out how clean the air is and how much lower emissions are due to COVID19 — you realize we don’t need a deadly virus to achieve this. This is what the world could be like if humanity would fully embrace the sustainability solutions we already have available.
Julia Pyper

Wealthiest 10% consume 20x energy than the bottom 10%
Top 10% use 187x more fuel than the poorest 10%
The problem isn't humanity - it's inequality.
Rage with us.
Extinction Rebellion

(For the record, in terms of societal disruption, COVID-19 is just a warm-up for the Climate Emergency.)
Alex Steffen

Wow... Earth is recovering
- Air pollution is slowing down
- Water pollution is clearing up
- Natural wildlife returning home
Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We’re the virus
@ThomasSchuIz

Humans are not “the virus.”
Indigenous people have shown that it is possible to live in balance with nature.
Colonialism and extraction for profit, those are the virus.
Lakota Law Project

A really important new paper shows in incredible detail something we already knew: The rich cause climate change. It turns out, the more money you make, the more you spend on the highest-polluting activities, like air travel and vehicle fuel. This is true across 86(!) countries:


Eric Holthaus

I fear I'm going to lose my temper at climate people who won't reduce their flying because climate change is a "systemic problem," but who are now tsk-tsking on Twitter about Americans' refusal to make sacrifices or forego satisfying their consumer preferences [due to the pandemic]. I mean, come *on*.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

Joe Biden's *entire 10-year climate plan* costs $1.7 trillion. We spent that *just today* on propping up the markets [due to the pandemic], with zero debate.
Eric Holthaus

Ban short-haul flights for climate? In an EU poll, 62% say yes. A majority of European citizens would support a ban on short-distance flights to fight climate change, according to a survey the European Investment Bank (EIB) said on Tuesday.
@robintransition

This moment of chaos is a time for us to decide who we are going to be during the rest of the climate emergency. Deepening our trust in mutual aid, not competition, could form the basis of a new collective story.
Eric Holthaus

Just in: This winter was up to 7.9°C (14.2°F) warmer than normal for large parts of Europe and Asia. By far the warmest winter there, and the 2nd warmest winter on record globally, according to NASA. We are in a climate emergency.
Eric Holthaus

The goal is to make decarbonization something that power wants to achieve rather than block.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

To be clear: Coronavirus causing mass death and reduced emissions is not something to cheer. That's eco-fascism. Petrostates and multinational oil companies engaging in an all-out price war that collapses the industry *is* something to cheer. That is capitalism eating itself.
Eric Holthaus

If fossil fuel extraction is reduced by Covid-19, that's awesome, but if it turns people into fearful, huddled shadows of their potential, hoarding and hunkering, they'll not be incentivized to fight the climate threat. So how do we as climate messengers deal with this paradox?
@carbonivorous

In the EU, airlines that do not fly at least 80% of scheduled flights risk losing their spots to competitors, so Europe's skies are filled with largely empty "ghost planes," burning tons of fuel for no reason.
GlennyRodge

Scientists: you should wash your hands because of Coronavirus.
People: I'm gonna stop flying, hoard masks, work from home & totally rearrange my life.
Also Scientists: the #ClimateCrisis will kill millions - we must use clean power & change how we get to work.
People: No way.
Nathaniel Stinnett

Europe + Asia + the Arctic just finished a winter that was 3-10°C (5-18°F) warmer than "normal". In several places, it was the first winter in recorded history with no measurable snow. We are in a climate emergency.
Eric Holthaus

The (meteorological) winter 2019/20 has ended, and it was an absolute scorcher over Europe and Russia. This is what a persistently positive Arctic Oscillation (weather) and Climate Change can do in tandem. Remarkable.
Karsten Haustein

If we can stop flying because of coronavirus, we can also stop flying to preserve a livable planet and prevent irreversible climate destruction.
ClimateHuman

I told this to Tom Steyer (who I think is a good guy) when he visited Denver a few years back, and I’m gonna say it again: he should buy a bunch of newspapers in fossil fuel states and give those newsrooms the mandate to aggressively cover the fossil fuel industry and climate change.
David Sirota

Livable cities and transportation:

In case at some point in the future we actually start taking public health seriously, remember: 22 U.S. states' constitutions prohibit spending ANY gas tax on sidewalks. These rules were written by oil companies primarily in the 1960s and should be overturned.
Angie Schmitt

Now that pedestrians require roughly the same effective width as a car, we should reallocate street space accordingly:


@QAGreenways

an unrealistic thing about the movie Wall-E is that air pollution still hasn't dissipated after 700 years. we now know it only takes ~3 weeks of no driving.
Peter Krupa

You might think a crash barrier would be used to protect pedestrians from an errant vehicle. Instead, this one is protecting utility poles:


@MattPinder1

It’s weird how often people say smartphones are the problem and then describe cars and car culture. Dangerous for walking? Creates disconnection? Isolates people from those around them? A barrier to creativity and being in nature? Dangerous to children? Hurts public spaces?
@happifydesign

The need for Spatial Distancing is illustrating the great value of many city-building elements that we’ve been talking about for years — wider sidewalks; porches and balconies; pedestrian streets; wide separated bike-lanes, and the general concept of the hyper-local “15 minute city.”
Brent Toderian

My two year old daughter crossed a semi busy street by herself when I was trying to get her brother. This driver woman slows down and is like “you’re welcome.” Like I messed up but uh thank you for not running over my child? People are bad. Is it really that big an imposition to tap on your brake to avoid killing a child? Parents are never supposed to slip up but drivers deserve a medal or something for not flying blind?
Angie Schmitt

I hope everyone gets an opportunity to walk around their city now that there are so few cars on the road. Note how pleasant it is, and also how much safer. Also note all the unproductive space usually given over to moving and storing vehicles. That is where our money has gone.
Charles Marohn

E-bicycles: all studies point in same direction. Riders use similar energy and oxygen uptake. People ride longer and more often, and no longer hills are an issue. #FutureOfCycling for All Ages Abilities. @880Cities
@Penalosa_G

New experience for me - a violent drivist yelled that I was “forcing her to waste gasoline” by riding my bike. She was stopped next to me with her window rolled down, and I started laughing, and asked her to say it again, and then she gave me the bird, and then the light changed
@mateosfo

Who's buying e-bikes? Everybody. While electric cars remain heavily subsidized in most of Europe, e-bikes are outselling electric cars by a factor of ten. In North America, we're just taking off:


@LdnOntBikeCafe

Just to keep up with inflation, the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax from 1993 should be 33.3 cents per gallon today. Today’s actual value: still 18.4 cents.
Costa Samaras

“Ride-hailing services now account for up to 13% of all vehicle traffic in major downtown areas. But rather than simply replacing other cars, Uber and Lyft are increasing the total number of car trips, and our collective carbon footprint” by 69% (via Grist). Ridesharing hurts the climate (if you aren’t actually sharing the ride).
Brent Toderian

Drive like you won’t kill people irrelevant of their relationship to you:


@wafoli

If your city still insists that they can’t afford public transit, what they really mean is that they can’t afford public transit AND still keep spending on big road projects that cost billions and induce more driving. And even THAT isn’t true, since transit is a proven investment.
Brent Toderian

The fact that we use off-duty police to let drivers get out of parking garages safely but make kids responsible for their own safety crossing the street is an indictment of our society’s priorities.
@mplsalex

The best transportation plan is a great land-use plan. But too many cities still let flawed traffic modelling actually determine or limit land-use, resulting in what I call the “sweet spot of failure” — enough density to cause local traffic problems, but not enough to solve them.
Brent Toderian

Next time someone tries to argue that it’s “social engineering” (cue ominous music) to make walking, biking and public transit more enjoyable, inform them that designing our current car dependency has been the largest and most damaging social engineering experiment in human history:


Brent Toderian

Income and wealth inequality, wage theft, and a better way to organize our economy (largely subsumed in the political and economic tweets about the pandemic):

Disney CEO Bob Iger is forgoing his entire salary which is proof that when rich people are given the chance, they will show us just how much they don't actually need any more money
Sarah Cooper

It's not just mergers--its a whole approach towards power and productivity. We need a society where Private Equity is discouraged, and small business lending is encouraged. A society where workers can choose between jobs instead of inhumane terms dictated by Spectrum or Amazon. Antimonopoly is health policy. The hospitals mergers waived through will kill people and make tens of thousands of more suffer. The manufacturing mergers and resultant single points of failure have crippled our capacity to make basic medical equipment fast. Stop the mergers.
Zephyr Teachout

what if the disease is unfettered capitalism
andi zeisler

And then there were the best of the rest, because even when the shit is hitting the fan, the world is coming apart at the seams, and all the metaphors are failing, you still have to whistle past the graveyard:

People make fun of Sally Field's character in Mrs. Doubtfire for not seeing through Robin Williams' ruse but accusing your nanny of secretly being your ex husband disguised as an elderly british woman is the sort of shot you don't take unless you're 100% certain
@ItsDanSheehan

Every newspaper should have a single mom who can barely pay the bills columnist. We miss so many important perspectives.
Angie Schmitt

Quarantine parenting hack: never throw out your recycling:


Christina Agapakis @thisischristina

Q is too high up in the alphabet. I respect it but it has no place between P and R. Should be at the end with the weirdo/goth letters
Brooks Otterlake @i_zzzzzz

Honestly, the ones who understand cults and deprogramming are the only ones left who can save the country.
Nancy Alenier

Lot of chatter about how pass/fail grades [because of the pandemic and colleges switching to distance learning] will affect clerkship chances?? You get clerkships by being in the Federalist Society, everyone knows that
Angelo Guisado @VoltaireLaFlare

If you really want to stretch your mind, try to explain to someone with a 200-word vocabulary and a 6-second attention span the difference between yogurt and sour cream, and why it's OK to spoon one into your mouth but not the other
Scott Shaffer @scttdvd

Nihilism is too stupid and easy. Kindness and compassion is a more interesting path.
ClimateHuman

Reminder that "I'm playing devil's advocate" usually means "I'm saying a shitty thing I actually believe, but I want plausible deniability when my statement gets ripped apart on logical and moral grounds." You're not fooling anyone, boo. And the devil doesn't need your help.
John Scalzi

Deductibles are a health hazard for everyone.
Zephyr Teachout

I fear that the popularization of protest has folks confused about it. Disciplined direct action has a target, strategy, and demands. When you don’t get what you want, you keep pushing. If you don’t get the nominee you want, you push the one you get to progressive policies.
brittany packnett cunningham @MsPackyetti

Members of Congress are increasingly refusing to cooperate with ethics investigations, according to a ProPublica analysis of 10 years of OCE cases
Robert Faturechi

So, needless to say, there's no person working at @MSNBC who says in a production meeting, "Who gives a shit what James Carville has to say. Fuck him."
Frank Conniff

A lovely - and, to me, highly relatable - observation from Debbie Meier: “I live so much in a world that disagrees with me that sometimes I over-cling to people on my wavelength”
Alfie Kohn

Sometimes I think about the fact that Hillary Clinton sank all her political capital into trying to get Americans universal healthcare only to have people insist she didn't give a shit about people having healthcare like 25 years later
@LuxAlptraum

90% of Finnish teachers remain in education for entirety of career. [In the U.S.] We don’t have 90% make it through a school year. They also teach 50% fewer hours with tye remainder for planning, multiple recesses, autonomy at the school level, limited teacher evaluation, and almost no high-stakes testing.
@DrBradJohnson

Personality tests reveal that undergrads who choose economics score unusually highly on the Dark Triad of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Perhaps this is the argument that economics needs to work to attract broader and more diverse students.
Justin Wolfers

So I technically have government healthcare because veteran. And while VA is certainly deeply flawed, having had it, private insurance and Medicaid in the past I remain perplexed that people think private insurance is better. You know what I don't hear at VA? That's not covered.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

Ran into a neighbor and her kid, who was sniffling in that post-crying-jag way. I said, “Aww, bummer, long day?”
Her mother looked at me and said, deadpan, “She learned about ticks today.”
The kid burst into tears. “I DON’T WANT TO SHARE OUTSIDE WITH THEM.”
Jeeyon Shim

Porcelain coffee pot by Yuri Ganrio, USSR, 1969


Soviet Visuals