On Trump's Watch

The New York Times has posted an animated graphic of how Covid-19 has spread through the United States. A picture really does beat a thousand words.

Maggie Haberman discusses the "jarring" reality that a man with Trump's track record with adversity is leading America's response to a pandemic. It's a deep dive into the damaged psyche of America's commander in chief. Well worth a read.

Mr. Trump is no stranger to crisis. He has spent a lifetime grappling with bankruptcy, fending off creditors, evading tax collectors, defending lawsuits, deflecting regulators, spinning reporters and dueling with estranged wives, usually coming out ahead, at least as he defines it. But these were crises of his own creation involving human adversaries he knew how to confront. Nothing in his background in business, entertainment or multiple marriages prepared him for the coronavirus pandemic now threatening America’s health and wealth. 

Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.

“When he’s faced a problem, he has sought to somehow cheat or fix the outcome ahead of time so that he could construct a narrative that showed him to be the winner,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer. “And when it was all about feuds with other celebrities or contests over ratings or hotel branding, he could do that and no one cared enough to really check. And the bluster and bragging worked.”

Here's a Little Gem for Self-Imposed Shut-Ins.

This social distancing/self-isolating thing is going to get tiresome if it's not already.

If you're like me you may wonder how long you can live out of your pantry. The problem there is that you wind up looking at what's actually in your pantry. That can give you an immediate case of the "glums."

Tinned goods - oh aren't they appealing. Flour, yeast, sugar - the mind practically reels with excitement. Pasta of so many descriptions and shapes.

But there may be some hidden gems that you're overlooking. I discovered one last night, Marcella Hazan's recipe for pasta sauce. It's the ultimate in simplicity and, when it comes to Italian food, simplicity is often the key to really good dishes.

The ingredients:

1 28 oz. tin of San Marzano tomatoes (roma tomatoes will do if that's what you've got)

Butter - 4 tablespoons

1 onion, peeled and cut in half.

Salt to taste.

That's it, just four ingredients.

You put the tomatoes in a pot, juices included. Break them up with a fork or potato masher. Position the onions, sliced side down, in the bottom of the pot. Add the butter in chunks.

Heat the tomatoes almost to boiling then turn down the heat to simmer, uncovered, for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Cook your pasta of choice, just past al dente. Drain.

Remove the onions. Mix the tomato sauce in with the pasta, add parm, perhaps a bit of basil or parsely.

Done.

My expectations weren't high, despite all the rave reviews of this recipe. I was very surprised. It must be the butter. It creates a pleasantly rich tomato sauce that somehow filled the penne to capacity. It was delightful.

As I don't feed a horde I've got plenty of pasta sauce left over. I'll fiddle with it tonight and see if it will double as a pizza sauce.

There you go. Utter simplicity. Perishables - one onion, a bit of fresh herb, and a slab of butter. Shelf-stable - pasta, tinned tomatoes, cheese.

BTW - the onion you used to lightly season the sauce? Don't throw it out. It's also delicious all on its own.

Can a Virus Teach Us to Live Smarter?

The Toronto Star's Heather Mallick reckons we can come out the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic a lot smarter. It might even allow us to take a grown-up attitude to the even greater threat, climate change.

COVID-19 is something of a test run for worse news, which is climate change. As two McGill University professors, Eric Galbraith and Ross Otto, recently pointed out in The Conversation, total COVID-19 deaths may increase day by day but that’s not where the terror lies. The true terror is mass death. 

Global heating is another universal danger where the suffering will be intensely personal. Canada is racing to flatten the COVID-19 curve just as we will eventually be cutting carbon output, as life grows increasingly arduous and unpleasant even in fortunate countries like our own. 

But here’s the thing that strikes these two professors, one in earth system science and the other in psychology. Why are we so frantic about COVID-19 but not about climate change? They say there are four reasons: the instinctive, vivid, personal fear of COVID-19; the suddenness of the viral attack; the immediate, obvious strategies to fend off the virus strategies; and finally, the fact that nations are able to go it alone. 

Dealing with the coronavirus is easier than dealing with climate change. 

It has been fast and remarkable. The economist and historian Adam Tooze says the coronavirus has shattered the myth of “faith in the market,” that the economy has to come first. “We are deliberately inducing one of the most severe recessions ever seen. In so doing we are driving another nail into the coffin of one of the great platitudes of the late 20th century: it’s the economy stupid.” 

There is a certain freedom to this, he says. “Given the experience of the past dozen years we should now never tire of asking: which economic constraints are real and which imagined?” He is clearly referring to what we might do to slow climate change.

...

Our lives will be different from now on. The hope is that we will live more intelligently, thinking more about our future on the planet rather than the blithe destruction we indulged in for 50 years.

Today In the Grey Lady - the Donald Trump Roundup

Highlights from today's New York Times or, as I like to call it, 'Today in Trumpland'

The United States is falling further behind and, without urgent action, could be overwhelmed by the Covid-19 virus.  Closing our southern border to all but essential traffic might be the very best thing our federal government has achieved so far.

Even if the country cuts its rate of transmission in half — a tall order — some 650,000 people might become infected in the next two months. 

The growth is driven by Americans with mild symptoms who are carrying and spreading the virus without being aware that they have it, the researchers say. The number of undetected cases — 11 times more than has been officially reported, they estimate — reflects how far behind the United States has fallen in testing for the virus.

Trump falls back on rightwing ideology. Won't use emergency powers to mobilize industry to fight the corona virus. 

President Trump and his advisers are resisting calls from congressional Democrats and a growing number of governors to use a federal law to mobilize industry to provide badly needed resources to help halt the spread of the coronavirus, days after the president said he would consider using that authority.

Some of the president’s advisers have privately said they share conservatives’ longstanding opposition of government intervention and oppose using the law, and the president again suggested his own ambivalence toward using it.

Pandemic profiteering. NYT editorial board wants all members of Congress barred from stock deals.

The NYT panel is too little, too late. The stock trading horse has left the barn. Action, however, is needed. Someone should investigate each member's major donors to see how many of them unloaded their portfolios while Trump and Congressional Republicans were misleading the American people with claims they had the virus under control. We know that the Senate intelligence chairman, Richard Burr, tipped off his major donors about the coronavirus even as he was giving contrary, false assurances to the public.

Trump is off to Mar-a-Lardo this weekend. He'll have the place to himself.

In recent days, the Trump Organization cut staff from hotels in New York and Washington, halted new reservations at a hotel overlooking the Las Vegas Strip and closed golf courses in Los Angeles and the Miami area, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It also closed the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, which normally would be at a peak right now, with regular seasonal visits by Mr. Trump himself.

When grave threats emerge, the most common response is complacency, not panic, according to Dr. Ido Erev, an Israeli professor of behavioural science.

Everyone tends to overreact somewhat at the beginning. But then, a little experience reverses that sense in most people, and they begin to believe that “it won’t happen to me.” 

A minority of people — 10 to 30 percent, depending on the situation — continues to overestimate the risk and behave more hysterically, or overreact. These are the people who are causing much of the rush on supplies like toilet paper and emptying the shelves. This is a problem, of course, because it can prompt the same kind of behavior in others. But the important point is that this is a minority. Most people have the opposite problem.

"Never Trumpers" knew he would be a disaster for America in an emergency.

NeverTrumpers feared that Mr. Trump’s own cruelty, narcissism and sexual incontinence would make the job of remoralizing the country that much harder, a goal they prioritized over tax cuts, deregulation and judicial nominations. As the controversial conservative social scientist Charles Murray told us in the summer of 2019: “You can’t have a successful limited government unless you have a population that itself is virtuous. And so, that means character in the leaders is important, not just so they can perform a job effectively. It’s extremely important as an emblem of what the country’s all about.”

Many NeverTrumpers who held important positions in previous Republican administrations agreed. These conservative critics of Mr. Trump recognized — if only in outline — that the president’s personal pathologies that would lead to something like his disastrous management of the Covid-19 crisis. While most Republicans focused on Mr. Trump as an ideological and cultural bludgeon with which to pummel their enemies, NeverTrumpers foresaw that his character and governing instincts would have unpredictable and terrifying consequences.

Kenney Runs Out of Whipping Boys

Pity Alberta premier, Jason Kenney. The provincial government's favourite game, Blame Ottawa, has run out of steam. Michael Harris writes "it's Game Over for Kenney."

Before COVID-19 turned Times Square into a ghost town, shut down the NHL, and closed Parliament, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Taj Mahal, Kenney was making news directing elbows into Justin Trudeau’s grizzled beard — elbows sharpened by years of political skirmishing. He kept bugging Trudeau to concentrate on the economy. Alberta’s primarily. 

It was the familiar harangue: Ottawa was failing the West and the energy sector, and it had to stop or else. Trudeau had other fish to fry, including extravagant promises on fighting climate change — promises he largely broke during his first term, and for which he was punished by voters in 2019. 

After crushing Rachel Notley and the NDP in that year’s provincial election, Kenney turned his guns on the feds with a vengeance. His base was suffering from extreme economic angst. Nothing concentrates the mind like being out of work. Alberta’s premier had lots of targets: the hated carbon tax, the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline in 2017, and sluggish progress on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

Reality Rains on Jason's Parade.

In the middle of mugging the feds, Kenney was hit by a double whammy for the ages. COVID-19 took the world by storm, crashing the stock market like a house of cards. And then there was the catastrophic drop in the price of oil after Russia, OPEC, and Saudi Arabia rumbled over the issue of cutting supply to prop up sagging prices.

Welcome to West Texas Intermediate oil hovering around $22 dollars U.S. a barrel -- less than a third of the price needed by Teck Resources to make its Frontier project in the tar sands viable. 

And welcome to the truth about the tar sands and Jason Kenney. Turn out the lights, the party’s over. It has been for quite some time. This week, oil made from Alberta bitumen was going for just over $7 a barrel, discount and all. 

The premier lives in the past, a place where successive Conservative governments relied on what they believed would be ever-increasing oil revenues; where you didn’t have to have a real Sovereign Wealth Fund like Norway’s; you didn’t need a sales tax; climate change didn’t exist; gas would always be cheap; and no one had ever heard of shale fracking.

The Lights Dim and the Curtain Comes Down on the Wild Rose Theatre of the Absurd

Trudeau can’t be blamed for either COVID-19, or the catastrophic drop in the price of oil. There is only a ticking clock on fossil fuels as they overheat the planet, decades of bad resource management in Alberta, and Jason Kenney’s determination to carry on the tradition.

Simply put, the province has a lot of a resource that no one wants, and fewer institutions are willing to invest in as the carbon window closes on a dying industry. There is a reason that so many companies have simply sold their interests in the tar sands: Koch Industries, Royal Dutch Shell, Norway’s Statoil, and Marathon Oil. They can’t make money. Not making money doesn’t fit into anyone’s strategic plans. 

There is also a reason that other companies like Imperial, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil admit that billions of barrels of oil within their tar sands holdings will likely be left in the ground. 

These are the stranded assets that the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, made headlines with a few years ago.

When companies can’t make money from their tar sands assets, and more and more banks won’t finance such projects, there is only one option left — the one Jason Kenney will likely choose: government will become the financier of last resort for a doomed industry. 

Kenney has thrust the Batmobile into reverse. He is offering his electorate a ride back to a time when Barry Manilow was crooning Mandy, and Peter Lougheed was premier of Alberta. Just one problem. There is no highway to the past. Using public money to finance oil and gas projects through the Alberta Energy Company, the way Lougheed did nearly 50 years ago, is delusion on roller skates.

Trudeau's Folly or Why Ottawa Should Stop Throwing Good Money After Bad

As for Justin Trudeau, it would be a major mistake to allow Premier Kenney to use the COVID-19 emergency to extract federal tax dollars for the fossil fuel industry. That doesn’t square with his promise to fight climate change. Besides, Ottawa already put one multi-billion dollar pipeline on the public tab, and that is one pipeline too many.

Are the Fossil Energy Giants At the End of Their Rope?

A report at OilPrice.com claims the fossil energy producers are running out of space to store their oil. Some are even renting supertankers and using them for mid- to long-term storage until world oil prices rebound. In the meantime they continue to drag oil out of the ground without any place to put it. Something is going to give.

Global oil storage could overflow in the coming weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has dealt a severe blow to demand while Saudi Arabia has promised to supply 12.3 million bpd—not just in April but also over the next few months. 

Reuters reports, citing analysts, that such a development would overwhelm the already troubled oil industry, forcing production shutdowns. Storage facilities—both on land and offshore—are already filling up, the news agency noted, and Saudi Arabia has not yet started to increase its deliveries of crude. 

If such a scenario unfolds, some analysts believe oil prices could slide as low as $10 per barrel.

“We believe we have not seen the worst of the price rout yet, as the market will soon come to realize that it may be facing one of the largest supply surpluses in modern oil market history in April,” Reuters quoted Rystad Energy’s head of oil markets, Bjornar Tonhaugen.

Some claim that oil - the good stuff, not bitumen - could fall to ten bucks a barrel - if anyone wants the stuff.

“There are no buyers,” an oil trader from the U.S. told Reuters. “Refiners in trouble, exporters in trouble, producers in trouble. This is a disaster with no end in sight.”

“Cargoes are being severely discounted to move as there are little prospects to export and also very few options to store on ship and/or tanks,” another industry source told Reuters.

Bear in mind, this mega-glut is before the Saudi's ramped up production comes to market.

Government Pulls Its Thumb Out. Why Only Now?

The Trudeau government has not distinguished itself in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was slow off the mark declaring an emergency but it's inexcusable failure has been the delay in using its powers to mobilize Canadian industry to help meet the demand for medical supplies and equipment such as ventilators. On that score they're way behind the curve.

It's not as though the federal government lacks powers. A few days ago I took a look at the federal Emergencies Act. Parliament is recalled. A national emergency is declared. The government has 90 days (renewable) to take control of the economy and mobilize industry.

Many of us, most I would hope, have been pretty meticulous in social distancing, self-isolating, washing our hands, avoiding obvious infection risks and such. The government has been reasonably good at telling us what we must do but far from diligent in doing what it is given express powers to do on our behalf.

What would have been a benchmark date on which to judge our government's performance. I think it's fair to go back to when the NBA, MLB, and the NHL  canceled their seasons or when those high-risk septuagenarians, The Rolling Stones, called off their "No Filters" concert tour. By then we should have expected Ottawa to have been up and running with its coronavirus response measures.

Today - only today - does the government of the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau announce that it's going to direct Canadian industry to ramp up production of medical equipment and supplies so badly needed in hospitals across the country. Today.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a series of new measures Friday to protect Canadians from COVID-19, including a strategy to help manufacturers rapidly ramp up production of medical supplies and a plan to bar asylum seekers from crossing the Canada-U.S. border. 

Trudeau called the measures unprecedented and necessary during an emergency that many are comparing to wartime and the Great Depression. 

Trudeau said the industrial strategy will allow companies already making sanitizers, masks another other equipment to scale up quickly, while mobilizing others to shift production to items that are in high demand.

But wait. Ottawa still hasn't pulled the trigger.

Senior government sources have told CBC News they're hoping to work with existing manufacturers — especially of gloves, masks and ventilators — on a supply chain that's resistant to disruption.

"Hoping" isn't doing. Hoping is anticipatory. Hoping is manana - eventually, when we get around to it.

In addition, sources say, almost every program within the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development will be "refocused" on fighting the virus. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly.

"Will be refocused"? When? This is 'in house' stuff. You're going to, at some time, hopefully soon I'm sure, refocus on fighting the virus. Shouldn't you have been refocused on this weeks ago?

That'll be a big failing grade for the federal government and this prime minister on this one. There are a lot of Canadians who may pay a price for Mr. Trudeau's neglect and tardiness.

Here's Something to Mull Over. Did Trump 'Game' the Covid-19 Pandemic?

Let's face it. Donald Trump is an unscrupulous prick. He's a grifter. Same same for many of his immediate family and his courtiers.

We've got this pandemic brewing. The best scientific advice is that a shit storm is en route to the United States of Murica, a seismic event that would be bound to roil the stock markets.

Corrupt corporate executives use advanced knowledge to their personal benefit all the time. When they're on the evening news doing the "perp walk" it's often for the crime of insider trading. If you know a company is on the way down you unload before word gets out and the share price plummets. If you know the company has discovered gold, you and your proxies buy as many shares as you can before the word gets out and the share price soars. Either way, it's cheating. Money in your pocket, money in the bank.

How many members of Team Trump dumped all or some significant portion of their portfolios in the couple of weeks while Trump was saying the virus was contained, no problem, it would just disappear?

What leads me to ask that is the curious story of the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Richard Burr, R - N.C. It seems Burr and his wife dumped upwards of $1.7 million in shares in mid-February and bought no shares thereafter.

In his most recent annual financial disclosure filed in 2019, Burr reported holding $1.3 million in equities. Anywhere between one-fourth and three-fourths of that was liquidated on a single day last month.

It’s unclear how much control Burr has over his portfolio. His assets are managed by private wealth management firm Stephens Inc. Burr’s net worth in 2018 was between $3.4 million and $11 million, according to OpenSecrets’ review of his disclosure.

While Trump was crooning "Don't worry, be happy," Burr held a private session with his major donors to let them in on the truth that Republicans, including their president, withheld from the American people.

In an audio recording obtained by NPR, the North Carolina Republican was heard telling donors at a luncheon on Feb. 27 that the coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, would likely spread through the population aggressively—and suggested it could kill hundreds of thousands of people. 

"It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history," Burr said.

"It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic," he added, referring to the flu pandemic which killed more than 600,000 Americans.

Was Burr some deviant, an outlier, a Senator gone rogue? Is the US Congress "bought and paid for?"

Consider this. What Burr told his select donors demonstrates that he, and probably many more of his ilk, knew a near apocalypse was coming down on the United States. It would be ruinous, especially to the donor class.

Recall that Lindsey Graham, with the mid-term elections looming, openly warned his GOP colleagues that they had to pass another round of reckless tax cuts for the rich or else lose the donor class, their electoral lifeline, their benefactors and so they did.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday became the latest Republican to admit the GOP is trying to ram through massive tax cuts for the rich to satisfy its wealthy donors, telling a journalist that if the party’s tax push fails, “the financial contributions will stop.” 

Lindsey Graham says “the financial contributions will stop” if tax reform fails.
— Alan Rappeport (@arappeport) November 9, 2017 

David Sirota, reporter with the International Business Times, responded by noting that it is both “laudably honest for Graham to admit this” and “a repulsive glimpse of how politicians see so many public policies as private financial transactions between them and their donors.”

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) has made a similar comment recently, complaining that his donors are pressuring him to pass tax cuts or “don’t ever call me again.” 

Critics had the same response to Graham as they did to Collins: “Dude, you’re not supposed to actually admit that out loud.”

That erased any lingering doubt that Congressional Republicans (and a load of Democrats too) were indentured to their donors, afraid to lose that critical support. They were indeed "bought and paid for."

Covid-19 created an opportunity to cement that support by ensuring that those key donors would be able to get out with their assets largely intact - even if that meant smallholders, the ma and pa retirement investors remained in peril, unwittingly left to face a collapsing market.

It would also mean a delay in mobilizing medical and other resources necessary to respond to the virus as the contagion took hold. That sort of delay translates into lives needlessly lost, jobs lost, and modest investments and savings wiped out.

Chairman Burr's loose lips may come back to haunt him and his colleagues. It begs the question of what must have been running through the mind of the person who leaked that tape.

Totalitarianism is a Stealth Movement

The retreat of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, especially in America and parts of Europe, has intrigued me for many months. How does this happen? How do good people, including educated people of comfortable means, succumb to it? Are we witnessing the same patterns today that emerged in Germany in the 30s?

My readings led me to buy two books. "Defying Hitler" is a rich memoir of a young German law student of an upper-middle class family who married a Jewish girl. They managed to escape their homeland as the rightwing contagion swept the land. It's definitely worth a read if you can find it in a library or one of the secondhand book dealers.

Today I'd like to turn to "They Thought They Were Free." The author, American Milton Mayer, was of German Jewish descent.  He visited Germany pre-war hoping to get an interview with Hitler. No luck. Following war's end he returned to Germany where he successfully passed himself off as a German national. Mayer cultivated ten "friends" from a cross-section of society and digested these conversations in his 1956 book.

One of Mayer's subjects was a philologist, a person who studies and authenticates literary texts and other written records. An educated and cultured German. I think you will find this fellow's remarks interesting, perhaps even a bit worrisome. Is this a blueprint for what could become of us?

What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider.  

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it. 

This separation of government form people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. 

...I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was 'expected to' participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time. 

The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.  ...I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent  people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regreted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process in the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.  

How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? ...Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis ostai and  Finem respice - 'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One most foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?  

Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he ...said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and when they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something  - but then it was too late. 

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. 

Uncertainty s a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, is the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.  You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues some of whom feel as you do' but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise the end? On the one  hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. 

...Your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves n their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to - to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it. So you wait, and you wait. 

But that one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. ...But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not be shocked by the next.  

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were born in at all.  ...Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most uf us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Wouldn't This be Lovely? Can a Japanese Anti-Viral Combat Covid-19?

An off-the-shelf anti-viral for Covid-19? It may not be perfect but the Chinese coronavirus experience suggests it is both safe and effective.

Zhang Xinmin, an official at China’s science and technology ministry, said favipiravir, developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm, had produced encouraging outcomes in clinical trials in Wuhan and Shenzhen involving 340 patients. 

“It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” Zhang told reporters on Tuesday. 

Patients who were given the medicine in Shenzhen turned negative for the virus after a median of four days after becoming positive, compared with a median of 11 days for those who were not treated with the drug, public broadcaster NHK said. 

In addition, X-rays confirmed improvements in lung condition in about 91% of the patients who were treated with favipiravir, compared to 62% or those without the drug.

No one is talking about a magic wand solution but in these pandemics death happens at the margins and a drug that can improve lung condition in 91 per cent instead of just 62 per cent otherwise, narrows those margins.

There may be better products coming but they could be months, a year or more away. If there's something that can produce favourable results while we wait we should go for it.

Kenney Bemoans Catastrophe. Fails to Blame Trudeau.

Jason Kenney says the Alberta economy is getting hammered. It's getting hit so hard that he can't even lay it off on Justin Trudeau. You know it's bad when Kenney can't blame it all on Trudeau.

Alberta’s economy was expected to post a real GDP growth rate of 2.2 per cent this year, which would have been a modest recovery in a province that economists say has yet to fully recover from the previous recession in 2014, when oil prices crashed. Now, another brutal recession appears unavoidable as the price of Western Canadian Select crashed below the US$10-per-barrel mark on March 18.

“We are facing a period of profound adversity unlike any we have since the 1930s,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said Thursday as he announced a suite of financial programs including six-month mortgage, credit-card and line-of-credit payment deferrals through the provincially owned bank, ATB Financial. 

“Alberta is going to be hit significantly as a result of both the coronavirus and the oil-price wars we’re seeing right now,” said Adam Legge, chief executive of the Business Council of Alberta. “That has a larger-than-normal impact here in Alberta.” 

Legge said he expects major oil and gas producers will be able to “weather the storm,” but he’s concerned that drilling companies, oilfield services providers and engineering companies along with the gyms, restaurants and tourism operators that are shutting their doors “are going to be at greater risk.”

Wishful Thinking Gone Bad

The Alberta government in its budget released in February had forecast that oil prices would average US$58 per barrel this year. The province has since acknowledged that assumption no longer holds and it’s readying a spending package in an effort to lift the economy, but it’s not ready to discuss what its fiscal picture will look like.

A Precarious Economy

Matt Stewart, director of economics at the Conference Board, said previous projections for a turnaround in Alberta this year after several years of “terrible growth” are now gone. 

“We expect no growth in 2020 for the year as a whole,” he said. “It didn’t take much to knock us towards a recession.”

Alberta's predicament lays bare the need for visionary leadership, government that doesn't insist on trying to breathe life into its dead horse.  Can Jason Kenney rise to the challenge? Hard to say but he has shown a fondness for wallowing in difficulty so long as he can blame it on someone else, a guy in Ottawa.

Give It a Rest. Lockdown Has Nothing to Do With Fascism.

China did it first. Thus it's obviously totalitarian, outright fascism.

This is leftist nonsense on acid.

Lockdowns aren't a creature of fascist ideology. Epidemiology has nothing to do with fascism or any other 'ism. Lockdown is a medical strategy honed in severe epidemics such as Ebola. No one called that a fascist plot, did they. No, of course not.

So, please, stop being a dick. This has nothing to do with fascism. It's about saving lives and, if that sticks in your craw, well, that's tough.

Oh, look - Squirrel!!!

No End in Sight to Saudi Blitzkrieg

Saudi Arabia isn't done with its recalcitrant rival, Russia and that's tough news for every petro-state, especially our own.

Oil giant Saudi Aramco will proceed with the reduction of its refinery rates in Saudi Arabia in April and May in order to free up more crude oil for exports, an official at the company told Reuters on Thursday. 

Saudi Arabia will continue to supply a record 12.3 million barrels per day (bpd) to the oil market in the coming months, as per order from the energy ministry, the official Saudi Press Agency reported on Wednesday.

The Kingdom is intent on unleashing growing crude oil volumes on the market, aiming to significantly boost its crude oil exports to a record-breaking more than 10 million bpd in May.

Hmmm, I wonder if the Sultan remembers what Vlad Putin's day job was before he became Russia's president? 

We've Gotta Do Better than This

It's bad enough that grocery store shelves are empty of paper towels, toilet paper, flour, sugar and other essentials. Blame that on hoarders.

However, why has the news media stopped covering the news as though anything that doesn't involve the coronavirus doesn't matter. When I glanced at CBC's web site this morning, it was all Covid-19 except for one non-pandemic story about the "Wonderchicken" fossil, the oldest known ancestor of modern birds that got whacked in the asteroid strike. That's it, Wonderchicken.

So, while you're busy trying to dodge this virus, take a few moments out of your day for something that matters - a dead bird. See, now you're all  caught up.

Italy Pulls Out the Stops to Produce Ventilators, Calls In the Military

European countries now deep in the throes of the corinavirus, Covid-19, are racing to increase production of ventilators that, for patients in intensive care, can mean the difference between life and death. Meanwhile, what is Ottawa doing to take advantage of their experience now, when we still have a little more time?

Demand is so great in Italy for pulmonary ventilators that the government has called in the military to help a local manufacturer ramp up production of the devices, which can mean the difference between life and death for the country’s thousands of COVID-19 patients. 

Italy has the most pressing need for ventilators. By Wednesday evening, the country had recorded another shocking rise in positive COVID-19 tests. The total number of cases rose by 4,207 to 35,713; fatalities climbed by 475 to 2,978. If the pace continues, Italy will have half as many cases as China before the weekend. 

About 30 military technicians started work this week at Siare Engineering International Group, a private electromedical supply company whose factory is near Bologna, in the hard-hit north-central part of the country. Italy is the European epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, and Siare’s short-term goal is to double production to 500 ventilators a month – higher if possible. 

“All of a sudden, we found ourselves facing an operation of titanic proportions,” wrote Gianluca Preziosa, the company’s founder and president, on Facebook late last week.
Siare is the only Italian maker of ventilators and one of just four in Europe. Each is suddenly working flat out to meet demand.

Germany has put in an order for 10,000 ventilators to supplement the 25,000 already available. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has asked companies such as automakers to retool their assembly lines to make ventilators and other emergency medical devices as the pandemic sweeps across Europe, putting hundreds of millions of people into lockdown and overwhelming hospital emergency wards.

I've heard lots of excuses in defence of our prime minister's failure to act. Oh, we don't have a manufacturing capability left. That all went to Asia. Bollocks, there are plenty of industries that can be harnessed into ventilator production. Oh, the prime minister can't lead the people where they don't want to go. Nonsense. It's a pandemic. We're going to be compelled to do a lot of things we would rather not do. It's an emergency. That's when leaders are supposed to show leadership. Leadership from the front, not the rear.  A real leader understands the distinction between duty and popularity.

That's the leadership that's so badly needed now. I commend this prime minister for providing financial aid to those in need. He is to be commended for sealing our border with the US to all but essential goods and commodities.  But now he needs to lead the fight for Canadian lives. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Theme Song For a Pandemic

Are You Ready for Lockdown?

According to Foreign Policy, the Covid-19 pandemic is heading only one way - toward lockdown.

Politicians won’t admit it yet, but it’s time to prepare—physically and psychologically—for a sudden stop to all life outside your home.

Whether you are reading this in your living room in Vancouver, office in London, or on a subway in New York City, you need to think hard, and fast, about two crucial questions: Where, and with whom, do you want to spend the next six to 12 weeks of your life, hunkered down for the epidemic duration? And what can you do to make that place as safe as possible for yourself and those around you? 

Your time to answer those questions is very short—a few days, at most. Airports will close, trains will shut down, gasoline supplies may dwindle, and roadblocks may be set up. Nations are closing their borders, and as the numbers of sick rise, towns, suburbs, even entire counties will try to shut the virus out by blocking travel. Wherever you decide to settle down this week is likely to be the place in which you will be stuck for the duration of your epidemic. 

To appreciate what lies ahead for the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, pay heed to Italy, France, and Germany. The United States, for example, is currently tracking exactly where Italy was about 10 days ago. France and Germany, which track two to five days ahead of the United States, are now revving up measures akin to those taken by Italy, including lockdowns on movement and social activity. In a matter of days, the United States will follow suit. 

If you live alone, have no family members or close friends who require your special attention, and have no alternative living space, you have no decision to make. You are where you will be for coming weeks.

...

It’s also important to prepare psychologically. Every family or couple has its issues, and tensions can amplify during long confinement. Common sense can ease the shared suffering. 

If children are undergoing remote schooling, and parents are simultaneously working remotely, everybody needs headphones, plenty of computer bandwidth, and a designated workspace. Before stores close, make sure every user has proper cables, headphones, batteries, adapters, and other tools of the computer trade. 

Printers, if they will be used, require paper and ink: Have plenty on hand. 

Everybody needs routines, including exercise and recreation. Shared burdens of cooking and cleaning should be offset by shared play and fun. 

Boredom and stress can suck the lifeblood out of a person. Before your home goes on lockdown, make sure your download accounts for movies and television are paid. There are plenty of good books around the house, and games and decks of cards are handy.  

Perspective

This Speaks Volumes But the Message is Dire

India, the second most populous nation, has 137 confirmed cases of Covid-19. Pakistan is reporting just 236 cases. Those low, low numbers spell trouble for the Indian subcontinent, South Asia, and the rest of that overpopulated region.

If community spread of the coronavirus is already underway across South Asia, the region’s health care system will come under unprecedented stress. Consider hospital beds, for example. According to data from the OECD, India has just 0.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 people. The United Kingdom has five times as many per capita (2.5), Italy has more than six times as many per capita (3.2), and South Korea has over 24 times as many per capita (12.3). If the number of infections in India rises exponentially, the country’s hospitals will struggle to cope. India has just 0.8 doctors for every 1,000 people, while the corresponding numbers for the United Kingdom, Italy, and South Korea are 2.9, 4.0, and 2.3 respectively. 

Other South Asian countries have just as much cause to worry. In an interview this week with the Associated Press, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan candidly expressed his fears: “If [the coronavirus] spreads, we will all have problems with our health facilities. We just don’t have that capability. We just don’t have the resources.”

As Sumit Ganguly writes in FP, India’s emergency response systems sometimes hold up remarkably well. In 2018, the state of Kerala curtailed the spread of the Nipah virus, and the nation has a history of successful contact tracing in influenza outbreaks. But the question now is whether the number of coronavirus cases will grow too high, too quickly, and overwhelm the country’s hospitals. Have South Asia’s countries missed their chance to flatten the curve? 

It will be several weeks before we’ll have real data and answers. Whatever happens, the pandemic will be a reminder to South Asia’s governments that they have long neglected health care infrastructure, especially for their lower-income populations. As the chart below shows, South Asian nations have among the lowest rates of spending on health care as a proportion of their GDPs.

And what of the poorer nations of Africa, i.e. "Ebola Alley"? They certainly have ample experience of lethal viral epidemics but has that sapped their resources to bear another, Covid-19?

Still Unclear About Covid-19? MiT has Links

MiT's tech review, The Download, is often a font of great information you won't find in the funny papers.

Today's edition opens with the editor-in-chief explaining that the life you knew last week is over and it's not coming back. (sorry the formatting is so screwed up)

How so?: To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will. Why?: It’s widely agreed (even by Britain, finally) that every country needs to “flatten the curve”: impose social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so that the number of people sick at once doesn’t cause the health-care system to collapse, as it is threatening to do in Italy right now. That means the pandemic needs to last, at a low level, until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine. This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life. Read the full story. Then there's a discussion of "herd immunity" and what needs to happen before we get it.   Once enough people get Covid-19, it will stop spreading on its own. But the costs will be devastating, reports Antonio Regalado. The options: One involves extraordinary restrictions on free movement and assembly, as well as aggressive testing, to interrupt its transmission entirely. The second is a vaccine that could protect everyone, but it still needs to be developed. A third is potentially effective but horrible to consider: just wait until enough people get it.   Herd immunity: If the virus keeps spreading, eventually so many people will have been infected and (if they survive) become immune that the outbreak will fizzle out on its own as the germ finds it harder and harder to find a susceptible host. This phenomenon is known as herd immunity, and experts say it would kick in after about 60% of the world population has been infected.   However: About 80,000 people have recovered from the coronavirus already, and it’s likely they are now resistant, although the degree of immunity remains unknown. Some viruses, like the flu, do find ways to keep changing, which is why immunity against such seasonal germs isn’t complete. Read the full story. And now, those promised links.

1 All 50 US states now have coronavirus cases  The virus has killed over 100 and infected nearly 6,000, though the true figure is likely far higher. (CNBC)   + This map shows the hotspots. (NBC)   + The White House wants to spend more than $1 trillion to blunt the impact. (NYT $) 2 A new app would say if you’ve crossed paths with someone who’s infected Even better, it preserves your privacy. (TR)   + Maybe tech companies could use all that location data they collect to good use. (WP $)   + What to do if you think you have coronavirus. (Vox)   + Build up your mental resilience. (Bloomberg) 3 Why Italy has been so severely affected by the outbreak The country has lots of elderly people, and its young people mingle more with them. (Wired $) 4 Please post about your mundane life on Instagram We’re suddenly seeing people’s more intimate, homely side. (The Atlantic)   + Parents with young kids are pulling a triple shift during the coronavirus outbreak. (NPR)   + Pity the people planning their weddings. (Wired UK)   + This is our chance to live online. (NYT) 5 Misinformation is baked into Facebook’s business model Its current approach to moderation just won’t cut it, says a new report. (The Verge) + Facebook says a glitch meant it marked reputable coronavirus posts as spam. (Buzzfeed) 6 Birds are incredible engineers 🐦🔧 Their nests are resilient in ways we’re just beginning to understand. (NYT $) 7 Quarantini time! Virtual happy hours are on the rise 🍸 You can’t go to the pub, so make the pub come to you. (WP $)   + We’re all Zoomers now. (NYT $) 8 Airlines are carrying freight instead of passengers Coronavirus is playing havoc with supply chains. (Wired $)   + Coronavirus created the world’s longest passenger flight. (CNN) 9 A day in the life of a delivery driver right now 🛵 "I thought I'd be getting fat-ass tips. I'm not getting fat-ass tips." (Vice) 10 Jared Leto was blissfully ignorant about coronavirus until yesterday Imagine. (The Guardian)