Month: April 2020

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appears as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now added a layer of paint over the sky. Contrasting with the shadowed (blue) areas are the various lit portions seen in the brown/orange color. You can hopefully see where I am going with this.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

 

You know things have gotten tense in the Big Apple when the New York Times starts headlining columns with the title: Jared Kushner is Going to Get Us All Killed. It’s not really accurate though. A few of us will live, and it’s really Donald Trump who is ultimately responsible for all the excess deaths occurring with this pandemic.

I know where Michelle Goldberg is coming from, however, even if I wouldn’t use Gabrial Sherman clickbait anonymous quotes as my starting point. She details all of Kushner’s failings, going back to his time at Harvard. It’s probably unnecessary to harp on all of that. He’s failing in the here and now:

According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)

Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

It seems clear that Kushner fancies himself an expert, and he’s the farthest thing from an expert on Clovid-19 or anything related to health care. But is it really his fault that his father-in-law doesn’t trust anyone else to deal with pretty much anything of importance? I’m not interested in Kushner, and never have been. He’s just a byproduct of Trump’s paranoia and incompetence. It’s not Kushner who is killing us.

Rick Scott is a U.S. Senator representing Florida, but he was the state’s governor from 2011 to 2019. He wasn’t serving in that position when the Great Recession hit, but he had to deal with some of the aftermath. One thing he did was make the state’s unemployment services harder to access. In theory, this saved the state money since they had to pay out less in benefits, although there are hidden costs to having a bunch of people running around short on cash. It also gave him better statistics to trumpet as he argued for his own reelection.

But now that hundreds of thousands of people are out of work and seeking benefits, Scott’s “reforms” are infuriating Floridians.

Already anxious about Trump’s chances in the nation’s biggest swing state, Republicans now are dealing with thousands of unemployed workers unable to navigate the Florida system to apply for help. And the blowback is directed straight at Trump’s top allies in the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott.

Privately, Republicans admit that the $77.9 million system that is now failing Florida workers is doing exactly what Scott designed it to do — lower the state’s reported number of jobless claims after the great recession.

“It’s a sh– sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

This is what happens when you elect people who don’t care about you. I’m sure New York State will wish that Andrew Cuomo had been a more people-first governor, too, but it’s easy to see that he still takes his job of protecting New Yorkers seriously despite his record of knocking heads with the progressive wing of his party. His popularity is surging because he’s visibly working his ass off to solve problems.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order Friday giving New York State the right to seize ventilators and send them to hospitals in novel coronavirus hot spots.

The National Guard will be deployed to remove and redistribute ventilators and personal protection equipment from institutions determined not to have as great a need, Cuomo said at a news conference.

“I apologize to the hardship for those institutions,” Cuomo said. “I’m not going to let people die.”

Those institutions will either have the ventilators returned or be financially reimbursed, Cuomo said.

He’s listening to experts and spending his days trying to manage a problem of unprecedented seriousness and magnitude. He’s thinking about the whole country, too, and how we can pool and allocate our resources in an efficient and logical way.

The contrast to Florida’s Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis could not be starker, and that’s reflected in how the people are responding to their leadership. A month ago, Cuomo was on progressives’ short list of most infuriating Democrats in the country, but in recent days I’ve seen some calling for him to replace Joe Biden on the ticket. This is solely due to the way he’s impressed even ideological enemies with his approach to the pandemic.

That’s not going to happen, but Joe Biden will be very happy to campaign anywhere in the country with Cuomo. Chances are, Trump won’t want to be seen within a country mile of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis.

Part of this is just that Cuomo isn’t ideologically rigid. If this pandemic reveals some error in his previous thinking, he doesn’t let that keep him from doing what needs to be done now. Republicans are afraid to contradict the president. They don’t believe in generous unemployment benefits. Their opposition to Obamacare (and Medicaid) hasn’t wavered even as millions have lost their jobs and their health insurance. They’ve spent their whole lives trying to tear down the things we built to deal with the Great Depression, and now that those kinds of things are really needed, they have trouble accepting that fact and acting accordingly.

I hope Joe Biden is watching Cuomo closely and seeing how people respond to him. He needs to be flexible, too, and not let prior positions become an obstacle to embracing what makes the most sense right now. If he becomes president, he’s going to inherent the same kind of mess that Franklin Roosevelt inherited, and policies that were politically impossible a month ago will be requirements by next January.

Living in the recent past is not the place to be. We can’t go back to the 1930’s either, but we do need to understand what we can take from that era since otherwise we could waste time reinventing the wheel.

Photo Credit: Trademark Property

Martin and I both pointed out the ways in which the majority of southern states aren’t really dealing with the coronavirus epidemic consistently or responsibly today.

I’ve spent the past several years living in Tennessee, and as a musician I’ve spent more time than a lot of folks traveling and meeting people below the Mason Dixon line.

Maybe it’s because of the music I play and the audiences my bands have always courted, maybe it’s the nature of being a musician and thus a bohemian, but nearly everyone I know down south is doing the right thing, and well aware that they’re being failed by their state and federal governments, if not their municipalities.

So in the interest of giving a little love to our brothers and sisters living in the old Confederacy and fighting the good fight—and recognizing the hard place they’re in—here’s a great band from Arkansas, deFrance.

Keep rockin’ y’all.

Image credit: Brian Kemp campaign ad

Yesterday, I highlighted Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee as an example of bad leadership in a time of crisis. Then I saw Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp, and… man. Talk about sheer incompetence.

A stunning admission of deadly ignorance from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who says he only just learned that asymptomatic people can transmit #Covid19. “[I]ndividuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad, but we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.” pic.twitter.com/T7NZWk2GDR

— Andisheh Nouraee (@andishehnouraee) April 2, 2020

The Washington Post has more.

Kemp said he was “finding out that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs.”

“Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad, but we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours,” he said. He added that the state’s top doctor told him “this is a game-changer.”

It may have been a game-changer, but it was a game-changer weeks or even months ago. That’s when health officials started emphasizing that asymptomatic people are transmitting the coronavirus. The idea that Kemp didn’t know this is striking. But he’s merely the latest top politician to indicate he’s unfamiliar with the science even as he’s making life-or-death decisions for his constituents.

Is this man a mental deficient? Does he have a cognitive deficit? Does he just smoke so much pot that he’s more interested in scarfing down Moon Pies than paying attention to his job?

The plain fact is that EVERYBODY HAS KNOWN FOR MONTHS that coronavirus can be spread by people without symptoms. Did Kemp simply miss the outrage over entitled college students on spring break?? Did he not see the news about Italy, from February?

Then you have Florida Man turned governor, Ron “Dumbest Shit” DeSantis, who famously refused to close Florida beaches and was most recently seen consigning people with COVID-19 to DIE on a stranded cruise ship.

And then you have Mississippi’s Tate Reeves, who didn’t take COVID-19 seriously. Or Kay Ivy of Alabama, who announced “Y’all, we’re not California. We’re not New York. We aren’t even Louisiana,” days before coronavirus cases in her state surged to more than 1,100 patients. Also worth mentioning: according to Kaiser Health News, the vast majority of Mississippi and Alabama hospitals don’t have ICU beds.

Arizona’s Doug Ducey also caught some heat just two days ago for his weak response.

Now, it’s not entirely a wash. Mike DeWine seems to understand what he’s facing. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker also seems to have his head together, not thanks to Trump, who had told Massachusetts to get its own supplies, then outbid the state. I’ve read that Governor Hutchinson of Arkansas has done a pretty good job—here he is on March 16 addressing the state—but who knows. Republicans love to give themselves credit they don’t deserve, as Bill Lee tried and failed to do on Twitter a few days ago.

But the fact is, when it comes to COVID-19, the Republican brand is quickly becoming “incompetence.” As Esquire’s Jack Holmes explains about the “feckless morons” running southern states.

TThis is what you get when “competent administration” is not among your criteria for choosing a state executive. All you need to make it in Republican politics these days is to lash yourself to Trump and start yelling about immigrant crime.

As a result, many people—many Trump voters—will die, because they elected officials whose only qualifications were yelling loudly and saying Donald Trump is a very stable genius.

Maybe the voters have learned a lesson this time around. It’s hard to tell a pile of dead bodies they’re not being sufficiently enthusiastic about making America great again.

As you can see from the New York Times’ examination of travel patterns in the United States, there has been a wide and largely regional disparity across the country in terms of who was quick to self-isolate and who wasn’t. Most of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Upper Midwest, and the West Coast had issued stay-at-home orders by March 27. Other states that were proactive include New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Louisiana. The urban areas in Texas tried to be proactive even the state government opposed them. The South, as a whole, did not instruct people to stay at home and the result is that their travel patterns remained normal, or close to normal.

This is going to matter later.

The inconsistencies in policies — and in when they are imposed — may create new problems, even for places that set limits weeks ago.

“Let’s assume that we flatten the curve, that we push transmission down in the Bay Area and we walk away with 1 percent immunity,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “Then, people visit from regions that have not sheltered in place, and we have another run of cases. This is going to happen.”

There’s a tradeoff to self-quarantining. People don’t get infected with Covid-19, so people don’t survive the infection and get immunity. The isolating communities are nearly as vulnerable to a new outbreak as they were before all this began. It’s worth doing anyway for a variety of reasons, including that it limits how many people are flooding our unprepared and undersupplied hospitals, and that it buys time for researchers to find effective treatments and develop a vaccine.  Hopefully, getting Covid-19 in the fall or winter will be more survivable than getting it now.

But areas that were slow or still refuse to isolate and limit travel have spiked their own infection rates and spread the virus far and wide. They’ll have a higher level of immunity but that’s not going to be helpful to the rest of the country.

Looking at the charts, there seems to more going on than just whether or not a given state government asked people to shelter in place. Outside of the South, people seem to have complied with this even in the absence of official guidance. Meanwhile, with the exception of parts of Louisiana and South Florida, the states of the former Confederacy all look the same regardless of what their governor set as policy. Something cultural explains why Southerners didn’t heed the advice they were hearing in the media, and it’s not just support for Trump because he has plenty of support in the prairies states and Mountain West, and they did significantly reduce their travel.  The pattern is visible even in a blue state like Virginia and a purple one like North Carolina, both of which have Democratic governors.

Whether religiosity explains it, or a probably related skepticism of scientific expert advice, or maybe something to do with their car culture, I don’t know. But their slowness to respond to this outbreak has undermined the effectiveness of the efforts of the areas that did respond. And, because of the nature of this disease, we’re all going to be paying for that for the foreseeable future.

As Martin, I, and others have pointed out, a lot of the southern states haven’t prepared for COVID-19. Trump and his fellow turds are now freaking out because THEIR voters are going to die. They didn’t care so much about the rest of us:

Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

As y’all know I have a special interest in Tennessee, given that I decamped the state for the duration. I’ve been watching Governor Bill Lee demonstrate why simply being a businessman who ultimately ran his daddy’s company doesn’t necessarily make you leadership material. Here, the essential Tennessee Holler makes mincemeat of the gov on Twitter, with his own words.

WATCH — @NC5PhilWilliams: “The medical community has been pleading with you for 10+ days for a shelter-in-place mandate… are you concerned lives may be lost because of the delay?”@GovBillLee: “there are varying opinions” – “we made the right decision” – “the storm is passing” pic.twitter.com/sqCaGc9S6S

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) March 31, 2020

One minute he’s saying “the storm is passing,” the next he’s saying ““We’re concerned about ventilators. We’re in the process of counting. We’re assuming we don’t have enough and pursuing other options.”

And meanwhile, another rural hospital closed its doors

This is madness, and people are going to die as a result. This is going on in every single red state. It will get worse and worse.

As I was tossing and turning in my bed last night, I thought about calling in sick today. It’s not something I’ve done more than once or twice in this job. In general, writing makes me feel better, so there’s really almost no circumstance where I’d want to spend an entire day not writing. But this pandemic was starting to get to me. It’s not that I feel ill, although with all this stress and worry I can’t say I feel well either. It’s more that I’m finally confronting something that kind of asks me to just step back and observe without comment. A little voice is saying to be still and quiet for a moment. Maybe I need to find my bearings.

But I can’t do it. I can’t report in as sick when my sickness is so widely shared and yet isn’t truly incapacitating. The same things that are weighing on me like a black cloud are weighing on everyone else. For example, how do I safely procure food for my family when my wife is asthmatic and at high risk? I’ve made 3am trips to the local Wegman’s, but that’s not a healthy schedule for anyone. I’ve used the delivery services of Whole Foods, but their workers are striking over unsafe conditions and low pay. I’ve gone to convenience stores, but found it impossible to maintain a six-foot distance from the check-out person, let alone the other shoppers. What about my twentysomething step kids? They haven’t been rigorously isolating for 14 whole days, so under what circumstances should we get together?

My mother-in-law came up from Florida over two weeks ago, but I’ve only waved to her from a safe distance. She made the whole family some cloth masks. I’ve had mine in my coat pocket for at least 10 days now, but I haven’t used it. I very much appreciated her effort and thoughtfulness, but didn’t think it would would actually help since the virus is so small it can pass through cloth as easily as it passes through air. But now I realize that I’ve been making a mistake. The mask won’t protect me, but it could protect everyone around me.

You see, it’s very possible that I’ve been infected during my resupply forays and don’t even know it. If I cough into my mask, it will limit how far I spread the virus. This might even apply to the simple act of breathing.

As many as 25 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus may not show symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns — a startlingly high number that complicates efforts to predict the pandemic’s course and strategies to mitigate its spread.

In particular, the high level of symptom-free cases is leading the C.D.C. to consider broadening its guidelines on who should wear masks.

“This helps explain how rapidly this virus continues to spread across the country,” the director, Dr. Robert Redfield, told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.

So, I have something to write about after all. I’m going to wear my mask from now on because I have no way of knowing if I have Covid-19 and I don’t want to put anyone at risk. I’ve taken as many precautions as I can, but who can say if the clerk at 7/11 had the virus, or the woman at the grocery store who invaded my space to fix the glitchy self-checkout computer?  They’re spending eight hour shifts serving people, some of whom are almost definitely asymptomatic carriers. My township only has two confirmed cases right now, but the township where my Wegman’s is located has the highest rate of infection in the county. In fact, Wegman’s may be the reason for that.

These are now life and death decisions for me and my wife and possibly for anyone I encounter outside of my self-quarantine. Wearing my mask will make me feel self-conscious. But it’s the smart and moral play here. So, I’m going to do it.

This is another reason why we need widely available testing. Without it, even the smallest decisions can be paralyzing.