In Brazil Bodies Begin to Pile Up

In Manaus, Brazil, Covid-19 has arrived and the city of over two million is struggling with limited resources.  Brazil's Trump loving president, Jair Bolsonaro, has downplayed the pandemic even more aggressively than Trump himself.   Bolsonaro fired Brazil's health minister for the temerity to suggest implementing social distancing in the face of the crisis.  The good news for Bolsonaro, Manaus' heathcare system is so overloaded it may be impossible to determine home many of his fellow Brazilians, Bolsonaro's policies are killing.

Bodies are piling up in refrigerated trucks outside overwhelmed hospitals. Doctors are in short supply. Bulldozers are digging mass graves at cemeteries. And the worst of the pandemic is yet to come.

Welcome to Manaus, the now chaotic and desperate riverside capital of vast Amazonas state as it grapples with the highest coronavirus mortality rate of any such city in Brazil.

The daily death rate here has shot up from 20 or 30 pre-pandemic to 100 a day in a matter of weeks after the city recorded its first case on March 13. And an already weak health care system has simply collapsed.

Billionaire MAGA Fan Says, "Get Back to Work!"

Uihlein's Home

Money is not an antidote to stupidity.  Of course, Trump is living proof of this fact, but many of his right wing supporters seem equally oblivious to the way the real world works.  Liz Uihlein and her husband have been bankrolling MAGA trolls in Wisconsin and providing millions to right wing causes for years.  Her family company, Uline, remains open, but she wants everybody back to work right now.  After all some bad stuff happened when she was a kid and we got through it, so stop whining and get to work.  

In her interview with the Guardian, Liz Uihlein, who is 74, repeatedly compared the current crisis to polio outbreaks in the 1940s and 1950s – her own sister contracted the disease when they were children – and suggested Americans then had not “shut down” communities to deal with those outbreaks.“It was a terrifically scary thing.

 It hit children and this virus doesn’t hit children. So I’ve got a different view on it. And I don’t think you should live in fear,” she said.

But Elena Conis, a medical historian at the University of California, Berkeley, said comparisons between polio and the coronavirus were not apt in this case. Polio had been ravaging communities for decades before a vaccine was discovered in 1953 and large segments of the population had developed immunity to the virus. When outbreaks occurred, she said, communities did, in fact, shut down to isolate the disease. Those outbreaks also occurred at a time when populations were far less mobile than today.

Move Over Funner - Las Vegas Has the Best Comedian Mayor

Back in 2017 the city of Funner, California became a reality.

...on May 18, a bit of Hollywood promotion took center stage when actor David Hasselhoff was officially inaugurated as Mayor of Funner. Quick to play his part, Hasselhoff announced, “When I was tapped to run for mayor, I knew I was the guy for the job because, honestly, who’s funner than The Hoff?”

Two years later and The Hoff was out as mayor and actor/comedian Rob Riggle stepped into The Hoff's shoes as mayor of what is essentially a casino resort.



OK.  Great publicity stunt for the Rincon Band of Luiseno Mission Indians who are the landlords of the Harrahs casino and resort.  But, after yesterday, I realize that it's not just Funner that has a comedian as mayor.   Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas gave us a masterclass in satire on CNN.  One that I would have expected to see on Onion TV.  She was stunning.  The most exquisite bit may have been her admission that she had volunteered Las Vegas to be the control group for a massive experiment in testing for a Covid-19 cure.  Not to be in the group getting the cure, but the group getting a placebo.

...I offered to be a controlled group, and what I was told by our state is, you can’t do that because people all from all parts of southern Nevada come in to work in the city,” she stated. “And I said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad because when you have a disease you have a placebo that gets the water and the sugar and those that actually get the shot.’ We would love to be that placebo side so you have something to measure against.”

Stay the Course by Staying At Home

When should cities and states relax stay-at-home orders?  Two new polls suggest that the vast majority of Americans don't want to relax the Covid-19 restrictions until science and common sense prevail.

A CBS News/YouGov poll released today makes it clear that Americans don't think Trump should decide when to relax the restrictions.  They prefer leaving that decision to state and local government.  Only 19% believe that Trump should make decisions regarding re-opening their state's economy.  

Only 7% of those polled believe that Trump should be encouraging his MAGA fascist supporters in their "open our states and let old people die" efforts.  A resounding 55% believe that Trump should "discourage" these kind of protests in states.  And, 38% believe that, at the very least, he should just shut up about the protests.

Cheaper Ways to Sacrifice the Weak

If we want to cull the herd, waiting for people to die in the hospital from Covid-19 seems to be a really inefficient way to go about it.  Why not just put everyone over 701/2 into concentration camps or load them all onto cruise ships?  They're all just bunch of takers anyway.  Using the health care system to weed them out will take years. 

Hatched by the Right and Covered in Trump BS

From Talking Points Memo, here are five things you should know about the pseudo-grassroots anti-shelter in place movement.  It's roots are deep in Republican soil and nurtured by White House fertilizer.

1

Familiar Tea Party names are fueling protests and sharing info with Trump’s task force

2

Deep-pocketed Libertarians and militia extremists have united against public health orders

3

A White House adviser is cheerleading the movement

4

When conservative bigwigs asked for help, the Trump administration provided it

5

Trump fuels supporters’ rage even as the White House claims ignorance of protests

Earth Day 2020 - Planetary Lockdown in Place

Today is Earth Day.  It's the only planet we have and Covid-19 is just one more piece of evidence that we are doing a very bad job protecting nature and the Earth.

Ansel Adams: “I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”
Rachel Carson: "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”