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We had drama. Julie commented at bedtime that she hadn’t seen Vivvie, our slate-gray cat, for about 24 hours. So we spent some time looking around the house for her. I went down in the courtyard, though Vivvie never, ever shows any interest in leaving the house. She’s a timid cat and runs away at any sign of busyness. No sign of Vivvie. I kept my eyes peeled around the yard when I was putting Minnie to bed. No sign of Vivvie. I looked in the spare room and closets. Nothing.

Vivvie did not come to bed with Julie during the night either.

This morning, we looked around some more. Still no sign of Vivvie. Julie was distraught. I was concerned and also puzzled. Sammy is an escape cat. If Sammy was missing that amount of time I’d be sure she’d gotten out. But Vivvie stays put.

Then Julie had an idea: My recliner in the living room. I’d been sitting in it yesterday. What if Vivvie climbed up in there when it was open, then couldn’t get out when I shut it and got up?

And we went to the living room and opened it up and Vivvie SHOT OUT AT TOP SPEED.

We are often in the living room with the dog and Vivvie is wary about the dog so when she got stuck in there she didn’t complain the whole time we were in the room. Or I don’t know maybe she liked it. Cats are weird. 📓

What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’t - Michael Grunwald at Politico

Progressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).

McElwee defies conventional wisdom for progressives by saying progressives need to embrace conventional wisdom — polling, focus groups, and changing the message to suit the district.

He popularized the slogan “Abolish ICE” — even had it as part of his twitter handle — but advises Democratic candidates to be extremely cautious using it themselves, because it’s just not a slogan that will win many elections.

Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.

This article comes at a good time for me; I’ve been disgusted by national Democratic Party politics, discouraged and pessimistic about the future of the US. But now I’m reminded politics is incremental. Getting Trump out of office and keeping Congress would be a big win and it seems very achievable. Winning the Senate and a few state houses would be even better. That would only be the beginning — if Democrats fail to deliver real improvements in people’s lives, they’d be out of power by 2024. But victory in 2020 would be a great start.

Why Aren’t We All on the Same Time Zone? - Patrick J Kiger on How Stuff Works

Time zones are confusing to people who routinely communicate or travel across them, and some people are proposing to put the whole world on one time zone - UTC, which is five hours ahead of Eastern time in the US.

This does not mean that New York businesses would open five hours earlier. A business that opens at 9 am today would open at the same time under the new system, it’s just that the clock would say 2 pm. Everybody would get used to it quickly, say proponents of the change.

I think this is a bad idea, simply because I don’t think there are enough people doing business across time zones to make it worthwhile to change the system for everybody.

However, I have thought for years, that there should be a custom of using universal time for those of us who DO have business crossing time zones. I’ve been routinely doing business across time zones for many years, and even now I still occasionally miscalculate, or propose a meeting time to someone without specifying which time zone I mean.

One of my favorite features of the iPhone is the ability to get notifications for replies to individual email messages and threads.

Watch the weird cinematic rabbit hole that is Blade Runner: The Lost Cut - Adi Robertson at The Verge

“Blade Runner: The Lost Cut” is a 20-minute fan film that splices Blade Runner with

… other films that star Blade Runner cast members, plus more films starring those films’ co-stars, resulting in a masterfully edited cinematic rabbit hole where Rick Deckard is hunting down a cast of replicants including Gene Hackman (via The Conversation, one of Harrison Ford’s first films), Steve Martin (via The Jerk, which stars M. Emmet Walsh, who plays Deckard’s boss Bryant), and John Belushi (via The Blues Brothers, which features Ford’s Star Wars co-star Carrie Fisher).

Getting on lunchtime here so I think I’ll be watching this while I eat.

The coronavirus pandemic is heightening the need for “Right to Repair” – eliminating laws that make it illegal to fix the machines you own.

Cory Doctorow writes about two instances: A researcher has released a proof-of-concept for a hack that allows a relatively inexpensive CPAP machine to function somewhat like a ventilator.

Also, several state treasurers have demanded ventilator manufacturers release documentation so hospitals can maintain their equipment during a crisis.

Also on Cory’s Pluralistic.net today:

  • One guy is in charge of oversight for $2.2T in stimulus. He’s got no staff and he communicates by Twitter. He formerly worked for Elizabeth Warren so we can be optimistic he’s both honest AND competent – but nobody is that honest and that competent.
  • Universities want to install mandatory, undetectable spyware on students' computers.

And more.

(How) American Collapse Resembles Soviet Collapse: Six Ways America’s Collapse is Eerily Like the Soviet Union’s Last Days - umair haque

This article seems more timely now than it was a year ago when it was published.

American collapse is not preordained – we have free will, both as individuals and as a society. But every day Trump remains President and the Republicans remain in power, it’s a day closer .

The Democrats are better. But on a national level they’re still not good. Just not as bad.

‘That Thing You Do’ cast plans reunion fundraiser for coronavirus relief [USAToday]

The Wonders, the fictional group at the center of the 1996 movie “That Thing You Do,” will reunite on Friday for a community watch party of the film to benefit the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund….

Funds raised through the watch party will aid musicians and touring professionals who are out of work because of the coronavirus.

The watch party also will pay tribute to Adam Schlesinger, The Fountains of Wayne musician who died recently of complications of COVID-19. Schlesinger wrote and composed “That Thing You Do,” the song that launched the fictional band ― initially and confusingly called the One-ders ― to brief stardom in the film, set in 1964.

I love this movie. I need to see it again.

Bloomberg News Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife [David Folkenfilk/NPR]

“ … Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”

Bloomberg was concerned about being locked out of the lucrative Chinese market.

Not a good look, Michael.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic:

  • Amazon fires tech workers for warehouse worker solidarity.

  • Southern states are in for the worst coronavirus misery. Poor healthcare and social services contribute to the problem, and the burden will be borne more heavily by PoCs, who are more likely to have chronic untreated health conditions, no savings to allow them to take time off, and no healthcare – which is of course why Republicans are OK with it.

Also:

  • “… if billionaires need you to go back to work to keep their fortunes intact, then it follows that your work – not theirs – is responsible for those fortunes to begin with.”

  • And Cory’s doing a charity reading for #podapalooze, reading an hour of his novel “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” – one of my favorite of his novels. It’s is about a man’s quest to build a mesh Wi-Fi network in Toronto. The man’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, one of is brothers is a zombie, another is a set of nesting dolls, and his girlfriend has wings.

I’ve always thought that fundamentalists support Trump because they’re idiots who choose to believe he repented from his philandering, lying and other sins. Or as a calculation – Trump himself is an unrepentant sinner, but he appoints conservative judges and supports conservative policies.

Here’s an alternate theory – Trump’s fundie supporters see him as being just like them.

Welcome to the Trumpocalypse [Bob Moser/Rolling Stone]

Maybe the administration would take a bit more care with the coronavirus pandemic if it weren’t loaded with folks who are looking forward to the end of the world…

Trump gets these people and their brutal, zero-sum view of the world — and vice-versa. For starters, the universe is divided neatly into friends, who must constantly prove they’re really friends, and mortal enemies, who must be trampled. Also, of course, the truth that he knows, like the truth they know, is the only truth, even if it’s often subject to revision. And just as the world is out to get them, it’s out to get him. What’s often painted as a marriage of convenience between Trump and the religious right is far closer to a pure love match. When Pence fixes those doe eyes upon his president, he isn’t just kissing up; he means it."

These fundies believe the end times are here, the Rapture is coming, and any day now they’ll be transported bodily to heaven.

… before things start to get really ugly on the earth, with God-sent wars and plagues far worse than COVID-19, they’ll be wafted up to heaven en masse, to live in eternal peace, bliss, and moral superiority while everyone else — including lesser Christians — suffers years’ worth of unspeakably gruesome torments prior to the final, earth-destroying battle between Warrior Jesus and Satan at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment in which Jews and others who refuse to convert are condemned to eternal torture in hell."

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo really believe in this toxic bullshit. Or they claim to, which is the same from a policy and political perspective. Trump probably does too – this worldview casts him as literally having been chosen by God.

This does not look comfortable to me but Minnie seems to love it. I think it’s because the concrete is absorbs the sun. I patted her two minutes later; she was a very warm dog. đŸ“·

Minnie is back to herself, energetic and cheerful. This morning when she came in she was very excited, and I sat on the daybed with her for a little while and petted and praised her. Much of the time she appears to be walking normally; you have to look closely to see she’d favoring the injured leg. I am optimistic she will not need the surgery and soon she’ll be back to where she was before, or very close, and I’ll be able to take her on our regular, long, 3-mile walks. Although I’m enjoying them alone; without her I can do the walk in 100 minutes or so on good days.

Minnie gobbles treats and cheese and rotisserie chicken with gusto, but turns away from her regular kibble and canned food. She doesn’t even eat peanut butter, which she previously jumped for joy over. She is barely eating since Wednesday. I talked with the vet about Minnie not eating her kibble and canned food, and also got comments on Reddit and Facebook. My conclusion is that Minnie is playing mindgames with me, as she did when she was a puppy, and holding out for better food. So from now on I’m a tough guy; we are back to the normal routine, modified for current circumstances: Glucosamine treats and a cheese ball containing her anti-inflammatory pill in the morning, and kibble in the morning and evening. If she doesn’t eat the kibble, she doesn’t eat. We’ll give that a couple of days and see how it goes. 📓

We watched episode one of “World on Fire,” a big-budget British miniseries about England during World War II, focused, so far as I can see, entirely on regular people, not great generals or statesmen, drawn from all social classes.

Two cast members I recognize: Sean Bean is a shell-shocked World War I veteran, father of a brave young woman and an insolent, obnoxious teen-age boy. It’s a very different role from the last thing we saw him in, the swashbuckling Richard Sharpe adventure stories, set in the Napoleonic Wars 200 years ago, that aired mainly in the 1990s, with two sequels in the mid-2000s. Bean is also famous as Eddard Stark on Game of Thrones, and for a role in the Lord of the Rings movies. We only saw the first LoTR movie and I, at least, was so bored by that that I didn’t bother with any of the others and have nearly forgotten it. This is a very different role than I’ve ever seen Bean in; he’s previously always seemed to be some variation of the dashing warrior, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain but still basically the same guy. In this he’s a working-class father, psychologically scarred by his own war experience, and now a committed pacifist. He moves stiffly and his clothes are cheap but neat, fitting my image of a certain type of respectable working class British man. And yet in his own way he’s as strong and courageous as Richard Sharpe or Eddard Stark.

The other actor I recognize is Helen Hunt, playing an American journalist in Berlin and Poland as the Nazis begin their march across Europe. The series is set in 1939; HItler is rolling into Poland and still proclaiming that he is only interested in peace; Helen Hunt’s character is a radio journalist, trying to warn the world that Hitler is lying. She’s strong and tough as nails. Also a different role for Hunt than I’ve seen her in; she was a movie and TV star in the 90s, in “Twister,” “As Good as It Gets,” “Mad About You,” and a flawed but interesting movie called “Pay it Forward.” She was gorgeous, and could do sexy and also smart and she was a good actress too. The most recent thing I can remember seeing her in was the HBO miniseries “Empire Falls” in 2005, where she was still recognizably the same actress she was earlier in her career. I loved “Mad About You” and have been bummed that the new miniseries is only available to Spectrum cable subscribers – I’d gladly have paid for it on Apple TV, Amazon Prime or whatever, or even signed up for a new subscription service for the duration, but Spectrum is not available where we are and anyway I will not go through the hassle of switching Internet providers just to watch ONE TV series.

In “World on Fire,” Helen Hunt plays a woman who would have been described at that time as “handsome,” rather than beautiful or sexy. It’s a more limited performance than Bean’s, with a narrower range and more conventional, but Hunt is still very good. Her character is tough, brave and smart, the very ideal of what a journalist of any gender should be.

The series is DARK. I went into it with some vague idea that it might be a period piece like “Downton Abbey,” a fun melodrama that would have some sad moments but that would remain safely inside the TV. But “World on Fire” is, at least so far, a bleak and scary story. The Nazis were some of the biggest monsters history has produced, and in 1939-40 they appeared to be an unstoppable force, rolling effortlessly over Europe and leaving a trail of dead and broken bodies behind them. It must have been a terrifying time to be alive, and the series captures that perfectly.

Although it also occurs to me that the Nazis' sin was that they treated Europe the way that Europe and America treated Africa and Asia. So maybe the Nazis were not so uniquea after all.

I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of this one.

John Scalzi talks about how he did a “reboot” of the classic H. Beam Piper novel “Little Fuzzy." Same story with many of the same characters, Scalzi just wrote his own version of it

“Little Fuzzy” (both the 1962 version by H. Beam Piper and Scalzi’s version in 2010) is the story about a prospector on another planet who finds a race of cute, furry childlike aliens (I think the Ewoks in Star Wars were lifted from Piper’s Fuzzies). The prospector takes it on himself to fight a legal battle to get the Fuzzies declared as people – the equivalent of humans – with all the rights attached thereto. Both the Scalzi and Piper novels are terrific, although the Piper, at least, is problematic because it echoes the White Man’s Burden justification for racism, which lives on in American exceptionalism today, the premise that other races are like children and white people are like their parents, with a responsibility to guide those childlike brown-skinned people into adulthood. Which is a load of crap.

Still, I re-read the Piper Little Fuzzy relatively recently, and I quite enjoyed it; the aliens in that novel really ARE like children. And the Scalzi novel was very good too.

One of my three unpublished novels is a reboot, in its own way, of one of my favorite series of novels, the Cities in Flight series by James Blish. Written in the 1940s-50s, Blish’s premise is the invention in the early 21st Century of a device called a “spindizzy,” which combines a faster-than-light starship drive, artificial gravity, and a force field that can hold in air and keep out radiation. Whole cities on Earth are put in spindizzy globes and flung into space; “gone Okie,” in the jargon of the stories. The hero of the series is John Amalfi, Mayor of New York, New York, which is now a trading ship flying between the stars, with a bridge on top of the Empire State Building. Like all the Okie citizens, Amalfi has had immortality treatments, so he’s hundreds of years old. The series is great fun! But also badly dated, and not one I’d necessarily recommend to new readers today.

In my reboot of the series, I did not make the setting New York or any terrestrial city, both for copyright purposes and because then I’d have to do research and stuff. Instead, I made up a city, Nighthawk, built into an asteroid and converted into a starship. In my story, Nighthawk has fallen on hard times, trapped in orbit around a planet, and the hero is somebody from the bowels of the city, an honest street cop on a corrupt force. I had fun writing it.

Matthew Yglesias explains the argument over the post office bailout [Vox]

No, the post office isn’t failing because Amazon is ripping it off, which is Trump’s stupid theory. People are just sending less First Class mail, and Congress won’t let The USPS go into other lines of business, such as banking.

Yglesias is skeptical that six-day-a-week delivery needs saving.

But given USPS’s popularity with the public, it’s also not really clear why spending money on this would be a big problem other than a principled opposition to having the government do anything at all.

In the immediate circumstances of a collapsing national economy that coincides with a census, a huge surge in people’s dependence on delivery services, and the potential need to convert the entire fall election to vote-by-mail, laying off tons of postal workers seems obviously unhelpful. But unless Congress can reach some sort of deal, that’s the situation they’ll be facing by late summer.

As others have pointed out, having a service that can visit every home and business in America in a single day seems like an incredibly useful thing potentially. One that should not be dismantled. Not useful every day, but useful during an emergency. Such as a pandemic.

Additionally, as Cory Doctorow pointed out earlier today, the postal service disproportionately benefits rural people and veterans, two groups that Republicans are popular with. It continually amazes me how the Republicans continue to shit on their supporters, and the supporters just ask for more.

5 of the 13 things Messy Nessy Chic found on the Internet Monday

100-year-old Bell Telephone ad; restaurant sleepover of World War II; rare 17th Century Parisian apartment for holiday rental (gorgeous!); how you get your hair done in the 1920s for a permanent wave; Harlem fashion boutique (1968) credited with popularizing Afrocentric style for the next decade; mini-dressed hostesses working for British Rail in 1972.

Trump goes postal, coronavirus in the UK vs. Ireland, and more on Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic.net

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

Trump plans to murder the US Postal Service, in violation of the US Constitution.

The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…

But Congress has decided not to bail out the postal service, despite Art 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Maybe it’s because without a USPS we couldn’t have a postal vote in 2020?

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…

The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.

www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/w…

The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.

www.govtrack.us/congress/…

…

The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”

As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman….

The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.

The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love — veterans and rural voters.

www.eff.org/deeplinks…

Also:

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has made election day a statewide holiday, joining the handful of other states that have passed this vital, democracy-protecting law, like Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky and New York.

edition.cnn.com/2020/04/1…

It should be a federal holiday. It isn’t, because Republicans believe that increased voter turnout is bad for their electoral chances.

www.commondreams.org/news/2020…

…

Northam’s new holiday-establishing order also eliminates Virginia’s Lee-Jackson day holiday, which celebrated the traitorous, slave-owning Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who murdered American soldiers to defend their right to treat other Americans as property.

Here’s a campaign to #TakeBackTuesday and establish a US-wide election-day holiday.

www.good.is/take-back…

Also:

Coronavirus death rates in Ireland, which embraced quarantining early on, are half what they are in the UK, whose idiot Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in denial about the seriousness of the threat.

Medical historian Elaine Doyle notes that “as the Irish government was shutting schools, 250,000 people in the UK were gathering for a Cheltenham match.”

Ireland canceled St Paddy’s Day and shut pubs a week in advance. The UK had megaconcerts like the Stereophonics gig in Cardiff.

The Irish government made clear, continuous announcements about the gravity of the pandemic, urging people to stay home and take care. The UK government was virtually silent.

The thing about exponential growth is that early interventions make a huge difference. The UK dawdled for nearly two weeks before taking the lockdown steps that the Irish enacted.

The Tory ideology holds that governments are incompetent. This creates a perverse incentive: when Tories govern badly, they prove their own point. But Tories are supposed to murder poor people to juice the economy, not murder pensioners AND the economy.

Boris Johnson is a vile piece of work: a racist, misogynist bigot and a fool. His unwillingness to take (medical) expert advice (and his reliance on finance-sector advice) resulted in the measurable, deaths of Britons. Thousands of them.

What Cory says about Johnson and the Tories goes for Trump and the GOP too of course.

Minnie is recovering nicely, but she won't eat her regular kibble or canned food.

Minnie is hopping around on three legs and occasionally using the injured one, which suggests it is healing. She’s got her old personality back – active, curious and playful. She even tried chasing one of the cats yesterday.

However, she won’t eat her regular kibble or canned food. We’ve been giving her treats, a little cheese and a lot of rotisserie chicken. She loves that rotisserie chicken.

I put down a bowl of kibble for her to eat a few minutes ago. She sniffed the edges and gave me a dirty look, like, “You are SO getting a one-star review on Yelp for this!”

I’m not worried – yet. We went through something like this when she was a puppy. I’ll keep giving her rotisserie chicken until we run out of that, then switch her back to 100% kibble. If she skips eating two days in a row then back to the vet she goes. 📓

I am having my feelings and thoughts without guilt

Monotony, frustration over having to wear a mask, being unable to take the dog to the park, or go anywhere around people. And I have so many opinions!

But I am also mindful that there are people out their dying in the most miserable conditions, exposing themselves to contagion to stock supermarket shelves, and medical personnel working 20 hour days without adequate protection. So yeah my problems, while large to me, are small. 📓

This is one of our neighbors. He is unfriendly and never says hello. đŸ“·

I’ve always like this house around the corner from ours. đŸ“·

I am not a sentimental man who cries at rainbows and flowers, but when I saw this in the supermarket today I bawled.

The Jungle Prince of Delhi

For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?

Ellen Barry unravels the mystery at the New York Times

James Nicoll reviews Isaac Asimov’s 1950s time-travel novel, “The End of Eternity,” and finds it still holds up.

Interestingly, Nicoll notes, the premise of Eternity is similar to the Foundation series — a secret cabal manipulating human history — but this novel takes the story in the opposite direction.

Earlier I said the premise of Foundation is sinister when you think about it: The two forms of government we see are empire and rule by a secret, unaccountable conspiracy of technocrats. Both of these states are presented as utopian, when in reality the first has been shown to be pretty awful, and the second looks a lot like Communism, which has not proven to be swell either.

Nonetheless, I cut Asimov slack. He was a VERY young man when he initially wrote Foundation, reading headlines about the Nazis seemingly unstoppably conquering the world and wanted assurance that everything was going to be OK. Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory could have provided that assurance, had it existed. That observation is not original to me; Alec Nevala Lee said it in his terrific history of science fiction, “Astounding.”

I think it’s also true that in both the Foundation series and later in End of Eternity, Asimov was exploring the desire to be assured that the grownups are in charge of the world, as presidents and prime ministers and heads of billion-dollar companies and vast government bureaucracies, and that these grownups had matters under control. The 21-year-old Asimov who wrote Foundation had very diffferent ideas about that premise than the 34-year-old who wrote The End of Eternity.

Asimov wrote more Foundation stories in the 1980s. By that time he was in his 60s, written hundreds of books, including bestsellers. He appeared many times on national TV and had been published in the New York Times. He was an American public intellectual, and was himself one of the supposed grownups running the world. He had a different perspective on those issues once again.

Passover was a really big deal when I was a kid

We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.

Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.

Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.

Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.

To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕

We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.

I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.

Happy Easter!

He is risen!

But do not talk to Him until He has had coffee because seriously he’s just plain grouchy til then.

One of the crazy things about this pandemic is that it’s all going to be over in a year or a few years at most. Done. History. Past tense.

Everybody who was going to get it will have gotten it, many will die, the rest of us will just get on with our lives. The disease itself might continue in the population, but it will be like the flu. Just part of normal life. No social distancing or special measures required.

And if the 1918 pandemic is a guide, we will not talk about it much and it will be all but forgotten in a generation.

A generation from now we will STILL be talking about the 1970s because that was such a crazy decade. But the “coronavirus pandemic?” What was that? Never heard of it.

Last night I was getting ready for bed and looked at my pedometer app and saw it was at 9,800 steps and said to myself, welp, guess I’m not making it to 10,000 today.

And then I got into bed and pulled the covers up and was all set up and cozy and ready to go to sleep and I looked at the pedometer app again and it was over 9,900.

And I got out of bed and walked around the house for about 5 minutes until I was over 10,000.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

[Private equity] companies that “looted healthcare want billions in bailout.”

Corporations that went to binding arbitration to stiff consumers are screaming now that automation is threatening to make the playing field fair

E-voting is a nonstarter for secret elections but it’ll work for public votes by elected officials such as legislators

Republicans plan squads of ex-military and ex-police to intimidate black and Latino voters

“‘Job creators’ are job annihilators”

Eric Snowden warns that pandemic surveillance will become permanent. If you liked the PATRIOT Act, you’ll love pandemic surveillance!

Also: “RIP MAD’s Mort Drucker: One of ‘the usual gang of idiots:”

His daughter, Laurie Bachner, told the AP: “I think my father had the best life anyone could hope for. He was married to the only woman he ever loved and got to make a living out of what he loved to do.”

Drucker worked at MAD from the mid-50s on, helping to define the magazine’s caricature house-style.

I just cancelled my $119 annual Dropbox account, which expires in 10 days. I’m pretty sure I can get everything I need from iCloud plus the free Dropbox tier.

As a test, I moved everything out of the Dropbox sync folder except for one small folder that I still want to use with Dropbox. We’ll see if anything breaks!

I’ve been using Dropbox for at least 10 years, so this feels like more of a big deal than it probably actually is.

The vet gave us parking lot service: when I arrived, I called from the parking lot, a vet tech came out to the car, checked us in, and brought Minnie inside. I never entered the vet building.

Out of old habit I almost ordered a burger, fries and chocolate shake from the vet tech. But I stopped myself in time. Still, would’ve been nice if she’s cruised up on roller skates.

The vet phoned me while I was in the car trying to figure out how to get the iPad hooked up to the Verizon network (which I never did succeed in doing). She said Minnie has basically blown out her right rear knee. Minnie probably did the left one too at some point a while ago (the vet said), but recovered and has been compensating.

I’m thinking Minnie probably did the left one in September when we took her into the vet because she could barely stand up after zoomies.

The prognosis: Rest for two weeks, anti-inflammatories, and then we’ll see.

If that doesn’t work: Surgery. Which costs $4,000. So yeah, permanently disabled dog vs. spending $4K on surgery is a choice between unacceptable options. Let’s just say she’s going to recover fine after two weeks of rest.

The vet said Minnie will probably eventually need the surgery, when she is an old dog. But “eventually” is a long way away, and may never come, so I’m not going to worry about that now.

When I dropped Minnie at the vet initially, I asked how long it would take. They said a half-hour to an hour. I said OK we live a short way away so I’ll just turn around and go home and then come back to get her when I get the call that she’s ready. I figured it’d probably be more like two or three hours, just because things usually take longer than people say they will .

But nope, the vet called just as I was pulling up the road to the house. I finished the call in our driveway, went upstairs, had lunch, then went back downstairs and picked up the dog.

Julie took this photo of Minnie recovering from her ordeal.

I filed a bug report with Flexibits about a Fantastical 3 problem I had in February. I’m just getting a response now.

Um, yay?

Minnie was still hopping along on three legs this morning and looking pretty miserable. I called the vet and they’re doing parking-lot check-ins. So I’m off to the vet later this morning.

It’s pouring rain out. I know that’s no big deal to the real world, but we Southern Californians are big babies when it comes to any kind of foul weather.

A friend says dogs just do that sometimes, and she’ll get over it in a week. Maybe so. But Minnie is seven years old and she has never done it. She frequently strains herself after zoomies, but never like this and never this badly. And she seems pretty miserable, so anything we can do to make her more comfortable seems like a good idea.

Also, it seems prudent to have her checked out.

Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’

Last year, Democratic state Senator and party leader Scott Weiner said,

“The federal government is no longer a reliable partner in delivering health care, in supporting immigrants, supporting LGBT people, in protecting the environment, so we need to forge our own path…. We can do everything in our power to protect our state, but we need a reliable federal partner. And right now we don’t have that.”

Yes.

[Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg]

Alan Brown reviews a the recently published lost Robert A. Heinlein novel, “The Pursuit of the Pankera,” and likes it [Tor.com]

“The Pursuit of the Pankera” is a kind of metafiction – fiction about fiction. It is an alternate version of “The Number of the Beast,” which Heinlein published in 1980.

Both novels are about travel between alternate universes, and so they are alternate-universe novels about each other.

I have never liked “The Number of the Beast,” in part because it suffers from the sins of late-period Heinlein: Long-winded political preachiness combined with the author’s creepy sex scenes.

And a third problem for “Number:” It’s Heinlein’s love letter to the science fiction/fantasy action-adventure of his youth, particularly the Oz books, Barsoom books and E.E. “Doc” Smith.

None of those three series were childhood favorites of mine and Heinlein does nothing to make them seem appealing.

Brown says “The Pursuit of the Pankera” is a much better book than “Number.” and that’s what I’m hearing elsewhere. It’s on my to-be-read list, near the top.

Heinlein has been one of my favorite authors since I was 8 years old, but his most-popular books tend to be the ones I like least. I like his early and middle-period stuff.

Well, shit. Minnie injured her foot and now she’s walking on three legs. Nothing visibly wrong with it and she doesn’t react when I manipulate it.

Normally I’d say give it a day and if she’s not better tomorrow she’s going to the vet. But that’s not an option now. Not for this.

Larry David, Master of His Quarantine

Maureen Dowd at the New York Times:

When I ask if he is hoarding anything, he is outraged. “Not a hoarder,” he said. “In fact, in a few months, if I walk into someone’s house and stumble onto 50 rolls of toilet paper in a closet somewhere, I will end the friendship. It’s tantamount to being a horse thief in the Old West.”

“I never could have lived in the Old West,” he added parenthetically. “I would have been completely paranoid about someone stealing my horse. No locks. You tie them to a post! How could you go into a saloon and enjoy yourself knowing your horse could get taken any moment? I would be so distracted. Constantly checking to see if he was still there.”

I've been drinking a meal replacement shake called Huel for breakfast for months

For several months, my daily breakfast has been about a pint of a thick “nutritionally complete” liquid, called Huel.

Huel is a powder you mix with water to make a milky liquid, like a thin milkshake. You can add more water to make it thinner, or less to make it thicker. You can use vegetable milk, or mix it with fruit or peanut butter for added flavor. The powder itself can be unflavored, or vanilla, chocolate or berry flavored. I’ve tried all three, and settled on the vanilla as my favorite.

I used to eat a real breakfast every day, fruit and cottage cheese, but when I started Huel in November I needed to get a running start in the morning and keep running all morning.

At that time, I was working with an international workgroup. I’m based in San Diego, which means I got into work when everybody else around the US had already been working for hours and colleagues in the UK were already into late afternoon. I didn’t want to take time out to eat breakfast, even though my body demands it.

When I read about Huel in this article by Nicole Dieker, I said sure, why not. And I liked it and stuck with it.

And I feel fine. I no longer have that morning scheduling pressure but I’ve stuck with Huel. It takes some of the complexity out of the day. And I like it.

Some people, including Nicole Dieker, above, take Huel for two meals a day, but that’s too many for me, because I like to eat. Just not as often as my body seems to need me to eat.

Some people take all their meals with Huel, but that’s not a good idea, because you risk nutritionally deficiencies. Human beings are evolved to consume a variety of foods to get a broad range of nutrients; it’s why your dog and cat are happy eating kibble every day but you’d go nuts if you always ate exactly the same thing every meal.

Huel is one of several “meal replacement” liquids that have come on the market in the past few years. They all have pretty much the same marketing pitch: Eating three meals a day, plus snacks, is a hassle. Meal replacements are designed to replace the fast-food burger you consume at your desk, not the meals you enjoy with family and friends.

Meal replacements are particularly touted for people looking to get off a junk food diet.

Soylent is the most famous of these meal replacements. I’ve tried Soylent and like it fine, but I went with Huel this time around on a whim, because of that article.

Also, Soylent is made with chemicals but Huel is made with real ingredients: Oats, tapioca, flaxseed, sunflower, coconut, peas, rice, etc.

(Yes, I know that those so-called “real ingredients” are ALSO chemicals. You know what the fuck I mean, piglet..)

As Huel notes on its website: A liquid meal made from a powder sounds weird and dystopian, but it’s actually an old idea: Flour is an example of a powder that becomes food, and soup is an example of a liquid meal. Both have been around for thousands of years. Many people have smoothies for breakfast. Huel is just a variation on that. 🌕

Kansas Republicans are fighting to kill Christians and Jews [Zack Budryk/The Hill]

Kansas’s Republican-led legislator overturned the Democratic governor’s ban on gatherings during Easter and Passover.

Kansas legislature strikes down governor’s directive limiting size of religious gatherings

Kansas Republicans are claiming religious persecution, which is ridiculous because (1) The law is designed to save people’s lives and (2) The law does not single out any particular religious denomination or indeed single out religions at all. This is settled law in the US and has been for many, many decades.

The Pope and Saudi Arabia are canceling religious gatherings, including the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is a tradition dating back more than a thousands years and literally the holiest thing that a Muslim man does in his life.

Via Cory Doctorow, who says:

It’s another reminder that the right’s claim that it is the party of rational long-termism rather than squishy bleeding-heart reflex is just bullshit.

There’s literally nothing more politically short-term than dooming your core voters to die gasping deaths in a month because you’re afraid they’ll be angry at you on Easter Sunday. Angry voters might not vote for you. Dead voters can’t.

I do not celebrate anybody’s death but it is really hard to remember that when toxic people are fighting for the right to kill themselves and their followers. But even if I were cold-blooded enough to wish death on my enemies, they’ll take their neighbors and innocent children with them.

Remember this the next time you hear someone say the Republican party is pro-life and pro-common sense.

This is why I am a Democrat.

Sure, the Democratic Party is frequently fucked up – you want to complain about the DNCC, Congressional leadership, and the way the Presidential Primary played out, I’m right there with you.

But the GOP is a criminal conspiracy and death cult.

Automating micro.blog categories using emoji. Nerdy fun!

Listening to the Monday microcast with @macgenie and @manton yesterday, I learned that you can use filters on micro.blog to search for text in a post you write, and automatically include that post in a category.

So you can automate micro.blog to search for any post containing the word “beer,” or the beer emoji đŸș, and put that in a “beer” category. Instructions are here.

Additionally, micro.blog uses emoji in lieu of hashtags, which I like. Because emoji are awesome and hashtags are ugly.

Later, in the evening, I set up an automated, filtered category for “best of,” using the full-moon emoji 🌕 for a filter. I chose that emoji for no other reason than that it is a nice emoji, and won’t get in the way of people reading the post.

So now I have a blog category for my best posts, to distinguish them from the daily flow of ephemera.

I’m also thinking of using emoji with IFTTT or Zapier to control cross-posting to Twitter and Tumblr.

One of the things I love about micro.blog is that it manages to be both simple and powerful, which is a rare combination.

And now because this post contains that full moon emoji, it should automatically appear in the best-of category, without my having to do anything about it.

Appalling/delightful Disney horror/comic mashups! IT heroes! Forging PDF signatures! And more!

On today’s Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow

Disney horror/comic mashups are appalling/delightful

Daniel “Kickpunch” Björk created an incredible set of Disney Comic/horror movie mashups.

The chemistry of cold-brew coffee

I can’t say I have strong feelings about cold-brew coffee. I like a nice iced coffee in hot weather. But even in hot weather, I like hot coffee.

The crisis is making heroes of IT workers

IT workers are pulling all-nighters and multi-day marathons to set up co-workers for remote work and provision systems for new workflows.

Automating fake PDF signatures

The modern era has many tiny hypocrisies, but none quite so common as the mutual pretense by which you ask me to print, sign and scan a PDF and I pretend that I didn’t just paste my signatures into it."

But some firms shatter this tacit social contract and demand that you really engage in the ridiculous ritual of actually printing, signing and scanning.

Enter Falsiscan, a tool to automate convincing forgeries of this procedure.

gitlab.com/edouardkl…

Falsiscan takes in 27 variants of your signature and then feed these sigs and your PDF to it, with the (x,y) for each signature blank as arguments, and it will produce a slightly off-center, slightly degraded new PDF that looks like you actually signed it.

Feds are seizing medical supplies from hospitals without saying what they’re doing with it [Noam N. Levey/LA Times]

“In order to have confidence in the distribution system, to know that it is being done in an equitable manner, you have to have transparency,” says Dr. John Hick, a Minnesota emergency physician.

“Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know,” one official said. “And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things.”

The 10 Most Offensive Movies Ever Made [Keith Langston/Screenrant]

(1) The writer Tad Williams and his wife, Deb, had a cat named “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Kitten.” Or just Henry. Tad told wonderful stories about that cat, and Julie and I got to meet the cat, who was indeed wonderful.

(2) The following would be great names for podcasts: “I Spit On Your Grave,” “The Human Centipede,” and “Cannibal Holocaust.”

Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin may have solved one of the fundamental mysteries of physics: Does time exist?

Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math

Relativity makes no distinction between past, present and future; they are all fixed. In relativity, “now” does not exist.

In real life, though, we know that time flows from past to future and we live in the now. Quantum mechanics agrees with real life.

How to resolve the contradiction?

Gisin thinks he has, using an obscure, turn-of-the-20th Century branch of mathematics.

Gisin’s theory, if borne out, would explain the nature of time, reconcile classical and quantum mechanics, explain whether numbers are real, describe the nature of “now,” and might require physicists to invent a whole new kind of mathematics. Kind of a big deal!

[Natalie Wolchover/Quanta Magazine]

Coronavirus breaks my iPhone: FaceID doesn't work when you wear a mask

Privileged person problem: When I go to the supermarket, I keep the shopping list on my iPhone. When I’m wearing a mask, Face ID doesn’t recognize me. I have to open my iPhone by entering the passcode a dozen times or more.

I heard about a feature called “Setup Alternate Appearance” for situations where you have an “appearance that can look vastly different.”

I tried it with my mask on this morning. Nope, didn’t work. It said I had something obscuring my face and I should try again.

Joanna Stern has more on the whys and wherefores at the Wall Street Journal. The iPhone needs to see your eyes, nose and mouth. It’ll work for many sunglasses but not all. It supposedly works when men grow and shave off facial hair, and when women wear or don’t wear makeup.

There’s apparently a workaround to the mask problem: masks printed with images of the lower parts of faces on them!

Doctors who’ve been living with this problem for years offer suggestions: Just use pen and paper, bunch up your interactions with the iPhone in batches all at once, tell someone you trust to unlock the phone for you, ir continue typing in your passcode like a savage.

Stern notes, and I can confirm, that you can punch in your passcode and otherwise use your iPhone while wearing thin nitrile gloves on with trivial additional inconvenience. 🌕

Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic.net: Cleveland Plain Dealer massacre; TSA child molesters and more

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

Cleveland Plain Dealer’s new owners massacre staff

The owners of the Cleveland Plain Dealer laid off all but 14 of the newsroom staff, then prohibited the survivors from covering the beats they’ve mastered over decades, giving those roles over to the non-unionized staff at cleveland.com. …

Among those affected: Ginger Christ, the paper’s health reporter, who has been stripped of her beat during a pandemic.

This during the largest public emergency in the last 75 years. Peak parasitic capitalism.

The TSA wanted to inspect a 16-year-old trans girl’s genitals

The scanner operator “she told Jamii she must go to a private room, expose herself, and let her ‘feel up in there.’ That is, a TSA supervisor demanded to molest a child.”

When her mother refused, TSA called in the police and top TSA managers. They were eventually released and drove 600 miles rather than flying.

The TSA previously strip-searched a grandmother on Mother’s Day to get a look at her sanitary napkin, and penetrated another woman’s vulva and “falsely told her that she could not refuse the search and abandon her trip and threatened to physically restrain her if she didn’t submit.”

Also:

  • The 400-year-old Bannatyne Manuscript may not be the oldest surviving F-bomb. Roger Fuckebythenavele ftw.
  • Excellent public domain Zoom backgrounds. Alas, my MBP is too underpowered to use Zoom backgrounds. I have not been moved to buy a greenscreen but these backgrounds may change my mind!
  • Monster-themed COVID PSAs.

What will you do the day social distancing ends?

I think we’ll be cautious and not rush out to any restaurants or crowded social gatherings.

But I think I’ll absolutely take the dog to the park, Lake Murray, where we used to walk every day. Stop and talk to people. Let Minnie sniff out some other dogs. That sounds lovely. With Julie of course if she wants to come. 🌕

This looks like a useful new feature on Inoreader: Convert Almost Any Webpage Into RSS Feed With Inoreader’s Web Feeds

Inoreader will let you subscribe to updates for web pages even when those pages don’t offer RSS feeds.

Whenever you see a web page with a series of updates, be it news articles, blog posts, classifieds, product updates, weather alerts, practically any series of HTML links, Inoreader should be able to present it as an RSS feed. This feed will then be continuously updated, and any new links added to the list will pop up as articles inside Inoreader. Just like any regular feed.

I’m guessing it does a little screen-scraping and looks for patterns in text.

Social distancing is getting hard in our house. And we’re normally people who have a limitless capacity for solitude and not going out.

500-year-old manuscript contains one of earliest known uses of the “F-word”

Scotland is the home of a 500-year-old medieval manuscript containing the oldest extant written F-bomb.

“The profanity appears in a poem recorded by a bored student in Edinburgh while under lockdown as the plague ravaged Europe…. The poem is getting renewed attention thanks to its inclusion in a forthcoming BBC Scotland documentary exploring the country’s long, proud tradition of swearing, ‘Scotland—Contains Strong Language.'”

That is darn interesting.

[Jennifer Ouellette/Ars Technica]

Life Without Toilet Paper Is Better

Frank Bures at Vice:

If you were walking barefoot through your yard, and felt the unpleasant squish of fresh dog do through your toes, what would be your reaction? Would you think, “Geez, I need to get some dry, easily torn paper to smear this off my foot”?

No. You would quickly get yourself to a hose, or a sink. You would find some soap. And you would scrub your foot off using your hands.”

Don’t thank me for sharing this.

Really. Don’t. I don’t ever want to discuss it.

This is what happens when a narcissist runs a crisis

Jennifer Senior at the New York Times:

Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats….

Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity….

Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can’t bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” During Friday’s news conference, he added the tests “we inherited were “broken, were obsolete,” when this form of coronavirus didn’t even exist under his predecessor.

This sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: “It was like that when I got here.”

Cambridge Analytica and other abusers killed the open, collaborative, API-driven Web 2.0. “It’s amazing, in hindsight, just how naively open everything was back then.”

This Video Has 3,627,803 Views - YouTube

A delightful video that takes a surprisingly philosophical and optimistic turn.

The stimulus bill seems big – $2 trillion – but it’s just one week of median income for small businesses and families.

Cory Doctorow: “The crisis is already four times longer than that, depending on which city you live in. The end is not in sight.”

Umair Haque: “Coronavirus is an extinction level event for modern economies.” We are living through the complete collapse of the US economy. This is happening now, will play out over the summer and will take generations to recover.

The solution for Congress is to just spend money to keep the economy going – or, more precisely, put the economy in suspended animation. Whatever it takes. Fund businesses to pay employee salaries and meet other essential expenses while the employees stay home, so when the crisis passes the businesses can just reopen their doors, call the employees back in and get back to work.

Only essential employees should be working now, and the government should spend whatever it takes to pay them and be sure they have the best protection we can provide.

Whatever it takes. $2 trillion is inadequate. A thousand trillion is a quadrillion. A thousand times that is a quintillion. If that’s what it takes, so be it.

After a church pastor in California announced he would defy shelter in place orders and hold services, his landlord, the Bethel Open Bible Church, changed the locks. [Lisa Fernandez/KTUTV] Via Cory Doctorow

Reminds me that I’ve been looking for years for a word other than “Christian” to describe the folks like those idiot pastors who are keeping their churches open. I have Christian friends; they are lovely, SANE people.

I’ve come up with “Fox News Christians” but I don’t really care for that either.

Why is Trump touting hydroxychloroquine? Follow the money

Trump and his cronies are investors in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine. Trump has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a possible coronavirus cure, despite lack of scientific evidence, and also despite significant risks to people who take it, and despite its being needed for legitimate, proven medical uses, such as treating lupus.

Peter Baker, Katie Rogers, David Enrich and Maggie Haberman report at The New York Times: Trump’s Aggressive Advocacy of Malaria Drug for Treating Coronavirus Divides Medical Community

Sanofi’s largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the investment company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans including Trump.

Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. Mr. Ross said in a statement Monday that he “was not aware that Invesco has any investments in companies producing” the drug, “nor do I have any involvement in the decision to explore this as a treatment.”

As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi….

Several generic drugmakers are gearing up to produce hydroxychloroquine pills, including Amneal Pharmaceuticals, whose co-founder Chirag Patel is a member of Trump National Golf Course Bedminster in New Jersey and has golfed with Mr. Trump at least twice since he became president, according to a person who saw them.

Andrew Cuomo is also touting the drug.

Dr. Daniel H. Sterman, the critical care director at NYU Langone Health, said doctors there are using hydroxychloroquine, but data about its effectiveness remained “weak and unsubstantiated” pending the study. “We do not know whether our patients are benefiting from hydroxychloroquine treatment at the present time,” he said.

On the other hand, many healthcare providers are advising use of the drug based on good preliminary results.

Dr. Roy M. Gulick, the chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, said hydroxychloroquine was given on a case-by-case basis. “We explain the pros and cons and explain that we don’t know if it works or not,” he said.

Doctors at Northwell Health and Mount Sinai Health System are using it as well. At the Mount Sinai South Nassau County branch on Long Island, doctors have employed a regimen of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin “pretty much since day one” with mixed results, said Dr. Adhi Sharma, its chief medical officer.

“We’ve been throwing the kitchen sink at these patients,” he said. “I can’t tell whether someone got better on their own or because of the medication.”

Irony: Calling someone stupid, naive or malicious for failing to anticipate a leak in a speech that you failed to anticipate leaking.

Transcript: Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly addresses USS Theodore Roosevelt crew about ‘stupid’ ousted captain [CNN]

Like a good kleptocrat, Modly echoes the boss’s party line: It’s all the media and China’s fault. Like the way the media and China laid off the pandemic response team, took numerous golf breaks and campaign rallies while the pandemic spread, ignored warnings from the Obama White House, Department of Defense and other sources that a pandemic was imminent and said the seriousness of the pandemic is a Democratic Party hoax.

Who Reads Cosy Catastrophes?

Jo Walton:

Cosy catastrophes are science fiction novels in which some bizarre calamity occurs that wipes out a large percentage of the population, but the protagonists survive and even thrive in the new world that follows. They are related to but distinct from the disaster novel where some relatively realistic disaster wipes out a large percentage of the population and the protagonists also have a horrible time. The name was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, and used by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by analogy to the cosy mystery, in which people die violently but there’s always tea and crumpets.

Cosy catastrophes were hugely popular after World War II in Britain, among people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading science fiction. They were a reaction (says Walton) to social programs that made life vastly better for working people, but somewhat less comfortable for the middle class, who could no longer afford servants, vacations to France, etc.

The social contract had been rewritten, and the richer really did suffer a little. I want to say “poor dears,” but I really do feel for them. Britain used to be a country with sharp class differences—how you spoke and your parents’ jobs affected your healthcare, your education, your employment opportunities. It had an empire it exploited to support its own standard of living. The situation of the thirties was horribly unfair and couldn’t have been allowed to go on, and democracy defeated it, but it wasn’t the fault of individuals. Britain was becoming a fairer society, with equal opportunities for everyone, and some people did suffer for it. They couldn’t have their foreign holidays and servants and way of life, because their way of life exploited other people. They had never given the working classes the respect due to human beings, and now they had to, and it really was hard for them. You can’t really blame them for wishing all those inconvenient people would
all be swallowed up by a volcano, or stung to death by triffids.

[Tor.com]