Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

Never let that crisis go to waste.

The Trump administration rolled back ambitious Obama-era vehicle mileage standards Tuesday, raising the ceiling on damaging fossil fuel emissions for years to come and gutting one of the United States’ biggest efforts against climate change. 

The Trump administration released a final rule Tuesday on mileage standards through 2026. The change — after two years of Trump threatening and fighting states and a faction of automakers that opposed the move — waters down a tough Obama mileage standard that would have encouraged automakers to ramp up production of electric vehicles and more fuel-efficient gas and diesel vehicles.

“We are delivering on President Trump’s promise to correct the current fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards,” Andrew Wheeler, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement Tuesday marking the release. 

He said the final rule “puts in place a sensible” national program that “strikes the right regulatory balance that protects our environment, and sets reasonable targets for the auto industry. This rule supports our economy, and the safety of American families.” 

Opponents contend the change — gutting his predecessor’s legacy effort against climate-changing fossil fuel emissions — appears driven by Trump’s push to undo regulatory initiatives of former President Barack Obama and say even the administration has had difficulty pointing to the kind of specific, demonstrable benefits to drivers, public health and safety or the economy that normally accompany standards changes. 

The Trump administration says the looser mileage standards will allow consumers to keep buying the less fuel-efficient SUVs that U.S. drivers have favored for years. Opponents say it will kill several hundred more Americans a year through dirtier air, compared to the Obama standards. 

Even “given the catastrophe they’re in with the coronavirus, they’re pursuing a policy that’s going to hurt public health and kill people,” said Chet France, a former 39-year veteran of the EPA, where he served as a senior official over emissions and mileage standards.

The EPA mileage rollback is just the first blow. COVID-19 is already being used as the excuse to suspend enforcement of EPA regulations on clear water and air, and to suspend FDA food safety inspections.  These regulations will never be reinstated under Trump.  In fact, the Trump regime will say that industries have proven they can police themselves, and they will, right down to hundreds of thousands of Americans getting sick every year because of health violations.

And all this happening while COVID-19 is going on.

Rent's Due And The Devil's, Too

It's April 1.  Rent's due.  And millions of Americans don't have it.

New York hair stylist Vanessa Karim has not worked since March 21, when the state closed all salons to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She only has enough cash on hand to cover half of her $1,400 April rent.
“It all feels like a bad dream,” said Karim, 36, who planned to ask her landlord if he would be willing to accept a partial payment. “Every day I’m like, ‘Is this really happening?’ I’m trying not to stress out.”

As the pandemic wreaks havoc on the U.S. economy and transforms Americans’ daily lives, the start of April brings a moment of reckoning for millions: rent checks are due.

Many Americans have already lost their jobs – last week’s national unemployment claims exceeded 3 million, shattering previous records – and huge swaths of the country have essentially shut down, with more than half of U.S. states now under some version of a stay-at-home order to curb the disease’s spread.
One third of the nation’s 328 million residents live in rental homes, according to U.S. Census data. In New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, the proportion of those who rent is much higher.

Some states have instituted a moratorium on residential evictions. Housing advocates, however, have called for more dramatic action, including putting rent payments on hold altogether until the economy can restart.

Alfa Cristina Morales, 21, lost her job as a line cook at an Oakland, California, coffee shop, along with her health insurance, three weeks ago.

Now she has been forced to take the money she had saved for a U.S. citizenship application and use it to pay bills, including her April rent. She is not sure how she and her 2-year-old son will make it through May. She has applied for unemployment benefits, which could take weeks to arrive.

“We’re worried that it won’t be enough,” she said.

For millions of Americans, it won't be enough. Moratoriums on evictions won't be enough either, because landlords in nearly every state will still be able to initiate eviction procedures if there's cause. Landlords will absolutely pursue "material violations" of leases.  In Kentucky that means you get evicted after 14 days instead of the 7 for non-payment. Eviction still requires a court order, but it's not like a tenant is going to have the money to fight it.

So yeah, if a landlord decides to boot you for non-payment, you're still getting kicked out onto the street during a pandemic.

And it's going to happen to millions.

StupidiNews!

• GOP Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina has officially resigned from the House to begin his job as White House chief of staff, Trump's fifth in four years.
• The Trump regime is offering to relax sanctions on Venezuela if the country ousts President Nicolas Maduro and forms a transitional government that excludes opposition leader Juan Guaido.
• The captain of the USS Teddy Roosevelt is begging the Pentagon for COVID-19 help in a rare public letter as the naval aircraft carrier has dozens of cases of the virus among a crew of 4,000.
• California and Texas are joining New York in releasing non-violent offenders from jails as COVID-19 threatens to turn prisons into breeding grounds for the virus.
• The FDA has granted emergency approval for chloroquine to treat COVID-19, despite limited supply, a need for the drug to treat lupus sufferers, and no real evidence the drug is effective.

Last Call For Bringin' Home The Fakin', Con't

Battleground states with Republican governors that Trump needs to win like Florida get every piece of equipment they ask for.  New York, California, and Washington state get to beg at Trump's feet or their people die.

As states across the country have pleaded for critical medical equipment from a key national stockpile, Florida has promptly received 100 percent of its first two requests — with President Trump and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis both touting their close relationship.
States including Oklahoma and Kentucky have received more of some equipment than they requested, while others such as Illinois, Massachusetts and Maine have secured only a fraction of their requests.

It’s a disparity that has caused frustration and confusion in governors’ offices across the country, with some officials questioning whether politics is playing a role in the response.

Governors are making increasingly frantic requests to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for material. State and congressional leaders are flooding FEMA with letters and calls seeking clarity about how it is allocating suddenly in-demand resources such as masks, ventilators and medical gowns.

Frustration level is high,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) said of the struggle to find ventilators for patients infected by the novel coronavirus. “We’re hoping we’ll be able to get them. The federal government needs to help us with that. There’s no question.”

Governors and state officials have become increasingly frustrated by what they describe as a byzantine and unsteady process for distributing medical supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile. As they try to combat a worsening pandemic, several have complained about chaos and disarray within the system and a lack of guidance about how they can secure lifesaving supplies, according to interviews and documents from officials in more than a dozen states.

And yes, I know the outlier here is Kentucky, but that's Mitch McConnell's home state, and Mitch needs to win too in November.

There’s no direct evidence that Republican states are receiving more favorable treatment overall, and some GOP-led states such as Georgia have had trouble filling their requests. But Trump has contributed to the sense that politics could be a factor by publicly attacking Democratic governors who criticize his handling of the public health crisis.

Trump said last week that he is inclined not to speak with anyone who is insufficiently appreciative of his administration’s efforts. He has touted his personal relationships with several governors while also declaring that the federal government won’t be “a shipping clerk” for local officials who seek help in obtaining masks, ventilators and other critical supplies. States should buy the materials themselves, he said.

“All I want them to do — very simple — I want them to be appreciative,” Trump told reporters Friday. “I don’t want them to say things that aren’t true. I want them to be appreciative. We’ve done a great job. And I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about Mike Pence, the task force; I’m talking about FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers.”

Georgia's Brian Kemp is in Trump's doghouse for appointing Kelly Loeffler to the Senate rather than Trump's pick, Rep. Doug Collins back in December.  Now Kemp is having "trouble filling their requests".

One White House official said Trump is attuned to the electoral importance of Florida in November, giving added weight to the arguments DeSantis has made to the administration that his state’s economy should reopen as soon as possible.

“The president knows Florida is so important for his reelection so when DeSantis says that, it means a lot,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank. “He pays close attention to what Florida wants.”

The states getting things they want are Republicans governors in Trump's good graces and Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky.  Everyone else is getting screwed, and it will kill people.

A Streetcar Named Retired

In probably the least surprising column of his career, Jason Williams over at the Cincinnati Enquirer notes that the city has shut down the streetcar amid city worker furloughs announced Monday and doesn't even give it 24 hours before floting the idea that it should never, ever reopen.

Cincinnati's streetcar is shut down. It should stay closed. Forever. 

The magnitude of City Council's streetcar-before-people priorities has never been so glaring. 

The city on Monday furloughed 1,700 employees indefinitely amid the coronavirus-induced financial free fall. The news came as the city also announced it is shutting down the streetcar during the health crisis. 

How many of those temporary layoffs could've been avoided if the city had an extra $5 million? That's how much it costs to run a mostly empty streetcar each year. 

It's days like Monday when everyone should clearly realize that, yes, it's real money being used for these pet projects. So is $100 million, which is roughly what it'll cost to keep the streetcar running for another 20 years. How many future cuts are going to come at the expense of a useless trolley circling around Downtown and Over-the-Rhine? 

It's days like Monday when it's never been more obvious that the streetcar is both a luxury and a liability. The city faces a potential $80 million budget deficit in the coming months, and it can no longer afford ex-Mayor Mark Mallory and the progressives' streetcar. 

This is an opportunity for Mayor John Cranley and City Manager Patrick Duhaney to try and stop the streetcar budget bleeding for good. They must call the Trump administration and ask for it to let Cincinnati out of streetcar prison. My apologies to the four people who regularly ride the streetcar.

Williams is mad and gleeful at the same time, and frankly Cranley probably will have the city kill the streetcar.  But whatever the future holds for Cincinnati's downtown during and after the Trump Depression, the streetcar almost certainly won't be a part of it in any way.  The Queen City's made three big bets in the last few years, on keeping the Bengals in town, on getting FC Cincinnati into MLS with a new stadium, and on the streetcar.

The city's losses on the streetcar will be pocket change compared to the other two.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Social distancing is failing miserably across the country. We are only barely beginning to maybe flatten the curve a bit. Red state folks refuse to do it.

This dynamic is playing out in small ways across the country. Bret, a sales representative from Plano, Texas, who asked that I not use his last name, proudly told me how unfazed he and his conservative neighbors were by the threat of an outbreak. In his view, the recent wave of government-mandated lockdowns was a product of panic-mongering in the mainstream media, and he welcomed Trump’s call for businesses to reopen by Easter.

When I asked whether the virus had interfered with his lifestyle, Bret laughed. “Oh, I’m going to the shooting range tomorrow,” he replied.

Was he worried that his friends might disapprove if they found out?

“No,” he told me, “around here, I get much more of people saying, ‘Why don’t you go Saturday so I can go, too?’”

Terry Trahan, a manager at a cutlery store in Lubbock, Texas, acknowledged that a certain “toxic tribalism” was informing people’s attitudes toward the pandemic. “If someone’s a Democrat, they’re gonna say it’s worse,” he told me, “and if someone’s a Republican, they’re gonna say it’s bad, but it’s getting better.”

As an immunocompromised cancer survivor, Trahan said he’s familiar with commonsense social-distancing practices. But as a conservative, he’s become convinced that many Democrats are so invested in the idea that the virus will be disastrous that they’re pushing for prolonged, unnecessary shutdowns in pursuit of vindication.

Among experts, there is a firm consensus that social distancing is essential to containing the spread of the virus—and they warn that politicizing the practice could have dangerous ramifications. “This is a pandemic, and shouldn’t be played out as a skirmish on a neighborhood playground,” Dina Borzekowski, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, recently told Stat. (For the moment, at least, the scientists seem to have brought the president around: Yesterday, Trump announced he was extending social-distancing guidance until the end of April.)

Read: The four possible timelines for life returning to normal

Of course, not everyone who flouts social distancing is making a political statement. Many have to work because they can’t afford not to; others are acting out of ignorance or wishful thinking. Beyond personal behavior, there is a legitimate debate to be had about how to balance economic demands while combatting a global pandemic.

Still, the polarization around public health seems to be accelerating: In recent days, Republican governors in Alabama and Mississippi have resisted calls to enact more forceful mitigation policies. Polling data suggest that Republicans throughout the U.S. are much less concerned about the coronavirus than Democrats are. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Trump won 23 of the 25 states where people have reduced personal travel the least.

Some of this is likely shaped by the fact that the most serious outbreaks so far in the U.S. have been concentrated in urban centers on the coasts (a pattern that may not hold for long). But there are real ideological forces at work as well.

Katherine Vincent-Crowson, a 35-year-old self-defense instructor from Slidell, Louisiana, has watched in horror this month as businesses around her city were forced to close by state decree. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Vincent-Crowson told me Louisiana’s shelter-in-place order was a frightening example of government overreach.

“It feels very militaristic,” she said. “I’m just like, ‘What the hell, is this 1940s Germany?’”

But when we spoke, she seemed even more aggravated by the “self-righteous” people on social media who spend their time publicly shaming anyone who isn’t staying locked in their house. “It really reminds me of my kids who tattle on their siblings when they do something bad,” she said. “I’m a libertarian … I don’t really like being told what to do.”

But you know what?  Blue states are ignoring it too.

People are gathering in crowds on the West Side Bike Lane to *take photos of the hospital ship* coming in for the pandemic. https://t.co/vGa7b5MdDF

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) March 30, 2020

Again, there is nothing I am seeing that makes me want to revise my estimation of millions of dead Americans downward.  States are talking about extending shelter-in-place orders and closures into May right now, and a $1200 check isn't going to cover that.

The only way we get around the corner on this is through a massive testing program.  Tens of millions.  And Trump?  He literally doesn't care.

Several rural-state governors alerted President Trump on Monday that they are struggling to obtain urgently needed medical supplies and testing equipment, warning that despite the worsening coronavirus situation in New York and other urban areas, more sparsely populated parts of the country need help, too.

In response to requests for more testing kits, Mr. Trump said, "I haven't heard about testing in weeks," according to an audio recording of the call between the president and governors obtained by CBS News.

During the call, which lasted a little over an hour, Democratic and Republican governors detailed how they are struggling to obtain the protective equipment doctors and nurses will need to treat the sick and the test kits needed to determine whether sick residents are suffering from COVID-19.

"We understand the challenges in New York. I have family in New York," Wyoming Republican Governor Mark Gordon told the president. But, he told Mr. Trump, "I think a little bit of supply going our way could get us better prepared going forward."

"Good point," Mr. Trump replied. "Thank you very much, Mark. If you have a problem, call me. I'll get you what you need."

All of this fails without testing increasing by orders of magnitude.  We need to be testing a million Americans a day if not more, and right now we have governors begging Trump just to placate his ego in order to get table scraps.  Trump promised these tests a month ago.

There will be no help from Trump.  And there will be no more help from Congress. Not anytime soon.

After passing the largest economic relief bill in history, Congress is now considering staying away from Washington for a month or more as the coronavirus makes even the routine act of legislating a dangerous risk for new transmissions.

Officially, Congress is scheduled to come back on April 20 as lawmakers try to avoid traveling and congregating amid the raging crisis and as they plot a potential fourth phase of economic relief.

Unofficially, it could take even longer for Congress to physically come back into session. And longer still for things to return to anywhere near normal on Capitol Hill, where members of both chambers, staffers and Capitol Police officers have now tested positive for the deadly respiratory virus.

President Donald Trump on Sunday embraced extending his administration’s social distancing guidance until April 30, an edict that now clashes with the Senate and House schedules to return on April 20. Those schedules are tentative, according to aides in both parties, and are almost certain to be pushed back unless there’s must-pass legislation that forces Congress’s hand.

"That's sort of an aspirational goal, but I think it's obviously subject to radical change based on circumstances," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "April 20 is what, three weeks away? That seems a little early based on the pace of this crisis."

“This could go on for a little while longer until things settle down. But right now, it's pretty hard to predict,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is close to the Senate majority leader.

Ironically, Congress actually is practicing social distancing.  Meanwhile, the Trump regime is throwing cold water on any more COVID-19 relief as Trump called the current package "wasteful spending by Democrats".

Another 4-6 weeks of lockdown is not going to go well.  It's not going to go well at all.

StupidiNews!

• Oil crashed to under $20 a barrel as the world is under lockdown, airports and roads remain largely empty, and demand is the lowest in decades.
• A federal judge has temporarily blocked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's order to shut down the state's abortion clinics, saying the procedures remain medically necessary.
• The US Naval hospital ship Comfort has arrived off the coast of NYC as Central Park is being turned into a tent hospital for the growing number of COVID-19 cases in the Big Apple.
• The WHO says COVID-19 cases in Italy, Span, the UK and Germany may be approaching their peak as new cases have slowed due to social distancing and closures.
• Nintendo says it will be bringing much of Super Mario's 35-year catalog to the Switch console to celebrate the company's mascot's birthday in 2020.

Last Call For Hungarian For Power

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the first real COVID-19 fascist dictatorship is not a south-of-the-border banana republic or a Mideast kingdom, but a now-former European democracy as of this week.

Hungary’s parliament handed Prime Minister Viktor Orban the right to rule by decree indefinitely, effectively putting the European Union democracy under his sole command for as long as he sees fit.

While governments around the world assume emergency powers to fight the coronavirus, locking down all aspects of every-day life and shutting borders, few democracies have given their governments such latitude without an end date.

Hungary’s ruling party lawmakers overrode the objections of the opposition in a vote on Monday, handing Orban the right to bypass the assembly on any law. The Constitutional Court, which Orban has stacked with loyalists, will be the main body capable of reviewing government actions.

“I don’t know of another democracy where the government has effectively asked for a free hand to do anything for however long,” said Renata Uitz, director of the comparative constitutional-law program at Central European University in Budapest.

Orban is dictator for life.  He will never give those powers up willingly. He may be the first dictatorship to rise in the COVID-19 era, but I guarantee you he won't be the last fascist to take over this year.  As I discussed before,  the "soft fascism" of his regime is now a hard fact of life.

Your Take Out, Taken Out

The restaurant business isn't going to survive COVID-19, not in the form that it is in now, and if even one of the biggest fast-food juggernauts in the business, Yum Brands, is closing 7,000 locations worldwide already, it's going to be a bloodbath over the next couple of months.

Louisville-based Yum! Brands is closing around 7,000 stores around the world because of the coronavirus, according to financial records.

Among the closures are 1,000 Pizza Hut Express locations the the U.S. and at least 900 KFCs in the U.K., according to a March filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yum!, which has at least 50,000 restaurants in more than 150 countries, owns KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and The Habit Burger Grill.

"The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the operations of our restaurants in numerous markets across the world," according to the filing. "As we have taken steps in response to the pandemic, our primary focus continues to be the safety of everyone who engages with our Brands, including our employees, franchisees and their team members, and customers."

Sales are expected to drop through the quarter ending March 31, the company wrote in the filing, but it expects the quarter ending Jun 30 to be "more significantly" impacted.

"Because this situation is ongoing and because the duration and severity are unclear it is difficult to forecast any impacts on the company’s future results," the filing says.

One thing that's going to be really clear in a few months is that sit-down restaurants, movie theaters, bars and nightclubs, and brick-and-mortar stores are not going to survive, not as mass-market concepts.  We were already facing a retail apocalypse in this country.  Places are going to close their doors this week and never reopen. 

The survivors are going to be leaner, meaner, and delivery-friendly, because that's the future.  Oh sure, some will exist, but they will be boutiques, people are still going to need to eat.  But there won't be four Starbucks within a mile radius.  There may not be four in a 100-mile radius.

Just an utter obliteration of commercial real estate.  Show a picture of an Outback steakhouse or a TGI Friday's to a kid in ten years and they will look at you like you just handed them a mythical relic of last century, like a flip phone or a compact disc or a moderate Republican.  Automation will become king. And everyone else will be working from home.  No offices full of people. 

Everything is going to be different, and I don't think people fully grasp yet how fundamentally this country is going to be changed by the next month ahead of us. We'll come out of this, but it's going to be ugly.  The pressures that were coming gradually over the next decade are coming in the space of one month thanks to COVID-19.

There are going to be huge breaks in the chain. Nightmare doesn't begin to describe it. The changes are being forced into a small time frame and it's going to be catastrophic for most of us.

I've been saying "Buckle up" for years now.

It's too late to buckle your seat belt when you're in the crash.

Boom.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Over the weekend, the Trump regime was too busy moving the goalposts of "victory" to actually do anything to slow the spread of COVID-19.  Now Trump is literally demanding praise if he manages to hold the death toll to under 100,000.

President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he's extending his administration's guidelines on social distancing during the COVID-19 outbreak until April 30.

Trump said last week that he wanted to see much of the country return to normal by Easter, April 12, despite warnings from top health experts that easing the guidelines too soon could cause widespread deaths and economic damage.

Trump said Friday that he would consult with his administration's top medical experts on whether to extend or change the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

But on Sunday, Trump said that the Easter target date was "just an aspiration" and that he expects "great things to be happening" by June 1. Instead, Trump said he believes Easter will mark "the peak number, and it should start coming down, hopefully very substantially at that point."

Trump said his administration felt Easter "was too soon" and "we can't take a chance."

Instead, Trump said he felt June 1 would mark "the bottom of the hill."

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said the choice to extend the guidelines had not been made lightly.

"We know it's a huge sacrifice for everyone," she said, adding that more detailed guidance will be released Tuesday.

The good news is that people finally got through to this orange buffoon to make it clear that tens, quite possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die from this virus.

But another month of shutdowns and closures, while necessary, will come at a cost, and Trump doesn't seem to think that he should bear any of it.  It's only going to get worse for areas where the pandemic is just starting to take hold, like in rural Alaska.

Early this week, Kodiak Island, part of an archipelago in southwest Alaska, issued a “hunker down” proclamation, asking residents to stay at home as much as possible. In the Covid-19 pandemic, the remote island, known for its brown bear population, might seem well-positioned — travel on or off the island is limited to the water or air. But Elise Pletnikoff, a family physician and the medical director of the Kodiak Area Native Association, says the same physical remoteness which may help protect rural communities from infection will become a liability if — and, more likely, when — the novel coronavirus arrives.

“Our capacity will be the limiting factor,” she says, “meaning not just equipment, but also staff.” Her organization provides care for 5,000 patients on Kodiak; while there is a hospital on the island, it has limited resources for critical care and usually flies patients needing that kind of medical attention to Anchorage. But Pletnikoff says when Covid-19 cases surge, “we’re worried about how busy everyone will be.”

Many small communities around the United States don’t have a full-time doctor — and in Alaska, many aren’t connected by road. Instead, they rely on community health aides, a physician who visits a few days out of the month, and either commercial or medevac flights to larger urban centers during emergencies. Already because of the outbreak, health workers are forced to disrupt this limited care even further, transitioning to telemedicine when possible. “We’ve stopped traveling to remote villages to reduce exposure,” Pletnikoff says, and staff currently in each village are staying, “until … we don’t know when.”

Even though small towns like these may be thousands of miles from Covid-19 hotspots like New York City and New Orleans, there’s good reason for the 60 million Americans in rural areas to worry.

A new map of confirmed cases and deaths nationwide from the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science shows a disturbing trend:

While New York state still has the highest per capita rate — 1,995 cases per million people as of March 26 — there are also significant clusters of Covid-19 in rural areas in the Midwest and South, including Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. Every US Health and Human Services region also has shown a sharp uptick in non-flu-related influenza-type illness.

On Friday, Alaska reported 85 cases and its first Covid-19-related death. Shana Theobald, another doctor on Kodiak Island, explains the grim calculus for her state: Given that experts from the CDC estimate 40 to 70 percent of the state’s 737,500 people may eventually contract Covid-19, at least 295,000 Alaskans could get sick. Based on initial reports, 20 percent, or 59,000 people, will need hospital care.

Keep those numbers in mind: 40 to 70% will get sick, of those that get sick 20% are going to need to be hospitalized.  We're still headed for tens of millions needing emergency treatment, and millions dead.  Nothing I've seen or read makes me change my mind.  The worst is yet to come.

StupidiNews!

• The US State Department says it has brought18,000 Americans stranded abroad in countries home, but almost twice as many US citizens are still stuck in a era with few or no international flights.
• Digital privacy advocates say monitoring of citizens through smartphone positional data is the wrong tool some governments are using to contain COVID-19 and enforce social distancing.
• Islamic State prisoners in Syria has taken control of and escaped from a Syrian prison, US-backed militia forces are trying to retake the prison and capture escaped militants.
• North Korea has fired more test missiles into the East Sea, this is the third time in March that Pyongyang has launched missile tests.
• It's not just your internet, a new industry report finds more than 40% of the largest US cities have seen internet download speeds drop last week due to stay-at-home orders.

Last Call For Deliver Us From Evil

The billion-dollar corporations exploiting the gig economy are running headlong into the COVID-19 era and the realization that if they don't have workers to exploit, the corporations crumble to dust.

As some Instacart workers prepare to strike Monday, the company is making more updates in a bid to appease them. 

Instacart said Sunday that it will soon begin making hand sanitizer available to its "full service shoppers," who shop and deliver groceries for the company. It is also making it easier for customers to set their own default tipping percentage in the app. 

Instacart is one of several companies delivering essentials to households and now expanding rapidly at a time when much of the American economy is at risk of contracting. Last week, the company announced plans to bring on another 300,000 "full service shoppers" in North America over the next three months to service demand. 

But while the company has seen a surge in customer orders in recent weeks and introduced an option for customers to have orders left at their doorsteps, workers have criticized the company for not doing enough for them. 

The strike, which is being called for by Instacart shoppers and a newly formed non-profit called Gig Workers Collective, has a list of demands including providing workers with safety items including hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and sprays, hazard pay, and an expansion of its coronavirus pay to include those with underlying health conditions. The workers specified in a Medium post that they wanted an extra $5 per order and a default tip of at least 10% of the order total.

Reagan busted air traffic controllers 40 years when they tried to strike.  I fully expect Trump to try to do the same here, and it won't just be delivery guys who go on strike soon.  It'll be the people keeping the lights on in the hospitals.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The word is that Trump will urge states to send people back to work and reopen schools as early as next week, with Americans being advised to wear masks and proceed as normal.

On Saturday, Weill Cornell’s Dr. Matt McCarthy reported that the Centers for Disease Control will revise their recommendations on protective masks.

In the next ten days, the CDC guidelines will reportedly change to advising Americans to wear masks “in everyday life.” This contrasts with the current guidelines, which only recommend masks for high-risk groups like health care workers.

The country is currently suffering from a shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment as health care workers struggle to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. Many have been forced to reuse spent masks, or fashion their own out of materials lying around. The revised guidelines would threaten to worsen the mask shortage unless increased production begins right away.

Following the publication of this story, the CDC denied the report.

Trump is calling up retired troops and reservists back to duty to prepare for the inevitable.

President Trump issued an order Friday night that permits the Pentagon to bring back to active duty some veterans and reserve members of the military to augment forces already involved in the response to the coronavirus pandemic, senior U.S. officials said.

The president said Friday night that the decision will “allow us to mobilize medical, disaster and emergency response personnel to help wage our battle against the virus by activating thousands of experienced service members, including retirees.”

The president did not clarify whether anyone will be involuntarily recalled to duty but said some retirees have “offered to support the nation in this extraordinary time of need.”

“It’s really an incredible thing to see,” Trump said, speaking at the White House. “It’s beautiful.”

An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Emmanuel Ortiz-Cruz, said some 15,000 veterans have expressed interest in rejoining the service to help the military’s response to the pandemic.

But a U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, would not rule out that involuntary recalls also are possible.

“That’s to be determined based on requirements,” the official said.

I guarantee you that the orders will not be voluntary in a matter of weeks.  In a matter of weeks, it will be utter and complete chaos, with thousands of Americans dying daily.

We're up to hundreds of Americans dying daily now as the total number dead are doubling every 3 days.   If there's anything good that has come from the last week, it's the fact that far fewer Americans now believe Trump this week when it comes to COVID-19.

A clear majority of the American public, including self-identified Republicans, do not believe the disinformation that President Donald Trump keeps pushing around the spread of coronavirus. And even members of the president’s own party are skeptical of his argument that getting the country back to work needs to be as prioritized as public safety measures.

A new survey conducted by Ipsos exclusively for The Daily Beast provides some of the clearest evidence to date that the president’s attempts to paint a rosy picture about the coronavirus’ spread throughout the country are not resonating beyond a small segment of the populace with a small exception for those who say they’re getting their information from Fox News. 

• A full 73 percent of respondents, including 75 percent of Republicans, said that it was not true that “anyone who wants to get tested [for the virus] can get tested.” Just 17 percent said it was true. 
• Only 20 percent of the public, and just 25 percent of Republicans, said that they believed a vaccine will be available soon. Forty-two percent said that was false and 38 percent said they did not know. 
• Fifty-one percent of respondents, including a plurality or Republicans (46 percent), said it was false that the virus would go away on its own in warm weather, while just 13 percent said that was true. 
• And 61 percent of respondents said that they believed COVID-19 was more deadly than the flu; with 22 percent saying it was about the same and 11 percent saying they believed it was less deadly. 

The question that seemed to generate the most confusion was on whether the Federal Drug Administration had “approved anti-malaria drugs to treat the virus." 

But even then, 45 percent of respondents correctly identified that statement as false, 22 percent said it was true and 33 percent said they did not know. 

Collectively, the results present a portrait of a public that is sober minded about the coronavirus and unpersuaded by talk that life could return to normalcy soon. Over the past few weeks, Trump has suggested that the spread of coronavirus would abate as the temperature warmed. He’s repeatedly insisted that those who want a test can get one, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He’s downplayed the lethality of it by comparing it to the flu. He’s talked about a vaccine hitting the markets in weeks, if not months, and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a therapy for coronavirus, despite his own medical experts warning that there is nothing more than anecdotal data suggesting it could work.

We're still in the first 20-30 minutes of this pandemic movie, where the national leader is telling everyone that things will be fine.

They will not be fine.  The next month will be hell.

It will be significantly worse in the days ahead.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

Sunday Long Read: Prepper's Paradise

Needless to say, America's doomsday prepper community believes COVID-19 is The Big One, and those who have spend years preparing for the end of American civilization as we know it are gearing up to ride out the storm in places like old nuclear bunkers in South Dakota, as our Sunday Long Read comes to us from The Guardian's Mark O'Connell.

I had made arrangements to meet with one Robert Vicino, a real-estate impresario from San Diego who had acquired a vast tract of South Dakota ranch land. The property had once been an army munitions and maintenance facility, built during the second world war for the storage and testing of bombs, and it contained 575 decommissioned weapons storage facilities, gigantic concrete and steel structures designed to withstand explosions of up to half a megaton. Vicino intended to sell them for $35,000 a pop to those Americans who cared to protect themselves and their families from a variety of possible end-time events.

Vicino was among the most prominent and successful figures in the doomsday preparedness space, a real-estate magnate for the end of days. His company specialised in the construction of massive underground shelters where high-net-worth individuals could weather the end of the world in the style and comfort to which they had become accustomed. The company was named Vivos, which is the Spanish word for living. (As in los vivos – as distinct, crucially, from los muertos.) Vivos claimed to operate several facilities across the US, all in remote and undisclosed locations, far from likely nuclear targets, seismic fault lines and large urban areas where outbreaks of contagion would be at their most catastrophically intense. They were advertising an “elite shelter” in Germany, too, a vast Soviet-era munitions bunker built into the bedrock beneath a mountain in Thuringia.

Vivos’s new South Dakota location went by the name xPoint. Each of the bunkers, evenly spaced across 18 sq miles of prairie land, had an area of 204 sq metres – significantly larger than my own (admittedly not very large) house. The place would, it was claimed, be home to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people and would become “the largest survival community on Earth”. It was pitched at a demographic somewhere between the super-wealthy clients for Vivos’s luxury underground shelters and the doomsday preppers who planned to survive the apocalypse through manly grit and YouTube knowhow. It was the future domain, in other words, of the post-apocalyptic petit bourgeoisie.

The place was, I read on the company’s website, “strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America”, at an altitude of about 1,200 metres and 100 miles from the nearest known military nuclear targets. “Vivos security team can spot anyone approaching the property from three miles away. Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated. Private. Defensible. Off-Grid. Centrally located.” It was not intuitively clear to me how a place could be both isolated and centrally located, but, to be fair, if pretty much the entire rest of the world had perished, any settlement of living humans would have legitimate grounds to proclaim itself centrally located.

Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers and turnkey apocalypse solutions. It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders – the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared – and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilisation from the ground up. What was being offered, as such, was a state stripped down to its bare rightwing essentials: a militarised security apparatus, engaged through contractual arrangement, for the protection of private wealth.

End-time real estate was an increasingly competitive racket. On the website of one major purveyor of luxury apocalypse solutions, Trident Lakes, I read that in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological emergency, the properties would be sealed by automatic airlocks and blast doors, and that each would be connected via a network of tunnels to an underground community centre featuring dry food storage, DNA vaults, fully equipped exercise rooms and meeting areas. The promotional blurb also promised such features as a retail district, an equestrian centre and polo field, an 18-hole golf course and a driving range.

This was a new entry into the canon of apocalyptic scenarios: bankers and hedge-fund managers, tanned and relaxed, taking the collapse of civilisation as an opportunity to spend some time on the links, while a heavily armed private police force roamed the perimeter in search of intruders. All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself.

The super-elites will be fine in a COVID-19 world.  They'll have the supplies, the resources, and the clout to pull through for the most part, and if the wealthy head of a family is felled by the virus, they'll have heirs to follow through.

One thing's not going to change after COVID-19: the super rich will still be rich.  What might finally change is how we choose to view and deal with them.

Last Call For Bringing Home The Fakin'

Remember folks, Mitch McConnell is up for reelection in November. Former fighter pilot Amy McGrath is the front-runner in the (now June) primary, and McConnell knows his fortunes are irrevocably tied to Donald Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. McGrath knows damn well that McConnell is vulnerable on his treatment of Kentuckians in crisis.

Two weeks ago I received a letter from Angie, a working mom. She wrote to me about her 12-year-old daughter, Addison, who has had Type 1 diabetes since she was 3. Sometimes, Angie and her husband, Steve — who have insurance — pay as much as $1,000 out of pocket per month for the medication and supplies their daughter needs to stay alive. That’s in addition to the $1,250 she and her husband are paying every month for their health insurance premiums.

Angie has been fighting with insurance companies for nine years to get coverage for her daughter’s lifesaving health needs. And she’s not alone. As I talk to Kentuckians across the state, the No. 1 concern I hear about is access to affordable, quality health care.

Kentucky has some of the worst health statistics in the nation. We have the highest mortality rate for cancer and among the worst rates of lung disease, diabetes and heart disease.

Yet as Kentuckians struggle, Sen. Mitch McConnell has fought to make our health care system and its outcomes even worse.
As we are in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, let’s remember that McConnell has consistently voted to cut funding for medical research and immunization programs, and cut funding to the very agencies (CDC and NIH) that should be prepared for an infectious disease outbreak. Instead of acting immediately to include provisions in an emergency bill to control the costs of vaccines and treatments being developed in response to this outbreak, he held up coronavirus funding in order to make sure Big Pharma would still be able to gouge prices.

Businesses are shuttering, schools are closing, our front-line workers are at risk, and McConnell took off for a long weekend instead of working with his colleagues on the legislation we urgently need to curb this public health crisis. What good is a powerful senator if he treats Kentuckians like this?

But Mitch has drafted a new player in his battle to keep his seat: Gov. Andy Beshear.

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell negotiated his chamber's $2 trillion coronavirus response package, he was turning to a Democrat in his home state for advice: Gov. Andy Beshear. 

McConnell and Beshear have been in frequent contact in recent weeks, as McConnell shaped the Senate's $2 trillion stimulus deal and Beshear led Kentucky's effort to slow the spread of coronavirus there, sources close to both men said. The conversations started with the state's basic needs -- tests and protective medical equipment -- and eventually encompassed how the federal government could help states, municipalities and hospitals. Top staff members continue to speak daily. 

"It has been really helpful to get ground truth on this while developing a bill of this magnitude," said Phil Maxson, McConnell's chief of staff. 

The link between the nation's most powerful Republican lawmaker and his home state's first-year Democratic executive, who was sworn in just three and a half months ago, underscores the central role governors like Beshear have played in attempting to slow the spread of coronavirus. 

Beshear's daily briefings, alongside Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack and American Sign Language interpreter Virginia Moore, are sober and straightforward -- lacking the gusto of New York's Andrew Cuomo, but similarly accomplishing the dual tasks of providing instructions to his state's residents and outlining its needs and challenges for the federal government. 

"I will do what it takes. I will spend what it takes," Beshear said Thursday.

Beshear is caught in the middle, like many of us here in Kentucky.  On the one hand, he has done an amazing job getting out ahead of the state's COVID-19 cases when they were smaller in number, with social distancing and closures, two weeks ago.  We're still seeing a major spike in cases, going from 250 to 300 today alone, and from 5 reported deaths to 8.  But we're nowhere near in as bad as shape as neighboring Tennessee, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, Illinois or Indiana are.

On the other hand, he's absolutely refused to attack Mitch McConnell for his role in weakening the nation's public healthcare system, trying to destroy Obamacare, and trying to take affordable healthcare way from more than 10% of Kentuckians.  Beshear needs to keep McConnell happy, and McConnell needs to keep Beshear happy, and it just so happens that there's enough enlightened self-interest there to keep Kentucky alive, too.

I don't expect McGrath to win, frankly.  McConnell is too canny a politician and will have too many opportunities to point to Kentucky's success in limiting the spread of COVID-19 so far.  When the checks show up in people's mail next month, they'll remember Mitch...and Donald Trump.

Even though Mitch made things infinitely worse.