To All Trump Enthusiasts Everywhere

I'm sure your master endorses this message.



Meanwhile, Heather Mallick has an interesting explanation for the servile attitude so many Americans have toward their clown president.

Why do Americans, alleged rugged individualists, upholders of liberty, haters of king and government, put up with this grotesque man? They’re in the habit of doing so, some American observers have said. Most presidents — thought not Nixon or Dubya — generally talked sense before and Americans grew used to listening.

But it’s more than habit. Americans bow down to authority just as Britons do to monarchs and aristocrats; they doff their cap. They actually play a silly song, “Hail to the Chief,” when a president enters a room and have done so since 1829.

Americans worship titles. We refer to former prime ministers, but a president is called President for the rest of his life. On political talking heads shows, a long-retired diplomat is always called “Ambassador.” Generals remain generals even after retirement, which seems hopelessly pompous.

For me, however, the crowning element of her article is her invocation of some classic Shakespearean insults she deems particularly fitting to lob at the mendacious, inept, sociopathic American president:

“He’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker.” “Thou cream-faced loon! Where got’st thou that goose look?” “Nut-hook, nut-hook, you lie.” “Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon”

“That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years?”

Shakespeare truly was a man for all time.

Build That Wall!

It is our only hope of keeping out citizens of the Benighted States of America such as these:

Essential Activities, Essential Idiocy

God love the Americans. No one else will.

This Is Absolutely Ghoulish

First it was Dr. Oz betraying his Hippocratic Oath.



Now Dr. Phil has joined the movement as he and the ever-compassionate Laura Ingraham discuss why the lockdown should end. Start at about the 2:00 minute mark:

The Weakest Link

There has been much criticism worldwide over national governments' failures to act quickly enough to contain the spread of Covid-19; one needs only look at the frightening death tolls in countries like Italy, Spain and the U.S. to appreciate the merit of such criticism. But in my view, much of that failure is a result of our refusal to recognize the interconnectedness of today's world.

When the bug first broke out in Wuhan, China, our initial response was to check all passengers travelling from the afflicted area. Not a bad first start perhaps, but it was predicated on the assumption that such people could be effectively isolated, an assumption that quickly proved illusory. Before long, cases with no known contacts with travellers arose. Community spread had begun.

The rest, of course, is very recent history, and the story is still unfolding.

If nothing else, this pandemic has been a pointed reminder that, thanks to contemporary technology, no nation or individual can successfully isolate from others. And as the following report by Redmond Shannon makes abundantly clear, until all countries have ready access to the equipment and medical support necessary to contain Covid-19 (and whatever pandemics follow it), no one will ever be truly secure.

Please start the following at the the 16:15 mark:

Pandemic: The Lessons On Offer

To say that our current Covid-19 global crisis is causing us to rethink many things is to state the obvious. Far and wide, people are coming to new understanding about their priorities, their values, and their attitudes toward others.

Suddenly, that spa treatment isn't so urgent; the coveted new outfit can wait; maybe the precariously-employed should have more stability and remuneration. That it takes a near-apocalyptic event to bring about such introspective cogitation likely reveals a great deal about our shortcomings as a species.

We have always mouthed platitudes about our essential workers, but now our appreciation of them feels more genuine, whether we are talking about medical personnel, grocery store workers, sanitation workers or mail carriers. But are we willing to go the distance for them when this catastrophe finally wanes?

History provides a mixed answer, according to history professor Walter Scheidel. The Black Death, caused by rat fleas carrying bubonic plague, started in the fall of 1347 and, over the next century and a half, (periodic flareups being the pattern,) likely killed one-third of Europe's people.

And it upended the socio-economic order, despite the old guard trying tenaciously to keep things as they had been for a very long time.

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrunk the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

Consequently, the worker finally caught a break, and a certain leveling occurred:

... wealth inequality in most of these places plummeted. In England, workers ate and drank better than they did before the plague and even wore fancy furs that used to be reserved for their betters. At the same time, higher wages and lower rents squeezed landlords, many of whom failed to hold on to their inherited privilege. Before long, there were fewer lords and knights, endowed with smaller fortunes, than there had been when the plague first struck.

But a worker's paradise was by no means established. While there were some successes, there also were many disappointments:

During the Great Rising of England’s peasants in 1381, workers demanded, among other things, the right to freely negotiate labor contracts. Nobles and their armed levies put down the revolt by force, in an attempt to coerce people to defer to the old order. But the last vestiges of feudal obligations soon faded. Workers could hold out for better wages, and landlords and employers broke ranks with each other to compete for scarce labor.

Elsewhere, however, repression carried the day. In late medieval Eastern Europe, from Prussia and Poland to Russia, nobles colluded to impose serfdom on their peasantries to lock down a depleted labor force. This altered the long-term economic outcomes for the entire region: Free labor and thriving cities drove modernization in western Europe, but in the eastern periphery, development fell behind.

In the end, true change proved elusive:

When population numbers recovered ... wages slid downward and elites were firmly back in control. ... In most European societies, disparities in income and wealth rose for four centuries all the way up to the eve of World War I. It was only then that a new great wave of catastrophic upheavals undermined the established order, and economic inequality dropped to lows not witnessed since the Black Death, if not the fall of the Roman Empire.

There are obvious parallels to be found in today's world. Employers such as Loblaw, Metro, Shoppers Drug Mart, Dollarama and Walmart have retroactively boosted the wages of their front-line employees, people bravely performing necessary work. Even banks are getting into the act, with the Royal Bank offering a $50 per day bonus for onsite workers who earn less than $65,000 per year. Notably, however, these boosts are temporary.

Clearly, there are lessons for all of us during this pandemic. Unlike earlier times, we have a much wider grasp of the world and our place in it. We have immense power to shape the future for the betterment of all that previous generations did not. If we elect to fall back into the patterns of the past, we will have made an informed choice, but it will be one that reveals much about our character as contemporary citizens of the world and as a species.

Decision time is here.

On Covid-19 Fake News

I received a lovely note the other day from a reader named Rose. While I am pleased she finds my blog a useful resource, I am also happy that she included a very pertinent link as an aide in spotting fake news, especially that involving our current pandemic. I shall return to that link in a moment.

But first, how big a problem is disinformation during this time of fear and uncertainty?

The Guardian cites the growing problem of prominent people who apparently have more fame than brains:

The actor Woody Harrelson and the singer MIA have faced criticism after sharing baseless claims about the supposed connection of 5G to the pandemic, while comments by the likes of the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, playing down the scale of the crisis in the face of scientific evidence have attracted criticism in recent days.

Such ravings have consequences.

The issue has gained extra prominence as Britons began vandalising mobile phone masts in recent days amid wildly sharing baseless claims linking the virus to 5G.

There is growing concern that online disinformation could be having real world health impacts. Research by Dr Daniel Allington, senior lecturer in social and cultural artificial intelligence at King’s College London, suggested there was a statistically notable link between people who believed false claims about the coronavirus and people who were willing to flout the government’s social distancing guidelines.

His findings, based on a experimental study conducted in coordination with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, found that people who said they believed coronavirus was connected to 5G mobile phone masts are less likely to be staying indoors, washing their hands regularly or respecting physical distancing.

Even more unhinged is Roseanne Barr who, in a phone interview with Norm Macdonald, had this to say about the bug:

"You know what it is, Norm? I think they're just trying to get rid of all my generation...."The boomer ladies that, you know, that inherited their — you know, are widows. They inherited the money so they got to go wherever the money is and figure out a way to get it away from people."

Barr made a number of other unorthodox claims during the interview: She argued that people are "being forced to evolve," urged working women to learn how to make bean soup, claimed that Chinese people eat bats and rats (and that she saw one guy eat a baby), and insisted that "there exists an operative in each town that reports back to Central Intelligence false information to ruin my career."

If you want to read more about this supremely unbalanced lady, Venay Menon has a droll take on her escapades.

Misinformation can be deadly, especially as it pertains to Covid-19. Perennial huckster/televangelist Jim Bakker is facing legal consequences after peddling a snake oil called Liquid Silver Sol he claimed would protect people from the bug. One hopes that the convicted felon pays a heavy price for his dangerous advocacy.

Which brings us back to the question of how to best inoculate ourselves against the virus of hysterical untruths. Readers of this blog will know that I have long been an advocate of critical thinking as the best protective; as I have said many times, it is an ideal toward which I continually strive, well-aware that I often fall short.

Reading widely of legitimate sources is a vital nutrient in this quest, but happily there are some readily accessible sites that make it easier. Snopes, of course, is one of the best. Its recent effort to dispel the myth that eating alkaline foods will confer protection against Covid-19 is an apt illustration of its usefulness.

A search engine can be of great benefit as well. Try putting the term fake news covid-19 into one and look at the results.

There are many, many useful resources on the web which I am confident you can access with little difficulty, and so I leave you with the site suggested by my correspondent Rose. Called Website Planet, it offers some very useful guidance and tools in our collective quest for truth and accuracy.

The Covid-19 virus is naturally dominating all of our concerns today. However, working to flatten the curve on the pandemic of misinformation that existed before and will continue long after the bug is managed will surely serve us well in the bigger picture known as everyday life, life that we will, eventually, return to.