May 5, 2020

Billionaire Sam Zell Sees Economy Permanently Scarred by Pandemic

(Bloomberg) Sam Zell, the billionaire known for buying up troubled real estate, said the coronavirus pandemic will leave the same kind of impact on the economy and society as the Great Depression 80 years ago, with long-lasting changes in human behavior that imperil many business models.

“Too many people are anticipating a kind of V-like recovery,” Zell said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We’re all going to be permanently scarred by having lived through this.”

Just as the depression left behind a generation that couldn’t shake the experience of mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the burdens this crisis has forced on society may be similarly hard to forget. Zell, 78, said it won’t be easy for people to live as they did before the “extraordinary shock” of the pandemic. .........(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/billionaire-zell-sees-economy-permanently-scarred-by-pandemic?srnd=premium

May 5, 2020

"We have become a nation of magical thinkers"

Law professor: Virus reveals we all need a class in evidence

LEN NIEHOFF | DETROIT FREE PRESS
11:59 a.m. EDT May 5, 2020


Numerous public officials and individuals have made dreadful decisions about how to assess and respond to the threat posed by COVID-19. Those errors reveal a fundamental flaw in our K-12 and collegiate education systems.

We have failed to teach a subject of critical importance, and as a result have imperiled our health, our economy, and our republic.

We teach it in law school. We call it Evidence.

....(snip)....

COVID-19 has revealed our societal failure to understand what evidence is and to respect how it works. National and local political leaders have made decisions that ignored the evidence. Members of the general public have proved slow to accept the evidence. Measures adopted to help flatten the curve have been met with virulent protests, despite the evidence that they are working."

....(snip)....

We have become a nation of magical thinkers, making decisions based on what we hope is the case and whom we want to believe. When confronted with opposing evidence, we do not engage with it. We dismiss it and stick a label on it: “fake,” “phony,” “biased,” etc. And then we mistake that label for evidence. .........(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2020/05/05/coronavirus-evaluating-evidence/3083768001/

May 4, 2020

The Darwin Awards Committee is exhausted

https://m.

May 3, 2020

The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump

From the Atlantic:

The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump
The president created a leadership vacuum. China intends to fill it.

It looks, at first, like one of a zillion unfunny video clips that now circulate on the internet: “Once Upon a Virus” features cheap animation, cheesy music, and sarcastic dialogue between China—represented by a Lego terra-cotta warrior with a low, masculine voice—and the United States, represented by a Lego Statue of Liberty with a high, squeaky voice. They “speak” in short sentences:

“We discovered a new virus,” says the warrior. “So what?” says the Statue of Liberty.

“It’s dangerous,” says the warrior. “It’s only a flu,” says the Statue of Liberty.

“Wear a mask,” says the warrior. “Don’t wear a mask,” says the Statue of Liberty.

“Stay at home,” says the warrior. “It’s violating human rights,” says the Statue of Liberty

The dialogue goes on like that—“It will go away in April,” the Statue of Liberty says at one point—until it ends, finally, with the statue on an intravenous drip making wild and contradictory statements while the warrior jeers at her. ........(more)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/time-americans-are-doing-nothing/611056/

May 1, 2020

Florida Man calls 911 for assistance with quarantine stress eating

CHARLOTTE COUNTY, Fla. - A Punta Gorda man called 911 multiple times and asked deputies to deliver him ice cream and liquor, according to Charlotte County deputies.

Last Saturday, deputies responded to a Punta Gorda apartment after Michael James Gables, 65, called 911 to report an 'emergency.' ........(more)

https://www.nbc-2.com/story/42063781/florida-man-arrested-after-asking-deputies-to-return-with-booze-and-ice-cream

April 29, 2020

Florida man claims guns found in car belonged to his cousin 'John Wick'

A Florida man allegedly tried to blame a weapons bust on John Wick, the legendary assassin played by Keanu Reeves in the eponymous movie franchise, according to a new report.

Cops confronted Getro Gelin, 27, at his Port St. Lucie home Sunday after a woman told police he shoved her to the ground and threatened her with a firearm, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun.

The woman told authorities Gelin may have stashed the weapon in his Porsche SUV, according to the report. Cops searched the vehicle and found a Glock 21 pistol, a semi-automatic rifle, and a bulletproof vest, according to the report.

When cops asked Gelin to explain, he explained that the SUV wasn’t even his anymore — he’d sold it “to his cousin John Wick,” according to the affidavit. ......(moe)

https://nypost.com/2020/04/28/florida-man-claims-guns-found-in-car-belonged-to-his-cousin-john-wick/

April 29, 2020

No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out

No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out
We need to start preparing for a darker reality.


(The Atlantic) The past few months have been bleak. Every day has brought word of new casualties from the coronavirus. The world economy entered free fall. And even for those who do not have a sick relative or a mortgage that can’t be paid, the isolation imposed by social distancing has begun to take a heavy psychological toll.

In these circumstances, I—and, I imagine, many others—couldn’t resist latching onto any piece of news that promised quick deliverance from the pandemic. I scoured the papers for positive stories. And I found at least three reasons to hope that the suffering the virus imposed might end sooner than the most pessimistic experts warned.

First, because some people who have COVID-19 don’t seem to show any symptoms, I wondered whether the disease might be far more widespread than the initial data suggested, raising the prospect of the United States’ reaching herd immunity without mass casualties. Second, reports that some existing drugs might prove effective against the disease led me to hope that doctors could soon be in a much better position to heal patients who contract the virus. And third, because some foreign governments have seemed successful in containing the virus through ambitious test-and-trace programs, I thought the United States might find a way to open up its economy without inducing a large resurgence of cases.

There was real reason to indulge in each of these hopes. But in the past several days, a series of developments have undermined the factual basis for all of them. So I am, finally, starting to reconcile myself to a darker reality: The miracle of deliverance is not in sight. ......(more)

http://on.theatln.tc/DKYOMTG

April 29, 2020

Obvious trolls are obvious.....

The (presumably) Russian bots are at again on HuffPost, Occupy Democrats and other progressive FB sites, trying to sound like disaffected leftists, and trying to sow discord. Donnie's poor poll numbers clearly have their knickers in a bunch.
Unlike 2016, they're pretty obvious this time. And I gotta admit, troll hunting is lots of fun.

April 29, 2020

Michigan is flattening the coronavirus curve and increasing testing capacity

(Detroit Metro Times) Michigan’s stay-at-home order has one purpose: Stop the deadly spread of the coronavirus.

And it appears to be working.

The number of COVID-19 hospital admissions in Michigan has declined 34.2% since peaking at 3,986 on April 12. During the same period, the number of patients on a ventilator dropped 41.3%, from 1,365 to 801. ......(more)

https://m.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2020/04/28/michigan-is-flattening-the-coronavirus-curve-and-increasing-testing-capacity

April 26, 2020

America Is Not Set Up For This

(HuffPost) By the last week of January, Rob DeLeo knew it was going to get bad.

“I was having breakfast with my partner and I said, ‘We should get some extra food because we’re going to be inside for awhile,’” said DeLeo, a Bentley University professor who has been studying America’s political response to pandemics for more than 15 years.

Over the next two weeks, as he began preparing for a lengthy period of self-isolation, he was struck how calm political leaders seemed to be. The coronavirus was never mentioned at the Democratic presidential debate on Feb. 7. Even as cases appeared in major cities and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that person-to-person transmission was underway, no one seemed interested in warning Americans to get ready for a lockdown.

DeLeo later searched the congressional record and found just six mentions of the word “coronavirus” before Feb. 8.

“I’m a political scientist, not an epidemiologist,” said DeLeo. “If I was freaking out, why wasn’t anyone else?” .......(more)

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5ea491f3c5b6d37635909669?utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063&utm_source=main_fb