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You and Whose Army?

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Let’s check in with Dollar Store Sarah Palin, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. She’s lifting the stay-at-home order for the over-65 in Sioux Falls, epicenter of the outbreak and home of the Smithfield Foods COVID cluster, even though the state is still on the upward part of their COVID curve. She’s also in a very public fight with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (CRST) and the Ogalala Sioux Tribe, demanding that they remove checkpoints from state and federal highways running through those reservations.

Kristi’s agenda is really to become the next Palin — she’s had a $130K studio installed in the basement of the capital so she can appear on Fox and Newsmax. $75K of that price was for makeup.

The tribes’ response to Dollar Store Sarah has been basically fuck and you. They consider themselves sovereign nations when it’s in their interest, and when you are running a 10,000 member nation that has an eight-bed hospital, one respiratory therapist and a three-hour drive to the nearest referral hospital, you damn well aren’t letting any COVID in. Here’s CRST tribal chairman Harold Frazier’s statement:

… We will not apologize for being an island of safety in a sea of uncertainty and death… I absolutely agree that we need to work together during this time of crisis, however you continuing to interfere in our efforts to do what science and facts dictate seriously undermine our ability to protect everyone on the reservation.

Frazier’s action has been backed by a group of state legislators, including the two pictured below, who reiterate that the state doesn’t have jurisdiction on tribal land, and also criticize Dollar Store Sarah for basically gunning for a fight.

I just had to include this picture. Such a classic.

I’ve heard from different people who wonder what Noem will do. My answer: she will do nothing more than flap her gums and flash her crazy eyes on the TeeVee. The South Dakota state highway patrol, her “army”, has 189 officers. There are a few more state officers at the DCI, but that’s it. Probably 200 on a good day. I guess if she wants to really make headlines, she’ll call out the National Guard, but I’d hate to fight against a well-armed group of Native Americans when they hold all the high ground on the few roads into the rez. It would be a bloodbath. Who knows, maybe Noem’s buddy Trump will call out the FBI and the Marshals and we’ll have the COVID equivalent of the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff. All because the tribes decided to stop a few cars on the highway and tell them to drive through without stopping if they don’t have business on the rez. Fucking stupid, but that’s where we are in Trumpville 2020.

Also, somewhat related, I wrote about the Navajo Nation’s terrible COVID problem last week, and one of you sent a link to a GoFundMe which looks legit, if you’re looking to help out.

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Test, Trace, Isolate for Me but Not For Thee

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Ivanka Trump’s personal assistant tested positive for COVID-19, but she’s teleworking so it’s no big deal. But let’s not bury the lede:

Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner both tested negative on Friday, the person familiar with the matter told CNN. 

Also, here’s a detail about Katie Miller, who is asympomatic:

Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller tested positive for the virus on Friday, after having tested negative Thursday.

It sounds like people in the White House and Trump’s inner circle are being tested daily. When, everywhere else, people are being tested only sporadically. And they get rapid tests, thanks to an Abbott Labs machine that only takes 15 minutes to determine a result.

Is this a big issue? Not if Trump were trying to get the same quality of testing for doctors, nurses and first responders. I think it’s a big deal and we should be making noise about it. What about you?

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Wear A Mask or Pelosi is President

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Someone on Pence’s team has tested positive for COVID-19, as did one of Trump’s valets. If these old guys are going to surround themselves with people who stand close and don’t wear masks, the right set of circumstances could lead to Pelosi becoming President. Don’t you think that, if anything, would be enough to scare them into some kind of compliance with reasonable distancing and mask wearing?

They probably all think that Pompeo is next in line because that’s what they learned in grade school, but 25th Amendment, motherfuckers!

Open thread.

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Shooting at the Walls of Heartache

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Bang, bang from Trump:

Asked Wednesday if the nation needs to accept greater loss of life, Trump said “hopefully it won’t be the case, but it may very well be the case.”

“We have to be warriors,” he said from his seat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. “We can’t keep our country closed down for years.”

First, am I the only one who is sick and tired about hearing about the “Resolute desk”? Apparently it is venerated by a set of White House reporter-wankers who were on the receiving end of nuggies and swirlies during high school, because it sounds so fucking butch.

Second, related to David and John’s posts below, two things:

  1. Most of the country ain’t seen nothing yet. Maybe they won’t, who knows, but if they pack into the Legion Hall Friday night without masks, they’ll probably meet the Grim Reaper sooner rather than later.
  2. The olds know the score. The old Fox News Republicans I know are all hunkering down and not planning on going out. Yeah, they might talk some smack when a pollster calls on their landline, but they’re not going anywhere, and if they must go somewhere, they’ll wear a mask, no matter which of their constitutional rights are violated.

I think there’s probably nothing that will keep the Fox News olds from voting absentee for Trump, but if there is, it might possibly be Trump’s manic insistence that they become combatants in a war to hide his gross incompetence.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I need another cocktail. Open thread.

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Voter Suppression and Life Suppression Go Hand in Hand

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This story about the Seattle Indian Health Board requesting medical supplies and getting body bags and toe tags instead is making the rounds.

I’m not surprised. My dad was a physician in what was at the time called Indian Health Service (IHS) in the late 50’s and early 60’s — I spent my first few months of life on the South Dakota reservation where he was stationed. He also practiced on the Navajo Nation and has some terrible, horrible, no good stories about that time in his life, and the many, many children who died in the pediatric service there. “We were so stupid then” is one of the common refrain of those stories, which include accounts of how he and his fellow doctors did blood chemistry on dehydrated children by judging the color of the flame in a bunsen burner. Today those tests are done in seconds with a machine. The children were often dehydrated because it was common for sick kids to spend some time at a Navajo ceremony called a sing prior to being brought a long way to the hospital. Today, the Navajo Nation is one of the worst COVID-19 hot spots.

Back in the 50s and 60s, there was a compulsory draft, and the IHS was considered military service, so most of the medical staff consisted of people who joined to avoid the draft, many of whom went on to distinguished careers — my guess is that the quality of care when judged by standards back then was probably decent, who knows. I do know that the services offered at the reservation hospitals were bare-bones, and Dad has a lot of stories about riding in an ambulance to a far-off hospital with a sick person. He also has many stories of the illnesses of poverty on the rez, mostly shared after a few martinis.

I don’t have a lot of reservation stories but I do have a story about voter suppression. Because of their clear-eyed, rational concern about fraud, the South Dakota state legislature took a minute off from their usual work of banning abortion to pass laws requiring that voter registration forms and absentee ballots be notarized. So, more than 30 years ago, I became a notary public, following the advice of the South Dakota Democratic Party (RIP). It costs money to become a notary (application fees, a bond, a stamp and a seal), and notaries can charge for services. Who knows what the laws are today — they probably require that notaries wet their stamps using ink obtained from Chilean octopuses on full moon high tides in months ending in “r”, a requirement that John Roberts would understand and endorse as an eminently reasonable safeguard of democracy. The point is that, back before voter id became a thing, Republicans were pioneering voter suppression in their laboratory of anti-democracy, the reservation.

Well, enough story time, but it’s obvious that voter suppression and being shipped body bags when you ask for medical supplies are two pieces of bread around the shit sandwich called “being poor” and “being brown” here in the greatest country God has ever wrought, the U.S.A.

By the way, Pine Ridge knows the score — over a month ago, they posted guards at the entrances to their reservation towns to keep the modern day equivalent of smallpox blankets away from their people.

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Every Day Ends in Wasted Motion

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If you want to understand why meat is cheap and slaughterhouses are COVID-19 hotspots, here’s some really good journalism about John Deranamie, 50 year-old survivor of the Liberian civil war, and now COVID-19:

He’s one of 3,700 workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, where more than 800 employees have contracted the novel virus spreading across the world. But those employees are just a fraction of essential workers across the nation who are feeding America.

Deranamie understands the importance of his role in the food supply and keeping Americans fed. But he’s risking his life every time he steps into his uniform, he said.

“I don’t like the term essential worker,” he said. “Essential worker just means you’re on the death track.”

Deranamie makes $18.50/hour as a night shift worker at Smithfield. His wife works there, too. They support 8 kids on their pay, and send half of his paycheck home to his family in Liberia.

The story details how he kept going to work until he became ill, then quarantined in his bedroom while his wife and family (six of the eight children) stayed in the rest of the house. Luckily, nobody else got sick.

Part of the reason there was a big cluster around Smithfield is that the immigrants not only work close together, but a lot of them live together in densely packed housing near the plant.

Slaughterhouses like this are just one part of a food chain optimized for cheap meat. Other prices we pay for cheap meat: stinking, cruel confinement farms, overuse of antibiotics to the point where they lose effectiveness in human beings, and watershed contamination from manure spills, pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff. Those are just off the top of my head.

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Straight floatin’ on a boat on the deep blue sea

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Who the fuck is going to take them up on this offer?

Carnival Cruise Line announced Monday it will start cruises again with a fraction of its fleet this summer.

The cruise company, one of the largest in the world, did not say what changes caused by the coronavirus pandemic will be in place or whether itineraries will be altered. Cruises are set to start Aug. 1 on eight ships sailing from ports in Miami, Central Florida’s Port Canaveral and Galveston, Tex.

“We are committed to supporting all public health efforts to manage the covid-19 situation,” the company said in a statement. “We are taking a measured approach, focusing our return to service on a select number of homeports where we have more significant operations that are easily accessible by car for the majority of our guests.”

(Emphasis mine.) The tacit acknowledgement that planes probably won’t be flying at the same time when they expect a bunch of suckers to board their flagship, the Carnival COVID-19, is hi-fucking-larious.

“Let’s pack up a car with Ma, Pa and the kids and get on one of these floating petri dishes, because the planes ain’t flying, but we want to take the risk that we’ll be marooned off the coast if the ‘rona hits and we all get sick. Plus, we might even get diarrhea from the buffet!”

Talk about succumbing to stupid…

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And The World Didn’t End

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This happened yesterday:

TORONTO — The Canadian government on Friday announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of “military-grade” assault weapons, including two models used by the gunman who killed 22 people last month in rural Nova Scotia during the country’s deadliest mass shooting.
“These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the largest amount of people in the shortest amount of time,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a news conference in Ottawa on Friday that began with him listing several mass shootings in the country’s history.

We’re all here today — well, most of us — the sun has gone on shining and the sea still rushes to shore, so I’m assuming this was not the end of the world, though I’m sure the whining, moaning, caterwauling and bitching of the gun strokers of the True North will make you think otherwise.

Gun owners will have two years to turn in their weapons, and they will receive “fair compensation”. Sounds more than fair to me.

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Too Pink to be Admired, Too Punk to be Desired

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This is a fun Spanish band called Hinds. Pure fucking joy oozes out of every pore in their live performances. This song is pretty much a clapback to every dumb thing that people have said to them, and I love that about it:

“can i tell you something about you and your band?
cause i’m sure you’d love to listen to my advice;
you’re always out of tune and there’s no place there for you”
dude, do i know you?

“where are you from with that accent that doesn’t let you pronounce?
are you Spanish or something, wait, can you roll your R’s?
you’re too pink to be admired
and too punk to be desired”
ñañañañañañañañaña

Open thread.

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That’s Why They Call It Work!

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The title of this post is what a friend of a friend used to say to people who were complaining about their work. The picture is from Lunch with Andrew, which is shaping up to be some very long-running TV. His announcement today that schools would remain closed for the rest of the academic year (basically through the end of June) was accompanied by this long and daunting list of what schools would have to figure out to re-open.

If you want to understand part of the reason why Trumpy governors and legislators are agitating to “just open everything up”, it’s because a phased re-open is a shit ton of a four-letter word that starts with “w”. It’s going to require that people who aren’t accustomed to doing anything (except flapping their gums) lead or participate in an intelligently-guided sustained effort. They just can’t do it, my friends. And that comes from the top, where a guy who is used to “stealing, loafing and whining” isn’t doing shit about testing, which is an absolutely vital pre-condition to phased re-opening.

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Re-Opening? Nah

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I watched the Andrew show almost to the end today. Special guest Mike Bloomberg came on to tell how he would spend more of his billions on the contact tracing program that he’s helping to fund via his connection to the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, since our federal government’s public health efforts are as fucked as anything else Trump touches. Bill de Blasio was on, too, and man he’s a bloviator. “Why take a few words to say what can be said in 10 sentences?” asked Bill de Blasio, repeatedly. When Bloomberg is more charismatic than you, it’s past time to work on your speaking skills.

But we’re not here for theater criticism. The substance of New York’s re-opening plan is a massive test, trace and isolate program, coupled with fact-based tripwires that will stop re-opening if we’re running hot. For example, all hospitals have to keep a 30 day supply of PPE and at least 30% capacity over and above elective surgery. The rate of transmission (Rt) needs to be 1.1 or less. If any of these (and other) tripwires are hit, the regional re-opening is paused by the board that’s in charge of re-opening.

Here’s the thing: while I’m sure a lot of retail businesses want to re-open, I predict a lot of resistance on the part of employees who are now working at home, and by potential customers. And since New York is putting its eggs in a test-trace-isolate basket, that’s just fine for our purposes. The more people who voluntarily isolate, the fewer cases we’ll need to test and trace.

Personally, I’m not going to eat in at a restaurant, go to the gym, or go to the movies for a long time. I might get my hair cut if I can be sure the hair salon is taking precautions seriously, but, then again, I might not. Friends will be 6 feet apart or virtual for a long time. It’s not like you magically can’t die just because we’re at Rt of .9 instead of 1.1 or 2.0. I think almost everyone has seen enough death to understand that, except the few bleating morons who are protesting and running their yaps on TV. Fuck them all, individually and collectively, but no matter what they or any other politician says, I predict that isolation will be the norm for a long time to come.

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The Short-Lived Rebellion of a Freedom-Loving Small Business Owner Crushed Under the Jackboot of an Out-of-Control Government

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It’s a rainy day and I’m sitting here with my iPad, alternating between watching YouTube travel videos and reading travel books. About two hours ago, a “breaking news alert” came in from the local rag, telling me that the asshole that runs a local pizza place is going to defiantly open up in a few days. I simply noted the name of the restaurant and tucked it into my titanium grudge carrier, since I knew I would never darken the door of that establishment for the rest of my life.

No less than two hours later, another “breaking news” alert from the local rag, Pizza Stop Owner Backs Down After Visit from Code Enforcement Officer. Here’s the good part:

Pittsford’s compliance officer informed Staffieri that consequences of violating the New York’s PAUSE order could include a cease and desist order from the town, a do not occupy order from the town or even the loss of the restaurant’s county health department permit. The substance of the visit was confirmed by Staffieri and Smith.

Staffieri’s response was to back down.

“I can’t take that chance,” he said. “I can’t have the guys here be out of work.”

“Smith” is Bill Smith, the town supervisor, an old-school New York Republican and a competent public servant. He probably called the code enforcement officer the minute the story hit, if the code enforcement officer’s phone wasn’t already ringing off the hook.

This guy sells fucking pizza. It’s the ultimate delivery and takeout food. New York PAUSE allows his restaurant to continue delivery and takeout. He acknowledges that his “guys” are working, because I’ll bet that he’s doing pretty good business. But he couldn’t be satisfied with that — he probably saw a dozen protesters on Facebook and his neurons fired in a way that made him fart out some words on Twitter about his precious freedoms.

Since my grudge carrier is like the Hotel California — after you check in, you can never leave — I’m still not going to buy pizza at his place. But it’s good to see that our local authorities aren’t fucking around.

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This Seems Important

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Preventing the vent:

Doctors at the University of Chicago Medicine are seeing “truly remarkable” results using high-flow nasal cannulas rather than ventilators and intubation to treat some COVID-19 patients.

High-flow nasal cannulas are non-invasive nasal prongs that sit below the nostrils and blow large volumes of warm, humidified oxygen into the nose and lungs.

A team from UChicago Medicine’s emergency room took dozens of COVID-19 patients who were in respiratory distress and gave them the cannula treatments instead of putting them on ventilators. The patients all fared extremely well, and only one of them required intubation after 10 days.

High flow nasal cannulas are a special technology that can deliver up to 60 L/min of oxygen, whereas a regular cannula maxes out at ~6L/min. At UChicago, they combined the high-flow cannula with prone positioning (laying on the stomach instead of the back). Unfortunately, the high flow cannula and blows a fine spray over the patients’ room, so negative pressure rooms and anterooms (changing rooms) need to be created.

In the video accompanying the article linked above, Dr. Michael O’Connor, who heads up the UChicago critical care response, explains how they are able to segregate COVID-19 patients at their hospital. There’s some footage from within the hospital showing the massive amount of equipment and PPE devoted to the treatment of just one patient. Dr. Thomas Spiegel, of the Emergency Medcine department, also expresses how relieved he is that the curve has been flattened.

Every day that we flatten the curve gives research hospitals like UChicago time to figure out he best way to treat COVID-19. Unfortunately some people need tattoos and haircuts, so in those states, the hospitals and medical examiners will be slammed.

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A Couple of Happy Hour Thoughts

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Graphic courtesy of my daughter (someone sent it to her). By the way, Trump tried to walk back his “let’s inject Lysol” comment, but CNN, at least, wasn’t buying his bullshit. Good for them.

I’m thinking of my paternal grandmother this afternoon. She died over 40 years ago, but once in a while I buy a jar of bread-and-butter pickles, and inevitably I think of her, because the first time I tasted them, they were from her cellar. She was an immigrant who homesteaded 160 acres of North Dakota farmland in the 1920’s, herself. She had six children, three of whom survived, and all of the survivors went to college, because that’s why she came to America – to have a better life for her children, at least the ones who lived.

In other words, she was acquainted with grief, as were her children. Death was not an abstraction for her, and if she were alive today, I doubt that she would fool herself into thinking that somehow she would be above dying of COVID-19 because of her allegiance to a political party (btw, she was a Democrat who kept a picture of FDR on her living room wall).

So, knowing my grandmother and people like her, I wasn’t surprised that my South Dakota hometown locked down over a month ago, no matter what the idiots in state government were doing. The 80+ year olds in town were all raised by women like my grandmother and went through a hell of a lot as children. My dad has a story about his sister, one of the three who died before they grew up. My father-in-law, who lives in the same town, has a story about his brother, and the night he died of some childhood illness. Both my dad and my father-in-law locked down even before the town did. They know death.

Andrew Cuomo, who today mentioned his Italian grandmother, who sounds not so different from mine, knows death. In the comments to my post yesterday about Cuomo, Elizabelle posted this transcript of Cuomo’s response to a fucking stupid question about idiots protesting in Albany:

Speaker 9: (54:37)
I have a couple questions for you and one for Melissa. I don’t know if you can hear, but there are protesters outside right now honking their horns and raising signs. We did speak to a few of them before we came in and these are regular people who are not getting a paycheck. Some of them are not getting their unemployment check, and they’re saying that they don’t have time to wait for all of this testing and they need to get back to work in order to feed their families. Their savings is running out. They don’t have another week. They’re not getting answers. Their point is the cure can’t be worse than the illness itself. What is your response to them?

Andrew Cuomo: (55:19)
The illness is death. What is worse than death?

Speaker 9: (55:23)
What if somebody commit suicide because they can’t pay their bills?

Andrew Cuomo: (55:27)
Yeah, but the illnesses may be my death as opposed to your death. You said they said “the cure is worse than the illness.” The illness is death. How can the cure be worse than the illness if the illness is potential death?

Speaker 9: (55:47)
But what if the economy failing-

Andrew Cuomo: (55:52)
Worse than death?

Speaker 9: (55:53)
… equals death [crosstalk 00:55:54] because of mental illness-

Andrew Cuomo: (55:56)
But it doesn’t. No, it doesn’t.

Speaker 9: (55:56)
… the people stuck at home.

Andrew Cuomo: (55:58)
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t equal death. Economic hardship. Yes, very bad. Not death. Emotional stress from being locked in a house. Very bad, not death. Domestic violence on the increase. Very bad, not death; and not death of someone else.

The stupidity and flailing of Trump, and the goon squad of Trump-humping governors, shouldn’t keep us from understanding that the vast majority of humanity knows death, and they also know a death-bringer when they see one. Trump and his cohort of idiots bring death. Strip away the noise, and that bare fact remains.

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