Reopening America

First things first. Download the CDC’s recently published Guidelines for Reopening America (pdf).

This is intended for all Americans, whether you own a business, run a school, or want to ensure the cleanliness and safety of your home. Reopening America requires all of us to move forward together by practicing social distancing and other daily habits to reduce our risk of exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19. Reopening the country also strongly relies on public health strategies, including increased testing of people for the virus, social distancing, isolation, and keeping track of how someone infected might have infected other people.

***

A spoof or not a spoof? That is the question
The lines between reality and farce increasingly blur as The Don and his wrecking crew refuse evidence-based, scientific, medical, research-oriented data.
And, our life and times become increasingly surreal.
Donald Trump tweeted this video of a grotesquely transformed scene from the 1996 movie “Independence Day.”
Watch for faces of spell-bound Republicans – including Sen Ted Cruz (shedding tears of joy?), Marco Rubio, Donald Trump Jr. – superimposed over actors’ faces.
The Donald is the hero lip-sync’ing original movie script lines that he’d never think of actually saying.

Trump apparently viewed the manipulated clip as calling Americans back to a reopened economy amid the COVID-19 crisis. But the speech could also be interpreted as a call to Americans to fight for their lives.
The twisted version uses [original movie actor Bill] Pullman’s …voice, but images of Trump’s head have been superimposed on [Pullman’s far sleeker] body. Spectators enraptured by his speech include Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson of Fox News, a teary-eyed Sen. Ted Cruz, Ivanka Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and others.

In the clip, Trump, the man who couldn’t care less about actual humans, mouths,

“Mankind. That word should have new meaning for us today… We’re “fighting for our right to live, to exist.”

Indeed, with 4,716,520 million infected and 315,225 dead, Trump got something right, even if unintentionally.
We are in the fight of our lives – and getting little help from a chaotic wanna-be hero.

News blues…

Trump names Moncef Slaoui his COVID-19 vaccine czar/ “chief scientist” for Operation Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine development. Slaoui, former pharmaceutical executive of Moderna, owns 155,000 Moderna stock options, totaling more than $10 million.
Conflict of interest, you ask? What conflict of interest?

Moderna last month announced that it received $483 million in federal funding for vaccine development, which sent its stocks up 15 percent, CNBC reported.
On Friday, when Trump introduced him in a Rose Garden press briefing, Slaoui said the president’s aim to have a vaccine by the end of the year was “credible,” though it would be “extremely challenging.”

Hmm, what if the challenge proves too challenging?
Microbiology Society’s report, “The current challenges for vaccine development” states:

…there is still a great need for new vaccines and these are emerging far more slowly than we would wish. Despite the massive expansion in understanding of immune responses to infection, research is often hindered by a lack of understanding of the immune responses required specifically for protection, or by a lack of approved adjuvants and delivery systems to induce the required responses. In addition, the financial commitment required to license new vaccines is significant, and the more lucrative markets are often not those with the greatest need.

How soon before Trump fires Slaoui for promising a vaccine and didn’t deliver? Or Trump, notoriously truth-averse, tells Americans that Slaoui never, ever said a vaccine was possible by the end of the year?
Enquiring minds ….

Whackjobbery*: it’s baaack

Journalist for News 12 Long Island, Kevin Vesey covered a pro-Trump, anti-stay-at-home protest. There,

... a protester without a mask and wearing a red MAGA hat and Trump T-shirt deliberately advanced on Vesey (who was wearing a mask).
“I think you need to back away from me,” the reporter told [the protester] on video, turning his face away.
“No, I’ve got hydroxychloroquine,” said the unidentified protester as he strode closer. “I’m fine.”
The drug, touted by Trump, has not proved to be effective against COVID-19 and can have lethal side effects.

 Kevin Vesey writes, “The level of anger directed at the media from these protesters was alarming. As always, I will tell a fair and unbiased story today.”
Despite all captured on film, Donald Trump slammed the report as “fake news.”

***

Eric, son of Trump
Last Friday, I shared Eric Trump speaking “fluent Donald.” Eric is an echo chamber of “fluent Donald,” too.
Taking a page from dad’s playbook, Eric insisted in an interview with Fox News uber-Trump-groupie Jeanine Pirro that:

COVID-19 will “magically” disappear — after election day.
He indicated that the coronavirus [that has killed 315,000+ people around the globe — including nearly 90,000 Americans] is a ploy cooked up by the Democrats to stop Donald Trump from rallying his supporters at campaign events.
[Middle son maintains] Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden “loves this. They think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every time.” [BTW, Trump has never had 50,000 people in any American arena.]
“You watch,” Eric added. “They will milk it every single day between now and November 3rd.”
“And guess what – after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically, all of the sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.” He called it a “very cognizant strategy.”

Gosh, is Eric a poopagandist* who believes his own poopaganda*?
[FYI: In English “cognizant” is defined as “having knowledge or awareness.”]

*Whackjob: term coined by Steve Schmidt of The Lincoln Project to denote virulent Trump supporters who’ve given up common sense in favor of Trumpism.
*poopaganda – a quasi-genteel term for virulent bull-s**t “truthiness” masquerading as self-empowering info.
*poopagandist – one who perpetuates poopaganda and then complains that social media and “fake news” is trying to silence contrary views and/or conservative voices.

***

Recently, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni warned against people misbehaving during the COVID-19 period.

"God has a lot of work,” he said. “[God] has the whole world to look after. He cannot just be here in Uganda looking after idiots...."

President Museveni, can you extend that warning to anti-mask, anti-stay-at-home idiots in the United States? And, to the current inhabitants of the White House and Trump Tower?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Still struggling for sufficient aerobic exercise -  and trying to keep busy - during lockdown, I’ve taken up Weed Walking.
This entails laps around the garden while wearing gardening gloves (and other clothing). I walk, I notice weeds. I pluck an armful of weeds and, at the end of the lap, I place them into a wheelbarrow.
When full, I push the wheelbarrowful through the security gate, along the road, and dump contents into the burn pit.

Blackjack seedpod.
© Something over Tea 

This time of year, the predominant weeds is the almost indestructible (not easily compostable) blackjack - Bidens Pilosa. Originally native of South America, each tenacious blackjack plant “bears about eighty flower heads that can produce over 3,000 seeds in a single generation.” Designed to persist, seeds “radiate outwards and have sharp awns that hook onto passing animals and people as an efficient means of dispersal.”

In the garden, Weed  Walking keeps me ahead of blackjacks’ seeding phase.
With lockdown preventing outside garden care, weeds run amok and blackjacks are in Blackjack Heaven.
I return from the short trip to the burn pit covered in blackjack seeds. Before re-entering the garden, I pluck seeds from my hoodie, my pants, socks, shoes, gardening gloves, and hair.

Perhaps the only living thing currently more reproductively successful than blackjacks is the nightmare coronavirus.

Read Week 1 | Week 2   |  Week 3  |  Week 4 | Week 5  | Week 6  |  Week 7  | Week 8

See photos  Spying on Garden Creatures 

Watch  Videos of Garden Creatures

Digital death clock

Day 50! Let the humor  begin...
Ragging on Eric Trump, known in the US as the “least smart Trump” is like, well, bobbing for fish in a pot – so to speak.
Trying for an epic put-down of “truly evil people” @EricTrump Tweeted: “The chips are starting to crumble!”
Fellow Tweeters responded with a flurry of mixed clichés:

• No use crying over pissed milk
• You know what they say, the bigger they are, the more the eggs in the basket flock together
• How the turns have tabled!
• The tiger is now truly out of the barn!
• Down is away and up is far-fetched!,
• Time to shit or get out of the kitchen
• It’s collapsing like a house of cookies
• The cats out of the cradle
• Looks like the domino's on the other foot.

One wag Tweeter pointed out, “Eric speaks fluent Donald!”

Talking Trump

Digital Death Clock
in Times Square, NY
Click to enlarge.

‘Trump Death Clock’ In Times Square Is Grim Reminder Of Preventable Virus Deaths.
The “Trump Death Clock”  is a digital billboard in New York City’s Times Square that highlights President Donald Trump’s early inaction on coronavirus.
On Wednesday, May 13 it ticked over to an estimated 50,000 deaths that, according to two leading epidemiologists, could have been avoided had social distancing measures been implemented earlier.

News blues…

Around the world:
Philippines. More than 50 million people in the Philippines are locked down due to Covid-19, with 11,876 confirmed cases. Simultaneously, more than 200,000 people are facing Typhoon Vongfong with winds of at least 115 mph - an intensity equivalent of a category 3 hurricane - forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands.
Russia is hailing its medical workers as heroes …

But as the country becomes one of the global hot spots of the pandemic, those workers are suffering astonishing levels of infection and death in their ranks.

Thousands have been infected, and more than 180 doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical workers have died.
Like their colleagues in much of the rest of the world, many of those doctors and nurses are suffering from a shortage of protective gear and equipment. But Russian health workers are also at the mercy of a convoluted, unforgiving bureaucracy that increasingly appears outmatched by the pandemic.

Bangladesh…[where] tented Rohingya encampments spread across landslide-prone hills are already susceptible to disaster and disease.

Diphtheria, all but eradicated in most of the world, has raced through them. Marauding elephants have trampled children to death. A fire recently destroyed hundreds of shelters.
The first cases of the coronavirus in crowded refugee camps for Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh were confirmed on Thursday, raising fears about how quickly disease can spread through one of the world’s most overcrowded and vulnerable communities…. where around 1 million refugees have taken shelter after fleeing decades of persecution in neighboring Myanmar.
A community leader in the camps said that up to 1,900 people who had contact with the pair have been identified and may undergo some form of quarantine.
Epidemiologists fear the virus could spread like wildfire through such camps around the world, teeming with millions of people fleeing war, persecution and famine. It has turned up in camps in Syria, South Sudan and Greece’s Aegean Islands.

Yemen. It was just two weeks ago that war-ravaged Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, reported its first cluster of coronavirus cases.

Since then infections appear to have exploded, realizing the worst fears of aid groups.
Save the Children, the global charity, reported Thursday that at least 385 people had died over the past week with Covid 19-like symptoms in the city of Aden, where the first cluster — five cases — surfaced at the end of April.
Several hospitals in Aden have closed, and some medical workers have refused to work because of a lack of protective equipment. The two main public hospitals are providing only emergency services, and are not admitting patients.

Mumbai, India.
India’s ‘Maximum City’ Engulfed by Coronavirus. Photo essay.
Overflowing hospitals. Exhausted cops. Desperate slums. Images from Mumbai as the coronavirus upends the metropolis.

After President Ramaphosa’s lockdown update  EFF MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi weighed in saying, “US President Donald Trump's Covid-19 addresses are good compared with how President Cyril Ramaphosa conducts his.”  This, because Trump “allows” reporters to “interrogate him” – nothing said about the lies Trump visits upon the American public and his abuse of reporters.
Economic Freedom Fighters – EFF – founded in 2013 by expelled former ANC Youth League President Julius Malema, and his allies, describes the party’s ideology as “far-left Pan-Africanist.”
“Far-left,” indeed. If political ideologies formed a circle, EFF is so far left that they’re overlapping far right. Of course, they love Trump. As Eric Trump might say, “they’re chicks of a feather.”
See post Day 6 – Tuesday April 1 for more.

(more) Whackjobery …

Another chapter in the ongoing saga of poopaganda, poopagandists, and poopagandism.*

• Get Ready for a Vaccine Information War. Social media is already filling up with misinformation about a Covid-19 vaccine, months or years before one even exists. A concerned citizen (non-poopadandist) mulls the success of the anti-vaccine poopagandists mindset and raises awareness about what could be at stake.
• Conspiracy theorists, far-right extremists around the world seize on the pandemic.  Civil rights advocates have warned for months that the coronavirus could aid recruiting for the most extreme white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. People seizing on the pandemic range from white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe, according to a POLITICO review of thousands social media posts and interviews with misinformation experts tracking their online activities.

*poopaganda – a quasi-genteel term for virulent bull-s**t “truthiness” masquerading as self-empowering info; poopagandist – one who perpetuates poopaganda and then complains that social media is trying to silence contrary views and/or conservative voices.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Another sunny, warm autumn/fall day.
Mowed 1.5 of 5 lawns – piece of cake! Mowing is smooth since I overcame the struggles encountered the first weeks of lockdown. Smooth, expect for the occasional wheel falling off the mower. The mower was new when first I began mowing and, during my first foray, the front left wheel fell off. Since then, all four wheels have fallen off, one at a time. Today, the front left wheel fell off again. If a wheel falls off tomorrow when I tackle lawns 3 through 5, I'll know there's a wheel-conspiracy....
Wheels notwithstanding, mowing, weeding and prepping the garden for winter is a pleasure. Full body exercise – bending, pulling, clipping, crawling – allows the mind to range and enquire.

Ongoing area of enquiry: what’s up with the U.S. Embassy’s confusing Updates on Special Repatriation Flights?
Last week I mentioned Qatar Airlines had arranged several flights from SA airports to Doha. That upon arrival in Doha, travelers would seek flights heading to the US and find their own way home. SAA had offered a flight to Dulles, Washington D.C.
Soon after, I received another email from the Embassy stating all flights had been cancelled.

Another confusing email arrived today:

Event:  The South African Ministry of Health confirmed 12,074 cases of COVID-19 within its borders.
May 16 Qatar Airways and May 17 SAA Flights
The airlines have notified us that these flights have been sold out. The airlines are working directly with customers on ticketing for the flights. These special repatriation flights are organized by the respective airlines and are not U.S. government-coordinated flights, and the U.S. Mission did not compile or prioritize the passenger lists but did work with the airlines to clear the passenger lists. If you have a ticket booked on one of these flights and have specific questions about baggage allowance, cost, or anything specific to the flight, please contact the airline directly. Otherwise, please wait until we have coordinated with the Government of South Africa and the airline to complete the passenger list clearance process after which we will create and distribute travel letters for confirmed passengers. You do not need to email us to request a travel letter; they will be distributed as soon as possible once the passenger list is finalized.
We continue to work with airlines for repatriation opportunities for our citizen community and we hope to be able to announce upcoming opportunities in the coming days. We want you to know that we've heard your questions and concerns as the lockdown was extended and future commercial flights continue to be canceled.  We understand there is a lot of uncertainty during this time and we are doing everything we can to seek clarity and pass on the latest information we have.
We will continue to follow every lead and pursue every option for repatriating U.S. citizens to the United States.

Hmmm, each time I receive an email from the Embassy, my lack of confidence in repatriation flights grows ….

Read Week 1  | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4  |  Week 5   | Week 6   |   Week 7   | Week 8

See photos Spying on Garden Creatures     

Watch Videos of Garden Creaturesatures