caulfield12

US intelligence briefing books (President’s Daily Brief) had over a dozen Coronavirus warnings in January and February...Trump has never read a single one, he gets them read to him roughly once a week, but God knows if he actually pays attention compared to Fox News. And something that makes absolutely no sense is blaming China while simultaneously extolling Xi Jinping and his personal relationship with him. The reason for the coverups/secrecy and “fear factor” for local and provincial officials here in Wuhan/Hubei in their attempt to obscure the true scope of the problem as long as possible has everything to do with the cult of personality here that has seen President Xi lift himself up to the highest stature (core leader) of any Chinese official dating back to Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. The two are inseparable. And “China hardly targeted American farmers“...they simply became the victim of the trade war/tariffs. There was no choice at that point but to turn to other sources for soybeans, primarily Brazil. We’ve (the US) spent tens of billions to subsidize those farmers and still are far from returning to their 2015-16 levels. With a world economic crisis brewing, it might take a generation. Almost every small business here in Wuhan has been wiped out, with the vast majority of financial support going to massive, state operated enterprises (exactly like the US government response.)

5.6% isn’t even close to the lowest death rate. It’s much closer to the worst ten than the most successful countries like South Korea, Germany, Taiwan, Iceland, New Zealand, etc. The United States, as of today, is at that exact same 5.6% rate according to the official numbers.

Great, now we’re getting VP Pence to provide his expert opinion on testing, and both Dr. Birx and Fauci are sidelined. Trump, predictably, took no responsibility for the hospitalization increases related to disinfectant. We have HHS Asst. Secretary Admiral Giroir quoting Fauci on testing without him being there. Talk of how the Federal government isn’t ultimately responsible for testing...yet more than half the press conference is extolling the virtues of what they have supposedly done or are doing. Still no idea why reporters don’t call out the President for not bringing up per capita comparisons vs. sheer numbers of tests...guess they’ve given up. ”I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. I built it.” Repeats. “I built the greatest economy thecworld has ever seen.” (Well, GDP closer to 2% than 4-5% doesn’t exactly count....China was at over 8% GDP growth for nearly thirty consecutive years.) The stock market was at 24,000 two weeks ago, btw. Just so obvious that everything is viewed from the lens or prism of November rather than the public health crisis aspect of this whole thing.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/opinions/west-point-graduation-trump-covid-19-hertling/index.html June 13th West Point commencement address looks like Trump’s first big attempt to get back out in public and hold a rally of sorts...in NY State of all places. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52434854 Cadets have been attending classes virtually since they left campus for spring break on 6 March. The president announced on 17 April he would be giving the West Point commencement address this year. According to the New York Times, that came as a surprise to West Point event organisers, who had yet to finalise graduation ceremony plans amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a weekend editorial, the New York Daily News cautioned "there's no reason to believe that New York State, nor the academy itself, is prepared to host a graduation ceremony amidst a pandemic". In a statement, the academy said approximately 1,000 cadets would have to return to campus to pack their dorm rooms, graduate and "eventually move to Army Officer Basic Training".

My mom’s assisted living center in Davenport had a staff member with Covid roughly two weeks ago (supposedly they caught it quickly, not that they would admit otherwise)...but we are just finding out about it now. The Waterloo situation can largely be explained by that plant closure, not sure about DM. Isn’t there a similar beef/pork processing plant in Sioux City? Arkansas was being touted a couple of weeks ago as the perfect Covid response by Trump...

It’s much bigger than testing at this point. This philosophy of deliberately destroying the government from within isn’t a solution that’s currently working well for the majority of Americans...and the rebound of the stock market due to the free money spigot being turned on by the Fed while thirty million are unemployed and major states are being advised to declare bankruptcy is simply not going to be a winning formula, Thursday’s press conference debacle notwithstanding. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/ The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning. We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

Last poll had him tied 41/41 with McGrath. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/senate/kentucky/

Right. It’s all about value-added skills. Coding, quantitative and data analysis, AR, VR, algorithms, cloud computing, IOT, there are all more specialized, white collar positions. The other side of that coin is the challenge for the top 1/3rd of blue collar workers to upgrade their skills before age 50 or so in a way that they become invaluable somehow to their companies. When we have this discussion in class...it’s more about setting parameters that will allow a program to create 1,000 designs in a second, then the architect essentially using their human instincts to choose from the best options, taking into consideration both aesthetics and functionality while creatively developing improvements on the original base design. Collaboration and cooperation vs. competition. Kai Fu Lee has an excellent 15 min. TED Talk as well as recent book on this subject that combines the best of American and Chinese approaches in this emerging field (he started his career in the US at Apple, Silicon Graphics and MSFT). All the middle and high schools here in China are adding AI components to the curriculum these next two years...

Playing these same numbers out for the United States following a similar strategy (see below) as the UK would yield rough 475,000 deaths. (Greg, I haven’t gone outside once since January 20th or 21st, haven’t cut my hair once, haven’t had Starbucks once...just curious, why do you feel that are you facing mental health problems that are especially acute or unique? I could even argue that I’m even in a certain amount of pain waiting to have a dental crown put on after having gone 4 months since the original series of root canal treatments... ) The UK could experience more than 100,000 coronavirus deaths later this year if the government eases restrictions to focus on just protecting those most at risk, according to one of the country’s leading epidemiologists. Neil Ferguson is one of the scientists who has been advising the government in its response to the pandemic. "The people most at risk of death are in care homes or have other health conditions," Ferguson said in an interview with the 'Unherd' website. "I am very sceptical (skeptical) we can get to the level of shielding which would make that a viable strategy,” he said, referring to the idea of easing restrictions for most people and focusing government efforts on those most at risk. "If you just achieve 80 percent shielding -- 80 percent reduction in infection risk in those groups – we still project you’d get well over 100,000 deaths later this year." www.cnn.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/us/coronavirus-trump-chloroquine-hydroxychloroquine.html Prescriptions surged by 46 times normal demand for hydroxychloroquine...for those who continue to believe the President’s words don’t have real-life consequences. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-generation/609832/ What little data exist point to a financial tsunami for younger workers. In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. Nearly half said that the cash payments the federal government is sending to lower- and middle-income individuals would cover just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults. This means skipped meals, scuppered start-ups, and lost homes. It means Great Depression–type precarity for prime-age workers in the richest country on earth. For Millennials out there, how do you think this current pandemic is going to change your outlook on life, having experienced this twice now in the last 12 years? Besides saving more, investing earlier, paying for everything in cash or at least not running balances on credit cards, rethinking the value of many four year degree programs or graduate school...staying closer to home, attending community college or state schools, more focus practical trades that will be in continuous demand and cant easily be replaced by AI/automation/algorithms...? Less travel/tourism? No longer buying or leasing expensive new/er cars? Eating at home more frequently...more cooking together, time spent with family? More reading and introspection?

At least the Nobel Prize for Economics boosting the sale of Lysol/Clorox... Creating this new “Memorial Day we will largely have this behind us” talking point is curious because 1) the amount of deaths will be significantly higher than 60,000, 2) Trump spent only 4.5 minutes the last week eulogizing the dead and 3) any holiday highlighting deaths and cemeteries, probably not the best idea. Before the states began reopening prematurely, I might have agreed with this vague, open-ended statement. But not so much now. Pretty scary that “we need a technology breakthrough in antigen testing” is Dr. Birx’s current strategy for feeling more confident that we can reopen the country. Maybe a nuclear confrontation with the new/future leader of North Korea will do the trick of distractIng everyone?

Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him https://www.yahoo.com/news/nervous-republicans-see-trump-sinking-160008532.html From the NY Times...and now we arrive at the primary reason for the ending of the coronavirus briefings. That said, the whole grab women by the pu#$& Billy Bush video came out less than a month before the 2016 election, and there was premature celebration and even a sense of complacency setting in from that moment on, through the Comey email findings. Beating any incumbent has never been easy, but the two most recent examples were both tied into economic declines or recessions (1980/1992).

Residents in Connecticut, Massachusetts (GOP governor but essentially a blue state), New Jersey and New York have some of the highest tax bills in the nation. They also pay thousands more in federal taxes than their state receives back in federal funding. In total, 10 states are so-called donor states, meaning they pay more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back in funding for, say, Medicaid or public education. North Dakota, Illinois, New Hampshire, Washington, Nebraska and Colorado round out the list. Among the top four, the negative balance ranges from $1,792 per capita in New York to a whopping $4,000 in Connecticut, according to a new report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Put another way, residents in Connecticut receive just 74 cents back for every $1 they pay in federal taxes. "What the report shows is, when you divide up the receipts, certain states win and certain states lose,” says Michelle Cummings, one of the report’s authors. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/04/23/andrew-cuomo-mitch-mcconnell-blue-state-bailout-coronavirus-intv-cpt-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/26/politics/mcconnell-trump-states-cities-budgets/index.html Will Trump Fight McConnell To Get Help For the States?

Is it possible that he doesn’t serve a full term, sure. Bernie Sanders already had a heart attack, and Trump has himself been under extreme pressure this last month. If it looks like Trump is still a threat when it comes to decision-making time, there’s going to be more pressure on Michelle Obama to run as VP, especially if Mark Cuban throws his hat in the ring. The likelihood of either happening has to less than 10%, though. Of course, that kind of complacency is how we got here in the first place, the Clinton campaign’s arrogance in trying to expand the board instead of protecting WI, MI and PA in the first place. At this point, the only thing that really matters is which administration (or future one) was is more dangerous to the health and prosperity of the United States...to me, it’s not even a close call. The fact of the matter is that with Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, Cohn, etc., all gone...the guardrails are completely off and there is just nobody he will listen to other than Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Eventually, a foreign policy crisis will arise and there will be nobody there with any degree of governmental competence to provide a counterweight to the President’s worst, most aggrieved impulses.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52425825 Looks like antibody/immunity passports are not going to be a thing. Not shocked to see Azar on the way out. The writing has been on the walls for weeks, and that thing with the “dog breeder” (his Chief of Staff) taking a major role was probably the last nail in the coffin. Redfield’s likely the next to be axed...for putting out negative interviews and simply the completely botched initial CDC testing rollout in Jan/Feb. Meanwhile, it’s back to the WHO and China as bogeymen since a GOP governor like Kemp doesn’t work very effectively. Since Mark Cuban is still talking about running for President, might as well have Bill Gates (huge WHO supporter/funder), too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-expands-battle-with-world-health-organization-far-beyond-aid-suspension/2020/04/25/72c754e6-856e-11ea-9728-c74380d9d410_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_viruswho528pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans&itid=hp_hp-banner-main_viruswho528pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans President Trump and his top aides are working behind the scenes to sideline the World Health Organization on several new fronts as they seek to shift blame for the coronavirus pandemic to the world body, according to U.S. and foreign officials involved in the discussions. Last week, the president announced a 60-day hold on U.S. money to the WHO, but other steps by his top officials go beyond a temporary funding freeze, raising concerns about the permanent weakening of the organization amid a rapidly spreading crisis. At the State Department, officials are stripping references to the WHO from coronavirus fact sheets, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has instructed his employees to “cut out the middle man” when it comes to public health initiatives the United States previously supported through the WHO.

https://theathletic.com/1757830/2020/04/23/layoffs-twitch-streams-and-hope-checking-in-on-the-white-sox-minor-leagues/?source=shared-article

We did have a couple of quarters of robust growth, but as soon as the boost from the tax cuts wore off, we were back down around 2% GDP growth. The “robust” job creation we did experience was mostly in the service/gig/retail sector, and was still not higher percentage wise or even in raw numbers compared to the last two years under Obama. This what my cousin had to say about the situation in the South: “It is all about Football and the $$$. Depending on how Trump is behaving, Jones has a good chance. We applied (she runs a non-profit providing senior/elderly services with a thirty year history), like most small businesses and nonprofits, for the SBA PPP and EDIL loans. We knew from the get go that the big businesses were going be first to be funded. They change the rules to fit what will benefit their big buddies and get votes in November. The working poor are being screwed too. Georgia opens up the service industry businesses and they call the employees back to work. Guess what, they are having to stay home to take care of their children. Day Care centers are closed. What are these characters thinking? No idea when schools will resume. So, you call your boss to say you can’t return to work and he fires you. So then he won’t have to pay unemployment. I can’t believe Trump has a chance in November. He is self serving, egotistical, and outright rude and disrespectful.”

Here comes correlation is not equal to causation arguments in 3, 2, 1. I’m going to guess their argument will be so many more people are kept inside by coronavirus, household cleaning incidents were bound to increase by X factor of cases anyway.

Definitely not in Florida (Castro comments), North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania (fracking). The only state where Sanders was outperforming Biden by about 1% in Wisconsin. Sanders failed to unite the party after Nevada, continuing a grievance campaign against the establishment. That 60 Minutes interview was awful. Instead of exploiting the opportunities to put Clinton (emails) or Biden away, he refrained and got bogged down in philosophical or semantics arguments. He struggled to control some of the worst social media impulses of followers (my way or the highway mentality.) While he did make inroads with Hispanics in the SW, he didn’t expand his coalition in any meaningful way over the four years he had the opportunity to improve his 2016 weaknesses. While my preference would have definitely been for Sanders, and my support for Biden is only slightly higher than HRC, he wasn’t the right person to lead our country together through the greatest collective crisis in a century...the only way something would get done legislatively was by controlling the House AND Senate in 2021-22, leading to Tea Party II and reversals of all those new policies in 2023/24. And the Senate was never going to break for Sanders in November unless the US completely imploded.

Yet someone who has lied nearly 20,000 times while in the WH and thinks injecting or ingesting disinfectant clearly DOESN’T have any mental degradation because...he’s “rich,” which makes him more worthy or valuable somehow? Didn’t we see the exact same trick...four years ago, trying to convince voters that Hillary Clinton was failing physically? What has Trump done in the in the last 6 weeks that would indicate he shouldn’t be removed by his Cabinet. He refuses to attend coronavirus task force meetings, but instead just goes on spontaneous riffs in front of worldwide audiences about some latest junk science for a miracle cure that will only serve to get more Americans killed? It doesn’t bother you that the rest of the world is now watching these daily breakdowns (over science or fighting with reporters) and thinks the US has gone insane? Do you feel prouder now to be an American? Are your children better off now than they were four years ago?

https://theweek.com/articles/655770/61-things-donald-trump-said-about-women Explain how, for example, evangelical Christians voted 81% to 16% for Trump over Hillary Clinton...let’s remove Biden from this entirely. They all had the opportunity to vote for a woman who suffered at the hands of a man most frequently compared to Trump and Dr. Jeffrey Epstein. How could they do that? Trump has had multiple divorces, and at least 27 documented cases of sexual assault/harassment violations. Perhaps the one thing I’ve never heard critics of the Clintons or Obamas say is that didn’t raise their kids well. Conversely, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single person not economically or politically tied to Trump who asserted he was an exceptional parent. Yet all of these factors were consistently ignored.

A couple of thoughts. Most of the Southern states are safely in the GOP column in November, other than NC/VA and Florida. I can see where DeSantis and Kemp (until this week) felt they owed Trump or at least didn’t want to cross him. Maybe the relatively warmer weather and getting antsy with cabin fever, maybe it’s the outdoors culture (hunting, boating, fishing, camping), maybe it’s a little bit of that ornery, States’ right streak we’ve seen since the late 60’s/early 70’s and George Wallace, hard to pinpoint exactly. Two, almost all of the state budgets are closer to being balanced in those particular states than the Northeast, Illinois, West Coast, etc. What doesn’t make sense is Florida. Yeah, I get the travel/tourism lobby’s influence, we saw it the other night with the Las Vegas governor’s tone deaf comments. But the senior population down there is huge. They vote at the highest rate of pretty much any voting bloc, and have LONG memories. As soon as Sanders left the race, that state went up for grabs.

Trump just dodged all the questions in the press briefing and only read remarks already prepared for him. That’s a first. Just 20 minutes when they’ve been averaging 1:45. Apparently the “just being sarcastic” about loony Covid treatments defense hasn’t taken. No Fauci or Birx today to make him look bad with their reactions. LOL at the “Should Hillary Clinton finally be brought to justice?” banner ad at the top of the page from some entity called Conservative Buzz. I guess a year from now it will be the same question posed about Ivanka and Jared.

Just spoke with my cousin in Huntsville, AL. It’s crazy to imagine, but seems like ONE of the factors behind the rush to get things restarted across the South is the desire to see SEC Football this season. There’s almost a perfect correlation with proposed states reopening (I guess you could make a similar albeit more tepid argument for NASCAR) and that particular athletic conference’s geographic spread. Now the just shocking news reported by the NY Times that Trump rarely attends the MEETINGS of the coronavirus task force...but obviously never passes the opportunity to be on t.v.

Let’s just put it this way. Dr. Birx was (visibly uncomfortable yesterday, for perhaps the first time in public)...and even felt strongly enough about it that the official WH Coronavirus briefing transcript was changed to reflect she was NOT recommending any of Trump’s suggestions this morning. The first time I heard the audio, it seemed like she was stumbling and in shock, then she quickly segued into “as a fever treatment” (meaning the extreme heat)...difficult to catch, so the original notes coming out made it seem like she was neutral on the topic or even okay with Trump’s suggestions. That Birx reaction video (there was a similar one from Fauci weeks ago, putting hand over face in dismay) has been getting nonstop play all around the world, which won’t make her boss very happy, at all. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/24/politics/rudy-giuliani-donald-trump-laura-ingraham-coronavirus/index.html Then there’s Rudy Giuliani, who makes Trump look like Neil Degrasse Tyson almost.