Patrick Kennedy

Multimillionaire treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin (yeah, this guy) says that those $1200 stimulus checks should be enough to live on for 10 weeks. Let's see you try it, Steve.

Yes, I know the video is weeks old. So was his promise to mail Americans $1,200 checks.

Kidz Bop is a music brand that makes "kid-friendly versions of today’s biggest pop music hits." Think Raffi performing "Despacito."

As such, they tend to change the lyrics around, to keep things OK for the kids. The Pudding did a deep-dive into the linguistic data around Kidz Bop and their censorship choices, and turned their findings into a comprehensive and curious set of infographics:

Kidz Bop songs exist in a weird parallel universe, one where Lizzo’s famous line “I just took a DNA test, turns out I'm 100% that bitch” turns into “I just took a DNA test, turns out I'm 100% that kid.”

Sure, you expect profanity to be censored, but some of the swaps are giggle-inducing gems and travesties. So, we wanted to see if we could find patterns in the black-barred words — R.I.P. to our Spotify account algorithms. (See the “bad word” methodology).

Can you find what Kidz Bop censored?

View this post on Instagram

NEW PROJECT! This week we published a piece with contributor Sara Stoudt that takes a look at censorship in Kidz Bop – the parallel universe of "kid friendly" adaptations of hits by artists like Lizzo and Taylor Swift. Swipe through to see what types of "bad words" get the black bar treatment and be sure to check out the LINK IN BIO to take our censorship quiz and explore all the giggle-inducing and cringe-worthy word swaps. A note to our readers: At The Pudding, we are not currently working on anything coronavirus-related. We want to amplify the vitally important work that's already being done (see the link to our updating Twitter thread in our bio). We also want to hold space for non-coronavirus stories. Life is going to look a lot different over these next few months and it's important to keep BOTH our mental and our physical health strong. We want to encourage our followers to take this seriously, to vigorously wash your hands, and to practice social distancing. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. #kidzbop #music #censorship #datajournalism #ddj #dataviz

A post shared by The Pudding (@the.pudding) on Apr 10, 2020 at 8:49am PDT

Maybe we need to think a little more about what it says and does to our culture if we keep censoring things "for the kids?"

You can check out all of the data through the Instagram post above, or on the Pudding's website.

Just How Does Kidz Bop Censor Songs? [Jan Diehm, Sara Stoudt, and Amber Thomas / The Pudding]

Kidz Bop’s “censored” songs aren’t just annoying — they’re problematic [Aditi Shrikant / Vox]

Image: Justin Higuchi / Flickr (CC 2.0)

I know she doesn't specifically say that these are all emails from Brands or PR people — but I think we all know the truth. Either way, that's some beautiful god damn poetry.

Image: John Cummings / Wikimedia Commons (CC 4.0)

 

Joe Biden will need to win over the vast majority of Sanders supporters if he wants to defeat Trump. But his campaign’s first effort proves he’d rather risk losing than embrace even a fraction of the Sanders program.

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Joe Biden has unveiled his first two policy concessions to Bernie Sanders supporters as part of his effort to consolidate Democratic support. And they’re pretty bad.

On health care, Biden plans changes to Medicare where “Americans would have access, if they choose, to Medicare when they turn sixty, instead of when they turn sixty-five.”

The choice of new eligibility age is baffling. Fifty-five to sixty-five year olds have the highest median incomes and sixty to sixty-five year olds have the highest household wealth. For the median worker, the period immediately before retirement represents the peak of their earnings and wealth. While this change would no doubt benefit many low-income or unemployed people in an age group that has a hard time on the labor market, it is the least progressive age group as a whole to target for free health care. Biden unveils this plan in the midst of a pandemic-induced recession that has kicked millions off their health insurance, with a recent poll finding 35 percent of those under forty-five have lost health coverage.

Lowering the eligibility age to sixty also does nothing to alter the politics of Medicare expansion. Sixty to sixty-five year olds are already only a few years away from Medicare eligibility and will have no incentive to push for further expansion. Biden proposes to finance the lower eligibility out of “general revenue,” meaning the financially most well-off age segment would receive free public insurance. Distributionally, this potentially involves significant upwards redistribution with little overall political or economic benefit.

By contrast, expanding Medicare to children — as in the Medicare-for-Kids proposed in the People’s Policy Project’s Family Fun Pack — would be progressive and politically fruitful. This proposal would ease the financial burden on states — which already insure nearly 40 percent of children through the hard-to-lose Medicaid and CHIP programs — and of course young families. This would simultaneously create a constituency to further expand Medicare as people age out while bringing tens of millions of people into public insurance at comparatively little cost.

Biden’s second proposal involves forgiving some student debt for “low-income and middle-class people for undergraduate public colleges and universities, as well as private Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and private, underfunded Minority-Serving Institution (MSIs).” While this is significantly better than Kamala Harris’s now infamous proposal, it fails to capture many borrowers in need of relief by opting for yet another convoluted eligibility structure. Most significantly, it excludes attendees of for-profit colleges and universities, who are among the most distressed student borrowers.

For-profit colleges enroll less than 9 percent of students, but account for 25 percent of student borrowing and nearly half of all student loan defaults. If the purpose of student debt forgiveness is to provide relief to working- and middle-class borrowers, excluding for-profit colleges seriously undermines that effort. In fact, a strong case can be made that the federal government has the greatest responsibility to borrowers who attended for-profit institutions. The entire business model of for-profit colleges involved enrolling as many students as possible and loading them up with debt, often targeting students of color, immigrants, and veterans. The government’s lax enforcement of even the barest education standards has left countless students in worse financial shape than had they not attended these institutions at all.

Sanders’s platform embraced universality and comprehensiveness across the board in his bid to transform the American welfare state. Instead of adopting one or two of his proposals, Biden seeks to introduce yet another incoherent set of means-tested programs.

Biden could have opted for popular policies like universal childcare or a child allowance, the latter of which has even been proposed by Republicans like Mitt Romney. Instead, these overtures represent nothing more than the same tortured and conservative approach of the Democratic Party to the welfare state. They end up excluding a large share of those most in need and create no political opening for further expansion — it potentially accomplishes the opposite by setting one group of wage earners against the other. If this is what Biden starts with, it would likely end up even worse as it gets dragged to the right during legislation.

Biden cannot afford to bungle his outreach to Sanders supporters. According to the latest Monmouth poll, Biden is tied with Trump for eighteen to thirty-four year olds: the demographic who supported Bernie strongest of all. The same poll this time in 2016 had Clinton up twenty-three points on Trump with that age group. It would be a mistake to think Sanders’s supporters will take whatever is offered and fall in line. Nobody expects Biden to adopt Sanders’s whole platform. But his campaign should take Sanders’s social-democratic approach more seriously than these proposals suggest.

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Despite the clear public health risk to voters, and despite the sensible delays enacted by fifteen other states across the country, Wisconsin is going ahead with its in-person primary election Tuesday. The coronavirus pandemic will almost certainly worsen — and state Democratic leaders aren’t stopping it.

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With less than a week to go before a primary election that could jeopardize the health and civil rights of thousands of voters, Wisconsin’s Democratic leaders dithered.

Despite warnings from public health officials, and in contradiction with his own “Safer at Home” order, Governor Tony Evers is poised to allow in-person voting in next week’s elections to proceed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just one day after a federal judge chastised state leaders for holding the election, Joe Biden repeated his support for in-person voting and, in line with Wisconsin Republicans, refused to support an all-mail election in the state.

Wisconsin’s decision departs from the example set by fifteen politically diverse states — from deep-blue Rhode Island and New York to solid-red Georgia and Wyoming — which have delayed their primaries. Political leaders appear to have deliberately ignored evidence from Wisconsin’s southern neighbor Illinois, whose March 17 primary was an unmitigated disaster for public health and electoral democracy alike. Why?

Clearly, COVID-19 has not spared Wisconsinites. Statewide, there are 30 confirmed cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 residents. That rate is more than 300 percent higher in Milwaukee, host of the now-delayed Democratic National Convention. Yet despite restricting public gatherings and penalizing violators of his “Safer at Home” order with 30 days of imprisonment or a $250 fine, the state’s Democratic governor claims to lack the authority to delay the April 7 elections, which will be the largest public gatherings in the state. On Friday, he issued an executive order that merely invited the state legislature to meet in special session to take up an emergency election bill. Republican leaders quickly declined.

Wisconsinites are also no less risk-averse than voters in other parts of the country. According to a Marquette Law School poll, a majority of registered voters in the Badger State think the spring elections should be delayed.

Nor does Wisconsin’s decision reflect the wishes of local officials, or the preparedness of election administrators. Mayors from around the state have called for a delay. As Green Bay mayor Eric Genrich, a Democrat, put it: “We’re in the position of asking people to choose either their health or their right to vote, and in our opinion that’s unjust, it’s unlawful, it’s unsafe.” Numerous civil rights groups filed suits in federal court to delay the elections, citing Voting Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment violations. Rather than jumping in to take control of the situation, the governor allowed the election to continue.

The reality on the ground — of which Joe Biden is blissfully unaware — is stark. Seventy-one percent of poll workers in the City of Milwaukee will not be present on election day. As a result, the city is opening only 5 of its 180 polling locations on Tuesday. Hundreds of municipalities statewide are facing the same situation; in some cases, voters will have to drive to a different town to cast their ballot in person. Not only will overcrowding of polling places act as a deterrent to voters, but it will also simultaneously increase the risk of community spread in the small number of polling places that remain open.

What is happening is by now a familiar four-part story. First, a disaster — be it a financial crisis or a pandemic — occurs, jeopardizing public welfare. Second, Republicans stake out the most extreme position they can imagine. There can be no all-mail election, nor can we under any circumstances relax racist voter-identification requirements. Third, a pair of magic handcuffs appears; Democrats claim that apparent legal, economic, or political realities prevent them from bold actions (nationalizing the banks, enacting a national health program, eliminating student debt). In the case of the Wisconsin primary, the governor has claimed that he lacks clear authority to change election dates, even though there is no provision in the law that prevents him from doing so.

Finally, once Democrats have indemnified themselves, a counter-majoritarian judiciary — perhaps to no one’s surprise — fails to defend democracy. On Thursday, after chastising the state’s political leaders for holding the election, Judge William Conley found that he lacked the authority to mandate a delay.

In whatever arena this story plays out, the losers are the same: the black and brown working-class voters Democrats claim to represent. As Neil Albrecht, director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, has pointed out in a court filing, a disproportionate number of the city’s same-day election registrants and in-person voters are African American or Hispanic. Insisting on a pandemic primary jeopardizes not only their health but also their most basic political rights.

If you want to see how a pandemic kills electoral democracy, you need not travel to Hungary — go no further than the streets of Milwaukee.

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In a live broadcast Sunday, Queen Elizabeth II spoke about the coronavirus situation. It was a serious and reassuring speech. But, she wore a green dress, a green-screen-green dress. The internet, starting with Peter Chiykowski, took it from there.

One commenter quipped that the dress was the Queen's "'Easter egg' to provide entertainment to the quarantined masses." Unlikely, but fun to think about.

THIS ONE:

green-screen-screengrab via Peter Chiykowski/Twitter

Hey, John Krasinski: quit everything else you're doing and become a full-time Youtuber, please.

Previously: Good news: John Krasinski has a whole bunch of good news

From ProPublica:

Most ER providers in the U.S. work for staffing companies that have contracts with hospitals. Those staffing companies are losing revenue as hospitals postpone elective procedures and non-coronavirus patients avoid emergency rooms. Health insurers are processing claims more slowly as they adapt to a remote workforce.

[…]

[A memo from Alteon Health, a major hospital staffing company] announced that the company would be reducing hours for clinicians, cutting pay for administrative employees by 20%, and suspending 401(k) matches, bonuses and paid time off. Holtzclaw indicated that the measures were temporary but didn’t know how long they would last.

From The Boston Globe:

Emergency room doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have been told some of their accrued pay is being held back. More than 1,100 Atrius Health physicians and staffers are facing reduced paychecks or unpaid furloughs, while pay raises for medical staff at South Shore Health, set for April, are being delayed.

From Twitter, which is what lead me down this wormhole in the first place:

Good thing we paid billions in bailouts to airlines and other corporations. Granted, the coronavirus stimulus bill did provide $100 billion for hospitals and healthcare providers, but it seems that none of that is trickling down to the people on the front lines keeping us alive. Once again, it all gets kept by the bullshit jobs of bureaucratic administrators.

A Major Medical Staffing Company Just Slashed Benefits for Doctors and Nurses Fighting Coronavirus [Isaac Aarnsdorf / ProPublica]

Cutbacks for some doctors and nurses as they battle on the front line [Rebecca Ostriker / The Boston Globe]

Image: Public Domain via Pixnio

 

Prankster creativity from video producer Dan Crowd (above) and motion graphics designer Metehan Korkmazel.

I had the same like multiple instances of me hanging around. pic.twitter.com/05G4KDXNGY

— Metehan Korkmazel (@korkmazelm) April 3, 2020

Source - Patreon

James Blake also covered Billie Eilish, Feist, Joni Mitchell, Frank Ocean, and more during his Monday livesteam on Instagram.

Continue reading…

Rolling Stone is reporting that Adam Schlesinger, co-founder of Fountains of Wayne, and a prolific songwriter for film, television, and theater, has died of COVID-10. He was 52-years-old.

Schlesinger had one of the most unique and busiest careers in pop. With Fountains of Wayne — a group that blended power-pop delight with indie and alt-rock sensibilities — he released five albums between 1996 and 2011. During the same period, he released six albums with his other group, Ivy, all the while building a portfolio of TV and film music. His first hit came in 1996, but it was a song engineered to sound like it was actually from the Sixties: “That Thing You Do.” The track served as the sole hit for the Wonders, the fake band at the center of Tom Hanks’ film That Thing You Do!; in real life, the track charted well and earned Schlesinger an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Seven years later, Schlesinger and Fountains of Wayne would notch their own career-defining hit, “Stacy’s Mom.”

Read the rest here.

Written by Schlesinger:

It is staggering to try and comprehend how many of these obits we are going to be seeing in the coming weeks and months.

Image: CC 2.0

New York City has offered prisoners personal protective equipment and $6 an hour to dig mass graves, reports Ryan Grim for The Intercept. The best-case scenario suggests 100,000-240,000 dead in the next few weeks from coronavirus infections, according to NBC News, and New York City is the hardest-hit metro area in the country. So someone's got to do it.

They're considering Hart Island for the grave sites, but are concerned there won't be enough space.

The offer is only being made to those with convictions, not those jailed before trial, as is generally the case. A memo sent to prisoners, according to a source who reviewed it, does not specify what the work on Hart Island will be, but the reference to PPE leaves little doubt. The offer comes as New York City continues to be the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, with 38,000 people infected and more than 914 dead so far. New York City owns and operates a public cemetery on Hart Island, which has long been maintained by prison labor. The island was identified as a potential resting place for a surge of bodies in the event of a pandemic by a 2008 report put together by the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

Pay them minimum wage: $15 an hour in New York City.

This is Chris Ware’s illustration for the cover of this week’s New Yorker, the magazine’s annual Health Issue. The pandemic had to be the topic for the cover, and Ware’s daughter suggested that the specific theme focus on the families of the healthcare workers on the front lines of the crisis.

“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about — not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.

“‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.

“Good idea. And a personal one: one of her friend’s parents are both doctors; that friend, now distilled into a rectangular puddle of light on my daughter’s nightstand, reported that her mom had temporarily stopped going to work, pending the results of a COVID-19 test.

Tags: art   Chris Ware   COVID-19   illustration   medicine   The New Yorker

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

[Full Story]

Via IGN:

Japanese schools have been closed for over two weeks due to COVID-19 and, with the Japanese school year ending in March, it's meant many students won't have their graduation ceremonies, according to SoraNews24.

However, graduates from one elementary school found they could use Minecraft to create their own ceremony. Without any school or parental oversight, kids designed their own assembly hall, and gathered on a server to play out their graduation online.

Read the rest of the piece here.

[H/t Ted Tagami]

Image: Screengrab

”Truth be told, I am spending more time in Westeros than in the real world, writing every day,” George R. R. Martin writes.

Continue reading…

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo didn't formally issue a shelter-in-place order, but he did sign an executive order on Friday afternoon requiring all employees at non-essential businesses to stay home from work, starting Sunday evening (3/22) at 8 PM.

Continue reading…

Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame.

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Last week, the MS Braemar, a transatlantic cruise ship carrying 682 passengers from the United Kingdom, found itself momentarily stranded. Five of the cruise’s passengers had tested positive for the coronavirus. Several dozen more passengers and crew members were in isolation after exhibiting flu-like symptoms. The ship had been rebuffed from several ports of entry throughout the Caribbean. According to sources in the British government who spoke to CNN, the UK then reached out to both the United States and Cuba “to find a suitable port for the Braemar.”

Which country took them in? If you’ve paid attention to the Trump administration’s xenophobic rhetoric about “the Chinese virus” and its obsession with keeping foreign nationals out of the country, and you know anything about Cuba’s tradition of sending doctors to help with humanitarian crises all around the world, you should be able to guess the answer.

The Braemar docked in the Cuban port of Mariel last Wednesday. Passengers who were healthy enough to travel to their home countries were transported to the airport in Havana. Those who were too sick to fly were offered treatment at Cuban hospitals — even though there had only been ten confirmed cases in the whole country, and allowing patients from the cruise ship to stay threatened to increase the number.

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Cuba Mobilizes Against the Virus

Despite being a poor country that often experiences shortages — a product of both the economy’s structural flaws and the effects of sixty years of economic embargo by its largest natural trading partner — Cuba was better positioned than most to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

The country combines a completely socialized medical system that guarantees health care to all with impressive biotech innovations. A Cuban antiviral drug (Interferon Alfa-2B) has been used to combat the coronavirus both inside the country and in China. Cuba also boasts 8.2 doctors per 1,000 people — well over three times the rate in the United States (2.6) or South Korea (2.4), almost five times as many as China (1.8), and nearly twice as many as Italy (4.1).

On top of its impressive medical system, Cuba has a far better track record of protecting its citizens from emergencies than other poor nations — and even some rich ones. Their “comprehensive, all-hands-on-deck” hurricane-preparedness system, for example, is a marvel, and the numbers speak for themselves. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew killed dozens of Americans and hundreds of Haitians. Not a single Cuban died. Fleeing residents were even able to bring their household pets with them — veterinarians were stationed at the evacuation centers.

The coronavirus will be a harder challenge than a hurricane, but Cuba has been applying the same “all-hands-on-deck” spirit to prepare. Tourism has been shut down (a particularly painful sacrifice, given the industry’s importance to Cuba’s beleaguered economy). And the nationalized health care industry has not only made sure that thousands of civilian hospitals are at the ready for coronavirus patients, but that several military hospitals are open for civilian use as well.

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Masks: A Tale of Two Countries

In the United States, the surgeon general and other authorities tried to conserve face masks for medical professionals by telling the public that the masks “wouldn’t help.” The problem, as Dr Zeynep Tufekci argued in a recent New York Times op-ed, is that the idea that doctors and nurses needed the masks undermined the claim that they would be ineffective. Authorities correctly pointed out that masks would be useless (or even do more harm than good) if not used correctly, but as Tufekci notes, this messaging never really made sense. Why not launch an aggressive educational campaign to promote the dos and don’ts of proper mask usage rather than telling people they’d never be able to figure it out?

Many people also wash their hands wrong, but we don’t respond to that by telling them not to bother. Instead, we provide instructions; we post signs in bathrooms; we help people sing songs that time their hand-washing. Telling people they can’t possibly figure out how to wear a mask properly isn’t a winning message. Besides, when you tell people that something works only if done right, they think they will be the person who does it right, even if everyone else doesn’t.

The predictable result of all of this is that, after weeks of “don’t buy masks, they won’t work for you” messaging, so many have been purchased that you can’t find a mask for sale anywhere in the United States outside of a few on Amazon for absurdly gouged prices.

In Cuba, on the other hand, nationalized factories that normally churn out school uniforms and other non-medical items have been repurposed to dramatically increase the supply of masks.

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Cuban Doctors Abroad

The same humanitarian and internationalist spirit that led Cuba to allow the Braemar to dock has also led the tiny country to send doctors to assist Haiti after that nation’s devastating 2010 earthquake, fight Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and, most recently, help Italy’s overwhelmed health system amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Cuba offered to send similar assistance to the United States after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, but was predictably rebuffed by the Bush administration.)

Even outside of temporary emergencies, Cuba has long dispatched doctors to work in poor countries with shortages of medical care. In Brazil, Cuban doctors were warmly welcomed for years by the ruling Workers’ Party. That began to change with the ascendance of far-right demagogue Jair Bolsonaro. When he assumed office, Bolsonaro expelled most of the Cuban doctors from the country, insisting that they were in Brazil not to heal the sick but “to create guerrilla cells and indoctrinate people.”

As recently as two weeks ago, Bolsonaro was calling the idea that the coronavirus posed a serious threat to public health  a “fantasy.” Now that reality has set in, he’s begging the Cuban doctors to come back.

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Embracing Complexity About Cuba

Last month, Bernie Sanders was red-baited and slandered by both Republicans and establishment Democrats for acknowledging the real accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution. It didn’t seem to matter to these critics that Sanders started and ended his comments by calling the Cuban government “authoritarian” and condemning it for keeping political prisoners. Instead, they seemed to judge his comments by what I called the “Narnia Standard.” Rather than frankly discussing both the positive and negative aspects of Cuban society, the island state is treated as if it lacks any redeeming features — like Narnia before Aslan, where it was “always winter and never Christmas.”

Democratic socialists value free speech, press freedom, multiparty elections, and workplace democracy. We can and should criticize Cuba’s model of social organization for its deficits. But Cuba’s admirably humane and solidaristic approach to the coronavirus should humble those who insist on talking about the island nation as if it were some unending nightmare.

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It's already been reported that Trump is getting antsy about all the social-distancing quarantines intended to flatten the curve of coronavirus deaths, and that he's eager to return things to business-as-normal. Who cares about a million deaths as long as the economy is moving, amirite?

I'm sure his decision has nothing to do with the fact that his own hotels are hurting from the shutdown. Again, what's a few million lives compared to the President's personal profits?

Unfortunately, Trump is not alone in his mass-murdering sentiment. Republicans have been parroting a new refrain this week, that, "The cure cannot be worse than the disease." But this implies that a few billionaires losing some money is objectively worse than a million dead. And that's just absurd.

Jonathan Ashbach took to The Federalist to complain about the ways that coronavirus impedes on that uniquely American value of "freedom."

It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. Probably for that reason, few have been willing to do so publicly thus far. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.

First, consider the massive sacrifice of life Americans are making in their social distancing campaign. True, nearly all are not literally dying, but they are giving up a good deal of what makes life worth living — work, classes, travel, hugs, time with friends, conferences, quiet nights out, and so forth. […] The abandonment of normalcy, therefore, is in many ways equivalent to shortening the lives of the entire nation.

[…]

More is at stake than lives and money: namely freedom. Even for those of us who are by no means libertarian, the increasingly draconian measures put in place across the nation, especially in California, to isolate people and prevent them from moving at will are raising serious questions about whether Americans are in a dress rehearsal for tyranny.

[…]

The American people must ultimately decide what they really want. Perhaps the overwhelming majority would happily endure indefinite isolation and sacrifices of freedom to prevent a fairly bad pandemic from getting somewhat worse. But I doubt it.

While he's not necessarily wrong about the ironic gap between what many Conservatives claim to believe, and the authoritarian instincts that overwhelm them at every opportunity, I'm not sure his ultimate conclusions track. He also ignores the cooperative efforts involved in flattening curve, scoffing at individuals who would choose to isolate themselves for the promise of a prolonged life, in favor of the "freedom" for others to ignore those valiant efforts and render them utterly moot by transmitting the virus anyway.

I'm not Constitutional scholar, but I don't recall the Founding Fathers ever saying "The right to transmit deadly diseases to other people against their will shall not be infringed."

Over in the National Review, Robert VerBruggen ran a "cost-benefit analysis" on the coronavirus quarantine. This involves trying to quantify the financial value of a human life:

Value of a statistical life. This is a number estimated by looking at how much people need to be paid to put their lives at risk. It’s a controversial and unsettled concept, both mathematically and ethically — Regulatory Review hosted a debate on it earlier this year — but the center of gravity of various U.S.-government estimates is around $9 million or so.

But are all lives equal?

Quality-adjusted life years. The above number assumes that all lives are equally valuable, a thought that some might intuitively endorse but that also doesn’t seem quite right. Obviously it’s a lot sadder when a toddler dies in a car accident than when an elderly person with terminal cancer does. So we might want to measure the benefits of stopping COVID in terms of “quality-adjusted life years,” especially because the disease seems to fall heavily on the elderly and hardly at all on children. A decent estimate here is probably $125,000-ish.

VerBruggen takes these calculations and applies them to nation's greater economy loss as a result of the coronavirus shutdown:

One is to assume we save a million lives and value everyone’s life equally. In this case we’ve preserved $9 trillion in value, more than 40 percent of a year’s GDP — before we try tallying all the health-care costs of an uncontrolled pandemic and the suffering we avert among nonfatal cases. Starting with these numbers I suspect it would be very, very difficult to make the costs add up to more than the benefits.

The other is to assume we save a million lives, but on average each person only had, say, a decade to live — which is roughly the additional life expectancy of an American male who makes it to 78. The average COVID fatality is significantly younger than that, so we’re probably lowballing here, though many also have other health issues. In this case we’re preserving only $1.25 trillion.

I understand the, um, urge, I guess, to take this Very Rational Logic approach to the crisis. But there's also the inherent (read: sociopathic) fallacy of assuming that economic gains are somehow a "rational" priority. It's like someone reading Watchmen and accepting Ozymandias's Alien Squid Genocide as an obviously and unquestioningly righteous action.

America may need to face some difficult decisions about how to manage itself economically in the wake of this health crisis. But the possibility of sacrificing human lives for the sake of some short-term gains should never even factor into that conversation.

A COVID Cost-Benefit Analysis [Robert VerBruggen / National Review]

The Federalist Asks: Is America ‘Better Off’ Letting People Die From Coronavirus? [Jared Holt / Right Wing Watch]

Image: Public Domain via Pexels

International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound announced today that the summer games in Japan will be postponed until at least 2021, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“On the basis of the information the IOC has, postponement has been decided. The parameters going forward have not been determined,” said Dick Pound, a longstanding veteran of the organization.

Added Dick Pound: "It will come in stages. We will postpone this and begin to deal with all the ramifications of moving this, which are immense.”

Dick Pound's comments followed IOC president Thomas Bach's earlier suggestion that it was possible the Tokyo Games would called off.

Earlier, Dick Pound had taken a wait-and-see line -- "we can kind of see how things develop to see whether there are more effective means to prevent the spread and to mitigate the lethality of it that we don't know yet" -- but the withdrawal from the games of major nations and the outbreak's increasing severity led the committee to take a more conclusive approach.

"The Games are not going to start on July 24, that much I know,” said Dick Pound, born Richard William Duncan Pound in Ontario, in an interview with USA Today.

Dick. Pound.

It’s a well-known fact of parenthood that what belongs to your kids belongs to your kids, and what you once loved as yours and yours alone will soon be theirs too, fairness be damned. This is especially true of any electronic gadgets. I once enjoyed the exclusive right to call upon my amiable robot friend Alexa to chat about the weather, or the news, or just to stream dusty old tunes from yesteryear (2004). But that all ended once my kids realized they had the power to override me and command Alexa themselves. My once-contented mornings with David Greene and the NPR crew are now cut off by sleepy-eyed, PJ-clad brigands who show up for breakfast and simply must hear “The Hamster Dance” or yet another Guy Raz kids podcast, or maybe they want to ask Alexa whether she has gone poop.

Nuclear semiotics is the discipline of communicating the nature of radioactive waste to people who don't know what it is. How do we tell our distant descendants -- people 10,000 years from now -- to stay away from it? The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico studies the proposals, which include scary earthworks but also a disarming message (below) originally devised by Sandia Labs. These immortal words have been immanentized by Nuclear engineer and PhD student Katie Mummah as a "Live Laugh Love"-style sign.

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

The tutorial screen for Plague Inc.’s Fake News update, which launched at the beginning of December. | Image: Ndemic Creations

Reasons not given, coronavirus tensions likely involved

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One Zachary Bisenio created a handy chart illustrating age differences in Disney couples. There are some interesting surprises, to be sure, but also lots of statutory rape.

Online image emporium Giphy has partnered with Jif (the peanut butter people) to offer a limited edition jar of peanut butter with a dual-sided label: one side features the soft-G pronunciation of Jif and the other side the correct hard-G pronunciation of GIF. You can purchase a jar on Amazon. (via @waxpancake)

Tags: food   Giphy   Jif   remix

Sure, when the rubes glance at your feet, all they see are five-pointed stars. But when YOU gaze in the direction of the underworld... HAIL SATAN!

Provenance unknown; posted by u/black_rose_ to r/coolguides.

Source - Patreon

It was hip to be square, even in 1986. Especially in 1986. Jma Mitch writes:

As a teenager in 1985 and 1986, I used my trusty Commodore 64 and the "Music Construction Set" program to create computer versions of a slew of songs by the greatest musical artist of all time: Huey Lewis and The News. Only Huey songs, that was the only artist I did. I recently (Feb 2020) was able to access my 35 year old C64 disks, many of which survived, including the ones with the songs I'm uploading to this channel. Some of the songs sound better than others, but these are the original unedited files.

More here: "Commodore 64 plays Huey Lewis (1985-1986)" (YouTube via Waxy)

I watched the Oscars last night, and found it to be a pretty dull affair. But one thing that caught my attention was the great-looking art and character design I saw in the very short clip from "Hair Love," the 6-minute film that took home the best animated short film award. This morning I found "Hair Love" on YouTube, so I watched it and loved it -- excellent art, music, and story!

Image: YouTube screenshot