The sun is shining today, and we plan to lay in it on our building’s unfinished roof, so just some brief thoughts on political misdirection to follow.

It’s always humbling to realize you had no idea what was really going on, and yet, that’s the feeling most of us are subjected to daily relative to national, state, and even local politics. Technocrats and career politicians make decisions behind closed doors/in private Zoom rooms that bear very little on most people’s needs and reflect very little most people’s wants. This is one reason why good investigative journalism is so important, and one reason why oppressive regimes everywhere look to suppress independent media.

Thankfully, here in the US, we have tremendous independent media outlets like Democracy Now!, and it was through DN! that I came to the daily COVID-19 newsletter of David Dayen. Outsider to DC that I am, I wouldn’t have guessed that a key reason why Mitch McConnell is pushing to let “Blue States” go bankrupt (in what Governor Cuomo has generously called “one of the really dumb ideas of all time”) is Republican antipathy to public sector unions and a Republican desire to liquidate the massive public sector pension obligations sitting within many state and municipal budgets, and yet, according to Dayen, that’s exactly what McConnell’s hard line is all about.

Similarly, as an outsider to Georgia politics, I wouldn’t have put together that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is pushing to partially “reopen” the Georgia economy (a process which started this morning) less out of servile and idiotic fealty to the President (who – having initially given his go-ahead for the reopening plan – of course, promptly turned on the hapless governor), and more – as journalist George Chidi suggested, also on Democracy Now! – out of a desire to “reduc[e] the potential unemployment insurance costs to the state.”

Of course, even as the President has suggested injecting bleach and spewed constant lies, mis-, and disinformation at his shameful (and shamefully uncritically rebroadcasted) daily “press briefings,” he has been masterful (or masterfully used) in distracting the public at large from his real agenda through his obscene antics. Such has been the modus operandi of his presidency that – mock his bombast and buffoonery as we must – it’s impossible not to admit that he has been effective (or effectively used) in driving through tax cuts, deregulation, Federal bench (including Supreme Court) appointments, and now this massive corporate giveaway of a “bailout” – and effective is a drastic understatement. What’s been “accomplished” in the last 3+ years threatens to reshape our country for at least a generation, and has badly (further) tilted the already very tilted table against those of us who hope to address climate crisis before it’s too late through a reimagining and remaking of almost everything about how the world works.

Meanwhile, as New York State faces a “$13.3B shortfall” in its budget, one imagines that the same Governor Cuomo who raked McConnell’s “dumb idea” and made political hay out of this admittedly heartwarming Red State-Blue State-divide-crossing letter (accompanied by a single N95 mask) from a farmer in Kansas, came out yesterday with the following statement regarding culpability for the pandemic:

The president says it’s the World Health Organization, and that’s why he’s taken action against them. Not my field. But he’s right to ask the question because this was too little, too late.

One imagines this sudden bolstering of the President’s racist and deeply destructive position on the WHO by the now internationally-revered, mainstream liberal-darling Governor has something to do with the meeting the two men had earlier this week at the White House and some private agreement reached between the two Queens boys.

Is this how the world should work? Obviously not. Is this how it works? Evidently so. And as – operating as “a one-woman Congress” – Nancy Pelosi, with Chuck Schumer at her side, ushers to passage one after another disastrous “relief” bills – bills that neglect, as Dayen wrote on Wednesday, “payroll support, vote by mail guarantees, postal service funding, expanded health insurance, workplace standards, rent relief, state and local government money, you name it” – we witness ourselves dug ever deeper into a hole it may prove impossible to climb our way out of in the coming decade.

Yesterday, I continued my critique of our shockingly unreliable COVID-19 data in this city, state, and country, while last week, I pointed out how blatantly uncritical (at least some of) the scientific press had been in reporting on early signs of the “effectiveness” of Gilead’s experimental COVID-19 treatment, remdesivir. Now, the same website reports, “New data on Gilead’s remdesivir, released by accident, show no benefit for coronavirus patients. Company still sees reason for hope”; thank goodness Gilead hasn’t given up “hope” on making all the money their investment bankers want them to…

It’s Saturday, though, and the sun is shining, so let’s end with some hopeful numbers for a change. Doug Henwood has a short post up on prospects for the 2020 general election encouragingly titled: “Biden by 20,” in which he relies on a simple model with a good track record to predict a landslide for our doddering Quixote of a candidate. A few caveats in Henwood’s words:

I should attach some consumer warnings here. The model predicts the popular vote, so it called Gore the winner in 2000 and Clinton in 2016 (which, if we had a sane electoral system, they would have been). And 2020 is a completely wacko political year, featuring a lifeless challenger to a mad incumbent in the midst of a pandemic-induced economic crisis. But the conclusion here is that no matter how things look now, if we have an election, it’s Biden’s to lose, a formulation that admittedly may inspire more doubt than confidence in the prediction.

Here’s to Biden pulling through in November. The world needs it. If he hadn’t already committed to choosing a female running mate (and let’s hope she’s as progressive, visionary, forceful, and principled as he is none of the above), I’d suggest he choose this verbal cannonball of a man instead. I don’t know if this is performance art, agit prop, or just the caged anger it seems to be of a decent, salt-of-the-asphalt New Yorker, but, whatever it is, you won’t want to miss it. As our man puts it: “We need a real fuckin’ plan.”

Damn right. Here’s to a better world.

As the President fires “one of the nation’s leading vaccine development experts” for refusing “to approve the widespread use of the drug hydroxychloroquine,” wonders aloud if people should be injecting bleach to combat COVID-19 (leading “the maker of Lysol” to issue “a stern warning that “under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body”” and Dr. Craig Spencer to respond on Twitter, “Instead of being asked about how we improve our #COVID19 response in the coming months, doctors are being asked to comment on why people shouldn’t drink things like bleach or isopropyl alcohol. This has to stop.”), and retweets a fictional supporter of a very real terrorist group; China struggles to contain a new (imported) outbreak of COVID-19 in another city of 10+ million that almost no one in the United States has ever heard of; evidence from India hints at spread of the disease far exceeding that indicated by the official numbers; and “Morgue Workers” in New York City “Struggle to Give Coronavirus Victims Death with Dignity” while new work out of Northeastern University suggest that “Hidden Outbreaks Spread Through U.S. Cities Far Earlier Than Americans Knew” (and that there were already ~10,000 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in NYC at the time that the first official case was recorded) and the most-widely-cited model suggests that, under a best-case scenario with thorough, as-yet-non-existent measures in place, “relaxing social distancing” may be possible in NYC by the end of May, I’d like to turn today, as briefly as proves possible, to the numbers.

There are a lot of them. And people are confused.

In fact, the confusion is so deep and so fundamental that academic researchers are now studying the differential impact on COVID-19 mortality attributable to watching Sean Hannity versus Tucker Carlson and questioning grimly in their titles: “Coronavirus Disease 2019 […] and Firearms in the United States: Will an Epidemic of Suicide Follow?”

Coming to the point, though, sadly, we continue to operate in a haze of uncertainty about even the most basic features of this disease. A few cases in point: Recent surveys using serological/antibody tests in Germany and California (in Santa Clara and LA Counties) suggest, unsurprisingly, that much higher percentages of the various populations have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than official case counts indicate. In the German town in question, nearly 15% of those tested came up positive for antibodies against the disease, while in Santa Clara and LA Counties, researchers estimated – based on test results – that 3-4% of people had been infected. Almost immediately though, these claims were subject to numerous criticisms, chief among them that: 1) The samples were not random (in the case of Santa Clara County, for example, people were recruited via Facebook ads), and 2) that the tests themselves were not terribly reliable.

Additionally, in the case of the German study, the lead researcher “had argued even before the study that the virus is less serious than feared and that the effects of long shutdowns may be just as bad” as those caused by the virus – a position similar to that of John Ioannidis of Stanford, who attracted a lot of attention in mid-March with this article that, in my view, has already aged very badly (although I will agree with Ioannidis’ assertion from a subsequent paper that “Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic” while also reasserting my own steady refrain: This whole situation was avoidable, and we should never have been in the position where a shutdown became necessary in the first place.)

The German study yields an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.37%, while Ioannidis March paper posits an IFR of 0.125% (with a possible range of 0.025 to 0.625%), and yet by simply looking at the New York City data to date, we can see that – either New Yorkers are especially unhealthy and susceptible to die from this disease – or these figures (barring the very highest end of Ioannidis’ range) are not particularly plausible. I’ve written this up elsewhere in detail, so suffice it to say here that because a great many rich people, and plenty of not-even-rich-but-comfortable people have left New York City indefinitely at the moment, I feel comfortable using 8 million as the City’s current actual population, while because the City, State, and Federal Governments have done such a dismal job of data collection and reporting, I feel comfortable estimating that 20,000 people have already died in NYC of COVID-19 (though I’ll come back to this figure in a moment, and the true count is likely higher by now).

Simple math then yields the following for the crude mortality rate in NYC thus far from COVID-19:

(20,000 / 8,000,000) * 100 = 0.25%

That’s the percentage of the entire population of NYC that has already died from this disease. Okay, but based on the results released yesterday of the first large-scale serological testing in New York, ~20% (21% according to the survey results) of people in NYC tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. These results are subject to most of the same criticisms already addressed above, so should be taken with a grain of salt; however, I’m at least gratified that my previous estimates (based on data on the number of birthing people at two NYC hospitals who had tested positive for the virus in recent weeks) seem to have been reasonably accurate (here’s what I wrote on April 14th: “I’ve been guessing that somewhere from 10-50% of New Yorkers have already, at some point, been infected, with a best guess putting the number at ~20%, and these ~15% figures [of birthing people testing positive] seem to validate that guess to some extent.”).

Using the 20% figure, we then get the following for an ~IFR for NYC:

[20,000 / (8,000,000 * 0.2)] * 100 = 1.25%

That actually seems a little high to me (my best guess would put the IFR somewhere between 0.6% and 1%) but one also imagines that not a lot of essential workers (and especially not a lot of undocumented people) ended up being sampled here. In fact, according to Reuters: “The survey targeted people who were out shopping, but not working, meaning they were probably not essential workers like grocery clerks or bus drivers. Those surveyed were more likely to test positive for antibodies than someone isolated at home, Cuomo said.” Those caveats work in opposite directions – excluding high-risk essential workers, but perhaps including people more likely to put themselves at risk regardless of the nature of their work – as do the facts that the death count and the infection rate are likely both higher by now than the figures above suggest.

So then, finally, why can’t we at least agree on some basic facts? Because we were so woefully underprepared for a public health crisis like this one. As I’ve written about extensively elsewhere, the City and the State can’t even get their numbers square in New York, and that has been leading to confusion since day one. In fact, it took both the City and the State weeks to get public-facing data portals launched online, and they continue, to this day, to share confusing/misleading data. A quick example: I get newsletters from Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer (which are chock-full of helpful announcements), and these newsletters always start with the latest figures for NYC. Her office had been relying on the widely-used Hopkins tracker, but yesterday, they wrote:

But Johns Hopkins has a lag, so going forward we’ll now relay the count prepared by nonprofit news site The City, which consolidates and cross-references data from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Governor’s office, and several private sources, including the Johns Hopkins tracker. Visit their page here and see how robust their data are.

I’ve linked to The City before, and I find their data page helpful; however, so far as the top-line numbers are concerned, The City (the news outlet) is simply copying directly from the City (of New York)’s official data portal, but taking the one additional step of actually adding together what the City presents separately as “Confirmed” and “Probable” deaths. For some time, and still, the City’s portal trailed the State’s in reporting the latest fatality figures (for reasons I’ve explored previously), but since the City started counting “Probable” fatalities, a new problem has arisen, as the State – although it pledged to – does not yet seem to be counting those deaths. In fact, as I’m writing this (around 1 PM on Friday, April 24th), The City – simply aggregating figures from the City – shows 15,411 total deaths for NYC, while the State shows 16,162 deaths total state-wide, but with nearly 5,000 of those outside NYC.

To complicate matters further, the Hopkins portal – on which Brewer’s office has stopped relying – currently shows a mortality figure for NYC alone of 16,388. How did they get that figure? By adding up the total deaths in each of NYC’s five counties as shown on the State’s portal, not as they currently stand (which, at the moment, yields, 11,544), but as of yesterday’s update (11,267), then adding the the number of “Probable deaths” from the City’s portal (5,121) – simple:

11,267 (State’s figure from yesterday for the City)

+ 5,121 (City’s current “Probable” figure for itself)

= 16,388 (Hopkins tracker’s current figure for the City, which exceeds the State’s entire figure for itself as of today)

and it is by taking this figure, and then adding the 3,000+ additional deaths above baseline since the onset of COVID-19 in NYC (the deaths that are, according to the City, neither “Confirmed,” nor “Probable,” and yet which, even the Mayor admits, must be COVID-19-related, and to which I’ve been referring as “Still-ignored”) that I arrived at the above figure of ~20,000 COVID-19 deaths in NYC to date.

You can see why it’s next to impossible to have any confidence in data around our current global predicament. Yet, we’re doing a much better job here in New York than are many governments around the world (eg, New York State has tested significantly more people than have been tested in all of India), and everywhere one looks, one finds evidence of data failures; for example, a study in The Lancet argues that “China may have had four times as many cases as [indicated by the] official figure” (additionally, the Chinese Government recently adjusted up the fatality figure for Wuhan by 50%), and a Financial Times analysis suggests that COVID-19 deaths in the UK are double the official count.

What do we do?

First, we should never lose sight of the fact that these confusing and ill-maintained figures represent people. We’re suffering through a time of heartbreaking loss, and we can only hope that the trauma will strengthen our resolve to shape a better future, while also shedding light on the breathtaking misery that has persisted in our midst (in the form, for example, of poverty, inequality, and endemic infectious diseases) largely unheeded.

Second, we can look for voices that offer some clarity in the midst of all this muddle. To that end, I’ll close by pointing to the work of a whole raft of visionary women of color: Our friend Lalita has this thoughtful piece out on the “The Immeasurable, Cascading Effects of Primary Care” against the backdrop of the pandemic; there are more great insights from Sonia Shah (primarily on the paradoxical connections between migration and disease) in this webinar; this interview on Democracy Now! with Dr. Syra Madad, the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals, is especially illuminating; I really enjoyed Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Dr. Seema Yasmin “a former officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”, and this conversation between Mehdi Hasan and Arundhati Roy – and a quote from Roy, in particular, on the present unreliability of numbers regarding COVID-19 – gives this piece its title.

Read, listen, watch, think, and be well. There’s an alternative to fascist dystopia and it comes from all of us.

——

Note: I’m including below screenshots of the various portals and trackers as mentioned above.

Redbuds are in bloom. Dogwoods have just come into flower. Under a steel-grey sky, I walk the short distance to check in on my partner’s business as I’ve done daily since she closed her physical space six weeks ago.

At Manley’s, Andrew, his coworker, and I chat from behind our masks. It has also been five or six weeks since I bought a case of wine – something we’re not in the habit of doing – and obviously we underestimated how much Cab Franc and (funky, natural) Chardonnay it would take to get us through this.

Someone’s at the grill inside a dark La Bonbonniere (to the GoFundMe for which I just donated), and out front of Mohammed’s currently shuttered Casa Magazines an MTA bus driver – smoking the butt-end of a cigarette with soiled N95 at his chin – speaks into a cell phone: “Yeah, yeah. I didn’t know that Costco sold caskets.”

Already disoriented by my first in-person shopping in a month, I’m jolted by his declaration as I carry my eight (this time, not 12) bottles of wine. Call the restraint a hopeful gesture.

Family-owned, Sam’s Deli has remained open as usual through the crisis. I wave whenever I walk by, worried for the older gentleman behind the counter. Then I’m back in front of our neighbors’ place. They bear the misfortune of having allowed HBO to use an exterior shot of their townhouse in the opening credits for Sex and the City (the story is long, sad, and bizarre – a parable for our times about mass tourism, social media, and the experience economy in an age of omnicidal late capitalism – but let it suffice to say that it was out of generosity of heart and not greed for a payout that, after months of being begged by a young location scout – who told them he’d be fired if they didn’t relent – they at last relented, signed over the rights, and the rest, as they say, is history).

Yesterday, in the sun, I was walking past this same townhouse with my mind elsewhere when I looked up to see a party of four, dressed like Vanderbilt Tri-Delts, taking photos on the sidewalk. After two decades of disrespect – including from the star of the show that has brought them so much grief – our neighbors at last posted a “No Trespassing” sign on the chain which has long hung at the bottom of their steps. We’re accustomed to occasionally encourage tourists to respect our neighbors and get the hell off, please, but yesterday, when one of these sightseers stepped over the chain with a broad smile, I saw red and launched into a severe tongue lashing.

Unsurprisingly, they seemed shocked – they were just living their Sex-and-the-City fantasies after all – but types that they were, the clipped apology from their spokesperson came across more as rebuke than contrition.

“Look, we already said we’re sorry,” she glared at me from between her pearl earrings.

“Are you from here? Do you have any idea what’s been going on in this City? Elders live here. They’re at risk for this disease,” sure, I was on my high horse at this point, but I hope I can be forgiven my outrage.

“We’re nurses,” said one of them.

“That’s not how you get the disease,” said another.

“Well then I thank you for your service,” I replied in the face of this yawning irony, “but why don’t you show some respect for our neighbors.”

“We said we’re sorry three times now,” the spokesperson repeated.

None of them were wearing masks. All of them were wearing precious metals. I should mention that, at this point, I was also holding a four-foot-tall potted umbrella tree. The whole situation was too farcical, and – in the face of their condescension and indifference, giving up on prevailing upon them regarding the humanity of others – I walked away.

Of course, I’m aware of the current state of our knowledge about the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (knowledge which has led to guidance verging on the hypochondriac regarding the risks involved in touching surfaces, like fences, gates, and metal chains), and – as a non-essential New Yorker who has largely been at home for six weeks – I’m also easily capable of imagining how it must feel to someone at greater risk from COVID-19 than myself to – on top of everything else – be besieged in my own home by tourists who could care less about my well-being.

I relate this both to exorcise the anger that I can still feel lingering, and because I find it instructive in unpacking the ideology of healthcare hero worship that has understandably sprung up as this crisis has unfolded. This ideology, like all ideologies, has a political use, and while I myself have referred to our healthcare workers actions as heroic, I will no sooner call the individuals heroes, in a blanket sense, than I called police and firefighters so after September 11th.

Healthcare workers don’t need hero worship fanned by cynical politicians. They need PPE, adequately funded public health and medical systems, paid sick and family leave, etc., etc. As a friend’s friend who works at the Guggenheim put it years ago, relative to her dismal pay, “You can’t eat prestige,” and you can’t eat gratitude either. Just remember, under cover of the budget crisis, Governor Cuomo has pushed through austerity measures that will further starve our public healthcare system of necessary funds, and no amount of pot and pan banging will make up for hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts, unless it is the pot and pan banging of the cacerolazo.

As one healthcare worker at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx put it in this video: “I want to thank everyone for thinking that we are heroes, and you know what I mean? We may be so, but we’re also human to.”

Our healthcare workers need forgiveness of their student loans. They need emotional support to deal with their trauma and loss. They need the things that human beings under immense stress and strain need. Cheering is fine, but not if it blinds us to the realities.

Coming back to the four SJP fans though, as I reflected on the unpleasant encounter and tried to breathe down my adrenaline, it eventually occurred to me who they might be. They’d left my first question unanswered, but a myriad of factors led me to conclude: No, they are not from here. But, yes, they’re obviously here now, and on the strength of having lived five years in North Carolina, I recognize a certain type of Evangelical when I see him, her, or no other gender. These were the good Presbyterians and Baptists I’d known (not Biblically) in college, the good Presbyterians and Baptists who were now – from my graduating class – mostly mothers of five in the alarming suburbs and exurbs of the South.

Blame me if you like for making so many assumptions, rushing to so many judgments, but, in short: I concluded they may very well have been volunteers at Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse. So curious was I to test this conclusion that I even spent a few fruitless minutes on Samaritan’s Purse’s Instagram, but all to no avail. Already, I feel better, just having written this down. Maybe they weren’t nurses at all, and their quick-witted spokesperson just imagined it would be hard for me to counter such a claim. Maybe they are nurses, and I’m right that they’re in New York City just to enact sanctimonious charity. Some 60 beds in exchange for those aerial shots of Central Park? For those tear-jerking, heartwarming stories about José from Queens – an immigrant, a boxer – and maybe how his soul was saved? For Franklin Graham’s outfit, the PR is priceless.

Maybe there’s some other wholly unrelated explanation for the behavior of these maybe nurses, and I’m totally wrong about all of this: If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is humility about the limits of our own knowledge. Either way, call me ungrateful (and, of course, hindsight is 20/20; as it turns out, even with the strain on our medical system, we would’ve been fine – which is to say, just as dismally bad off, but not much more so – without the help from the hateful millenarians). The leaders of St. John the Divine made the right choice in rejecting a slated partnership, and – like Kunal Kamra – Reverend Billy is someone I’m comfortable calling, without reservation, a hero.

As he can be heard shouting in this video – just after planting a rainbow flag next to the Central Park field hospital, and just before being violently tackled by officers of the NYPD (who – even with, at that point, roughly 20% of the force out sick – clearly didn’t give a shit about social distancing):

“Get out of New York!”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

With Handmaid’s Tale-style scenes playing out at state capitols across the US, and authoritarians around the world rushing headlong to capitalize on the pandemic to cement their power, we must be asking ourselves where we stand. And how firmly. And what levers exist to wrench the world – away from this madness – in the direction of sanity and justice.

Last night, I listened to two moving DiEM 25 TV episodes on the plight of Julian Assange (interviews with Assange’s father, John Shipton, and his colleague, Stefania Maurizi). Through a steady stream of anti-WikiLeaks propaganda, I think many people in the US, even on the left, came to feel that Assange was a nasty fellow more or less getting what he deserved, and only belatedly, if at all, realized 1) that those of us who have never met Assange really have no idea what sort of person he is, and 2) that the attack on him is an attack on the freedom of the press writ large. The conditions under which he’s being held in Belmarsh Prison by the UK Government are a scandal, and in the words of Anand Teltumbde that concluded my post yesterday: “I earnestly hope that you will speak out before your turn comes.”

On Democracy Now! this morning, through some technical difficulties, Bill McKibben spoke plainly about the connections between the crises of the pandemic and of climate disruption. In both instances, science denial, gutting of state capacity, and corporate greed have left us vulnerable to catastrophic harm, and as our current predicament makes frighteningly clear, timely action means the world. Relative to the global climate crisis, the hour is already very late.

The P2P Foundation has a nice primer up entitled, self-explanatorily, “Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?” while, on his blog, Heiner Flassbeck points to the urgent need for action (in particular, a shift away from Northern European wage dumping and predatory abuse of the European Monetary Union) to prevent the collapse of the EU. As he writes: “Anyone who does not start now to critically reflect on their own position in and on Europe can probably save themselves the trouble altogether, because the European idea and a European future are disappearing faster than the coronavirus.”

In the US, looking back rather than forwards, the President “Weighs Aid for Oil Companies” as prices for US oil dipped well into the negative (!!) range on Monday. No word from the President on the results of a large study in VA hospitals on the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 (with the AP headlining: “More deaths, no benefit from malaria drug”) even as the New York Times reports that the “federal agency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci issued guidelines on Tuesday that stated there is no proven drug for treating coronavirus patients,” further undercutting the President’s frequent unsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment or prophylaxis.

Meanwhile, between the US and China, the information war only escalates, with the Times dutifully reporting this morning – relying on accounts from “American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” – that “Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S.” On Sinocism, with a greater degree of nuance, Bill Bishop examines claims and counterclaims regarding flights from Wuhan to the rest of the world following the suspension of travel within China from that City, concluding:

There are many legitimate reasons to be very angry with the PRC/CCP and the handling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and to apportion a significant amount of the pandemic blame to them, but it seems to me that parts of the US government and media establishment are getting way over their skis with claims that may not be based in fact, which ultimately will only hurt the efforts to hold Xi and the CCP accountable. Do people really need to embellish their bad behavior? I think a much more effective approach is to sit back and let the CCP and its wolf warrior diplomats torch their reputation in many countries around the world. But that does not help domestic political considerations.

And, writing of the work of Canadian academic Daniel Bell – currently of China’s elite Tsinghua University – in rebuking the claims, regarding flight logs – claims now circulating on Fox News, etc. – of noted windbag and current senior fellow at Stanford’s right-wing Hoover Institute, Niall Ferguson:

Bell’s post of course has propaganda value for the CCP. The top item at time of editing on the Eric X. Li-funded Guancha site is Bell’s rebuke of Ferguson over the flight claims.

Dizzying world we live in. Vijay Prashad, whose work I generally love, continues his attempts to totally vindicate the COVID-19 response of the Chinese government, attempts of which I remain profoundly skeptical.

Finally, as we look ahead to the path out of this mess, the news is mostly ambivalent at best if not downright bad. The pandemic is disrupting vaccine delivery for non-COVID-19-related “immunisation campaigns in low- and middle-income countries” and, of course, threatening to throw hundreds of millions of additional people into poverty and hunger. This editorial in The Lancet opines that an “urgent measure is widespread testing in all affected countries,” emphasizing that serological/antibody testing will provide “knowledge [that] will be crucial to inform a more accurate global infection-fatality rate that will then guide governmental decisions on the features, scale, and duration of lockdowns,” but this as-yet-unpublished study (of an admittedly small number of cases in China) suggests that many/most asymptomatic individuals will not develop antibodies sufficient to be detected. One imagines they may also not develop antibodies sufficient to provide any immunity in that case.

Summarizing much of the above, this account from a J.P. Morgan analyst is similarly pessimistic about US pandemic response strategies and the current state of treatment options globally, but is sunny about the state of the US public markets, which, to a narrow class of individuals, seems to be all that really matters.

In New York, Riker’s is in crisis, with nearly 1 out of 10 incarcerated people there already having tested positive, but, in the City at large, people are doing all sorts of good work (including on sidewalk width, to give a sense of the gulf between the circumstances of those hardest hit – in places like Riker’s – and the rest of us), and I recommend everyone take four minutes to watch this powerful video from The Intercept featuring healthcare workers at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

What do we do? Thinking never hurts. Here’s Jeremy Scahill on “The Moral and Strategic Calculus of Voting for Joe Biden to Defeat Trump — or Not”:

Donald Trump’s presidency is not an aberration of U.S. history in substance. His rise to power and the policies he has implemented are, in many ways, the logical product of the U.S. as a failed state, politically and functionally. Trump says the quiet parts about the system out loud, but his agenda is firmly rooted in the bloody history of this republic. And his rise was made possible by the failed two-party system and the corporate dominance of electoral politics in the U.S. Also, let’s not pretend that congressional Democrats have not enabled Trump by regularly voting for his obscene military budgets and sweeping surveillance powers while simultaneously calling him the most dangerous president in history.

Assuming Biden is the Democratic candidate in November, I will, of course, vote for him, although given his age and the current state of the world, I won’t yet be surprised if Sanders, Warren, or even our own late-blooming Governor Cuomo turns out to be the actual nominee. As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe what’s currently at stake – in the 2020 US presidential election and the choices and actions we all make in the next few years – is the possibility of a future. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about Biden, but our current President and the openly fascist cabal around him most be stopped, just as the Right-wing International which he now anchors cannot be allowed to secure its grip on the planet.

Freeing Assange is part of this. Winning in 2020 is part of this. And preventing the wholesale dismantling of what remains of US democracy while we sit at home is a part of this, too.

Death to fascism. Here’s to a better future.

More than four years ago, not long after my father’s death, I wrote a tribute to my partner entitled, “Beautiful People, the Whites“; it remains the most widely shared piece I’ve written, but I was surprised to find it still online, as I’d been under the impression that my Medium posts had come down (at least outside the Wayback Machine) with the closure of my account as I transitioned to my own WordPress-hosted blog. That’s surveillance capitalism for you.

My father’s death and the emergence of our current President as a viable political force in this country launched me into what felt at the time like an explosive period of productivity, and my first round of writing that was properly public (if modestly so). I worked a lot more then, and was not as fully awake to my own conscience as I am today, and that period of production pales in comparison to the bought in the midst of which I remain. Still, I’m gratified that those pieces have aged relatively well, and pleased, for my own narrow purposes this afternoon, that they remain up for me to reference here.

During 2016, in writing about fascism, white supremacy, and other obvious or emergent features of US life, I received a great deal of pushback from friends and relatives. Some felt personally targeted. Some felt I was being histrionic. Some accused me of being sloppy with my words. A handful of those encounters became quite heated, though I’m thankful that love, generosity, and a constructive urge won out in all instances in the end.

I write this less to vindicate my past self (as I was obviously nowhere near the leading edge of political critique), and more to point to how radically our politics have shifted in four years. Today, it’s become quite routine – in casual conversation and across much of the mainstream media – to characterize our President as a white supremacist, and, by extension, at least in some cases, to acknowledge the long history of structural racism and white supremacy in this country; that is, good liberal people in the United States no longer simply think of hooded KKK members when the term white supremacy is employed. Now, they think of the President of the United States.

Last night, my partner looked up in shock from her phone and asked: “Have you seen these images from Pittsburgh?”

I had not. I’d just been writing about Pittsburgh’s response to the flu pandemic in 1918, but – having seen images from Michigan, Minnesota, and elsewhere – gathered that this was about the protests, and what shocked my partner also shocked Juan González, the co-host of Democracy Now! Here’s what he had to say on this morning’s episode:

And what troubles me most about this is how right-wing extremists are brandishing automatic weapons, and they’ve become regular features of these protests, and with the man in the White House saying nothing to condemn this form of intimidation. And obviously, most of them are Trump supporters.

And I’d like our viewers and listeners to ask themselves a question: If hundreds of African Americans or Latinos showed up in cities around the country brandishing automatic weapons, what would be the response of the country to this? Why is this being almost accepted and normalized now as a method of protest? And my fear is that this will become normalized over the next few months as we head toward a bitter national election. And we should make no mistake, that this country is edging closer and closer to neo-fascist authoritarianism.

He’s so damn right. Fascism doesn’t show up one day and declare: “Hi. I’m fascism, and I’m here to overthrow your government.” In Germany – even in the extraordinary historical pressure cooker of the Weimar years – more than a decade passed between the formation of the Nazi party and Hitler’s rise to power. In India, the Hindutva project of the RSS has been slowing gaining strength for nearly a century, and almost 20 years have passed since the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat that – despicably – established Narendra Modi as a force in Indian politics. Sadly, frighteningly, other examples abound around the world today, but coming immediately to the point that González already made, we are now trembling on the precipice of actual fascism.

Wall Street continues to get what it wants from this Administration. From Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen pretends to carve out a neutral politics of “the building of things” while not so quietly becoming closely aligned with Charles Koch. The US media can’t even stop promoting ISIS propaganda, let alone the re-election campaign of this vicious ignoramus in the White House.

Meanwhile, Amazon-owned Whole Foods can’t give its workers paid sick-leave, but it can surveil them to preempt unionization. New York nurses can’t get adequate PPE and are dying of COVID-19, but are nonetheless pressured to work even when sick, including in capacities for which they’re not qualified. Documented cases of the spread of COVID-19 owing to in-person voting in Wisconsin are showing up. The New York Times reports on ~30,000 “Missing Deaths” globally (after examining excess death rates for only 11 countries) – deaths, alone, which would increase the global death toll by nearly 20%. And in a mixed piece of news, as-yet-un-peer-reviewed studies from the Bay Area and LA County suggest – based on potentially unreliable serological tests – infection rates may be as much as 50x higher in California than official numbers suggest. We can dig into the ramifications of that unsurprising finding another time.

For now, I have a Zoom call, so I’ll close with the words of Anand Teltumbde, to whose “Letter to the People of India,” I’ve linked previously, and who is now in jail in India under a draconian and much-abused law:

An individual like me obviously cannot counter the spirited propaganda of the government and its subservient media. The details of the case are strewn across the internet and are enough for any person to see that it is a clumsy and criminal fabrication.

As I see my India being ruined, it is with a feeble hope that I write to you at such a grim moment. Well, I am off to National Investigative Agency custody and do not know when I shall be able to talk to you again. However, I earnestly hope that you will speak out before your turn comes.

Will you?