This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!’” Vanity Fair quoting an un-named ally of Donald Trump saying the President was furious about the coronavirus.

The President of the United States @realDonaldTrump has just walked from the White House to St John’s Church where rioters set fire last night. It’s a triumphant moment of hope over fear. Tweet by Richard Grenell@RichardGrenell.

Ahead of Trump Bible photo op, police forcibly expel priest from St. John’s church near White House RNS Religion News Service

Being quarantined at home makes everything out in the world seem surreally imaginary; behind the trees, over the next hill, ten miles away people are sick and dying…So I am told and so I believe only because of a blind faith that I’m being told the truth. When I make my infrequent forays into that world, I don’t see any bodies or obviously sick people stumbling around. This virus has not produced zombies, not even pictures of bodies – although we do see refrigerator trucks for body storage – but I believe that death is, in fact, out there.

• I’m shocked by the power that President Trump has solely because he is exercising it; power that I didn’t think came with the office. It turns out that what I thought were legal limitations on Presidental Power were just suggestions. Over and over, Trump will do something that I thought was illegal but turned out to just be a quaint convention that past Presidents followed. Conventions like granting access to Congressional oversight committees or not firing people whose job it is to make sure the Administration is following the law. I thought our commitments to WHO were locked in by treaties but, it seems, the President can just wave his arms and poof, the treaties are gone (or never were). We watched The Great over a series of days last week. It is a very fictionalized account of Catherine the Great of Russia and her rise to power by a coup d’état that she organized against her husband. It is also an essay on the power of Office. Watching it, I kept thinking about the power of the Presidency and how much Trump has enlarged and changed that power.
• I’m shocked that most, if not all, American companies do not have enough reserves to go a couple of months without income. A month without income and airlines are going broke, a month without income and Neiman Marcus has to declare bankruptcy. It is apparently considered good business to be leveraged to the maximum and have a business plan that assumes nothing will ever go wrong.

• I’m shocked that the picture above, of troops in full battle gear, is real. It was taken yesterday, June 2nd, 2020 at the Lincoln Memorial.
• I’m shocked that in the picture below, nobody even knows if these troops, who reputedly said they were with the Justice Department but have no identifying badges, are even with the government.

• I’m shocked that the Trump Administration is so inept. When Donald Trump won the election, I got in more than several fights with my friends who kept saying he was dumb. I thought he had run a brilliant campaign – although it was aided and abetted by Hillary running an unusually tone-deaf campaign – and was smarter than he was getting credit for. But, watching this Administration bumbling through the pandemic, first trying to say it wasn’t even real, and now escalating the violence of protests when everybody wants a leader to spread calm, I realize I was wrong.

• I’m shocked that our supply lines are so fragile. It turns out that our efforts to make our supply lines as efficient as possible, going to “just in time” deliveries by eliminating the waste of redundancy, has taken all the resiliency out of the system.

Maybe it is just my age, maybe I’m shocked by everything that is different now, but I do not think so, I think we are in the midst of major societal changes. I think that these really are extraordinary times.

“I can’t breathe,” George Floyd.

The prelude to the week started with armed thugs threatening the government with mayhem if they didn’t get their way. I agree with their goal but two things bothered me. And surprised me. We Liberals like to tell ourselves that these are just man-boys trying to compensate for small dicks – or something – but these guys didn’t look like week men trying to act tough, they looked like marginalized men – who really were tough – trying to look as scary as they could. The bigger surprise, looking back from the cop’s reaction to unarmed protesters, was that there was no pushback from the police. I had a shivering moment when I thought, Oh man! there are more of us, but they are better armed and the police are on their side.

Back on Monday, George Floyd was killed by a Peace Officer, Derek Chauvin. Killed slowly, while begging for his life. We all asked ourselves, what kind of man does that, what kind of human being kills a man like that? The answer is “A cop because they pretty much can”. Even with a video of the eight-plus minutes, it took the cop to murder Floyd, it took several days to charge the cop and six days to book him. As the reality of the killing sunk in, the protests grew and turned nasty.

On Tuesday, out of nowhere, some asshole woman calls the police on a black guy who is out birdwatching saying, “I’m calling the cops…I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” He was out Birdwatching for crying out loud. Birdwatching. But it wasn’t a case of birdwatching while black, she called the cops because he had the audacity to ask her to leash her dog in New York’s Central Park.

Then, around the time the President, during his daily talk – press conference is too grandiose a term – told us what a great job he is doing, we passed the one-hundred-thousand-dead landmark. One hundred thousand souls – and that is probably an undercount – dying alone. Stalin is reputed to have said A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic, well so is 100,000. Every once in a while, a name will pop up in the paper – pop up on the screen, really – a well know Amazon Indigenous activist or an altruistic restaurant owner has died of Covid-19, but most of the one hundred thousand souls have disappeared from the American conscience like a rock dropped in a mine shaft.

The world’s economy, our economy is in freefall and our president is preoccupied with strange conspiracies about Joe Scarborough. It is disturbing that the President of the United States goes after individual citizens. It is so cowardly, but it is also distracting. The economy is in freefall and supply lines are trashed so getting out of this mess is not going to be simple.

As the protests turned nasty, the cops got nastier and then, in some places, they rioted just like the cops did in Chicago at the ’68 Democratic Convention. I watched a video of a New York cop driving by a peaceful crowd spaying – randomly – pepper spray as he drove by; I watched two other New York cop cars just drive into a crowd. I watched another video of a cop pushing his bicycle into a black woman, knocking her down, and then I watched a white woman, half the cop’s size push back, knowing her whiteness protected her.

We have militarized the police, they no longer seem to be here to “Serve and Protect” the people, they now seem to be here to control. Somehow, as a nation, we can not afford to protect our doctors – our state governors have to bg for protective equipment from foreign countries – but we have enough riot gear to cover anything. What a graphic statement on who we have become, what a statement of our values.

I want to end with saying I also saw a video of the Chief of Police of Santa Cruz take a knee with the protestors – who broke nothing – and the Chief of Police of Houston first speak movingly and emotionally to the protesters and then march with them. The sun is shining today and the world looks better but…

What a shitty week it has been.

“We’re reluctant to follow China, but they did it…We’re nowhere near getting on top of this virus,” New York Times’ health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air.

Based on all the moving goal posts we now see the federal government will not protect us. There is no vaccine coming in the near term and we have no reliable treatments for active infection. Don’t be distracted by the spin. Keep your eye on what we know and where we are…No doctor or responsible public health official I know is advocating to stay home until we have a vaccine. We need to move forward. Let’s be smart in how we do it. First two Tweets of a long Thread by Dara Kass, MD@darakass who is: She, Her, Wife, Mom, Doctor, Boss, Ally, Advocate, and Accomplice.

You can call me a Grandma killer, I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not. Tweet from Bethany S. Mandel@bethanyshondark who says: Wife to @sethamandel | SAHM homeschooling momma to 4 | Editor @Ricochet | On @LadyBrainsCast | Neo-Nazi & grandma killer.

It’s wild to me that when daily new infections were 676/day and deaths were 6/day we shut the country down but now that we’ve reduced infections to 23,912/day and deaths to 1,262/day, it’s time to reopen. Truly the beacon on the hill. Tweet from Doctor Nifkinbio@DocNifkinobstetrician who says: I deliver babies and provide abortions. I save lives. I used to be somebody. Future resident of the Kingdom of Heaven

I’ve had a hard time writing this particular post, I started to say something but the world kept changing and my opinion kept changing and the post kept wanting to tell me, No, you’ve got it backward.

The pictures and stories Google and Facebook’s mysterious algorithms choose to show me are of thugs carrying assault rifles and waving anti-Semitic signs out of cars, threatening mayhem if we don’t open up. My instant reaction is anger and it bothers me that I’ve somewhat trained my digital world to make me angry. In the real world, driving around, I don’t see thugs with assault rifles, what I see are normal people not wearing masks as they walk the streets or wait in line for takeout at a restaurant, what I see is that the parks are busy on weekends and people are going to the beaches. What I don’t see are many masks, what I don’t see is the level of caution I would like, but the real world is already opening-up, relaxing the rules. As much as I dislike and disrespect the thugs – and, I want to stress I think it is despicable that these people are in the public space with their people-killing-weapons, making threats disguised as clamoring for Liberty while waving anti-semitic signs – I think that the thugs are right. Let me explain.

I’ll start with the bottom line, our government is not going to protect us, it is literally – in the old fashioned sense – incapable of protecting us. For a long time, months at least, life is not going to get easier than it is right now. Our government is not able to protect us as well as China is protecting its citizens or South Korea, or Germany, Singapour, or almost any other Class A country in the world. We don’t have the ability to test as much as is required, we have supply chains that have increasingly prioritized efficiency over resilience, and, most importantly, here an individual’s rights trump – sorry – the community’s rights. In China, when you are tested – and everybody is tested and given a CT scan – you sit in a waiting room until the results come back, if you have COVID-19 you’re isolated instantly. The potential infectee doesn’t go home until they are clear, the infected people are separated from the uninfected. In Wuhan, they had six new cases last weekend, the first new cases since April 3rd, and they ran 11,000,000 new tests in ten days. But we can’t do that. Sadly, we can not rely on either our state government or the Federal Government to protect us. We have to protect ourselves and the only way to protect ourselves is by acting as if everybody we interact with is infected and can make us very sick if not dead.

OK, not everybody, not the people we live with because you will probably be co-infected or co-not infected. But from there on it just depends on how much risk we want to take. It’s a lot like sex in that we are not just interacting with one person but that one person and everybody they have interacted with over the last fourteen days.

I know that the problem with opening up now is that the virus is still here. Where I live, San Mateo County, California, the number of infected people is still growing at a rate that will double the number of infected every 38.3 days. However, if we wait six months or, even, eighteen months to open, the virus will still still be here. The whole point of sheltering in place – SIP, henceforth – the way we are doing it is to slow the curve down; our halfway measures are not going to get rid of the virus, they haven’t yet and they won’t going forward.

I went to the eye doctor last Thursday and then stopped by a restaurant to get lunch to go on the way home. Wednesday a week ago, I got Chinese to go, and the day before that I went to our local market. After all that, I’m still alive. I keep seeing pictures of kids at beaches or parties and my Facebook stream is full of friends talking – screaming – about how irresponsible the perpetrators are but their gamboling on the beach doesn’t bother me much. When I was in San Francisco a couple of days ago, I drove by Alta Plaza Park which had, probably, twenty groups of people most of them young and many of them closer than six feet to some other maskless young person. Sure, I can get angry, I can get myself stirred up, but their actions can’t influence how I interact with the world outside my front door.

Those that are paranoid – that think every unknown person is infected – are safe. The eye doctor had a sign on the door for me to wait for her to open the door, she made sure I didn’t touch anything but the floor, the exam chair, and the metal shelf I put my glasses on. I kept thinking, She’s overdoing this and then realizing, no, she’s not. Her paranoia made me safer too. Like her, I’ve got to protect myself and to do that effectively, I have to be paranoid. The butcher had a table blocking the door, which was open and my prepaid package was sitting on it waiting for me while the butcher, masked, stood at the back of the shop. I think that is going to be my life for the next year, at least.

I