Ugh

We officially crossed 100,000 covid19 deaths. At least that's shut up all the dumbassess who kept saying "The flu kills 60,000 a year, gawd. We don't shut the country down for that!!!!!!!!"

The only thing that remains to be seen is how deep our official levels of asshole will go. Multiple states are changing their unemployment systems to if your job is open but you refuse to go back because of fear of infection it counts as a voluntary quit. Which means those people would be ineligible for unemployment.

In Texas, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a lack of immunity to covid19 was not a valid reason to request an absentee ballot. They delivered this decision after hearing the case remotely so not to risk potential infection from covid19. This will be one of many such cases in the months to come with potentially similar outcomes in red states. As Trump said, if you allow mail-in voting, you'll never get Republicans elected again. 

Usually, flagrantly saying the quiet part out loud like this will bite you in the ass but, given that election rules are the purview of the states, it is unlikely to lead to a negative outcome. There's enough political cover for Chief Justice Roberts to say that since Trump is merely expressing a political opinion and has no capacity to create discriminatory rules, there's no infringement on the people's right to vote. 

Since Roberts has the daylight, he'll take it- but he'll probably assign Kavanaugh or Gorsuch to write the opinion, if it comes to that. He may cast the deciding vote, but Roberts won't want to get his hands dirty to validate the reasoning. 

Which brings me back to a horse I feel compelled to keep beating until election day. Biden is in a deep hole against Trump. Yes, I know he's up in the polls. So what? Polls are a measure of who the general public prefers as a person. What they don't measure is how effectively campaigns deliver their message to mobilize its supporters to donate, phone bank, canvas, etc. etc. that makes up the actual work that gets people elected. Being liked more than Trump isn't a game changing asset- you could put up a rotting corpse in a head-to-head against Trump and odds are the corpse comes out on top. 

It seems the cornerstone of Biden's campaign is that he isn't as bad as Trump, which is the exact same mistake the Clinton campaign made in 2016. So far, Biden has told people that if they believe Tara Reade's accusations they shouldn't vote for him, that any black people who hesitate to support him aren't really black, and has failed to gain any traction among Bernie's supporters.  

If you tell people not to vote for you because of a moral quandary surrounding you, you're giving people license to won away from supporting you. They may not denounce you, exactly, but their silence will be noticeable. Also, if you tell black people that their concerns over your long history of cementing institutional racism that you aren't really apologizing for is making them hesitate is actually all their fault not yours, that won't end well. Also also, the idea of a white dude getting to dictate black people's level of blackness because they won't let the harm he's done to their community go is bound to be a winning issue. 

Lastly, if you want Bernie supporter's you have to adopt his policies. They won't come along without a convincing commitment to their policy goals which Biden can't deliver, sooooo yeah, there's a good chance a large portion of voters under 45 for show up, which obviously doesn't bode well. 

All of these are factors are looming over the Biden campaign but don't appear dangerous because there's no pressure yet. But once the summer is over and Trump and Biden start going at it, all these weaknesses will manifest and drag Biden into a statistical tie if he's lucky until November. Since the best idea the Biden camp can come up with to get younger voters on their side is glorified online hangouts, I'm not optimistic they'll get a handle on things. 

What should be especially concerning is that Biden doesn't have any avenue to shore up his weaknesses. Usually, candidates use their VP picks to cover any holes in their appeal. This is actually why Obama picked Biden as his VP; Biden was a sign to the conservative wing of the party that all the hope and change talk wouldn't go too far or change too much. 

But who could do that for Biden? His biggest weaknesses are from the left-wing of the party and left-leaning independents but he can't exactly placate them given that the entire philosophy of his campaign is a rejection of everything those voters believe in. Even if he picked Elizabeth Warren, she's so thoroughly trashed her reputation that she's nothing but a liability at this point. Sanders is obviously a no-go because the establishment figures who fought so hard to deny Sanders the nomination won't abide him being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

So who does that leave? The only people Biden can pick are other centrists which only compounds the problems with his campaign. Anybody who could plug the holes in Biden's campaign would end up being more dynamic, influential, and personable than the man himself so, that's also a limiting factor. 

Funnily enough, the literal week long affair of Amy Klobuchar highlights the problem Biden faces. Just on its face, who cares about Amy Klobuchar? Who among you even bothered to learn how to pronounce her name or remembered it after she flamed out in the primaries? The only reasons she was a serious contender were-in order- she's a woman (which Biden promised as his VP), she's a centrist who appeals to the same people as Biden so there's no threat of her taking her ball and going home if Biden doesn't agree to policy demands. 

Even if things went well, at best she adds nothing to his campaign so there's no real point to her being there in the first place. But things did not go well because a Minnesota policeman named Derek Chauvin murdered Gregory Floyd. Chauvin has killed people on the job before, you see, and the prosecutor who declined to bring charges against him and dozens of other cops was none other than our dear friend Amy Klobuchar.

This ultimately is the greatest weakness Biden and his ilk face. They spent their entire careers chasing the reputation of being respectable, of not being soft-hearted liberals out to save pathetic losers from a world they were too weak to survive in on their own. They did this by creating policies like the Crime Bill or the Welfare Reform which caused an insane amount of suffering in minority and poor communities on purpose. They saw that the true test of being a respectable, serious politician was the willingness to fuck over black people so they grabbed that ball and ran with it. 

So while centrist Democrats rail against Trump's bigotry, the uncomfortable truth Biden et al. are desperately trying to avoid is that Trump is merely escalating the policies and attitudes Biden staked his entire career on.

Even so, the most annoying thing about pointing out all these flaws is inevitably the argument becomes "He can't be worse than Trump." Which, I know. Pretty much everyone who doesn't like Joe Biden knows that Trump is worse. However, Trump being Trump doesn't erase the consequences of Biden's career or the philosophy that drives him to this day. 

Brow beating people into voting for Biden with no guarantee that he'll be different is effectively telling those people that their suffering doesn't matter, that asking for protections and guarantees that the harm won't be perpetuated is selfish. 

What you're telling these people is that you don't care.  

You're telling them that the life and death struggle against Trump is an abstract one about democracy, the soul of the republic, the Constitution, or the Supreme Court. Blood is too messy in such pristine, rarefied air, so it gets left out. Sure 100,000 and counting are dead, yes what happened to Gregory Floyd was tragic, but let's not be untowardly angry about the whole thing. Won't someone consider the property damage?

There's no point in saying this election is the biggest fight for the country's soul if you're going to get squeamish. If you think people stealing shit out of a Target is morally comparable to a cop murdering someone in broad daylight on fucking camera, shut up. If protesters breaking the windows of a precinct is worse then the cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the peaceful protests which started the riots, give up. 

If things like Minnesota bother you, if they make you uneasy, then please be courteous and come to terms with your defeat, now. You don't have the guts to fight for the world you want in the way it needs to be fought for, so it'll never come to pass. If you don't like the protests because they make you uncomfortable in the same way Trump makes you uncomfortable, then you can't distinguish against the legitimate anger of the oppressed and the whims of a dictator. You want the fight of the century but you want it done politely, comfortably, where no one steps out of line.

You're right about one thing, though. We're about to have one of the most defining elections in recent times. It's going to be a brutal, nasty fight. And because of you we're walking into it timid, crippled, and afraid. I hope you're happy. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2

A few years ago, I did a fun little piece on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I planned on following it up with write-ups for the other two seasons but I got distracted and never got back to it. But now that the show has returned to the interwebs, now's as good a time as any to rectify my mistake. 

To summarize my first piece, the first season is good but suffers from an overall lack of tension. Zuko is too sympathetic, Zhao is more antagonistic to Zuko than the main cast, which makes for with good episodic tension but leaves something lacking when it comes to the bigger picture. 

Season two changes this immediately. With the introduction of Zuko's younger sister Azula, the threat level in this show skyrockets. She's everything you want in this show- she's dynamic, powerful, manipulative, and just barely holding back a psychotic break. In her introductory episode, she nearly captures Zuko and Iroh just by playing on Zuko's insecurities. She puts everyone on their back heels by attacking them from every possible angle. Whenever she loses, it's just barely, so it's no surprise that, come the end of the season, she wins everything, conquering the Earth Kingdom via a coup and nearly killing Aang with a well-timed lightning strike. 

The other thing that really pushes this season to another level is the introduction of earth bending. We saw a bit of it in season 1, but we get so much more of it here and adds a much more visceral quality to the fight choreography. There's just something about two people pummeling each other with the ground they're standing on that makes the fights feel so much more dangerous and exhilarating. 

What I also appreciate is how the show explores the political aspects of the 100-year war. The Gaang spends the first half of the season making its way to Ba Sing Se, the last major Earth Kingdom stronghold and home of the Earth King. Their plan is to see the Earth King, tell him about an upcoming eclipse which will disable all firebending, which is the perfect time to launch an invasion of the Fire Nation to end the war. 

Except, once they get to the city, they're cut off from seeing the king and everyone they talk to seems to have no idea that there's a war going on outside the city walls. 

This state of affairs is brought about by the Dai Li, the secret police of Ba Sing Se who work to keep order by gaslighting the city into ignoring the war altogether and actively keep its existence from the king so he doesn't do anything stupid. 

Funnily enough, there is a legit point behind them behaving this way. Cities under siege tend to fall because they crack from the inside. When resources spread too thin it gets fantastically hard to hold everyone together and soldier on through food, medicine, and water shortages. Even cities as self-sufficient as Ba Sing Se have a psychological limit that a century of war would erode. Eventually, the walls protecting you from the threat outside morph into the walls of your coffin. 

So it makes a certain kind of sense that the Dai Li would value order above all else. In a city where the poor are literally walled off from the rich and powerful, any breakdown in order would lead to massive riots and fires which would be a nightmare to deal with. And it would be increasingly harder to prevent such a thing when to have the Fire Nation slowly but surely raiding, burning, and conquering its way all over the continent until Ba Sing Se is the only place left to go. In that scenario, its only a matter of when the city breaks, not if. 

Of course, pretending that the war doesn't exist at all to the point were the pressure keeps on mounting because nothing's being done to relieve it is stupid and bound to fail as well, so remember kids, you can only propaganda your problems away for so long before they come bursting through your door. 

Personally, I think this is the strongest of the original Avatar's three seasons. Part of what made the show so fantastic was that it isn't three separate seasons as much as one story broken into three distinct acts. In the second act, you raise the stakes, complicate the established arcs, and bring the heroes down to their lowest point. This season does all of these with aplomb, making for some of the funnest, most exciting, and heartfelt moments you'll find in any media. 

This season is the show firing on all cylinders without an ounce of fat on it. It doesn't have to do any off the narrative set-ups that slow down the first and third seasons to varying degrees and can get along with the business of telling its story. It leaves the heroes in such a desperate place that it makes their victory feel all the more powerful when it finally comes. It makes that inevitable victory feel earned because, even though you know it's coming, you have reason to doubt. 

More than anything, it leaves you in a position where you have to keep watching to find out all it works out in the end. Which is what we'll get into when we look at how the ending of the series kinda spoils all the good work spent getting there. 

The Curse of The Dark Knight

I love The Dark Knight. From the moment the first trailer dropped with Heath Ledger's Joker laugh echoing over the outline of the bat symbol, I couldn't wait for the summer to come and see it on opening day. Which, I did. Then I saw it three more times in theaters over the next four days. 

One thing that always bugged me though, was the handling of Harvey Dent. For the longest time, I thought it was the result of movie reaching for too much, being too ambitious for its own good. 

Now though, I realize that the problem wasn't Nolan's ambition but his rejection of mythic storytelling. 

One of the key selling points of Nolan's Batman was its commitment to realism; that is, providing plausible explanations for how some one like Batman could exist. That didn't stop from the movie from stretching things out for a more heightened reality but it did so in the way that was acceptable for action movies.

This move away from the more comicy aspects of the form didn't hurt the main story so much since it replaced those with the genre conventions of cops and robbers movies to great effect. But that only covers the conflict between the Joker and Batman- the genre conventions leave Harvey out in the cold which Nolan and screenwriter Drew Goddard didn't quite know how to reconcile. 

So why would Harvey throw such a wrench in a grounded, realistic narrative? Well, it's because Harvey is drawn from a more theatrical, operatic tradition that isn't meant to be cut down to a more naturalistic setting. 

Dent is made up like a modern Greek tragic hero; he's an exceptional figure who's prowess and competence has led him to the zenith of his world. But, because of an inescapable flaw, his world will come crashing down until it inverts around him- everything that created his success will be what traps him in his misery. 

What makes Dent such a pitiable figure is that he is trapped in his dichotomy- he is forever completely good on the one side and an utter sadist on the other. His sides have no way of communicating or reconciling, he is nothing more than two absolutes forever warring for dominance. The trait he's meant to warn us about is thinking that there are only the guilty and the innocent, the good and the evil, with nothing in between, so that we learn to navigate the gray in the world or drown.

To pull this off, you have to lean into the more mythic elements of the comic form and be willing to go for those more operatic notes even it does risk making things feel a bit silly. 

But, Nolan doesn't do this until it's too late. 

When Dent makes his transition to Two-Face, he becomes a one-dimensional villain obsessed with vengeance the we've seen a million times before. The movie reduces him to a coin flip gimmick that it removes all meaning from. The point of the coin flip is that, because he is nothing but absolutes, he can't make a nuanced decision. He doesn't know how to handle ambiguity or decide which extreme he needs to engage with. 

So he flips the coin, letting fate decide for him. Flipping the coin is a surrender, the final pathetic act of a man who's will has been completely crushed inside of him. In the movie, it's just the vehicle for the whims of your everyday murderer. 

This refusal to engage in the more mythic aspects of Two-Face's character is part of why the ending doesn't land the way Nolan wanted it to. The end of The Dark Knight hinges on the audience accepting that the legend of Harvey Dent is so important that if it's compromised by the revelation of his actions, then the entire project of reform dies with him. So the idea that if you push Dent's crimes onto Batman, then the people of Gotham believe they can solve their problems within the law and don't need someone like Batman to do that work for them. 

The whole speech of "the hero we deserve, but don't need right now," is about how there are larger stories people need to believe about the world they live in. It's a very mythic approach to the characters and the world they live in. It's also the very thing Nolan has been doing his level best to make sure his audience ignores. The tonal whiplash that comes from this shift is why so many people left the theater thinking "The fuck was that ending on about?"

It's a shame, really. The success of The Dark Knight convinced the industry that for comic book movies- and fantasy action movies in general- to be successful they had to match Nolan's hyper realistic style, so they removed all traces of the any mythical origin. Do you remember the Russell Crow Robin Hood? Or that Hercules movie The Rock did? Probably not. Because, shock of all shocks, if you divorce characters from the things that make them interesting and compelling, they turn out boring more often then not. 

Thankfully, this trend is starting to buckle. The Guardians of the Galaxy series and especially the success of Into the Spiderverse has shown that studios can make money by leaning in to the more fantastical and sillier elements that comics have to offer. 

There's a reason comic books haven't died out, even though they have come very close over the decades. So, maybe, just maybe, there's something about these characters and how their stories are told that keeps audiences engaged and coming back for more decade after decade. And, I don't know, maybe there's something to learn from that. 

A Little Panic Never Hurt Anyone

One of the things that's been driving me insane over the last two weeks or so is the blase attitude liberal political analysts are treating the current pandemic situation. This piece in USA Today is emblematic of the trend where people are pointing to Trump's growing panic over his falling poll numbers against Joe Biden, which is fueling the desire to reopen the country to put a halt to the economic disaster before November rolls around. What drives me crazy about these takes is the unspoken assumption that things will be normal enough come November for the elections to happen like normal. This idea isn't quite as dangerous as Trump's reopen at all costs, but it is in the same ballpark.

It's insane to me that there are still people thinking that the time for our lives going back to the way they used to be is just around the corner. I know I talked about this in my last piece but it bears hammering in- unless we exponentially increase our testing capacity, none of us are going anywhere anytime soon. Every expert who looks at our situation says we need to run 500,000 tests a day at least to track the transmission of the virus and safely reopen society. That estimate of what we need runs up to 5 million a day which sounds all but impossible when you consider we've only managed to do around 6.5 million tests in the last three months.

Even if we do manage to get the bare minimum of 500k tests a day, we'd be still be months behind in our testing capacity that we'd only just start to get the general outline of what our infection rate is. The idea that our testing capabilities will be up to snuff to guarantee public safety in the middle of what will probably be our second wave in the fall is, respectfully, dubious at best. When you factor in that there were 52 cases tied to the Democratic primary in Wisconsin after they were held with in-person voting, I imagine it's going to be a pretty hard sell to convince millions of people to go stand in line for hours on end all over the country.

This is a massive problem because Biden's only hope to win is high voter turnout. Almost every piece I've seen discussing the election goes out of its way to mention Biden's lead in the polls and treat that as a slam-dunk guarantee for a win in November. Sure, Biden has a five-point lead on Trump right now, which seems impressive except Hillary had a ten-point lead on Trump at this time in the 2016 election. If the candidate you're running now has half the lead after three-and-a-half years of horrific incompetence that's on full display in the middle of a pandemic, you shouldn't be celebrating.

What's more, you should consider that this is about has good as it gets for Biden. Sooner rather than later, he's going to have to start appearing on the national stage to make the case for his presidency. He won't have the safety net of his wife to speak for him, and the questions around the Tara Reade allegations will only intensify as time goes on. It's going to be a brutal onslaught after the summer, one that Biden is blatantly incapable of handling. Of Biden's supporters, only 28% say they're very enthusiastic about his campaign which, in the context of our times seems like a trivial thing to focus on but, it's really, really not.

Think of it this way- assume there's no backup election process set up by November, meaning everyone has to go out to fewer polling places and risk exposing themselves to infection. Biden is starting out four points behind Hillary's "very enthusiastic" numbers in September 2016, and that number is only going to drop the more pathetic performances Biden delivers as the campaign intensifies. If fewer and fewer people are fired up for Biden's presidency, then the fewer people are around passionate enough to convince people to brave election day.

If things keep going the way they're going, election day will revolve around one question: which candidate do you believe in to risk the lives of everyone you love by going out to vote for? We know for certain that Trump's voters will follow him to their graves, do you know any Biden supporters who will do the same?

All these factors should have Congressional Democrats scrambling like their lives depend on it to set up vote-by-mail systems across the country and get it done now. Trump has made his opposition to this well known, but you could get around this by making it look like states that support him get more aid to vote in person or whatever to make it "fair" in his eyes. They should've started this three months ago, to be honest, but the second best time would be right now. The House however, isn't scheduled to come back until next week; and since there aren't enough tests in DC to cover the members of the Senate, there's no way the House will be fully covered so who knows how long they'll be in session before they have to break when someone catches the virus.

Remote sessions and voting would be the logical solution to all these problems, but again, nothing's been done to set up such a thing up. Yes, it'd be a huge logistical hassle, but, I don't know, maybe it's worth the effort to set that up so the country isn't left to the whims of a toddler to manage the pandemic response?

At the end of the day, I'm stupefied that there are still people who honest to god in their heart of hearts believe that Trump is a problem that will, eventually, solve itself. No one does anything to stop him, no one sets up any strategy to win, they just sit back and wait for Trump to lose. This delusion means our nominal opposition party is sleep walking us into four more fucking years with this asshole.

So yeah, maybe these are things we should be worried about, and I don't know, start making sure don't happen?

Fever Takes

With quarantine stretching out into the foreseeable future, it's given lots of people time to reflect on things as they did whatever ways they can to cope. For others, though, it's been a prime opportunity to show everyone the complete asses they've always been.

 We'll start with Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post arguing that pandemic makes the case weaker, not better, for socialized medicine. As you know, few things make me happier than pointing out how terrible other people's arguments are, especially when those arguments are coached in self-righteous condescending tones.

Thiessen gets the ball rolling by making rapid fire brags about the American healthcare system that range from irrelevant to clueless. He makes a really big deal out of how many more ICU beds per capita the U.S. has compared to other countries like the U.K. and touts this has some kind of brilliant innovation of the free market system. He goes on to say that we're actually much better at providing critical care than other countries and then gets what he thinks is a really harsh dig in on other countries by saying they ration ICU care to the elderly and people rated with low chances of survival.

These are all interrelated, but, to start, of course other countries ration their ICU beds to those who need it the most. That's the whole point of critical care and it's exactly why we do the same thing here. Also, pointing out that we have a higher ICU bed per capita rate or that we're so experienced in delivering critical care isn't quite the achievement Thiessen is claiming.

Thiessen presents critical care like it's a luxury upgrade that European or other socialized medicine countries deprive their citizens of in the pure, socialist pursuit of mediocrity. He glosses over that the reason we need so many beds is because we're a much sicker country than our European counterparts. Because we delay going to the doctor for so long, by the time we drag ourselves in for treatment we're in much worse shape than we otherwise would be if we could just, you know, go to doctor without worrying about walking out with a $2,000 bill hanging over your head. 

It's a neat rhetorical trick, honestly. If you make it seem like our abundance of ICU beds is an innovation of our market system while ignoring the implications of why we need a supply that large in the first place then you don't have to deal with the layers of failure required to get there. 

There's so much more here. Thiessen complains at length about how the FDA refused to use the WHO test at first, then failed to make its own and had to wait for a private alternative. Or how since Medicare pays a lower rate to hospitals and doctors we would be facing a shortage of hospitals and doctors since they wouldn't make as much. He closes with saying that we're now relying on the same pharmaceutical industry Bernie Sanders has for so long decried as greedy to find a vaccine for the virus to protect us from future outbreaks.

You have to ignore a lot to come to these conclusions. The FDA refused the test on Trump's orders because he didn't want anybody to have the capability of testing. He thinks, rightly, that the economic shutdown brought on by the coronavirus is a threat to his reelection campaign, so, if we couldn't test for the virus, there'd be no panic- no virus, no thereat, no panic. The refusal wasn't the result of the government being incompetent because that's all government can be, it was the deliberate result of a president who only cares about his public perception intentionally sabotaging our response.

And if Theissen wants to talk about hospital staffing and availability, sure, lets talk about that. All over the country, hospitals are laying off or furloughing staff and cutting the wages of whoever's left because they aren't making any money. Anyone who speaks out about these issues, gets fired. In New York alone, the state lost 20,000 hospital beds from budget cuts and other profitability issues. So that's nice. 

And the pharmaceutical industry? Any vaccine they develop for the coronavirus will be heavily subsidized by public funds, as are most of their products. After they develop this largely tax-payer funded medicine, they will then obtain a patent over it then charge people exorbitant amounts of money to get it.

 Granted, they may not do it at first for PR reasons but, sooner rather than later, they'll double or triple the price whenever they want to so that only the most well off will be able to afford it just like the companies who make insulin and inhalers do. If tying people's ability to live to their ability to pay your profit margin isn't greed, then what is?

This isn't even touching the fact that the private sector can't perform the mass testing required to track the rate of infections accurately. The can't do that because they don't have the resources to test at the level we need. So even though we're  at 987,000 confirmed cases as of this writing, we still don't know how many we're missing. We had 38,000 new cases between April 23rd and 24th, the highest one-day increase we've had yet. Do you really believe we're anywhere near our peak?

Granted, fun as it is to do all this, it is admittedly somewhat pointless. It doesn't matter if Theissen believes what he writes, all that matters is that he continues to be a vessel that champions a system that makes a lot of people money off the misery of everyone else. All he needs to do for his piece to work is reinforce someone's idea that the government just sucks at everything to accept that they, too, should be one crisis away from losing their job and insurance in the name of freedom and profit.

Sadly, there's always going to be plenty of those idiots around, so, congrats Marc, you got 'em.

Moving on, this piece about landlords and how they feel unfairly maligned over the fact that they're still demanding rent from their tenants during this crisis in The Guardian still has me wondering if it's a stealth parody or earnestly tone deaf.

Things start out as sympathetically as they can. We're introduced to Ricardo Reis, owner of sixteen properties in Michigan, a classic, salt-of-earth American heartland kind of guy we've all been trained to think of as inherently sympathetic and trustworthy. But holy shit these quotes and the attempt at context are gold:

"Everyone has an impression of us as being rich and greedy. A lot of tenants will be thinking, how can they ask [us to pay] during this time? But in reality, there are costs involved,” says Reis.

Those costs include property taxes, insurance, maintenance and mortgage payments. Although homeowners will be provided with mortgage relief during the pandemic, many renters are wondering why they should still pay rent. But plenty aren’t aware that commercial property owners – landlords, in other words – are not entitled to this benefit. Furthermore, forbearance programs only defer mortgage payments, rather than completely forgiving the cost."

The idea that renters are too stupid to realize that there are costs involved in owning or maintaining a house is hysterical to me. I'm pretty sure every renter understands that property taxes, mortgages, insurance, and maintenance costs exist- that's what they're fucking paying rent to cover, right? Reis goes on to say that most landlords in Michigan only make between $200-$300 in profit once expenses are accounted for, so it's not like they're rolling in money. Which, yeah, if you go by those rates, that nets between $38,400- $57,600 a year which, even at the top end, just barely pushes you over the median income line in Michigan.

So, you're not Uncle Pennybags, cool. Also, yeah, I do think landlords and commercial property should get relief from their mortgages just like everyone else but if they're not, it's almost like there are people who exist that make laws or something that could change the rules, if you made enough of a fuss about it. And maybe, I dunno, they should focus their energy there instead of trying to hound their unemployed tenants out of every last dollar they can squeeze from them.

But where this story goes off the rails for me is the introduction of its next subject, Greg Marguiles.

This dude is everything you could possibly want in your stereotypical landlord; I mean, look at the shit he lets come out of his mouth:

"They’ll only band together for a very short time – until the first eviction paper comes [through]. Then I think it will hit home"

"It’s unfortunate you’re not working, but that should have nothing to do with paying for what you used. "

I love this guy so, so much. His entire attitude boils down to "But think of how your problems create more important problems for meeeeeeee."

On some level, I get it. Owning property is your main if not sole source of income and if your tenants aren't working your income dries up just as much as theirs. It's the central tenet of capitalism that all spending is someone else's income so everything grinds to a halt when nobody can spend anything beyond absolute necessities. 

Now, there are plenty of people who argue that rent qualifies as an absolute necessity. Which, in one sense is true. Having a house or a safe place that shelters you from the world is an essential part of psychological development and contentment. But what makes people fucking hate landlords is that they take this literally essential aspect and hold it hostage to dole out to those they deem can make them a profit. 

When Margulies says "What could be more greedy than withholding rent that you have the ability to pay?" what he's saying is that your rent is his rightful income. Because he owns the capital in the form of a house, it is his right to demand that you sacrifice money you could use to feed yourself and your family to put food on his table so he doesn't have to sacrifice anything. Reis talks a big game about since they take the risk, they're entitled to the reward. But what Reis and Margulies are asking for is that they only be reap the benefits of their risk and not be subject to any potential failure- if that protection comes at the financial ruin of their tenants then that is a sacrifice they are willing to make. 

What's hilarious to me is that none of this registers. Reis talks about how they'll have to screen people differently once this is all over because if the government can stop evictions, then he'll need an extra layer of security on his investment. He doesn't go into specifics of course, but I imagine looking into the social media profiles of future tenants to gage their political beliefs to see if they'd engage in a rent strike will play a part, which will then determine whether the applicants get a lease or how much rent they'll pay based on this newly defined "risk" factor.

Honestly, they're free to do this if they want. Political beliefs aren't a protected class under federal law nor should they be. But thinking you should charge tenants more for what you think are dangerous political beliefs is a good idea while bemoaning how unfair it is that you can't leverage the threat of eviction over their heads during a pandemic goes a long way towards explaining why people feel the need to put landlords and property owners against the wall when revolutions break out. 

Luckily, there's a solution. As Reis says, the government "should instead bolster social housing if they believe that people should live rent-free”.

Indeed. 

Lastly, I want to talk about those stupid protests. That they're largely fake, paid for and organized by lobbyists or members of Trump's administration is no surprise. The Tea Party had the same astroturf origins and the media is failing in its coverage of these groups all over again. 

By presenting these protests has genuine outgrowths of discontent, the media obscures the real motivations behind these protests which robs of a chance to properly put them in context. It also guarantees that by treating them as legitimate, the wider they'll spread. 

This is, naturally, incredibly bad. It's nice that 80% of the country believes the lockdown measures are appropriate and should continue as they are. I don't want to dismiss how good that is or how far it'll go in keeping things from the worst case scenario. 

Still, the important part isn't necessarily the numbers of the protests- which are still comparetively small- but the fanaticism behind it. The displays will, hopefully, finally dispel the foolish notion that die-hard Trump supporters have a limit to their devotion, and thus can be pulled back from the brink when the man himself goes too far. 

Lurking underneath all of this is the question of when will we go back to normal, which is a question I doubt many people like the answer to. We might, possibly, if we're incredibly lucky, see a slowdown in the summer. Granted, if the protests keep going, we probably won't, but still.

Anyway, the second Trump has his fig leaf he'll declare the virus beaten and insist everyone go about their lives as before. He'll go back to having in-person rallies thumping his chest and crying that he gets no credit for the response, yadda yadda we've seen this movie before. 

While he's doing that, the states should continue to form cross regional alliances to better prepare their responses to the disease once flu-season kicks in. Trump and the federal government will of course be caught with their pants down, again, but there's no reason we shouldn't. 

My hope is that the majority of people, even if the green light is given, still follow as much of their quarantine routine as possible. So far, we don't have evidence of antibodies preventing getting the disease a second time, which puts serious dampners on a vaccine making this all go away. We should be prepared for this to become something we live with until we remake our society into one that can better handle the task of combating the spread of infection. 

Things have been rough, and are likely to stay that way for the rest of the year. Do what you can, keep yourself safe and sane, and, one way or another, make sure you and yours all see the other side of this. 

Ah, Mass Effect

As the quarantine goes on, I find myself playing more and more video games. For one, they're a natural time sink- nothing really makes the day go by like spending a breezy eight-to-ten hours plugging away in a digital world. For two, I've been playing video games since I was five-years-old, so they have a lot of emotional value to me, too. As a result, I find myself thinking on games I have a love/hate relationship with which, inevitably, gets me thinking of Mass Effect.

The Mass Effect series is a trilogy of games about you, Commander Shepard, as you jet around the galaxy trying to save it from the invasion of an ancient machine race called the Reapers. It's a space opera of the highest sort and, overall, I really love the series as a whole and how it evolved over the years.


Now, the first game, I wouldn't change at all. Your character has powers called biotics they can deploy to affect gravity and create mini-black holes, you can overload enemy shields, or shoot massive fireball shots from your shotgun just to name a few. The game has multiple character classes with their own specialties that you choose at the beginning of the game with each class getting 5-6 active powers you can use all with their own independent cooldowns- meaning, you can use as many as you want at the same time. On top of that, you have two companions with you for each mission and they have their own set of 5-6 powers with independent cooldowns. So, by the end of the game with everyone's powers fully leveled up, the combat in the game can very easily have you lifting enemies into the air, trapping them in the gravity of a mini-black hole, then throwing them against the walls of whatever building you're in or shooting them like floating fish in a barrel. Or, alternatively, you can overload their weapons so they can't shoot back as you walk up to them blasting them in the face with a shotgun.

In the last level of the game, you're forced to climb up the outside of this massive space station to get to the final boss fight, right? Part of the this climb involves you getting bull rushed by seven-foot tall robots or ridiculously tough mini-boss creatures called Krogan in tight, narrow walk ways where the only out is through. Since the game operates on Newtonian physics, if you lift them up into the air they'll just float up and up and up until they're off the readable part of the map and the game just declares them dead. It's a chaotic, horrifically unbalanced mess of a game. I love it and would change absolutely nothing.

For Mass Effect 2, Bioware decided to scale back the systems in the first installment to balance out the game play and put some sense into the combat. Mostly, I think this approach worked. Every class still has a wide variety of powers at their disposal, but you can only use one at a time. This brought a new edge of tactical thinking to the combat encounters as it became a matter of picking and choosing what powers to use in what combination at just the right time for maximum impact.

 It also cut down the laborious and repetitive inventory management in Mass Effect 1. While it was nice having a wide range of ammo-types to adapt to the enemy you were facing for maximum damage, in the first Mass Effect it would regularly get to a point where you had to open your inventory and just delete things for ten minutes at a time. In 2, Bioware made it so ammo-types were a power you could invest in just like any other and once you equipped it, that was that.

Mass Effect 2 also brought with it what is probably my favorite story of the trilogy. As far as the main quest goes, it's actually pretty short. You find who your enemies are, what they're trying to accomplish, where their base is and how to get to it over the course of five main missions not including the final assault. The meat of the game comes in the preparation, of upgrading your ship to top fighting condition and, more importantly, getting your team ready to go off on a suicide mission as you deal with all their unfinished business.

Luckily, save for one person, all the characters have rich backstories that are fascinating to dive into. One is among the last members of a wandering alien warrior class on a mission to kill her daughter. Another is an assassin suffering from a terminal illness trying to do one good thing before he passes. Two are genetically engineered to be the "perfect" example of their species who both struggle to understand what that means both in the context of their creation and how they can define themselves outside of the fact that they were literally molded to be the pinnacle of existence. Jumping around the galaxy, talking to all these people as your relationships go from stand-offish, slightly hostile, and impersonal to deeply felt bonds of people who will risk their lives for you and each other is fantastic and just thinking about it makes me want to give the game another spin.

Except, I won't. Because the parts of this game I hate, I deeply, truly, profoundly, hate. 

Partly, what drives me up a wall is how limited the options are in this game. There are five main weapon types in the game- pistol, SMG, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle- which, without DLC, have two options each. Some classes get a bonus weapon in one category, but, even then, having the choice of three weapons in just one category unless you shill out extra cash for more is just... limiting, shall we say. Also, the upgrade options suck. Well, they would suck, but they're largely nonexistent. The only things you get are increases in overall damage or bonuses to damage done to a specific type of protection like shields or armor, but those are universal. If you want to modify how accurate they are or how give a little bonus to their head-shot damage or literally anything customizable, well, there are plenty of other games you can do that in so you may as well play those instead.

But what gets me, what really, really gets under my skin and gets to my teeth to grinding, is how the game makes you replay it on higher difficulties. Part of the experience is that you level up as you play, and, if you load up to play through on a higher difficulty, you get the benefit of already having all those skill points once you get the characters so you can level them up to their most powerful states from the jump. Well, you'd think that's what would happen, buuuuut, no. See, when you start a new play through, only you and two other characters get the full amount of experience points to fully max out their abilities. Everyone else gets a reduced amount which forces you to pigeon-hole your companions into being really good at just one thing or sort of shitty at everything. 

Playing through the upper difficulties feels like you're doing so with a hand tied behind your back, which doesn't feel like I'm overcoming a unique challenge laid out by the game as much as I'm powering my way through unnecessary hamstringing.

What sucks even more is that the game renders almost all if its cast practically useless as the difficulty progresses. Out of twelve potential companions, on Insanity- the highest difficulty- you have a viable option range of three, maybe. Four, if you stretch the definition out a bit. And when you can only take one of those viable companions out on everyone else's loyalty quest, which renders a full third of your party as dead weight, it turns what should be compelling difficulty to conquer into an arbitrary chore to get through.

 It takes a game that should be about finding unique combinations and synergy among a wide cast of characters and just throws them all out the window for a boring, twenty-two hour grind. Every time I think about trying to do the play through on Insanity again just for completionists sake, the fact that it won't be any fun at all stops me dead cold and seething for a good twenty minutes.

Game-play wise, these problems were fixed for me in Mass Effect 3. The amount of guns, armor, and upgrades were greatly expanded to really make Shepard feel like your own creation. The issue with powers was removed- you couldn't fully upgrade everything on everyone, but you got enough to make your companions flexible and adaptable for any situation you came across. This also means that any combination of companions will work on any difficulty- you're no longer shackled to just using the same people over and over and over again. The way the various biotic and tech powers interact was also expanded, giving rise to some pretty devastating combos you could trigger to lay waste to everything in sight.

Where this game screws up is the narrative. A big selling factor of the Mass Effect series during its run was choice; you as the player made the all-important story decisions that shaped the world around you and determined how the story would ultimately resolve. Or at least that's what you were told, anyway. For this game, the decision was made that certain player decisions would be overridden to bring the game into the more uniform continuity of the expanded universe of the tie-in novels and comic books.

On its own, this isn't necessarily an awful thing. But it was a sign on things to come that would ultimately cause everyone to violently turn on the game once they got to the end.

Over the course of the series, you make some monumental decisions. In the first game, you determine whether a species called the Rachni will live on or you can wipe them out of existence, forever. Multiple people comment on this over the course of the series and what it, potentially, means for the galaxy as a whole. Also in the first game, you make the decision of who will represent the human race on the galaxy overseeing Council with the other three prime alien races. Pretty much everyone picks Admiral Anderson over the other option of Ambassador Udina because Udina is a slimy little shit you wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand.

A third major choice comes from the second game, were you decide whether or not you're going to blow up the secret base the Reapers have been using to construct another one of their own made out of the liquefied remains of the entire human race. If you blow it up, the head of the terrorist organization you've been working with all game gets very upset with you for ruining his plans of getting humans a leg-up when it comes to galactic domination.

As you probably guess, all these choices are undone or cancelled out in this game. Anderson retires for reasons, the Reapers jury-rig the Rachni back into existence so they can have living artillery weapons to shoot at you, and Cerberus has all the tech they needed, including parts of the baby Reaper that you blew up, at its base anyway. All your decisions meant nothing, aren't you proud?

What's especially galling is that none of these changes were really necessary. Anderson has a special interest in you, so it makes sense he would be on Earth to lend you his support after you pulled some truly heinous and necessary shit at the end of the second game. He could have easily appointed Udina to act as an acting Councilor until he returned but that gets thrown off due to the invasion and once he's on Earth, he can't leave it or the resistance movement behind so he stays. 

This lets him be in danger on Earth, which the plot wants, while also making Udina's second act coup against Cerberus all the more palatable because his power isn't really his. So it makes sense that he'd be vulnerable to an offer of overthrowing the other Councilors to take all the power for himself in what is surely a devil's bargain that will bite him in the ass if it ever worked. Instead, what we have is the game throwing off a player decision for no real reason and having a major plot point not make any sense because the guy already has everything he'd be supposedly getting.

The Rachni issue could also be avoided if the game wanted to. There's another species in the game called the Elcor who are basically these elephant looking things who speak in hilarious monotone voices. You're told by one of the members of this species that they go into battle with cannons strapped to their back which they use to lob artillery at whatever they're fighting. This essentially fills the same role as the Rachni and as the added bonus of giving a new enemy type out of a species you don't see much of in the series.

Even the Reaper tech of Cerberus can be explained by the Reapers reaching out and manipulating the organization for their own ends. Doing things this way reinforces the later theme of the game that what's happening is part of a cycle, that what's happening has happened countless times before to innumerable species, all part of a twisted ideology of the preservation of life in Reaper form. Cerberus is just the latest of many, many distractions the Reapers have perfected in the billions of years they've been doing so its easier to harvest the species they've come for. Instead, we get a massive plot hole that's never explained in game and only briefly touched on in a comic a majority of the players never read because, why would they?

These little insults made the ending- where you're initially forced into a binary choice of controlling or destroying the Reapers- feel even more like Bioware crafted this final chapter with no care or regard for what their players did in the lead up. Maybe they felt overwhelmed; the head writer of the first two games left Bioware before the third game started, so it's possible that given all the possible ways for the game to finish, the new writer and the staff looked to find the most uniform canon they could work from, deeming the changes to player decisions as unfortunate but necessary sacrifice in the name of fuller, more complete narrative closure. To me, it's an example of a company trying to play it safe only to have it backfire in every way they were trying to avoid. 

All that said, Mass Effect is still one of my favorite pieces of media, ever. When it's firing on all cylinders, it's a great action game in a huge space opera with the best bunch of misfits to keep you company. Does it get maddeningly, hair tearing out frustrating at times? Of course. Is it still worth all the trouble? For now, yeah. If there does come a time where I just don't want to put up with all the hassles of the game, it'll still have been nice to be in its world for so long.

The Truth in Crisis

The worst thing about watching the coronavirus pandemic unfold here in the U.S. is the knowledge that we, as a society, are in the absolute worst position to deal with it as we can be. We've set ourselves up to be completely unprepared to deal with a public health crisis specifically because we don't really believe in public systems to address societal problems. So I've had the feeling this whole time that no matter how bad the disease is on its own, because of who we are, it's going to so much worse. I hate it, I hate how unnecessary it is.

There are a lot of different factors involved here- some of them structural, some specific to leadership- but it ultimately comes down to the fact that we as as a society despise capable government. If there's something that needs doing, it's only worth doing if people can make money off it. If there's no profit in it, then we just pile on unnecessary cost and difficulties until some company somewhere can extract enough money from the public and call themselves successful.

Our healthcare system is a prime example of this. There's really no need at all to make  healthcare an industry with a profit motive. In fact, it makes it exponentially worse by cutting off access to those who need it but can't afford it. The crippling fear people have about going to doctor is a feature, not a bug, because, from a business stand point, it's better to make one big payout after people delay treatment then pay out lots of little piecemeal claims. It also, in the past, made it easier to deny claims when people needed treatment. It was a pretty good scam insurance companies had going- in order to get coverage, you had to divulge your entire medical history to them which they would later use against you to find any pretext to deny your claim so they could keep the money you paid them specifically so you would be covered in times of medical crisis.

Obamacare has made people forget that when it literally wasn't against the law to do so, it was standard practice for our entire insurance industry to leave thousands of people destitute, buried in debt, all for a bigger profit margin. 

Another feature of our fragmented system is that it makes any coherent national response to pandemics and other health crises so much harder than it needs to be. Since there are millions of people who are covered by different insurers, HMO's, and government programs, it makes coordinating national testing efforts a convoluted mess of bureaucratic coordination of who will pay what costs for how long e.g. setting aside funds to cover the testing but not treatment. 

There's also the problem of deciding who will administer the tests. Since we don't have a national health care system, the CDC can send out the tests but those are only administered by private institutions to people who self-select to get the test administered. We should have a massive testing effort like South Korea's where people just drive up to a testing station but we literally don't have the capability of doing so. 

This essentially cripples our ability to accurately judge the spread and scale of the pandemic. The most crucial aspect of any pandemic is the basic knowledge of knowing how many people are infected. It's a hard thing to do in and of itself, but having a healthcare system that people avoid by design makes that problem exponentially harder. 

It's the kind of problem any administration would have difficulty with; it's a nearly insurmountable challenge unless you go Spain's route and nationalize private hospitals- which we should, for the record- that requires a delicate, coordinated, and deftly executed plan of attack. 

Unfortunately, all we have are these yahoos who would drown in a wet paper bag. 

It's impossible to overstate how Donald Trump is the worst person in the world to handle this type of crisis. Disciplined, direct, and most importantly, honest communication is essential in times like these. People need to know what the government is going to do, how they're responding, and how they plan to handle the fallout.

But what we have instead is a man who whiffs the softest of softballs so he can complain again how the media is unfair to him. Trump disbanded the Pandemic Response Unit, refused to send doctors to China to get a head start on preparing or understanding how the virus operated, didn't prepare or stock up on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and denied the World Health Organization tests because he didn't want to scare the stock markets. His only concern this whole time is making sure the stock market and the economy don't crash and ruin his chance at reelection.

That's not to say the rest of the government has been doing any better. Senators using classified info for some good ol' insider trading, Republicans setting up a $500 billion slush fund to be doled out anonymously by Steve Mnuchin to whoever he sees fit, and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer balking at direct cash payments because it costs too much and isn't means tested. Biden flat out went MIA for almost an entire week and came back looking like a sad, confused grandpa who can't remember who he's talking to. The only one who looks like they have a clue as to what they're doing is Bernie, but why talk about him?

Not to say that any of this unexpected, of course. Republicans never waste an opportunity to funnel ever more billions into the hands of the already disgustingly rich. Liberals like Chuck and Nancy are pathologically afraid of handing out free money lest it end up in the hands of the undeserving poor. What did surprise me though, is how quickly the "let's go back to work and cull the herd" crowd popped up.

I figured we had to go into the tail end or very start of the second quarantine week before the "You know what? Maybe we just let people die" crowd reared its head. But nope. Instead we've got people from Trump to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick all talking about how they need to strike a balance between keeping people healthy and the economy going.

There's been a large contingent of people hammering them for this, thankfully, but one thing I keep seeing repeated is the charge that Trump et al. are willing to let 2% of the country die to save the economy for a few more months. This is based on early reporting that the coronavirus has a 2% mortality rate, so people are just running with that.

The thing is, mortality rates aren't inherent- they're the end result of a lot of different factors coming together. For one thing, a lot depends on how big you can make the denominator of total cases. South Korea, for example, has a mortality rate of .65%. A big reason for this is that the government did a huge testing blitz- as a result, they found and recorded thousands upon thousands of mild cases that didn't require hospitalization and were more effectively give treatment to those who needed it. So even though they have had 40 deaths as a result of the virus, taken against the 6,088 cases they've reported, you end up with a whisper of a mortality rate.

Another thing to take into consideration is the capacity of the healthcare system and the ability of that system to dedicate the resources it needs to deliver care. Italy, with its large elderly population, has been hit incredibly hard by the virus and is driving doctors to despondency over rationing care. A vulnerable population mixed with a government who took active steps just a little too late has led to a situation where people are dying by the hundreds every day. Things are looking up, however, in that it seems Italy has passed its peak with fewer new cases reported in the last few days.

We don't have any reason to expect that kind of news anytime soon, especially if Trump gets his way of getting people back out to work and regular public life in the next few weeks. We are no where near our peak, and, even though, as of this writing, there are 54, 808 (edit: in the three days this sat on my computer, it jumped to 100,392) officially reported cases, the paucity of our testing regime means we are missing tens of thousands more. If we go back out like there's nothing wrong in a world where we aren't ramping up production of PPE's, of not buying respirators and ventilators, of no social distancing, no quarantines, then by the middle/end of April we'll have people dying by the thousands, every day. In that world, we'll be praying to work our way down to a 2% mortality rate.

I know it sounds a little hyperbolic, but it breaks down like this. We only have so many hospital beds and hospitals, period. Over half of rural counties have no hospital at all, so where are they supposed to go? To larger, urban areas with already overfilled hospitals? The lack of PPE's means that the doctors, nurses, and EMT's who are going to the front line of this crisis will have no reliable protection against the virus so when they get sick, it lowers the capacity of professionals who are able to direct and administer care to the infected. The lack of respirators and ventilators will compound this problem as there are fewer and fewer mechanical resources for depleted medical staff to dole out to an ever increasing number of patients.

What makes this all the more horrifying is this situation doesn't add any new complications, it just amplifies the built-in flaws of our system to their logical conclusions.

 There are ways to mitigate what's happening and that we can dedicate our time to screaming the government make happen. First, just give everyone money; $2,000 for every adult and $1,000 for every child. Next, cancel/suspend all debt, rent, mortgage payments for everyone, period. Then, increase unemployment insurance so it provides 75%-90% of lost salaries. Increase SNAP benefits by at least 50% for anyone receiving them. Do all of this indefinitely.

There will be cries of "How do you pay for it?" and "But what if rich people get them too?" to which I say, who gives a shit. The U.S. is called a sovereign currency issuer, meaning that since the government has the sole authority to create money and does so on demand, the government doesn't actually have to "get" its money from taxes or other revenue streams. It literally can make money appear out of thin air. I know that idea makes people uncomfortable, so fine, you can tax the 1% a modest percentage after this whole thing is over so the government can "make" the money back.

Next, a federal shelter-in-place order for at least two weeks. All non-essential businesses are shut down, everyone stays home, start a curfew, anyone who breaks it is subject to legal penalty. Use the Defense Production Act to requisition and redirect manufacturing capabilities to increase the supply of PPE's, ventilators, and respirators around the country and supply around the globe. Also, nationalize every private hospital in the country and make treatment free at the point of care.

Release as many prisoners as possible to stop the spread of infection in prisons. Supply housing- in the form of empty hotel rooms or vacant housing- for every homeless person in the country. If any corporation requests a bailout, it must be under the terms that Elizabeth Warren outlined. If it's a company like a cruise line- which, why are we even talking about this?- they must additionally register their businesses so they sail under the U.S. flag to pay all appropriate taxes and comply with the labor laws of the U.S.

Sadly, the large majority of this won't happen. Congress is set to adjourn until at least April 20th after the massive corporate bail-out works its way through the House. It should tell you everything you need to know that, after giving away half a trillion dollars to the rich, our leaders consider their jobs done and are packing up to go home.

 If it should come to pass that Trump orders the country to go back to work in the next two weeks, then we need a general strike to grind everything to halt. Refusing to go to work and possibly triggering an economic collapse is tragically one of the few ways we have of saving millions of lives.

I'm sure a lot of this sounds too radical to do. But consider the alternative. The vision of Trump and the Republicans means you get sent out to work in a time of literal plague to protect the profit of someone else. And what do you get in return? Sick, most likely. At best, you get a mild case of a high fever and terrible cough that puts you out of commission for a few weeks. More likely though, is that your symptoms progress and get worse because you don't have access to treatment. And whatever mild symptoms you start out with balloon into something worse that even if you survive will leave you with chronic lung issues probably for the rest of your life.

While all this is happening to you, your job, your employer who is demanding you put yourself at risk of all this, will abandon you to die without a second thought.

Fuck that. Fuck living on the edge, fuck a system that will literally kill us by the millions to protect its profits for a few more months. It's a barbaric way to live and for anything good to even have chance of happening after all this is done, we have to admit that the way we live now is a failure and we have to do something different. It's literally a matter of survival and if we ignore it, we die. It's just that simple.

Things are going to get bad, no matter what. Our government is incapable/refusing to do everything in its power to stop the spread of the virus and to mitigate the damage its already doing. It basically comes down to how good your governor is, at this point. So please, stay home, stay inside, treat the situation like you're already infected and just aren't showing. We're pretty much all we've got to get through this, so, let's not fuck it up.