One of the things that has made endurance difficult through the pandemic is the lack of an endpoint. A great many yardsticks are available from many sources – cases by day or month, numbers of hospital beds available, hospitalizations, deaths – but not when things are likely to get better, when we can see our friends and family in person again, when children can return to school, when we can feel safer.
The measures we have go up and slightly down, then up again. They can be tied to the early call to “open things up” long before it was wise to, with no plans for stopping the spread. They can be tied to the politicization of measures, like mask-wearing, that might have helped to stop the spread. The general movement in numbers has been upwards, to our current state of almost 4000 deaths daily and a total of 400,000 dead, a medium-sized city of Americans gone forever.
In New Mexico, we’ve seen a bump up from the holidays, and the numbers seem to be going down again, but we don’t know whether that will last.
The lack of an endpoint results from the lack of a plan. So parents feel like they will be teaching their children at home forever. Senior citizens feel like they will be isolated in their homes or retirement communities forever. Young people feel like they will never be able to go to a restaurant again or have a party. It is not surprising that they take any excuse to break the rules, which feel arbitrary because there are so many voices.
But Joe Biden has plans for addressing covid-19 and for vaccinating people quickly. The plans contain markers that we will see being met (or not). One hundred million vaccinations within the first 100 days. Make vaccines more available in more places, like through mobile vaccination clinics. Hire people to trace contacts. Provide funds to schools to prepare for safe in-person learning.
If everything in these plans is carried out, we will begin to see an endpoint. Case numbers and deaths will decrease. We will be able to do some normal things, like go to the store, without feeling that we are endangering our lives. Children will go back to school.
The virus is so widespread now that nothing will happen quickly. We’ve watched the maps turn redder and redder with uncontrolled community spread. Time delays are built into decreases in numbers, just as they are for increases. Ron Klain, President-elect Biden’s chief of staff and manager of Barack Obama’s response to the Ebola virus, says that we will see a total of a half-million dead by the end of February.
The pandemic has momentum. But if we mask up for 100 days, if Congress grants a more appropriate level of support, the Biden plans will work. We can start to see a turnaround by the end of February, slow at first, then gathering speed. For now, that turnaround is my light in the tunnel. Once we get there, we will start to see the light that is the end of the pandemic.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Martin
LA has temporarily suspended air quality laws on the number of daily cremations.
I’m now having to trickle charge all of the car batteries due to lack of use. This should be a much more common problem.
rikyrah
?????
This should make you LOL
https://twitter.com/ambermruffin/status/1351172848237355015?s=20
rikyrah
Saw this on LarryO last night..
Think on this:
Nancy Smash will now be passing bills that aren’t automatically doomed to certain death on Moscow Mitch’s desk.
THAT IS LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL???
Central Planning
@rikyrah: We love The Amber Ruffin Show. Everyone should be watching it.
citizen dave (aka mad citizen)
FORTY EIGHT HOURS !!!
rikyrah
la caterina
@rikyrah: Love it! That song made me LOL.
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah: That is good. Fills me with joy too.
rikyrah
46 is wearing Ralph Lauren on Inauguration Day
https://twitter.com/chrislongview/status/1351208346498510853?s=20
Omnes Omnibus
@O. Felix Culpa: I have to admit that my feeling is more grim satisfaction, but I’ll take it.
Kelly
2020 was quite a year for disasters I sort of vaguely anticipated. I’ve read occasional articles about a novel plague sweeping the world for decades. Here it is and it did help to know isolation is the only immediate defense. Shocked at the resistance to the simple measures that could mitigate the disaster. Vaccines arrived much sooner than I expected.
Wildfires across the west have been more catastrophic in more places year over year. Still I was shocked when we had to flee. Still kinda shocked. Probably will be until the burnt homes, buildings and trees are cleaned up. It’s a comfort to have Democrats in charge soon. Worrisome how close it was.
laura
I’ll gladly wear a mask for 100, 200 – even 365 more days if it will get us closer to ending this illness. If someone could design a trucknuts mask, I expect the men concerned about manliness to wear on too.
Amber Ruffin is en fuego!
wvng
I would be feeling better about right now if it turned out there was NO vaccine stockpile, and all the states are scrambling to recalibrate their vaccination schedules. But in a couple of Days Biden’s team will be in place and we will start to get actual honest information that we can plan on.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: Po-tay-toh, Po-tah-toh.
Grim satisfaction has a nice ring too it too. :)
Raven
@wvng: What do you mean?
Martin
@rikyrah: Guessing that Trump only wears Hugo Boss knockoffs.
O. Felix Culpa
In response to the OP, it’s so refreshing to have an administration with a PLAN. Even if it isn’t 100% perfect in conception or execution, it’s a PLAN. It’s also refreshing to have a President and administration that actually, you know, give a damn.
We’ve been making travel plans, possibly for September. That’s my personal light at the end of the tunnel.
mrmoshpotato
@O. Felix Culpa:
The fuck is this? ?
O. Felix Culpa
@mrmoshpotato: Something far too high class and sophisticated for the likes of us.![]()
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@mrmoshpotato: ♫ Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, to-may-to, to-mah-to, let’s lock the whole gang up. ♫
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kelly:
Hate to say it, but devastating wildfires are going to be the new normal up and down the West Coast for the foreseeable future.
I live in the center of a midsize Oregon city, but I couldn’t see moving to the outskirts, the mountains, or any rural forested area due to the fire danger. Even camping seems much riskier than just a few years ago. It’s not the same Northwest that my dad grew up in…
CCL
In case no one else has posted it:
Countdown clock
mrmoshpotato
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: LOL
Sounds good to me!
Also
sdhays
@mrmoshpotato: Ok, that’s a good one!
Kelly
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Yes more fires are coming. Even here inside the borders of the Beachie Fire there is plenty left to burn. My Dad ran heavy equipment. Every summer in the 60’s and 70’s he’d push dozer line on a fire or two. A big fire was 50,000 acres. Two 50,000 acre fires at a time was a catastrophe. Fire season is twice as long as it was then and the fuels are much drier.
stinger
Cheryl, I’m glad you cross-post this to two sites. It has a message that should be widely distributed. The lack of hope and absence of endpoint does lead to people to say, The hell with it, and engage in risky behaviors.
debbie
@rikyrah:
LOL indeed. Zero shame here!
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: I junked my old car–the battery died, but when I got the battery replaced I realized that sitting idle had done much more damage to it than that, and it had been on its last legs anyway.
Now I need to get a new one, which is a process I’m not looking forward to under the circumstances–but I’ve got all sorts of medical stuff coming up too, including knee surgery; I might wait until after that. My office isn’t going to require me to come in regularly any time soon, and given how successful we’ve been at working remotely, “I don’t have a car yet and my knee is still healing too” is probably an adequate excuse.
Martin
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Yep. We have red flag warnings here in CA in Jan. That’s new. It was 93 on Friday here by the coast. Broke the old record by 8 degrees. That’s also new.
wvng
@Raven: sorry, typo. should have said “when it turned out there was no vaccine stockpile” – which we learned a day after the Trump team said they were releasing all the stockpile and the states geared up for more vaccinations in response and then had to gear down.
FlyingToaster
I woke up this supposed holiday morning to the principal’s e-mail, informing me that 7th grade is going remote because one of their in-person teachers was exposed late last week. The timing of exposure makes it unlikely that the instructor was contagious on Thursday (their most recent class); she tested negative Saturday but her spawn tested positive (from a Wednesday exposure at that kid’s school).
I checked, and indeed, Thursday 9am class was with the windows open and parkas on (along with masks and distancing), with work being done collaboratively on Chromebooks. School has had, to date, no in-school transmission of cases. The middle school is live 8:30-12:30, and in-school or at-home remote in the afternoon (MS instructors leave at 12:30; afterschool instructors monitor the 6 pods while the students zoom in to classes).
For fucks sake. This is the second time a grade has been sent remote because of a live instructor’s exposure, and I fear that we’re going to look more like last year, where we were remote from March 17-June 12.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: I figure I probably need to trickle charge them once a month. They do get used a bit, but the brief outings aren’t enough to keep the battery charged, and lead acid batteries get damaged when they’re discharged as you note.
I’ve replaced my car with an ebike which has been great, but then I don’t need knee surgery.
MisterForkbeard
@rikyrah: First time I’ve seen it and it’s hilarious. Will send it on to a few more people.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Over at KOS someone has a fascinating post showing the parallels between Q-anon and Christian Millianism. Basically Q-anon is Left Behind without any of that Loving Savior to get in the way of vicious revenge fantasy. Trump as the Messiah, lovely. I suppose the golden throne fits.
So this guy predicts that most of the Q-anoners will bail on even politics.A hard core will remain and splinter into various factions as they explain Trump failure to POWN all Libertards and become more mainstream over time as a persistent theme in conservative politics. The specific example the write cits in the how the Millerits eventually because the 7th Day Adventist.
Cheryl Rofer
@stinger: Thanks for reading the post!
aliasofwestgate
What hasn’t helped here in WI is the SC of the state invalidating the stay at home order the Governor made. We were very close to a controlled opening and then that threw everything open again (quite a few businesses waited, but many opened without safeguards) and basically eliminated any gains we’d made statewide.
The national aspect will help work against that, but unfortunately, it’s having to be piecemeal measures by various cities on restrictions on capacity and whatnot stifle the spread as much as possible. The vaccine’s been the best part, and once the organization at the top gets going i think we’ll get a helluva lot more than 100 million vaccinations in 100 days. Much higher. Organization and actual leadership make a HUGE difference in how things are distro’d. My time as a pharm tech during the Swine flu in 09 showed that in full, with somewhat decent leadership. i caught it myself, but also–pharm tech. It was a given we’d all run across it and i have health issues that made me pretty susceptible to it.
Once we have enough doses to pass to pharmacies and local mass vaxx clinics? It will grow exponentially. Something that Biden’s plan addresses immediately. So yeah. The light at the end of the tunnel here is such a good feeling. I’m no longer a pharm tech, but i know enough of how things work that once the hiccups of the transition and streamlining and actual leadership is done (a month max, i think), that we’ll gain momentum. I still figure on masking up at least until fall or longer. But it’s within our grasp and that’s the most important thing.
brendancalling
All I want is a vaccine and to be able to see my kid again. I’ve likely mentioned this before: I have a dual citizen kid in Canada, but even with the family exception there’s no way to get across—I don’t have the means to afford a 14-day quarantine, and despite getting along very well w/his mom and stepdad, I can’t just move in with them for two weeks. They’d have to quarantine too, which is a nonstarter.
March 8 will be a year since we have seen each other in person, and my dude is posting on Instagram that the only thing keeping him sane is long walks. Meanwhile, I moved up to Burlington VT to be closer to him—and it is immensely frustrating to be so close (90 minutes!) and yet so far.
That light can’t come soon enough. You can imagine how little mercy I have for the people that got us here—both leaders and their dupes—and how much I want to exact retribution.
if I knew them what I know now, I would have abandoned my car at the pick up point, and repatriated in Montreal.
Martin
Here is a delightful little browser game about 2020.
Run and jump your way through the year.
KenK
@Matt McIrvin: @28 Wow, when you lack wheels, you really lack wheels. Good luck with surgery (and other stuff, too).
Phylllis
Same here–our 7th & 8th grade are virtual through next week due to the number of teachers exposed. And now that the vaccine rollout is now looking like March or April for teachers, things are only going to get worse.
Felanius Kootea
@rikyrah: ??? Someone said it’s the new schadenfreude anthem.
MomSense
I think we have a long, dark tunnel ahead of us before we can see the light.
Jeffro
It is my very fervent hope that Biden & Co will give updates a couple times a week on how the vaccine rollout is going, how cases/hospitalizations/deaths are going, all prefaced and concluded with some Biden-isms about what a holy rolling clusterfuck the trumpov maladministration’s Covid-19 (non)response was.
“Sweet lordy Jane, these numbnuts were doing next to nothing while we were losing 3,000 Americans a day to this thing! Jiminy that just chafes my chaps!”
They should also put someone in charge of reminding the American public on a daily basis just how many rounds of golf trumpov had racked up by the same time, ie: “Good morning. Today is Day 73 of the Biden/Harris administration. By Day 73 of the trumpov administration, Donald trumpov had played 25 rounds of golf (23 at his own resorts) at a cost to taxpayers of $40.3M. Thank you.”
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yeah, that sounds about right.
This is the extinction burst of white christian supremacy. That doesn’t mean it won’t continue – it will – but it won’t intersect with national politics in any meaningful way. There’s no winning coalition here. It’ll probably hold in the confederacy for some time, but it’ll start a steady decline everywhere else.
That’s what CAs Prop 187 (The Save our State initiative, if the motive here wasn’t clear enough) moment was. It was the last effort of the white GOP to preserve their political control. It took a while for them to really lose power. Prop 187 was in ’94, and it wasn’t until 2010 that they were truly dead and buried, but it was pretty much all downhill during that time. It’s also why in 2016, CA went from a sorta blue state to a really blue state. We’d already gone through our ‘MAGA moment’ 2 decades earlier.
In time they’ll accept that there is no political path for the movement. The GOP will be forced to choose a policy and rhetorical path that is appealing to non-whites and non-christians. Don’t expect much, they’ll only open the tent door as wide as is necessary to get power, but if they’re like the CA GOP, they’ll do as little as possible and consistently fall short.
The downside is they’ll look for other ways to get what they want. They won’t give up, but they’ll give up on the national political route at least. I would expect something like the batshit ideas they had about taking over New Hampshire and turning it into some kind of libertarian paradise (with bears!). Expect them rally to turn Florida into a QAnon white supremacy paradise.
debbie
@MomSense:
We know now that the tunnel will end.
GrueBleen
@aliasofwestgate: Sad to see that American states can’t achieve what the state of Victoria in Australia did. Currently running at zero local infection cases (though a few have snuck in from overseas), zero new hospitalisations and zero deaths.
Current population of Victoria: 6.5 million (about 5 million in the capital city Melbourne) and we haven’t even started to seriously think about vaccination yet.
cain
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
I hope THIS TIME – the GOP will allow the damn fire management bill to pass. Given how badly it devastated rural Oregon – entire towns lost – and never mind that we’ll probably see flooding as well this season – we some already if I recall.
CaseyL
Just knowing the people in charge will be competent, honest, and have a concept of public service will be a wonderful change.
I have been wondering what Biden’s first SOTU will be like. I hope it’s truthful, however depressing that will be (“It saddens me to say that one-third of the people in Congress are active accomplices in a coup to destroy our democracy”), with a dusting of optimism (“But with the help of the American people, and a reinvigorated Department of Justice, the thugs who attacked Capitol Hill – including all of those who did so from within Capitol Hill – will face the consequences of their actions”).
None of this “The State of the Union is strong” nonsense, when that is obviously not the case.
Ken
@Martin: Robin Vencel has had some 2020/covid themed games at monkeyhappy.com. His latest is what it would take to make 2021 worse.
Brachiator
This was exacerbated by Trump’s lack of interest in the pandemic despite the development of a vaccine, and of course his side quest into his own delusions about the election.
I expect things to get better with Biden. The wild card will be the impact of continued stupidity and defiance.
As an aside, I wonder if travel during the upcoming New Year will have an impact on the pandemic in Asian countries.
Conversely, a BBC News report says that 4 million people in the UK have received the vaccine. We might soon be able to track the impact of the vaccine based on what is happening elsewhere.
Ken
Make it part of the backdrop in the WH press room, to make it harder for Fox to edit it out.
Yutsano
@Martin:
The GOP cannot do this and remain the GOP. The party elected to embrace racism and white grievance way back when Nixon started the Southern strategy. It hit a peak when Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The focus on white supremacy got somewhat diminished under Dubya (because of brown family members) but the party found both its culmination and the start of its demise in Drumpf. The pieces start to fall apart after a mass repudiation in the House (I still have no idea what happened in the Senate) then the Biden victory is seeing the beginning of the end. After January 6th the GOP either has to do what you say and morph into a multicultural party or they will go all in on supporting white supremacy. Both is not an option and papering over the racism won’t be tolerated by the white race panic folks. Only one of these concepts is the actual GOP. If what you say actually does happen, it has to leave that shell behind*.
*’I’m ignoring the tax cuts and promotion of oligarchy at the moment for the sake of simplicity.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jeffro:
I actually don’t want Biden or members of his administration doing much of that. Plenty of journalists can do regular comparisons with the Trumpers — the ones who kept us regularly updated on what percentage of his presidency Trump had spent golfing, or how many documented lies he told in a year, or how many of his cabinet had to resign in disgrace.
If Biden does it, no matter how accurate and justified, it will start to sound like whining and excuse-making. All Biden and his team need to do is a good, competent, well-explained job. The contrast with Trump will speak for itself.
ETA: I do agree with regular updates, just not the forced comparisons.
geg6
@rikyrah:
Because he’s such a good person and a great American designer who dresses all kinds of women, I hope either FLOTUS or MVP pick a Christian Siriano.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
skimming over the names you can see both the in-the-weeds ideology of the people around trump (Whitaker Chambers) and trump’s own chain-restaurant kiddie-placemat understanding of US history (Johnny Appleseed, 50 quatloos says one of Large Adult Children lobbied for Molly Pitcher or Johnny Tremaine)
dmsilev
Here in LA County, the heart of the storm right now, there are some glimmers of hope. Case counts are all over the map because of variations in test rates etc., but hospitalizations have been decreasing steadily for the last week or two; down maybe 8% from the peak. Still hugely high, but going in the right direction. Meanwhile, vaccination rates are going up; the county expects to open several major sites tomorrow (n addition to Dodger Stadium, which started on Friday), aiming to jab 30 or 40 thousand people a day.
Fingers crossed, a month or so from now we’ll be in a much better situation.
Yutsano
@geg6: I have this weird hope she calls Michelle Obama and gets a list of designers from her. But another part of me wants to have her find something much more classic her. But I think you and I agree the dress should be bare-armed. Dr. Biden just NAILS that look.
Brachiator
@Martin:
White supremacy is as American as apple pie. It has always been part of the national character. Fortunately, resistance to white supremacy has also always been part of America. But it is premature to predict its demise.
Yep. The California example is instructive. On the state level, the GOP largely became irrelevant. But anger and anti-immigrant bigotry simmered and conservative Californians jumped onto the Trump train very early. They finally got someone who spoke openly about their own resentments.
There are still states which are firmly under GOP control. This also gives some states a conservative edge when it comes to congressional representation, unless we get much more neutral drawing of congressional districts.
Trump has shown one path to the resurgence of bigotry. The national GOP might become like the CA state GOP, stupidly and stubbornly committed to a lost cause.
mali muso
@geg6: I’m so old, I remember watching Project Runway the season in which he competed. Nice to see him continue on with such professional success!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev: There was a pretty sharp drop off in testing early this month, I’m not sure why. There was a pretty good leap in the positive rate which seems to be falling(it was over 21%!). Deaths seem to be leveling off, though at horrible high rate(around 250/day). I’d expect the positivity rate to continue to fall and deaths to fall quite a bit in the next several weeks. Most of this is due to family gatherings for the holidays.
Yutsano
Melania is trash.
That’s it. That’s the post.
burnspbesq
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Silver lining: insurance companies are going to stop suburban sprawl dead in its tracks in places like east San Diego County.
Ken
First step is to use eminent domain to obtain some site. Let’s see, it’s an outdoor sculpture garden, so you’d want someplace where the weather’s pretty nice year-round, near a large city so visitors can fly in, ideally avoid seizing any residential property (or at least any place that’s legally a full-time residence)…. I have a thought.
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: I’m wondering if being on the east side of the Cascades means less fuel loads, though there was plenty of fire smoke around here last year from what I read; this year we’ll get to live through it. The area we left in CO was in severe drought all last summer and this winter hasn’t changed that much, at least so far. I think the entire state of CO is back into severe drought with the areas that never quite got back to normal now at “extreme”. I love mountains and pine trees, and I admit I look at pine trees a little bit differently now. We specifically avoided looking at any homes out in the thick woods; the center of town is a much more comfortable place to be. I’m unfortunately of the “what is the worst case scenario” mindset, which makes being alive in 2021 a bit of a mental health challenge sometimes.
Ken
Unless the federal government establishes an insurance program for properties that insurance companies won’t touch, as is the case for Florida flood and hurricane insurance.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ken: I added a link to the actual EO that got et, but the short version: Another one of his patented “I Hereby Do DECLARE under my TOTAL AND COMPLEET AUTHORITY under the CONSTUTION that somebody oughta do this thing that my adderall-addled brain that stopped developing in the eighth grade thought sounded cool when I bellowed it at a bunch of mouth-breathers somebody tell KEllyanne to bring me another diet coke and send Meadows out for a big bag of McDonald’s what oh yeah American HEROES and make AMERRICA GRATE AGAIN and make sure there are two FILET OF FISH cause I’m dieting….”
geg6
@mali muso:
Yes! I cheered for him to win that season and am just thrilled to see him do so well. And he really does design for every kind of woman. And does good on the side. He’s a mensch.
Kelly
The big storm last week changed our view rather dramatically. Some fir trees that were overhanging the 50 foot high steep dirt riverbank are now at the edge of the river. All the vegetation on the bank burnt in the Beachie Fire. The big fir is about 2 feet in diameter. The root wad down by the river is about 12 feet high.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/en84FaV5964SqZf77
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: Wow. Reminds me of the devastation all along the creeks outside of Boulder, CO after the huge week long monsoon event in fall of 2013; big trees in the creeks and rivers, roads taken out by flooding exacerbated by large floating battering rams, etc. Some places it was estimated to be 500 to 1,000 year hydrographs though once you get up to that frequency it gets very general; more like “oh shit, this is bad beyond historically bad”.
If there’s a good spring runoff, there’s big risks of localized severe erosion from the downed trees impeding flow. How far is that bank from your home?
Yutsano
Kamala has officially resigned.
It’s starting to feel real for me now…
dmsilev
@?BillinGlendaleCA: At a guess, closing the test center at Dodger Stadium so it could be converted into a vaccine center? Seems like the right decision though; ramping up vaccinations is the most urgent thing right now.
Kelly
@StringOnAStick: East side of the Cascades are pine forests fuel loads can be managed with thinning and controlled burns. It’s dry enough that the underbrush doesn’t return very quickly. Western slopes of the Cascades and the Coast range are wet enough that flammable underbrush returns quickly. I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done about fuel loads on the west side.
Suzanne
Honestly, the fact that “reopening” or really any specific action is not tied to any factual evidence or numerical threshold is the largest failure of this pandemic. I said when this all first started that Americans just wouldn’t comply. I was mostly correct. Leadership didn’t give anyone any idea of what to expect and for how long. Instead, everything is piecemeal and patchwork and just shitty. Closing down restaurants should happen at XXX number of cases per capita, and then be undone at YYY cases per capita, for example.
Honestly, much of why compliance has been a shitshow has been because people feel like it is FOREVER. That isn’t sustainable.
I also still think we should have subsidized young people because they were needed to reduce their risky, spreading behavior but are at relatively low risk themselves.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@SiubhanDuinne:
Not just regular updates. Trump taught me one thing. Presidents and Congress need a real marketing department. The Trump people were constantly marketing their ‘accomplishments’ to their followers. The sales pitch never stopped. It doesn’t matter that it was complete BS. People believed it and repeated it and that was one basis for his support.
burnspbesq
@Brachiator:
Texas is a fucking mess. Dems completely misread Cruz’ 2018 close call against Beto. There are no plausible candidates for any statewide office.
The divide between urban and rural is stark: the 20 most populous counties went 60 percent for Biden, but the remaining 234 counties went >70 percent for Trump. Counties like Fort Bend (suburban Houston), Collin (north suburban Dallas), and Williamson (north suburban Austin) are slowly—glacially—moving toward purple, but it will take at least two more election cycles. Meanwhile the Republicans have complete control over Congressional redistributing, so expect even more (and more outrageous) gerrymandering.
And the average Texan’s biggest concern: can Sarkisian recruit California.
Kelly
@StringOnAStick: The edge is about 50 feet from our home. I’m not worried. If the slope fails another 10 feet closer it should reduce the slope to a stable angle of repose. The trees were leaning 20+ feet out over the bank, reaching for the sun. That’s a lot of mass and leverage.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev: I think the drop off occurred before the closure of the Stadium as a testing site, a bit of a puzzle.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve been seeing tweets this morning that trump will pardon about 100 peolpe tomorrow. Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post just up that to “100-200 people” on MSNBC. Maybe he’s hoping the word “trump” won’t stand out
Fair Economist
My concern is that between the mutated strains, their higher infectivity, and vaccine refusals, this vaccine will not be enough. Things will be somewhat better, but not normal. People who want to be reasonably safe will need a second vaccine against the new strains first, and possibly even multiple vaccinations per year because Sars2 is evolving far faster than the human coronaviruses do.
In the silver lining department repeated variants of this thing will hopefully kick the legs out of the antivax movement.
jackmac
@SiubhanDuinne: Republicans are going to do everything they can do bury Trump in some kind of memory hole. In the meantime they’ll whine about how the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic recovery and other efforts to restore competence impacts the deficit all while failing to wear masks or practice social distancing and other safety practices. Republicans will continue to have an undeserved media soapbox (Washington is still wired for the GOP) so the Biden Administration and Democrats will have to frequently and loudly remind the public just how bad things were.
prostratedragon
@rikyrah: Lit-er-al-ly!
WaterGirl
@brendancalling: That’s so hard. And so frustrating. So sorry.
Matt McIrvin
@KenK: Thanks. We had two cars, and the reason mine died was that during the pandemic shutdown we’ve only been using the healthier of the two on the occasions when we do need to drive somewhere, so it’s not that much of a mobility crisis–at the moment, we have no great need for more than one car. But that likely won’t be true forever.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Trump needs to cover all of his aliases.
burnspbesq
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Reading the nutrition information on fast food chains’ websites can be an eye-opener. I would never have guessed that the fish sandwiches are the highest-sodium items on the menu, or that BK’s onion rings are way worse for you than their fries.
BK Big Fish and onion rings used to be my second favorite fast-food meal (after Del Taco’s steak and egg burrito). Now I can feel my blood pressure going up if I even think about it.
Fair Economist
@burnspbesq: The 2020 political situation was not nearly as good as we expected but Trump’s coup attempt has exposed the traitorous core of the Republican party so we do have a chance for further gains in 2022 if we can keep the American population focused on how evil Trump was.
100 pardons could be a tool. Every week to the 2022 elections focus on a different Trump pardon. You know they are all heinous.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: A truthful accounting would require blaming a large portion of the American people themselves, and that, Biden cannot do.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: Most of the experts on this seem to think that the existing vaccines will be adequate against the new strains that have emerged. That may not be true forever, of course.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Fair Economist: You’ll see the vaccination rate climb once they are under regular FDA authorization, employers will mandate vaccination as a condition of employment.
Martin
@Yutsano: They have no choice. Literally no choice – which is why they are acting out so violently. Demographically white christians will be 40% of the population by 2024. They are hemorrhaging numbers, between olds dying out, young whites not embracing Christianity and latinos in particular simply out-populating them. Maybe if they had opposed immigration under Reagan they could have headed this off, but it’s way too fucking late now. (See my Prop 187 reference above).
And they’ve backed themselves into a corner where white christian supremacy was the path to victory by intensifying the base, and getting turnout up, while adding some disenfranchisement, but thanks to an insurrection attempt the Dems won’t blow off elections for some time, thereby negating their intensity increase (consider the argument regarding how many voters turned out for Trump in 2020 – intensity was up, but Dem intensity was up more, and they hadn’t factored for that.)
They have three options – appeal to non-whites, non-Christians and expand the tent which cannot happen under a white christian policy motive; ramp up voter suppression to unprecedented levels (impossible under the current circumstances with Dems holding the WH and Congress); or become a regional party.
This is why it’s going to be so hard for them. If they do what the CA GOP did, they’ll wind up a regional party.
Mind you, the Dems struggled with this as well back then. Civil rights meant that white christians couldn’t hold dominance in two political parties, so they consolidated under one. Dems grabbed black voters, because they needed voters and black voters had nowhere else to go. Dems held unions because they still needed a fair number of white voters. Latinos were largely ignored by both parties. The Dem coalition was a fucking shitshow until Obama, and I think it took Trump to really solidify it.
They’re in a hell of a bind. They let the white supremacists take over, and their only real path out is for the mere racists in the GOP to lead the way, and I’m not sure that’s going to happen.
Brachiator
@Ken:
RE:
@burnspbesq: insurance companies are going to stop suburban sprawl dead in its tracks in places like east San Diego County.
I think that California has a state agency that provides earthquake insurance that supplements the private market. Maybe something similar can be done with respect to brush fire insurance.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Actually the point of the article is QAnon will result in two to three splinter movements. It’s safe to say not all Christian Millianalists are white supremacist for example and there will be those who reject Trump as the White Jesus and those who cling to him (even after Trump dies). But, Florida as the hub all things QAnon will complete Florida’s transformation into the Fruit Loop hub of the Americas.
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: Yes, lots of mass and leverage. I’m glad it’s not close to your home.
I did some hydrogeology work in my prior career on the geomorphology of high mountain streams in the CO high country; temporary features like beaver dams and fallen logs had a lot of effect on stream shape and sediment loads. The largest existing boulders controlling stream position and shape were left over from the much higher flow regimes of the glacial periods; the other side of the legal fight were claiming these VW bug sized boulders were positioned and mobilized by the current flows; uh, no.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Worth noting that QAnon was an attempt to do that, by replacing Jesus with Trump it made Millianism more acceptable to secularists. Mostly an appeal to people who were raised as Christians and rejected it.
geg6
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
But, Florida as the hub all things QAnon will solidify Florida’s place as the Fruit Loop hub of the Americas.
There. That’s better.
Miss Bianca
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: If they nominate Johnny Tremaine, that would mean they would have actually read Johnny Tremaine at some point. That’s more evidence of literacy than I’ve noticed among that crowd.
LuciaMia
@Yutsano: Just no hats. I’m still haunted by Hillary’s pillbox hat at Clinton’s first.
Kelly
@StringOnAStick: Landslides are the most common feature of this drainage. Something like 40% on the land area has slid over the last 20k to 30k years. Intermittent volcanism has led to sedimentary layers interspersed with weak welded volcanic ash and strong layers of basalt. Silver Falls State Park is a beautiful hike that displays all that. It’s all exposed throughout the Columbia river gorge as well. I used to puzzle over gigantic basalt boulders in the middle of small streams with no nearby formations. Finally found out they arrived in massive landslides and remained after the streams carried the small stuff away.
Citizen Alan
@Martin:
I’m not so sure about that. A single state is different from a nation, especially with an electoral college that is so tilted in favor of the red states. And California still only has the same number of Senators as Wyoming, after all.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: The 2020 election results suggest that the way forward for them is to keep doubling down, but also endeavor to turn various minority groups against one another, or against other imagined menaces, so they can carve some of them off anyway. Some fraction of them will say “I don’t like the Proud Boys but I *really* hate those undocumented Hondurans,” or “…but Communism is worse,” etc.
Yutsano
@Martin:
Tears, I shed not. Why should I care that they got themselves into a complete mishegas? This is their Gordian knot*. Let them untie it.
*I always considered the concept of “cultural appropriation” curious for a country that basically had to make up its culture as we went along. Maybe it’s just me.
Martin
@Brachiator: I don’t undersell the power of white supremacy. But there’s some reality coming to play. Civil rights corresponded with white Chrisitans falling under 80% of the population for the first time in 350 years. They fell under 50% during Obama’s term. They’ll fall under 40% in 2024.
I’m not predicting that white supremacy will go away. But you can’t build a winning coalition around white supremacy, mainly because it, by definition, precludes doing so. As soon as you invite Latino Christians (with all of the policies that would be necessary to convince them to overlook the fact you were just demanding they be deported), you lose both a decent amount of your coalition that are true believers, and you lose the intensity of the more marginal ones that stick with you.
The GOP plan was always to ride that line between marginalizing people and having deniability that they wanted them to be marginalized, because they might need them as voters in the future. Despite their protestations, they learned a lesson when they pissed off black voters so badly that it’s virtually impossible to win them back. (Lee Atwater alludes to this). But Trump threw that out the window after decades of maintenance, and even if you put Mitt Romney at the philosophical head of the party, it’s going to take them a long ass time to prove to us that they aren’t going to go all Stormfront on us again.
White supremacy *as a national political coalition* is dead. They failed. Pretty spectacularly in the end, and did massive damage to the GOP in the process. Not that I’m shedding a single tear. I honestly don’t know how they rebuild. White supremacy will live on for some time as a regional power and a terrorist group.
But Dems should lean even harder into intersectionality – take away the more obvious places for the GOP to go. And Biden and Congress should enshrine that in law. Nuke the filibuster and go all-in on legislation that chokes off the GOPs ability to build a coalition focused on minority rule.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If you had asked me ten minutes ago, I would have predicted I would go to my grave without ever approvingly citing Rush Limbaugh, but I think this is probably one of the most honest appraisals of trump I have ever heard from an ally. If you don’t want to get out of the boat: The Ogre thinks The Beast is too lazy and undisciplined to do a regular show.
I would still bet half my quatloos that some kind of media-platform cash mill is in the offing, he won’t have a regular schedule, but it will be understood that regular programming is preempted whenever the Big
GuyOaf has some spleen to vent. HE’s going to be desperately seeking places to get attention, he might as well turn a buck while he’s doing it.And I found that nugget following this one: The Murdoch family– I’m guessing this is Lachlan, who’s said to be even nuttier and more hateful than the old man– is doubling down
Brachiator
@Martin:
Of course, we have some conservatives openly advocating white minority rule, no matter what happens with voting. The rationale is that this is necessary in order to preserve “American” values and culture. I expect this mischief to intensify.
Also, Christianity is less an issue, I think, than you make of it. It does, of course, motivate evangelicals, but I don’t think it is much of a unifying factor for most conservatives, except as a general aspect of American cultural identity.
Voter suppression will continue. Hell, Trump managed to push voter suppression of Democratic voters out of media discussion by shouting his own ridiculous claims.
And the Supreme Court may become the forceful ally of voter disenfranchisement.
“Whiteness” has always been more cultural than real. I had a conversation with a friend recently where I noted that a lot of Hispanic people see themselves as white, especially in their home countries, and do not accept being lumped together into the grab bag of “people of color.” And, as I have even noted in posts here, some Hispanic people see themselves as better than gringos, and often with good reason.
I can easily see more Hispanics, along with some Asian communities, becoming “culturally” white. And there are a lot of these people who are religiously conservative, and more likely to agree with some conservative economic principles.
These people may be the last best hope for the continued existence of the Republican Party.
ETA: You also see a number of people of Asian and African descent becoming power players in the UK Conservative Party, despite appeals to nativism. Rishi Sunak is a plausible future prime minister. And Conservative government minister Priti Patel does not see a problem in the fact that the immigration policies she champions might have excluded her own parents from entering the UK.
It is also interesting that some of the insistence that Hispanics are not “white” comes from white liberals. Go figure.
Martin
@Brachiator: We do.
At some point though the government will have to come to terms with the idea that it’s going to be cheaper to build mass transit and desirable livable cities than continue to subsidize suburban sprawl.
The sprawl only happens because we’ve fucked up the broad contours of our economy so badly that the only way to get ahead is to be a kulak. Rent seek or die trying.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin: He doesn’t have to blame the American people, at least not directly.
He could say, with perfect truth, that GOP politicians betrayed their own constituents by aiding and abetting the conspiracy theories that are the stated reason for the insurrection attempt.
In fact, he could make a special point of highlighting how GOP politician use inflammatory BS like conspiracy theories to divert attention from their utter lack of policies which would actually benefit their constituents.
Mike in NC
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: This ‘Garden of Heroes’ bullshit needs to be shot down quickly. Fat Bastard would have included himself and Steve Bannon.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: Actually 2020 proves that won’t work. They had to resort to insurrection levels of voter suppression to even remotely approach a win. They turned out in record numbers and still lost by 8 million votes to a geriatric white catholic with a black female VP from (spits) California.
It’s dead. They threw everything they had at it and failed miserably. They’re turning on each other now. It’ll be much harder in 2024.
Yutsano
@Mike in NC: It’s an executive order. It will be dead by this time tomorrow if not a bit later.
Suzanne
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I have been saying this FOREVER. So thank you. I feel vindicated.
Trump has no intellect but he has the intuitive skills of a salesman. We all should have been more scared of it.
Mr. Suzanne and I had a great discussion about visual culture of the Trump era, and I wish more of our politicians and their campaigns looked at things through that lens. We would win a lot more than we do.
Jeffro
@SiubhanDuinne: I think it’s something the country needs to be reminded of as regularly as possible. We have the collective attention span of a goldfish.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator:
That’s been happening to some extent, I’ve seen it in the Korean community, but that problem is the GOP is becoming a less hospitable place for them. George W. Bush and the “autopsy” after the 2012 election tried to make the GOP a good home for conservative POC, but that went nowhere.
Martin
@Brachiator: White supremacy and christian identity go hand in glove. If the GOP backed off on abortion, or muslim panic, or demonizing gays, they’d lose evangelicals in the same way. Look at how hard they fought to put Barrett on the court. Abolishing gay marriage is still on the party platform. Just look at the sheer volume of antisemitism that has come out of the GOP in the last 4 years and how important it was for Trump to keep the evangelical vote.
I mean, Lafayette Square was peak signaling to the base – ‘I’m willing to gas and beat black people for the opportunity to hold up a Bible’. He was signaling clear as day who he was fighting for and who he was willing to fight against. That is the GOP now.
Benw
@Suzanne: interesting article on how Trumpy visuals built heavily on classic fascism:
https://jezebel.com/the-triumph-of-fascist-aesthetics-1846041279
cope
Thanks for this post, it articulates exactly how I was feeling, how I am feeling and how I hope to be feeling soon. Just a couple of months ago, the lack of any kind of reference point to help figure out when things might return was totally disorienting. Now, my wife and I have had the first vaccination, less than two weeks to the final one and maybe some ability to get our lives back. I’m guessing they will never be the same but they will be better than they have been. Also too, daylight is lengthening, the inauguration is nigh and finally, some bad things are being meted upon some bad people.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yutsano: Now we just have DiFi.
Brachiator
@Martin:
I am not sure what this is a reaction to. I didn’t note anything in this thread about mass transit. I don’t think.
However, I think the desirability of mass transit, in terms of trains and buses, is a regional issue. And even here, the possibility that the Covid virus may persist could have a serious impact on transit proposals.
Also, in Southern California, a lot of mass transit proposals have become outdated or never seriously addressed anything remotely real. And some of the more interesting solutions have come from, yeah, I have to say it, Uber, Lyft and other alternative transportation alternatives. Even Metro is experimenting with the use of vans/SUVs.
Budget priorities are also a problem. I love, love, love the Metro light rail system. But cutbacks to bus connections made use of the system an absolute pain in the ass in the days where I commuted. The situation is getting worse in a post pandemic landscape.
Most of the people I know who live in Orange County avoid mass transit like, well, like the plague. The exception is the use of Metrolink to commute between Los Angeles and Orange County.
It’s been a while since I had regular business in the Bay area, so I don’t know what transit priorities there are.
Martin
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Precisely. The GOP had some plausible deniability at least in the past. Liz Cheney is hardly a proponent of multiculturalism, but she’s not throwing up salutes like some of the other members of her party are. She understands what the GOPs path needs to be, even if she doesn’t like it.
The GOP is a mix of people that use white supremacy as a means for the GOP to win, and people that use the GOP as a means toward achieving white supremacy. From Nixon through Romney, the former group ruled the show. Trump used both for his own personal gains, but paved the way for the latter group to gain control of the party. And that’s all too obvious to everyone now – most of all to the people they need to attract for the GOP to succeed.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator:
The OC has always had the philosophy of more and better freeways as opposed to mass transit. There has never been a real push for light rail, just buses. Buses are slow since they have to compete with traffic.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@?BillinGlendaleCA: back in the day I said that Bobby Byrd was determined to die, figuratively speaking, on the Senate floor. I guess DiFi is too?
Suzanne
@Benw: Yes for sure.
One thing that really dawned on me this year, moving from a rapidly growing city in the Sun Belt to an older industrial city in the Rust Belt/Northeast, is the aesthetics of a family business. Family businesses have a distinctive look and feel to them that are evidence of a specific aspiration. It didn’t really dawn on me before how I bet part of Trump’s appeal to a lot of his cohort is that he essentially runs a small family business with his kids around him, which is the same aspiration of plenty of people who don’t live in glamorous urban centers and who don’t want to go to college. It’s a distinctly weird idea to me: the idea that your parents would literally give you a job and a livelihood. Not just money, not just paying for your college…. they literally give you a job and make your career available to you, and you continue to live near them. Obviously, this aspiration is out of reach for many. But we keep asking what these Cletuses see in Trump, why they feel such a kinship…. this is why. And also why they feel such hostility to college graduates: because going to college privileges different skills, and quite frankly, a different kind of family culture.
In the Sun Belt, family businesses are far less of a thing.
Martin
@Brachiator: You didn’t mention it. I bring it up because I think that the insurance thing is a temporary patch, but avoids the bigger problem. If you subsidize sprawl by way of making the sprawl insurable, then you’re actually contributing to the problem by creating a larger surface area for the fires to affect, and adding to the climate problem by trucking people out there.
The cheaper solution for government would be to not subsidize the insurance, allow those places to be uninsurable, and help make higher density more desirable
I should add, we avoid mass transit because it’s hot garbage here. I looked at taking the bus to and from work – it was on average an hour 15 to go 4 miles because of the need to transfer and infrequency of buses. I can literally walk it faster. I now bike it faster than I could drive.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m not surprised, but I wish she’d retire.
Sure Lurkalot
@Martin: I would be interested in learning your take on why California voted in favor of Prop 22.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: That’s a really good point.
Ruckus
@GrueBleen:
Think of the difference of the state of Victoria and the county of Los Angeles. 6 1/2 million vs over 10 million population. Victoria, 87,800+ thousand sq miles, LA county 4,753 sq miles. Many parts of the world have less exposure risk than parts of the US. Many of course have far more exposure risk, and have done a much better job with Covid than the US, what I’m saying is that it’s far easier to keep 2 meters between in Victoria than in LA. There are states with similar exposure limits in the US as in Victoria and they are not doing anywhere near what Victoria is.
What I’m saying is that, yes, our entire response to the disease has been crap, because of our politics. But we do have some issues of bodies per sq mile, the exposure risk, which is harder to mitigate. Especially if many/most don’t even try.
Haroldo
@Brachiator:
“may” ?????
Shelby County vs Holder comes to mind.
But otherwise your analysis is spot on.
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: Sounds lovely. I have a MS in geology but volcanic terrains were not a big part of what I’ve worked on before so I’ve got some major learning to do. We are thinking about making a trip towards the west tomorrow for a day, maybe we should look at that park. We’ve hiked a lot at Smith Rock and the landforms are fantastic! Visiting the Deschutes here has been a near daily activity since it’s just a 5 minute walk from here. I am constantly stunned by how beautiful it is here.
Landslides were part of the areas I studied that I mentioned, but not the major one. I do have some experience studying landslides but without the volcanic component.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Just not true.
The GOP have their own coalition. I recently found out that a very committed, Jewish friend was a huge Trump supporter. The key issue for him was, of course, Israel. And this caused him and many other Jewish people who might not otherwise support the GOP to vote for them despite the obvious and manifest anti-semitism. I still do not understand Log Cabin Republicans, but their support of the GOP seems strong.
Evangelicals may be strongly anti-abortion, but for many conservatives, all this nonsense only means that they don’t want to pay for abortions for poor women, but have no problem with abortion or birth control for themselves.
But even here, there are some crazy Republicans who might even support restrictions on contraception and birth control, like in the good old days.
And some of this anti-abortion and “pro-family” madness appeals to some ethnic groups.
Currently, right wing nutjobs are whipping up the “Joe Biden is a socialist/communist/tool of China” thing more than they are whipping up any Christianity angle.
Black people and Native Americans are often seen as the perpetual Other. “You, too, can now beat up black people” is one of the markers of cultural whiteness for other immigrant groups.
Ruckus
@Yutsano:
The senate? Moscow Mitch is what happened in the senate, along with the republican desire for self destruction. As far as mitch goes, there is a picture of him in front of a confederate flag, accepting an award. Notice his age, this was about 30 yrs ago and his office said he wouldn’t pose in front of one again, not that he doesn’t believe this crap.
NoraLenderbee
@Yutsano: the link at #70 points to the story about Mrs. Trumpf.
Suzanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Everything about Trump has the aesthetic quality of a successful family business in a small place. (I know he isn’t successful but I’m talking about appearances.) Even his clothes. Expensive but not fashionable. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, who is a far better businessman, has a much more corporate look. The look of someone who was hired into a C-suite position at a large firm rather than who owns a small firm.
Ruckus
@dmsilev:
Doing my part, 12 days till stab one.
My boss asked me last week if I would continue to wear a mask after the vaccine and I said yes, until the danger is actually past, it is the wise thing to do, not take the level of risk that not wearing one brings, the mask is about all of us not just the individual.
Martin
@Sure Lurkalot: Two reasons:
The underlying problem, really, is too far removed from the discussion. The real problem is health insurance, and who pays for it. CA spends more money on MediCal than Texas spends in their general budget – on everything. The clarification of CA labor law that lead to Prop 22 was indirectly around whether these services were obligated to pay for health insurance, mainly for effectively full-time employees, and how do we handle that for people that are full time workers, only because they are juggling 4 part-time gig jobs.
In short, a lot of this is how employers externalize these costs to government, and whether that social contract should continue. In 40s and again in the early 70s, employers were prohibited from raising pay, so they told the government to let them be responsible for health insurance as way to attract workers. That’s why benefits are such a big part of hiring in the US, to the degree that labor unions will give up pay increases in favor of benefits – they’re that valuable. But now employers are saying they don’t want to be responsible and handing that back to government, without handing back the tax revenue needed to pay for it. So the CA government spends $112B a year just on health insurance – and not terribly good insurance at that. And that’s not insurance for govt employees – that’s whole other budget.
So, if you put single payer on the ballot here it would probably pass. Basically the public is saying, give people more flexibility in choosing jobs (because that’s good for workers) and shift benefits back to government (because that’s good for workers).
The state should have put up a competing initiative that would have vastly opened up worker classification and established a single payer system, at least for non-full-time workers. That probably would have done even better.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: Having worked for a large corporation, that’s spot on.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
He looks like someone who owns a small business but also owns an ego the size of all outdoors and puts on airs he has no idea about.
Which is actually who he is.
So you are exactly right.
NotMax
@Ruckus
Change “owns” to “inherited” and you’ve hit the bullseye.
;)
Hoodie
@Martin: Demographics have never really been on the GOP’s side, if you don’t limit demographics to race. Once their traditional base of small farmers and shopkeepers diminished with the Depression and the growth of corporations after WWII, the pattern of the GOP has been to win national elections by branding strategies rather than by cultivating a coherent coalition of interests. This started as early as the postwar period with figures like Eisenhower, and has been pretty dominant in the last 40 years, e.g., Reagan, Bush post 9/11 and now Trump.
Even though demographically challenged, this can work quite spectacularly because it is a branding-based technique and the US is a consumer culture. In the case of the GOP, these branding techniques enable them to get out people who have a messianic (as opposed to interest-based) view of politics and often do not vote on a regular basis. We see this with a lot of Trump supporters. It also enables them to strip off some of the more weakly-held elements of the normal Dem coalition (e.g., Reagan Democrats) These techniques will always have some effectiveness irrespective of racial demographics, although it may be harder to form an effective enough brand across an increasingly diverse population because different strokes for different folks. For example, a lot of people just can’t grok why a fat, nasty, combed-over POS like Trump has a near sexual appeal to white goobers.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: True, but Uber, etc ran a really good marketing campaign, especially with drivers testimonials saying how much they loved their jobs and didn’t want any changes.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Correctamundo.
He inherited everything he is.
And now he, or more appropriately, the banks, and likely vlad own it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Hoodie: Reagan Democrats are a small and dying breed. They were folk who were Democrats before Reagan and voted for him. The youngest would be over 60, most were “Greatest Gen” folk.
Ruckus
@Hoodie:
Don’t forget the electoral college. It’s what makes the gop play possible, making land more valuable for votes than people. That was the reasoning for the senate and for the EC itself. Take that away the the gop loses.
Brachiator
@Martin:
OK. You make an excellent point here.
Unfortunately, some Californians see it as their Deity-given right to move anywhere they want.
I have heard people admit that they under-insure or do not insure at all, and are willing to depend on federal disaster relief to bail them out.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I knew a whole bunch of “Reagan Democrats” when I was young, older relatives and friends of my parents. I’ve always suspected “Nixon Democrats” was probably a more accurate descriptor. I remember at a family party in ’92, my uncle’s best friend bellowing out, “I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I’m voting Buchanan!”
Yutsano
@NoraLenderbee: …
Dammit. Sorry. Link fixed.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Will he require her to wear her opera gloves on camera? //
Suzanne
@NotMax: But lots of people, who knows how many, see inheriting a company from a parent as a validation that they learned a skill over a lifetime at a parent’s knee, not as a privilege. We sneer at it — and rightly so — but that blow didn’t land the way we thought it would, because plenty of people would love to either inherit a business or pass one down.
My MIL, who is genuine white working class and hates Trump, inherited a farm from her father. She doesn’t see herself as an heiress like Paris Hilton. She sees herself as someone who lived and worked in that farm for fifty years before she inherited it. The topic of what to do with the farm when she is too old to deal with it is very fraught. She would love for my husband and I to live near her and my husband and his brothers to continue the farm in common. None of them want to do that. It is emotional for her.
catclub
@Brachiator:
AND deity given RIGHT to have their asses covered by the government insurance if a disaster happens. See also, flood insurance and beach houses.
Not limited to californians.
Yutsano
@Suzanne:
I’m sorry but I don’t understand this. A person who has worked since let’s say their teenage years how to run their parents’ business aren’t necessarily idiots for doing so. Hell some of them go to college to get certain skills just to bring back to run the business. As far as I’m concerned that’s as much valuable work as going away to college to become a lawyer. Maybe I’m reading this wrong, and if I am my apologies. I just don’t see how looking down at people who have their life’s ambitions tied in running what their family has been building.
catclub
Was his name Adelson?
So what percentage of Jews Voted from Trump versus Biden? How much did it change. my guess is approximately zero. the old 75% of Jews vote for the Democrats.
geg6
@Yutsano:
I would say you are both correct. I know lots of families who have handed down family businesses and have had children who went to school to improve their skills to improve and maintain those businesses. They are good citizens and some may even be Republicans but of the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. But we all also know a large number of assholes who had the family business dropped in their laps and who knew that nothing they did or didn’t do would change that circumstance. They were entitled, lazy douchebags in high school, often the class bullies, and they haven’t changed a bit in the years since. I know so many of these assholes!
SiubhanDuinne
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I’m absolutely fine with Biden promoting all the good stuff his administration is doing, with regular updates. I think that’s important, and the Joe I’ve come to know and love will do a great job of explaining what it will mean to us and getting us to be part of it, whatever “it” is. We’ll have buy-in, and that will make a difference. What I don’t want is Biden (or his Cabinet, or Press Secretary) constantly pointing to the Trump administration and saying “They didn’t leave us a plan, we had to do the whole thing from scratch, we inherited such a mess!” That’s what Trump spent four years doing, blaming the Obama administration for everything. It was tiresome from him and it would be tiresome from Biden. But I do agree on the importance of marketing.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Parents often try to make their kids follow a path that seems perfect to them, I think often because their parents did the same. But the world changes and people have different needs/desires/worlds they live in than their parents. I did. But I will say that the trade I learned from my father has stayed with me and supports me to this day, about 60 yrs later. I’ve done other things and a person of 18 today could do worse than following in those same type of footsteps, but quite possibly they could do better as well, because business/the working world has changed in the last few decades. Looking back, my working life has been OK, possibly not as OK had it gone the way I envisioned but one never knows the road untaken or unavailable. And of course it works both ways in the concept of parents selecting a child’s future, could have been better, could have been worse. My take is that it’s the child’s future, a parent gets them to adulthood and needs to back off a step or two(dozen), which if they’ve done their job works fine.
catclub
@catclub: Update after checking: in 2016 Trump got 24% of the jewish vote. in 2020 he got 22%.
catclub
I disagree. When trump did it he was lying, which Biden will not be doing.
Also, it works. People saw Trump as creating a great economy because he said he was creating a great economy. Sell it. repeat all the things that are obvious. Trump failed catastrophically on Covid19. repeat that every day it makes a difference.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Before Donnie’s campaign went broke in the fall, they were spending all kinds of money on ads on HGTV in the DC area. Some of them were amazingly slick. It would be easy for people who don’t pay attention to politics to be swayed.
Yes, Democrats at all levels need to campaign continuously. The GOP has been doing it on talk radio, churches, Fox News, etc., etc., for decades. We can’t win if we only tell people what we’re doing and why for a few weeks before an election – not when they don’t ever let up.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
Speak for yourself.
rikyrah
@Jeffro:
I don’t want to hear from 46 on this.
I want to hear from the scientists and medical people on his COVID team.
rikyrah
@geg6:
I love him
Became a Forever Fan when he dressed Leslie Jones that year after all those other designers snubbed her.
She looked fabulous.
He knows how to dress women who aren’t a size 8
Suzanne
@Yutsano: I’m not sneering at their skill nor their work. But I do sneer at the assertion that it isn’t a privilege. Having a parent pass down a business or an asset of any sort to you is a privilege, no two ways about it.
ETA: there is very little I hate more than the statement “I worked hard for everything I have”.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s a privilege. Everyone works hard. Not everyone gets something from their parents.
jnfr
@brendancalling:
I’m so sorry about your situation. I hope the vaccine will fix this soon.
GrueBleen
@Ruckus: The real exposure in Victoria was the City of Melbourne: over 5 million in 3858 sq miles. Melbourne was blocked off from the rest of Victoria, masks were compulsory (even when walking outside alone), limited to 1 shopping and 1 exercise time outside our residences daily, 8:00pm to 5:00am curfew, not permitted to travel more than 5km (3.1 miles) from our residence at any time (unless for, eg medical emergency), all hotels, restaurants, cafes and schools and colleges etc closed – though some takeaway available.
And we put up with that for about 112 days – all while Melbourne totalled up about 820 deaths.