I knew all along that Lio was a good kid

Of course, the first comment on the comic is this BS:

Nobody gets to be a billionaire without creating something that millions, even billions, of people want and pay for. If you don’t like billionaires, then trying living your life without everything they’ve made possible for you.

Reassuringly, that commenter will never be a billionaire, because he fundamentally misunderstands how one becomes a billionaire. It’s not by creating something, but by figuring out how to profit off the labor of others.

The game of “could be worse!”

Here’s an entertaining pastime for when you are getting cabin fever: find people on the internet who are worse off than you. It’s easy! So easy, it’s easy to tell yourself things aren’t so bad.

An example: Julia Whitcomb has been trapped at sea for a month in this little windowless cabin.

Cruise companies are allowed to disembark and repatriate people still trapped on ships around the U.S. by private transportation as long as their executives sign an agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that holds the companies accountable for the process. They are refusing to do so.

In conversations with the CDC, cruise company officials have complained that arranging private transportation for disembarking crew is “too expensive,” according to a spokesperson for the agency.

The standoff is preventing about 100,000 crew members and some passengers from leaving cruise ships lingering in and around U.S. waters, including dozens of U.S. citizens. Crew members still stuck on board say they feel like an afterthought after watching their companies move mountains to repatriate passengers on charter flights and other private transportation after the industry was shut down on March 13. Only a handful of ships still have passengers on them, including Carnival Corporation’s Coral Princess, floating off of South Florida.

Remember this, next time you see an ad for a cruise in some exotic, beautiful place. There is a range of possibilities here. You could have a wonderful time, putting on pounds at the buffet, drinking lots of sickly sweet alcoholic drinks on the deck with strange people. Or you could spend the whole time vomiting in your cramped cabin as norovirus sweeps through your ship. Or you could get quarantined and end up wandering the seas like the Flying Dutchman, no end in sight, as the cruise line stonewalls on signing paperwork that would set you free.

It’s like gambling! If you’re one of the people who likes to gamble, you should sign up for a cruise!

In the game of “could be better”, the government refuses to bail out all these foreign-registered vessels, the cruise lines all collapse in bankruptcy, and the ships are all sunk to provide artificial reefs for wildlife. But first they let all their hostages off. Maybe the owners could be locked up in first-class cabins before the scuttling?

The Manchurian tangerine has a cunning plan to undermine the American military

Bwahahaha! Bring the officer class together during a pandemic to have a bozo who doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease to lecture at them! Trump has recalled the graduating class of West Point to stand before him in some kind of formation. Why? I don’t know. He just needs the ego boost, I guess.

It remains unclear how the graduation ceremony will actually look. The Naval Academy decided against holding an in-person ceremony at its campus in Annapolis, Md., and opted to hold a virtual event instead, according to The New York Times. The Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. held a ceremony with cadets sitting eight feet apart from each other, with Vice President Mike Pence as its commencement speaker.

Three sources told The Times that West Point still hadn’t made its decision on how to conduct the ceremony, originally planned for late May, when Trump surprised officials there by saying he would speak in person.

I’m amused that they have no idea how best to do this. We’re struggling with it here at UMM, too, but we decided to do an entirely online ceremony, because we’d rather not risk the health of our students. That’s a trifle Trump does not worry about.

I would hope that all the graduates at that ceremony are seated a safe distance apart, and that they all wear masks, because you know no one in the Trump administration will wear them. It makes for great optics to see the disregard Trumpkins have for the safety of others.

You can go too far for Fox News

Diamond and Silk have discovered that there is a level of stupidity that can get them booted from the network.

Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk, who had contributed original content to the network’s streaming service Fox Nation since shortly after its late 2018 launch.

The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus. “After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.

It’s not clear what exactly triggered some Fox executive somewhere. Was it:

  • claiming that coronavirus deaths were exaggerated?
  • arguing that the virus was engineered?
  • suggesting that WHO had a “switch” to turn the virus on and off?
  • claiming that we had to end the isolation to cultivate an immune response?
  • saying that Bill Gates was promoting vaccines for population control? “Abortions! Genocide!”
  • suggesting that 5G towers were used to fill hospitals for their profit?

If Diamond and Silk (the pro wrestling names of Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson) were making the network look bad, what about all those other sycophantic suck-ups like Hannity and Watters and Carlson and Fox & Friends? I don’t think there’s any degree of purging that can rescue the reputation of Fox News anymore.

Sobering news about universities

The state of Minnesota universities in the pandemic is not exactly optimistic. The Star Trib summarizes our financial situation.

The University of Minnesota has frozen tuition for the next academic year in hopes of attracting a large freshman class during the pandemic. As of last week, fall freshman enrollment was trending nearly 10% behind where it was this time last year.

The Minnesota State colleges and universities system took a $17 million hit from room-and-board refunds and could lose up to $13 million more this spring from canceled events, summer camps, travel and trainings.

The University of St. Thomas, Minnesota’s largest private college, has already lost $8 million and won’t get to replenish with revenue from marquee events such as the Special Olympics.

Public and private institutions are mapping out sobering scenarios that foretell steep revenue and enrollment losses. They are planning for a fall semester that might look anything but normal; some colleges envision a mix of online and in-person instruction, while others may delay the start of the semester until students can enjoy a traditional campus experience.

Yeah, that’s our situation — we’ve been asked to map out how we would manage online instruction for the fall. I’m not a fan of the idea of delaying the start of classes until the pandemic recedes, since that implies that we can accurately predict when things will be back to normal. If I had to make a prediction, it’s that we should be OK for the fall, except that, as we’re seeing right now, at the first sign of a decrease in infections our selfish, mindless populace, goaded by idiot Republicans, will stampede to opportunities to suck faces with their fellow damfools, undoing any gains and blowing all predictions to smithereens, making it impossible to know when the situation will actually improve. So I have no idea what we’ll be doing at the start of the school year. The administration will make some preliminary decisions in June, which I’m sure they’ll revise in July, and then update in August.

At least there’s some cautious optimism about the future of the University of Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota took an immediate loss of nearly $35 million when it issued room-and-board refunds to students who had to move off campus. Early projections show the U could lose up to $315 million in revenue if the pandemic lasts into fall.

President Joan Gabel and members of her cabinet have taken a voluntary 10% pay cut, and hiring and salary increases have been frozen.

Minnesota’s land-grant institution should be able to withstand even the worst hit, thanks to deep reserves, a strong credit rating and manageable debt levels.

“We have some ability to make decisions that can help us work into a new reality,” said Brian Burnett, the U’s senior vice president for finance and operations.

I’m glad the administration has taken a voluntary pay cut, since they were just asking us faculty to take one. I could reluctantly accept a 10% cut — I also voluntarily took a 50% pay cut the year before last, to indulge in a sabbatical, and there was some savage belt-tightening around the Myers household that we’re still trying to recover from, so it’s going to hurt, but we have to face this New Reality where we’re all going to be hurting.

I do still have to worry a bit about how the UM will deal with their losses — one approach they could take would be to contract down a bit, starving their branch campuses (like mine!) to save the Twin Cities core. That seems unwise to me — centralizing during a pandemic seems risky, especially when their far-flung branch campuses (like mine!) are a kind of social distancing already, and when some of our lightly populated rural counties have fairly low rates of infection. There have been zero reported cases of coronavirus in Stevens county so far, although I suspect part of the reason for the low number is the lack of testing.

If I had to suggest a place to cut, top of my list would be…football. I was dumbfounded that one of our Minnesota sports writers, Patrick Reusse, suggested the same thing — that UM should hit football hard.

This is a university that exists through the residents of Minnesota. Those residents are men and women, football families and gymnastics families. There’s an obligation to continue to present valid sports opportunities for a wide spectrum of students.

It’s absurd FBS teams can offer 85 scholarships — with another 25 walk-ons for Power Five programs. That scholarship number should be 70 (or fewer), and with 90 bodies total.

It’s absurd P.J. Fleck came here making $1 million (with incentives) and, in his fourth season, he will be kicking off a new contract at $4.6 million.

Also absurd: The ever-growing football support staff; a $170 million athletic facility devoted largely to football, and a drain to the university’s more vital fundraising; and colleges footing the bill as the developmental arm of the NFL, the most profitable sports league in U.S. history.

The first post-virus gouge in athletic budgets should come in football — at Minnesota, and across the Power Five landscape.

I fully agree with that first paragraph. We should encourage college sports, they’re important to a lot of our students, and part of a liberal arts education is to promote a healthy body and mind. Football, however, has become a bloated cancer on higher education with gross inflation of its budgets.

The University of Minnesota head football coach is paid $3.6 million per year, which is insane. And it’s going up to $4.6 million next year! That one guy is getting the salary of 60 professors at my university. He does not have 60 times the intelligence or education of your average professor, nor is he working 60 times as hard.

We’re also paying a massive army of assistant coaches. That $170 million facility is called the “athletes village”, with weight rooms, indoor practice field, sound-proofed basketball courts, a cafeteria just for athletes, and their own medical facility. We have a stadium, capitalistically named the TCF Bank Stadium, that cost $300 million to build. I don’t think TCF Bank paid for it. I know our students were levied a $50 per student per semester fee to help cover it.

Maybe the pandemic will compel the universities to rethink the frivolities they’ve been throwing cash at for decades.

SNL is also blessed with easy targets

I think if I were famous enough to get a celebrity impersonation on television, Brad Pitt wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice. Anthony Fauci has got to be stoked.

It’s a good message, though.

The whole SNL episode is interesting for its new format: everyone is just doing their own thing from home, probably using good consumer-grade cameras, with maybe some off-site editing. Clearly some of them must have knowledge of lighting, since it’s their business. It comes off pretty well, maybe even a little better than their usual in-studio show.

The NYTimes is just Fox News in a slightly less shiny suit

Here’s how the NY Times reports on yesterday’s White House briefing:

“dangerously, in the view of some experts”…what the hell? This is not a situation that requires some cautious ambiguity. In the view of all experts and your mother, injecting bleach or lysol or other surface disinfectant is a bloody stupid idea that will do great harm. UV is dangerous — it’s what’s going to give you all painful sunburns as summer arrives — you should not lightly irradiate your delicate internal tissues with it.

“muses”? Fucking “muses”? We do not need the pig-ignorant musings of a rambling fool. I would point out to you that Ecuador is suffering massive pandemic deaths. Ecuador is on the equator. Ecuador is soaking in sunlight. Light is not a sufficient remedy.

Just for comparison, here’s an actual Fox News headline.

I can’t tell the two apart. Some are saying that the NY Times soft-selling of a crisis is dangerous. Some are saying that the tepid reporting of the NY Times is once again going to lead us to disaster. Some are saying the NY Times is the propaganda organ for the status quo. Some are saying you should cancel your subscription. Some might even say that Dean Baquet and the entire editorial staff of the newspaper ought to be tried for their responsibility in misleading the public, and thrown in jail with Judith Miller.

Oh, wait. Judith Miller is not in jail. She was promoted to a position at Fox News.

Irradiate yourself and drink poison, that’ll cure COVID-19

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Trump had another of his daily talks today.

After the presentation, Trump asked whether UV light could be used to help people with the virus, whether sunlight could be brought “inside the body,” or whether disinfectant materials could be used to cleanse bodies in the same way they disinfect surfaces.

“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way,” Trump said, adding it “sounds interesting.”

He turned to the power of disinfectants, ad libbing about what it could do inside the human body.

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out [from a surface] in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that [by] injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number,” Trump pondered.

Good god. Our best hope anymore is that Trump and his trumpkins start shooting up bleach or gargling isopropyl alcohol. Please, start a rumor that cyanide is an effective anti-viral.

That man is spewing criminal misinformation. He’s killing people.

Unimaginable stupidity.