“It is better not to have the country run by sociopaths”

That is the lesson derived by Seth Meyers as he looks at the non-stop flow of nonsense and dangerous false information peddled by Trump and the people in his administration, including his odious son-in-law Jared Kushner. He points to the fact that Trump actually brags at his press conferences about how successfully Mike Pence, the vice-president and the head of the coronavirus task force, avoids answering questions posed to him by journalists.
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Challenging the pandemic skeptics

If you are a credentialed academic in any field at all, then if you espouse policies that are favored by the libertarian, free-market, right wing, you can be assured of a platform for your views in think tanks and the media, even if the subject you are pontificating on are not the ones in which you are credentialed.

Richard Epstein is a good example of that. He is a professor of law. In a recent interview, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker questioned him about some contrarian claims that he had made about the coronavirus epidemic. Epstein is one of those who believes that we are over-reacting to the pandemic and that the danger to the economy is greater than the danger to people and we should not be having these tough social distancing rule, views that the Trump administration is anxious to believe, and so his views have been influential and received considerable publicity.
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Coronavirus and ventilators

After self-isolating for seven days because he had the coronavirus, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has now been placed in an ICU of a London hospital, presumably because his symptoms have taken a turn for the worse. It is not clear if he has been placed on a ventilator. His spokespersons have been less than forthcoming about his condition in the past week, issuing upbeat statements when it now seems that he was not doing so well, and that has naturally made people suspect that things are worse than what they are being told.
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The ‘nobody knew’ and ‘everybody believed’ phase of evading responsibility

We have been warned by the US Surgeon General that this might be the worst week of the pandemic in the US and that we should brace for it. The time-lapse graph of world wide infections shows today that the US is still on the rising part of the curve while there are hopeful signs that Italy and Spain, two hard hit countries, are starting to show signs of stabilization by veering away off the exponential growth line.

The Trump administration bears responsibility for its late, inadequate, and confused response to the pandemic but as with all things Trump, it seeks to avoid any responsibility or blame. Governments tend to duck responsibility by making sweeping claims, such as “every believed” or “nobody knew” to imply that they alone should not be held responsible. The “everybody believed” excuse was trotted out after they lied about Iraq having WMDs prior to invading that country. In fact, people knew and said at that time that the evidence produced by the US was false or faulty and should not be believed.
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Jared Kushner, slumlord millionaire

Netflix has just released the six episodes of the second season of its excellent Dirty Money series that looks at all the corruption that is around. It focuses on the wealthy and big businesses that are corrupt and get rich at the expense of poor and vulnerable people. Back in 2019, I wrote about one episode in the first series that looked at the corrupt practices of the giant bank HSBC that was enabling the laundering of drug cartel money. In the second series they focus on Wells Fargo bank, the incredibly corrupt prime minister of Malaysia, ‘dirty gold’ that is produced using illegal mining and environmental destruction, abuse and exploitation of the elderly, and companies that pollute the environments of small towns. They are truly the scum of the Earth.
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Music nostalgia

One of the reasons we remember certain songs so fondly is because they kindle old memories, if not of specific events then of certain periods in our lives. There were plenty of songs that I enjoyed, especially in my teens and twenties when popular music played such a big part of my life. But one can never remember them at will though sometimes all it takes are the opening bars of a song to have the memory of that song come flooding back.

So I was delighted when I was sent this website called The Nostalgia Machine. Pick a year and then click on the ‘Hit Me’ button and it brings up some of the hit songs from that year. I just randomly chose 1967 and I found so many songs that I used to love that I had forgotten, such as Something Stupid by Frank and Nancy Sinatra.
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Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (2017)

I watched this 2017 production by the New York City Metropolitan Opera company two nights ago and really enjoyed it. I thought that it was a superb production, well sung. I learned that the only other time that the New York Met had put on this little-performed opera was way back in 1918 featuring opera legend Enrico Caruso.

The story is set in a pearl diving fishing village in ancient Sri Lanka, though this production had people in modern dress, seemingly in the 1950s. It tells of two close friends Zurga and Nadir who both fall in love with the same woman Leila. They agree to preserve their friendship by not pursuing her any further. She in turn becomes a priestess that requires a promise to keep her face veiled from everyone and remain a virgin. Leila later becomes the priestess of the village where Zurga is the leader but he does not recognize the veiled woman. But Zurga becomes intensely jealous when he discovers that Leila and Nadir had indeed secretly pursued their love before their earlier parting, and that on meeting again after she became a priestess in the village, they still loved each other. When it is discovered that they met secretly, it causes a major uproar.
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Europe was central to the spread of Covid-19

One of the features of the current pandemic is that the more developed countries especially in Europe seem to have been hit the hardest in terms of the current number of cases. Joe Penney writes that Europe was also the hub from which cases spread to the rest of the world.

As Covid-19 cripples the U.S. and ravages many countries in the world, politicians are battling to craft a narrative of who is to blame for its damage. The virus started in China, of course, but narratives of how it went from epidemic to global pandemic often leave out a crucial element: the role of Europe.
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