Bernie Sanders had a great debate

There was a lot to like about the Democratic debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden last night. Because there were only two people, it allowed for a lot of direct back and forth, with each actually asking the other questions, and the moderators let them do so. The moderators deserve some credit for not interrupting and making it all about them. In general the questions were decent and some important issues were discussed. Of course the pandemic and how to deal with it dominated the discussion, especially at the beginning, but there was a lot of discussion on topics that earlier debates had largely ignored, such as immigration reform and climate change. But the very fact that considerable time was given to these topics meant that other important topics did not get a hearing. I also thought that the lack of an audience in the room was a good thing and they should be dispensed with in future debates.
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Afghan government talks with Taliban stalled

The deal announced on February 29th by the Trump administration with the Taliban had as a major feature that in return for the US withdrawing all its troops from that country in 14 months, the Afghan government would release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban would issue ‘security guarantees’ (whatever that means) and pledge to begin talks with the Afghan government (whatever that means). But the US did not include the Afghan government in the negotiations and now it looks like there is a problem that has prevented the talks from beginning on March 10th.
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The pandemic will dominate the Democratic debate tonight

There will be a debate today between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden starting at 8:00pm ET and moderated by CNN. It will be held in a studio in Washington DC without an audience instead of the original location in Phoenix in a large auditorium. One thing that you can be sure of is that the coronavirus is going to be the main topic of discussion. Both Sanders and Biden will deservedly blast Donald Trump for his administration’s catastrophically bad response. Another thing that you can be sure is that Sanders will hammer home the undeniable fact, now increasingly being realized, that the single-payer health care system like Medicare For All that he has been pushing for and which Biden has dismissed, would have been far better placed to respond to this pandemic that the rotten system that we now have in the US. I do not expect Biden to have a coherent response despite all the time he has had to prepare one.
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Normal, yet not normal

We have been fortunate not to have experienced a global pandemic before in our lifetimes. The previous global epidemics that threatened to become one, (SARS, MERS, swine flu (aka H1N1), and bird flu) did not pan out (Ha!) so it is hard to know what would constitute a normal state of events during one. So I am not surprised to find that things seem to me to feel a little strange.

I went to the supermarket today to buy a couple of potatoes for a recipe but there were no potatoes. It is a very large supermarket so at first I thought that they had moved it to another location, something they do from time to time but no, they were out of potatoes, something that had never happened before. I then realized that there had been a run on potatoes because people were stocking up on food. Why potatoes? I don’t know. I was about to leave when I thought I would wander around a few aisles to see what else was gone. The shelves were mostly full and by no means bare, unlike in the Latvian town where Andreas Avester lives, but some shelf sections were empty, especially those that should have had cleaning products. [Update: See correction from Andreas.] This article describes what people are NOT buying, as evidenced by the things still on the shelves of denuded grocery stores: pasta made from chick peas, chocolate hummus, Dasani brand bottled water while all other brands are gone, pork, kidney beans, vegan food, and obscure canned vegetables.
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When reality bites

Donald Trump is notorious for thinking that he can create his own version of ‘reality’ that can replace, you know, actual reality, by simply dismissing the views of experts, making counterfactual assertions, and claiming that anyone who contradicts his ‘reality’ is either a fool or a knave, part of a larger conspiracy that seeks to thwart his glorious plans to make America great again. He is not the first person to try this. We recall the top official in the administration of George W. Bush (believed to be his chief propagandist Karl Rove, though he denied it) who told reporter Ron Suskind during the period when the Bush administration was lying about the Iraq war:
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The gender difference in lifespans

It is well known that women live longer than men. I had not been aware that this was not true for all species and that when comes to birds, the opposite is true. Now some researchers are finding new evidence to support an idea that what causes the difference is whether one has an unpaired sex chromosome or not.

From humans to black-tailed prairie dogs, female mammals often outlive males – but for birds, the reverse is true.

Now researchers say they have cracked the mystery, revealing that having two copies of the same sex chromosome is associated with having a longer lifespan, suggesting the second copy offers a protective effect.
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If only there was a better health care system to deal with emergencies …

After relentlessly attacking the idea of a universal, single-payer, health care system such as Medicare For All, that Bernie Sanders has been pushing for so long against even the opposition of the Democratic party establishment, as a Utopian, pie-in-the-sky, fantasy that would bankrupt the country, the corporate media is suddenly realizing that such a system would have resulted in a much better and more coherent response to pandemics that the utterly inept, confusing, and chaotic system than what the current US system is able to provide.
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The Bernie bro myth has no empirical basis

The myth of the so-called ‘Bernie bros’, that the supporters of Bernie Sanders seem to be particularly prone to making nasty misogynistic attacks on rival candidates and their supporters, seems to be one of those things that will never die. But what evidence is there for this idea? Part of the problem is that the criteria for being a Bernie bro is very vague and getting vaguer with time. Right now, it seems to consist of just two necessary and sufficient conditions: (a) that one must be a supporter of Sanders and (b) one has to have said something bad about other candidates and/or their supporters. Neither gender nor age nor ethnicity nor any other demographic feature seems to be required to be thus classified. This is indeed a wide net that has been cast and it should not be surprising that it should catch people in it. As Robinson Meyer, the person who coined the term later wrote, what we are witnessing is ‘category collapse’, where something that was intended to have very narrow usage has become so elastic as to cease to have any meaning since it could be applied to pretty much anything and anyone.
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