Apr 282020
After several days in the hospital, the cat is back in the CatBox. Apparently my chemo wiped out my immune system, and I caught a bug that brought raving Republicosis. The first two days,they quarantined me and tested me for Trump* virus twice. I am not guilty! Then they loaded me with antibiotics. WWWendy brought me home last night. I’ll be crawling back in the saddle, barring future complications. I plan to get WWWendy and JD in touch with each other, so I don’t leave you beloved people hanging again. Hugs!
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:14 (average 5:05). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Trump* Virus Update:
RESIST!!
Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!
18 Responses to “Personal Update–4/28/2019”
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So good to see you alive and kicking – including kicking the JigZonw. Hey, everyone knows my email address here – Wendy is more than welcome to it. Except when we communicate in a small group here, I am very careful with BCC – and am capable of remiving an address from a Reply All for a reason.
Cartoon – Boy, do I remember this. I was in Okinawa and was instructed to pull (or to delegate to pull) pay rcords for the secret list of Marines assigned to accomplish this. I didn’t feel I should delegate that, so I stayed up most of the night (the longest was waiting for them to be picked up.) (Pay records were big yellow cards then. It wouldn’t make sense to pull and send records today. but I digress.) The first I realized what a betrayal that operation was of Vietnamese allies, those who had worked with us, was when I saw Ken Burns’s documentary.
Since we missed a Bill article … I often disagree with him, in details if not in general, but this time I am 100% with him. Y’all may have seen it – it was widely quoted at sites which quote these things – but in case you didn’t.
It has now been established that humans can infect their pets, i.e. cats and dogs, with COVID-19 and in Holland 2 minks on a mink factory farm have been tested positive. I wonder how long it will take before it spreads to other types of factory farms.
You mean before we learn it has spread to other types of factory farms. I feel confident it already has.
Cartoon: I remember reading about the last helicopter evacuations like it was yesterday. Some events one never forgets.
TVU: I’m thinking that we are the same as the other day..62 confirmed, 11 recovered, and 2 deaths. Abbott has slowly softened the rules, and has re-opened up the state with ‘limited 25% capacity’ thus far. Abbott said a second phase of business reopenings could come as soon as May 18 — as long as the state sees “two weeks of data to confirm no flare-up of COVID-19.”
Hey,…if my little Shih Tzu or my Russian Blue were liberal blue, I’d vote for them in a heartbeat!! No worries, here though. I’m going blue all the way through!!
THANK GOD!!! that you don’t have TV, that makes life better for you, now that you have received antibiotics. Please do take good, good care though, TC, stay hydrated, and get.your.rest!! Glad that you are getting two of our ladies together, that will make it smoother for you in not having to worry here with posting on PP. Best to you always, Tom, and great to see you back in your saddle too. Take good care. Kitty Hugs!
This just in: “The GOP Senatorial Committee is moving away from trying to defend DT on Covid 19 and advising their candidates to do the same. 45 is going to blow a gasket when he sees this.” ~ Luckner L. ~
2. And – just to clarify – “The medical term for injecting disinfectant into a body is called embalming.” ~ Nancy Pelosi ~
3. “We’ll be watching today’s briefing, so you don’t have to.” “Thank you, you’re a saint!” ~ Bill K. ~
4. “First…he put kids in cages, and now he puts kids in coffins. Cancel the West Point graduation speech! ~ Sherri F. ~
Cartoon: Was a happier time. Thank goodness they back in the U.S.
TVU: Still climbing here, we had another 98 people coming down with it and 2 more deaths. People are getting impatient with the lock down. They opened a couple of beaches yesterday for surfing, kayaking and distant walking. No lounging or loitering around. I personally feel it’s better to be safe than sorry, so I’m staying home.
Happy to see that you were released from the hospital. Was very concerned, especially when Wendy was saying you had been tested twice for tRump’s virus. I pray that you stay hydrated and get to feeling better where you can keep food and liquids down.
We are all grateful that Wendy was there for you. She’s a true ANGEL.
Plus I give Lona and Joanne credit for keeping us posted.
Take care.
Thanks TomCat
Cartoon — I remember this from the news. The image I remember most was that of children being handed onto helicopters by mothers who pleaded to have the children taken out of harm’s way but were denied access to evacuation themselves because they were Vietnamese, allies of the Americans. Sad and despicable!
Puzzle — 5:48 I did this in honour of your return. My hand was very shaky resulting in a very lousy time.
I am so glad that you are back but please take it easy, rest and otherwise be good to yourself! If you don’t, I may have to employ my size 10s on your kitty butt! Luv you Puddy Tat!!!
Good to see you’re back in the Cat Box.
Cartoon: While not as iconic as the naked, burned “Napalm Girl” (Phan Thi Kim Phuc), it’s still very memorable.
Just a note of “My 2 Cents” WRT well-meaning folks who might suggest you start taking some Probiotics because of the diarrhea and antibiotics you’re now on – unless your oncologist agrees with it, I’d be VERY HESITANT. In fact I would NOT take it unless it’s been prescribed (even though it’s an OTC med, and one I’ve taken after antibiotic treatment).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002586/
Thanks Nameless! I fully agree!
So glad to see you back home and testing negative. If you can give Wendy hugs for me. NoName’s advice strikes this one, not a doctor, as marvelously appropriate, and welcome.
‘Toon, and TVU: We have certainly had our share, and then some, of awful leaders!
Joanne’s Bill piece is sooooo on point! It will be telling to see that kind of response he gets for it.
This is a bit long, bust so accurate, and sad and it reminds me of the posting about why Brits do not trust Dumpy:
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2020 8:58 PMSubject: IRISH TIMES ARTICLE, by Fintan O’Toole; 4/24(or25)20This is very disturbing but worth a read and so much is so true! Subject: IRISH TIMES ARTICLEDate: April 26, 2020 at 3:31:07 PM PDTTHE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE US, NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT. Fintan O’Toole: Irish Times 25/04/2020US president Donald Trump has claimed he was being sarcastic and testing the media when he raised the idea that injecting disinfectant or irradiating the body with ultraviolet light might kill coronavirus.Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – willfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.Abject surrenderWhat used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.There is, as the demonstrations in US cities show, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fueled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.Fertile groundBut this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
It won’t come as a surprise that I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed in this Irish article, Mitch. This is how the whole world is looking at America. With pity and with contempt.
Good article, Mitch. Thanks!!
Exactly what Lona wrote, as other nations view us now, not as a Leader of the free world, but w/pity and contempt. Horribly sad.
Mitch, like Lona, I very much agree with the article. Trump and the GOP have made the US the laughing stock of the world! But even more, Trump has made the US an object of pity. I wonder if the US is in the throes of becoming a second “Hermit Kingdom”.
Mitch, parts of this remind me of Nancy MacLean’s book “Democracy in Chains” which is an excellent book. Thanks for recommending it some time ago.
As TC has oft said, Trump is a symptom of the Republican/libertarian disease that infects the US and I will add, is spilling outwards past its borders. Trump needs to be muzzled permanently by being defeated in 2020 and ideally by facing criminal prosecution. Although I am sure that his lawyers would argue under the first amendment, freedom of speech is one thing, inciting insurrection (Liberate Michigan! etc) is quite another.
Amen Mitch! Excellent piece.
glad you are back in the saddle and don’t have tRumpVirus……stay well…and always thinking of all of you here even if I am not…
Good to see you back in the knowledge you have not been infected with COVID-19 on your previous trips to the hospital. So what is your treatment regime going to look like now, TomCat? Plodding on from where you left off or something alternative. Your radiation may start as soon as you have recovered, perhaps?
3:16 You’re up to speed again, TomCat.
Cartoon: I hope that will never be replaced by “Last Democrats evacuate Washington”.
Update: The number of cases and the death toll may never be known, but without a doubt will be much higher than this. In The Netherlands, they have asked all the GP’s to go back through their records and mark all the cases and deaths but never made it to the hospital which they suspect(ed) were COVID-19-related, something which is raising the total even more.
A fortnight ago I read one day of the diary of a New York ambulance worker in which he noted 10 cases of sudden coronary death after a period of fever and difficulty breathing which went straight to the morgue without being tested.
Here in Australia deaths are now all in care homes for the elderly.
But Trump thinks it’s going well enough to have states end their precautionary measures and go back to “work”. If he is reelected, America will never know how many he and COVID-19 have killed.
RESIST!!
Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!
So glad they made sure–GI symptoms have been on the lists out of China since Jan., yet just added to CDC’s list of symptoms. Lately I’ve seen a ton of articles encouraging people to journal their ordinary daily life in these times for future historians–made me think of the content of your blogs, which will reveal both how similar and how different it has been, along with the extra impacts on the extra vulnerable among us. Future historians will be thanking you.
I won’t repeat others (yes, I agree with most threads present) and will add that my county’s data pattern is still attributable to only severe cases getting tested if their doctor orders it…and as recently as last week, the county’s public health officer telling people to access a neighboring county’s community health testing if they wanted to be tested. Hope to see changes with the ramped up testing the governor has announced (CA). Have noted how well OR is managing their health system and related needs of residents compared to so many other states–has made me glad you are there and not elsewhere.
Glad you have things up and running and this opportunity to help you through these challenging days. Take care and keep those tests negative.
Thanks and Hump Day Hugs to all!