Daniel Drezner on Trump as toddler:

Trump’s toddler traits have significantly hampered America’s response to the pandemic. They aren’t new, either. In the first three years of his term, I’ve collected 1,300 instances when a Trump staffer, subordinate or ally — in other words, someone with a rooting interest in the success of Trump’s presidency — nonetheless described him the way most of us might describe a petulant 2-year-old. Trump offers the greatest example of pervasive developmental delay in American political history.

Or delay combined with deterioration. He’s always been stupid and ignorant, but word is he hasn’t always been this stupid.

[T]he Trump White House’s inadequate handling of the outbreak highlights his every toddler-like instinct. The most obvious one is his predilection for temper tantrums. Some advisers describe an angry Trump as a whistling teapot that needs to either let off steam or explode. Politico has reported on the myriad triggers for his tantrums: “if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.”

Like a toddler’s, Trump’s temper has flared repeatedly as the pandemic has worsened and the stock market has tanked. Multiple reports confirm that Trump was irate with prescient statements in late February by Nancy Messonnier, a senior official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who warned that a coronavirus outbreak in the United States was inevitable at a time when Trump was insisting he’d prevented one by banning travel from China. A report in Vanity Fair quoted “a person close to the administration” saying that Trump was “melting down” over the pandemic. He pitched a fit after his Oval Office address in early March was widely panned. His temper has acted as an obvious deterrent for other officials to contradict Trump’s happy talk about the pandemic: In early March, Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered his overseas commanders not to take any action mitigating the coronavirus that might surprise the president. For Trump’s staff, crisis management revolves around managing the president’s temper, not managing the actual problem.

Let’s read that penultimate sentence again.

In early March, Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered his overseas commanders not to take any action mitigating the coronavirus that might surprise the president.

So more people will die because the Secretary of Defense is afraid of Trump’s tantrums.

Trump, like most toddlers, also has poor impulse control. Some White House advisers reportedly refer to it as the “shiny-object phenomenon” — his tendency to react to breaking news rather than focusing on more important issues.

He does it in the middle of his own sentences, even (or perhaps especially) when he’s on camera. His own words remind him of something so he veers off, mid-sentence, to say something he’s said 40 thousand times already and is irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Trump’s short, toddler-like attention span has been a problem throughout his administration. One former high-ranking government official told me that a 45-minute meeting with the president was really 45 different one-minute meetings, in which Trump would ask disconnected, rapid-fire questions such as “What do you think of NATO?” and “How big is an aircraft carrier?”

I know one or two people like that. Fortunately, they are not presidents of the United States.

That inability to focus laid the groundwork for the bad pandemic response. During the transition, the Obama administration prepared a tabletop exercise to brief the incoming Trump team about how to handle an influenza pandemic. The president-elect did not participate, and a former senior official acknowledged that “to get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”

Oh well at least he’s only the president; not much need to focus on something.

Trump’s inability to sit still has been on display recently. His aides have questioned whether he has the capacity to focus on what will be a months-long emergency. White House staffers acknowledged that the one time he tried to read a prepared speech from the Oval Office was an unmitigated disaster. Multiple reports confirm that he has grown restless while confined on the White House grounds. He has crashed staff meetings because he does not know what else to do.

He could always hold a two hour press briefing/campaign rally.

Ok this one shocked me. One keeps thinking shock has become impossible but they pull the football away again.

The official government webpage for the Strategic National Stockpile was altered Friday to seemingly reflect a controversial description of the emergency repository that White House adviser Jared Kushner offered at a news conference Thursday evening.

According to a brief online summary on the Department of Health and Human Services website, the stockpile’s role “is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well.”

But just hours earlier, the text characterized the stockpile as the “nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.”

So the feds are changing wording and policy to keep up with the ignorant and abusive claims of Jared fucking Kushner.

The previous language stated that when “state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”

Also stripped from the new summary is sentence that affirmed the stockpile “contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.”

In other words it’s not (or it wasn’t) a matter of “these are ours and we don’t have to share them if you don’t ask nicely,” it was a matter of “these are all of ours, for use in emergencies.” They’ve changed it now to agree with the selfish petulant remarks of a sleazy landlord.

The revisions come after Kushner argued at the White House coronavirus task force press briefing Thursday that the stockpile’s reserves are the property of the federal government.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” he said. “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”

That “we’ve” is interesting – Kushner framing himself as the federal government. He shouldn’t even have a job in his wife’s father’s administration, because Congress passed a law against that kind of nepotism after Kennedy made his brother Attorney General. Furthermore he has zero qualifications for any such job. Robert Kennedy was at least a lawyer.

Congress authorized the creation of the national stockpile in the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Act, which passed in 2002, nine months after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

The legislation orders the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “maintain a stockpile or stockpiles of drugs, vaccines and other biological products, medical devices, and other supplies … to provide for the emergency health security of the United States.”

The secretary, the law says, must also “devise plans for the effective and timely supply-chain management of the stockpile, in consultation with appropriate Federal, State and local agencies, and the public and private health care infrastructure.”

This doesn’t translate to “fight with governors and accuse them of stealing supplies.”

Let’s go through The Letter.

Dear Senator Schumer:

Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way.

He manages to dictate the first three words as an adult would, but then the enraged toddler breaks through. The adjective is “Democratic.” The letter was a request to expedite the provision of supplies IN A PANDEMIC – one that threatens the lives of millions or billions of people. It was not a public relations letter, it was a doing government work letter in a dire emergency. Imagine Franklin Roosevelt sending rude childish letters to Republican Senators a few hours after Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t “sound bites,” it wasn’t “incorrect,” it wasn’t “wrong in every way.” That’s a stupid spiteful child talking, not an adult head of state in a dire emergency.

As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job.

By most of the accounts Trump is aware of, possibly, but what Trump is aware of is an infinitesimal fraction of what there is to be aware of. In the real world hardly anyone gives an account in which Pence has done a spectacular job. If Pence had done a spectacular job, medical workers wouldn’t be wearing garbage bags and hospitals wouldn’t be desperate for ventilators.

The Defense Production Act (DPA) has been consistently used by my team and me for the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, medical supplies, ventilators, and other related items. It has been powerful leverage, so powerful that companies generally do whatever we are asking, without even a formal notice. They know something is coming, and that’s all they need to know.

He sounds like his ridiculous son-in-law prattling about “the best things.”

We have given New York many things, including hospitals, medical centers, medical supplies, record numbers of ventilators, and more.

He talks as if he were the king and the states were his peasants. He’s not “giving” anyone anything; he doesn’t own the “many things” so they’re not his to “give.” He’s not our boss. We’re not his humble petitioners. We don’t have to kiss his ass for providing (let alone for not providing) emergency medical supplies.

You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus. As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most others.

Says the petulant childish brat who spent weeks telling us COVID-19 was going to disappear quickly and doing nothing to prepare for it.

If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers)

People are dying. He needs to shut up about his poll numbers.

and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the “invisible enemy.” No wonder AOC and others are thinking about running against you in the primary. If they did, they would likely win.

Focus. The subject is a lethal pandemic and thousands of deaths.

Fortunately, we have been working with your state and city governments, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, to get the job done.

Is screaming insults for weeks on end “working with”?

You have been missing in action, except when it comes to the “press.” While you have stated that you don’t like Andrew Cuomo, you ought to start working alongside him for the good of all New Yorkers.

DARVO. Trump is the one who refuses to work with people he doesn’t like, and he certainly has not been working alongside anyone for the good of all New Yorkers.

I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became President.

Most of us neither knew nor cared what a terrible human being Donald Trump is until he became president.

Could someone drop a piano on him now?

Pinocchio-lookalike Jared Kushner takes the stage at a pandemic press briefing to say: “The President wanted to make sure that we had the best people doing the best jobs and making sure we had the right people focused on all of the things that needed to happen to make sure that we can deliver” while Anthony Fauci has to have a security detail.

The government’s top infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, is now receiving security protection after becoming the face of the nation’s coronavirus response — and a target of some supporters of President Donald Trump.

…

HHS Secretary Alex Azar had grown concerned about the growing online attacks against Fauci — whose profile has soared since he started regularly flanking Trump at White House coronavirus briefings, where he occasionally corrects the president — and asked the department to conduct a threat assessment. The decision was then conveyed to the Justice Department, which approved the request to deputize security for Fauci.

Because the kind of people who love Trump are the kind of people who threaten Fauci.

Did anyone ever have to have a security detail because supporters of Obama were issuing threats?

Some of Trump’s most zealous far-right supporters have targeted Fauci online, arguing that he’s worked to undermine Trump by publicly disagreeing with the president, and have begun spreading conspiracy theories about Fauci’s role.

Following that link…

But to a vocal minority of right-wing blogs and pro-Trump pundits, Fauci is the embodiment of the establishment forces that have been arrayed against the president since he came to Washington. And those voices are getting louder amid rumblings about Fauci’s standing with Trump as the president itches to get the economy restarted in the coming weeks.

“A Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving stooge,” read a Saturday headline on the American Thinker, a far-right website, latching on to a WikiLeaks-released email that showed Fauci praising Clinton for her Benghazi testimony as secretary of State.

[I]t’s the right-wing fringe that has been going after Fauci, largely due to the fact that he tamps down Trump’s excitement over quick-fix solutions, such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, his desire for stringent restrictions on gatherings and his publicly dire predictions about the potential death toll that are at odds with Trump’s more optimistic outlook.

And it’s all about the outlook. The virus is watching, and if it sees everyone perking up and saying “We can do it!!!!” it will shrivel up and disappear. No wonder the fringe-right are mad at Fauci!

Reaction to Jared Kushner’s new role as replacement for Anthony Fauci is not universally ecstatic.

The president has been very hands on the microphone, the podium, other people, but he has not been busy responding to the pandemic.

Very hands on, but only starting 13 days ago. And not very hands on.

And did he come across as an empty suit? Yes he did.

Oh wait, it turns out Kushner is totally qualified to save us from the pandemic.

Data, models, decisions, informed, people, focused, things, deliver, teams, barriers, lines of effort.

It’s a fucking pep talk. From Howdy Doody.

You’re fired.

The Navy announced it has relieved the captain who sounded the alarm about an outbreak of COVID-19 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Capt. Brett Crozier, who commands the Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier with a crew of nearly 5,000, was relieved of his command on Thursday, but he will keep his rank and remain in the Navy.

Crozier raised the alarm earlier this week that sailors on the ship need to be quarantined to stop the spread of the virus. His plea for assistance quickly made headlines.

And we can’t have people stopping the spread of the virus, so get him out of that command.

The move was announced in a briefing by Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly Thursday evening. The official reason for Crozier’s relief of duty is a loss of trust and confidence, according to the officials who spoke to NBC News

I have zero trust and confidence in the people who did this.

Nancy LeTourneau explains why many journalists were suckered into thinking Trump had changed simply because he managed to pretend to be serious for a few minutes on Tuesday.

It is infuriating to watch political reporters get sucked into the nonsense delivered by this president over and over again. But David Roberts recently described why that happens.

Ask someone who’s been in an abusive relationship with a malignant narcissist. One reason they’re able to maintain appearances/jobs/etc. is that they are relatively rare & unusual & the normal people around them simply can’t absorb that they are what they are…They try again and again, thinking there must be normal human intentions & emotions in there somewhere. It’s just remarkable how far someone w/out shame or conscience can get by exploiting this cognitive/emotional blindspot.

I do it myself. I can’t help continuing to think – despite knowing better – that if someone sat him down and explained to him (there would have to be a gag in his mouth) what an evil monstrosity he is, he would get it. That’s ludicrous, but it seems to be deeply wedged into my thinking process.

When Roberts writes about how we keep trying to see normal human intentions and emotions in someone who has never exhibited them before, it is because projection isn’t merely a matter of assuming that others are capable of our worst instincts. In general, we tend to project all of our responses onto others in an attempt to understand their actions. Since most of us aren’t malignant narcissists, it is difficult for us to grasp the levels of depravity exhibited by those who are.

It is. I can’t seem to do it despite knowing it. I know it and I don’t know it. If I really knew it, knew it all the way down, I would just ignore him. I can’t just ignore him, so clearly I don’t know it in that way. I want him to realize what a shit he is, and I guess wanting that makes it impossible for me to internalize the awareness that he never will because he’s not made that way.

Juxtaposition.

Six hours ago:

Soon after tweeting that, he retweeted this:

On the one hand he calls the Democratic Senate minorily leader “Cryin’ Chuck” and accuses him of complaining, and on the other hand he shares someone claiming that he doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican.

I beg to differ.

Well then we’re all doomed.

Dozens of Trump administration officials have trooped to the White House podium over the last two months to brief the public on their effort to combat coronavirus, but one person who hasn’t — Jared Kushner — has emerged as perhaps the most pivotal figure in the national fight against the fast-growing pandemic.

Jared Kushner is not a person you want as the pivotal figure in a pandemic.

I put that with careful, jaw-clenching restraint.

What started two-and-a-half weeks ago as an effort to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures has become an all-encompassing portfolio for Kushner, who, alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government: Expanding test access, ramping up industry production of needed medical supplies, and figuring out how to get those supplies to key locations.

How are we defining “experts” here? Are they experts in what’s needed in a pandemic, or in extracting profit from whatever situation they find themselves in? We need the former more than we need the latter.

Kushner’s group, which some have characterized as an “all-of-private-sector” operation in contrast to Vice President Mike Pence’s “all-of-government” task force, has had its successes – including airlifting emergency medical supplies to the United States, crowdsourcing mask and glove donations, and rapidly devising a last-ditch plan for hospitals to maximize ventilators.

But the behind-the-scenes working group has also duplicated existing federal teams and operations, and its focus on rapid, short-term decisions has created concern among some health-agency officials, according to interviews with 11 people involved in Kushner’s effort, including senior government officials, outside advisers and volunteers on the projects, as well as other health department and White House officials.

…

“You can’t have enough good smart people working on a problem of this scale,” said Andy Slavitt, who helped lead the Obama administration’s 2013-2014 HealthCare.gov repair effort and is now advising on Kushner’s coronavirus response. “But they have to be organized with a clear chain of command.”

And they have to be good smart people. What reason is there to think Kushner is either good or smart?

[T]he effort’s makeshift nature has unnerved even some recruited to aid Kushner’s team, who described it as a process unlike any other traditional disaster response. Kushner’s team has stepped in to coordinate decision-making at agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the scope of his authority now exceeds that of Health Secretary Alex Azar, the one-time leader of Trump’s coronavirus response.

He’s the criminal and corrupt president’s son-in-law. Before that he was a slum landlord. None of this bodes well.

About those naughty medical workers with their “insatiable appetites” for the tools to save our lives – Politico has a jolting story:

Last week, a Trump administration official working to secure much-needed protective gear for doctors and nurses in the United States had a startling encounter with counterparts in Thailand.

The official asked the Thais for help—only to be informed by the puzzled voices on the other side of the line that a U.S. shipment of the same supplies, the second of two so far, was already on its way to Bangkok.

Oops. The shipment was put on hold (which I guess means told to bob around in the ocean) while the geniuses in the Trump administration figured out how to cover their asses aka “what went wrong.”

The heightened scrutiny comes as American health care workers complain of severe shortages of masks, goggles and gloves amid a nationwide spike in coronavirus cases, and as Democrats rip the administration for shipping aid to other countries while vastly underestimating America’s own needs.

Foreign aid is a good thing, both inherently and instrumentally, but at the same time it’s more than a little pointless to send supplies Over There while ordering in supplies from Over There. Cut the duplication of effort, I would suggest. Also…talk to each other. Find out who is sending what where, and co-ordinate.

There is bipartisan agreement on the need to resupply American hospitals and take care of domestic shortages first. But the issue is tricky: Other countries’ ability to fight the virus directly affects the U.S.—an infected man from Wuhan, the sprawling capital of Hubei province in China, is believed to be the first to bring the novel coronavirus to American shores in January—and millions of Americans work, serve, and study overseas in countries that have been hard hit.

Point taken, but at least co-ordinate, and also tell Trump to shut the fuck up with the blaming medical workers for needing equipment.

H/t What a Maroon

Jennifer Rubin at the Post compares Trump to governors like Newsome and Cuomo:

If you watch New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or most every other governor (except the bumbling Ron DeSantis of Florida) at his or her daily news conference, you will see someone in command of the facts (e.g., number of infected patients, number of beds, number of ventilators, number of discharged patients) and with a clear sense of mission.

On Wednesday, Newsom rattled off lines like this: “Again, the prioritization of our day in date discussion interaction is the issue of hospitalizations and ICU beds. Roughly hospitalizations to ICUs are running about 41, almost 42%. You extrapolate that out based on the graph that was just provided in the model, we’ll exceed that phase one surge capacity of 50,000 somewhere in the middle part of May, and if you get up to about 66,000, that’s based upon our current modeling, we’re looking about 27,000 ICU beds that we’ll need to procure in this state.” Just imagine — no, you can’t do it — President Trump displaying that mastery of information.

A Trump who could do that wouldn’t be Trump.

The contrast between the governors’ level of sophistication and Trump’s abject ignorance manages to still shock and appall us. On Wednesday, Trump explained how his thinking on covid-19 had changed. “The severity,” Trump said. “I think also in looking at the way that the contagion is so contagious, nobody’s ever seen anything like this where large groups of people all of a sudden have it just by being in the presence of somebody who has it. The flu has never been like that. . . . Also the violence of it if it hits the right person.” The contagion is so contagious. That’s the president of the United States.

Always with the idiot mind-blind “nobody’s ever seen anything like this” when all he means is that he hasn’t seen it before and hasn’t been paying attention for the past three months.

You would think the president and vice president’s abject ignorance would be a source of embarrassment. Nope. They are locked in the right-wing media disinformation bubble. They find out details under duress. Only when things go very badly and their experts are forced to confess bad news do they grudgingly move into the real world. The change in “tone” that too many gullible reporters coo about is the point at which Trump’s lies, disinformation and self-delusion can no longer be sustained. No wonder he looks deflated.

Let’s hope he deflates all the way and we never hear his voice again.

They should have been prepared, says the evil maggot who was not prepared.

But isn’t he the guy who sent medical supplies to China without replacing them? Wasn’t he a tad unprepared?

Yes, he was.

Snopes has more:

It is also true that on Feb. 7, 2020, while critics contended that the Trump administration was doing relatively little to prepare for the coming pandemic in the U.S., the State Department announced it had facilitated “the transportation of nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies to the Chinese people, including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials” in order to help “contain and combat the novel coronavirus”.

Humanitarian relief is a good thing, but so is keeping supplies ready at home during a raging pandemic.

Evil maggot outdoes himself.

I wish someone would douse him in gasoline and throw a match.

Ahh theodicy, just what we need to distract us from pandemics and Trump telling the world he’s Number Wun on Fasebook.

Dude’s a theologian according to his profile. Ok so a theologian to theodicy is like infectious disease specialists to the coronavirus, yeah?

No, because there is no coronavirus equivalent in theodicy. There is no thing to know; there is no body of knowledge to master; there is no evidence to bring to bear. The theo of theodicy is a human invention, so expertise about it is like expertise about a literary character. You can know a lot about what people have said about the literary character, and a lot of opinions about what the author meant by the character, but you can’t have the equivalent of knowledge about how a virus operates. It’s not the same kind of thing.

So, sure, there could be things theologians have said that would make a kind of sense of a god who sent pandemics to kill millions of people. A kind of sense, because you have to accept a lot of very dubious premises first, but still something. But is it a kind of expertise that mere civilians shouldn’t try to challenge?

No. No, because “God” is also the god of the pews who tells people what to do, and we all need to be free to challenge that god and what the priests say about it.

Anyway…I for one am not “telling God how to deal with evil”; I’m telling godbotherers that their god is evil. The god is supposed to be in a position to tell us what to do, so there shouldn’t be professional-credential obstacles to saying why that god 1. doesn’t exist and 2. is a shit.

Dear god.

NPR reports:

Malaysia has the largest number of COVID-19 cases in Southeast Asia with more than 2,900 and counting.

Oh dear, what to do – I know, tell women to stop being such bitches.

Malaysia’s Ministry for Women, Family and Community Development issued a series of online posters on Facebook and Instagram with the hashtag #WomenPreventCOVID19. It advised the nation’s women to help with the country’s partial lockdown by not nagging their husbands.

That’s right. If he drops his clothes on the floor when he takes them off it’s her job to pick them up, not “nag” him to put them in the laundry bag or even – gasp – do the household laundry.

The ministry also advised women to refrain from being “sarcastic” if they asked for help with household chores. And it urged women working from home to dress up and wear makeup.

And to wear catch me-fuck me shoes, and a thong, and nothing else.

“(It) is extremely condescending both to women and men,” Nisha Sabanayagam, a manager at the advocacy group All Women’s Action Society, told Reuters. “These posters promote the concept of gender inequality and perpetuate the concept of patriarchy.”

Also the concept that men should never do anything useful at home no matter how much time they spend there or how hard women are working.

H/t What a Maroon

The Grand Canyon remains open to visitors despite pleas to close it.

Calls mounted Tuesday for the federal government to close Grand Canyon National Park after the popular tourist destination saw its first case of the coronavirus in a hospitality worker.

…

Members of Congress and city, county and tribal officials have urged the federal government to approve a request from the park to close amid concerns that social distancing can’t be maintained.

“We understand that closing an iconic destination like the Grand Canyon is not an easy decision, but we implore you to do everything in your power to prioritize public health and not interfere with locally informed decisions to close parks where appropriate,” members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources wrote to the Interior Department.

So what’s the Interior Department doing? Counting the take? Watching Fox News? Stockpiling toilet paper?

The Navajo Nation also renewed a request for the park to close. Anyone headed to the park’s East Rim must drive through the tribe’s reservation, which has seen five deaths and nearly 150 coronavirus cases.

It’s smallpox blankets all over again.

The Park Service has been deciding whether to shut down individual sites on a park-by-park basis, in consultation with state and local health officials. Neither the Interior Department nor the Park Service immediately responded to requests Tuesday on the status of the Grand Canyon’s request.

…

Several of the country’s most popular national parks have closed, including Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Glacier, Arches and Canyonlands. Some of those calls were made at the request of governors and health officials in those states.

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey has listed parks, golf courses and other outdoor recreation areas as essential. A spokesman did not immediately return a message Tuesday asking whether the governor would support closing the Grand Canyon.

At first I was taken aback by the golf courses exception, but then I remembered that social distancing is pretty easy with golf, so maybe that’s not entirely absurd. Getting outside is good, and maybe golf courses can play a role there.

But the Grand Canyon is a place where people cluster at the viewpoints. Shut’er down.

Updating to add: yes the Grand Canyon is big, no that doesn’t mean you can allot an equal share of its total space to each visitor. As I said, people cluster at the viewpoints.

As always, women take the hit.

The “stay home, stay safe” mantra against the coronavirus is having dreadful — and even deadly — consequences for women in Turkey, where, activists warn, measures to contain the outbreak are exacerbating the rampant problem of femicide and domestic violence in the country.

…

At least 18 women have been killed across Turkey, 12 of them at home, since March 11, when Ankara confirmed its first COVID-19 case, according to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a civic group dedicated to fighting violence against women. The killers included spouses, partners, ex-husbands and ex-partners as well as male relatives of the victims, the platform’s tally shows. 

…

About 470 women were killed in Turkey last year, at least half of them by husbands, partners, exes and male relatives, the platform says.

If something goes wrong, attack the nearest woman.