David Frum is on a tear.

The author in question is Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum points out that however good US technology may be, its political system is backward and primitive and thus renders the technology far less useful than it could be.

[N]o officials from the Chinese Communist Party instructed anyone in the United States not to carry out testing. Nobody prevented American public officials from ordering the immediate production of a massive number of tests. Nevertheless, they did not. We don’t know all the details yet, but one element of the situation cannot be denied: The president himself did not want the disease talked of too widely, did not want knowledge of it to spread, and, above all, did not want the numbers of those infected to appear too high. He said so himself, while explaining why he didn’t want a cruise ship full of infected Americans to dock in California. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

We could have gone all-in on testing weeks ago, but we didn’t because we have a childish self-dealing incompetent in charge. That’s not some weird fluke, it’s a product of the political system we have. Technology might as well not exist if someone like Donald Trump can prevent us from using it when it’s needed.

Without the threats and violence of the Chinese system, in other words, we have the same results: scientists not allowed to do their job; public-health officials not pushing for aggressive testing; preparedness delayed, all because too many people feared that it might damage the political prospects of the leader. I am not writing this in order to praise Chinese communism—far from it. I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism. This means that our political system is in far, far worse shape than we have hitherto understood.

Like…our political system is on a ventilator and probably won’t survive.

What if it turns out, as it almost certainly will, that other nations are far better than we are at coping with this kind of catastrophe? Look at Singapore, which immediately created an app that could physically track everyone who was quarantined, and that energetically tracked down all the contacts of everyone identified to have the disease. Look at South Korea, with its proven testing ability. Look at Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to speak honestly and openly about the disease—she predicted that 70 percent of Germans would get it—and yet did not crash the markets.

The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor. When human life is in peril, we are not as good as Singapore, as South Korea, as Germany. And the problem is not that we are behind technologically, as the Japanese were in 1853. The problem is that American bureaucracies, and the antiquated, hidebound, unloved federal government of which they are part, are no longer up to the job of coping with the kinds of challenges that face us in the 21st century. Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare—these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.

We don’t have any of that, because too few of us believe in it and because we have a voting system ever more weighted toward the people who don’t believe in it. We don’t believe in educated bureaucrats and universal health insurance and good public schools; we believe in money and profits and ruthless greedy “success.”

Of course he did. Pandemics and cratering economies and millions thrown out of work are one thing, and sticking to a habit of racist name-calling is another.

Fifteen hours ago. No one has deleted it so far.

Stronger and more racist! If he has anything to say about it.

Updating to add: he’s “you’re not the boss of me”ing. One hour ago:

Loathsome disgusting poisonous man.

The Guardian reports:

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s three theatres will close, in line with government advice. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Swan Theatre and the Studio Theatre at The Other Place will all shut for an “undetermined period of time”, the company has said.

Shakespeare was used to that. Playing companies often had to hit the road to tour when plague in London closed the theaters.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Benefits and their absence.

Just a point here, this is not just a problem with Covid-19.

Look at how many of those people work with food.

Now go look at the CDC:

Sick food workers have been implicated in foodborne illness outbreaks caused by at least 14 different germs. Many of these outbreaks could be prevented simply by making sure that food workers don’t work while they are sick.

Now Covid-19 isn’t transmitted through food so far as anybody knows, but its quite startling when you read:

20% of food workers say they worked at least one shift with vomiting or diarrhea in the past year.

Oh yeah and they’re more likely to show up while sick if – it is a busy restaurant that doesn’t give paid leave. 19 states don’t follow the CDC’s food safety protocols, and of those that do they aren’t exactly well enforced.

This was in 2016, and Trump isn’t big on regulation, so I’m guessing not much has changed.

Food poisoning hits one in six Americans every year. In the UK it is closer to one in 66.

While comparing different countries in terms of food born illness isn’t exactly reliable (different countries have different methodologies) I think that big a gap says something in and of itself.

Think about Chipotle. It is famous for giving people diarrhea, as recently as 2018 it was found to be behind an outbreak in Ohio that sickened hundreds of people.

Well we’re in 2020, and here’s what The Guardian is saying about them:

Earlier this year, Chipotle settled with the city’s (New York) department of consumer and worker protection for firing an employee who took sick leave. The department is also conducting a deeper investigation of the chain’s workplace practices.

Chipotle isn’t the exception, in fact so far as sick leave is concerned it is better than those listed in the tweet – but it speaks to a deeper problem within the US workplace.

You can see that in Donald Trump’s election to president. He’s infamous for being an incredibly shitty boss, he was known for it before he became president, hell he had a TV show that centered on him being a shitty boss, but somehow this was never a big deal.

It was him being “tough” rather than him “having the temperament of a spoiled three-year-old”. And the results are bad, but there is such a culture of expecting the boss to be an asshole that I honestly think he’s going to get a second term anyway because that’s what someone who is in charge looks like for all too many Americans.

There is a recklessness that is actively harming America, that is actively sickening the nation, where being authoritative matters more than being effective. There has got to be a shift towards pragmatic “not being a bastard” at some point.

Trump insists on continuing to tell us he’s got this whole thing under control. He has nothing under control.

America’s top infectious diseases expert is warning that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die unless every citizen joins an effort to blunt the coronavirus pandemic — only to be contradicted by President Donald Trump, who insists the virus is under “tremendous” control.

Fauci knows what he’s talking about, and Trump knows how to flap his lips.

Amid calls for a stronger federal response, Trump urged the nation’s governors late Monday morning to try to secure additional medical equipment on their own without waiting for the federal government to intervene, though he did say they would try to help.

“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves,” Trump said on the call…

So they’ve got it totally under control, but try to get the necessary medical equipment yourselves. Not because they haven’t got it totally under control, you understand, but because…because…as a lesson in self-reliance, yes, that’s it. Stand on your own two feet like a good Amurrikan.

Trump flagrantly contradicted Fauci’s warnings at a White House briefing Sunday at which he celebrated the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates to 0% to help the shocked economy.

“It’s a very contagious virus, it’s incredible, but it’s something we have tremendous control of,” the President said.

Well. You know. If you asked him what he actually meant by “tremendous control,” he would babble helplessly. He doesn’t mean anything he says, he just cranks out words. Dangerous words.

In a possible indication of how Trump’s repeated misinformation is having an impact, a new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal Sunday showed that while seven in 10 Democrats are worried that they or someone in their family may catch the coronavirus, only 40% of Republicans, who are more likely to believe what they hear from the President and in conservative media, feel the same.

If they keep that up the Democrats will swiftly outnumber them, in the most literal sense. Maybe think again.

Another one of these “we’re safe because we’re on Team God” fools:

Asif Ashraf Jilali is failing to take into account that God could very well want people to do the right thing, pay attention to medical advice, have a care for other people, and the like. The Koran is full of a whole lot of instructions for how people are to act, right? So the God in question seems to pay attention to what people do, and to judge them for it. Isn’t it blasphemous to think God wants people to be so stubborn and reckless that they insist on gathering in crowds to talk about God instead of being sensible?

One issue:

Another issue: prisons.

Why Trump’s lies matter:

It’s bad enough that President Trump has relentlessly minimized the coronavirus threat for nakedly political reasons, disastrously hampering the federal government response to the crisis, with untold consequences that we can only guess at.

Determined not to be outdone by his own malice and depravity, Trump is taking new steps that threaten to make all of it worse. He’s telling millions of Americans to entirely shut out any and all correctives to his falsehoods. He’s insisting they must plug their ears to any criticism designed to hold his government accountable for the failures we’re seeing, even though such criticism could nudge the response in a more constructive direction.

And even though getting it wrong means death. He’s actively, openly telling lies to get people killed – not in a war or a rescue mission or a space flight but simply to soothe his own throbbing ego.

He’s on a tear about news media corrections of his Google nonsense.

note Trump’s declaration that in a larger sense, the media is not being truthful at a time of crisis. Trump is using his megaphone to tell the American people not to trust an institution they must rely on for information amid an ongoing public health emergency, all because that institution held him accountable for his own failures on this front.

His wounded vanity up against the survival of millions of people? No contest.

Early on, Trump raged at the media for supposedly hyping coronavirus to rattle the markets and hurt him politically. Here, too, Trump told the American people not to believe the press even as it accurately informed them about a severe public danger that Trump himself was busy misleading them about.

…

The big story here is that we’re now seeing just how catastrophically unsuited Trump’s brand of autocracy truly is in the face of a crisis like this one. As Anne Applebaum details, Trump’s enforcement of a loyalty code against civil service professionals, and his retaliation against them for exposing inconvenient truths, paved the way for Trump’s pathologies to hamper the response, because “Trump has very few truth-tellers around him anymore.”

As the pandemic spreads. Awesome.

Jesus won’t let you get the COVID-19 because you’re not pansies.

Oh look, now Chase Strangio is just plain grooming kids.

The quarantined people of Italy are singing to each other from balconies or windows.

Tenor Maurizio Marchini did just this, taking to his balcony to serenade the rooftops of his hometown, Florence.

Marchini sings Puccini’s impassioned aria from his opera Turandot, ‘Nessun Dorma’, or ‘None shall sleep’. After the aria’s climax with a high B, Maurizio picks up his son and repeats the line Vincerò!, or ‘I will be victorious.’

At full from-the-rooftops volume, which makes the little guy try to cover his ears, but it’s great for the rest of us.

Pandemic? What pandemic?

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos…

When progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders say “now is the time for solidarity” amid the coronavirus outbreak, they likely do not mean that employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—should be asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to their co-workers who have either contracted the deadly virus or been forced to take time out of work because of what is now a global pandemic.

But that is exactly what executives with the grocery chain are asking its employers to do, even though Bezos could effectively give them unlimited paid sick leave during the current national emergency without barely a scratch in his bank account.

In a letter sent to employees earlier this week, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey explained that one of the options available to workers was for them to “donate” their “paid time off” (pto) days to a pool that other workers could draw from.

In other words one of the options available to workers is to have fellow workers give up their pto. For the workers giving up the pto it’s not an option but a sacrifice.

Journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley, who broke the story with reporting for Motherboard, notes that “as a subsidiary of Amazon, the world’s biggest company, Whole Foods could easily afford to pay its hourly employees for sick days taken during the coronavirus outbreak without breaking the bank. Instead, the company has put the onus back on workers, and they’re not happy about it.”

In Mackey’s letter reviewed by Motherboard, the executive stated: “Team Members who have a medical emergency or death in their immediate family can receive donated PTO hours, not only from Team Members in their own location, but also from Team Members across the country.”

Though such labor practices are not unusual—with workers in various sectors and industries pooling accumulated sick leave for a colleague experiencing a long-term illness—doing so in the face of a global pandemic, in which all members of society are equally at heightened risk, the move was seen by critics as shortsighted, tone deaf, and cruel. The fabulous wealth of Bezos only increased the ire for many.

They’re just sore losers.

Meanwhile Devin Nunes is going on Fox News to tell people to go out and mingle with crowds.

Reuters has more:

Berlin is trying to stop Washington from persuading a German company seeking a coronavirus vaccine to move its research to the United States, prompting German politicians to insist no country should have a monopoly on any future vaccine.

Germany’s Health Ministry confirmed a report in newspaper Welt am Sonntag, which said President Donald Trump had offered funds to lure the company CureVac to the United States, and the German government was making counter-offers to tempt it to stay.

“The German government is very interested in ensuring that vaccines and active substances against the new coronavirus are also developed in Germany and Europe,” the newspaper quoted a Health Ministry official as saying. “In this regard, the government is in intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: “We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag.”

The German government probably suspects, probably correctly, that if Trump did succeed in luring CureVac here he would surround it with marines and small nuclear weapons, and demand a hefty percentage of the sales.

Karl Lauterbach, a professor of health economics and epidemiology who is also a senior lawmaker with the Social Democrats, junior partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, tweeted in reaction to the Welt am Sonntag report: “The exclusive sale of a possible vaccine to the USA must be prevented by all means. Capitalism has limits.”

Not in Trump world it doesn’t. Just think of all the billions he could make from a vaccine!

Trump has been trying to monopolize a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Trump administration has offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a Covid-19 vaccine, German media have reported.

As one might offer the officer in charge of the lifeboat “large sums of money” to push everyone but the briber and the briber’s friends over the side. If one were a festering piece of shit.

The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the US, the broadsheet Die Welt reports, citing German government circles. The US president had offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac “large sums of money” to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the newspaper, Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the US, “but for the US only”.

The Guardian asked the German government for comment but

the German health ministry would only confirm the accuracy of the quotes attributed to one of its spokespersons in the article.

“The federal government is very interested in vaccines and antiviral agents against the novel coronavirus being developed in Germany and Europe,” the spokesperson quoted in the original article had said. “In this regard the government is in an intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

The German health ministry spokesperson declined the opportunity to correct any inaccuracies in Die Welt’s account.

Which is a broad hint that there are no inaccuracies to correct.

H/t Omar

Of course they did.

After it was widely reported that Tom Hanks and his wife were able to simply walk into a clinic in Australia with the symptoms of a common cold and instantly get a coronavirus test – which was positive – Americans are beginning to ask out loud, “Why can’t we get tested?“

Because $$$, that’s why. Which is more important, people’s survival or more money for Trump and his goons?

Silly question.

According to President Obama‘s Ebola Czar (last night on Rachel Maddow‘s show), Ron Klain, Trump “privatized“ the testing here in the United States. Instead of taking the World Health Organization (WHO) test kits which are cheap and widely available all over the planet, and having them distributed across the country back in December, or January, or February when we knew this disease was spreading in the United States, Klain said that Trump has outsourced the testing to two big American companies, Quest and Labcorp. Trump’s head of HHS, Alex Azar, is the guy who doubled the price of insulin when he was CEO of Eli Lily company. Do he and Trump owns stock in these testing companies? Why are we refusing to accept the WHO test that the entire rest of the world is using?

Because there is money to be made. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with that.

Cool, this is helpful – the Surgeon General of the US tells us to stop bickering and focus on this health crisis problem.

Right, because we’re the ones who’ve been doing all that, as opposed to the bloated ignorant orange menace he works for.

If the results are positive are they going to tell us?

We can’t believe anything they say. We’re on our own.