If you thought that conspiracy theories were a modern invention, this one banged around the US newspapers in September 1918. Sadly, the influenza didn’t respect any borders and raged through Europe as readily as it did the USA: Riverside Daily Press 19 September 1918 SPANISH INFLUENZA BROUGHT BY HUNS Head of Health Section of Shipping Board … [Read more…]
Ed Yong writes in the Atlantic about America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral and ends with this: 9. The Habituation of Horror The U.S. might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is. Daily tragedy might become ambient noise. The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal. Like poverty and racism, … [Read more…]
Over on the Atlantic, James Parker writes about The Funkadelic Album That Predicted the Future The legendary band could almost blend in with other acts during the counterculture of the ’70s. But today, the group looks like a pure phenomenon.
One scathing essay and one graphic strip in the New York Review Daily which need sharing: The first is an essay from David Rothkopf: ‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader? “Being president,” former First Lady Michelle Obama has said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” In … [Read more…]
The Guardian, again, hits the nail on the head with this spot on essay “Republicans are hypocrites. They happily ‘de-funded’ the police we actually need” by David Sirota: After two weeks of police violence and protests, Republican politicians have been pretending to have a fainting spell over the phrase “defund the police.” “There won’t be … [Read more…]
From a Mother Jones Daily newsletter by Ben Dreyfuss: June 11, 2020 Fifty-seven years ago today, noted segregationist George Wallace — then of Alabama, now of Hell—infamously stood in the schoolhouse door in an attempt to block two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending the University of Alabama. In response, President John … [Read more…]
In the Guardian today, June 3, 2020, is an essay on the remarks from Jane Goodall about farming practices and food habits. “If we do not do things differently, we are finished,” she said. “We can’t go on very much longer like this.” She called for people to be lifted out of poverty, pointing to … [Read more…]
In the Columbia Journalism Review is an essay The bad news quietly buried during the pandemic by Zoë Beery: With the world’s attention glued to the coronavirus pandemic, news about anything else has been slipping farther and farther down the proverbial front page. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s been going on. Whether by design or … [Read more…]
I just finished reading Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time and am fascinated that these events from 1951 – 1952, the HUAC hearings, have such resonance with today’s administration. Today, thieves are thick, grandstanding the operative mode, derision and bullying are the norm as they were with Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon in this era. Employing such … [Read more…]
ProMED Digest, Vol 95, Issue 78 [3] Yemen: MSF report Date: Thu 21 May 2020 Source: Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) [edited] The number of deaths occurring in the COVID-19 treatment centre that MSF runs in Aden, Yemen, speaks to a wider catastrophe unfolding in the city, the international medical organisation said today [20 May 2020], … [Read more…]