Polarization: In the Desert Southwest, People go INDOORS in Summer.

Barr Nun:

 Creating an hospitable climate for an infection on the body politic.

As the US and the world struggle to come out of lockdown without corona-virus numbers roaring back, the toll of making a puerile sport of a pandemic by politicizing it for twitter and TV soundbites takes on starkly grim characteristics. For while one party argues that we must save the economy by re-opening in the face of escalating infection rates, the other insists that tens of thousands of people doing exactly what the NIH recommends they not do, had no effect on the virus spiraling out of control during the precise timeframe when it would have done so if it were true. The idea that their "opponents" arguments that church gatherings have an equivalent moral imperative has no effect on the street protesters' sense of the moral justification for their own actions.

But since I posited in a post I entitled The Heat is ON, that, "if the Chinese reporters are correct, as they have been all along, and AC helps spread the virus, the long hot summer we are about to experience could very rapidly turn into a nightmare".

Which it has.

Yet even as the East coast cities, where Springtime and warm weather brings more and more of the populace to spend a greater amount of their time outdoors where they are less likely to be infected by asymptomatic carriers, it has gone completely uncommented on that in the exact locations the virus is making the greatest headway are in just those places where the summers' heat has the opposite effect, driving people who were outdoors for many of their activities INdoors for a cooldown from the stifling heat.

People in Phoenix like to chide visitors to their hideous city who complain it is like living inside a blast furnace that, just as you snowbirds go inside during the winter, we go inside during the summer, coming out to enjoy what is ideal weather during that time of year when you are all shivering from the cold and shoveling yourself out of snowdrifts.

Florida, Texas, Arizona, Southern California's Imperial Valley and Orange/LA counties, all have spiked to their highest levels of contagion yet since the beginning of the pandemic precisely when I said  they would, and for the exact reason: Air Conditioning.

The fact that there has been no proof that A/C (which was the topic of the Chinese study referenced above, one that hypothesized that the flow of air used to cool it could be instrumental in spreading the deadly microbe) has gotten exactly zero attention, even as the temperature of the entire globe is spiking to give us the hottest atmosphere humanity has ever roasted itself in; preferring as we do, to blaming one another's actions, or inactions, to explain the sudden increase in infections.

But even if it is not A/C per se that is causing the spike, and there's as yet no reason to assume it's not, just the existence of the cool environment A/C provides to the sweltering masses means that in a region where people were not in the kind of close proximity to each other in late February and March when the virus was making its invisible inroads into our most vulnerable populations in the Northeast, the Southwest's populations were not so inclined to spend their time gathered in such indoor enclaves, or at least not close to the extent that they are now. And Lo and Behold! The infections in the Northeast have diminished as dramatically as those in the Southwest have taken off (unlike the flights of the carrier of the same name).

But could that not be because the people in one part of the country are more and more outdoors, whereas those in the other are spending more of their time indoors? Well, that question, having never been asked by any one besides a rather sad little man posting on a rather pathetic blog that's read by, at most, a handful of readers, will never be answered. We will instead continue to be led by the nose by our malevolent Furor, clutching a Bible in one hand while grabbing a pussy with the other, and his profit-driven mass (hysteria) media doppelgagner, neither of whom, even in the thralls of a global plague, has evinced the slightest inclination of promoting anything but their own self-interest. 

But let's consider how A/C works, as expalined by a concise article at HVAC.com:

Here's how Air Conditioners draw heat energy from the house and move it outdoors:

• Warm air from inside the home is circulated across an evaporator, where the refrigerant absorbs heat from the air. At this point, the refrigerant transforms from cold liquid to hot vapor, allowing the warm air to become cooler.
• The refrigerant vapor moves to the compressor, within the home’s outdoor unit. The compressor compresses the refrigerant vapor, increasing pressure and temperature.
• The refrigerant then moves to the condenser, where it is condensed back to a liquid, allowing the heat to release, exiting the unit through the fins.
• Cooled, liquid refrigerant then cycles back into the home, where the expansion device regulates its flow back into the evaporator to repeat the cooling process.

This cooled air, much like the cooled air in meat-packing plants, is much more friendly to the Covid-19 virus than the hot air it has removed. So even if the A/C unit itself has no role in recirculating already Covid-laced air to other parts of your living space (an assumption I find hard to countenance) it most certainly creates an artificial environment that's far more hospitable to this specific microbe, allowing it to live longer and infect more people, than the environment it has replaced.

Given the attributes of the current surge in infections and the locations in which their growth rates are the most startlingly robust, it is hard for me to believe that its is not precisely the heat and the effects it has on people's behavior (ie seeking indoor spaces, where no one is wearing a mask, and where anyone who is infected is shedding their longer-lived viral particles into air that is then recirculated) is not instrumental in causing a resurgence in the nation's Covid-19 infection rate.

Desperately ill in Brazil.

"Brazil"

Brazil, all hearts are contemplating doom

We stood inside our grandma's room  

And softly murmured "someday soon"

We kissed and clung together.

Then, tomorrow brought more disarray

As mourning took our smiles away

With still a million things to say.

Now, when early death rains from above

Corona's killed our every love

There's one thing I'm certain of

They're wiping out our old Brazil.

[Bolsonaro instrumental as Handmaiden of Death]

Now, new sorrow bends our heads each day

This mourning stench our sad bouquet

As Covid reeks of death's decay.

Now, we hear the twilight of the gods

We know now we can't beat the odds

From Bolsonaro's lies and frauds. 

We burn and kill that old Brazil.

That old Brazil

Cremate the old in Brazil

Brazil, Brazil.

As new cases flare up, Hospitals are Flooded.

Dastardly Deed inspired by the bastardly creed of Racism..

The language of climate change pervades headlines describing corona virus outbreaks, almost as though the media realizes they are symptoms of the same disease: Climate Change. They don't of course, but the click bait of certain phrases works no matter what phenomenon you are describing, so it is hard to tell sometimes which they are referring to until you remember that the increasingly dire forms the latter is taking this year receives nary a whisper of analysis from the talking heads who know they garner far more ad revenues from corona talk than from reporting Climate Change Catastrophes.

That's because you simply can't chastise people for not wearing a mask when it come to behavioral changes that are just as necessary to stave of the worst effects of globalized warming. You have to be able to announce an uptick in automobile manufacturing as a good thing, when in fact it feeds the flames of the ongoing conflagrations. Arizona is currently, perhaps not surprisingly, given its name, burning up. A dozen wildfires have torched nearly 400,000 acres  there, leaving parts of the state, particularly the southeastern portion, charred ruins. Likewise Siberia. Both are burning up and burning down at  unprecedented rates. The economies of the two Petro States in which these tragedies are occurring have pegged their economic futures to the continued exploitation of  untrammeled oil production while engaging in unfettered flaring of enormous quantities of natural gas, and as a direct consequence, both find themselves fighting a raging virus and raging flames at the same time. Raging flooding, another consequence of an over-amped hydrological cycle that burdens the atmosphere with unprecedented  loads of H2O, are also ravaging the landscapes of both countries, as well as those in their proximity. As one announcer after the other makes it clear that Corona Virus has no respect for boundaries, it has never once been spoken, except by yours truly, that the same condition exists for climate change: the floods inundating Central America, and Mexico, the waters ravaging Ukraine, the heat blistering the Southwest and the Siberia have no respect for State boundaries. They only react to the increasing load of CO2 and methane we put there by our increasing reliance on burning oil and gas for what we now know are largely consumed to power our non-essential activities, such as whisking ourselves away on international flights or burying ourselves at sea in an ocean-going hulk with thousands of other well-heeled but bored bourgeoisie.

In other words the Petro States may be the source of the crude lifestyle we live, but every other economy, including those in the South Pacific, where island nations chastise other countries, have all put their eggs in the lucrative basket of tourism, which is completely reliant on jet flights delivering the well-heeled turkeys for them to pluck to their very last buck. But airplanes are the single largest contributor to, not only burning fossil fuels, but doing so five miles up in the  stratosphere where they can more efficiently do their damage. And all that the trillions of dollars in magic money that's been created in the last few months has been slated to do while the virus is ravaging our bodies as well  as our body politic and economies, is to enable a return to the failing economic paradigm that brought the bloody virus to our shores in the first place. We are being burdened to support, by the Administration of a President who declared, "America will never be a Socialist Country", some of the richest MultiNaitonal Corporations on our increasingly crispy planet, all of which have spent and still do spend, while the President flings open the door of the US Treasury to their piracy, more money on paying accountants to decrease their tax burdens than they actually pay in taxes. Now we see first hand the blackmail our only black male ever elected President was faced with upon entering the Oval office that kept him from effecting any of that "Change" he promised during his campaign. "Want to revive the economy GW left in shambles? This is how you are going to do it" ... Or else. Now we have been subjected to the very same blackmail, and with the very same lack of even a peep of protest against the ravaging of the future GDP in order to keep businesses afloat that should be left to go bankrupt. They are wards of the State, kept viable for the jobs they create, not the goods they produce. That's Socialism, not Capitalism. It's Creditism, not Capitalism. We are all forced to bear the burden of the business culture's grand fiasco of paying the central Government to ease their continued existence by denying Climate Change and allowing, nay encouraging, the combustion of the last dregs of fossil fuels, despite the enormous cost in fossil fuels that in and of itself imposes, just to enable the scraping of the bottom of the barrel that fracturing the already earthquake-prone landscape of California, exemplifies.

Because Heaven forbid we should deprive the consumer nations of the world the ability to fly anywhere, infect anyone, and flee back home in time to bestow Sonny's birthday gift of a trip to Yellowstone because the Jersey Shores can't sufficiently satisfy his never-satiated urge to splurge.

But you'd  never know that to listen to the news. Just as you'd never know that the explosion of protests initiated by the Killing of Mister George has a direct link to the explosion of Corona virus cases happening all over the country. Instead all you hear is condemnation of the Orange One. Well-deserved, it can't be denied, but really? Never crossed your mind that the two could be related? Of course. But the media is full of cowards, afraid they will be seen as anti-black lives matter if they even hint that the spread of a deadly virus could have occurred during these lawful protests (since most of the country was still in some form of  lockdown, they may have been morally correct, but they were not legally so. They were in fact unlawful protests. Sorry. But they were).

But just as the media has largely decided that the nationwide protests against police brutality that's been focused on one easily identifiable minority, they prefer to ignore the fact that the form that protest took was more dangerous to that particular minority than even the police and the majority rule (in a Democracy, no less ... so maybe it's the majority Rule that's the problem? Just as it's Trump's tenure in the White House that has left it glaringly obvious that the Presidency itself has serious flaws, the Democratic principle of Majority Rules, despite the protections the flimsy coverage of the Bill of Rights begrudgingly provides (unless you want to own a howitzer) has problems right at its root, right at the base belief that if a majority of people believe it's OK to set police going after black people with deadly force because they're black, well than, it must be OK, 'cause it's legal).

That story captioned above details the plot of a husband who was tired of his wife, and didn't want to bother with rearing the child he had planted in her belly, so he shot her dead while driving her home from a birthing class (isn't that romantic?). Then  he shot himself, and called the police who he easily convinced some black man, who he later fingered, had held him up and shot both himself, his wife, and their unborn child. Boston's Mayor  Flynn declared, in the usual coded terms,

“I demand that the Boston Police Department continue to be extremely aggressive in cracking down on people who are using guns to kill innocent people (unless they're in uniform) … It’s intolerable. We will use every lawful tool to support our police officers in cracking down on gun-wielding criminals.’’ (Meanwhile the murderous psychopath, Flynn's fellow Irishman Whitey Bulger, was still roaming around scot free under the auspices of the FBI). (italics my own)

If the rampage through Roxbury that ensued, which resembled GW's War of Terror in microcosm, was among their "lawful tools", Boston was as mired in hateful racism as any Southern town in what has been made clear are the unapologetic States of the race-hating Confederacy of traitorous States of America, where a mere fifth of the States in this here Democracy, have surreptitiously imposed their will on the rest of the country and spread their own divisive, corrosive dogma of White Supremacy to their fellow pigment-challenged disciples throughout this nation, an alarming number of whom are apparently on Police forces.

Minnesota and Massachusetts are two of the Liberalest (I know that's not a word, but I like it) States in the country, so Black Lives Matter are not being what I would call iconoclastic. Theirs is not a trumped up reality but one they have to live with every day. What I am saying here, is that in order for them to do that, ie LIVE, they need to start behaving (and I've noticed a lot more masks, so that's a good start) as though the country, which does in fact include them, whether some people like that or not, is in the grips of a deadly pandemic, and as the alarmingly growing numbers are making it clear, their preferred method of protest is far more likely to kill them off in heretofore unseen numbers if they don't change their tactics. The fact that the media is, or may be, liberal, given the two Liberal States cited above, might not mean that they're reporting, or not, on the connection between the rapid rise in cases that exactly coincides with the start of the protests (with a 14 day lag ... the fact that the cases are in a much younger cohort only suggests an even stronger connection) might not be in their real longterm best interests.

Your Black life Matters no matter what is coming for you. Right now, despite the rhetoric, the far more deadly threat is invisible: but it is coming for you in far greater numbers, the evidence suggests, than for your paler compadres, so don't follow the example of the very people who revile you, the Trumpeters: wear those masks. It won't kill you to wear a freakin' mask. But the virus, now that will.

Flu Over Country: The American Heartless Land

                                                                     Partietag!

A Novel Danse Macabre.

Just as George W. Bush was the champion of climate change, dropping the GDP of the entire globe by sending the global economy into a tailspin, one so steep we have yet to truly recover from it, his environmental successor, in the form of DJ, continues to spin that disk, at an even faster pace.

As I have mentioned previously in this blog, specifically when GW was still in office, in order to contract the levels of CO2 exhaust into the atmosphere, the OECD countries, specifically the exceptional USA, (If everyone consumed like the US, global resource use would run up to a staggering 260 billion tons per year) must slow both their rates of growth and the combustion of the fuel of that growth: excavated hydrocarbons. What that basically means is that demand destruction must occur on a grand scale, and GW delivered the greatest hit to both domestic and global demand since the Great Depression. Now the DJ has outdone even him. GW got people thrown out of their homes at a previously unseen level, created mass unemployment in the one country whose consumers were far above any in the world for resource consumption, and curtailed the steady annual rise of 1.5%  in oil demand that had risen steadily for more than a generation before he crashed the ship of state, blinded by the continual fog of War, onto the rocks. Reef-er Madness, if you will. Bad for the citizens of the USA, a major gain for citizens and ecosystems of the World.

Obama trashed that model, and built back the failed system to clunk along on the last fumes of fossil -fuel extraction called fracturing, to hobble together a centralized economy built on the basis of Putin's Champions: Halliburton, Exxon, Silicone Valley, etc, all the usual suspects received federal subsidies, none more than greens. We must pretend we're green, like Europe, so Obama dutifully signed on to the useless Paris Climate Accords that did precisely nothing, and all-in-all got the economy back on track., That it was the wrong track seemed not to matter, it was the one that created jobs, and jobs together with resource extraction , creates the stream of federal tax revenues that keeps the belief in the bedrock strength of the US dollar and US debt intact.

But now DJ has trumped that by an astounding grand slam, not only following step-by-step China's policy on how not to stop a virus from spreading in your country (we should by now know this was a deliberate policy by his own pronouncements on the subject: he has blamed China for their bungled response, then followed it as a blueprint for his own administration's handling of it, having been shown its effectiveness in killing off that part of the population he and his Republican colleagues have time and again pointed to as a Liability on the USA's balance sheet: one that must be eliminated. Can't eliminate Social Security and Medicare, as the GW administration, following the Reagan administration's example, tried to do? Simple. Just use the virus to eliminate its recipients instead). However, the rampage of the virus through the country was causing the news media to focus their attention on the virus, taking the spotlight off him for the first time in his presidency, and he couldn't have that. So we were treated to the Corona Clown Circus for weeks, while the economy tanked at a breathtaking speed while the deaths of those parasitic oldsters climbed faster than his wildest dreams.

Unfortunately for him , but great for the environment, it brought down every single program he has championed. From the ecologically disastrous corn-based ethanol, demand for which has plummeted along with gasoline demand, to the fracking companies his Fed had provided cheap, ready-made dollars for, to the Petrochemical plants all lined up along the banks of the Gulf and the shores of the Mississippi to take advantage of that cheap ethane from the Permian basin's overproduction of natural gas, to the LNG industry, that heavily subsidized loans to politically well-connected companies like soon-to-be-bankrupt Chesapeake Energy, had enabled. The entire US economic future, having been configured to exploit the last fumes of fossil fuels exploitation to cover the world in cheap unbiodegradable plastic, was coming down around his ears, our ears. All of which meant that their combustion has been curtailed to a greater extent than any other time in the nation's history: DJ is a Climate Champion! Almost 46 million Americans have now filed for unemployment claims while 85,000 jobs have been shed by the In U.S. oilfield services companies thanks to the plunge in demand for oil.

But wait! There's more!

Not content with the slowing rise in the rate of infections, the administration has decided to host its own spectacular spectacular, congregating a crowd of cheering yahoos in one of the States with the fastest rising rates of infection so as to goose the slaughter of the innocents to a higher power.

Perhaps he saw the Mauna Loa, Hawaii readings of CO2 from May and noticed how they were still climbing. They actually did reach 420ppm at one point, but not on 4/20 ... it took another month, but they are stabilized at ~418ppm, well above last May's reading of 414.14 ppm, a good, in fact historical, 4.18 ppm higher than a mere year ago:

Daily average CO₂ on June 1, 2019: 414.14 ppm
Daily average CO₂ on June 1, 2020: 418.32 ppm

That clocks the largest acceleration in CO2 accumulation since such measurements were started.

Meanwhile methane leaks from abandoned wells, of which there are an ever-growing number, since rig count has plummeted (U.S. shale production is slated to fall by half over the next year due to the massive drop in the rig count, putting overall American oil production below 8 mb/d within a year’s time and it will take years, if ever, before production will rebound anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels).

Yet CO2 and methane atmospheric readings have never been higher, while aerosols, thanks to the curtailment of the combustion of coal, have never been lower, a harbinger of a long hot, and fiery, summer. All of which suggests a Perfect Storm for a summer in which temperatures have never been higher, not even those of last year, which literally had never been higher (in the timeframe of human existence).

That's because, although we may have already forgotten about the unprecedented intensity, scale and duration of the fires in Australia at the end of last year and the beginning of this, the atmosphere isn't allowed that luxury. Nor can it discount the fires raging in Siberia, in that other Petro State, Russia, where Putin doesn't actually deny climate change, he extols it, suggesting it will make the vast plains of the tundra suitable for farming ... a supposition, that, like the cock-eyed pronouncements of our own Head of State, have consequences. Because many of Russia's fires, fires that have consumed already ten times the area of last year's already extensive burns, were started deliberately by farmers anxious to make Vlad's predictions reality by burning down swaths of the taiga forest, much as Bolsanaro's Brazilian mafia is simultaneously burning down the Amazon rainforests.

This is a triple whammy that most don't take into account: not only do these fires pour enormous quantities of stored carbon into the atmosphere, they destroy a major resource that was not only performing carbon sequestration, but deprives us of the oxygen those forests were producing, not to mention the prodigious amount of oxygen they are voraciously consuming during their conflagration. Oxygen they will never replenish, because they will never regrow.

Simultaneously America is deliberately burning down its own forests in the Southeast by strip mining them to send to Europe where they are burned as biomass to generate electricity: but whether or not they are burned in situ ,or burned in an incinerator, they are still burned, their carbon still exhausted into the atmosphere, their O2-generating and carbon sequestration capacities destroyed. And to add fuel to the fire, they have to be harvested, transported to ports, and shipped overseas, where they must be unloaded, transported to the combustion chambers of Germany and not-so-Great Britain, each step of which has its own carbon footprint, making their conflagration a far greater calamity than the similar destruction that is now happening on the other side of the county where Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and California are all hosts to wildfires that are already (it's only June!) busy billowing enormous plumes of CO2 into the atmosphere, while further north the Alaskan permafrost releases ever-increasing amounts of its carbon store into the air right on the threshold of the Arctic, which is already warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe.

Now usually, the Mauna Loa readings of CO2 concentration go down from their June 1'st high, but given that the economies of the world have yet to truly fully open back up, perhaps the extra load that opening will result in will keep that from happening to the extent that it usually does. So instead of slowing down, carbon accumulation will again speed up.

Oh, but wait. That's right.We have the US President actively ensuring that the US economy will never again attain the growth rate it has enjoyed in the past. So The Donald is our ray of hope, his ploy to use his Partietags as Super Spreader events, sure to keep the economy shrinking, since he has already stated it will not be shutdown again, no matter how many "warriors" have to die; shrinking it like Grover Norquisling's vision of Government: until its small enough to throw out with the Ba'ath water. And the smaller the US economy, the better chances for curtailment of the burning of the fossil fuels that are making the planet hostile to life as we know it. Bad thing for Americans. Good thing for the world. Just like our President, n'est-ce pas?

The Slate Dawn

The Slate Dawn

1. The Burial of the Dead

We thought April was the cruelest month, bleeding

Corpses piled during the dead of night, mixing 

Tragedy and desire, stirring 

dull roots of Potter's Field 

With spring rain and pain.

Winter kept us snowblinded

To what we believed a foreign germ.

Cowering now in enforced solitude, 

Splendid isolation is anything but;

 Just a little lonely life deprived of Ubers'

rides through desolate streets.

Then summer surprised us when 

falling numbers began rising.

"Ask not by whom the death tolls swell."

Memorial day now has new graves to

Grieve us, new demons to seize us and rail about.

Let out at last into the sunlight

We can drink coffee on the sidewalks,

Bicycle down Linden Strasse,

Send the children to Summer camp.

My cousin's still confined to her bed

Where she lies alone and frightened. 

 Her Face Time face down in a lonely room

Unassuaged by well wishers' panning on Zoom.

The wealthy flee to the mountains now devoid of trees,

I read much of the night, holed up 'til winter's freeze.

What possible roots can clutch, what branches grow

Out of this Corona rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A stream of Netflix images, not where the sun beats.

And the dead, they give no succor, the Vicodin no relief, 

And the tombstone no sound of slaughter. Only

A shadow enshrouding dead flowers

Left by the righteous under the shadow of this bedrock

For the dead flock in droves to show you nothing's different.

Your shadow at mourning strides beside you

While death's shadow is evening stochastic lies you thought true;

Either will show you fear soon becoming dust,

yourself.

You gave me Hyacinth in a Bucket

It was a sweet Bouquet,

But when we went out to lay it on our friend's decay

The streets were full, and our progress met

With armed resistance and stinging spray;

Weak, my eyes filled with Pepper; I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.

Looking into the heartless light, of fires

Scorching everything in sight, now turned

Desolate and empty as the endless sea.

Oda Mae Brown, famous clairvoyante

Caught the virus nevertheless.

To enable her well-known congress with the deceased

She'd wielded a wicked deck of cards. Here, she said,

Is your card the seven of swords, or the Huntress,

the lady of situations?

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back

Which you are forbidden to see. 

I do not mind the Hanged Man nor fear death by drowning.

I fear crowds of infected people,
Unmasked, they walk 'round me in circles.

Neither MERS nor SARS are in your stars,

But I could write a novel about the virus 

Coming for you, poor death's Fool,

For whom the Horrorscope spring's a surprise.

Reading your fortune in dead men's eyes,

The Emperor's raiment foretells who dies.

Unreal City, swamp and bog

A failed nation's dawn under a brace of fog.

A crowd flowed over Brooklyn Bridge, so many;

I had not realized death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent are now exhaled,

As each soul fixed their eyes under six feet.

Flowed up the hills and down the street.

To where the others were dressed and waiting

For a dead sound of the final stroke of doom.

I saw one I knew, and stopped his crying

By calling his name and death defying, said

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Had it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? 

Or has your sudden loss disturbed its bed?"

"Oh keep the dogs far from it, that's friend to men,

Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"

You! Hannibal Lecter - mein doppelgänger - mon frère!

Fear of Emaskulation From the President who uses BabyJane Hudson as his make-up Consultant.

                                                           Sell me caMay and go away.

 Mask?! Just say "NO!"
MAGA: Makeup Anything Getting Aged 

"I find them emasculating", he whined, fluttering dainty eyelashes that float above eyes deftly highlighted by a makeup regime considered incomplete without a touch of maskara. He apparently doesn't think a swipe of eyeshadow, a few strokes of a pencil to enhance his meticulously tweezed eyebrows, on top of an Almay liquid foundation of wrinkle-filling glop, are in the least bit feminizing. Orbs carefully contoured with eye shadow from multi-hued palettes that deliver the ultimate in depth and dimension hide his swollen, puffy bags; all are laid down with loving care unmatched by the models of Elle, the drag queens of Paris, the Madames of New Orleans, or the streetwalkers in San Francisco's tenderloin district, none of whom are as well acquainted with the myriad of products necessary to produce the President's cosmetically-derived, meticulously-engineered image.

Trumple's make-up Consultant..

 Such is the daily make-up regime of the man who claims it's emasculating to wear a mask. Or, more accurately, a cloth mask over the liquid and powder-based mask he's already wearing; and wearing for no other reason than an ersatz Vanity. An inch of pancake make-up is unabashedly spackled across cheeks brushed with rouge to enhance cheekbones disappearing under mounds of sagging flesh. Eyes are shaped with a contour pencil found only in most women's handbags, they are unfamiliar to most American Males. A dizzying array of product is used to sweep carefully cultivated and expertly clipped strands of thinning hair as The Trump Toilette requires it be dyed, tinted, teased, tucked, and more carefully and expensively coiffed than Liberace's. Yet the man wearing the most feminized and daintily-engineered hair sculpture in the world, fussed over more obsessively than that of any teenage girl readying herself for the Prom, thinks a little mask will make him appear feminine.

And yet, were he not so obsessed with his own image, perhaps he would have been astute enough to expostulate a real reason or two for his reluctance to don a cotton, rather than a cosmetic, face covering.

More than six months since the first infectious outbreak in China, we have arrived at barely two Max factors determining who gets ill and by how much:

1) viral load
2) time of viral exposure

The larger the load and the longer you're in an atmosphere filled with virus, such as a sick patient's room, the more likely it is that you will contract the virus, and the more likely it will be severe the larger the initial load and the longer you were exposed to it.

So, at least for now, washing your hands every 10 minutes or washing every item you bring home from the grocery store is probably not going to help.

But what that makes me wonder is, wouldn't that mean that if you unknowingly have the virus and were wearing a mask for any prolonged period of time, you would end up giving yourself a lethal dose, whereas had you not worn said mask, you may never have even come down with symptoms?

Is that too speculative? Is my reasoning off? It's my impression that when the medicos talk about "shedding virus", it's not like a mangy dog's coat, or a stripper's clothing, but is what you are breathing out. The virus isn't being scraped from your skin by your clothes rubbing against it, it's coming out of your air passages and being released to the environment around you. Unless, that is, you're wearing a mask. Then, each time you breathe, it isn't being released to the environment, (that's the point of the mask, after all, n'est-ce pas?), but is instead staying within the fibers of the mask to be breathed right back in again ... over and over .... hour after hour.

To me, what that suggests is that the two factors we've learned about how the virus gets deadly: viral load and exposure time, are both dramatically, perhaps lethally, increased by the requirement that asymptomatic people wear masks. Being masked while they are unknowingly already infected could well be making it highly probable that they are making their own case of COVID-19 that much worse. And the more effective the mask, the worse they are making their infection: this could help explain why so many hospital personnel are getting such serious cases: even a mild exposure is re-enforced with every breath they take thereby increasing the probability it will become a serious viral load.

This is why surgical, handmade, or cotton masks are far safer for the layman than N-95 masks: they don't spread your droplets nearly as far as wearing no mask would, but they let them out, just not at such a distance (half a foot, say, as opposed to the three feet, and further, sans mask), so you aren't breathing as many of them back in again, whereas with an N-95 mask, 95% of the virus you are shedding are available for you to inhale yet again.

It is only when someone is all image and no substance, the famous Emperor without Clothes comes to mind, that such fear-based obsession with your looks develops.  In short, wearing a mask emasculates for the presumed reason that it violates the core principle of masculinity, which is to show no weakness. But when you make it so obvious that the main reason is your own fear, your exaggerated fear of looking weak, when that fear is so palpably displayed it has the opposite effect than the one it intends: it broadcasts weakness. And that's what our DJ has been airing for months: US weakness that grows ever more apparent the longer the Donald occupies the Offal Office.
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The Killing of Mister George: A Black Comedy in Two Acts.

It's now a full week. A week during which any enemy of the USA is staring agape at the realization of their fondest dreams as a minority population explodes into protest, spreading a killer virus throughout their own and the wider community while demanding justice. But that justice, as long as it has been in coming, will matter little to the millions more that will be infected and die thanks to the "demonstrators", as the NYT and other media call them even as they incinerate buildings, loot businesses, and riot like there were no tomorrow. Which there won't be for many of them. As there also won't be for their relatives and friends they bring the plague back home to.

Buy one Get one Free.

Although there has been a word or two about the consequences of such lawless congregation, the lack of any pleas or forceful remonstration is hard not to notice. Just a single week ago, there were pictures of pool parties, beach gatherings, church attendance splashed all over the media, all of which raised the specter, now being pretty much borne out by the documented rise in Covid cases, of an increase in the spread of Corona Virus caused by the relaxation of social distancing and the re-opening of non-essential businesses such as hair salons and tatootoo parlors With all this mob activity of the last week, why is there barely a peep about the explosion in infected people that is sure to result from it? Have we been being lied to all this time? Because that's exactly the impression such silence on the most dire implications of this mass hysteria forms. How can a single pool party, or any of the myriad other Super Spreader events that were said to have brought on the uncontrollable spread of the disease in the spring compare to this indiscriminate mixing of tens of thousands of individuals congregating en masse? Of whom as many as maybe 85% have absolutely no immunity? Oh ... they're wearing masks? Really? What masks encourage (and there are far more "demonstrators" without masks than with) is the elimination of social distancing, as they provide a false sense of security, such that people wearing masks get far closer than advisable to other (NO one knows whether they themselves  are infected) potential carriers of Covid. Because masks don't provide protection at that close range, and most of those worn are not N-95, but are more like surgical masks, which are designed to keep droplets from getting out, not prevent them coming in from the patient being operated on, so viral particles are small enough to go right through the cotton material and into the respiratory tract.

The prelude we saw in the Spring in New York City, New Jersey, and other hotspots of the pandemic's rampage was one that called for a swift, determined response to save the healthcare system from collapse by protecting as many people as possible from exposure. Those precautions have now been thrown to the wind, all the dutiful sequestering nullified in a single week. The danger to the heathcare system was still, despite the re-opening of the economy, an existential threat before this outbreak of mass hysteria. The spike in cases it will occasion will be on a scale, not of a second wave, but of a deadly inundation. That what the USA's Provocateur-In-Chief wanted was a riot of just such proportions he has made quite clear, the proof being right there in the remarks he twittered with the obvious intention of inciting violence ... not "to glorify" it, as Twitter so timorously chided ... but to INCITE it.

 Although it has been forgotten in the relentless monopolization of the airwaves by Corona coverage, before the virus struck there were demonstrations in France by Les Gilets Jaune, for a YEAR; demonstrations in Hong Kong; uprisings in Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Thailand, Indonesia: the entire globe was calling for an end to the neo-liberal regime that was tightening a noose around their necks, yet from not one single leader anywhere else in the world was there any such statement as that of the USA's Provocateur-in-Chief throwing down a gauntlet in a Dirty Harry incitement to "Go ahead, make my day", that the US President, relishing the sudden impact it would engender, twittered out contemptuously to both provoke the demonstrators and alert his minions to gear up for battle ... which they obligingly did. That the crowds of young people looting stores, and vandalizing businesses, torching cars and properties played so easily into his hands doesn't show them for pursuers of justice. That their despair, anxieties, and hopelessness are justified, few really had doubts about before, but now ...

Now that they have shown themselves to be such easily manipulated pawns of Power, it is sad to contemplate their fate. As the infection rate skyrockets, the suffering and the bodycounts brought about by their self-destructive rampage will spike right along with the summer's record-shattering heat and incidents of uncontrollable wildfires, while not an iota of justice will have been served. Like the Occupy Wall St demonstrations that had a similar lack of anything concrete to demand as a condition for their unoccupying Wall St, this mob action has no endgame. OWS demonstrated that action is not everything, that contemplation is necessary for the discovery of the way forward and for the refinement of the will. But this inchoate mob action has guaranteed only one thing: that the number of innocent deaths these brutish actions will bring about will be staggering. And the largest number by far will be suffered by their own people. Yet the amount of any remorse, feeling of responsibility or accountability for the lives of those laid low by their fiery display of disapproval of a single man's despicable, cold-blooded, and deliberate ignition of a powder keg of pent-up (literally) rage, by those that reacted by ransacking the place will be precisely what it always is: Zero. And for one simple reason: it is not justice that is being sought; it is Revenge.