Three years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice, I initially posted a piece that I’ve re-posted here every year since. Today, June 20, 2020, it is once more the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the actual solstice officially occurs at 5:44 p.m. EDT/21:44 UTC this evening. This year I decided to post the piece on my fiction blog, stonedcherry.com . You can see it there, and I hope you enjoy it.
It had been 3,249 days – nearly nine years – since Americans went to space aboard an American launch vehicle and from American soil, when the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, bearing the Crew Dragon capsule with two astronauts aboard, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 3:22 p.m. EDT on Saturday, May 30. The launch broke a hiatus that existed since the last U.S. manned launch, that of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on July 8, 2011, and during which only Russian vehicles, launched from the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, brought Americans to space.
The occasion was so momentous I decided I needed to be there, near the launch site, to see America’s return to manned spaceflight. For several years, in the 1980s, I covered the space program as a journalist and saw many launches, manned and unmanned, from KSC and adjoining Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. In the intervening 35 years my interest in space and America’s place in it drifted, as it did for much of the country. All that changed Saturday.
As impressive as the launch was, the tens of thousands of people who had come from all over the state of Florida, from all over the country, and even from abroad, to see the launch, was incredibly gratifying. To me, that was a big part of the story Saturday, just as it was three days earlier when similar crowds turned out, only to suffer disappointment when weather caused the launch to be scrubbed about 15 minutes before the planned liftoff.
Despite nine years during which no manned launches originated on American soil, people clearly are still interested in space exploration, and that interest is now passing to new generations of young people and children, generations which are likely to see people again set foot on the moon, and then going on to other planets, maybe even doing those things themselves.
As I’ve said before, to me perhaps the biggest tragedy of the cut-backs to the space program that happened after the last moon voyage occurred in the 1970s was that there were generations, billions of people, billions of children who were born and lived on this planet, but who were not alive as humans walked on the moon. All they could do was what people did for eons before American astronauts set foot on our nearest natural satellite, which was look toward the heavens, toward the moon, toward the planets and stars, and wonder what it would be like to go there, to dream about doing so. And now that dream once more is coming close to becoming a reality.
It could be as early as 2024 when we go back to the moon. And not many years after that when we send a manned mission to Mars, departing from the moon, which would serve as a stepping stone to reduce the cost and difficulty of breaking free from earth’s gravity.
Saturday’s launch marked another first: It was the first time that a launch vehicle and capsule built by a private company, SpaceX, carried astronauts into orbit. This is the new direction of spaceflight, a partnership between NASA and private enterprise, not just for private contractors to assemble parts and systems designed by NASA, but to design, build, and operate complete launch systems. Hot on SpaceX’s contrail is another private space venture, United Space Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two aerospace giants, which also is hoping to carry astronauts into orbit.
We clearly have come a long way since the early days of the space program. Tuesday marked 55 years since, on June 3, 1965, astronaut Ed White made the first American spacewalk, remaining outside the Gemini 4 capsule, which he shared with Command Pilot James McDivitt, for 23 minutes. More recently, we have come up from what was probably the absolute nadir for the country’s space program when, 10 years ago, then-NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden – himself a former astronaut – told Al Jazeera television that he had been charged by President Barack Obama with the “perhaps foremost” task for the agency: “ . . . to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”
There was no thought of that Saturday as the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule rose from Pad 39A into the blue Florida sky, carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station (ISS), 263 statute miles above the earth’s surface. Even as riots and violence was tearing apart cities across the country, and the nation was still reeling under months of lock-downs occasioned by an invading virus, the feeling of pride and happiness among those gathered along the shores of the Indian River or on the beaches and bridges and in the parks of Brevard County – people of all races, genders, nationalities, and ages – was evident.
Perhaps reflective of the feeling of those present would be the words of SpaceX founder and its self-styled Chief Technology Officer, Elon Musk. Himself born in South Africa and a citizen of three countries, including this one, Musk has described the U.S. as “[inarguably] the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth,” calling it “the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been.” I think few present Saturday would have argued with those words.
The Ride Up and Docking
The next crucial part of the mission came Sunday morning, 19 hours after launch, when the Crew Dragon capsule docked with the ISS. The docking went flawlessly, too, almost eerily smoothly, and it was enthralling watching it unfold on C-Span back in the confines of my living room. One wishes that terrestrial television transmission of sports and other events went as smoothly as the video being beamed down from space.
Behnken and Hurley, both Air Force test pilots, even got to pilot the capsule manually for awhile as they sped around the earth at 17,500 MPH in pursuit of the ISS, catching up with it at 10:16 a.m. EDT Sunday. The only apparent mishap was when Behnken bumped his head on the hatchway, causing some bleeding he mopped up with a handkerchief, as the astronauts came across from the Crew Dragon into the vestibule of the space station.
Welcoming Hurley and Behnken aboard the ISS were American astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Antoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner. Vagner on Saturday had captured a rare image of the launch of the Falcon 9 as the ISS passed east of Cape Canaveral.
Cassidy later told reporters that the Crew Dragon emitted a new car smell.
“In fact, there was a little bit of space smell in the vestibule, Cassidy said. “When we got that hatch open, you could tell it was a brand new vehicle, with smiley faces on the other side, [a] smiley face on mine — just as if you had bought a new car, the same kind of reaction. Wonderful to see my friends and wonderful to see a brand new vehicle.”
Comparing the ride up with his previous ascent on the Space Shuttle, Behnken said the liftoff was smoother, largely due to the Shuttle’s twin and powerful solid rocket boosters, though other parts of the ascent were rougher.
“But Dragon was huffing and puffing all the way into orbit, and we were definitely driving or riding a dragon all the way up,” he said. “It was not quite the same ride, the smooth ride, as the Space Shuttle was up to MECO [main engine cutoff] — a little bit less g’s but a little bit more alive is probably the best way I would describe it.”
The next manned SpaceX launch is projected to be around Aug. 30. But even given the successes of the SpaceX launch system, there will be at least one more American astronaut, Kate Rubins, to be launched on a Russian rocket in October. The U.S. pays the Russians $90 million per seat for those launches, but that probably will soon turn around and the Russians will begin paying the U.S. to launch their cosmonauts on our vehicles, at a more economical cost of $55 million per seat. A big part of the cost saving results from SpaceX’s use of recoverable and refurbishable first-stage boosters, unlike the Russians’ non-recoverable launch system.
After Saturday’s successful launch, Musk couldn’t help but get in a dig at the Russians during the post-launch news conference. In a jab at Russian space agency Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin who, in 2014, had said the U.S. might as well “deliver its astronauts to the ISS by using a trampoline,” Musk, sitting in a panel chaired by NASA Administrator James Bridenstine, quipped, “The trampoline is working.” Musk quickly added, “It’s an inside joke,” as he and Bridenstine both laughed.
While Rogozin’s spokesman was less than gracious, saying what happened Saturday should have happened a long time ago, Rogozin himself took Musk’s comment in stride.
Tweeted the Russian space chief to his American counterpart, “Please convey my sincere greetings to @elonmusk (I loved his joke) and @SpaceX team. Looking forward to further cooperation!”
A rivalry that has gone on for more than six decades isn’t likely to abate any time soon, cooperation aboard the ISS or not. For now, Americans have a lot to be proud about, and they showed it at the Cape on Saturday.
Featured Image: SpaceX Falcon 9 with Crew Dragon capsule lifts off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center Saturday. Photo by NASA/Bill Ingalls.
If you’re old enough to remember the Vietnam War, or if you’ve done some research on it, you probably know the term ‶fragging.″ While the practice predates the Vietnam War, it became an all-too-common practice during that conflict, and the word ‶fragging″ came into the vernacular during the Vietnam War years.
The term comes from the fragmentary grenades that often were used by American soldiers to kill their own platoon and company commanders who were deemed (rightly or wrongly) to be incompetent or abusive, or who ordered their commands (often acting on orders from above) into situations considered especially dangerous. Estimates of successful and attempted fraggings during the war run from 800 to more than 1,000.
If you’ve been watching or listening to what much of the national media has had to say about Donald Trump during the ongoing coronavirus drama, things amplified by the rank-and-file never-Trumpers in the country and so-called ‶leaders″ of the Democractic Party, you might agree that it is not an exaggeration to call what is going on ‶fragging.″ The President could leave the Rose Garden and walk across the surface of the Potomac River, or declare a cure for cancer, and the media would still pillory him. And it’s not just the President who is being hit by the virtual fragmentary grenades being hurled (and who, to his credit, has generally shrugged them off), but the general U.S. populace and, of graver concern, our very democracy.
At the more mundane level, as a former journalist I am embarrassed by the moronic nature of some of the questions members of the media ask at the daily White House coronavirus news conferences. Many of these alleged reporters are simply uninformed and unprepared, while others are clearly out to pose ‶got’cha″ questions that neither illuminate nor add to public knowledge. These questions clearly are part of a larger campaign to discredit the President who, again to his credit, is quick to bat them back and call out their not-so-hidden agenda.
No accident
With the 2020 elections approaching, this campaign is no accident. It’s the last-ditch attempt by the Democratic Party and its supporters in the anti-Trump media (which, in all fairness, is most of the media) to block the reelection of Donald Trump. To them, this is less a health crisis then a political opportunity, as dodgy as it might be. In the aftermath of one failed attempt after another at undoing the results of the 2016 election, this is their last shot.
As I’ve recounted on this blog, they watched their Russia hoax and the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine non-event, and their crown jewel, the impeachment fiasco, blow up in their faces. Along the way there were the Kavanagh confirmation and border stonewalling sideshows. The closest they’ve come to stymieing the President’s program, if not actually unseating him, was tipping the House of Representatives blue in 2018. But without gaining the Senate, it wasn’t enough for them to accomplish their goals, which was to unseat a duly elected President – just one they didn’t like.
Now picture their dilemma. Faced with the unnerving prospect of nominating a Socialist as their party’s candidate to stand off against Trump – architect of the best economy in anyone’s memory – in November, the party nomenklatura huddled, called in every chit in sight and some that hadn’t yet materialized, threatened, cajoled, and bought off every other candidate in the race, threw their compliant media machinery into high gear, and voila!, engineered the primary victories of the only logical choice they had left: A doddering soon-to-be-78-year-old (17 days after election day, to be precise) former vice president who thinks kids still listen to record players and who has a hard time remembering what state he’s in or what day of the week it is. Or, for that matter, even what office he’s running for.
In pushing Joe Biden to the forefront of the race, the party poobahs were counting on the power of reminiscence for a guy who, despite his paucity of any real accomplishments and being tinged with corruption throughout his career, was enough of a milquetoast that he could provide contrast with the brash Trump. What they probably weren’t counting on was how quickly Biden’s mental acuity was fading and how the man was virtually evaporating right before our eyes. Or that their chosen ‶pro woman″ candidate would be accused of rape.
Meanwhile, as the coronavirus drama accelerated, putting Trump front and center before the nation on a daily basis, Biden has retreated to his basement in Wilmington, issuing intermittent, sputtering, semi-coherent blasts, generating doubts (including by this writer) that he will make it to the convention, much less the election.
Even the usual useful idiots in the media have shown, through their facial expressions, their doubts about Biden as he babbles his way through on-air interviews. Don’t believe me. Listen yourself to the clip on that page. Be sure not to miss the part that begins at minute 1:00. It’s hard to decide whether it’s more amusing or frightening. If nothing else, it might make you feel sorry for this guy and question why his handlers are pushing him (often under the protective shield of his wife, Jill Biden) to make these appearances. Listening to these rambles, can you picture him leading a Scout outing, much less a national response to the coronavirus? The phrase that comes to my mind is, ‶We’re all going to die.″
Setting the record straight
It would be an impossible task to address every lie and every distortion put out daily by the media, but let’s look at just some of the biggies.
Myth: Trump didn’t listen to his medical advisers early on which allowed the virus to spread.
Truth: Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has led the country’s medical response to every viral epidemic since the early 1980s, said on multiple occasions in January and February that no one needed to be concerned about this virus. On at least two occasions, on Jan. 21 and Jan. 26, he told media interviewers that the risk to the U.S. was low.
On Jan. 21 Fauci told Newsmax interviewer Greg Kelly, “Obviously, you need to take it seriously, and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But, this not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” Then on Jan. 26 he told radio show host John Catsimatidis, ‶It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,″ adding, ‶It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China].″ Further, CDC Director Robert Redfield has said he agreed with Fauci’s statements at the time.
Fauci continued to make similar statements all the way until late February, including saying on Feb. 29 that Americans didn’t have to make any lifestyle changes due to the virus. Meanwhile, Trump announced the travel ban from China on Jan. 31 and it went into effect on Feb. 2, credited with avoiding many cases and attendant deaths being brought into the country from China. The kudos the media gave him for that? They called the travel ban ‶racist″ and ‶xenophobic.″ and Biden, without specifically referring to the travel ban, also called the President ‶xenophobic.″ On March 11 Trump announced a ban on travel from Europe, and on March 20 the EU, Canada, and other countries finally got around to announcing their own travel bans. By then Italy and Spain were on countrywide lockdowns as deaths already were piling up in those countries.
Myth: Trump was in denial about the danger the virus posed.
Truth: On Feb. 24, Nancy Pelosi, one of the President’s biggest critics, was urging people to attend Chinese New Year festivities in San Francisco’s China Town. “It’s exciting to be here, especially at this time to be able to be unified with our community,” Pelosi gushed at the time. “We want to be vigilant about what is out there in other places. We want to be careful about how we deal with it, but we do want to say to people ‘Come to Chinatown. Here we are, careful, safe, and come join us.’” On the other coast, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, another Trump critic, and New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot were urging city residents to go about their normal lives. Now who, exactly, was more in denial?
Myth: Trump has gutted the CDC and NIH and eliminated the pandemic task force that was attached to the National Security Council.
Truth: There is so much to be said about all his and the truth is so convoluted I’m not even going to try to detail it, except to say that funding for both CDC and NIH actually increased in recent years, mostly because Congress increased their funding against Administration requests to cut unnecessary positions. There has been no gutting. Read the details here.
Myth: Trump has muzzled Fauci and the other medical people on the coronavirus task force.
Truth: You’d have to be totally gullible and listening only to the media distortions rather than watching the actual daily White House news conferences (which the major networks and some cable networks have stopped carrying, either in full or in part) to believe this one. As in any major crisis-control environment, there is an attempt to coordinate public statements, which is just good management, but Fauci has made it clear that he has never been muzzled. In response to New York Times claims that he had been, Fauci responded, ‶I’ve never been muzzled and I’ve been doing this since Reagan.That was a real misrepresentation of what happened.”
Myth: The Democrats in Congress want to help working people and small business and it’s the Republicans who don’t care about them.
Truth: With Democrats claiming, under media cover, that it was Republican desire to turn the multi-trillion dollar stimulus package into a corporate slush fund, the main reason why Congress couldn’t quickly agree to get aid to millions of laid off American workers and closing small businesses was very different. It was because House Speaker and Democratic leader Nancy ‶Let Them Eat Ice Cream″ Pelosi drew up a competing 1,119-page bill stuffed with a Democrat wish-list that had nothing to do with the coronavirus or assistance to people, businesses, or hospitals. On the list were provisions to mandate ‶diversity″ on the boards of companies receiving stumulus funds, same-day voter registration and early voting requirements, collective bargaining for federal employees, carbon-offset requirements for airlines receiving assistance, a bail out of the U.S. Postal Service, paying off student debt, resurrecting the Obamaphone program and, of course, funding for the Kennedy Center in Washington. As House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (the same Jim Clyburn who was single-handedly responsible for putting Joe Biden back on the political map) put it in a conference call with his Dem colleagues, ‶This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” Never mind that people across the country were unable to pay their rent or feed their families. This was politics at its abysmal worse (which is really saying something).
Now that the funds earmarked for small business have already been depleted, Pelosi is again holed up in her San Francisco mansion gloating about her chocolates and $13 a pint ice cream stashed in her $24,000 refrigerator, holding up adding more funds to the program while Americans suffer through the biggest financial crisis to strike the country in 90 years. If there was ever more proof of her true priorities, this is it.
The misinformation spills over to hatred
Have no doubt: This campaign of misinformation by the media and the Dems is spilling over to generate further division and outright hatred among what is already a polarized country. You don’t have to look far to see it. To illustrate this consequence, intended or not, here is a random sampling of just a few of the hateful postings I’ve seen online in the past few days (never mind the factual lapses, these quotes weren’t selected for their credibility):
‶Trump is a mass murderer, period, and any person even considering voting for him should lose their voting rights forever.″
‶Trump’s response to the pandemic has been an unmitigated disaster, his press briefings are all about him telling lies about how great he is. His approval ratings have dropped. He will only help states get vital supplies if they suck up to him, while they compete against each other for protective clothing, ventilators, etc. He knew from the 20th of January about the risks, yet he did nothing until near the end of March in terms of social distancing. Even his own party wish he would STFU.″
‶The only political turds in this country are WR0NGIST G0P/C0NS. And only WR0NGIST G0P/C0N turds refuse to see it. You know almost nothing about politics, bro.″
‶the choice is between evil and the Devil Incarnate. the choice is between a lousy crook who has NO vision whatsoever and a racist criminal who is set on destroying our entire way of government, our entire way of economy and our entire planetary environment. I will vote for Biden because not voting or voting for a 3rd party candidate is to give a vote to the Rump in the White House…″
Nice stuff, huh?
Finally, on a personal note, I myself, your not-so-humble correspondent, have been the target of some of this hate in the past two weeks, in what might be the unlikeliest (but isn’t) of places. We have this neighborhood online thing, part of the nationwide NextDoor network, ostensibly to promote neighborliness among, well, neighbors. Along with the usual lost-dog postings and pictures of Bambi in peoples’ yards, some in the neighborhood have had the temerity to post things about the coronavirus, understandingly being a subject for conversation, and within a short time the Trump haters have jumped on and do their best to take over the threads and shut down everyone else. Not to exclusively defend the other side, since both sides put up their fair share of misinformation, but in a couple of cases, when I couldn’t stand the verbal fisticuffs any more, I’ve posted something intended to stop the politicization of what should, I think, be considered a national crisis and suggesting that people consider pulling together instead of apart
Some positive comments were posted in response to my postings, and then the anti-Trump haters jumped back on to spew their venom. They just can’t let anyone who disagrees with them or even has another view of things have the last word. In one case the whole thread shortly thereafter disappeared. But in another case one of my efforts was rewarded by having my post, intended to be conciliatory, deleted and my account disabled. Questioning NextDoor why this occurred garnered the fairly predictable blather about ‶neighborliness,″ blah, blah, blah (and, while it wasn’t applicable to my posting, there was boilerplate blather about not referring to the virus as a ‶Chinese virus″ even though we all know where it originated).
While I was being lectured about ‶neighborliness,″ what about its lack in those who got me blocked? I have little doubt but that the haters are probably still there. I haven’t bothered to go back even though my NextDoor-imposed exile has lapsed. I lived perfectly well before discovering NextDoor and I imagine I can live perfectly well without it going forward. And I don’t need more hatred and venom in my life.
I can survive without NextDoor, but can the country and our democracy survive this continual wave of hatred and misinformation? That remains to be seen.
Photo credits: Featured image: Peter Linford/Pixabay, used with permission; Jill defends Joe, Bloomberg/Bloomberg/Getty Images, used under Fair Use; Nancy tells the people to eat ice cream, CBS, used under Fair Use
When I was a practicing journalist I came to learn that there are few stories bigger than a big weather story. I still remember, more than three decades later, my managing editor at the daily paper where I worked standing in the middle of the newsroom as a tropical storm was headed our way and bellowing, “Blow it all out of proportion!” And we dutifully did.
So what’s bigger than a big weather story? The current furor over COVID-19, AKA the coronavirus, reminds me of our coverage of tropical storms and hurricanes, but on steroids. The media has certainly seen to the task of blowing it all out of proportion, making it bigger by far than a big weather story.
Now I can already hear the protests and mocking retorts. “But, BUT! This thing is deadly! It’s killing people! It’s a pandemic! It will destroy civilization as we know it!”
Yes, yes, I know all that (except the last one, of course), and I don’t mean to minimize the potential for death and destruction that this virus can wreak, any more than I would minimize the potential of seriously bad weather to kill and destroy. I’m also not intending to discourage people from taking reasonable precautions to protect themselves and others, though I am advocating that people not overreact. While some people, mostly older people and those with serious underlying medical conditions, are at high risk, many cases of the virus in the U.S. have been relatively mild. I think it’s both useful and even hugely beneficial to keep things in perspective and not run off the cliff by blowing things all out of proportion.
Striking a balance
As with any emergency, two factors are critically important. One is to recognize the danger and how to best address it, and the other is to stay calm and avoid panic. The kind of media coverage we’ve gotten on COVID-19, for the most part, has been heavy on the former (even as it was late in coming and largely distorted, which it remains), and exceedingly light on the later. I don’t think it has done what it could to make people safer and shockingly little to calm them or put things in perspective. We’ve seen the results of this as people rush to alter their everyday lives in ways that often are gross overreactions while not necessarily making them any safer. Meanwhile, the impact on the economy, with more than a 20% drop in the markets and massive slow-downs and shut-downs of whole industries, appears to be perhaps more harmful to the country than the virus itself.
We’ve watched on television as people in places, mostly on the West and East Coasts, stripped store shelves bare, as if they
were expecting some sort of plague of locusts to descend on them. By way of comparison, as recently as a few days ago everything remained normal here where I live in North-Central Florida. I felt people were being sensible, given the remote risk involved, and there were no signs of panic. And then the dominoes started falling here as elsewhere. The National Hot Rod Association announced it was postponing the Gator Nationals hot rod races in Gainesville, which particularly pissed me off, partly because I had already bought my ticket, but more because it is an outdoor event, furchrissake. Florida colleges and universities are considering moving all classes online. And then yesterday I visited some of the local stores and, while I wouldn’t characterize the atmosphere as one of panic, it clearly had shifted from the usual norm. I’m not an expert, but I have to think the chance of contracting a virus in the closed confines of a supermarket has to be greater than in the open air.
As in other places, along with water, toilet paper and some other products had been stripped from the shelves. While I can kind of understand and even expected the water – these stores run out of water even in more normal times – but toilet paper? Folks, this isn’t a dysentery epidemic. What possible need for toilet paper, beyond normal consumption, can anyone have? And it turns out this isn’t just happening in this country, but overseas, too. There is the family in Australia who (by mistake) ordered not 48 rolls but 48 cases of toilet paper. By their estimate, 12 years worth of the stuff. Now admittedly the order was placed before the coronavirus furor reached full bore, but the family is finding they’ve become very popular among people who can’t find TP in the stores in Oz and are re-selling the rolls as a fundraiser.
Watching people rolling carts topped to the brim with products, one wonders if they’re planning on withdrawing to underground bunkers to await the all-clear after the radioactive fallout from nuclear war has stopped dropping or for when the invading aliens have returned to their distant galaxy. In large part promoted by the media, this sort of rush is now under way across the country.
One report I got was from my contractor, who described the scene in coastal Mississippi: “I stocked up on enough food and supplies to last a month just in case we have to be isolated but I’ve seen people buying enough to last for the rest of the year. It’s absolutely ridiculous.” Number, as of today, of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Mississippi: 10, at least one of which originated out of state. Number of deaths in the state from COVID-19: 0. Mississippi’s population: 2.99 million.
Ridiculous, indeed.
Putting things in perspective
To further see how ridiculous, let’s put things in perspective a bit. As of today, this county where I live has had a grand total of no cases of coronavirus. The county to the east has had five cases, the county to the north has had one (which came from Georgia, the state, not the country), and one to the southwest has recorded one case. None of the other four counties that border on this county has had any cases, and no deaths have been recorded in any of these counties. The state of Florida, which has about 22 million people, not counting its many visitors, has so far confirmed 76 cases and three deaths, several cases involving people who had traveled abroad or were from other states.
Meanwhile, so far this year, if averages from other recent years can be relied on, in just 75 days something like 630 people have died in road accidents on the state’s streets and highways and another 51,000 or so have been injured. Perhaps if people paid more attention to their driving and less to concern about wiping their butts they’d be a lot better off.
I haven’t even been able to find accurate statistics on how many people have come down from the flu or died from it in Florida, but nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that as many as 49 million people this flu season alone have contracted the flu, there have been up to 23 million medical visits and 620,000 hospitalizations, and 52,000 deaths, including 144 children to date (that includes 12 so far in Florida). By comparison, the CDC is reporting 1,629 cases of coronavirus in 46 states and the District of Columbia, and 41 deaths, with no child deaths in the U.S. Not that any of those cases or deaths are to be dismissed, but the comparison with the illness and deaths from the flu and other things can’t be ignored. In this country, we see more than 67,000 people die each year from opioids.
Hysteria and playing politics
If you look objectively at what the current Administration in the White House has done to control introduction and spread of this virus, it has acted decisively and quickly. When it became apparent that the virus had originated in or around the city of Wuhan in China, the President on Jan. 31 ordered a limited ban on entry into the U.S. by most travelers coming from China, and it went into effect on Feb. 2. This past week, on March 11, the President ordered a similar ban on travel from Europe, with exemptions for travelers from the U.K. and Ireland, both of which were later added to the ban. And on March 13 he declared a national state of emergency, with the effect of releasing additional federal resources and funding to deal with the crisis.
To assure a coordinated approach, the President on Feb. 26 had put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus, with experts from the CDC and National Institutes of Health (NIH) leading the medical response to the threat posed by COVID-19. If you didn’t see that press conference you should now since I think it was one of the most explanatory and straightforward presidential press conference I’ve ever seen.
You’d almost never know that President Trump was doing anything to address the threat of coronavirus if you only follow the never-Trumpers on the left wing of the media who, along with some on the Democratic side of the aisle in Congress, have disgustingly done their utmost to politicize what is a national crisis. It reached the point where on some networks program hosts blatantly squelched any views that offered support to the President. This was transparently obvious, for instance, to anyone watching as CNN’s Don Lemon – who, in my assessment, would have a hard time beating out a clever hamster in an intelligence contest – repeatedly shut down former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (himself no big Trump supporter) as Kasich attempted to defend the President’s response to the crisis.
Along with the anti-Trump prejudice, we heard such inanities as commentators saying it was “zenophobic” and “racist” to call 
the virus “the Wuhan virus” or “the Chinese virus,” despite the fact that the origins of the virus in and around Wuhan is little disputed. That encouraged Chinese officials to blast the U.S. for saying the virus originated in China and even to threaten to withhold vital medications from the U.S. Meanwhile, lots of viruses and ailments, including Ebola, West Nile, Zika, and Lyme, not to mention “the Spanish flu” and “the Asian flu” – remember those, from 1918 and 1957, respectively? – have been named after the area in which they originated, and no one ever called those names racist or zenophobic.
Two big scandals exposed by the coronavirus
Not to sugar coat anything, there are at least two big national scandals this coronavirus thing has in fact uncovered, and we should be grateful that it has. One is the lack of our capacity to produce kits to test for the virus on a massive scale. While South Korea has been able to test 20,000 people a day, it is safe to say we don’t really know how many people in the U.S. have been tested. We do know that testing capacity in this country has been severely limited – perhaps no more than 20,000 tests in total performed to date – and this falls squarely on the shoulders of the CDC. Conflicts between the CDC and some states, such as the conflict with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, at the epicenter of the outbreak, have been reported, and little has been done to tap the capacity of the private sector to produce test kits of sufficient number. Fortunately, on March 13 the FDA approved pharmaceutical giant Roche’s new automated test, which should allow a rapid ramp-up of testing capability as it begins to roll out. Roche says it already has 500,000 tests ready and can produce another 1.5 million of them per month. Going forward, a more flexible approach to developing and deploying testing for various diseases needs to be implemented.
The other big scandal, and perhaps the bigger and more difficult one to address, is how dependent the U.S. has become on overseas production of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical components, with China holding the lion’s share of production of some key medications. It is estimated that China is the source of 97 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S., and two countries, China and India, produce most of the pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical materials used in the U.S. Along with the strategic threat this preponderance of source represents, there also have been issues of quality control and corruption in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. It would seem that moves should begin immediately to domesticate key elements of this country’s pharmaceuticals production, something other countries also should do.
We have learned lessons from previous pandemics, such as the H1N1 pandemic of a decade ago, but sometimes lessons are forgotten and each new pandemic brings with it new challenges. Making systemic fixes to address such obvious and serious problems as these two needs to be a national priority. And that is not blowing things out of proportion.
Photo credits: Featured image: Max LaRochelle/Unsplash; Crowded: Nauris Pukis/Unsplash; Masked Family: Macau Photo Agency/Unsplash
On July 31, 1909, the Milwaukee Road’s westbound Overland Limited went off the tracks and wrecked at Cambridge, Iowa. I’m inclined to see this as an allegory for what lies around the bend for the Democratic Party if things continue to shape up as they are.
It’s not just me saying this. The predictions are coming from both sides of the political aisle, with observers ranging from long-time Dem strategist James Carville to a ménage of commentators on the liberal cable networks, to none other than Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on the right, echoing similar views.
“I’m scared to death,” Carville ranted on MSNBC following the Iowa Democratic caucuses, something of a train wreck of their own. In a subsequent interview, Carville went on to say, “I don’t know. We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about, and we won. And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here.”
What has Carville and others so petrified is the rise of Socialist Bernie Sanders as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nominee to challenge President Donald Trump in November, and the overall lurch of the party – and seemingly all couple dozen of its presidential wannabes – toward the far left.
“We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.”
Right. Think about it. Plan to do it. Just don’t talk about it. You’d be excused for thinking that’s how politicians usually run their games. But that’s not the only cow, maybe not even the biggest one, lying across the tracks. It’s the ascendancy of the far left of the party, represented by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her left-wing corterie, known as The Squad, in Congress. And it’s the failure of the Democratic establishment’s self-styled savior, former Vice President Joe Biden, to light anything other than a small and flickering flame among Dem voters. More than the chickens coming home to roost, it’s the cows that are coming home to ruminate, right across the tracks.
Old Bernie, backed with a good chunk of the younger vote and others with a weak grasp on the meaning of Socialism or Bernie’s questionable past, eked out a 26.2% of delegate equivalents versus Pete Buttigieg’s 26.13% in the Iowa caucuses (if you can believe the results). And in New Hampshire he came out with 25.8% of the vote versus Mayor Pete’s 24.5%. Not exactly a rousing victory, especially since in 2016 he came away with 60.4% versus Hillary Clinton’s 38% (admittedly in a less crowded primary field). Meanwhile Trump, in the little-heralded Republican primary in New Hampshire, came away with more votes, by far, than any candidate of either party in the history of the state, even doubling the number generated by former President Ronald Reagan when New Hampshire was a far more conservative state than it is today.
The real story of both Iowa and New Hampshire has less to do with Bernie’s numbers as with the crashing and burning of two other candidates, previously considered “front runners” in the contest. In Iowa, both Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden sank respectively to third and fourth place, with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar hot on their heels. And then in New Hampshire Klobuchar jumped to third place, with 19.9% of the vote, exceeding the combined totals of Warren (from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, from which many New Hampshire residents have relocated) and Biden. Biden didn’t even wait around for the results before bailing on the Granite State and his supporters there and heading off to the Palmetto State, South Carolina, which he has called his “fire wall.” Underscoring Biden’s fall from grace, Sanders’ New Hampshire showing was enough to push him within just a day to the top of the polls nationwide, displacing Biden, the previous choice of the Dem establishment.
Are you beginning to see why this situation could be shaping up as a train wreck for the Democratic Party?
Shades of 1968
To be clear, let me say that, for a number of reasons, I don’t see what happens in June at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee likely to be equivalent to what happened in August 1968 at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Well, probably not quite. The country isn’t as worked into as much of a frenzy over the political divide as it was over the Vietnam War going full bore at that time. And probably more people, especially young people, have other things to concern themselves with today than they did in 1968. But it doesn’t mean that something along those lines might not lie ahead for the party.
Looking at the lay of the land going into the Nevada caususes, the South Carolina primary, and then Super Tuesday on March 3, when 16 states and terrirories hold their primaries, caucuses, and conventions, we have Bernie on the left and set to pick up most of the support on that side of the political spectrum. That’s even more likely given the lack of a viable way forward for Warren. Among the more ” centrist” (though not really) candidates, we have Buttigieg, the mayor of a small city in Indiana and a gay man also seen as beholden to Wall Street; Klobuchar, a lesser known senator from Minnesota with a history of abusing her staff; and Biden, an aging former Vice President who has a hard time putting two sentences together, who thinks it’s okay to refer to voters in terms of a 1952 movie on the Canadian Mounties, and whose credibility and integrity has been cast into serious doubt as a result of the Dems’ ill-fated impeachment fiasco targeting Donald Trump. Oh, and then we have another billionaire besides the President, former New York City Mayor (and ex-Republican) Mike “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg, who thinks he can buy his way into the nomination by pumping hundreds of millions of his own funds into the race. Speak of a field of poor choices. Now are you starting to see more of the problem?
Through the use of super delegates, the Dem establishment stole the nomination away from Sanders in 2016. Will they do it again this year? If you think the party poobahs in Washington and on Wall Street and out in the bastions of Dem power across the land (such as they are) aren’t thinking about it, I have a railroad to sell you. They have seen the writing on the wall about the virtually inevitable demise of Joe Biden. And so, seeking another alternative, they’ve already bent the rules to let Bloomberg onto the debate stage, even though he doesn’t have one actual donor other than himself, donor numbers being one of the previous standards for deciding who gets on the stage and who doesn’t. But any port in a storm, and somehow these people (who have had nothing good to say about the 2010 Citizens United decision) apparently think pitting one billionaire against another is a good idea and good for America. Or maybe it’s just good for them? Am I being too cynical here?
Let’s say the Dem establishment manages to once more steal the nomination away from Bernie. What then? Undoubtedly a significant number of his supporters will either stay home on Nov, 3, or they’ll vote for Trump, just as they did in 2016. But some of his supporters are talking about a third option.
As stated by Kyle Jurek, Sanders Field Organizer in Iowa, “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC Convention. Fucking Milwaukee will burn. The billionaire class. The fucking media, pundits. Walk into that MSNBC studios, drag those motherfuckers out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets.”
This inflammatory rhetoric, videotaped and presented online by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, must have touched a nerve somewhere out amid Sanders’ supporters. The Washington Post incorrectly reported that Jurek was a mere volunteer, not a paid staffer, and when O’Keede challenged that report as false Twitter blocked his account. Lest you think Jurek is an outlyer, remember that it was largely Sanders supporters who, in true Brown Shirt form, turned out en masse on the streets of Chicago on March 11, 2016, to force Trump to cancel a rally he had planned there that night. Do you remember that scene of political obsctruction by mob? I do.
I also remember, if vaguely, the events of August 1968. If you don’t remember them or were too young to have lived through them, you really should update yourself. If nothing else, you’ll learn there are precedents for today’s political divide, and the divide within the Democratic Party, and you might learn something about the power of the disenfranchised (self-styled or real) to disrupt and make their presence known. [Disclaimer: Following a little 1972 imbroglio with the Rutgers University Campus Police on the Rutgers-Newark campus, I was successfully represented by one Stu Ball, who had been part of the Chicago Seven defense team. Life’s little claims to fame.] One way or another, the chances for a schism within the party is almost fore-ordained. Whether it will lead to the kinds of dramatic events that gripped Chicago in 1968 remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, amid the current churn on the Democratic side, the President is at the highest levels of his popularity since taking office and has every reason to be optimistic about his reelection chances, regardless who the Dems wind up putting up against him.
Who put this cow on the tracks?
While it might take a village to raise a child, it took Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her band of unruly House Dems to help set up the crisis of identity facing the Democratic Party and the chess board likely to lead to the reelection of the President. As I’ve called it in a previous posting, the Dems’ unremitting rage against Trump and their repeated unsuccessful attempts to unseat him and undo the results of the 2016 election is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
What the ill-fated impeachment did, besides bolstering Trump’s support, was put a spotlight on the possible corruption of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Hunter’s business affairs in Ukraine and China. In the process, Pelosi managed to take the shine off her party establishment’s front runner and throw the whole process into even more disarray than it already was. All of Pelosi’s antics, like tearing up the President’s State of the Union address – seen by many as tasteless and lacking in decorum – can’t stop the impending train wreck she may have engineered.
After what will seem like an eternity of sound-alike debates, charges and counter-charges, and jockeying (or pony soldiering, if you’re Joe Biden) for position among the candidates, June is likely to roll around in, say, a mere four months, and then we’ll all get to see if the Dem train stays on the rails or runs off into a ravine. If nothing else, it should be entertaining to watch.
Featured image: Cambridge, Iowa, train wreck, unknown, presumed public domain.