Jesus, it’s July already. What a fuckshit year this has been.
If you haven’t already, I think you’re safe to just go ahead and write 2020 off. This year’s a wash. At the rate we’re going, I’ll be surprised if we manage to get much accomplished in 2021, either. We’ll be midway into 2021 before anything starts to look even vaguely normal again, and that’s only if we vote Trump out and do everything exactly right from then on.
One of the most frustrating things about this whole mess is that it didn’t have to be like this. Plenty of other countries have their COVID-19 epidemics under at least some kind of control. We could be living lives that were pretty close to normal, pretty safely, if we didn’t have a stunningly incompetent administration in charge.
📱 You should stop doomscrolling and doomsurfing. It’s destroying your mental health. And if you do figure out how to stop, let me know how you did it.
🦠 Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC says that COVID-19 is spreading too much and too fast to be brought under control. Awesome.
🇺🇸 Hey, you remember how after Obama was elected president the Tea Party sprang up and then in the next set of midterms the right wing went ahead and elected a bunch of frothing Tea Party nuts to Congress? Well, they’ve decided to go one better this time around and try to get a bunch of the even-frothier QAnon nuts elected to Congress. For the uninitiated: QAnon is a cult, please do not elect these people to positions of power, they are deranged cultists.
😠 These fucking assholes right here.
💨 Hey, you remember I mentioned the Saharan dust cloud a couple days ago? Here’s some more about that.
📈 There’s a new tool for keeping an eye on COVID-19 numbers. You can find it right here. It offers nice visuals and easy color coding.
🐘 “Since 2015, [Facebook] has wrestled with how to placate Trump. Responding to Republicans’ charges of bias against them on the platform, Facebook has largely abandoned or scaled back a number of its high-profile initiatives aimed at addressing the spread of false information and online harassment. According to the Post, this meant tweaking its news feed algorithm to ‘neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers.'” Read it.
🗳️ Please, for the love of little puppies with heart-shaped spots, get universal vote-by-mail up and running ASAP. The 2020 elections are going to be a hot goddamn mess.
😷 As far as anyone can tell right now, it doesn’t seem like the nation-wide BLM protests spread COVID-19 to any significant degree. Which kind of underscores that we already know how to slow the spread of the virus. Don’t congregate inside – stay outside. COVID-19 doesn’t spread as easily when you’re outside. Stand well apart. Wear masks. Wash your hands. This isn’t that difficult, you guys.
🍊 Trump claims he supports another one-time payment to Americans (because that last one went so smoothly), but doesn’t support extending the extra $600/week in unemployment payments that end this month. The GOP doesn’t support the continued unemployment payments, either. Trump also says he still thinks that COVID-19 is just going to “sort of just disappear.” 🤦♀️ Read it here and here.
Okay, kids, that’s enough for one day. Go enjoy this sleepy dog cuddling his toy while he dozes off.
Notes & Thoughts 