Stephan: I held this article a couple of days to see if other media picked up on it. Very few did. This is naked racism stirred up amongst the Magas by their "Dear Leader" Trump. But it is even worse. As you have probably noticed in all the television interviews what a large percentage of the doctors and nurses are Asian. These are people risking their own lives trying to save the lives of others regardless of race. And this is how the Magas treat them. All because of Trump.
Lucy Li outside her home in Boston on May 14. A man shouted a racist rant at Li after she left work one night during the coronavirus pandemic. Credit: Olivia Falcigno/For The Washington Post
Lucy Li tries not to let fear dictate her interactions with patients as she makes the rounds in the covid-19 intensive care unit. But the anesthesiology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital cannot erase the memory of what happened after work at the start of the pandemic.
A man followed the Chinese American doctor from the Boston hospital, spewing a profanity-laced racist tirade as she walked to the subway. “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?” Li recalled the man shouting. “What is wrong with you? Why the f— are you killing us?”
Stunned at first, then relieved she was not physically attacked, Li is now saddened and angered by the irony that she spends her days and nights helping save lives. Her work inserting tubes in patients’ airways has grown riskier since the coronavirus emerged — each procedure releasing droplets and secretions that could carry viral particles.
JAMES GLANZ and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, - The Virginian Pilot/The New York Times
Stephan: Donald Trump is a mass murderer; that is how I believe history will characterize him. As this story lays out if, instead of going golfing and blowing off the scientific advice he had received about the Coronavirus, Trump had listened and directed the nation to go into self-quarantine a week earlier than he did, 36,000 dead American men, women, and children would be alive today. If he had done it when he should have, two weeks earlier, 54,000 would not have had to die.
To give you a sense of scale. The Vietnam Conflict Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) reports that over 19 years of that war there were 58,220 U.S. military fatalities.
Quite apart from all his other failings as the U.S. President, Trump for this failure has become one of history's villains.
If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.
And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83% — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.
Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May.
The enormous cost of waiting to take action reflects the unforgiving dynamics of the outbreak that swept through American cities in early March. Even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans and other major cities, the researchers found.
It’s a big, big difference. That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia and the leader of the research […]
Sheila Kaplan, Matthew Goldstein and Alexandra Stevenson, - The New York Times
Stephan: In the world of Trump everything is a grift. He doesn't try to hide it because he is not embarrassed by it. I believe he thinks the grifters he appoints demonstrate his unquestioned power to do as he likes with the government. I'd be curious to know if any Trump family members own stock in Moderna, and when they bought it.
Moncef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive and now the chief scientist of the White House’s initiative to develop a coronavirus vaccine, in the Rose Garden last week. Credit: Samuel Corum for The New York Times
Moncef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive, is now overseeing the U.S. initiative to develop coronavirus treatments and vaccines. His financial interests and corporate roles have come under scrutiny.
The chief scientist brought on to lead the Trump administration’s vaccine efforts has spent the last several days trying to disentangle pieces of his stock portfolio and his intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests, as critics point to the potential for significant conflicts of interest.
The scientist, Moncef Slaoui, is a venture capitalist and a former longtime executive at GlaxoSmithKline. Most recently, he sat on the board of Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass., biotechnology firm with a $30 billion valuation that is pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. He resigned when President Trump named him last Thursday to the new post as chief adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the federal drive for […]
Stephan: Donald Trump isn't very smart to start with, he makes that clear almost daily; and he is astonishingly uneducated and ignorant. But worse, he is utterly incurious and uninterested in learning. Consequently, he makes one geopolitical mistake after another, because he can't be bothered, or doesn't have the attention span, to learn how geopolitics works.
As a result, in three and a half years, he has more or less destroyed America's leadership in the world, in the process, making the world more dangerous for everyone including Americans.
Here is his latest stupidity.
A man wearing an orange prison outfit and a Donald Trump mask during a protest against the U.S. president’s U.K. visit to attend the NATO summit on December 3, 2019 in London. Credit: Sam Mellish / In Pictures/Getty
In a move that alarmed nuclear experts, anti-war activists, and policymakers around the world, the U.S. government notified international partners on Thursday that President Donald Trump is withdrawing the country from the Treaty on Open Skies over alleged Russian violations.
“Trump and enablers are systematically undoing the systems [put] in place at end of cold war to prevent accidental conflict and escalation.” —Jon Wolfsthal, Global Zero
“Once again, Donald Trump’s belligerent approach to foreign policy has put us all at risk,” declared Win Without War advocacy director Erica Fein, warning that the withdrawal “puts us further down the path of nuclear brinkmanship.”
The Open Skies Treaty (OST), which has over 30 other party states, was signed by then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker under President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and entered into force a decade later. The agreement aims to build trust and reduce […]
Stephan: I don't usually run one-off stories like this one but, in this case, I am doing so because I see more and more such stories and they are always Republican politicians. I think it is time to start asking: Why is it from the lowest to the highest level the Republicans put forward people, mostly men, but there are some notable women, who are obviously low IQ morons with really nasty prejudices? Why has this become the hallmark of one of the two American parties?
Republican Mayor Eric Hogue
In an email that was posted online, the mayor of a small town in Dallas, Texas, said that women shouldn’t be leading prayers in city council meetings because it’s forbidden by the bible.
According to WFAA, Wylie Mayor Eric Hogue referred to passages from the New Testament in an email to another member of the Wylie City Council, who asked if some local student could be allowed to lead the public prayer at the next council meeting on May 26.
The passages Hogue cited were 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which he quoted in the email as reading, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. […]
