WNash

Very sad to say that legendary singer-songwriter John Prine is in critical condition with COVID-19. He’s in his early 70s, and is a cancer survivor in not great health, but he was still touring and recording. https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2020/03/29/john-prine-critical-hospital-coronavirus-symptoms/2937229001/ Other sad news from Nashville: Opry member and 90s country star Joe Diffie died from COVID-19.

Irrefutable and damning. It’s very hard for human beings to admit mistakes, but I really pray that people wake up to the fact that Trump failed, and that his failure has been catastrophic. We don’t have to expect this little out of our leaders. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster?fbclid=IwAR1f9vq0h6JfRqQMJahGmBMXhS_VscPGlyvJusnvgBHp1zGxB7DFnPr0v_4

Apparently a UB frat was promoting a big party they planned to hold. Rumor has it that the Buffalo police and UB told them that wasn’t gonna happen.

I bought a switch the day after Trump’s “oh shit” speech (the one that caused stock indices to collapse), figuring we might get a lot of use out of it. Animal Crossing came out a week later, and my wife plays it for hours a day. Even our toddler loves to watch the little critters on the screen. Best purchase I have ever made!

You can download games, or order them from an internet retailer, so the need (as such) can be met without exposing workers to a potentially fatal infection.

My concern is that the social distancing efforts will be diluted so we have a flatter curve, but one that still exceeds our care capacity by several times. A total failure of social distancing would result in millions of US deaths. We won’t hit that, but if the NYC area alone gets to tens of thousands of deaths, a million nationally isn’t out of the question. I suspect that the virus is still being passed freely in much of the country. How much, I don’t know, but if we see 15+ hotspots in two weeks, we are on target for catastrophe.

This is absolutely bonkers. The source is a religious information website in Kansas, but the story goes back to completely implausible, conspiracy-mongering sources like the Epoch Times and Breitbart. You can’t make 21 million bodies vanish. The PRC did their typical thing of trying to hush the virus story, but it was too big to be hidden. With extreme social control and contact tracing, they lowered the infection rate, but the virus is still out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if the infection and fatalities are higher In China than reported, but in the last few days it seems like there’s an increased desperation on the part of the Trump-sympathetic media to claim that China undercounted deaths by orders of magnitude. Why the sudden attempt to make these explosive and unprovable claims? I think that as the horror of the coronavirus situation in the US becomes evident, there is an incentive to inflate the problem elsewhere to make Trump look better by comparison. This has been and still is being catastrophically mismanaged. What should have been a difficult but manageable public health crisis has turned into a runaway disaster in the US. Let’s be clear: at the current rate of infection increase, we are headed for an absolutely historic disaster, demographically and economically. I don’t see much being done to stop the biggest crisis in this country since the Civil War. We should be terrified and we should be enraged at the elites who brought us to this point and who still are trying to play their usual games. It is dumbfounding to see regular people try to fit this into their usual simple formula where everything is the fault of the other party. Every single person in power has failed us, and the people with the most power have failed us the most. We will be very lucky to escape this with only a million deaths and no social breakdown. But if you don’t hold the elites who let this happen to account, you actually deserve the immiseration that is likely going to hit us all.

I think a return of the virus is likely for epidemiological reasons, largely because most western governments won’t do what it takes to track cases effectively. But there is good news that may keep the rate of return slow: apparently the virus has a very low mutation rate, so antibodies and (fingers crossed) a vaccine should be effective for some time to come.

Unless we’re talking about virology, there are no non-political facts to discuss. Somehow, a small elite desperate to ensure they stay ungodly richer than everyone else is ignoring epidemiology and the scale under which the healthcare system can operate without breaking down.

Not the least bit surprising that the same crew that for years has screamed about how many people have been killed by “socialism” are dismissive of the enormity of the death toll caused by forcing a return to capitalism far before we have flattened the curve.

Does it really need to be explained to you that car crashes and heart attacks don’t increase exponentially every few days?

Not going to bother unhiding the original that you are responding to, but Boeing is getting 20x the money that all the arts are getting, and the failure that led to their financial ruin has absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19.

How embarrassing for you to contort logic and language into an attempt to justify actions that are both authoritarian and unhinged. What hilarious is that you frame anticipated objections to your utter nonsense as an issue of “popularity,” as if you’re a brave truth teller instead of a coward who is willing to bend reality to the fantasies of a very powerful and very unstable man.

Sorry about your brain worms, get well soon

If someone posted a map like that on this website, they would get a weenie tag

There are a lot of weather hobbyists, and the hobby takes many forms, but some forms seem weird to me. Interest in chaser personalities is not my thing, but he has really cultivated an image and brand. I'm a little grossed out by referring to cyclones as "sexy" and "hawt" but clearly I'm not his audience. That said, you make a great point about how legitimately terrifying some hurricane videos are. Being trapped in an attic as the storm surge rises seems like a particularly awful way to spend your last few minutes on earth. But I was already convinced by the famous Katrina warning issued by the WFO in New Orleans that I would not want to be anywhere near a major hurricane.

He's a videographer, not a livestream chaser, so it's a little ridiculous to see all these prayers for him on Twitter. Getting online wouldn't be his first priority. To his credit, he hasn't tried to finagle a quick trip out of devastated areas in the past, when authorities are left counting the numbers of the living and seeing if civilization can ever be restored. Besides, he is enough of a showman to appreciate the drama of his re-emergence after a couple of days incommunicado.

We have had probably 20" this winter, about half of which came in one storm. The rest has fallen in small increments, while areas to the south have gotten huge amounts. By contrast, 25 miles south of here, they're over 100 inches with half the winter still to go. Part of it is geography amd part of it is bad luck. Point is exactly what you said, the snow is always deeper on the other side.

I moved from Tennessee to Buffalo about four years ago, and I can tell you that I have seen the snow clouds for epic multi-foot storms, including the Nov 2014 70" storm, just 3-5 miles south and never come any closer. I have to live where I live for work, and in my part of the area we do get some decent snow from time to time, but even up in the Great Lakes you would be amazed at how often you can find yourself in the screwzone.