Anyone who doesn’t support Medicare For All or similar is my enemy.

I don’t care if I like you. Simple as that.

A catalog of failure.

First, a quick refresher on how the media botched the initial coverage: On Jan. 23, authorities in Beijing sealed off Wuhan, a city of 11 million in China’s interior, to contain the virus. Much of the media response was to downplay this harbinger of the deadly global threat to come. “Don’t worry about the coronavirus,” BuzzFeed wrote on Jan. 29. Worry about the flu.” On Jan. 31 – the same day the Trump administration imposed a ban incoming visitors from China – the “explainer” news site Vox was telling readers, “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” On Feb. 1, the Washington Post ran an article headlined, “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.” On Groundhog Day, the Post was saying, “Past epidemics prove fighting coronavirus with travel bans is a mistake.”

To be fair to the media, they were publishing this garbage because “experts” were also spouting the same nonsense. You know, those people with all those fancy credentials who know what’s going on. (You should be chuckling now.)

In retrospect, it’s hard to deny the mainstream media’s initial downplaying of the threat was very wrong, or that it was partly a result of kneejerk antipathy to the Trump administration’s travel ban – which in retrospect looks like a prescient move.

But it was so RACISTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT *hair catches fire as triggering intensifies*

Turns out that Covid-19 is not racist, and will ride here on any carrier that hitches some transpo and strolls onto US soil. Funny how a virus has no ideology, nor does it respect human ones. Who could’ve imagined that?

Again, thank fucking god for Zeynep Tufekci. Been reading her for years, for good reason, and she really came through as the MVP of this whole shitshow.

Anorexia and obesity are both eating disorders but it’s only okay to call one of these a disease in the mainstream today.

Imagine how many obese people, women specifically, that this hurts.

— Margarita (@margaritaevna95) April 18, 2020

It follows from this that the accommodating credo, “There is nothing you can do about obesity” is also wrong — a reflection of what the food companies et al. want you to believe. (Yes, I know what the studies say. I think they are flawed in crucial ways.)

Perhaps there is nothing to be done, and we can just adopt the centrist-like “fuck it, everything is impossible” approach. But you know, I’d really prefer not to give up and declare that being unable to walk 100 feet is just fine. Seems like a real failure of imagination and initiative to me.

It takes a surprisingly small amount of activity to maintain your strength.

The only way you’ll take a big step back is if you’ve done nothing. https://t.co/4jKBjptue7

— Jason Helmes (@anymanfitness) April 18, 2020

True. I worked hard to get as strong as I am on the deadlift, but now only train on it very sporadically because I’ve prioritized other things for the moment.

And I’ve lost basically nothing even though I only do maybe 20% (if that) of the training I formerly did. It does indeed demand a lot of initial effort to get strong, but comparatively little to maintain it once you get there. It does take something, but 20% of the original level of effort total is probably the sweet spot to just maintain.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

There are tons of cranks, certainly, but it’s a nice little racket that academia has going that you get much credibility from merely being in academia, and if you aren’t in academia no amount of being right proves anything. It was all “just chance” or you didn’t have the proper credentials…even though you were correct and those in academia were not.

These types say that if you had the right credentials you’d be taken seriously. However, having the right credentials in too many areas means that you’d have to be stylishly wrong to be given any credence.

I don’t even care that much. I’d rather be right. But it’s all sclerotic and doomed as it won’t be able to self-perpetuate for much longer.

I kind of selfishly like that the Fat Acceptance movement exists. Though they harm millions, one can easily generate a good fitness and diet program and set of ideals from doing exactly the opposite of what they champion and advocate.

It’s not every day that a movement offers such a clear and coherent guide on how to live, so that is truly a notable and rare achievement. All one has to do is to reverse the signs and one can become healthy and fit with little cognitive effort.

Those who argue that math and physics is, like, the hardest, have probably never really studied any other field. I have no talent for math, but I know that means I just have no talent, not that it has any particular claim for supreme difficulty.

For instance, here is the a bit from a book on linguistics I am reading, The Syntax of Comparative Constructions Operators, Ellipsis Phenomena and Functional Left Peripheries by Julia Bacskai-Atkari:

I do have talent for this area (unlike math) and I enjoy it, so that is pretty comprehensible to me, despite being at a post-grad level. But maybe one out of 100,000 people would have any clue what that is talking about, and no math person would.

But sure, the only difficult (“hard”) fields with any rigor are math and physics. Right. (In reality, it just means that those are the only fields social fuck-ups can easily prosper in.)

Biden has a chance of being the next president. That is, if we do actually hold elections. As incomprehensible as his ascendance might seem, his rise is rooted in the most dangerous of human emotions: nostalgia.

The problem is that some of the worst problems America faces today—including Trump’s presidency itself—are in many ways the products of the Obama years, during which inequality grew worse and average life expectancy dropped. Obama’s vice president hardly seems like the leader that Americans need to tackle them. Political operatives may not know this, but historians do: time moves forward, never backward. There can be no return to the past, “normal” or otherwise.

If Obama had done the right thing in 2009, Trump would’ve not been possible. He didn’t because he wanted to become a billionaire himself, so here we are. Obama is not solely to blame for all our problems, of course, but he is mostly responsible for Trump — and that is an unforgivable offense.