Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1196 (SoD #1885) - No More Nighthawks - Throwback Thursday 2004.16 and Hodge Podgery


Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1196 (SoD #1885) - No More Nighthawks - Throwback Thursday 2004.16 and Hodge Podgery

Hi Mom,

Maybe in quarantine I can get back to a weekly missive to you as you have been on my mind a lot as we shelter in place, and I think about what you went through when the meningitis took over your brain and spinal cord.

And yet, these posts are not all serious. In the face of the pandemic, there is also love, compassion, empathy, and laughter. And comic books. And poetry read by Patrick Stewart. And anger as the "leader" of the country continues to make an ass of himself from the briefing room in the White House and no one who stands up with him seems to be able to stop him or curtail his outrageous and undignified behaviour that's more like a raging bull of a racist, violent homophobe belching epithets and barbs in his cozy and threadbare living room. At this point, I would gladly take Archie Bunker, who had more sense than this preening, petty, power-mongering, thin-skinned idiot seems to have.

Yesterday, there was a "protest" in Michigan by citizens who did nothing other block traffic for first responders and ambulances to get where they needed to go. In my POST, there's a great Twitter message of an ambulance caught in the "gridlock." Heck, it needs repeating:



And so this followup:

‘Political rally’ wasn’t really about stay-at-home order, Gov. Whitmer tells MSNBC

Updated Apr 15, 2020; Posted Apr 15, 2020
The protest dubbed “Operation Gridlock” at the Michigan Capitol wasn’t actually about the stay-at-home order, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on MSNBC Wednesday night.
It was about politics, Whitmer said.
“It wasn’t really about the stay-at-home order at all,” Whitmer said. “It was essentially a political rally, a political statement that flies in the face of all of the science and all of the best practices from the stay-at-home order that was issued.”
...............and....................

“They absolutely impacted peoples’ lives today and threatened peoples’ lives,” Whitmer told CNN. “We’ll never know the precise number of COVID-19 cases that come as a result of this gathering, but we know that there will be some.”
Wednesday’s protest is the exact kind of thing that can spread coronavirus, Whitmer said. And, ironically, it could be a reason the stay-at-home order needs to be extended beyond April 30, she said.
“Showing up and being this irresponsible is not just endangering our own lives, it’s endangering all of our first responders,” Whitmer said. “This is precisely the worst thing that could have happened, today.



Of course, the rally was about misogyny, hate, and the divisive nature of the virtual civil war that the GOP has sown into the national fabric in the last twenty years, an us or them strategy that plays into people's fears, insecurities, and tendency to hate the "other."

 It makes me sick.

 I am glad you're not still here to see this sort of grotesquerie, Mom.

10 cartoons that capture America's response to coronavirus | Opinion

And then we have this asshole.

I have been appalled at the lack of dignity and stupefying lack of intelligence with which this man has conducted himself the GOP and Russia hoodwinked him into the presidency. And with appalling thing after appalling thing, I think to myself that he cannot redefine lack of dignity any more, that he is as low as he can go, that he cannot bluster, rave, rage, jibe, caterwaul, preen, or debase people and newspapers and reporters and other politicians or basically anyone who doesn't kiss his ring any more virulently than he has already, and then he finds new ways to appall me, disgust me, outrage me, and make me sick to my stomach.

His antics and absurdities dominate my weekly hodge podge with the "state of the hate nation" as I like to call it with the CATEGORY of posts I have created for it.

There's so much to share.

And as he continues to berate and ballyhoo, he shows more and more that there is no man behind the curtain. He seems incapable of getting before the nation and actually LEADING the American people. He seems unable to explain in any detail, depth, or intelligence the plan his administration has to address the single WORST HISTORICAL EVENT OF OUR LIFE TIMES (not counting my Dad who lived through WWII).

I mean, really. Do you have a plan, man?

I don't think you do.

No photo description available.


And so what's in this post, the weekly HODGE PODGE, the gallimaufry and a throwback.

I led with the edited NIGHTHAWKS painting because like so many of the revised art, books, movies, it's genius.

So is this one:



And then there's lots of news items and tidbits that respond to THE STATE OF THE HATE NATION for my readers, all two of you.

There's lots of art throughout, cartoons (see above and below), Adrian Tomine, a great FU to the virus and more.

Before I fully dig into the curating, let me say one thing for the record.

COVID-19 is not the 19th version of ANYTHING. It's named that because it's the Novel CoronaVirus Disease discovered in 2019. CO for Corona, VI for virus, D for disease, 19 for 2019.

People who are supposed to know things like Kellyanne Conway  are supposed to know these things!

Kellyanne Conway
stated on April 15,2020 in an interview on "Fox & Friends":
"This is COVID-19, not COVID-1, folks. And so you would think the people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that."


false

SIGH.


A big set of stories from WIRED with an editorial by Nicholas Thompson to lead it off.

Trump's confusing Mutiny on the Bounty analogy. Idiot.

And a good article on the ULTIMATE GASLIGHTING.

But then non-political, non-Coronavirus stuff.

Kate Bush photos in a video.

The sad news on the passing of Mad Magazine artist Mort Drucker.

What we need is more of this:



There's lots of random goody bits, like a tumblr post from Lutrine or some supposedly iconic sequence from a British soap in which a grande old woman throws everyone out of the pub.

GET OUT NOW.

That reminds me, Saturday night we watched this: IRISH PUB. LOVED IT.

Documentary 'The Irish Pub' to be shown in Ketchum on Jan. 10 ...

SARA TANTLINGER - new author.

Her story "To Be Devoured" is up for a Stoker award this weekend. That's horror, as in BRAM STOKER.

The NASA HUBBLE thing.
Mine: Jan 19th - the Whirlpool Galaxy

On January 19 in 2005
Whirlpool Galaxy
This image provides a close-up of some of the winding arms in the Whirlpool galaxy. Tracing the arms of the spiral galaxy are red-colored clouds of hydrogen gas, which are giving birth to new stars.





Some horror movies.

There will always be some comic book stuff.

Some news from SLASHDOT.

Some Obama love, including his brilliant endorsement of Joe Biden.

Hilarious EASTER post (Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix).

Brilliant Easter Egg post from Atwood.

So many cool things!!

Patrick Stewart reading a sonnet!

That's all for the curating. Scroll down into the stew of the content (IE Gallimaufry is stew).

See you tomorrow.


Trump and coronavirus | Editorial Cartoons | lagrandeobserver.com






CHECK THIS MAP!
This is a great map (just below) for current counts of cases and deaths worldwide and a wonderful visual display to watch the spread of the virus.
It looks like this: (static capture):

I forgot to add this on Thursday the 16th, so I went back and added it on the 17th as the date and time stamp notes.



Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)


Adrian Tomine

From NPR because Trump keeps wanting to make scapegoats because nothing is his fault and he did everything right.

THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

'We Alerted The World' To Coronavirus On Jan. 5, WHO Says In Response To U.S.

Responding on Wednesday to a question about the U.S. accusations, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, said, "In the first weeks of January, the WHO was very, very clear."
"We alerted the world on January the 5th," Ryan said. "Systems around the world, including the U.S., began to activate their incident management systems on January the 6th. And through the next number of weeks, we've produced multiple updates to countries, including briefing multiple governments, multiple scientists around the world, on the developing situation — and that is what it was, a developing situation."
Trump said the WHO had "deprived the scientific community of essential data," accusing it of failing to obtain virus samples.
To that charge, Ryan replied, "The virus was identified on January the 7th. The [genetic] sequence was shared on the 12th with the world."
As for the guidance about human-to-human spread of the new virus, Ryan noted that in initial reports, there was no mention of human-to-human transmission. But he also said, "There is always a risk with respiratory pathogen that it can move from person to person."



FROM WIRED

On January 22, a committee at the WHO met to discuss whether the novel 
coronavirus constituted an international emergency. The same day, WIRED 
staff writer Megan Molteni published an article asking, “Could China’s New 
Coronavirus Become a Global Epidemic?” From there, she stayed on the beat, 
monitoring the growing pandemic. In February, senior correspondent Adam Rogers reported on the US’s first community spread case and the disease’s new name, Covid-19. By early March, we had retreated to our apartments and attics and almost our entire staff had devoted itself to covering the most important public health crisis of our lifetimes. Our May Issue, out today, even got a new cover to reflect these rapidly changing circumstances.
It’s been a demoralizing, scary time. But it’s also been energizing for the journalists at WIRED, who are constantly reminded of the value of providing the public with truthful and trusted information. In the last month, we’ve put out comprehensive guides to how testing and vaccine development work. We’ve broken important news, like about Google’s not-really-a-giant-website website. We’ve gone deep into the science and progress of potential treatments. We’ve launched a daily “Coronavirus Update” newsletter. Just down below, I’ve included a list of 12 of our most essential stories from the past weeks.
Like many of our peers, we’ve also lifted our paywall. Readers have free access to all of our coronavirus stories about public health and protecting yourself during the pandemic. Despite this, it’s been heartening to see a significant uptick in subscribers this past month. Subscribers make our work possible, so thank you.
It’s a privilege to do this work at a time like this, and we’re grateful to have our readers’ support and trust.
Nicholas Thompson
Garrett M. Graff, 03.27.2020
The first installment in our weekly oral history series, Covid Spring. Since then, we’ve heard from New Yorkers and those celebrating milestones and practicing religion at a distance.
Louise Matsakis, 04.10.2020
Amazon is calling its front-line workers heroes. But many feel scared and inadequately protected by their employer.
Adam Rogers, 04.06.2020
At first, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were lauded for their coronavirus responses. But now reimportation of the disease has their curves trending upward.
Megan Molteni, 03.23.2020
It’s true that kids are less likely to get Covid-19 than adults. But babies, toddlers, or those who have other conditions may still be at risk.
Roxanne Khamsi, 03.14.2020
There isn’t a consensus as to whether coronavirus is airborne, probably because scientists don’t always agree on what the term means.
Maryn McKenna, 03.26.2020
Warnings about taking ibuprofen with Covid-19 vanished almost as quickly as they overtook the internet, much like so much bad or incomplete information that circulates online.
Medea Giordano and Jeffrey Van Camp, 04.09.2020
After lengthy speculation, the CDC finally advised wearing cloth masks. Here’s our guide to making your own, how they can help—and how they can’t.
Steven Levy, 04.07.2020
Ron Klain explains what the government needs to do to fight coronavirus: speak with a unified voice and take control of the supply chain, ASAP.
Paris Martineau, 03.26.2020
Americans are losing their jobs at staggering rates, but antiquated websites make filing for unemployment a challenge.
Matt Simon, 03.31.2020
The absence of routine provides a psychological explanation for why none of what is happening right now feels real.
Gregory Barber, 04.07.2020
If we can’t test everyone, analyzing wastewater could be one way to figure out how many people in a community have been infected.
Emma Grey Ellis, 04.02.2020
Homelessness makes it hard to stay healthy under normal circumstances. During a pandemic, it makes avoiding sickness nearly impossible.


Capt. Bligh stands in the foreground, looking self-satisfied, as a Brando’s Fletcher Christian looks on skeptically


Trump’s Mutiny on the Bounty Tweet, Explained

The president seems to think the tyrannical Capt. Bligh is the hero.

Although Trump claims that Mutiny is “one of my all time favorite movies,” there’s no apparent record of him having mentioned it before this morning, and the language of the tweet—“an exciting and invigorating thing to watch”—is just elaborate enough to raise that doubt that Trump wrote it himself. But stipulating that a) Trump has seen the movie and b) he wrote the tweet himself, he would seem to be likening himself to Bligh, who, at least in every filmed version of the story, is its villain. In fact, the American Film Institute named Charles Laughton’s Capt. Bligh, from the 1935 version, the 19th greatest villain of all time, one after the shark from Jaws.

 Trump has shown a truly heroic ability to misread movies in the past, notably Citizen Kane, whose moral he concluded was “Get yourself a different woman.” And it’s not hard to imagine him identifying with Bligh, a high-handed authoritarian who demands that his subordinates obey his every command, even when it means committing outright fraud. But Bligh was overthrown, and though a contemporary trial cleared his name and the mutineers were hanged, his name has become synonymous with paranoia and despotism. Bligh is, in short, a loser, and thus a pretty darn odd person for Trump to cite in a bring-it-on boast to Democratic governors.



https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting*

You are not crazy, my friends

Julio Vincent Gambuto

What the trauma has shown us, though, cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet. What’s not fit for a postcard are the other scenes we have witnessed: a health care system that cannot provide basic protective equipment for its frontline; small businesses — and very large ones — that do not have enough cash to pay their rent or workers, sending over 16 million people to seek unemployment benefits; a government that has so severely damaged the credibility of our media that 300 million people don’t know who to listen to for basic facts that can save their lives.



https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/615203911999094784/stay-home-david-pollot





https://lutrine.tumblr.com/post/615205493202436096/melisica-marco-sousa














https://saratantlinger.com/





















More and more there is evidence that I should learn COBOL.



https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/04/11/212202/cobol-programmers-heed-the-call-to-support-americas-overloaded-unemployment-systems

Cobol Programmers Heed the Call to Support America's Overloaded Unemployment Systems (ieee.org)




Posted by EditorDavid  from the party-like-it's-1959 dept.

Earlier this week Slashdot reader puddingebola shared a CNN story headlined "Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims..."

But now IEEE Spectrum reports that "Cobol programmers in the United States are heeding the call to work on antiquated state unemployment benefits computer systemsâ¦"The new claims brought the three-week total to more than 16 million, the equivalent of a tenth of the U.S. workforce. The spike in new claims has inundated benefits computer systems in states such as Connecticut, Florida, and elsewhere, some of which haven't updated their Cobol-based mainframe systems in years, or decades...

New Jersey isn't alone. Florida's unemployment claims system has been so overwhelmed, the state is reverting to using paper applications. Massachusetts deployed more than 500 new employees to work remotely to meet increased demand that has overloaded its unemployment system... Connecticut's labor department is bringing back retirees and using IT staff from other departments to upgrade its 40-year-old system, which runs on a Cobol mainframe and connected components.
One company that says it reached out to New Jersey was the Texas-based "Cobol Cowboys" placement agency, with nearly 350 contractors, including a man in his mid-80s "who did some work with Grace Hopper." Also helping is U.S. Digital Response, a new group hoping to find skilled volunteers with technical skills for government agencies.

The article notes estimates that Cobol still handles 95% of all ATM swipes and 43% of banking systems.


https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/cobol-programmers-answer-call-unemployment-benefits-systems




https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/04/11/2357223/mutant-enzyme-could-vastly-improve-recycling-of-plastic-bottles

Mutant Enzyme Could Vastly Improve Recycling of Plastic Bottles (sciencemag.org)




Posted by EditorDavid  from the good-for-the-bottle dept.

sciencehabit writes:Recycling isn't as guilt-free as it seems. Only about 30% of the plastic that goes into soda bottles gets turned into new plastic, and it often ends up as a lower strength version. Now, researchers report they've engineered an enzyme that can convert 90% of that same plastic back to its pristine starting materials. Work is underway to scale up the technology and open a demonstration plant next year.

The researchers generated hundreds of mutant enzymes changing amino acids as they went. They then mass produced the mutants in bacteria and screened them to find efficient breakers of plastic bonds. After repeating this process for several rounds, they isolated a mutant enzyme that's 10,000 times more efficient at breaking down an important bond that allows plastic to be recycled.

The team is currently building a demonstration plant that is expected to recycle hundreds of tons of plastic per year. The enzyme can't recycle other major types of plastics, such as polyethylene and polystyrene, which have bonds between building blocks that are harder to break. But if successful, it could make it help society deal with one of the most challenging plastic problems we face.
John McGeehan, who directs the center for enzyme innovation at the University of Portsmouth, also tells Science that now recycling companies typically melt plastics together to make carpets or other low-grade plastic fibers that will eventually end up in a landfill or get incinerated.

"It's not really recycling at all."







https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/04/14/2132206/state-officials-ask-trump-administration-to-pull-3d-printed-gun-files-offline


State Officials Ask Trump Administration To Pull 3D-Printed Gun Files Offline (theverge.com)




Posted by BeauHD  from the undetectable-firearms dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge:Two dozen state attorneys general are asking the Trump administration to crack down on Defense Distributed's Defcad site for selling 3D-printed gun files. In a letter sent today, they urged the Justice Department and State Department to enforce rules against exporting weapons and making undetectable firearms. "If the federal government fails to act, these files will be distributed widely with potentially grave consequences for our national and domestic security," warns the letter. Attorneys general argue that Defcad is violating export control regulations and the Undetectable Firearms Act, which bans manufacturing, owning, and selling guns that don't trigger metal detectors. Anyone who downloads files could "automatically manufacture functional weapons that cannot be detected by a standard metal detector and, furthermore, are untraceable because they lack serial numbers," says the letter. "Continued dissemination of these files will increase the risk of terrorist attacks and gun violence across the United States." Defcad has well-established problems with ITAR, but the letter doesn't explain how it violates the Undetectable Firearms Act beyond asserting that files "enable the automatic manufacture of functional plastic weapons."
https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/04/14/2030239/beijing-tightens-grip-over-coronavirus-research-amid-us-china-row-on-virus-origin

Beijing Tightens Grip Over Coronavirus Research, Amid US-China Row on Virus Origin (cnn.com)




Posted by msmash  from the stranger-things dept.

Nectar Gan, Caitlin Hu and Ivan Watson, reporting for CNN:China has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the novel coronavirus, according to a central government directive and online notices published by two Chinese universities, that have since been removed from the web. Under the new policy, all academic papers on Covid-19 will be subject to extra vetting before being submitted for publication. Studies on the origin of the virus will receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by central government officials, according to the now-deleted posts.

A medical expert in Hong Kong who collaborated with mainland researchers to publish a clinical analysis of Covid-19 cases in an international medical journal said his work did not undergo such vetting in February. The increased scrutiny appears to be the latest effort by the Chinese government to control the narrative on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives and sickened 1.7 million people worldwide since it first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December. Since late January, Chinese researchers have published a series of Covid-19 studies in influential international medical journals.











https://atomic-chronoscaph.tumblr.com/post/82449157328/falcon-girl-james-hance




https://annaxmalina.tumblr.com/post/615199674678329344/anna-malina



https://beeple.tumblr.com/post/615159184776953856/vibecity


https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/615149329720688640/humanoidhistory-they-said-i-was-this-william



https://rosymegic.tumblr.com/post/615141581997080576

































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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you soon, Mom.

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- Days ago = 1748 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2004.16 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.

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