It’s not over. It’ll never be over.

This week is Covid Anniversary Week, depending on how you figure it. This was the week, four years ago, that we finally started to realize how deep the shit we were in really was. It’s when Tom Hanks revealed he and his wife were sick, when the travel bans, restaurant closings and other shutdowns began to happen. The cruise ships full of sick people were anchored offshore. You were there, you remember.

Not long ago a Detroit media personality said, “Why did we have to shut everything down, when we were just trying to protect old people?” How soon we forget that we were trying to protect everyone. Certainly, older people were the bulk of the deaths, but lots of people under 65 died, too. In Detroit, there was a 7-year-old girl who died. A state legislator, 44 years old. Lots of people, over 44,000 Michiganians, over 1 million Americans. Seven million worldwide. Dead.

I wrote a one-year anniversary story for Deadline Detroit, and I’ve reread it around this time of year for the last couple, not because it’s great journalism but because I don’t want to forget the details. The way Woodward Avenue looked in the middle of a weekday (empty). The doctor who had food delivered for ER workers, because there wasn’t time to go out for any, and PPE was in such short supply that they couldn’t afford to do a complete change. The funeral director who had to spend time he didn’t have sourcing gloves, because without gloves, he’d be out of business, and then how would he pay for the refrigerated truck outside keeping the overflow from decomposing? The mom trying to coordinate schooling for all her children, plus care for her ailing father, back in New York. All of it.

The funeral director said this, and it stays with me:

The real trouble started when government offices closed. We couldn’t get death certificates. You have to have an official cause and manner of death to bury, and especially for cremation. I rented a refrigerated truck. My holding room was overflowing. Hospital morgues were overflowing. It was late May to June before I could finally catch up.

Without death certificates, families can’t collect insurance. And because people were dying so young, nobody had a will or plan. Some people had their living wills, medical power of attorney, all those things in order, but that wasn’t the majority. Then you had households with multiple Covid cases, like a husband and wife in the ICU at the same time. If one died and the other was on a vent, no one could speak for them. So someone had to get emergency guardianship. It complicated all the situations.

We barely heard about cases like these, but they happened everywhere. And I want to remember it all, because time erodes memory, and bad actors are still lying about so much of it, especially vaccines, but other stuff, too. “Don’t say ‘died of Covid,’ say ‘died with Covid’ because that’s more accurate,” for instance. I still see “pureblood” in online bios.

When we talk about long-term changes to American society, we’ll need books to examine it all. The loss of respect for institutions. The cost of having an idiot president in charge, who casually suggests hospital workers are selling PPE “out the back door,” and wondering how we might get “a light inside the body.” The still-being-sorted effects of white-collar work-at-home. The way the governors of Ohio (male) and Michigan (female) ordered virtually identical business restrictions, and the Michigan governor endured great blowback for it, but the blowback in Ohio was directed at the state health director, and I bet you can guess what gender that person is.

Now, of course, many of us have had Covid, some multiple times, and this is offered as “proof” that the whole business was overblown, that it was self-inflicted punishment, never mind that viral outbreaks become less deadly as the virus mutates, that each wave that followed the initial one was less deadly. That’s in part because doctors knew what they were dealing with, but mostly because of vaccines. Which few people are keeping up with, many because they “feel they’re ‘done’ with Covid.” Huh. I’ve had six shots so far, and may yet get the spring version, because we’ll be traveling in a few weeks and why risk a spoiled vacation. P.S. Still a No-vid here, as is Alan.

So.

Like many of you, we’ve had a spectacular run of pleasant, warm weather. It perhaps portends a truly hellish summer, but that’s just more reason to get out and enjoy it. I hope you are. I intend to. Happy midweek.

Posted at 9:22 am in Current events |
 

60 responses to “It’s not over. It’ll never be over.”

  1. Mark P said on March 13, 2024 at 9:46 am

    Just one more thing Trump normalized: stupidity. Another great one: projection. That’s where the accusation of medical people selling PPE came from; that’s what Trump would have been doing.

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    • nancy said on March 13, 2024 at 10:50 am

      Exactly.

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  2. Jeff Borden said on March 13, 2024 at 9:47 am

    I was astonished by the challenge of tRumpanzee Elise Stefanik asking voters if they “were better off now than four years ago.” Yeah, Elise. Much better. Thanks for asking.

    There’s a scary opinion piece in today’s NYT by a Republican who worked for Reagan and both Bushes. He calla out the party’s turn to nativism, isolationism and contempt for science and expertise. He says this will be with us for a generation. Dear dog, we are fucked.

    Notice the spike in measles cases? It’s only going to get worse. Morons are setting our national agenda. Can polio and smallpox be far behind?

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  3. Dexter Friend said on March 13, 2024 at 11:23 am

    Many hated Governor Cuomo with his daily briefings on national networks, but he gave accurate reports with a comforting voice and he projected honesty with the numbers. My wife was recovering in a nursing home with complications from knee replacement surgery; she didn’t have a chance when she contracted Covid19 and it took her quickly. She hated Trump and Trumpers and by damn, she lasted until just after Joe was sworn in, and she passed that night, January 20, 2021.
    FEMA paid for her funeral home costs but the family argued about a final resting place until time ran out for a headstone, which FEMA would have paid for. FEMA coming through like that surprised me and just made things easier.

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  4. Jason T. said on March 13, 2024 at 1:19 pm

    “The way the governors of Ohio (male) and Michigan (female) ordered virtually identical business restrictions, and the Michigan governor endured great blowback for it, but the blowback in Ohio was directed at the state health director, and I bet you can guess what gender that person is. “

    The blowback in Pennsylvania was directed at the transgender woman health director. The viciousness aimed at her was jaw-dropping. There are people to whom I’m still not speaking. And there’s at least one restaurant where I won’t set foot again because the owner showed his ass on the issue so badly.

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  5. Jason T. said on March 13, 2024 at 1:20 pm

    Our governor (male) at the time was named “Wolf.”

    “You are all sheep led by a Wolf” was one of the more “clever” things that COVID-denying idiots were saying on social media, and posting on signs outside of their homes.

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  6. Suzanne said on March 13, 2024 at 2:03 pm

    The idiots are still out there.
    I signed up for a program at the local YMCA for cancer survivors. A Live Strong program. The director has made clear she is deep into the wellness world, touting the efficacy of essential oils for nearly everything, brought in a speaker to tell us that sugar is bad because it feeds cancer, had a reflexologist speak to us about how many things she could help with foot baths and reflexology done with essential oil, along with some legitimate fitness suggestions. I let some of the more questionable comments pass but on Monday, as she was waiting to introduce a chaplain who had come to speak, she launched into a rant on how bad COVID vaccines are, how they cause death, and how they don’t do any good. I vocally expressed my disagreement with her views, as did another woman but she kept going. She personally knew someone who got the COVID vaccine and died, don’t you know? At that point, I stood up and announced that I was not going to sit there and listen to this and was leaving. I did stay because she finally shut up. After the session, several of the other attendees expressed to me that they, too, thought she was out of line. But what is wrong with people like this program director? I have gotten every vaccine and booster on the advice of both my primary care doc and my oncologist. Does she assume they are lying to me?? If I had gotten COVID during my cancer treatments with no vaccine, I am sure I would be dead.

    The chaplain’s talk, however, was quite good so I am glad I stayed. Still debating if I will go back for the remaining sessions. I do like the other people I have met there. I am also debating if I need to report her to the Y higher ups.

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  7. FDChief said on March 13, 2024 at 2:05 pm

    A generation? (laughs in a slightly hysterical way)

    Unless these idiots are completely and utterly destroyed socially and politically we are doomed to fight this stupidity (and let’s recall against what the gods themselves struggle in vain…) for…a very, very long time.

    And what chance that happens? When “conservatives” know the only hope they have of enacting their loathsome policies is rube-running these nitwits?

    So no. We’re stuck with these gomers. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t harvest them because their pelts are worthless…

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  8. Julie Robinson said on March 13, 2024 at 2:46 pm

    Covid reared its ugly head in our book discussion group last night. There was a passage about how when you have trauma and are unable to process it, especially when others won’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t just go away. It festers and comes out in depression, anger, and other negative behaviors.

    Everyone had a Covid story; many revolving around deniers and resuming meetings or offices happening too soon. One left their church, one left their job, and they are still traumatized today.

    So many industries haven’t recovered; restaurants, movie theaters, stage theatres, churches. Kids haven’t all caught up with their academics. And too many have an aching hole in their lives like Dexter.
    But tell me again how everything is fine and we should just be over it all.

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  9. FDChief said on March 13, 2024 at 3:08 pm

    Something similar happened w the Spanish Influenza. When it mutated into its lethal form in the autumn of 1918 numerous polities took what public health measures they could.

    Same in the spring flu season of 1919.

    But by autumn 1919? The U.S. public was done, despite a pretty lethal wave that came thru.

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  10. Dorothy said on March 13, 2024 at 4:12 pm

    Suzanne I would suggest you talk to the director of that YMCA – someone over the head of that Program Director – and let them know how she behaved and what she talked about. She’s allowed her own personal opinions, but she’s not a medical doctor and should not be talking like that to paid members of the YMCA. I think she stepped over the line.

    Nancy since your post included information from four years ago from a funeral director, life insurance, death certificates, etc. I thought I’d mention a situation with my sister who died about 2.5 weeks ago. She left no will; she owned a 2007 Malibu but I got photos of it yesterday from the apartment manager, and it appeared she had not renewed the license plate (Pennsylvania) since 2017. How she drove that car around and didn’t get ticketed for driving with expired plates is beyond me. I know she went to doctor appointments and the grocery store. Maybe she had stopped driving that car and got rides with fellow apartment building residents. I’ll never know. But since we could not turn up a title to the car, and we needed to get rid of it, my brother phoned a salvage yard in Pittsburgh. This guy has been in the salvage business for 50 years. He only uses a flip phone – cannot receive pictures on the phone. So we typed out the VIN so he could research it and make sure there were no liens against it (there were not). He just picked it up and towed it away and that’s a huge relief. My brother said this guy seemed like a real character, someone you’d see on an episode of Law & Order. We’re very lucky we found him!

    So let this be a warning of sorts – try to be sure you have your act together and your important papers and information secure somewhere in case you die suddenly. Give someone you trust your passwords. We haven’t needed anything like that for my sister (yet). She had nothing. I’m sure she’s in debt somewhere but the companies she owes will write it all off. None of us had co-signed any loans for her. My mother had her name on the Malibu along with Lou’s name, but Mum died in 2017. I wondered if perhaps the title to the car was in my brother’s possession since he was the executor for Mum. However in 2022 he lost nearly everything in a fire in a condo he and his wife live in (it belongs to one of her daughters).

    So I am pretty sure we will have no more issues to deal with after her funeral on April 20. I did get a phone call a few years ago from a doctor’s office – she had asked me to be her emergency medical contact and I said yes. When they called me they had been having trouble reaching her and asked me if I had another way to get in touch with her. I am curious to find out if she had a fatal illness and had not told any of us. I know there are privacy laws and a doctor’s office might not want to tell me anything, but once she is dead do those rules no longer apply? I wonder….

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  11. Bob (not Greene) said on March 13, 2024 at 5:27 pm

    Dorothy, I believe that you mentioned that you got a call from the county medical examiner. I’m not sure how it works in Pennsylvania, but in Cook County, Illinois, if there was an autopsy done by the medical examiner, the determination of cause of death is a public record, so I am guessing you could ask for that information.

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  12. Deborah said on March 13, 2024 at 5:28 pm

    Suzanne, I agree with Dorothy, I would report that woman’s behavior to someone higher at the Y, for all of the reasons Dorothy mentioned. So sorry you all have to be subjected to that when it could be a good program for people who need it.

    I’m happy to say I slept through the night in the Santa Fe condo, the first time in about 3 weeks since all of the traveling.

    One thing I thought might be of interest here at nn.c because this subject comes up from time to time here: the price of gas in Tokyo and Kyoto was around 160 Yen per liter. The currency conversion rate is about 147 Yen per US dollar, so you can figure it out. If that is correct the cost of gas was a lot less over there than I expected. I didn’t see a lot of charging stations in either of those cities compared to what I find in Santa Fe and in France the last time we were there. I don’t know where Japan gets their oil?

    Also funny thing was they had a clothing store called Hoosiers. Oh and also they have stores over there called 100 Coins which are equivalent to dollar stores over here.

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  13. Julie Robinson said on March 13, 2024 at 5:46 pm

    Dorothy, my sister died in similar circumstances without a will, title to her car, passwords, any provisions made. I had to reconstruct everything from her phone, a Kindle that was signed in to her email, and the bills that kept arriving.

    Don’t waste your time trying to get anything from the doctors even if you were set up as power of health care. We had to get her car title from the salt mines (I kid you not) in Tennessee where Toyota has long term storage. She had paid it off but never bothered to get the title. We sold it for $1500, making it one of her most valuable assets.

    Any evidence she had filed taxes? If not, without a will you may have to go through probate, which, of course, is pricey.

    I’m so, so sorry for what you’re going through and will echo that everyone should have their affairs in order. We have wills and all our powers of everything, but the wills are 40 years old and we’ll be updating them with an attorney here.

    And, speaking of Covid rearing its ugly head, our neighbor broke her kneecap and was in the hospital for almost three weeks. Guess what she brought home with? She complained about feeling like she had a bad cold but no one tested her. After she got home she did a self-test, and sure enough the line was pink. She’s been home an hour and has called Dennis twice already. I would bet he will be at the pharmacy picking up Paxlovid tonight.

    Her sons are not in town although one is half an hour away, but guess who has been taking care of her cat? Not them. Now she is home with zero help and they won’t stir their stumps.

    Make that three times.

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  14. David C said on March 13, 2024 at 5:53 pm

    I second what Dorothy said about getting your papers together. My dad wouldn’t tell any of us anything about their finances, insurance, etc. before he died. My brother is still trying to sort out if our mom’s Medigap policy is still active. We’re fortunate that mom is healthy except Alzheimer’s (other than that Mrs. Lincoln) Just a couple of weeks ago, he discovered a six figure investment dad had that we didn’t know anything about. We think it’s the proceeds from selling their house so it was a piece of change. After you tell your loved ones you love them, this is probably the second most important thing you can do for them before you pass.

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  15. Dorothy said on March 13, 2024 at 6:28 pm

    I did ask the ME when they called me on Wednesday morning (first phone call came at almost 1 PM Tuesday) to tell me they were releasing her body to the funeral home if an autopsy was done. He said no, but they took blood and tissue samples and the results should be done in ‘a few months.’ I think they might mail me a report on the cause of death since I’m the one they telephoned after she was found. I already asked my husband if he’d mind opening the envelope if we get anything in the mail and preview it. I dread reading the particulars. She was in a locked apartment and was already gone for almost four days. I think I already mentioned last week that she was hoarding. The place was a mess.

    We don’t need the title to the car because we gave it to the salvage guy. He’ll probably sell it for parts. Julie I’m not going to spend ANY time asking any doctors for information. I just meant that if one of them happens to call me, possibly if she misses an appointment and they wondered where she was, and if they do call, I’ll ask then. I don’t even know the names of any doctors.

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  16. Julie Robinson said on March 13, 2024 at 7:42 pm

    Three for my sis, Dorothy. My daughter went over after a day of her not answering the phone, but got a funny feeling and called the police instead of going in. That was a trauma she didn’t need. They asked if we wanted an autopsy, but she had three or four conditions that could have killed her, so we said no. They didn’t ask about doing tissue and blood samples. In every case we’ve known, those have come back inconclusive. So don’t get your hopes up too far.

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  17. Cheez Whiz said on March 13, 2024 at 7:43 pm

    The little secret that almost no one talked about at the time was that the point of “lockdowns” was to prevent the collapse of out hospital system, with saving lives a secondary concern. Just ask a nurse or doctor. As the death rate dropped restrictions were eased though keeping them might have saved more lives, but the public was pretty clear where its priority was in that decision.

    God, lockdown. I moved to California from Detroit in 1983, and when I was in Detroit in Sep 2020 my family bitched about “the lockdown”. I was all, your restaurants and bars are open! With indoor service! We have none of that in Cal, and that’s not a lockdown there!

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  18. Dave said on March 13, 2024 at 8:14 pm

    Julie Robinson, you might want to do something about your wills as soon as possible, not that anything bad will happen but, as we all know, sometimes. . .

    When we moved to Florida, after we’d been there a couple of years, we thought we should do something about our wills, so we chose a lawyer and went. She specialized in estates and elder law and the like and she told us our Indiana wills would work but, because they were Indiana wills, for them to be recognized and workable, they would have to find the witnesses who signed them and get them to legally confirm they were the witnesses before any of the will could be acted on. All those folks were in Fort Wayne and we knew the lawyer who’d done our wills there had retired so it would have created, had anything bad happened to us, a hard situation for our children.

    We traveled to Chile last month, primarily Santiago, the capital city, and gasoline was roughly $1.30 U. S. dollars a liter, so over $5.00 a gallon. I thought it would be cheaper there.

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  19. Julie Robinson said on March 13, 2024 at 8:35 pm

    Yeah, pretty sure our witnesses have both died since then, and not sure about the attorney. I just got a very strong recommendation for an elderlaw attorney last Thursday. But now you’ve made me question my mom’s will. Oy veh.

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  20. Julie Robinson said on March 13, 2024 at 9:12 pm

    Oh, and Paxlovid is $1700 now that the official designation from the government is over. There is a form the neighbor’s son knew about which made it free.

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  21. Gretchen said on March 14, 2024 at 1:08 am

    I still want to know what was going on with the feds confiscating PPE that was heading to hospitals. There was never a report of what happened to it after confiscation. My theory was that Kushner was selling it. Shipments were being disguised in food trucks and taken down back roads so the feds wouldn’t take them. Meanwhile, my son in law was a respiratory therapist in New York who got one new mask a week, kept in a paper bag between shifts. He had as many as 80 patients when 8 was more usual. He told my daughter to stop asking how work was that day. “Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow”.

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  22. nancy said on March 14, 2024 at 9:41 am

    That’s not a terrible theory about Jared Kushner. I know he did appoint a passel of his dumbass friends to “solve” the supply-line issue for PPE, and they made an absolute hash of it. As detailed here:

    Federal officials who had spent years devising emergency plans were layered over by Kushner allies, working with and within the White House coronavirus task force, who believed their private-sector experience could solve the country’s looming supply shortage. The young volunteers — drawn from venture capital and private equity firms — were expected to apply their deal-making experience to quickly weed out good leads from the mountain of bad ones, administration officials said in an interview. FEMA and other agencies, despite years of emergency preparation, were not equipped for the unprecedented task of a pandemic that affected all 50 states, they said.

    Yes, I’m sure a private-equity guy is exactly who you want sourcing PPE from overseas markets during a global pandemic.

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  23. Jeff Borden said on March 14, 2024 at 10:30 am

    Wasn’t there a story floating around that Prince Jared didn’t really care much for getting proper medical materials to blue cities and states? He saw no political upside to it. Under tRump, who refused to use the federal powers to coordinate distribution of critically needed medicine and equipment, states were competing with each other for the same limited materials, driving up the costs and slowing down their delivery. I recall Illinois hiring charter planes to collect and bring back the materials here. Like everything else in his miserable life, tRump completely screwed the pooch on the most important job he had during his reign of imcompetence. How many Americans died because of his ineptitude? Millions?

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  24. LAMary said on March 14, 2024 at 11:39 am

    The republican governor of Maryland pissed off Trump by getting PPE from Korea through his Korean American wife’s connections.

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  25. nancy said on March 14, 2024 at 1:09 pm

    Borden, yes you are right. This is one reason Biden’s Covid relief money has been given directly to cities; they’ve learned that if they block-grant it to states with GOP governors, it’ll all be spent on red suburbs and not the places that need it most.

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  26. Jerrie in Mid-MD said on March 14, 2024 at 1:12 pm

    I’m not a Hogan supporter but it was a dramatic and proud moment when the jet landed at BWI. He had the Maryland National Guard and the state police hide the test kits purchased from South Korea for fear that the feds would seize them. Unfortunately, the tests were flawed, which he and his health administration officials hid from us, and were not used. The state quietly returned the tests 2 months later and purchased 500,000 more from the company. The University of Maryland rejected the replacement tests for too many false positives but a private lab were offered them for free and took them.

    Unfortunately, as with other things Hogan, it didn’t live up to the hype.

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  27. LindaG said on March 14, 2024 at 3:46 pm

    Suzanne, I go to the Parkview YMCA in FW. There are comment cards available so you can make your complaint anonymously if you like.

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  28. David C said on March 14, 2024 at 6:11 pm

    The Feds shouldn’t give money to any government entity controlled by the GOP. The Covid relief money given to the City of Oshkosh (nonpartisan but Dem dominated) was appropriated and spent as within six months. The money given to Winnebago County (non-partisan but GOP dominated), well, first they wanted to turn it down completely. Someone smacked them upside the head and told them how stupid that would be. Then they started a pissing contest over where to spend it that almost brought them to losing it because of the time limit. Only Republicans can fuck up spending free money.

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  29. Mark P said on March 14, 2024 at 6:21 pm

    Georgia’s Republican governor has steadfastly refused to accept federal funding for Medicaid expansion. So Georgia has one of the highest uninsured rates and one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. That’ll show Obama.

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  30. Jeff Borden said on March 14, 2024 at 7:46 pm

    Mark P

    Nothing “owns the libs” like fucking over your own constituents. And still the dolts vote for their oppressors.

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  31. Julie Robinson said on March 14, 2024 at 7:55 pm

    Mark P, Florida has also turned down Medicaid expansion. It’s supposedly because the Federal government would have too much control.

    So you end up with people like the lady who was cleaning for us at church. She never learned to read and can’t figure out life very well. She had a toothache for three weeks, so last night she pulled it herself. I’m sure she needs antibiotics and she’s lucky she didn’t bleed out.

    She’s actually lucky, because her older sister pays her rent and utilities. So she won’t go homeless, at least.

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  32. Auntie Velvet said on March 14, 2024 at 7:56 pm

    I was just thinking today about my brother-in-law’s funeral in April ’21. (Many of you knew him as Lance Mannion.) So much of what would have been horrible anyway was made exponentially worse by Covid, from his poor sons not being able to get a definitive cause of death from the overworked coroner’s office, to the inability of people to embrace at the funeral.

    At the (backyard) gathering afterwards, an emergency call came that my mother-in-law, herself in a hospital Covid ward, might be in her last hours. So we all raced over, changed into boiler suits and visors, and plunged into her room, which was tented as if for termite treatment.

    My lasting memory of that day is of course of endless sobbing, and specifically, of trying to shimmy wads of Kleenex under various types of face masks, from drugstore fabric to hospital-grade plastic.

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  33. Deborah said on March 14, 2024 at 9:05 pm

    Auntie Velvet, I was a fan of Lance Mannion and as a matter of fact he brought me to nn.c many years ago now. Sorry to hear about your experiences with Covid, while I was full of anxiety during the worst of it, it never got to be that dramatic for me and my family. Thankfully.

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  34. Auntie Velvet said on March 14, 2024 at 9:20 pm

    Thank you, Deborah! You would think that it would be the opposite trajectory for me — that “Lance” brought me to nn.c. In fact, my reading the blog was a coincidence.

    But I kept thinking “WHY do I know this name?” Of course it turned out it was from “real life,” and Lance and The Blonde talking about their adventures with Nance back in Indiana.

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  35. Sherri said on March 14, 2024 at 9:56 pm

    Auntie Velvet, I never met Lance (David) in person, but we corresponded quite a bit electronically, and it was quite a blow when he died. I still think of him.

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  36. Jeff Gill said on March 15, 2024 at 8:29 am

    Auntie Velvet, thank you; Lance/David was one of the great joys of the internet for me, and I was sorry never to meet him in person. I appreciate the reminder of his life.

    From the top of the thread, some “Never Trump” conservative whose name I can’t recall used to say often “everything Trump says can be sorted into two piles: confessions, and projection.” It’s an interesting heuristic to carry around in your head, when you end up having to listen to the man. Because it’s (mostly) true. He admits what he really did or intended, or he accuses others of what he really wishes he was doing or has already done.

    There is, though, a third pile, which is denials of obvious fact. He gets a bunch of those out in any average public statement. Like “I never even met that woman.”

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  37. FDChief said on March 15, 2024 at 8:48 am

    Funny thing about the Trump/COVID thing; I…
    1) realized early how easy it would have been for him and his GOP cronies to have been heroes because WW2 and the Depression. Seriously; say the right words. Get the emergency government systems and organizations spun up – fuck, that’s what they’re there for! Work with the epidemologists to come up with vaccines ASAP (which, in fairness, they did…but then let the whacko antivaxxer QANuts take the wheel and undermine the good work) while weaponizing the medical industry. But…
    2) knew they’d fuck it up because Iraq. Seriously; we’ve shoved it down the memory hole, but the last time the Heritage Foundation/Wingnut nitwits had a massive project to run the result was the rolling clusterfuck that was the Coalition Provisional Authority and what a screaming goat rodeo THAT was. You were the treasurer of the Darthmouth Young Republicans? Sure, you can run the entire Iraqi central banking system! Make pallets of banknotes disappear! You’re a Sisterfuck County, Arkansas sheriff’s deputy? Sure, here’s the entire national police academy to reform!

    These gomers killed hundreds of thousands because when your political philosophy (such as it is) is “government is bad” it stands to reason you’ll be bad at governing.

    The Trump clan are just thieves, mind. But the fundamental dysfunction is baked into this tribe of dullards and fools.

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  38. Mark P said on March 15, 2024 at 10:09 am

    If we’re going to get into Julian assignments, we can say that all of the Republicans are divided into two parts, the stupid and the evil.

    And thanks for reminding me of Lance. Remembering is maybe the only thing we really owe the dead. I didn’t know him, but I read him, and I remember him.

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  39. FDChief said on March 15, 2024 at 10:17 am

    Mark: porque no los dos?

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  40. FDChief said on March 15, 2024 at 10:21 am

    Mannion and I had a fun “friends-on-the-internet” kind of thing over our mutually unabashed enjoyment of goofy genre films from Star Wars to Tolkien. He was always perceptive and literate, the very best sort of “internet pal”.

    For someone I never actually met, he left a surprisingly large loss…

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  41. Mark P said on March 15, 2024 at 1:28 pm

    FD Chief, I guess that does fit better: All of the Republican Party is divided into three parts, the stupid, the evil, and the stupid and evil.

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  42. Jeff Borden said on March 15, 2024 at 1:30 pm

    tRump is one of the most loathsome men on earth, but the S.O.B. is so fucking lucky. His trial in NYC is delayed a month. The Georgia situation is bollixed by the personal life of Fani Willis, so more delays there. And that tRump-appointed nincompoop judge keeps delaying the documents trial in Floriduh. She’s a good little MAGAt, isn’t she?

    ‘Murican Justice System, baby! Gotta love it.

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  43. Jim H said on March 15, 2024 at 4:03 pm

    Tom the Dancing Bug’s take on NYT “balanced” coverage: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/tom-the-dancing-bug/

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  44. Deborah said on March 15, 2024 at 5:27 pm

    I need to get over thinking that the courts are going to save us. Justice is slow, it just is unfortunately. With all of the voter suppression that’s happening out there I’m not sure anything is going to save us. Depressing. But not giving up, ever.

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  45. David C said on March 15, 2024 at 5:36 pm

    I don’t think anyone can figure out why SDNY decided to dump the evidence on Alvin Bragg now. He subpoenaed it months ago. It must still be a rat’s nest of Rudy cronies. At least that’s the only thing I can think of.

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  46. ROGirl said on March 15, 2024 at 6:48 pm

    Off-topic, but we had a Friday afternoon massacre at work today. 2 people got fired, the email from HR went out at 3. It’s been a hard week for me anyway, I’ve been feeling like just walking away, but I actually got some support from someone this morning, which gave me an emotional lift. It’s a place that operates in a swirl of chaos and lack of accountability, but I manage to navigate through it and get stuff done.

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  47. brian said on March 15, 2024 at 8:20 pm

    You go, ROGirl! I don’t miss my semi-toxic former workplace, one iota (or .0031 scintilla)

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  48. alex said on March 16, 2024 at 10:25 am

    I don’t miss my toxic former workplace either, although I plan to lunch with some former colleagues one day soon. I get occasional updates from them about the palace intrigues but also about “Alex the plant.” That’s what they named the red shamrock that I left in their care because I didn’t want to haul it to my car on my last day. The latest picture shows it thriving and happy and bringing joy to a place otherwise bereft of it.

    I spent time in Chicago with my formerly liberal friend who has been radicalized by Trump World. He insists that crime is up drastically and that he’s afraid to use public transit; that Michigan Avenue is shedding department stores because of “the George Floyd bullshit”; that the panhandlers are now “all the Venezuelans that Biden let into the country”; ad nauseam. And if I countered with factual information, he was all like “Fuck you, I live here and you don’t.”

    One night we strolled past a rather schmancy camping tent on the sidewalk in a well-lit underpass and it reeked of marijuana smoke. My friend said he wished he had a can of gasoline and a lighter.

    I suspect that he has abandoned legitimate news media entirely, but other than Ann Althouse he doesn’t say where he’s getting his information. I met up with another friend who asked me whether I knew any Democrats who had gone to the dark side and she says that she has been experiencing the same thing. Her take is simply that the Trump era has given people permission to be assholes and that when liberals try it on for size, some of them end up liking it.

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  49. Sherri said on March 16, 2024 at 5:32 pm

    I think that Trump giving liberals permission to be assholes and them discovering that they like it may be part of it, but this phenomenon predates Trump. There are quite a few people who are only liberal as long as they aren’t impacted by any changes, but the instant changes to the status quo cause them discomfort, they flip. Martin Luther King observed this long ago, that there were people who didn’t like that lunch counters were segregated in the South, but were less supportive when he started talking about housing segregation in the North.

    People who claim to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative are prone to flipping; they’re liberal until they have to pay for change.

    I think it was Atrios who made a joke about people who claimed to be Democrats until 9/11, after which they became deeply concerned about Chappaquiddick.

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  50. Jeff Gill said on March 16, 2024 at 9:37 pm

    “The U.S. homicide rate began to trend upward in 2015 after a long-running decline. . . Homicide rates spiked by 57% from April to July 2020 in a sample of 32 American cities. By the end of 2021, rates were an average of 39% higher than in 2019. The average rate began receding in 2022 but was still 18% higher in 2023 than in 2019. The homicide rate in the sample cities fell by 10% from 2022 to 2023.”

    https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/

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  51. Deborah said on March 16, 2024 at 10:16 pm

    I had no idea https://terikanefield.com/the-right-to-vote/

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  52. brian stouder said on March 16, 2024 at 11:12 pm

    Deborah – thanks for the link. That article was quite thought-provoking, indeed

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  53. Heather said on March 17, 2024 at 1:04 am

    Alex, you can tell your friend that you know people who do live here and aren’t afraid of crime, public transportation, etc. I do notice a lot of Venezuelan immigrants in my neighborhood with signs asking for money but they are hardly aggressive or scary. Many of them have children with them. I give when I can or offer to buy them food. I wish the city would do more for them.

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  54. Dexter Friend said on March 17, 2024 at 3:01 am

    I always wondered how… https://www.fox32chicago.com/video/1426754

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  55. Deborah said on March 17, 2024 at 5:24 am

    This is the weekend when Chicago’s sidewalks are plastered in vomit. Lots of drinkers stumbling around wearin green and funny hats. I go back to Chicago on Thursday to stay there through the spring. Spring and fall are the best times there. After lots of traveling it will be good to be back.

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  56. alex said on March 17, 2024 at 10:26 am

    Heather, it was our mutual friend Celia who asked me if I knew any Dems who had become radicalized into Trumpist assholes. She told me that she knows several.

    If it comes up again, I’ll be sure to mention to my radicalized friend that I know plenty of people in Chicago, none of whom agree with him, not that it will change his mind. Everything he told me was easily refutable. I pointed out that stores aren’t just closing on Michigan Avenue but everywhere; they’ve lost business because of people working remotely and shopping online, not because of “George Floyd bullshit.” Hell, Macy’s just announced it’s closing 150 underperforming stores. And this is a trend that began long before anyone heard of George Floyd.

    As a former Chicagoan, I find myself constantly defending Chicago to people repeating crap they’ve picked up from right-wing media. It’s just surprising to discover that one of my friends, a lifelong and current Chicagoan, believes any of it.

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  57. Mark P said on March 17, 2024 at 11:01 am

    Did anyone else see Trump’s prediction (threat) of what will happen if he loses to Biden? A bloodbath. How is this man a leading candidate for president? Looks like maybe the current Supreme Court thinks the Constitution really is a suicide pact.

    Oh well. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

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  58. brian stouder said on March 17, 2024 at 4:30 pm

    Mark P, it is indeed amazing to me just how genuinely stupid – or willfully ignorant? (or utterly and irredeemably evil) Donald Trump and his klan is. Does he ever (ever!) read books, or listen to intelligent people? (people who present points of view different from, and/or opposed to his?) He seems to be willfully and resolutely ignorant; indeed – proudly stupid. Shame on us (American voters) if we re-elect him

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  59. Jeff Borden said on March 17, 2024 at 7:07 pm

    Brian Stouder,,

    You’ve asked the $64,000 question. tRump typically talks in extremely vague terms about pop culture, i.e., comparing his crowd sizes to those attending a concert by Elton John. His rallies are preceded by the most banal of song choices aside from the so-called choir of jailed traitors from J6 singing the national anthem. He sneered at the Oscar won by the South Korean film “Parasite,” but I’ve never heard him talk about films that thrilled him. (My guess is they would be “Patton” and “Home Alone 2,” cause he has a cameo.) Books? Oh, please. He’s a fucking moron. His ignorance of history –even 20th century history– is gobsmacking. Fucker doesn’t even know how to dress with any class.

    If we survive this –and the jury is still out– the first years of the 21st century are going to amaze future readers of history.

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