A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Two decades of pandemic simulations failed to account for Donald Trump
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6
Like all pandemics, it started out small. A novel coronavirus emerged in Brazil, jumping from bats to pigs to farmers before making its way to a big city with an international airport. From there, infected travellers carried it to the United States, Portugal and China. Within 18 months, the coronavirus had spread around the world, 65 million people were dead and the global economy was in free fall.
This fictitious scenario, dubbed Event 201, played out in a New York City conference centre before a panel of academics, government officials and business leaders last October. Those in attendance were shaken — which is what Ryan Morhard wanted. A biosecurity specialist at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, Morhard worried that world leaders weren’t taking the threat of a pandemic seriously enough. He wanted to force them to confront the potentially immense human and economic toll of a global outbreak. “We called it Event 201 because we’re seeing up to 200 epidemic events per year, and we knew that, eventually, one would cause a pandemic,” Morhard says.
The timing, and the choice of a coronavirus, proved prescient. Just two months later, China reported a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in the city of Wuhan — the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that has so far killed around 650,000 people.
Morhard was not the only one sounding the alarm. Event 201 was one of dozens of simulations and evaluations over the past two decades that have highlighted the risks of a pandemic and identified gaps in the ability of governments and organizations around the world to respond.
The exercises anticipated several failures that have played out in the management of COVID-19, including leaky travel bans, medical-equipment shortages, massive disorganization, misinformation and a scramble for vaccines. But the scenarios didn’t anticipate some of the problems that have plagued the pandemic response, such as a shortfall of diagnostic tests, and world leaders who reject the advice of public-health specialists.
Most strikingly, biosecurity researchers didn’t predict that the United States would be among the hardest-hit countries.
More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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On the anniversaries of Hiroshima, like some doomsday variant of Passover, we ask the four questions that ethicists and historians have been posing for decades:
• Why did President Harry Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima?
• Why did he then decide to bomb Nagasaki?
• Would a demonstration of the weapon—a massive eyewitnessed explosion in the middle of nowhere—have persuaded the Japanese to surrender?
• How might the war have ended—would more or fewer people have died—if the atom bomb had never been invented?
On the first two questions, declassified archival documents are pretty clear: There never was a decision to drop either bomb. Instead, there was a decision to build an atom bomb. Once it was ready, it was used; once the second bomb was ready, it too was used. From the outset, this was the plan — an automatic sequence from building the bomb to testing it to dropping it on the enemy. The only decision Truman made was not to alter the plan.
Even well before World War II, distinctions had been drawn between civilian and military targets, especially in the context of aerial bombardment, which had started in the First World War. However, this Rubicon was firmly crossed by the time of Hiroshima.
In June 1945, a few of the physicists in the Manhattan Project, notably James Franck and Leo Szilard, expressed concerns about what they called “political and social problems” of the bomb — its murderous destructiveness and the possibility of a nuclear arms race after the war — and urged the administration to demonstrate the bomb, on a “desert or barren island,” before using it to kill people. A month later, they and 66 of their colleagues signed a petition to the president, making the same points. However, the top-ranking scientists on the project — including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Arthur Compton (who was Franck and Szilard’s immediate supervisor) — disagreed, saying a peaceful demonstration would prolong the war. The top U.S. officials sided with the directors — or, more accurately, took the directors’ reports as affirmation of their own position. President Harry Truman — who hadn’t heard of the Manhattan Project until April, when Roosevelt died and he stepped up from vice president to commander in chief — never saw these petitions, in any case. (After the war, many of these scientists joined or led anti-nuclear organizations. Oppenheimer opposed development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb and lost his security clearance as a result.)
Before the bombs fell, Truman’s briefers told him that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. (There was a troop-loading dock on the outskirts of Hiroshima, but this was a minor consideration; the bomb was aimed at the city’s center.) For many years after, Truman feigned total comfort with having dropped the bombs, boasting that he “never lost any sleep” over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. However, the archives reveal that, in fact, he was horrified by the civilian destruction—and even ordered his generals not to drop a third bomb, so he wouldn’t have to kill more of “those kids.” Groves, the Manhattan Project’s supervisor, had been planning to do just that as soon as a third bomb was ready, sometime after Aug. 24, if Japan hadn’t surrendered by then; but Army chief of staff Gen. George Marshall told him not to do so without Truman’s express orders.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/hiroshima-anniversary-trum
an-atomic-bomb.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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T 
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.
N.Y. Attorney General Files Lawsuit Against NRA
Letitia James is seeking to put the gun advocacy organization out of business. The suit claims NRA executives diverted millions of dollars for lavish personal trips, no-show contracts for associates and other questionable expenditures.
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The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism
Matt Taibbi book review
Thomas Frank is one of America’s more skillful writers, an expert practitioner of a genre one might call historical journalism – ironic, because no recent media figure has been more negatively affected by historical change. Frank became a star during a time of intense curiosity about the reasons behind our worsening culture war, and now publishes a terrific book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, at a time when people are mostly done thinking about what divides us, gearing up to fight instead.
Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.”
Yet Clinton’s chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party’s latest Kennedy wannabe, John Kerry, did worse, and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant, despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?”
Frank, a Midwesterner and one of the last exemplars of a media tradition that saw staying in touch with the thinking of the general population as a virtue, was not puzzled. What’s the Matter with Kansas? was framed as an effort to answer that liberal cocktail-party conundrum – “How could anyone who’s ever worked for someone vote Republican?” was the version Frank described hearing – and the answer, at least on the surface, was appealing to coastal intellectuals.
Frank explained the Republican voter had thrown support to the Republicans’ pro-corporate economic message in exchange for solidarity on cultural issues, as part of what he called the “Great Backlash”:
While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic policies.
What’s the Matter with Kansas? was about more than that, but for the chattering classes, this thesis was enough. What they heard was that the electorally self-harming white Republican voter from poor regions like the High Plains was motivated not by reason, but by racial animus and Christian superstition.
For a certain kind of blue-state media consumer, and especially for Democratic Party politicians, this was a huge relief, the political version of Sean’s hug-it-out message to Will Hunting: It's not your fault.
A reader looking back at that book will note Frank also predicted political disasters that would later befall Democrats, and outlined the thesis of his current book The People, No, which will probably suffer financially for being pretty much the opposite of “All this shit, it’s not your fault.”
The Kansas title alone spoke to one of Frank’s central observations: while red state voters might frame objections in terms of issues like abortion or busing, in a broader sense the Republican voter is recoiling from urban liberal condescension.
That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: I was very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese, Bible-thumping dolts
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
T
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.
N.Y. Attorney General Files Lawsuit Against NRA
Letitia James is seeking to put the gun advocacy organization out of business. The suit claims NRA executives diverted millions of dollars for lavish personal trips, no-show contracts for associates and other questionable expenditures.
lol
Good luck. That ain't ever going to happen.
They could make a kickstarter campaign for the legal funds and meet the goal in a day.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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How inequality is changing the Republican Party — and breaking American politics
Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls “the conservative dilemma.” How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them.
This is not mere ivory-tower theorizing. Conservative politicians know the bind they’re in. When Mitt Romney told a room of donors during the 2012 election that there were “47 percent of the people who will vote for the president ( Obama ) no matter what” because they “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,” even though they “pay no income tax,” he was describing the conservative dilemma. “Our message of low taxes doesn’t connect,” he said, a bit sadly.
Occupy Wall Street’s rallying cry — “We are the 99%!” — framed the math behind the conservative dilemma more directly: How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets?
In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers.
More at www.vox.com/2020/8/6/21354453/inequality-trump-election-populism-pluto
cracy-hacker-pierson-let-them-eat-tweets
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Vox...
Hope they're saving their money. They're all going to be stocking shelves like me some day soon.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Trump has let every nuclear weapons treaty expire. If Vox told you, you won't believe, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Vox...
Hope they're saving their money. They're all going to be stocking shelves like me some day soon.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-Revealed/dp/1982128
518/
Media coverage of the bombings had been initially widespread and intensive, but details of the aftermath were actually scarce from the beginning, thanks to U.S. government and military efforts to control information about their handiwork in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States—which had just won a painfully earned moral and military victory over the Axis powers—was not eager to “get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” as the country’s secretary of war put it. Right away, officials in Washington. D.C., and newly arrived occupation forces in Japan went into overdrive to contain the story of the human cost of their new weapon. The Japanese media was forbidden by occupation authorities to write or air stories about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, lest they “disturb public tranquility.” As foreign reporters began to get into the country, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immediately put off-limits to them. The few journalists attempting to report on the atomic cities in the weeks immediately following the bombings were threatened with expulsion from Japan, harassed by U.S. officials, and accused of spreading Japanese propaganda, dispensed by a defeated enemy attempting to cultivate international sympathy after years of aggression and their own outsized atrocities.
On the home front, U.S. government officials corralled the population into thinking of the atom bomb as a conventional superbomb, painting it in terms of TNT and denying its radioactive aftermath. “It was just the same as getting a bigger gun than the other fellow had to win a war and that's what it was used for,” said President Truman. “Nothing else but an artillery weapon.” When it was eventually conceded that bomb-induced radiation poisoning was real, its horrors were downplayed. (It could even be a “very pleasant way to die.” stated Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, which had created the bombs in just three years.)
The American public was allowed to see images of the mushroom clouds and hear triumphant eyewitness descriptions from the American bombers themselves, but reports containing testimonies from below the clouds were virtually nonexistent. Images of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s devastated landscapes were also released to newspapers and magazines by U.S. forces. However, while sobering, the post-atomic landscape photographs failed to register deeply enough with readers who had been inundated with images of decimated cities—London. Warsaw. Manila. Dresden, Chungking, among scores of others—on a daily basis for more than half a decade. Hersey himself acknowledged that post-bomb landscape photos could only get a limited emotional response: ruins, he thought, could be “spectacular: but . . . impersonal, as rubble so often is.” What the American public did not see: photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki hospitals ringed by the corpses of blast survivors who had staggered there seeking medical help and died in agony on the front steps. (Most of the doctors and nurses had been killed or wounded anyway.) Nor did they see images of the crematoriums burning the remains of thousands of anonymous victims, or pictures of scorched women and children, their hair falling out in fistfuls.
The published images of Hiroshima’s demolished landscape gravely undersold the reality of atomic aftermath. Usually a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case it would take Hersey’s 30,000 words to reveal and drive home the truth about America’s new mega-weapon.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407
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Some years back that ex Governor Bill Richardson was questioned by Luke Rudkowski & Matt of WeAreChange on his reported attendance at the Occult Homosexual California Blackmail event called 'Bohemian Grove'
https://wearechange.org/bill-richardson-sweats-bullets-over-bohemian-g
rove/
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