It's a sad thing that many Americans' first introduction to Europe is Charles de Gaulle airport, which serves the same purpose in European transportation as Hell does in Christian theology. CDG is how France punishes Americans for telling World War 2 jokes.

When you're landing at CDG, the pilot says "We are now arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Please prepare to weep tears of blood and rage." That's when you realize the scenes below of people running in circles and screaming in panic is just the line for passport control. It gets worse from there and differs from Dante's Inferno only in that Dante' got out within a single human lifetime.

(Story: I got lost in that place once -- and by 'once', I mean 'every single fucking time' -- and couldn't figure out how to get to the taxi stand. Since no one will give you help at CDG like no one will give you ice water in Hell, I approached this French military guy toting what looked a lot like a MP-5.

"Bonjour, Monsieur," I began, "je ne parle pas français; parlez-vous Anglais?" and I'm trying to scrape together enough of the infantile French I know into some semblance of "how the fuck do I get out of this failure of architectural design and vacancy of God's mercy to get a taxi?", which came out as "Taxi, S'il vous plaît?", probably much to my advantage.

The dude with the MP-5 gives me the Gallic stink-eye, shakes his head slowly, and then points directly up.

"Taxi -->" said the giant sign directly above his head.

"Ah, merci!" I said brightly while he, my mortified wife and pretty much the entire nation of France rolled their eyes.

I so fucking love France!)

Panic. Which, is largely understandable.

re: the wanted-to-play-it-down-so-not-to-create-a-panic story, Churchill's "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech comes to mind in contrast: Churchill instilled confidence by leveling with his electorate, and the country hauled together to defeat a greater, more serious threat.

So he knew from the start wearing a mask would help.

Even if he didn't want to cause a panic and downplayed the severity to help keep order (fucking lol). There is no excuse for not promoting the use of masks.

As has been stated before if he was a remotely decent businessman he would have sold tens of millions of MAGA branded masks by now.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

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Trump was right from the beginning, Assembling a team , stopping china flights and starting preparations for this. The media countered with racist against China, Fool this is just another flu type event.

Now its 24hrs a day panic panic fear mongering from media and Trump should have prepared.

China lied and knew person to person spread back in mid December. The WHO carried the lies of China.

Best to investigate Trump and his cronies in real time, it minimizes the damage he can do. The investigations have already exposed numerous senator's insider trading attempts to profit from the pandemic. It's also revealed the reason Trump refused WHO tests and put us months behind S Korea...the company that makes the American test donated over $1.5 million to political campaigns this year. That must be why it was worth waiting months to get them at all and still be in short supply. They paid for the contract.

So, Democrats work hard to try to save the lives of their constituents, Trump, because he has nothing better to do besides play more golf, wrote a nasty political smear filled with ignorance and self congratulatory lies. Keep in mind, he's admitted he's so incompetent that his impeachment, which he claimed was a nothing burger, distracted him from having time to properly deal with Coronavirus....but he had plenty of time to golf.

Trump was pushed to enact a travel ban from China a month after the danger was clear to everyone with a brain, it was not him dragging the CDC like he claims, but he had dragged his feet so long that most airlines had cancelled those flights well before he acted....but not before numerous infected were here. January first he should have acted. That would have made a difference.

Trump called this a flu until it was too late, telling the nation there's no need to prepare through February. This led to panic when reality hit us hard.

Trump publicly said that if Democrats aren't nice enough to him his Whitehouse won't respond to their state. That's politics being played with millions of lives by Trump.

Trump has publicly told governors to go find supplies on their own, don't look to the Fed to procure and distribute necessary medical devices, then ordered the Fed to bid against those states for that same equipment. That's playing politics with citizens lives.

Trump STILL refuses to order a nation wide shelter in place order because he doesn't want any responsibility for one. That's playing politics.

Trump inexplicably didn't use the defense production act until last Friday, but he's used it reportedly hundreds of thousands of times to procure materials for the military....chemicals for missiles, materials for aircraft carriers, using the law to put the military orders first in line repeatedly. That's playing politics.

Trump reluctantly had ventilators sent to a few hard hit states, <5% of the numbers needed, but shipped broken units to Democratic states and told them they need to be appreciative (translation, kiss his ass on TV) or he won't send more. Again, playing politics with citizens lives.

Also don't forget Trump ended the CDC international pandemic detection program last September, months before the outbreak in China. This program was designed to detect and protect from New viral outbreaks, and would have given America a fighting chance to avoid any infections at all had it not been killed by Trump.

This kind of ignorant propaganda is exactly what I expect from @bobknight33. Using Trump's statements as if they're fact is incredibly dumb, Bobby. Even you admit the man doesn't tell the truth, you just prefer his divisive lies to the truth.

Hilarious you tag this philosophy, it's not...news, it's not.....*lies , that's a proper tag. *facepalm
I would downvote, but this drivel isn't worth watching through. I was at my lie limit under one minute in.

BTW, someone should remind him, nuking them from orbit didn't stop the xenomorphs....it didn't even stop that outbreak of xenomorphs, it only exposed the ignorance of the Space Marines for thinking "nuke em" answers all problems. So dumb Bobby.

Here in Toronto Canada, we had these same panic buying of TP just the same as in the USA, Australia and other countries, no stock anywhere last week. But today the supermarkets has them on sale (~$10 CDN for a bag of 30 rolls.... that's like $7 USD) but under 1 bag per customer limit. All the TV news said the stock will be replenished soon.

What I'm worry about though, are the cleanliness of fresh produce. I've seen lots of a**holes coughing of fruits & vegetables AFTER they had their pick....

Your video, Sanders’ Rise Prompts Media Meltdown, Establishment Panic, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

If this was to go viral and everywhere it has the potenial of causing the mass panic to the likes of the original "War of the Worlds" radio program IMO. We live in interesting times

No need for panic at all if you listened to the crew. It's not like the roof blew off like the Hawaiian Airlines plane.

As much crap as Prometheus gets, that movie and this video prove that humans don't usually make the best decisions in high-stress/panic situations. Lizard brains FTW.

I see lots of red smoke, and panic, but still have no idea what this movie is about!