Tag Archives: Coronavirus

What If Hillary Clinton Had Been US President For Coronavirus?

Ahhh, poor Hillary Clinton. One of this channel’s first great successes was a polite video explaining why she shouldn’t be president, and here I am now, fondly wishing she had won. To be clear, I made that video all the way back in 2014, I took that video down after Trump was nominated, and I kept it down throughout the 2016 election. There’s no question in my mind that Clinton was a more competent politician and would have made a better president than Donald Trump. Today’s video makes it clear how much the world lost when she lost the election in 2016. But Politics is always more complicated than the personality of individual contestants. Today’s video attempts to play the tape all the way through, and look at the ways that any Democratic president might have been defeated by the absurd politics of the Coronavirus in the United States.

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AwakenWithJP Believes Too Much Media | WHO | Bill Gates

My second Egypt video is taking longer than I thought, so for today’s video we’re going pure response. Late last week, and affable comedy channel entitled Awaken with JP dived deep into the Coronavirus Conspiracy waters with a video called: “What It’s Like to Believe Everything the Media Tells You“. It’s a very cleverly executed video, that never mentions the Coronavirus in it’s meta-data, and carefully approaches the topic in a comedic, sarcastic way, that’s really hard to pin down as misinformation.

When you watch it carefully though, it becomes clear that the underpinnings of the video are deeply conspiratorial. It indulges in, and furthers a range of strategies the Trump campaign is currently using to explain away the president’s responsibility for the crisis. JP has been rewarded for this well crafted piece of media. It’s been seen over 3 million times, instantly becoming the third most popular video on his over five year old channel. I’m a little jealous of course, but I think it’s also worth calling him to account. Which is what today’s video attempts to do.

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The TSA Finally Has Something Useful To Do! | Coronavirus 7

If you’re like me, you probably find the Transportation Security Administration deeply irritating. But it’s also an institution whose time may have come. Back in the old days of ship travel, and even into the early decades of air travel, things were not as easy and seamless as they were in 2019. A cursory health examination was once a routine part of any long journey. There’s a distinct chance we may be returning to that era. I’ve certainly been somebody who has chafed at restrictions on travel in the past. Some of you might react to today’s video with indignation. It’s certainly not a very “More Freedom” thing to suggest that somewhat more strict restrictions on travel might be necessary.

But it’s not actually all that unprecedented or strange. A big part of building state capacity in the 19th century was around issues of public health. The modern state was, in part, built around sacrificing liberty in the name of sanitation and disease mitigation. The thing was government was almost too successful at this. People have forgotten how important the public health function was. I am grateful to the Prelinger archives for the clip I used in this video. If you are interested, you can check out the video description on YouTube for a link. It shows just how normal heightened public health procedures were at our ports and airports, not all that long ago…

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No, China Is Not Winning the Pandemic | Coronavirus 6 | Markets Are Dumb 12

In the month since everybody woke up to what a disaster the Coronavirus pandemic is, it’s been interesting watching people use it as an excuse to push the same things they were already pushing. Conservatives, Socialists, Environmentalists and Nationalists, all of them are eager to tell you that this confirms everything they have been saying all along, and proves that their particular policy priorities should be enacted immediately. Some of them may be right. But one of the most important Washington, DC lobbies is looking a little silly right now. The Military Industrial Complex, that monstrosity that gets close to a trillion dollars a year to keep us safe… did nothing to stop the greatest calamity to befall the homeland since the war of 1812.

But this hasn’t stopped them from pretending that they are still relevant after this extraordinary failure. In alliance with a Trump administration that is desperate to find another scapegoat, they are calling for a deepening of the “New Cold War” against China. They seem to believe that China is “winning” the pandemic somehow. China had what looks like a competent public health response after all, and now it’s flying stuff all over the world to help other countries. Well today’s video is here to tell you that that suspicion is ridiculous. China is not winning this thing. In fact, they are likely to end up the biggest losers.

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The 4th Republican Disaster In 20 Years | Coronavirus 5

For most of this channel’s existence I’ve worked to remain fairly non-partisan. I’m generally uninterested in the whole performative, substance-free mess of party politics in the United States. I’ve adopted the understandably popular “pox on both their houses” approach. Obama’s foreign policy left plenty for me to bitch about, and it’s easy to cover Trump as if he’s some unique biblical plague, somehow distinct from the party he leads.

But at a certain point you’ve got to acknowledge facts. The Democrats are an uninspiring bunch of managerial, condescending twerps. But if your expectations are low, they can be trusted to be reasonably honest and competent. 20 years, and four disasters have shown us that the Republican party is filled with dangerous anarchists, and even worse, people who pretend to be principled, but are eager to bow down to the dangerous anarchists in charge. This video chronicles the 9-11, Iraq war, 2008, and Coronavirus disasters and the political party that brought them all to us. It also lays out why no other media outlet will talk about this…

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Donald Trump: The Man Who Killed The World | Coronavirus 4

What a week! Today’s video deals with a troubling aspect of all this that hasn’t really begun to be reckoned with yet. Because of CDC and FDA screw-ups, and Trump’s campaign against acknowledging the disease, we are only now waking up to the fact that the United States probably harbors more cases of Coronavirus than any other country in the world, including China. This has probably been true for weeks, or maybe even a month. What this means is that our country has acted as a super spreader, sending this disease everywhere. We have the medical capacity to (hopefully!) keep this from being too much of a mass death event. Many of the countries we gave this disease to do not have that capacity. While Donald Trump has done the United States incredible damage with his mismanagement of this pandemic, he may have done even more to harm the rest of the world.

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Saudi Arabia Goes To War | Coronavirus 2 | Oil Endgame | Markets Are Dumb 11

This Coronavirus thing impacts everything. The oil market is no exception. I’ve committed to some pretty strong predictions about the future of the oil market and how it means the end of the current regime in Saudi Arabia. I still stand by all of those predictions, but it’s hard to say whether this current crisis accelerates the timeline, or slows it down. Starting March 6th, Saudi Arabia went to war against every other producer in the world.

I believe that the US oil industry will be the most prominent victim. The sustained period of low oil and gas prices we are about to experience may bring us to an inevitable future more quickly. Saudi Arabia will be the last oil producer. The crucial question remains the price at which they are able to sell that oil for. It’s now possible to envision a future where Saudi Arabia controls price again… but only briefly. Today’s video explains…

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2008 All Over Again? | Coronavirus 1 | Markets Are Dumb 10

I’m not kidding when I say I’ve been agonizing over Coronavirus for months. It’s really quite infuriating how hard it was to get good solid information. China looked terrifying. But all market and government sources in the US seemed pretty relaxed. A couple weeks back only the US government was relaxed, while media was waking up to the shock. It was only two weeks ago that the markets began to reflect what was happening. Now everybody is losing their shit, just as China seems to be recovering. It’s all a mess.

When it comes to history, I usually know as much or more than any journalist I am reading. That’s not the case with diseases and epidemiology. It seemed like everything I read contradicted the last thing I read, making it impossible for me to say anything definitive. Eventually I gave up on talking about the disease. It’s too late to warn folks, we are now at the crisis, which is what today’s video covers. I feel like I’ve kind of let the viewership down. I knew this was coming for a while now, but I’m only now adding to the panic pile with this video. Guess I should bone up on biology for the next plague.

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