Quarantine Diaries: Day 349

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Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

Visualizing 500,000 Deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S.

In 2020, the U.S. saw a more than 15 percent increase in deaths over the prior year, the highest year-on-year rise in deaths across the U.S. since 1918, which experienced both a global flu epidemic and the First World War.

You're Not Imagining It: The Pandemic Is Making Your Hair Fall Out

Boris Johnson lays out go-slow plan to take England out of lockdown by summer

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:

Bitcoin Stabilizes After Margin Calls Fuel Biggest Plunge in Month

US treasury secretary floats idea of digital dollar maintained by the Fed. What could possibly go wrong?

Wait Till You Hear the Latest Bitcoin Movie Plot

As Cities Grapple With Climate Change, Gas Utilities Fight To Stay In Business

Texas está congelado:

NatGas Traders Begged For Cash As Arctic Blast Paralyzed Texas Energy Market

‘This Is Some Crazy Nightmare’: Mom Recounts Last Moments With Her 3 Kids Who Died in Texas Power Outage

Ken Paxton Left Texas During Power Outages

While millions of Texans languished in their homes last week without heat, many of them racking up astronomical electricity bills, the state official in charge of consumer protection left to take an out-of-state trip.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) left the state during the middle of the power outage crisis to meet with a fellow attorney general in Utah for a ‘previously planned meeting.’ Hs wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton (R), was also on the trip.

Politics:

Trump Is Angry Prosecutors Will See His Tax Returns

Donald Trump’s yearslong quest to prevent the public, Congress, or law-enforcement officials from seeing his tax statements came to a resounding end with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. He did not take the defeat in stride. Instead, the former president released a statement that, even by Trumpian standards, brims with anger.
Trump’s response bears every hallmark of an authentically Trump-authored text, as opposed to the knockoff versions produced by his aides. It is meandering, filled with run-on sentences, gratuitous insults, and exclamation points.
The statement does contain one unambiguously true point: ‘This is something which has never happened to a president before.’ That’s correct, because every president for the past several decades has voluntarily released his financial information. Only Trump refused.

New York Attorney General Letitia James says Trump Supreme Court ruling won't affect her tax probe

Garland tells senators his first priority will be prosecuting Capitol insurrection

Republican Senators Are Suddenly Very Concerned About DOJ Being Politicized

Clarence Thomas Promotes Trump’s Voter Fraud Lies in Alarming Dissent

Serendipity:

Terrifying Video of United 328’s In-Flight Engine Failure

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Badge thanks to @arcange



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Visualizing 500,000 Deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S.

Right. Take every one of those visualizations. Now more than double them. That's deaths from heart disease and cancer, which we will have with us, year in year out long after this pandemic.

But those illnesses will have been exacerbated by the unemployment, despair and unhealthy inactivity that we are living under now.

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Most of the dead have been Americans 65 and over.

But the youngest people in that cohort had a life expectancy of 69.6 years at birth. Those who died at 70 last year had already outrun the reaper.

Taking nothing away from the gravity of the suffering and loss that accompanies all human mortality — these deaths are normal.

What we are doing to our entire society out of the fear of death, is abnormal and maladaptive.

Lockdowns/shutdowns are killing people too. For some reason journalists aren't as obsessed with counting that. From where I sit the harm from the "cure" is far more widespread and grim than the disease.

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I think the point is that many (most?) of those deaths could have been avoided had we had competent political leadership that would have better responded to the pandemic.

Canada for example has about a tenth of our population but has had “only” 22k COVID deaths.

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