Back in the good old days of the Cold War when all you had to fear was imminent Nuclear Annihilation, the Soviet Union had two main Newspapers- Pravda and Izvestia.

Pravda means “Truth” and was the official organ of the Communist Party. Izvestia means “News” and was an official product of the Soviet Government. Not that they didn’t print facts occasionally, whether by accident or as sugar for the medicine, just that’s not what you should expect.

I think of the Washington Post as Pravda. It’s a Company Newsletter all about politics and since I write about politics I cite them frequently. If you are inclined to peruse I invite the same kind of filter you would apply to CNN– Not particularly Liberal. I have taken them to task recently for being especially stupid.

I think of The New York Times as more like Izvestia. All the news that fits, Oceania’s paper of record. I once held them in great respect, now I wish I still had a Cat (not that there aren’t other reasons like they’re affectionate and fun and low maintenance). It’s printed with Soy based ink which means you can even wrap your greasy Fish and Chips with it which is what makes it so popular on the Upper West Side. It used to arrive with a satisfying thump on my doorstep as I virtue signaled I was liberally hip.

Now I’d rather have Pravda. It is voluminous, cheap, and more focused on my research in Kremlinology.

It sometimes has some interesting sciency things and recipes, and if you live in the Tri! State! Area!, you can find stuff to do within a reasonable distance and I like to travel (D.C. is not a reasonable distance, have you looked at Congress? And I’d have to go through NYC anyway.).

But don’t mistake it for Truth or News, it’s pretty much pure propaganda.

The current contretempts is about their characterization of Drinking or Injecting Clorox, Lysol, or Isopropyl Alcohol as a thing some Doctors think is bad, implying they are a subset rather than an overwhelming Super Majority. My answer is–

IT DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU CONSIDER INSTANT DEATH BAD!!!

You should really check out my Jack Sparrow joke.

As wrong as that is it’s not the worst thing that appeared in Izvestia this week. No, that would be Bret Stephens about how Red States shouldn’t have to suffer the excruciating pain of Social Distancing, the Estrangement from their God at this Holiest time of the Year, the Economic Consequences of having filthy and crowded Meatpacking Plants (over 100 years after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) all over the Country errupt as Coronavirus Hotspots and have to be shut down anyway as the Workers succumb to the infection. Not only do they die but the price of Meat goes through the roof.

FEI World Cup from Göteborg, Sweden- Freestyle Finals 2019

What? Not enough Horsies for you? A 3 Hour summary.

Proust in his first book wrote about, wrote about.

A 6 Minute summary.

No Horses were infected with Coronavirus during this event.

“The problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory.”

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization!

You people speak so lightly of war, you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors.

You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

Short on cash, scared of coronavirus, Georgia businesses grapple with reopening
By Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Haisten Willis, Washington Post
April 24, 2020

Only a handful of the 18 hairdressers who work at Salon Cheveux came in on Friday. They donned masks, spaced their workstations apart and screened inbound customers by phone with the dedication of hospital admission nurses: Any fever recently? Or contact with someone sick? Can you wear a mask?

It was the first day businesses reopened in Georgia, which is moving faster than any other state to ease restrictions amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. As a result, Georgia has become a flash point in the battle over whether it is time to remove the shutdown orders that have kept much of the country indoors.

Jamie McQuaig glanced at the two cosmetologists, clad in masks, coloring customers’ hair and wondered whether coming back to work was the right decision for her family, her salon or her state.

“I do feel like it’s too soon, but it will probably always feel like it’s too soon because we’re all scared of the virus,” she said. The nation’s response to the pandemic has left many in her shop with difficult choices. “The ones that are going back to work right now are the ones that have got to. They’ve got to feed their children. They’ve got to pay their mortgage.”

Gov. Brian Kemp (R) was one of the last governors to issue a statewide stay-at-home order to help stem the spread of the coronavirus; it went into effect April 3. Now, Kemp is opening more businesses more quickly than anywhere else, bucking experts who warn that doing so could lead to an increase in the number of coronavirus deaths.

Friday was the first day bowling alleys, tattoo parlors, gyms and salons were allowed to reopen, provided they follow social distancing guidelines, take employees’ temperatures and screen them for signs of illness. Movie theaters and dine-in restaurants will follow suit on Monday, three days before the state’s shelter-in-place order expires.

Georgians tiptoeing back to work in those industries acknowledge they are essentially guinea pigs as governments experiment with how to return the nation to normal. After weeks of unemployment, often with uneven government help, some said they are happy to be earning paychecks but worry about the ultimate costs of abandoning isolation too soon.

They will not be worrying alone for long. Tennessee’s governor has said he will allow many businesses to reopen once his shelter-in-place order expires next week. The governor of South Carolina allowed some retail stores to reopen this week. People have been walking on the beaches near Jacksonville, Fla., for a week.

Darwin.

If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place. I know thousands and millions of good people who at simple notice would come to North Alabama and accept the elegant houses and plantations there. If the people of Huntsville think different, let them persist in war three years longer, and then they will not be consulted. Three years ago by a little reflection and patience they could have had a hundred years of peace and prosperity, but they preferred war; very well. Last year they could have saved their slaves, but now it is too late.

All the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves, any more than their dead grandfathers. Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.

Everything so far has been a bad deal. Put restrictions on the types and size of the Businesses being bailed out? They will ignore them. Get money for the Post Office? They’ll seize it and jack up the Rates 400%. Put in specific provisions against Graft and Self Dealing?

Well, what are you going to do about it? Impeach?

But Democrats have been typically weaselly claiming great victories and progress.

But Chuck and Nancy and their minions are lying to your face, just like Republicans do because their interests are the same.

Michael Hudson from a Podcast by Moderate Rebels on 4/21/20. Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton also paticipated but I’m highlighting only Hudson. There’s a full transcript @Naked Capitalism

Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!

The idea is that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent.

People hesitate to think that. They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But for those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show.

But you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about just words, and they use euphemisms. It’s a kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world.
…
Banks and corporations, airlines, have a whole wish list that they had their lawyers and lobbyists prepare for just such an opportunity. And when the opportunity comes up — whether it’s 9/11 with the Patriot Act, or whether it’s today’s coronavirus — they just pasted the word coronavirus onto an act, which should be called a giveaway to the big banking sector.

Let’s talk about who’s not bailed out. Who’s not bailed out are the small business owners, the restaurants, the companies that you walk down the street in New York or other cities, and they’re all shuttered with closed signs. Their rent is accumulating, month after month.

Restaurants, gyms and stores are small-markup businesses, small-margin businesses, where, once you have no sales for maybe three months and rent accruing for three months, they’re not going to have enough money to earn the profits to pay the rents that have mounted up for the last three months.

The other people that are not being bailed out are the workers — especially the people they call the prime necessary workers, which is their euphemism for minimum-wage workers without any job security. There have been huge layoffs of minimum-wage labor, manual labor, all sorts of labor.

They’re not getting income, but their rents are accruing. And their utility bills are accruing. Their student loans are accruing. And their credit card debts are mounting up at interest and penalty rates, which are even larger than the interest rates. So all of these debts are accruing.

The real explosion is going to come in three months, when all of a sudden, this money falls due. The governor of New York has said, “Well we have a moratorium on actually evicting people for three months.” So there are restaurants and other people, individuals, wage-earners, who are going to be able to live in their apartments and not be evicted. But at the end of three months, that’s when the eviction notices are going to come. And people are going to decide, is it worth it?

Well, especially restaurants are going to decide. And they’re going to say, “There is no way that we can make the money to pay, because we haven’t had the income to pay.” They’re going to go out of business. They’re not going to be helped.

The similar type of giveaway occurred after 9/11. I had a house for 20 years in Tribeca, one block from the World Trade Center. The money was given by the government to the landlords but not to the small businesses that rented there — the Xerox shops and the other things. The landlords took all of the ostensible rent loss for themselves, and still tried to charge rent to the xerox shops, the food shops, and ended up collecting twice, and driving them out.

So you’re having the pretense of a bailout, but the bailout really is an Obama-style bailout. It goes to the banks; it goes to those companies that have drawn up wish lists by their lobbyists, such as the airlines, Boeing and the large banks.

The banks and the real estate interests are going to be the biggest gainers. They have changed the real estate law so that the real estate owners, for a generation, will be income tax free. They are allowed to charge depreciation, and have other fast write-offs to pretend that their real estate is losing value, regardless of whether it’s going up and up in value.

Donald Trump says that he loves depreciation, because he can claim that he’s losing money, and gets a tax write-off, even while his property prices go up.

So there’s a lot of small print. The devil is in the small print of the giveaway. And then President Trump has his own half-a-trillion-dollar slush fund that he says he doesn’t have to inform a Congress or be subject to any Freedom of Information law. He gets to give to his backers in the Republican States.

And states and municipalities are left broke. Imagine New York City and other states. Most states and cities, have balanced budget constitutional restrictions. That means they’re not allowed to run a deficit.

Now if these states and cities have to pay unemployment insurance, and have to pay carrying charges on the schools and public services, but are not getting the sales taxes, not getting the income taxes, from the restaurants and all the businesses that are closed, or from the workers that are laid off, they’re going to be left with a huge deficit.

Nothing is done about that. There has been no attempt to save them. So three months from now, you’re going to have broke states, broke municipalities, labor that cannot, whose savings was wiped out.

As I’m sure you’ve reported on your show, the Federal Reserve says that half of Americans do not have $400 for emergency saving. Well now they’re going to be running up thousands of dollars of rent and monthly bills.

So the disaster is about to hit. They will not be bailed out. But no major investor, really will lose. You’ve seen last week, the stock market made the largest jump since the depression — the largest jump in in 90 years. And that’s because Trump says, “The economy is the stock market, and the stock market is the One Percent.”

So from the very beginning, his point of reference for the market and for the economy is the One Percent. The 99 Percent are simply overhead. Industry is an overhead. Agriculture is an overhead. And labor is an overhead, to what really is a financialized economy that is writing the whole bailout.

It’s not a bailout — it’s a huge giveaway that makes them richer than they ever were before.

Make no mistake. Republicans are forced to make another deal as Red and Swing State Governors storm the Capitol with pitchforks and torches because they’re the first ones who are going to go “Bankrupt”.

This actually means no Police, Fire, Teachers and while they might be willing to throw Teachers under the Bus they like to at least pretend that Cops and Firefighters love them.

I’m sure our Corporatist Neo Liberal Democrats led by Chuck and Nancy will find a way to screw the pooch on this one too.

This is the PBS Episode that got posted day before yesterday.