España es el país mas golpeado del mundo por Covid 19
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CARLOS A. MONTANER EN CNN
El Blog de Montaner
El Blog de Carlos Alberto Montaner
Es uno de los periodistas más leídos del mundo hispánico. La revista Poder calculó en seis millones los lectores que semanalmente se asoman a sus columnas y artículos
Carlos Alberto Montaner
La verdad es que la explicación me parece traída por los pelos y poco convincente. Si me dijeran que es porque los españoles fuman más que los portugueses, comen más fabada o sus ciudades están más densamente pobladas, estaría más dispuesto a creerlo. Hasta si me dijeran que Portugal tiene más costa al Atlántico y el aire de mar mata al virus.
cam siempre ha sido POR LOS PELOS
no nos engañemos
Es simple, Julián. Porque Portugal no tiene una ciudad como Madrid (lo mismo que pasa con NY), ni siquiera como la quinta parte de Barcelona.
Como se prejuicia uno sin verdaderamente darse cuenta. Desde que comprobé que este blog tiene censura, me parece cada vez más estúpido el pobre Montaner, y para ejemplo ese vídeo. Un saludo.
>>Porque Portugal no tiene una ciudad como Madrid
¿Y en qué se diferencia eso de lo que yo dije? CAM está atribuyendo la mayor insidencia en España a las pugnas políticas. ¿Vio usted el video?
¿Cuál fue la parte que no entendió de ¨o sus ciudades están más densamente pobladas¨ para tratar de decirlo de otra forma? ¿Lo escribí en sánscrito y no me percaté de ello?
incidencia
Es que dijo tantas cosas en vez de señalar LA CAUSA.
Simplifique, Julián, simplifique…
Dije dos que tenían sentido (lo de que fuman más se dijo de los italianos) y dos ironicamente pues tiene más sentido echarle la culpa a la fabada o a que en Madrid no hay playa (vaya, vaya) que a Podemos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8XRN9fpm-0
Me pareció que anduvo usted viendo en estos días un video de “el triunfo de la voluntad” (porque apareció de seguido al video que posteó). Pero debo estar equivocado, porque alguien que vea a esos galleguitos brincando no puede ser que vea tambien temas tan niectzcheanos como su título lo indica. Un saludo.
La frase ¨en Madrid no hay playa, vaya, vaya¨ era muy popular en los tiempos en que yo viví en España porque esa canción estaba en uno de los primeros lugares en ¨Los cuarenta principales¨
Nietzche no estaba en el hit parade 🙁 Y no, no vi ningún video del triunfo de la voluntad, que yo recuerde.
Mi España es la de los 70s, y mi origen también español (o casi) me crié en una comunidad vasca asturiana, y ya lo dije aquí, cuando fui al colegio en BS me preguntaban los profesores “de que parte de españa es usted?”. Tuve toda la vida un policulturismo, la ruralidad y la gran ciudad. La argentinidad porteña total y el españolismo. Me entiendo mejor con las comunidades españolas (excepto los catalanes) que con los argentinos. Me identifico naturalmente con los españoles y ellos conmigo.
…y ahora hasta me creo Cubano, pero que va, no engaño a nadie aquí. Un saludo
El problema, Víctor es que yo NO soy ni me considero intelectual. Lo he explicado muchas veces pero al parecer es difícil de entender. Quizás se sale de ciertos esquemas. No solamente no lo soy: no me suelo llevar muy bien con ellos, a menos que sean de los que no miran por encima del hombro la cultura popular y no padecen de cierto complejo de superioridad. Los hay, pero no abundan,
No tengo ningún problema con españolitos brincando en la playa, ni los considero ¨por debajo de mi nivel¨, pues no creo tener nivel alguno. Lo que me atrae me atrae porque es de mi interés, no porque lo considere ¨elevado¨. No disfruto más de Shakespeare que del pato Donald, los disfruto a los dos.
Por supuesto que la pretensión es de intelectual, no la habría traído a cuento si así no fuera, aunque probablemente usted no tengan plena conciencia. Ahora bien, que se sienta o declare usted popular no excluye la pretensión, toda la intelectualidad de izquierda hace comunión con lo popular. La pretensión, que la padezco aunque reniego también de ella, es un producto de la la primera infancia, y por imposición de excepcionalidad. El único varón entre damas cultas y padre que aunque ausente (o casi) era profesional. Para cuando la revolución llegó usted ya era un aristócrata (entiéndase el término en su dimensión), y no pudo sustraerse a su destino.
…y no me contradiga, usted sabe que yo no me equivoco. Tranquilo, tranquilo.
Por supuesto que tengo que contradecirlo porque veo que su despiste conmigo es absoluto.
Sí se equivoca, porque los choques a lo largo de mi vida han sido constantes. No es que pretenda ser popular. Es que se pasan la vida diciéndome ¿cómo tú ves eso? ¿cómo es posible que te guste eso? No me entienden. Ya estoy acostumbrado.
Haberme leído varias veces la saga completa de Harry Potter no es ¨pretender¨ ser popular. Tener completas Smallville, Lois y Clark y otras series y volverlas a ver a cada rato no es ¨pretender¨ ser popular. Me leo lo que me gusta, no lo que se ¨debe¨ leer. No voy a conciertos, me aburre la música llamada ¨culta¨. No sabría distinguir a Bethoven de Brahms. Los comics de Spiderman, Superman, Batman o Scroggle McDuck, ocupan, cada colección por separado, más espacio en mis estantes que las obras de Shakespeare o Borges. También tengo completa a Agatha Christie.
Los intelectuales de izquierda pretenderán ser muy populares pero si se les pregunta qué significa Avada Kedabra o Expeliarmus probablemente no lo sepan. Y si se les pregunta quién fue eliminado ayer en el último consejo tribal de Survivor, winners at war, probablemente tampoco sepan que fue a Sophie.
Mi casa no era de gente ¨culta¨. Mi mamá era profesora de matemáticas y lo más ¨elevado¨ que había en casa eran las revistas de Selecciones. Crecí con la Pequeña Lulú, Archie, Disney, el Pájaro Loco, las aventuras de Rin Tin Tin y los episodios de Flash Gordon. A Carpentier y Lezama los encuentro más sosos que el beso de una vieja. Y lo que me gustaba en mi infancia nunca dejó de gustarme. La última película de la que disfruté realmente fue Onward.
Que de la casualidad de que TAMBIÉN me puedan gustar otras cosas (algunas, no todas, que sea algo ¨culto¨ no me resulta suficiente) no cambia mi esencia.
No, lo siento, no soy ni culto, ni aristócrata ni intelectual. Tengo gustos vulgares y es una vulgaridad auténtica, no fingida. Si se hizo una idea errada de mi persona lamento desilusionarlo.
Ya expliqué una vez que mi mejor definición es que soy un nerd. Esa probablemente sea mi verdadera tribu. Los nerds no son intelectuales. Les encantan Star Wars, Star Trek e Indiana Jones y juegan juegos de rol. Yo también. Hice cola para ver The rise of Skywalker en los primeros días y me fascinó. ¿Ha jugado usted alguna vez Dungeons and Dragons? Yo sí. ¿Sabe la diferencia entre un hechizo de fireball y uno de burning hands? Yo sí. Lo único que me falta es hablar klingon. Tengo amigos que sí lo hablan.
La frase “más soso que el beso de una vieja¨ no es mia. Citaba la película ¨Un rostro en la muchedumbre¨. Así definió alguien a un político al que Lonesone Rhodes quería hacer campaña y presentó a un amigo para que lo ¨evaluara¨.
La confusión es semántica y es mía, usted hace una separación entre nerd e intelectual y yo no le otorgo diferenciación suficiente para incluirlos en categorías distintas. Tal vez la costumbre haya ayudado a definir al “intelectual” hoy día como un “pensador en repartir el dinero ajeno”. En mi esquema el intelectual es una persona que utiliza la razón como su principal herramienta de trabajo en la resolución de problemas, tanto en lo cotidianos como en el ámbito abstracto. Voy a mencionar dos referentes históricos de intelectuales (puedo estar equivocado): René Descartes y Voltaire, ambos irreverentes, mundanos, tremendamente exitosos en lo económico (especialmente Voltaire), ambos mucho más cerca de un Steve Jobs o un Bill Gates, que son nerds (los creo nerds puedo estar equivocado), prósperos e interesados por los problemas humanos (el que está vivo, claro). Pero tiene usted razón, el intelectual como se le define hoy, es generalmente un empleado asalariado de alguna institución educativa (casi siempre estatal) que utiliza su intelecto para cazar réditos por cada publicación (que nadie lee) y hacer proyectos de filantropía con las platas de otros.
Mi error es de posicionamiento, estoy incerto en un anacronismo, lo digo con toda transparencia y verdad. Mi infancia (sin ser tan viejo) transcurrió en el siglo XIX. El tiempo se había detenido en aquellas soledades, yo leía con candelas de cebo de oveja y toda la dinámica de la granja era de aquel siglo. No voy a extenderme en un relato biográfico, pero le doy la razón a usted en cuanto a la semántica del término. No en cuanto a las particularidades conductuales que usted exhibe y que siguen siendo las mismas que yo entendí. Un saludo.
>>Tal vez la costumbre haya ayudado a definir al “intelectual” hoy día como un “pensador en repartir el dinero ajeno”.
Y, como el lenguaje hace al uso, eso es lo que significa el término actualmente. Ya Orwell lo había definido mucho antes como alguien capaz de creer en ideas demasiado tontas para que las crean las personas comunes y corrientes.
Así que al que me llame intelectual, le tengo que decir ¨la tuya¨. Me imagino que estaba usando el arte de la ofensa con eso de ¨ alguien que vea a esos galleguitos brincando no puede ser que vea tambien temas tan niectzcheanos¨. No con lo de los galleguitos brincando sino al llamarme lector de Nietszhe. Podría arrojarle un guante y retarlo a duelo por menos que eso.
>>En mi esquema el intelectual es una persona que utiliza la razón como su principal herramienta de trabajo
Lo cual contradice lo que yo he visto. Precisamente la tendencia de los que suelen definirse como tales es la casi total carencia de razón y de sentido común. He conocido ancianas analfabetas, que a nadie se le ocurriría llamar intelectuales, que la utilizan mucho mejor.
“…sino al llamarme lector de Nietszhe. Podría arrojarle un guante y retarlo a duelo por menos que eso.”
Jajaja eso sí que es hoy un anacronismo. Mi padre retó a duelo a un conocido a través de un campo pagado en la prensa. El pobre tipo se fue de la provincia y por eso y muchas cosas más, nos llamaban “los locos” jajaja. Espero me crea ahora que me crié en el siglo XIX. Saludos.
Se me cruzaron los cables, el uso hace al lenguaje.
Y sí, Gates y Jobs son nerds de cierto tipo. No de pura raza pues el nerd de pura raza, además de hablar klingon, carece de habilidades sociales y creo que Gates y Jobs tienen algunas (o tenían en caso de Jobs)
Yo tampoco creo ser un nerd muy puro, pues creo no ser totalmente inhabil socialmente, aunque sí que he tenido un montón de problemillas en ese sentido. Al menos siempre tuve cierta habilidad para no ser blanco de bullies: usaba mi innato sentido del humor. Desde muy temprano descubrí que con los bullies funcionaba no mostrarles temor, pero eso no necesariamente implicaba enredarse a los piñazos (nunca en mi vida me fajé) sino llevar las situaciones de lo dramático a lo cómico. Eso, sorprendentemente, los desarmaba.
Tenemos muchas diferencias jajaja, yo como campesino era muy tímido, pero fuerte. Al año de estar en el colegio ya habia acobardado a todos los matones. Menos al “oso”, que no me provocaba, pero que yo prefería esquivar por la peligrosa banda a la que pertenecía. Sin hacerlo largo, le cuento que un día con un amigo nos topamos de frente con aquella gavilla que reinaba en el barrio bajo y no quedó más remedio que pelear. Mi pobre compañero se quedó mirando mientras yo me fajaba, y después de haber hecho lo que pude quedé noqueado. Mi amigo me recogió, me metió en un autobús (recuerdo que me llevaban tendido en el piso) y fui a lamer mis heridas a mi cuarto. Pero el verdadero problema lo tuvo después él, a los pocos días lo cazaron y dijeron “así que vos dejaste solo a tu amigo?” y le entraron a volar cadena. Paso dos meses en el hospital, ni el padre que trabajaba en un departamento de las Fuerzas Armadas, quiso interponer denuncia contra la pandilla. Después pasó lo que tenía que pasar, unos cayeron por robo de carros, otro murió tirándose con la policía (en Mitre y Pavón) y uno que prostituia a sus hermanas (dos rubias preciosas) tuve la suerte un día de cobrarle la paliza que me habían dado jajaja. Causa de esto en parte fue, que abandonara el colegio y cogiera las de Villa Diego jajaja.
El analisis más realista es:
¿Qué porcentaje de la población ha muerto por el COVID 19?
Aquí va la lsita de peor A MENOS MALO:
PANAMA 0.0066% DE SU POBLACION HA MUERTO POR C19
ECUADOR 0..0031%
ITALIA 0.082% (24648 fallecidos entre 30.3 millones de habitantes).
ESPAÑA 0.042 (21000 fallecidos entre 50. millones de habitantes)
Entonces de dónde saca esa información Sr. Perez? Hay que saber analizar. España tiene mas fallecidos que Italia, sencillamente porque tiene 20 millones mas gente que italia
creo que a d le queda pOCO En el convento
motores de la H
a gandhi el periodista le comenta UD ES AMBICIOSO, a lo que gandhi responde ESPERO QUE NO
-you´re ambitious
-I hope no
son dueños de mi cuerpo
pero nunca tendran mi obediencia
podrán llegar a tener mi cuerpo
pero nunca tendrán mi obediencia
para josé julián lo importante era ver Cuba libre de toda metropoli, o monopolio
Ahora que mencionas a José Julián, Manuel, te diré una cosa simpática.
Mi familia SIEMPRE celebró mi santo el 28 de enero porque creían erroneamente que ese día era San Julián (no era así) pues a Martí le pusieron José Julian. Era muy usual que se pusiera como segundo nombre el santo del día. Por ejemplo, yo me llamo Julián Maximino (nunca uso el Maximino) porque nací el 29 de mayo, día de San Maximino.
A mi me daba igual el día que dijeran que era mi santo. Lo que importaba era que había 3 días del año en que podían venir juguetes (si me regalaban ropa eso era altamente ofensivo): mi compleaños, mi santo y el día de reyes.
Hasta se cuenta de un niño que le pusieron como segundo nombre ¨Santoral al Dorso¨
Yo no escribí en la columna de la ratita esa, por respetarte y cuidarte a vos, Danette. Me da un poco de vergüenza decírlo, porque se darán cuenta de lo que me pasa…
D. Carlos Alberto.
En parte su comentario es real, pero solo en la parte que indica la composición de gobiernos socialistas y comunistas en España y Portugal. Pero hay una gran diferencia. La parte de gobierno comunista que hay en Portugal es la clásica europea, muy similar a la que usted conoció en España cuando vivía aquí, de Santiago Carrillo. Recuerde que Santiago Carrillo es uno de los firmantes de los pactos del 78 que permitieron que la democracia española fuese modelo mundial de transición entre una dictadura y una democracia.
En cambio, el comunismo que gobierna junto a socialistas en España es un comunismo marcado y financiado por Venezuela y dirigido por el G2 cubano. Su objetivo es implantar en España el modelo venezolano y cubano contra el que usted tanto a luchado y escrito.
Y por su experiencia propia, sabe que con ese tipo de comunistas no se puede pactar.
Aquí en España, la confrontación entre la derecha y la izquierda se ha creado a propósito desde las filas de Podemos como parte del programa marcado de conseguir el poder absoluto. Hasta hace unos años, en España se había pasado página y a nadie le importaba Franco. Pues Podemos a resucitado a Franco como figura a la que vincular a cualquiera que disienta de lo que el Gobierno indica.
Y por último, el PSOE actual no es el que usted conoció de Felipe Gonzalez. El PSOE actual, desde Zapatero hasta hoy en día es un PSOE que parece un queso de Gruyere. Está inflitrado por todas las partes, empezando por Zapatero y siguiendo por Sanchez y algunos de sus ministros por el chavismo venezolano.
Creo que sus años en Miami no le permiten observar la realidad española como es actualmente. Pregunte a su amigo José María Aznar. Y se lo digo desde el mayor de los respectos y la amistad que tuvimos durante años en España nuestras familias.
Un cordial abrazo.
No disfruto más de Shakespeare que del pato Donald, los disfruto a los dos
Ovación.
The attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt, has filed a civil lawsuit blaming China for the coronavirus and seeking restitution. Schmitt has the right target, but his lawsuit is bad law and bad policy, and unlikely to go anywhere. Imposing consequences on China is a job for the president and Congress, not state- and local-government lawsuits.
…last year, having examined a spread of data from pollen samples to papyri to coins and mortuary archeology, scientists and historians concluded that Procopius had exaggerated the damage done by the Justinian Plague. Modern scholars have argued that the plague is what razed the Roman Empire; the paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says no, and even suggests the contagion might have been “inconsequential,” causing far fewer deaths than the tens of millions once attributed to it.
Could tall tales of that plague have been a political play by Procopius to destroy Justinian’s reputation? We’ll never know. The best-laid plans of microbes and man often go awry. Which is why, in plague years or not, we need less propaganda and more poetry.
A kindly thing it is to have compassion of the afflicted. That’s how Boccaccio begins his Decameron, and that medieval aphorism is still the most lucid insight into plagues we may ever have.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a regular contributor to wired. ■
What makes you you? The question cuts to the core of who we are, the things that make us special in this universe. The converse of the question raises another kind of philosophical dilemma:If a person isn’t himself, who is he?
Countless philosophers have taken a swing at this elusive piñata. In the 17th century, John Locke pinned selfhood on memory, using recollections as the thread connecting a person’s past with their present. That holds some intuitive appeal: Memory, after all, is how most of us register our continued existence. But memory is unreliable. Writing in the 1970s, renowned philosopher Derek Parfit recast Locke’s idea to argue that personhood emerges from a more complex view of psychological connectedness across time. He suggested that a host of mental phenomena—memories, intentions, beliefs, and so on—forge chains that bind us to our past selves. A person today has many of the same psychological states as that person a day ago. Yesterday’s human enjoys similar overlap with an individual of two days prior. Each memory or belief is a chain that stretches back through time, holding a person together in the face of inevitable flux.
The gist, then, is that someone is “himself” because countless mental artifacts stay firm from one day to the next, anchoring that person’s character over time. It’s a less crisp definition than the old idea of a soul, offering no firm threshold where selfhood breaks down. It doesn’t pinpoint, for example, how many psychological chains you can lose before you stop being yourself. Neuroscience also offers only a partial answer to the question of what makes you you.
Neural networks encode our mental artifacts, which together form the foundation of behavior. A stimulus enters the brain, and electrochemical signals swoosh through your neurons, culminating in an action: Hug a friend. Sit and brood. Tilt your head up at the sun and smile. Losing some brain cells here or there is no big deal; the networks are resilient enough to keep a person’s behaviors and sense of self consistent.
But not always. Mess with the biological Jell-O in just the right ways and the structure of the self reveals its fragility.
Lee’s personality had been consistent for decades—until it wasn’t.
From an early age, he was a person who could visualize sprawling structures in his mind. Growing up in the 1990s in Cupertino, where his dad worked at Apple, Lee had early access to the latest computers, and he and his brother grew up bingeing on videogames. As a gamer, he was legendary among his friends for being able to read a complex situation, rapidly adjust strategies, and win match after match. And it wasn’t just videogames. His childhood friend Justin Powell remembers Lee strolling into a middle school chess club tournament cold. He wasn’t a member of the club, but he won the tournament anyway. Lee avoided becoming insufferable by channeling his wit into snarky commentary. “Watching a movie with him was like a version of Mystery Science Theater 3000,” Powell says. “His very presence challenged you to keep up with him.”
Lee and his friends would cart their computers to each other’s houses to play games together. He became curious about the machines themselves and started learning computer science, first in high school, then at a local community college and UC Santa Cruz, where an unlikely set of circumstances connected him with Matthew Prince.
Then a young entrepreneur, Prince was pursuing an idea for an antispam software tool when he encountered Arthur Keller, a UC Santa Cruz computer science professor. Keller and his students had already worked out a very similar concept. Prince and Keller agreed to share a patent, along with Keller’s students. One of those students was Lee, and Prince hired him on the spot. “I had no idea this school project would turn into something much bigger,” Lee later said in a video interview with a group called Founderly.
Prince set up the company, Unspam Technologies, in Park City, Utah, about a mile from a cluster of slopes where he could indulge his passion for skiing. Lee moved into Prince’s basement, at first working for free in exchange for food and housing. But Lee and the other Unspam engineers grew restless, and they started spinning up side projects, including one called Project Honey Pot, which tracked spammers as they crawled the web. That’s all it did—it collected and published data on spammers, but it didn’t do anything to stop them. Still, the project quickly amassed a loyal following.
In 2007, Prince left Utah to start business school at Harvard, and Lee moved to California to live with his girlfriend, Alexandra Carey. They’d known each other as undergrads, when she was a teaching assistant in his computer architecture class. Lee had goofed off in that class, once pranking the professor by scrawling childish notes on the transparencies of an overhead projector. Alexandra had been amused, but it wasn’t until after college that a relationship bloomed. Living in different cities, they fell for each other while playing and chatting within a multiplayer videogame called Savage. Now, with Prince leaving Utah, it seemed a natural time for Lee to join Alexandra. They married in 2008.
Lee and Prince kept working at Unspam from their respective cities, but as Prince was wrapping up business school, Lee called to tell him he was considering other job offers. Prince countered with a new and rather audacious pitch: He and a classmate, Michelle Zatlyn, had hit on a startup idea they thought had potential. What if they expanded Project Honey Pot to not just recognize spammers and hackers but also fight back against them? The plan was to build out massive networks of servers around the world, convince website owners to route their traffic through those servers, and gather enough data to detect malicious requests amid the good ones. That might give them the tools they needed to stop even the world’s biggest denial of service attack. But Prince needed a technical cofounder, and his about-to-defect employee was his top choice.
Prince talked for an hour straight. At the end of this spiel, Lee’s side of the line was quiet. “I was like, ‘Are you still on the phone?’” Prince recalls. “Then he said, ‘Yeah, that’ll work, let’s do that.’” And that was it.
They whipped together a demo and in late 2009 raised a little over $2 million from two venture capital firms. It was enough to rent a converted two-bedroom apartment above a nail salon in Palo Alto, where they could start building their idea in earnest. Lee would show up every day wearing the same Calvin Klein jeans, leather jacket, and beanie on his head, and lugging a giant ThinkPad laptop nicknamed the Beast. “We had this shared vision,” Zatlyn says. “And Lee was the architect behind it. He just obsessed over it.”
The following year, Prince talked his way into TechCrunch Disrupt, an onstage competition for startups that can lead to big funding rounds. As Disrupt approached, Prince and Zatlyn grew nervous. Lee had missed a lot of days of work due to migraines. He didn’t seem anywhere close to finishing a demo. When the day of the event arrived, Prince and Zatlyn walked onstage praying that the software they were presenting would actually work.
Prince started his pitch. “I’m Matthew Prince, this is Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway is in the back of the room. We’re the three cofounders of Cloudflare,” he boomed, stabbing the air with his finger as he spoke. In fact, Lee was backstage furiously fixing a long list of bugs. Prince held his breath when he ran the software, and, perhaps miraculously, it worked. It really worked. In the hour after he walked onstage, Cloudflare got 1,000 new customers, doubling in size.
They earned second place at Disrupt. “In the next couple of weeks, all these somewhat mythical VCs that we’d heard of and read about all called us,” Prince says. Under the onslaught of attention, Prince, Holloway, and one early hire, Sri Rao, rolled out constant fixes to hold the system together. “We launched in September, and in a month we had 10,000 websites on us,” Lee said in the Founderly interview. “If I’d known, we would have had eight data centers instead of five.”
With customers now multiplying, Ian Pye, another early engineer, hollowed out a toaster, tucked an Arduino board inside, and hooked it up to the network. Whenever a website signed up for Cloudflare services, the toaster sang a computerized tune Pye had composed. “It was horribly insecure,” Pye says. “But what were they going to do, hack our toaster?” The toaster lasted two weeks before the singing became too frequent and annoying and they unplugged it.
Cloudflare was growing fast, and Lee worked long days, often from home in Santa Cruz. He and Alexandra now had an infant son. During the first few months of the baby’s life, Lee and Alexandra still made time to play videogames together. Alexandra remembers cracking up when Lee co-opted a nursing pillow to support his neck while he sat at his computer. Several of his old friends came over once a week to play the board game version of Game of Thrones or the multiplayer videogame Team Fortress 2. Alexandra focused on childcare, but she made sure the players had food. “I was doing it for him,” she says.
But around 2011 she started noticing that Lee was growing distant and forming some odd new habits. He spent a lot more time asleep, for one. After long workdays, she recalls, he’d walk in the door, take off his shoes, and immediately pass out on the floor. Their cat sometimes curled up and napped on his chest. His son, not yet 2, would clamber over him, trying and failing to rouse him to play.
“HE IS TYPING, TYPING, AND I DON’T THINK ANYONE DARED TO INTERRUPT. HIS HOODIE IS ON, HE’S IN THE ZONE. HE’S DOING BRAIN SURGERY OF THIS THING.”
When people invited them to parties, Lee refused to go. Alexandra started attending her friends’ weddings by herself. It hurt her to see everyone else there as a couple, while the chair next to her sat empty. At home she’d cook dinner, and he’d look at it and say he was ordering pizza. On a weeklong family trip to France, he spent three days sleeping in the hotel room. “I’d say, ‘What’s going on, we’re going to these places—are you coming?’” Alexandra says. He’d insist he was too tired. She was finishing up a master’s degree and shouldering the bulk of childcare; she, too, was tired. Alexandra begged him to go to therapy and cajoled him to play with their son, but he didn’t engage. “After a while you think, well, this is the person I’m with,” she says.
In 2012, Alexandra told him she was taking an internship in Southern California, at NASA, and she was planning to take their son with her. She says his response was to calmly ask her to file for divorce before she left. “I was crushed. I said, ‘Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘No, no, it does.’”
When Lee told Prince and Zatlyn about his divorce, they both expressed their shock and gave their condolences, but Lee seemed to barely acknowledge the change. Prince and Zatlyn found his behavior tremendously odd. Still, they could rationalize it away. Relationships end for many reasons. Alexandra and Lee had married young, and both had worked long hours; perhaps they had grown apart. Besides, Lee was thriving at the company, so they didn’t press.
Some months after Alexandra moved away, Lee was sitting at a table with acouple of coworkers, including Kristin Tarr, who ran communications at Cloudflare. She’d just published a blog post describing how customers could enable two-factor authentication on their accounts. He turned to her and said, “I read your blog post. It was really good.” A friend saw the interaction and teased her: Lee’s flirting with you!
Lee and Kristin started spending time together. On one of their first dates, Lee took her to see his favorite metal band, the Swedish group Opeth. He revved up her interest in basketball, and they became Golden State Warriors junkies, watching every game. Kristin brought her own interests and energy into the relationship. She convinced him to trade in his old jeans-and-leather-jacket uniform for nicer shirts from Rag & Bone. He
still wore beanies and hoodies, but now they came from Lululemon, where Kristin, a running freak, had a weekend gig as a brand ambassador. Sometimes he refused to get out of bed or retreated with a migraine; Kristin responded by signing him up for 5K races and coaxing him into training for them. Their coworkers marveled that their lead engineer had become so athletic.
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Lee and his wife, Kristin Holloway on vacation in Rome in 2014.
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He proposed to her hours after this photo was taken. Lee and his Cloudflare cofounders Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince, attend a holiday party in 2011.
Within a few months they had moved in together. She whisked him off on adventures, pulling him away from his computer and his videogames. They went tubing on the Truckee River. They played endless rounds of Bang! and Settlers of Catan with board-game-loving coworkers. Both nearsighted, they pretended they were moles, snuggled up in their burrow of a home. As their fortunes grew, they upgraded their digs, moving from Mole Hole to Mole Tower to Mole Terrace. They gave their friends animal identities too; Prince was a mongoose, while another executive was a swan. In May 2014, Kristin quit Cloudflare, and the next day they left for a vacation in Italy. They got engaged in Rome.
At work, Lee was still the star engineer. At the end of the summer of 2014, he took on a project that earned Cloudflare its first bout of internet fame: The company would help websites become encrypted for free. (It was not yet standard for company websites to be encrypted.)
Lee agreed to build the necessary software by the end of September. As the date approached, Prince asked for updates, but Lee blew him off. Then, on the day before the new system was supposed to go live, he pulled his hoodie down low on his head, put on his headphones, and sat down to bang out the code.
It was a Sunday, but the office was packed with people writing up the pending announcement or delivering coffee and food. Lee’s coding, though, was the main event. “And he is typing, typing, and I don’t think anyone dared to interrupt,” says John Graham-Cumming, then an engineer and now Cloudflare’s chief technology officer. “His hoodie is on, he’s in the zone, he’s doing brain surgery on this thing.”
Then, late in the night, Lee stood up. He announced that he’d finished, and he wandered away. “It was like, bzhzhzhzh, type-type-type, ‘I’m done!’” Graham-Cumming says.
The other engineers immediately started reviewing his code. By the morning, the debugging process began for real. The gambit worked, and all of their existing customers suddenly got encryption. It was a proud moment. Says Graham-Cumming: “The size of the encrypted web doubled overnight.”
As Lee and Kristin planned their wedding, he decided to address a health problem he’d long ignored. Lee had been born with a heart issue, a leaky aortic valve, and some doctors thought itmight be contributing to his migraines. “If you put your head on his chest, you could hear it,” Kristin says. “We called it his squishy heart.” Doctors were split on how serious his condition was, but in January 2015 a surgeon at Stanford insisted he get surgery right away. Lee went in for the six-hour procedure. As he lay on his hospital bed, he recorded a video to his son: “I love you! I’ll see you soon with a brand-new heart.” He signed off with a smile and a wave.
Kristin now sees the surgery as a grim turning point. Lee’s heart came out of the procedure stronger than ever, but mentally he never seemed to recover. He slept all the time. He’d taken a leave from work to have the surgery, but he extended his leave by a month, and then another, until he finally returned to the office in the late spring.
In June they got married, in Hawaii, in front of a crowd of friends and family. Kristin noticed that he seemed subdued. It was as if someone had washed the color out of his personality. Prince noticed too but chalked it up to a slow recovery from the surgery.
Not long after, Lee and Kristin took a trip to Europe, spending a few days in France, just as Lee and Alexandra had years earlier. Kristin had never been to Paris, and she was excited to explore the city. She ended up doing that on her own, while Lee again spent days asleep in their hotel room. “This is so weird,” Kristin remembers thinking. On their trip to Italy, he’d been eager to jump out of bed and visit museums and cafés, and walk around. She was puzzled, but between his migraines and his heart issue, there was always an explanation at hand.
At the office, he was becoming impossible to work with. He would lash out at people, and then in meetings he would zone out, openly playing games on his phone. During one meeting, Prince texted him: “Are you playing a game? People are noticing.” Then: “Not a great leadership signal.”
Prince and Zatlyn confronted him about his behavior, and Lee promised to do better. But his responses seemed rote. “I was like, why is he so disengaged? Why doesn’t he seem to care?” Zatlyn recalls. They figured he must be burned out. Still, it hurt; it felt as if Lee was breaking up with them. She’d paid attention to the stories of startup founders who split up, the mess of their breakups sometimes dragging their companies down with them. “So I’m thinking, well, I guess that’s what that feels like.”
They put their friend on an official performance-improvement plan. Over many weekly lunches, Zatlyn and Prince tried to get through to him. Nothing seemed to stick. “For several years,” Prince says, “the thing that was causing me just incredible anxiety was that I had all this loyalty to this person, but they’re becoming a jerk.”
Eventually, in 2016, they decided Lee had to leave the company. “He kind of just said, yup, that sounds about right,” Prince says. They threw him a goingaway party that July. Prince thanked him in a speech with tears streaming down his cheeks. Lee stood beside him with a beer in hand, a thin smile on his face.
Now that he wasn’t working, Lee napped constantly. Kristin wasseven months pregnant, and they agreed that after the baby’s birth, Lee would be a stay-at-home dad, at least until he figured out what to do next. In the meantime, they would live off their savings and Kristin’s salary from a new job at an ad tech firm.
Lee’s actions, however, only grew more bizarre. He watched Home Alone several nights a week. He wore his beanie all day, every day, pulling it lower and lower. When Kristin went into labor, he slept through most of the two-day ordeal, first slumbering at home and then resuming his nap at the hospital. When he woke up, he insisted, against Kristin’s wishes, that she not get an epidural, which provoked a heated argument with one of the doctors. After their son was born, Kristin’s mom says the doctor pulled her aside and commented that she’d never seen an expectant dad react that way. Kristin confronted him about his behavior later, and he promised her, “I’ll do better.”
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Lee (center) gathered with his family for Thanksgiving in 2016, including (from left) his brother Alaric; his wife, Kristin; his older son; his mother, Kathy; his younger son; and his father, Rendon.
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Lee still takes part in some activities with his wife and children, including working on jigsaw puzzles.
In those heady first months of parenthood, he failed. He took copious naps. Sometimes she’d cook him dinner, and he’d reject it and order a burrito. “I was like, what is happening?” Kristin says. “Everything felt so strange and out of control.”
Distraught at his lack of interest in their son, she decided to stage a moment of parenting normalcy. If she couldn’t coax him into engaging with their child, she’d settle for its illusion. While Lee lay on the couch, she handed him the infant and grabbed her phone to record the scene. “You’re standing, and you’re so cute!” he coos as he props up the baby on his chest. “You’re smiling and making a sound!” He dotes on his baby for less than a minute before handing him back to Kristin.
She kept trying to probe what was on his mind, and he kept replying, “I’ll do better.” The repetitiveness of his answers struck her as robotic. It seemed of a piece with the way he now touched every tree he passed on their walks. “I think deep down I knew something was wrong,” Kristin says. She thought maybe he’d developed PTSD after the surgery or was struggling with a bout of depression. She’d been asking him to see a counselor with her. Finally, as she prepared to return to work, she threatened to leave him if he didn’t. Lee agreed.
In the couples’ therapy session, Kristin cried openly and talked about how her husband didn’t seem to care about their new baby. “Lee was just blank,” she recalls, and she wondered why he wasn’t reaching out to comfort her. Suddenly he stood up, announced he’d forgotten to return the therapist’s office bathroom key, and wandered out of the room to put it back, returning a few minutes later.
When her maternity leave came to an end, Kristin hired a nanny and went back to work, but her alarm was mounting. She started booking appointments with every specialist she could think of while Lee spent his days in bed. “So I’m cajoling him out of bed, getting him into the car, making sure my son is out with his nanny, covering my own work somehow,” and then shuttling him from appointment to appointment. “It was like that for three months.”
In mid-March of 2017, Kristin and Lee went to a neurologist to get the results of an MRI. To Kristin, it seemed that the neurologist had initially been skeptical of her concerns. Lee was young, healthy, and communicative.
The MRI told a different story: There was atrophy in the brain inconsistent with the age of the patient, the neurologist reported to them. When Kristin asked her what that meant, she said Lee had a neurodegenerative disease of some kind, but they’d need to do more tests to get a specific diagnosis. One of their doctors suggested they go to the Memory and Aging Center at UC San Francisco.
That evening, Kristin started Googling. She pulled up the website of the Memory and Aging Center and started reading the descriptions of brain atrophy diseases. She knew immediately the neurologist was right. And in that moment she glimpsed the future: This was going to kill her husband.
She remembers sitting with her son that night. “Until that point, I’d held out hope. We have the resources, the best doctors, I can fly him to get him the best care,” she says. “But to be in this position where nothing can be done is just … It’s so awful.” She quit her job the next day.
A few weeks later, Kristin and Lee, their parents, and Alaric all gathered in a conference room on the UCSF campus with a panel of experts. “Do you know why you’re here?” the lead neurologist asked Lee. He replied, “My wife organized this.”
“Do you know that you’re sick?”
“I get migraines a lot,” he said. “And I had heart surgery.”
The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD—specifically, the behavioral variant of that disease. It targets a network of brain regions sometimes described as underpinning one’s sense of self. As the pathological process advanced, it was carving a different person out of Lee’s raw substance.
The term frontotemporal dementia refers to a cluster of neurodegenerative diseases that affect a person’s behavior or speech while leaving memory largely intact, at least early on. Unlike Alzheimer’s disease, FTD isn’t well known. It is a rare disease, affecting roughly one in 5,000 people, though many of the neurologists who study it believe it is underdiagnosed. What is known is that for people under the age of 60, it is the most common form of dementia. Still, as a man in his thirties, Lee was unusually young to be afflicted. For some patients, one of several genetic mutations turns out to be the likely cause, and a subset of patients have a family history of neurodegenerative diseases. But nothing in the neurologists’ investigations turned up even a hint as to why Lee had been struck down.
Regardless of cause, the prognosis is grim. There’s no treatment. Lee’s doctors warned that his symptoms would grow worse, and that over time he would likely stop talking, become immobile, and struggle to swallow, until eventually an infection or injury would likely turn fatal. The best the doctors could recommend was eating a balanced diet and getting exercise.
The family sat stunned at the neurologist’s words. The brain scans were undeniable. On a wall-mounted screen the doctors showed a cross-section of the four lobes of Lee’s brain. In a healthy brain, the familiar, loopy folds of tissue appear white or gray and push up against the edges of the cranium, filling every available space. Lee’s brain looked nothing like that.
Black voids pocked his frontal lobe, areas where brain tissue had gone dead. Seeing it, Kristin gasped. “There were huge dark spots in his brain,” Alaric says. “That’s what … that made it concrete.”
Lee received his death sentence with pure calm. While his family cried beside him, he complimented a doctor for having a nice wedding ring. At that, Alaric looked at him and realized for the first time the depths of his brother’s transformation.
Few disorders ravage their victims’ selfhood with the intensity of the behavioral variant of FTD. It takes all the things that define a person—hobbies and interests, the desire to connect with others, everyday habits—and shreds them. Over time, the disease transforms its victims into someone unrecognizable, a person with all the same memories but an alarming new set of behaviors. Then it hollows them out and shaves away their mobility, language, and recollections.
Because it is relatively unknown and can resemble Alzheimer’s or a psychiatric disorder, FTD is often hard to diagnose. As in Lee’s case, the early stages can be misinterpreted as signs of nothing more serious than a midlife crisis. Patients can spend years shuttling to marriage counselors, human resources departments, therapists, and psychologists. By the time patients learn the name of their disorder, they are often unable to grasp the gravity of their situation.
HOLLOWAY RECEIVED HIS DEATH SENTENCE WITH PURE CALM. WHILE HIS FAMILY CRIED BESIDE HIM, HE COMPLIMENTED A DOCTOR FOR HAVING A NICE WEDDING RING.
Depending on where in the brain the disease first strikes, the symptoms can be jarring. Some sufferers become deeply religious, undergo wild shifts in political identity, or have a sharp change in interests or style of dress. One stockbroker, for example, started wearing all-lavender clothes and developed a sudden obsession with painting. As his disease progressed, he engaged in petty theft and swam nude in public pools.
The loss of embarrassment is common among some FTD patients, leading them to act in ways that might have horrified their former selves. Urinating in public, shoplifting, running red lights, making inappropriate sexual advances, digging through trash cans for food—all can be symptoms. Patients can lose the ability to evaluate social situations too, making them hard to interact with. In one extreme case, a patient’s wife nearly severed her finger while using a pair of borrowed gardening shears. She shrieked to her husband, who had FTD, that she needed to go to the hospital. He replied by saying they had to first return the shears to their neighbor.
These behaviors all arise because neurons are dying off in the frontal and temporal lobes, two large areas of the brain. Particularly vulnerable within these broad continents is a dispersed set of regions known as the salience network, which sifts through a barrage of sensations, memories, and emotions to focus a person’s attention on what matters most in that moment. When this network breaks down, people may fail to grasp the emotional impact of their actions on others. “Emotions drive most choices in life, so if you don’t have those systems, you’re not the same person,” says Virginia Sturm, a neuropsychologist and neuroscientist at UCSF. “There are no tight anchors to your sense of self anymore, and the boundaries of self become loose.”
Eventually, many FTD patients end up as apathetic as Lee, the light of their personhood dimmed to a pale flicker. Apathy also leads to incontinence, as patients lose the desire to take even basic care of themselves.
husband as she could. His decline had been steady so far, and she realized he would only slip further away. They spent the summer of 2017 going on long walks together. They took family trips. She found herself scrutinizing every interaction: Was that his last joke? His last laugh? His last hug? She never knew. He started leaving the apartment without saying anything, and she’d have to grab the baby and chase him down San Francisco’s busy streets.
Lee was quickly becoming unmanageable. Once the baby learned to crawl, Kristin installed a gate at the top of the stairs to keep him from falling down the steps. But whenever Lee walked past the gate, he’d reach down and unlatch it. He started blasting music videos in the living room at 11 o’clock at night, despite the small child asleep in an adjacent room. Sometimes he’d stay up all night, walking around in circles. Kristin struggled to take care of her son while making sure her husband didn’t duck out the door unnoticed.
She and Lee’s parents grew increasingly worried he could get lost or mugged or wander into traffic. His parents, who are in their sixties, volunteered to take over Lee’s care, and in the fall of 2017, Kristin agreed it was time for him to move in with them in San Jose while they figured out a long-term plan. “It’s too hard to keep him safe in San Francisco,” his father, Rendon Holloway, says. “He has to have his walks.” Kristin was working full-time in San Francisco; she and their son stayed behind. Lee would visit them a few days a month.
Kristin and their son spent many of their weekends in San Jose. In the first year, his mother, Kathy Holloway, recalls, when Lee saw the two of them arrive, “he always ran to his bedroom and grabbed his suitcase.” He would say, “I want to go back to San Francisco.”
Lee often tried to leave the house. His parents eventually added an alarm that chimed loudly whenever the front door opened. They hid his shoes. He’d hunt for them, and if he found them he’d lace up and bolt out the door.
When he wasn’t trying to escape, Lee settled into a rhythm of scrolling through family photos on his phone, playing Mario Kart, or watching YouTube videos, all in roughly 30-second spurts. He’d search YouTube for “Cloudflare,” “Kristin Holloway,” or his favorite bands and watch snippets of their music videos. Then he’d pace heavily around the house, loud footfalls thudding at all hours of the day. Kathy lined the floors with rubber mats to deaden the sound.
As the months passed, he spoke less and less. In one video from July 2018, Lee has his arm wrapped around his son while he reads him a bedtime book. Lee mumbles the words unevenly, without inflection, and hurries through the paperboard pages.
From behind her phone’s camera lens, Kristin saw that this might be the last bedtime story he read their son. Still, she kept recording, and she ended it with a “Good job!” to them both.
Conversations soon became impossible. Lee started chattering in repetitive, unceasing loops. He would tell Kristin: “We met at Cloudflare. We got engaged in Rome. We got married in Maui, Hawaii.” He repeated it hundreds of times a day. Then the loops got shorter, more cryptic. He spoke fewer sentences, instead muttering sequences of numbers or letters.
In September 2018, Prince and Zatlyn went to visit him while he was on one of his trips to San Francisco. Seeing Lee for the first time in many months, they thought he looked like a zombie, trooping aimlessly from room to room with empty eyes. At intervals during their visit he’d sit down in the living room, turn on the TV, and flip through the channels, never watching any one thing for more than a minute. Then he’d wander off again, all the while whispering numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
He was both present and absent, a combination that kept his family on edge. When I visited his parents’ house in April 2019, Kristin and Alaric were also there for the day. We were clustered in the front hallway while his mother slipped into the kitchen to make tea. Lee, dressed in a Henley shirt and sweatpants, emerged from the back of the house. He stood tall and silent, and his arms hung heavily at his sides. He looked at Kristin, expressionless, as she introduced me and explained I’d come to write a story about his life. He turned to wander into the living room and kitchen, where he leaned his elbows on the counter and reached a hand out to his mother, wordlessly requesting a snack. Then Kristin and Alaric went out with him for a walk, while I sat down with his parents.
As we sat in the family’s living room, Kathy described caring for her son, even as he grew increasingly distant. She misses the warmth in their daily interactions. “He used to come give me a hug and say, ‘I love you, Mom,’” she says. “No more.”
Kathy is not the only one struggling to accept Lee for who he is—whoever he is. Managing his decline has strained the family, and his relatives sometimes clash over who should take care of him and how he should live. Kristin has spent many hours in therapy working through her grief and her feelings of guilt over deciding to live apart from Lee. She says she has felt alone in their relationship for years, and she’s determined to give her son a relatively normal childhood. Alexandra, Lee’s first wife, wonders whether her marriage fell apart because of the disease or their incompatibility. Was Lee simply someone who could sleep through European vacations and reject a homemade meal, or were those early incidents symptoms?
There’s no way to know for sure. Who was he then? Who is he now? How tightly knit is any person’s selfhood across time? The philosopher Derek Parfit might have approached the issue by asking how many psychological chains bind Lee today to Lee in the past. His links are more tenuous than most people’s. But they persist.
In January 2019, Kristin was driving in a grocery store parking lot when her phone rang. She glimpsed the screen and froze. Lee was calling. There on the screen was his face, an old photo from when they had just started dating. She hadn’t seen the photo in almost two years—it had been that long since he had called her.
She answered, and the words tumbled out of her. “Baby, I love you so much, I miss you,” she cried. “Are you OK? Do you need anything?” He didn’t say anything, but she could hear his breathing on the other end.
He hung up.
In that instant she realized how desperately she missed hearing his voice. “I’d been in this process of losing him, then to have this moment of him reaching out from wherever he is,” she says. “It blew my mind.”
The Cloudflare IPO in September raised $525 million. Lee, as one of the founders, suddenly became a whole lot richer. With his financial future now secure, Kristin set in motion the plan for his long-term care. She bought a 5,000-square-foot house on an acre of California’s Central Coast, a spot they chose in the hope that his father, Rendon, could walk with him along the shore. She worked with a landscape architect to tailor the outdoor space to Lee’s needs. There are zigzagging paths on which Lee can roam and a fence to keep him safely inside. Nontoxic plants only. No nut or fruit trees allowed; those could be choking hazards once he develops difficulty swallowing, as his doctors anticipate he will.
Lee and his parents have moved there, and he has full-time care assistance too. Kristin shipped some of the furniture they’d bought together to make the house feel more familiar to him, and she blanketed a wall in family photos. She, Alexandra, and their sons visit occasionally.
Kristin hopes she has designed the perfect environment. Most FTD patients aren’t so fortunate, if you can call it that, to wind down their lives on a personalized estate with a staff dedicated to keeping them safe and calm. Their families don’t always have a choice in how involved they want to be. Still, all the money in the world can’t answer the question of who, really, is living in that house.
On rare occasions, Lee still surprises his parents with an affectionate pat on the back. He calls people from time to time, even if he never speaks a word. An old colleague recently saw that he’d liked a post on LinkedIn. However diminished, a person lingers in the shattered roadways of his mind.
Some months ago, Lee sent Kristin a series of text messages. In them were photos she’d shared with him earlier: she and their son on Halloween, a trip to the park, Christmastime. At the end, he’d typed the words: “the love.”
SANDRA UPSON (@sandraupson) is a senior editor at wired. This is her first feature story for the magazine.
Courtesy of Cloudflare; courtesy of Kristin Holloway ■
Amigo Julián, me interesa su opinión sobre los dichos de Trump con su aparente sugerencia de inyectar desinfectante en el cuerpo o utilizar luz intensa para vencer al virus.
Pregunto porque si lo dijo “en serio” significaría que estamos ante un presidente realmente incapacitado para gobernar semejante país con todo lo que ello implica.
No tengo conocimiento de eso, amigo Ramiro. Me puedes pasar el link? Sé que muchísimas veces los media tergiversan lo que dice el presidente.
https://www.lanacion.com.ar/el-mundo/coronavirus-revuelo-eeuu-insolita-sugerencia-trump-inyectar-nid2357788
Encontré referencias y, tal y como lo sospechaba, los media toman el rábano por las hojas y aprovechan el estilo coloquial de Trump para hacerlo quedar como un imbécil (cosa que se cuidan de hacer con digamos, Biden, pese a que les sería sumamente fácil). USA Today, que no es CNN, ni Politico, ni ninguno de los más militantes odiadores de Trump, le da otro matiz.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/23/coronavirus-trump-touts-study-light-humidity-weakening-covid/3008523001/
Esperemos se trate de un estilo coloquial amigo Julián porque sino es probable que estemos ante alguien cerca del desequilibrio.
Tal vez solo sea un recurso para sacarle dramatismo al problema.
Ojalá
Amigo Ramiro
Con el tiempo he ido entendiendo mejor al presidente Trump. Se decía que hacía lo que le daba la gana, no se dejaba guiar por nadie y despedía a cualquiera que tuviera un desacuerdo con él. Si hay algo que ha provado el COVID es la falsedad de esas acusaciones. El quiere reabrir la economía, pero acepta la opinión del equipo que ha puesto al frente de esto y sigue sus sugerencias. Si fuera yo, ya hace rato que le hubiera dicho a Fauci ¨you are fired¨.
Hizo la pregunta de un profano, pues no es médico y se está dejando guiar por los médicos y los supuestos ¨expertos¨. Hasta yo la hubiera hecho. Si un informe dice que la luz mata el virus, ¿hay forma de usar esto? ¿Por qué no ha de hacer la pregunta? Una pregunta no es una orden ejecutiva.
También he oído que las altas temperaturas matan el virus y es más fácil ¨meter¨ altas temperaturas que luz.
En lo de la hidrocloroquina o como se llame todo parece indicar que si lleva razón y lo atacan. Lo cual es hasta criminal.
Personalmente no tengo ni la más mínima duda acerca de la capacidad mental del presidente ni de sus habilidades para dirigir el país. Me preocuparía, eso sí, muchísimo, que Biden fuera electo porque ése si tiene problemas obvios. Tantos, que he llegado a pensar que es incluso una opción peor que Bernie Sanders, cosa que me parecía inimaginable.
Por suerte, no creo que el elector americano esté tan loco como para poner esa amenaza pública al frente del país. Los millenials se pueden enamorar del socialismo por ignorancia, pero nadie en su sano juicio pondría en esa posición a alguien que raya en la demencia senil.
Fundamentada su opinión amigo Julián.
Sucede que en todos los medios sean de izquierda, centro o derecha se lo crítica muy duramente a Trump.
Tanto que ya hace dudar.
Aunque no siempre, cuando las críticas o aseveraciones son tan generalizadas, generalmente son reales.
Ya a ésta altura de la cuestión Trump, son tantas las aseveraciones respecto de su ineptitud que hacen dudar.
Y como conozco el 1% de Trump de lo que ud conoce me pareció adecuado preguntarle.
Agradecido.
Amigo Ramiro
También te encontré esto.
https://www.unitedvoice.com/what-trump-really-said-about-disinfectants/?utm_source=ew&utm_placement=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_content=UVnewsletter
Amigos, ya lo de la prensa como Univision( Jorge Ramos), Telemundo (Diaz Balart, este es incomprensible, teniendo en cuenta su familia), CNN(Todos), etc, etc …, etc es en extremo degradante. Cada cosa que dice el presidente lo tratan de tergiversar y encontrar algo malo. En Enero cuando cerro las fronteras con China y Europa, la critica de los medios fue arrolladora y ahora dicen que el error fue no haberlo hecho antes. Serán energúmenos o comprados por Soros? Julian, tienes razon, mentalmente Sanders, aun siendo un incompetente por sus ideas, esta mentalmente mejor que Biden. Saludos.
Recordarás, Bacu, que en Cuba se decía que un comemierda es peor que un HP porque el HP te la hace cuando le conviene y el comemierda te la hace siempre porque ni siquiera se da cuenta.
En ese sentido, Obama era preferible a Sanders y Biden. Sanders es solamente comemierda. Biden tiene el valor añadido de su demencia senil. Esto lo hace estar en plan desastre el 150% del tiempo.
En el caso del Bernie, olvidé agregar ¨con balcón a la calle¨. Como recordarás, constituían una categoría especial en virtud de su mayor visibilidad.
“Como Kant , habla el Veritas de rason teórica y de rason práctica . El Veritas sabrá por qué no habla también de la facultad de jusgar .
Usa además el Veritas las denominaciones propias de lo que Kant llamó método dogmatico . Y como Kant , habla de empirismo en concepto de conocimiento a posteriori .
Cual Descartes, emplea la frase sentido comun como sinónima de entendimiento ó razon .
Como Platon , admite el Veritas ideas tipos ó axiomas , emanados de la mente , no de los hechos ; axiomas que son tambien representantes de las ideas universales de los escolásticos .
El Veritas bebe, pues , constantemente en fuentes espi ritualistas . A través de todo el enmarañamiento y desfi guracion de las várias partes de su conato de sistema , lo que siempre se vé menos oscuro en él , es la propension espiritualista y el deseo de que no lo parezca . La voz rea lismo no ha de tener mejor mision que la de encubrir el espiritualismo del Veritas .
Digo esto , porque al desarrollar el Veritas sus opinio nes sobre el sentido comun , manifiesta , como ya he dicho , que este debe desdeñar los hechos por falaces , guiándose principalmente por los ariomas que emanan de su in mutable criterio .
Ahora bien ; esto es idealismo puro , ó sea precisamente lo contrario del ya olvidado realismo . Este se propone demostrar , por la realidad de las cosas , la veracidad de las percepciones intelectuales ; y el idealismo , al re vés , aspira á demostrar , por esta veracidad de las percepciones intelectuales , la realidad de las cosas . En una palabra : el realismo parte de las verdades de hecho , y el idealismo de los ariomas . El Veritas sostiene la supremacía de los últimos sobre las primeras , y á la vez dice ser realista . Es , pues , realista é idealista á un mismo tiempo”
al desarrollar el Veritas sus opiniones sobre el sentido comun, manifiesta, como ya he dicho, que este debe desdeñar los hechos por falaces, guiándose principalmente por los axiomas que emanan de su inmutable criterio.
Ahora bien; esto es idealismo puro, ó sea, precisamente lo contrario del ya olvidado realismo. Este se propone demostrar, por la realidad de las cosas, la veracidad de las percepciones intelectuales; y el idealismo, al revés, aspira á demostrar, por esta veracidad de las percepciones intelectuales, la realidad de las cosas.
En una palabra: el realismo parte de las verdades de hecho, y el idealismo de los axiomas. El Veritas sostiene la supremacía de los últimos sobre las primeras, y á la vez dice ser realista. Es, pues, realista é idealista á un mismo tiempo…
Un video que nos permite ver la realidad española y nos muestra además la similitud que tenemos entre su gobierno y algunos de los nuestros.
https://www.facebook.com/1085742303/videos/10220671836080900/
Humberto, el video esta muy bueno, dura para los que lo quieran ver alrededor de 14 min. y revela cosas que estan pasando en España con estas situaciones anormales. Saludos
Bacu, quizás su nombre se escriba sin h. El lo pone así y si es, por ejemplo, de ascendencia italiana, he visto que allá puede tener esa ortografía. Recuerdo la película de Vitorio de Sica ¨Umberto D¨. También hubo un rey Umberto.
“Probably in the not far distant future we will crawl out of our old methods of education, as a snake sheds its skin, and reorganize a new plan.” – Dr. Charlie Mayo
“Yet they called themselves modern and looked back at sort of pity from the pinnacles of scientific success to which they had attained…their predecessors with a patronizing I cannot always be sure that a century from now somebody will not be saying the same sort of things about us.”
“I look through a half-opened door into the future, full of interest, intriguing beyond my power to describe, but with a full understanding that it is for each generation to solve its own problems and that no man has the wisdom to guide or control the next generation.”
El Inagotable vive en Perú y le dio el coronavirus. Estuvo grave. Me mandó su testimonio. Lo divulgaba a personas con su autorización. Me ha pedido ponerlo aquí (no le aceptan sus posts) y así lo hago.
De paraíso perdido a paraíso recobrado
Me pasé unos 5 o 6 días en la Unidad de Terapia intensiva del hospital Moscoso. Un infiernito. Es duro dormir porque los pitidos no paran, siempre es día no apagan luces y el tropel de muchachitas hace bulla trabajando. Además, de otras incomodidades.
Luego de varios días con tubos de oxígeno en la nariz y tres tanques de suero que me pasaron, comencé a mejorar. Las chicas me ponían el lector en el dedo, una especie de pez que te muerde y al final me dicen.
“Don Orlando. Mañana te mandamos a un centro de aislamiento para que termines tu cura”
Y eso hacen, me mandan al Edén. No ruidos, obscuridad para dormir y baño individual. Una jaula de oro.
Llego por la mañana. La enfermera me muerde con su pescadito y me dice:
No ventilas bien. Tengo que regresar te al hospital”
Me le arrodillo. Por Dios. No me haga eso, deme una segunda oportunidad.
Me vuelve a morder el dedo con el aparatito pescado y me dice, okey, ya remontó.
Parece que el aparato tiene su truco.
Voy a dormir. El Covid-19 da un sueño horrible.
Tocan a la puerta.
Un tipo vestido de extraterrestre para tomar mis parámetros.
De nuevo. Estas mal. Cometieron un error mandandote aquí. Te vas a regresar.
Luego dice. Bueno. Regreso en un rato a chequarte.
Tin, tum , tum. Don Orlando.
La historia se repite cinco veces.Le digo. Déjeme dormir. Me siento bien.
Pienso que es una tortura, un experimento.
Está gente pienso, planean otra guerra con Perú y experimentan conmigo un método para extraer información a un prisionero.
Finalmente me dice. Lo siento. Vas a regresar. Te falta el aire. Aquí no tenemos oxígeno. Te puedes morir.
Le creo. Parece honesto.
Me montan en una ambulancia. Me tienen que pinchar tres veces para pasarme, en la ambulancia, un catéter.
Eso duele.
Pienso. “Cuando llegue al hospital, con esa falta de aire que tengo me van a poner oxígeno hasta por el culo”
Llego. Me recibe una chica. ¿Qué haces aquí?
Dice el extraterrestre que no respiro bien.
El dice que tú te quejabas de falta de aire y pedías regresar.
Eso es mentira.
Un tropel de 4 muchachas me enganchan a los aparatitos y se enojan. Una dice, voy a tirarle una foto y formular la queja. Mañana te mando de regreso. Aquí estás aumentando tu carga viral.
Pipi…los pitidos son insoportables. Me pasé unas 4 horas sentado en mí cama, divagando súper enojado
No sé quién es, si tiene familia y porque me hizo eso, pero yo lo voy a mandar a matar. Jajaja. Ya se me pasó el enojo. Fue solo exceso de celo.
Ni siquiera se llevó al pelotudo ese el coronavirus?
Entonces Manuel tenía razón!
Es un virus de joda, no sirve ni para llevarse a un político o un pinche intelectual. Me ha defraudado, pensé que al menos le iba a quedar bien a Cubano alivianándole la carga al planeta.
Pero no, no… pura pinta nada más. Un cordial saludo.
Cuánta razón tenían, Julián, Manuel y Sapucay lacayo Ramiro. También el “inagotable” claro, que escogió muy bien el país de residencia.
Muchachos más capaces todos estos.
Por encargo del Inagotable (puede leer lo que aquí se pone, pero no lo dejan postear) para Víctor:
¨Dile por favor que soy como Bruce Willis, hard to kill. Duro de pelar.¨
Espero que no me ocurra como al juglar con el rey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H2sLrbHGZM
Perdón por el lapsus. Dije Perú no sé por qué. Es Ecuador.
Por lo general uno solamente se entera de la gente que se recupera si son celebridades (Rand Paul, Boris Johnson, Tom Hanks y su esposa, Peggy Noonan) No es noticia si alguien se recupera. Además, a la prensa no le interesa que la gente se recupere para poner a Trump en crisis. El Inagotable es la primera persona que conozco que cuenta su experiencia.
Un saludo.
“¨Dile por favor que soy como Bruce Willis, hard to kill. Duro de pelar.¨”
No tengo duda, Bruce.
Siempre creí que sería Julián quien nos relataría esa odisea, pero vino a ser usted, un desconocido y duro de verdad. Me alegro que esté llegando a buen puerto.
Cuando vuelva la chica del “pescadito” aprovéchese, aproveche, dígale que “justo pensaba en ella para que le mordiera el pescadito”. Si se asusta haga las de Julián, se agarra la cabeza y dice “fue un lapsus”, “fue un lapsus…”. Tendrá que reírse, y sino nunca puede perder, como mucho lo manda para la casa. Un fuerte abrazo.
South Korea demonstrates that such a campaign can work. While both countries detected their first cases of COVID-19 on January 20, the trajectories in the U.S. and South Korea have since sharply diverged. By the beginning of March, South Korea had “flattened the curve”—that is, substantially reduced the number of people being diagnosed each day with coronavirus infections—whereas the United States was still struggling to do so when this article went to press six weeks later
South Korean health officials met on January 27 with private biomedical companies, urging them to develop coronavirus diagnostic tests and assuring them of speedy regulatory approval. The first commercial test was approved in that country a week later. South Korea’s now-famous drive-through testing sites were soon testing tens of thousands for the virus. By the first week in March, the country had tested more than 150,000 people, compared to just 2,150 in the United States. Testing and contact tracing helped daily diagnosed cases in South Korea peak at 909 on February 29.
In stark contrast, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests. Much to the contrary, the CDC required that public health officials use only a diagnostic test designed by the agency. That test—released on February 5—turned out to be contaminated by a reagent that made it impossible for outside labs to tell if the virus was present in a sample or not. The CDC’s insistence on top-down centralized testing meant there were no available alternatives, which greatly slowed down disease detection just as the infection rate was accelerating.
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This massive bureaucratic failure is a big part of why a larger proportion of Americans than of South Koreans will suffer and die from the viral illness.
On February 29, the FDA finally moved to allow academic labs and private companies to develop and deploy their own diagnostic tests. But in the meantime, the Trump administration had begun lying about the availability of tests. On March 2, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn declared that “by the end of this week, close to 1 million tests will be able to be performed.” During a tour of CDC headquarters on March 6, President Donald Trump asserted that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” In fact, it took until the end of March for 1 million tests to be administered in the United States.
Once the FDA got out of the way, diagnostics companies LabCorp and Quest rolled out tests almost immediately. Many academic labs followed suit. Unfortunately, pent-up demand led to significant delays in reporting results.
By the end of March, companies such as Abbott Laboratories had introduced tests that report results in less than 15 minutes. But after four startups began offering at-home testing, promising to further improve access, an obstinate FDA shut them down.
The FDA has finally managed to smooth the way for private companies to begin introducing blood tests for antibodies to the virus produced by people’s immune systems. General population screening using these tests will reveal undetected cases, providing a better idea of the actual extent of the pandemic. The tests will also identify people who have recovered and probably can go safely back to their lives beyond quarantine.
In the absence of effective treatments for COVID-19, testing and contact tracing on a massive scale will be vital to restoring economic activity—assuming the epidemic is beaten back, in the meantime, by social distancing. But due to red tape, the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. has turned out to be far more deadly than it could, and should, have been.
Science Correspondent RONALD BAILEY is the author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century (St. Martin’s).
Beware ‘Temporary’ Emergency Restrictions on Liberty
DAMON ROOT
STATE AND LOCAL officials have taken sweeping emergency actions to combat the spread of COVID-19, including shelter-in-place orders, bans on large gatherings, and widespread business closures. Such measures may well fall under the traditional police powers of the states to regulate actions on behalf of public health, safety, and welfare. But even the most necessary of emergency actions may still pose a significant risk to liberty.
The U.S. experience during World War I offers a cautionary tale about how government restrictions passed in the heat of a national emergency can linger for years afterward—a lesson that must be quickly learned if we are to avoid repeating some grave mistakes in 2020.
When President Woodrow Wilson took the nation to war against Germany in 1917, he did so in the name of making the world safe for democracy. But the president also targeted certain enemies much closer to home. “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit,” Wilson said at the time, “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life… The hand of our power should close over them at once.”
At Wilson’s urging, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, a notorious law that effectively criminalized most forms of anti-war speech. Among those snared in its net was the left-wing leader Eugene Debs, who was arrested in 1918 and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. His crime had been to exercise his First Amendment rights by giving a mildly anti war speech at an afternoon picnic. In 1919, the same year that the U.S.government signed the peace treaty that formally ended World War I, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Debs’ conviction for speaking out against the war. Debs would rot in federal prison until he was pardoned by President Warren G. Harding in 1921. As for the Espionage Act, while it has been amended several times over the years, it remains on the books.
State governments imposed various restrictions of their own. Nebraska’s legislature responded to America’s entry into the Great War by cracking down on the civil liberties of its German immigrant communities. Most notably, the state banned both public and private school teachers from instructing children in a foreign language. That law was aimed directly at the state’s extensive system of Lutheran parochial schools, where teachers and students commonly spoke German.
Robert Meyer, who taught the Bible in German at the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Parochial School, sued the state for violating his constitutional rights. But the Nebraska Supreme Court waved his objections away. “The salutary purpose of the statute is clear,” that court said. “The legislature had seen the baleful effects of permitting foreigners, who had taken residence in this country, to rear and educate their children in the language of their native land.”
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling in 1923. Thankfully, the rights of Meyer and others were ultimately restored. But the offending restriction was not eliminated until well after the war was over.
We should all be on guard to make sure that temporary COVID-19 restrictions—as necessary as they may be—remain temporary.
Senior Editor DAMON ROOT is the author of Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court (Palgrave Macmillan).
The Trade War Made Us Less Prepared To Handle This Crisis
ERIC BOEHM
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S trade war with China has been costly for Americans—and the COVID-19 outbreak reveals that we might be paying with more than just our money.
What’s worse, the White House knew the risk it was running. “These products are essential to protecting health care providers and their patients every single day,” Matt Rowan, president of the Health Industry Distributors Association, told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in August 2018. At the time, the office was considering a wide-ranging set of new tariffs targeting hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of annual imports from China. Among the products that would be hit with those higher duties were thermometers, breathing masks, hand sanitizer, patient monitors, and medical-grade personal protective equipment, including masks and sterile gloves. Those products “are a critical component of our nation’s response to public health emergencies,” Rowan warned.
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Other medical professionals at the hearing similarly pleaded for the Trump administration to drop the proposed tariffs. Alternative suppliers could not be found quickly, they said, in no small part because Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval was required before other sources could be used. The likely result of Trump’s proposed tariffs would be higher prices for medical gear and decreased availability of critical supplies.
The warnings went unheeded. The tariffs did what tariffs do. In 2017, the last full year before Trump’s tariffs were imposed, more than a quarter of all medical equipment imported to the U.S. came from China. By 2019, imports of Chinese-made medical products had fallen by 16 percent, according to an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a trade-focused think tank. While U.S. imports from the rest of the world increased during the same period, according to PIIE, the increase was not sufficient to offset the tariff-induced decline in imports from China. It’s likely that hospitals drew down on existing inventories, hoping that the trade war would end before they had to restock.
“In many instances, Americans had no choice but to continue to buy from China, which meant paying an additional cost due to the tariff,” says Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the think tank. “Medical equipment cannot instantaneously sprout up at another plant in some other country.”
Trump’s so-called “phase one” trade deal with China, signed in December, did not lift tariffs on medical gear. But when the coronavirus outbreak reached America, the White House finally took action. On March 10, the administration quietly dropped its tariffs on Chinese-made medical equipment in a too-little, too-late effort to allow American hospitals to stock up as the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Later in the month, the White House announced it would postpone all other tariff payments for at least three months as a form of economic stimulus.
Together, those two actions are an admission of guilt. They demonstrate that the administration is well aware that tariffs are paid by Americans—and that they harmed America’s preparation for a pandemic. Trump’s reversals, says Bown, serve as “an implicit indictment of his administration’s own policy.”
Recall that officials were warned about exactly this possibility. Their hubris and economic illiteracy may well have led to the deaths of innocent Americans.
“It reveals the foolishness of the administration’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach” to the trade war, says Scott Lincicome, a trade lawyer and scholar with the Cato Institute. “There was clearly no thought given to how this would actually work in practice, and now you’re seeing the consequences.”
ERIC BOEHM is a reporter at Reason
COVID-19 Makes the Case for Deregulation Everywhere You Look
NICK GILLESPIE
IT DIDN’T TAKE long after the coronavirus crisis began for the smart set to write off small-government types in articles with such snarky headlines as “There Are No Libertarians in a Pandemic.” By now, it seems more correct to believe there are only libertarians in a pandemic, including many public officials, who suddenly find themselves willing and able to waive all sorts of ostensibly important rules and procedures in the name of helping people out.
How else to explain the decision by the much-loathed and irrelevant-to-safety Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to allow family-sized jugs of hand sanitizer onto planes? The TSA isn’t going full Milton Friedman—it’s reminding visitors to its website “that all other liquids, gels and aerosols brought to a checkpoint continue to be allowed at the limit of 3.4 ounces or 100 milliliters carried in a one quart-size bag.” But it’s a start.
Something similar is going on in Massachusetts, a state wellknown for high levels of regulation, including in the medical sector. Expecting a crush in health care needs due the coronavirus, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has seen the light and agreed to streamline the Bay State’s recognition of “nurses and other medical professionals” who are registered in other parts of the United States, something that 34 states do on a regular basis.
As Walter Olson of the Cato Institute observes, that move “should help get medical professionals to where they are most needed, and it is one of many good ideas that should be kept on as policy after the pandemic emergency passes. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, by contrast, when storm-ravaged oceanside homeowners badly needed skilled labor to restore their premises to usable condition, local laws in places like Long Island forbade them to bring in skilled electricians even from other counties of New York, let alone other states.”
The group Americans for Tax Reform has published a list of more than 170 regulations that have been suspended in response to the current crisis: Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar has waived certain laws in order to facilitate “telehealth,” or the use of videoconferencing and other technologies to allow doctors to see patients remotely; the Department of Education is making it easier for colleges and universities to move their classes online; cities are doing away with open-container restrictions and allowing home delivery of beer, wine, and spirits in places where it was previously prohibited; the Federal Emergency Management Agency belatedly permitted Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories to acquire personal protective equipment from sources outside the country; and on and on.
You can probably see where this is headed: If the policies above are worth tossing out in an emergency, maybe they ought to be sidelined during normal times too.
Situations like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the coronavirus outbreak often open the door to naked power grabs whose terrible consequences stick around long after the events that inspired them. Governments rarely return power once they’ve amassed it. But if you listen carefully, you can hear them telling us which restrictions they realize can be safely tossed.
When the infection rates come down and life begins to get back to normal, it may be tempting just to go back to the way we were. Resist the temptation: Many of the rules we put up with every day are worth re-evaluating. And not only during an emergency.
NICK GILLESPIE is editor at large at Reason.
The Coronavirus Stimulus Is a Crony Capitalist Dream
ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN
CRONY CAPITALISM TRIUMPHED as members of Congress voted in March on a massive COVID-19 response bill. The $2.3 trillion package was unanimously approved in the Senate before clearing the U.S. House of Representatives 419 to 6.
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Getting the most attention in the new Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act is a stipulation that many Americans will be getting $1,200 apiece from Uncle Sam. People making less than $75,000 individually or $150,000 as a couple will receive the full amount, with prorated amounts available to single earners making up to $99,0000 and couples up to $198,000. Families with kids will get an additional $500 for every child 16 and under.
But the 880-page bill is also brimming with handouts for government-favored industries.
For airlines, the CARES Act includes a $25 billion grant plus $29 billion in loans and loan guarantees. Grant money is also available for agricultural companies, to the tune of $33.5 billion.
Government institutions—including some far removed from direct COVID-19 relief efforts—will also be getting cash infusions. For instance, the legislation includes $150 million for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The CARES Act also inexplicably provides $10.5 billion for the Department of Defense, though only $1.5 billion of that is directed at coronavirus-related National Guard deployment, and just $415 million is for vaccine and antiviral medicine research and development by the agency.
Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), one of the few in Congress to vote against the CARES Act, rightly called it “corporate welfare” that “reflects government conceit. Only consumers, not politicians, can appropriately determine which companies deserve to succeed.”
Amash supports payments to individual Americans in this time of crisis but opposes the carve-outs for favored industries. If the federal government is going to spend $2 trillion, “then the best way to do it, by far, is a direct cash transfer that otherwise keeps government out of the way,” Amash tweeted.
The bill has been celebrated by many Democrats and Republicans as a measure to help working Americans and ordinary people in the face of the new coronavirus. But the corporatist bent means that ordinary people will be paying more in the long run for this “help.”
The total cost of the measure leaves every American “on the hook for over $6,000 in debt for these ‘investments,’” commented Libertarian Party Chairman Nicholas Sarwark on Twitter, “but it’s the businesses that will receive the rewards.” He called the measure a “socialist” bailout for “corporate cronies.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) strikes a similar theme. “When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, did we come up with a $2 trillion stimulus package, or did we declare a war on our enemies?” he asked. “We declared war on our enemies. Why have we not declared war on this virus? Why is our first instinct to make sure that the rich people get to keep all their riches?”
ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN is a senior editor at Reason
While Government Dithered, Private Companies and Philanthropists Swung Into Action
SCOTT SHACKFORD
MICROSOFT FOUNDER AND philanthropist Bill Gates saw the pandemic coming. In a February 28 New England Journal of Medicine article, he warned that “COVID-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.” He called for public health agencies across the board to take steps to slow the virus’s spread. He argued for the importance of accelerating work on treatments and vaccines.
At the same time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was slowly—so very slowly—swinging into action. On February 4, the agency formally acknowledged the public emergency and agreed that the situation called for a quicker-thanusual response to entities seeking emergency approval for new COVID-19 diagnostic tests. Nevertheless, it took the FDA almost a whole month to provide guidance on exactly how laboratories and commercial companies could accelerate that process.
By then, private-sector leaders were already putting plans in motion. The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States was in January in Washington state, where Gates’ philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is based. On March 10, the Gates Foundation announced a partnership with MasterCard and Wellcome, a U.K.-based research charity, to commit $125 million to a “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator” that hoped to speed up the response by “identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling-up treatments.” The private response would turn out to be critical. A group of Seattle doctors had already had to defy the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to implement the tests that caught the virus’s arrival in America.
On the same day of the Gates Foundation announcement, the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health policy think tank, put together a tracker showing how much private philanthropy was going into the worldwide response. The group calculated that at least $725 million had then been committed by private nonprofits, businesses, and foundations to aid in international relief efforts. Candid, a foundation that helps nonprofits and foundations connect to donors, calculated that $4.3 billion in grants had been funded by early April for coronavirus responses around the world.
Early on, much of the assistance was directed toward China. But as COVID-19 spread everywhere, so did private philanthropy and innovation. As hospitals and health providers ran out of face masks (thanks in part, again, to FDA regulations that made it hard to ramp up production in response to demand), businesses donated their unused stockpiles. Soon, the private sector was iterating novel solutions as well. Across the world, companies and crafters with access to 3D printers and sewing machines began designing and producing masks of their own.
The number of breathing devices at hospitals became one of the more dangerous chokepoints in the COVID-19 response, leading to rationing and difficult medical choices in areas with high concentrations of infections. Again, innovators went to work. In Italy, for example, volunteers reverse-engineered a respirator valve that was in short supply, began manufacturing it with a 3D printer, and donated a stock to local hospitals.
As the spread of COVID-19 shut down auto manufacturing in the United States, companies such as GM and Tesla stepped up to suggest repurposing some unused spaces in their plants to help produce more ventilators. While President Donald Trump was a big fan of this response, both logistical and bureaucratic barriers got in the way. Yet again, the FDA’s slow response was a problem. It wasn’t until March 23, when the FDA announced it was relaxing some guidelines that strictly regulated where, how, and with what materials ventilators could be manufactured, that this problem could even begin to be solved.
Meanwhile, the worldwide collapse of tourism due to the spread of COVID-19 left hotels and short-term rental services such as Airbnb bereft of customers. Some hotels near medical centers were converted into clinics. Others, like the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, announced plans to let medical personnel responding to the pandemic stay there free of charge. Airbnb offered to waive its fees if its hosts would likewise volunteer to house medical personnel and aid workers responding to the crisis. The company claims to have gotten 20,000 such offers by the end of March.
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Beyond the philanthropic response, the ability of citizens to abide by shelter-in-place or stay-at-home recommendations and continue to thrive is entirely due to private-sector responses. While some small restaurants have had to shut their doors, many others are surviving thanks to delivery services such as Grubhub, DoorDash, and Postmates. Mass runs on grocery stores cleared shelves of staples, but within a week America’s truck drivers and warehouse workers had gone into overdrive to get things back to a certain level of normalcy. There continued to be shortages of some goods, but even amid a deadly pandemic, almost no one had to worry about starving. For those stuck without companionship, Pornhub even offered one-month premium subscriptions for free.
The colossal response from the private sector most certainly helped make it possible for greater numbers of people to work from home, spend less time interacting with others, and “flatten the curve” to reduce the spread of COVID-19. While the government was still trying to figure out its messaging and untangle its bureaucracy, countless individuals, businesses, and community groups were quickly adapting to solve problems on the ground.
SCOTT SHACKFORD is an associate editor at Reason.
Photo: Fleetwood, Pennsylvania, on April 2; Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty. Photo: New York, New York, on March 16; Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty. Photo: Seal Beach, California, on March 24; Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty. Photo: East Garden City, New York, on March 20; Al Bello/Getty. Photo: Las Vegas, Nevada, on April 3; Ethan Miller/Getty ■
UK y la commonwealth vs China
“ El informe de la organización británica añade que la actual crisis le costó solo al Reino Unido, Estados Unidos y Japón cerca de 3.2 billones de libras esterlinas.
El informe esbozó una serie de posibles vías legales, incluyendo recurrir a la ONU (Naciones Unidas) y la Corte Internacional de Justicia, por las que Gran Bretaña podría pedir compensaciones a China por el brote de coronavirus y sus consecuencias económicas y sanitarias.
Bajo el título “Compensación del coronavirus: evaluación de la posible culpabilidad y vías de respuesta legal de China”, se indica que el Partido Comunista chino buscó la manera de ocultar las noticias sobre la expansión del virus en su territorio”
El gobierno de Australia también solicitó a la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) realizar algunos cambios, por sus deficiencias en el manejo de la pandemia.
La educación es la tercera industria más grande de Australia y China es la mayor fuente de estudiantes que viajan a Australia. China también es el mayor socio comercial de este país.
Europa y EEUU deben asistir a Australia ante la amenaza china. Todo el mundo occidental debe ser firme frente al matonismo chino que tras causar con la ocultación -como el gobierno español después- una pandemia mundial es la menos afectada y encima reacciona con prepotencia. https://twitter.com/europapress/st
Y no es de extrañar. Soy el primero en desear que vuelva la normalidad, en poder celebrar mis cumpleaños y animaciones pero debemos ser realistas. En cuanto se ha permitido salir, se ha salido en masa y con demasiadas imprudencias por parte de los ciudadanos.
Por no comentar, nada sobre el gobierno y la gestión durante la pandemia.
En este tiempo de tantas noticias me ha perecido un audio muy interesante.