A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Chart Credit: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)  On the last week of March 2020, the United States of America reached a dark milestone in the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic: the number of confirmed cases in the country exceeded those in China for the first time. As of 7:57 AM on Friday, March 27, there were 85,996 reported cases in the U.S. and its territories (including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. 1,300 persons have died from COVID-19, including 365 in New York City alone, over the past three months. And as more cases get reported due to more testing and more people die due to the uncoordinated and even lethargic response by the inept and morally bankrupt Trump Administration, those numbers are likely to spike upward before they stabilize and then gradually slope down sometime in mid-spring. Clearly, the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, is not up to the task of guiding this nation in a major cri

Unbelievable. In the same week that Texas' Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick suggested that grandparents should sacrifice their lives in order to save the country and President Donald Trump rosily predicted that the war on the novel coronavirus will probably end in time for Easter, Glenn Beck piled on with his own idiocy. According to the Huffington Post and Media Matters, the popular right-wing commentator and author apparently shares Patrick's apocalyptic vision of older Americans going out to the workplace while their children and grandchildren stay at home, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have determined that COVID-19 is more likely to kill older people who become infected. Per Huffington Post's story : “I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working,” he said in comments posted online by Media Matters. “Even if we all get

Just when you thought Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, could sink no lower in his levels of incompetence, the Buffoon in Chief is signaling his impatience with the medically-necessary steps to limit the spread of COVID-19 and is making irresponsible predictions that the pandemic will end "before Easter." At a televised"town hall" arranged by Trump's favorite conservative media outlet, Fox News, the man who once said that the coronavirus pandemic would not have a serious impact on the U.S. and that the Democrats were exaggerating the gravity of the situation for political gain during an election year was irritated and, at the same time, making rosy predictions about when America could go back to business as usual. Per the New York Times:   President Trump said on Tuesday that he wanted to reopen the country for business by Easter, on April 12, despite widespread warnings from public health experts that the worst effects of the co

So now we've come to this. As President Donald Trump questions the wisdom of putting into place medically-necessary measures to protect Americans from the world-wide coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic because they're "doing more harm than good" to the economy, his Republican acolytes are clamoring for an end to quarantines, closures of businesses, and a return to normal activities. It's no secret that the GOP has long had a reputation for being the party of Big Business. The alliance between the Republican Party and what we now call the "One Percenters" began sometime after Reconstruction and was solidified by the time of the 1912 Presidential election, the race that split the party's pro-business wing (led by incumbent William Howard Taft) and its more progressive one (led by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt). In that intramural battle royale, TR and his adherents ended up forming a third party (the Bull Moose Party); as a result, a weakened Taft

Graphic by Open-ClipArt Vectors from Pixabay From Facebook's Captain Grammar Pants group : This is a non-standard post, driven by the fact that I am in self-quarantine; it has nothing to do with grammar. If you want all of your friends to (figuratively) blow up your newsfeed, just ask them to take a film title and substitute "toilet paper" for one of the nouns. For example: O Toilet Paper, Where Art Thou? My Fractured Toilet Paper Movie Titles A Toilet Paper Too Far The Toilet Paper on the River Kwai Toilet Paper Now The Battle of Toilet Paper Zero Dark Toilet Paper Captain Toilet Paper Raiders of the Lost Toilet Paper Revenge of the Toilet Papers Zulu Toilet Paper Band of Toilet Papers The Lord of the Toilet Paper Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Toilet Paper Star Wars - Episode II: Toilet Paper of the Clones Star Wars - Episode III: Toilet Paper of the Sith Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Toilet Paper Star Wars - Episode V: The Toilet Paper S

To my conservative friends who are posting false comparisons between the Obama Administration's handling of the swine flu outbreak in 2009 and the current Administration's handling of COVID-19 on social media: Stop it. When the world experienced the swine flu pandemic, Barack Obama was just settling in as President. The first cases were reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in late March, around the same time that the Obama Administration was dealing with the disastrous state of the economy, which had been battered by the Great Recession of 2008. It took the federal government less than a month to declare a public health emergency, but because the novel Influenza A/H1N1 was a new strain, it took the medical community several more months to get a handle on the outbreak and its spread. President Obama declared a National Health Emergency on October 24, 2009. In all, the CDC estimates that at least 60 million Americans were infected, 274,000 were hospitalized, an

Hasbro Star Wars: The Black Series #91 contains Rey and the droid D-O from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Photo Credit: Hasbro, Inc. © 2019 Hasbro and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On October 4, 2019. 11 weeks before the premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Hasbro released a "wave" of eight Star Wars: The Black Series action figures for the company's "Triple Force Friday" assortment of new  Star Wars collectibles and toys. This wave consisted of: Supreme Leader Kylo Ren Cal Kestis Rey & D-O Sith Trooper The Mandalorian Offworld Jawa Second Sister Inquisitor First Order Stormtrooper Although several of the Star Wars action figures in the October 4 wave are based on characters from video games (Cal Kestis is featured in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order ) and Lucasfilm TV shows ( The Mandalorian and Star Wars: Rebels ), four figures represent the then-unreleased final film of the Skywalker Saga, Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.