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Category Archives: Irony

bizarre and ironic

How South Korea responded to COVID-19

This is a good video showing how despite having a large number of cases of COVID-19 early on, South Korea was able to slow down the coronavirus significantly without having a full lockdown like most countries. This saved lives and protected their economy.

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Life is not like the movies

Trump seems to be dealing with the coronavirus as if it were a TV show. I guess that’s all he knows. This is what a previous world disaster handled the same way might have looked like in real life:

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Leadership

Yesterday, I read the transcript of the address to the UK by Queen Elizabeth II, but today a friend sent me a link to the video, which the NY Times has graciously allowed non-subscribers to watch for free (after watching an ad). I’ve lived in England, and (perhaps despite that) I’ve never been much for […]

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Exponentially Increasing

Humans are woefully terrible at understanding the impact of exponential growth. Here’s an example. An article in the NY Times looked at CDC data for COVID-19 and found something interesting: “By the time 50 cases were officially confirmed, at least 1,200 people had already started showing symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.” […]

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Sexual Harassment

Saturday, my favorite political site Electoral Vote published a question from one of their readers asking about Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden. Here’s the question and their answer: Q: I was wondering if you might comment on the recent failed anti-Biden propaganda push related to sexual assault. Whoever is pushing the […]

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Viral Spending

The Senate has passed the Coronavirus Relief Bill, which will likely pass the House by the end of this week. The size of the bill is staggering, at $2.2 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, total federal spending is already $4.45 trillion, so we are talking about increasing this year’s spending by 50%, to […]

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Read this NOW – UPDATE

The same person who authored the Medium article featured in my original “Read this NOW” post has come out with an update, and this time he had lots of help. The new version has concrete suggestions of good ways to contain the coronavirus outbreak, and has the added benefit of only requiring harsh restrictions for […]

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The Market Strikes Back!

How long before the market realizes that better advance preparation for epidemics and pandemics would be good for the economy (including the stock market)? Bill Gates, one of the most ruthless businessmen of the modern era, talked about this 5 years ago! UPDATE: The Atlantic has a great article listing all the times our government […]

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St. Patrick’s Day

Have a fun, but safe, St. Patrick’s Day!

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Read this NOW

Everyone should read this article NOW. It is long and contains lots of numbers and graphs, but it explains everything well, every step of the way. If you want the short version, it is that we must reduce the transmission of the coronavirus, and the best way to do that is through social distancing, which […]

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Virus Snark

This is a snarky article from The Independent, a UK newspaper: Thank God we have Trump to do what the scientists won’t – build that coronavirus wall by Mark Steel We’re so lucky. Because in a time of global danger, we need leaders who are clear, informed, sensitive and decisive. So, truly, we have been […]

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Repeating the Past

This article from the Daily Beast (so read it with a grain of salt) is supposedly about how Donald Trump claimed that he “didn’t know people died from the flu” when in fact his grandfather died from the Spanish flu. The article points out “The president’s grandfather, in fact, was one of the first domestic […]

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Pandemic Humor

A selection of comics about the coronavirus:

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Opportunity!

Joe Biden has a huge opportunity staring him in the face. And it is the same opportunity that Obama utilized for his winning coalition, when he brought many of his competing Democrats (and some Republicans) into his administration. Biden should announce cabinet level (or similar stature) positions for his now-vanquished competition: Elizabeth Warren. Is it […]

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Rudy Giuliani, Security Threat

Like his boss, Rudy Giuliani loves Twitter, but he has a problem. Rudy is a poor typist, and often mistypes URLs in his tweets (along with inserting other spelling errors). A director for a cybersecurity company noted that Giuliani creates these bad URLs regularly. His mistyped URLs have become so common that hackers have started […]

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