A Year in Solitary

I noted in the update that Mango Mussolini had suddenly been converted from a COVID Truther to a babbling imitation of a "war president" and I wondered what the hell? This joker notoriously never changes the brain cell he calls his mind; he's stuck where he was in the Eighties.

Well, apparently, here's what happened; he read (or, let's not kid ourselves, was probably read-to and given a colorful comic-strip summary of) a study done in London modeling epidemiological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the likely outcomes. The "no-action" response - i.e. treat this as a seasonal flu and let it run it's course, essentially the Trumpkins' "plan"?

2.2 million dead just from the disease. And that's without the deaths that will happen because the ICUs are jammed with people in respiratory failure from the disease.

But.

"Suppression" - completely banning all public gatherings, closing shops, workplaces, restaurants, basically making people inmates in their homes...apparently works.

Here's the nut grafs if you don't want to read the whole thing:

"Suppression works! The death rate in the US peaks 3 weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit but don't exceed the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear. But here's the catch: if we EVER relax suppression before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. After the 1st suppression period ends in July, we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by 2 more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. Staggering breaks by city could do a bit better. But we simply cannot EVER allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen."

When do the authors believe a vaccine is likely?

Eighteen months.

So for the next year and a half we will be unable to work, many of us. Theaters, restaurants, bookstores...won't be able to open. How will we live? We will still have landlords demanding rent and banks demanding mortgage payments. We will still have to buy food, pay bills.

As I was saying earlier; the ONLY way I see we will get through this without breaking our society in too many ways to anticipate is for government to, in effect, pay for society to go on for a year and a half while we're all in solitary. Pay wages, pay rent and mortgages, pay shop owners and businesses that can't open.

The alternative?

We emerge from this with a huge mass of impoverished "citizens" ruled by a tiny minority of the obscenely rich who were able to ride this out in luxury.

The problem?

For the GOP that's a feature, not a bug.

Well...shit.

WASF.

Sky Blue, Blue Skies

(This is a repost of my contribution to the Portland soccer website Slide Rule Pass. I liked it enough to put it up it here, but it is about soccer, and women's soccer, so if you dislike soccer, or women, please feel free to stop reading. Or you might skip to the end, where I do have some observations about the social divide between Portland's soccer cultures I got a little taste of last night.)

Portland woke up gray and drizzly, probably looking very similar to the way Jim Gabarra and the gals from Sky Blue FC are feeling after dropping to third in the NWSL.

Wednesday night Portland Thorns FC did the business they couldn’t last Sunday and hung a 3-1 whipping on the Jersey Girls.

Mind you, in the larger sense all that did for PTFC was set up a huge match this coming Sunday with the league leaders, FC Kansas City. But sufficient to the day is the soccer thereof. Let’s just take a quick look at last night and see what might have made the difference between giving up two points to Chicago last Sunday and hammering three out of SBFC last night.

Portland’s attack continues to be ferocious. That was the biggest similarity between the two matches, the intensity of the revitalized Thorns strikers. PTFC outshot SBFC 25-12, including 13-4 on goal but the numbers alone don’t really give a good sense of how different the two clubs looked last night. Thorns FC threatened from the opening whistle – Shim was desperately unlucky not to score in the first minute – to the final one. Sky Blue did what they could, given the depletion of their strike force, but relied largely on a counterattack that was generally well handled by PTFC.

While I’m here, let me shout out both Meleana Shim and Allie Long. Shim was perfectly positioned to clean up the mess Alex Morgan made firing twice at SBFC’s keeper Loyden at pointblank range.

And Long got some karmic payback for Mautz’s golazo Sunday, crafting what amounted to the identical play with the identical result for Portland’s third goal. Allie has been working her tail off on defense for the past month and it was nice to see her enjoy her beautiful strike.

And Alex Morgan. Let’s just say that the Thorns’ marquee player had a fire and a ferocity I wish she’d display every match. Her first half equalizing strike was beautifully taken, and Wednesday night she was in every way what Rose City supporters dreamed of and opposing fans feared; a game-changer and a force of nature.

Well played, Alex.

Portland’s midfield has been Tobinized. I was skeptical, I admit it; I didn’t see how the addition of a single player, no matter the quality, would fix the problems Thorns FC had been displaying in midfield. Well, for the record, I’m eating my words. Heath has made a vast difference, and Thorns midfield is finally showing the cohesion and composure we’d hoped to see from the opening match.

From what I can see Heath does this both with her own skills and the way she plays off the others. Her dribbling is far and away the most accomplished in the midfield and was really on display Wednesday night. I lost count of how many times she danced between or within a brace or trio of Sky Blue defenders, but the effect was to repeatedly draw pressure, like a black hole in a red jersey, and repeatedly free up space around her.

Then she would deploy her other talent, a gift for accurate passing. Especially to her forwards, Heath is capable of providing the sort of deadly service that makes her every possession a threat to the opposing goal and forces the defenders to concentrate on her as SBFC had to and as a result opening up opportunities for the Thorns around her. But she also makes her midfielders more effective, threading passes to them that would have been picked off three weeks ago. Wednesday night the Thorns midfield was no longer a place where the Thorns’ attack went to die, and I give Heath a huge portion of the credit for that.

I’ve seen other players do this, raise their teammates to a higher level, but it’s been delightful to see it here. Heath makes her midfield partners play better, gives her defenders a reliable outlet when pressed, and provides the service to make her forwards more deadly. That’s pretty damn impressive for one player.

Well played, Tobin.

Portland’s defense did a vastly better job of avoiding the derps that cost them Sunday. Not entirely; the lone Sky Blue tally was a 17th minute own-goal that combined poor positioning by Karina LeBlanc with a head-scratching flick-on from Nikki Marshall jumping above the PTFC wall that looped Freel’s free kick neatly into Marshall's own net.

In the second half Karina made up for her gaffe by stoning SBFC’s Ocampo’s 54th minute breakaway but with the entire PTFC backline puffing along behind thoroughly beaten by the well-placed long ball. Karina still had to make some other big saves, notably in the 13th minute when she dove to her right to palm a Brittany Bock shot around the post.

I have to give credit to Coach Parlow Cone on this, too. She started the match with Allie Long nearly sitting back amongst the defenders; technically the formation might have been a 4-4-2 diamond but in practice it looked like a 4-1-3-2 with Long acting as a sort of midfield sweeper, chasing down the ball and harrassing Sky Blue’s Rangel into insignificance. And that brings up another huge difference…

Coach Parlow Cone’s substitutions looked timely and sensible. Opposed to Sunday, where her choices seemed ineffective at best and actively harmful at worst, Wednesday night Parlow Cone did what she failed to do in the earlier game. Sitting on a 3-1 lead with about a quarter hour to go she pulled Meleana Shim for Courtney Wetzel and shifted to a 4-2-2-2 (or a 4-4-2 with Long and Wetzel deep in the bucket). This allowed the PTFC centerbacks the freedom to stifle Ocampo and a hobbled Lisa DeVanna while the fullbacks and DMs cut off their wing service, played keep-away with Heath and Foxhoven, and generally made nuisances of themselves. The result was a calm and controlled fifteen minutes that saw the game out and secured the victory.

There’s a saying to the effect that the reward for work well done is more work. Wednesday night’s work was well done by the Girls in Red; their reward is a meeting with a surging Kansas City Sunday. Last Sunday I looked ahead with a great deal of trepidation. Today I am a lot more confident. The Chicago clouds that loured upon our house are in the deep bosom of Sky Blue buried, and the hopes for sunny skies Sunday are suddenly once again on the rise.

Briefly Noted – The Sections of the Rich and Famous: For the first time since the renovation I watched part of the match from the East Stand, the “club” section of Jeld-Wen Field. I have to admit; several of those of us who normally haunt the North End call this stand the “Prawn-sandwich Patio” for the supposedly snooty and exclusive crowd it supposedly attracts. So I was curious to see how reality conformed to prejudice.

I tried to pick up a single General Admission ticket for the game but the on-line ticket service wouldn’t let me; the only seat it offered was over on the club side. As noted, these are expensive seats and I’ve never really had the urge to splurge. I wanted to see the match and didn’t have time to run down to the box office and try my luck, so I took the seat I was offered in Section C4, Row C.

And having been there, I have to tell you; it’s probably a very good thing that us unwashed proles standing behind the north goal don’t know how the Jeld-Wen 1% live. We’d be insanely jealous, rooting in squalor as we do.

First, club section seats are HUGE; my ass sighed in air-conditioned comfort as I wallowed about in the enormous bucket waiting for kickoff. Second, there’s a special little cup-holder on the back of the seat in front for your beer.

A cup-holder. For you. Yourself. For your very own beer.

The width of the rows is vast, with leg-room enough between your seat and the seatback in front for an NBA center. You can’t help it; you loll about like a Wall Street CEO surveying your minions with a sort of enormous well of contempt and self-satisfaction.

And the pitch!

So close, if you weren’t lolling about in your ginormous seat swigging your $9 beer from your very own cup-holder you'd feel like you could play a 1-2 with Tobin Heath.

It’s hard to describe the immense gulf between this luxury and the crowded terrace several hundred feet away, but lolling about in my club seat I suddenly understood how one could sweep past some grubby commoners in one’s Jaguar with not even so much as a sneer.

But.

Before the match I kidded a Section 109 (our usual spot under the Shed) friend about practicing my “tennis clap” to fit in with the club stand crowd. That turned out not to be much of a joke. When you’re used to standing and singing, shouting and jeering at the enemy and crying out love for your team it just seems wrong to respond to great play with a polite spatter of applause.

But based on the other night, that’s what you do sitting in the club stand section.

Let’s just say the intensity there wasn’t…intense.

With the game and possibly the season on the line the girls behind me spent most of the first half talking about the cute boys on their rec league soccer team. The young guy two seats over did nothing but catcall the referee. Other than a burst of cheering for the Morgan goal the stand was so quiet you could hear the players shouting on the pitch. When the two teams ran off at halftime 1-1 the entire section erupted in a burst of frenzied…clapping.

So I got up to get a beer, snuck around and into the North End, and spent the second half standing in front of a tiny seat in a narrow row, my warming beer in my hands, singing amid the thunder of drums and feeling thoroughly, vastly, immensely, contentedly privileged.

Cultural imperia...what IS that thing..?

Does anyone else find this "tumescent-blue-robot-and-Korean-schoolgirls" thing disturbing?It's from the blog "Gusts of Popular Feeling", where the author discusses Korea's official desire to be rid of those pesky foreigners currently used to teach the lingua anglia of technological civilization to the residents of the Land of the Morning Calm.

We're so used to being the biggest racists on the block that it can be surprising to find other peoples just as prejudiced as we are. But one thing our cultural prejudices do is blind us to the realities of the places and peoples we encounter. The people inhabiting the Korean peninsula have been ferocious fighters for centuries, invaders and conquerors whenever possible, and like most aggressive, self-confident cultures tend to be a leeeetle bit xenophobic.

Whether or not the Korean government succeeds in replacing their foreign teachers with robots, the fundamental nature of people won't change. Many Koreans will always find those funny, pale-faced, rude, noisy, horny outlanders a nasty inconvenience at best.

But the little blue woody on the robot? Ew.