That’s pretty in character for Ethan. It’s pretty tone deaf and narcissistic. On the other hand, with the mess that might well be about to unfold given the jump Covid-19 may well have on the West Coast (ball dropped by CDC and Trump administration), everyone might be finding this not so funny in the coming months. In case you didn’t hear: Covid-19 has a fatty outer layer that is broken by soap (not hand sanitizer, or at least not as well) and washing hands thoroughly with soap and water (for about the length of time to sing happy birthday twice… Read more »
What sucks is that why we can kind of joke about a convention being canceled isn’t a big deal, that actually does hurt a lot of people’s jobs. If you are someone who works at a convention or those companies that run stuff, it can impact you financially. Overseas people in some places can’t even go to work, in the real bad places they don’t even go outside. So overall, it just really sucks. Even if you don’t get sick, just the panic is causing is creating issue. And what probably sucks the most is that even canceling all these… Read more »
Well……. I agree with many of your points, but as a reader in China who has been stuck at home for more than a month, let me tell you something. Our Chinese New Year trip to visit my wife’s family was cancelled, and I’ve been home with my wife and 6 year old son for more than a month now. My job teaching is on hold, my son’s classes are all online meaning I’m the defacto teacher/enforcer, and everything in the city except for life-sustaining markets, hospitals, gas stations, and the like has been shut down. Just starting to reopen… Read more »
Despite some of the controversy about China silencing the whistle blowers I strongly believe that, considering the transition rate of this coronavirus, China absolutely was on the ball as much as they could be here.
Meanwhile, allegedly, in the US we’re talking about cutting low-income heating assistance to pay for Coronavirus stuff. After severe cuts to our social net healthcare systems and government groups similarly related.
Last thing we needed was people trying to skip overseas even more than they did.
To be fair though, this is something like an existential crisis for the Chinese government. If they can’t contain this quickly, it is expected this will cause a third of their small and medium business to go bankrupt. As the largest moneymakers for their government and their job creators it’s quite expected it would rapidly spiral into a large spike in unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and knock out a good percentage of their tax base.
Corollary: As China is a huge part of the global economy, the global economy would likely feel it and corporations worldwide would start going into depression/recession measures which tighten spending and limit expenses and layoff people and delay work and on it goes.
Yes and it looks like the CDC’s focus on ports of entry and on Asian travellers to the large exclusion of domestic testing (as of last week, only 500 people tested) is likely to lead to some outbreaks in the North West / West Coast area. One of the major issues is how the POTUS has stated how he sees it and, in an administration known to get even with dissenters, CDC and others haven’t fought that view, just kind of let their policy follow that view which is likely to be a regretable choice. One of the greatest requirements… Read more »
I actually just read an article on that sort of note about the Justice Department. I’m guessing people left there think they can somehow offset the awfulness but if they speak out they’ll get shitcanned without a reference.
This administration has far too much direct influence in places that are meant to be autonomous of it, and it is *fucking shit up*
Given the Trump said, “don’t bring those cruise ship passengers back till they’re cleared” and the CDC ignored him and did it anyway, bringing 56 patient 0’s to a military base in Washington. Given that Trump said, “don’t release them till were 100% sure they are clear, double check everything” and the CDC released a dozen of them without double checking a false-negative test, leading to dozens of exposures in the community by these “recovered” individuals who were still contagious… It would seem that the current spread is almost entirely due to the “permanent government” (a.k.a. Deep State) that Mr.… Read more »
Kaitensatsuma, that entire article is designed to convince, not to inform. It’s opinion journalism, filled with words meant to invoke anger. They pulled out a thesaurus in order to find the right word to bring out emotions to bring you over to their side without checking facts, stated and missing. How the media hasn’t lost all credibility with some people amazes me given their actions in the last year alone. They have been practically frothing at the mouth since trump was elected, swamping the media with so many twisted facts and lies that they’ve effectively drowned out what is actually… Read more »
Why is the Federal government paying for low income heating assistance? The Fed’s job is to manage and protect the States. The States’ job is to manage the people. When did we lose track of this?
The governments job is to assist its citizens in time of need. Having citizens freezing to death because they cant pay their heating bill is not only morally bad, but looks bad in the press.
In a Federal government that’s the State job, but it’s easier for them to lower taxes to big companies and then complain to the Feds when the budget doesn’t add.
The thing China did right (and maybe Russia, though their focus on Chinese vs. just anyone travelling from outside) is they slowed the spread. We can’t ever stop the spread – we’re too globalized and people don’t know they are infected for a couple of weeks or longer. What the global health community is really doing is fighting a battle to slow transmission. The fewer people have it, the fewer strains on the health care system and all that people being sick would bring. Why does that matter? The whole goal is to buy (depending on who you listen to)… Read more »
While I agree with almost everything you said, I have a hard time blaming any administration for a diseased spreading world wide arriving on our shores. Particularly if the incubation time of 14 days is correct and what you are saying is true. Not only do we have tons of world travel but we also have two of the largest borders which effectively can’t be that well guarded. The big thing is don’t politicize the CDC. Let them do their job and listen to them. My coworkers husband travels for work and all of it was cancelled as soon as… Read more »
Closing the pandemic control centers in a ton of counties (including China), firing the pandemic response team at the CDC, cutting CDC budget. I think this administration can own a little blame.
In this case, much blame can be placed at Trump’s feet. He fired many of those in charge of the CDC in 2016, putting political functionaries in place. And then in every year since has whacked at least 1 billion a year from the CDC’s budget. This has taken away 80% of the CDC’s prior budget for handling emerging diseases – specifically fighting new flu/viral outbreaks in China. So – by removing the people who can recognize viral dangers, gutting the CDC’s capacity to respond country & world-wide – this is a perfect storm a viral outbreak. The only amazing… Read more »
@Jaq all I will say is be careful of what you read. We know Russia loves using propaganda and right now they are in full swing trying to sow distrust in the US government centering it around the corona virus. I’m just saying dig deeper than the surface news. Were the people replaced also put there politically? We know congress actually provided more funding to the CDC than Trump requested in the budget(which is a good thing). Political blame won’t help us unite to help fight this. It only divides and plays into the hands of the Russians.
This is why the direct news reports – from Forbes, HuffPo, the Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Business Insider, politifact check, the Guardian, money.com, the hill – and lots of other sources should be read. Don’t trust me or gossip – trust news reports that are dated from 2016,2017,2018 & 2019. The reports from before the last few weeks are about the budget cuts for the CDC & how this has gelded that agency.
Political placement of science deniers is far worse than political appointment of scientists, even if both are ‘political appointments’. But this last is my opinion.
Allow me to direct you to some hard facts. Fiscal Year 2012 CDC Budget: (PHS = Public Health Sciences / research funding) PHS Funding = $517.462 million Fiscal Year 2013 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $492.508 million Fiscal Year 2014 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $480.989 million Fiscal Year 2015 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $481.061 Fiscal Year 2016 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $538.809 As you can see, PHS funding declined by nearly $40 million during the Obama Administration. Trump’s first budget reversed that trend with a nearly $60 million increase in direct funding for research. Fiscal Year 2015… Read more »
I truly hate for this to be my first post here, but it needs to be said; 1) The budget for the CDC has not been cut, that much is true. But it literally has nothing to do with Trump. Trump HAS proposed budget cuts for 2021, but Congress hasn’t approved it. 2) The bigger issue here isn’t even budget. It’s the fact that in 2018, Trump fired a LOT of the people who would have been responsible for our policy and reactions to this outbreak… and didn’t replace them. Ziemer left and his team (global health security) were disbanded.… Read more »
1.) Even by proposed budgets that congress hasn’t agreed to, Trump’s requested funding for respiratory disease research and response represents an increase compared to the downtrend seen during the Obama administration. No amount of word salad can change the numbers that prove this reality. 2.) Yes, Trump disbanded a GHS liaison team assembled to coordinate crisis response between DHS and the CDC. As someone who works in the crisis response and incident management field, I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret that experts in our field won’t admit in the press: THEY WEREN’T DOING ANYTHING. That’s right. They… Read more »
MIster GOTFACTS. It seems that a good part of your arument here is essentially: “my dad works at nintendo and told me xyz”. You could easily be a 14 year old trump supporter saying that they werent doing anything and lying about being in crisis management to make unsubstantiated claims they heard on youtube sound more reasonable.
Yeah except the president doesnt set any of those amounts. Its almost like there was a republican congress during those last 6 years of the Obama administration cutting funding for him anywhere they could. I notice you didnt include 2009 the year Obama was president with a Dem congress. Allocation was 8.8 Billion, 2.3 billion dollars MORE than what Trump wants 11 years later. Liberals know how to look things up too and recognize self-selected data.
Dear GOTFACTS. I find it telling that you only gave the 2015 and 2020 facts for trumps presidency. This makes it seem like you are hiding something. Even if you arent
It’s TDS sufferers, programmed by the media with an ocean of lies. It’s pointless to argue with them. They’ll just call you a white supremacist or something. Even black Trump supporters get called white supremacists because words don’t have meanings anymore.
@jaq This is just factually wrong. Please do ACTUAL research instead of googling articles by left-wing corporate media. The CDC budgets are publicly available information, allow me to present the actual numbers: 2015 CDC Budget – Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Fund: (Obama’s last budget) $748 million (decrease of $36 million from 2014) 2020 CDC Budget – Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Fund: (Last fiscal year’s budget) $790 million (increase of $700,000 over 2019) 2021 CDC Budget – Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Fund: (Current fiscal year budget) $830 million (increase of $40 million over FY 2020) Clearly, an increase of $82 million… Read more »
You just resposted the same thing twice, and that wasn’t even the main point of this discussion (which, by the way, was about the loss of the strong leaders and epidemiology experts the CDC had under Obama).
I commend you for trying, but making a lengthy and borderline obsessive-looking comment as a reply to a fairly passionate and reasonable set of statements is basically the embodiment of “ignorant pseudo-intellectual garbage”.
I blame it more on Trump than the CDC. He and his administration have been pretty much running on a skeleton crew for years now since Trump is incapable of filling positions and his current budget that has been suggested actually cuts the budget of the CDC.
Except funding ACTUALLY increased. And just because government actually got SLIGHTLY smaller, doesn’t mean it’s incapable. Just many now adults are used to Obama levels of government that got a whole lot bigger.
Oh sure, let me know how cutting staff and increasing the working hours of those that are left works out in literally every other setting.
As I recall our wait time for visa renewals before 2016 was something like year, and after cuts to resources, staff and funding it’s now going onto the third and fourth year for many applicants.
These are people who already were allowed to live and work here by the by.
Congress didn’t pass the budget for the fucking wall and 4 billion got raided from the Pentagon’s coffers for the fucking thing. Lets stop pretending we’re living in a country where the Checks and Balances still work, eh? Because they *don’t*, the first two years of this damninistration had such a ridiculous amount of non-law policy changes and executive orders that amounted to changes in the law it wasn’t even funny.
Really? Instead of looking up actual budget numbers from Congress and the CDC, you go to SNOPES? SNOPES! The “fact checking” laughingstock that “fact-checks” satirical websites and joke memes? SNOPES! The “fact-checking” site that isn’t run by professional researchers or actual journalists, and has no editorial oversight? SNOPES! The “fact-checking” site owned by an advertising agency, and a guy who cheated on his wife with dozens of prostitutes, one of which he eventually married? SNOPES! The “fact-checking” site embroiled in a scandal for taking money from Monsanto to lie in their “fact-checks” about Round-Up, until the known cancer risks were… Read more »
@Kaitensatauma, do you realize the number of immigration judges brought in by the Trump administration in two years was more than seven years with the Obama administration? https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-immigration-judges-backlog-20190315-story.html
My point is that every administration has had strong and weak points. I don’t like Trumps overall demeanor and rhetoric but many of his administrations policies have done well for the majority of Americans
Why do people still just believe everything CNN tells you? You do realize this whole idea of Trump’s administration being a skeleton crew after 9/10 staffers quit, is just leftist fantasy. His administration’s open positions are public record. Go look it up and compare with where Obama’s Administration was during his 4th year. It’s a narrative, not a reality. Besides, Trump has been quite capable of filling the 250+ judicial positions Obama failed to during his tenure. Did you know Trump has filled a HISTORIC number of vacancies left open by his predecessor? I suppose the media didn’t screech loudly… Read more »
The coverage I recall was about how the McConnell led senate refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Obama’s judicial nominees, including one for the supreme court. There absolutely was media attention paid to the fact that the republicans chose to cripple the judiciary. This is also why Obama’s administration had to rely on so many executive orders to actually get anything done (for which he was and is heavily criticized), considering that the partisanship by the majority at the time was in full obstructionist mode. It’s easy to replace empty positions when the Senate is rubber-stamping everything, it’s impossible… Read more »
I’m curious, how did the CDC/Trump drop the ball? From what I’ve seen, aside from the BS the media spews, it’s not going badly and it isn’t that harmful. It isn’t spreading fast and even if you get it, the symptoms are often mild. Most the deaths have been old people with compromised immune systems. It’s not the apocalypse the media is making it out to be in order to attack the idiot in chief.
Spiderous
4 years ago
Hmmm! I see that Ethan has his priorities straight…. as usual.
I just don’t get the whole panic about the corona virus. Sure, it’s highly contageous but not really that dangerous. Nearly every patient that has died so far was either old or had some pre-existing condition that in most cases would’ve soon been fatal anyway. Survival rate is around 97%, there are cities where simply walking on the street is actually a lot more dangerous. This pretty much puts things into perspective: https://youtu.be/6dDD2tHWWnU?t=88
The combination of the fact that it’s both highly contagious and has a higher mortality rate than other similar pandemics, and the fact that we don’t have a cure yet for it. Antibiotics also aren’t something that can be just quickly whipped up in a lab and distributed to tens of thousands, or millions. The faster something spreads, the harder it is to contain. Your video is four weeks old. Current estimates is over 89,000 illnesses and 3,000 deaths worldwide. Your video lists Swine Flu as being 76,431 cases and 376 deaths at that point (Day 62). So, it’s more… Read more »
Nope, it still isn’t all that dangerous. Pneumonic plage is dangerous. Ebola is dangerous. So are anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis and malaria. Covid-19 isn’t even close.
BTW, are you aware that antibiotics do precisely zero against a virus? Any virus? Using antibiotics to treat a Covid-19 infection will just make matters worse.
I’m currently writing this on April 6th, one month and four days after my initial post. At the time of my previous entry, we had 89,000 illnesses and 3,000 deaths worldwide. Today, we have 1,328,792 illnesses and 73,801 deaths worldwide. As the video that DarkMatter referred to pegged January 1st as ‘Day One,’ that means that Month 3 of Covid made the total number of cases increase fifteen times where it was before, and the total number of deaths increase by 24.6 times. Experts expect that the apex of the infection will be about two weeks away from today. Not… Read more »
Part of that is that case load to date has not overloaded our medical capacity. about 20% of people that catch it require hospitalization to keep them stable enough to recover and can need it for weeks, the rest get symptoms that range from common cold to moderate flu. It spreads as easily as the flu and has a retardedly long incubation period where someone can spread it but show no symptoms. I’ve heard estimates that between 50% and 60% of the population could contract the virus. Doing the math your looking at 10-12% of the total population geting sick… Read more »
It’s obvious you’re neither old nor immuno-compromised, because otherwise you might have a different view about how dangerous it is. The point of limiting spread isn’t to save the 20-year-old men, it’s to save people in hospitals, people in care homes, seniors, etc.
Hunter
4 years ago
I’ve seen keyboard warriors bitching hard about GDC being delayed.
Everyone has short memories or don’t give a shit.
I remember when the H1Nerd1 virus exploded in North America after PAX.
Crowd thousands of people into a small space, add someone infected with a highly infectious virus, stir for three days and watch it grow.
Except H1N1 was literally just another flu that the media blew way out of proportion because views are more important than truth. Nobody cares about a flu when it’s just a flu, but give it a name like H1N1 and then the media and various companies are printing money off of scaring the public.
Different people release stress if different ways. Some people think it’s wrong to make light of a serious situation, while other make jokes because if they can’t laugh about it they’ll be swallowed by depression. Most people are somewhere in-between.
Personally, I think that things like this help lift spirits. I’d rather laugh at a little black humor than live in stoic seriousness.
I’m actually happy that you people are taking the anti-‘safe space’ road
Avion
4 years ago
Hello, northern italian here, living roughly 40 km away from the epicenter of the infection. I find it funny.
Him.
4 years ago
You know it’s bad when Webcomic artists are talking about it
It’s worth noting that outside of China, Coronavirus seems to be having an even lower fatality rate (it’s about 2% in China IIRC), which were largely in elderly people. This isn’t a Spanish Flu 2.0 scenario, or any form of black plague analogy. However, you can help by remembering to wash your hands with soap and water, sneezing into TISSUE or a napkin instead of your hand, and so on.
I hope you are right. However thanks to the Chines government fencing up the place (albeit a tad late), the rest of the world got a preparation period. Meaning we (I am not in China) are about 6 weeks behind China in the growth curve. It would seem that China has successfully slowed the contamination by quarantining millions. The rest of us are shrugging it off as a no-risk pandemic, and are not willing to take the extreme measures pandemics need. Tourism, mass-events, should be stopped for 4-6 weeks to stop the pandemic in its tracks. Yes this will lead… Read more »
no thanks nintendo
4 years ago
I hope E3 gets canceled. One, E3 has sucked for years now. Two, the ESA shouldn’t be able to dox E3 attendees if there’s no E3.
Arguably, the reason why it’s “sucked for years” has everything to do with Sony. I’m sorry, but Sony’s 2017 was a repeat of their 2016; half of 2018 was a repeat of 2017/TGA, and they legitimately showed nothing 2019 because they had no interesting first party games coming out 2019. Their most hyped exclusive was a walking simulator in which you waste huge chunks of time balancing boxes across terrain in the hopes of maybe, MAYBE getting a tidbit of story. As soon as it was clear to Sony that they were in the lead, they legit just stopped trying.… Read more »
I disagree. From my perspective, E3 has been on the decline long before 2017. It went from “Hey! Check out all the new and cool gaming related stuff coming!” to “Hey! Look at all these names we’re paying to be here, regardless of what they have to show!”
Sony isn’t Nintendo, it doesn’t live or die by its first party offerings e3 has problems because 1. It’s been shifting more and more from an insiders event to a commercialised public facing event 2. We don’t need a big event to show us what’s coming, we can all watch the trailers online and the rapid pace of games news means everything gets leaked instantly. e3 mattered when print journalism ruled games news and they needed something like this to see what was coming, now its just another convention and we have a lot of those that are arguably better… Read more »
Everyone lives or dies by their first party offerings and exclusives, Dan. I mean, look at Microsoft. Coming in last place this generation, the same generation that had the WII U. Reason? Where’s the quality first-party offerings? Being outsider-focused rather than insider-focused is more of an effect rather than a cause. But you do make a good point about leaks. Sabi’s leaks before almost every presentation took a lot of the ‘bang’ out, but also just kind of revealed that what WAS there wasn’t all that exciting. Do you remember 2015? I sure do. Everyone had something amazing. Fallout 4,… Read more »
I gotta chime in here, 3 days late, but as I agree with you that Sony not showing at E3 brought it to peoples attention that there was something wrong with E3, there has been some things to back that up, like Geoff Keighleybacking out as well. Regardless of if Sony had anything to show or not, the ESA shouldn’t have to rely on publishers to make their show great. They are supposedly changing the formula to make it more fan friendly but it seems to be taking away from the reason the publishers went and shown there games. At… Read more »
maclura
4 years ago
ha..ha…ha.. ?
DrakeStarkiller
4 years ago
I’ve gotta ask but is that a tv in the background between the 2 posters in the first panel cause whats on it keeps changing
Like the in-character joke … and joking about something horrible, that you have no influence on what so ever, is a human coping mechanism. If anything, it’s better then denying the whole thing even exist and is ‘nothing more than the flu’.
Steeeve
4 years ago
You’d think Lucas wouldn’t be surprised by the things Ethan says by now. At least he seems to know why he receive the “WTF Ethan” look.
Andrew Gil
4 years ago
First time back in about 5 years, man the quality of the comics has changed!
Andrew
4 years ago
This isn’t funny.
Frank Bromley
4 years ago
Well i mean gdc being canclled is going to affect a lot of indy developers who might have to let ppl go because of this so
24
That’s pretty in character for Ethan. It’s pretty tone deaf and narcissistic. On the other hand, with the mess that might well be about to unfold given the jump Covid-19 may well have on the West Coast (ball dropped by CDC and Trump administration), everyone might be finding this not so funny in the coming months. In case you didn’t hear: Covid-19 has a fatty outer layer that is broken by soap (not hand sanitizer, or at least not as well) and washing hands thoroughly with soap and water (for about the length of time to sing happy birthday twice… Read more »
Don’t worry, the heat will kill it…
Yeah… that…. or not so much…
This comment aged like fine milk.
I already don’t find it funny.
Boo. Hoo.
What sucks is that why we can kind of joke about a convention being canceled isn’t a big deal, that actually does hurt a lot of people’s jobs. If you are someone who works at a convention or those companies that run stuff, it can impact you financially. Overseas people in some places can’t even go to work, in the real bad places they don’t even go outside. So overall, it just really sucks. Even if you don’t get sick, just the panic is causing is creating issue. And what probably sucks the most is that even canceling all these… Read more »
Well……. I agree with many of your points, but as a reader in China who has been stuck at home for more than a month, let me tell you something. Our Chinese New Year trip to visit my wife’s family was cancelled, and I’ve been home with my wife and 6 year old son for more than a month now. My job teaching is on hold, my son’s classes are all online meaning I’m the defacto teacher/enforcer, and everything in the city except for life-sustaining markets, hospitals, gas stations, and the like has been shut down. Just starting to reopen… Read more »
Despite some of the controversy about China silencing the whistle blowers I strongly believe that, considering the transition rate of this coronavirus, China absolutely was on the ball as much as they could be here.
Meanwhile, allegedly, in the US we’re talking about cutting low-income heating assistance to pay for Coronavirus stuff. After severe cuts to our social net healthcare systems and government groups similarly related.
Last thing we needed was people trying to skip overseas even more than they did.
To be fair though, this is something like an existential crisis for the Chinese government. If they can’t contain this quickly, it is expected this will cause a third of their small and medium business to go bankrupt. As the largest moneymakers for their government and their job creators it’s quite expected it would rapidly spiral into a large spike in unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and knock out a good percentage of their tax base.
Corollary: As China is a huge part of the global economy, the global economy would likely feel it and corporations worldwide would start going into depression/recession measures which tighten spending and limit expenses and layoff people and delay work and on it goes.
Yes and it looks like the CDC’s focus on ports of entry and on Asian travellers to the large exclusion of domestic testing (as of last week, only 500 people tested) is likely to lead to some outbreaks in the North West / West Coast area. One of the major issues is how the POTUS has stated how he sees it and, in an administration known to get even with dissenters, CDC and others haven’t fought that view, just kind of let their policy follow that view which is likely to be a regretable choice. One of the greatest requirements… Read more »
I actually just read an article on that sort of note about the Justice Department. I’m guessing people left there think they can somehow offset the awfulness but if they speak out they’ll get shitcanned without a reference.
This administration has far too much direct influence in places that are meant to be autonomous of it, and it is *fucking shit up*
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/
Given the Trump said, “don’t bring those cruise ship passengers back till they’re cleared” and the CDC ignored him and did it anyway, bringing 56 patient 0’s to a military base in Washington. Given that Trump said, “don’t release them till were 100% sure they are clear, double check everything” and the CDC released a dozen of them without double checking a false-negative test, leading to dozens of exposures in the community by these “recovered” individuals who were still contagious… It would seem that the current spread is almost entirely due to the “permanent government” (a.k.a. Deep State) that Mr.… Read more »
ONE DAY ITLL ALL GO AWAY. LIKE A MIRACLE
Kaitensatsuma, that entire article is designed to convince, not to inform. It’s opinion journalism, filled with words meant to invoke anger. They pulled out a thesaurus in order to find the right word to bring out emotions to bring you over to their side without checking facts, stated and missing. How the media hasn’t lost all credibility with some people amazes me given their actions in the last year alone. They have been practically frothing at the mouth since trump was elected, swamping the media with so many twisted facts and lies that they’ve effectively drowned out what is actually… Read more »
Why is the Federal government paying for low income heating assistance? The Fed’s job is to manage and protect the States. The States’ job is to manage the people. When did we lose track of this?
The governments job is to assist its citizens in time of need. Having citizens freezing to death because they cant pay their heating bill is not only morally bad, but looks bad in the press.
In a Federal government that’s the State job, but it’s easier for them to lower taxes to big companies and then complain to the Feds when the budget doesn’t add.
Well said, Randall. I hope you and your family stay safe.
The thing China did right (and maybe Russia, though their focus on Chinese vs. just anyone travelling from outside) is they slowed the spread. We can’t ever stop the spread – we’re too globalized and people don’t know they are infected for a couple of weeks or longer. What the global health community is really doing is fighting a battle to slow transmission. The fewer people have it, the fewer strains on the health care system and all that people being sick would bring. Why does that matter? The whole goal is to buy (depending on who you listen to)… Read more »
While I agree with almost everything you said, I have a hard time blaming any administration for a diseased spreading world wide arriving on our shores. Particularly if the incubation time of 14 days is correct and what you are saying is true. Not only do we have tons of world travel but we also have two of the largest borders which effectively can’t be that well guarded. The big thing is don’t politicize the CDC. Let them do their job and listen to them. My coworkers husband travels for work and all of it was cancelled as soon as… Read more »
Closing the pandemic control centers in a ton of counties (including China), firing the pandemic response team at the CDC, cutting CDC budget. I think this administration can own a little blame.
In this case, much blame can be placed at Trump’s feet. He fired many of those in charge of the CDC in 2016, putting political functionaries in place. And then in every year since has whacked at least 1 billion a year from the CDC’s budget. This has taken away 80% of the CDC’s prior budget for handling emerging diseases – specifically fighting new flu/viral outbreaks in China. So – by removing the people who can recognize viral dangers, gutting the CDC’s capacity to respond country & world-wide – this is a perfect storm a viral outbreak. The only amazing… Read more »
@Jaq all I will say is be careful of what you read. We know Russia loves using propaganda and right now they are in full swing trying to sow distrust in the US government centering it around the corona virus. I’m just saying dig deeper than the surface news. Were the people replaced also put there politically? We know congress actually provided more funding to the CDC than Trump requested in the budget(which is a good thing). Political blame won’t help us unite to help fight this. It only divides and plays into the hands of the Russians.
This is why the direct news reports – from Forbes, HuffPo, the Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Business Insider, politifact check, the Guardian, money.com, the hill – and lots of other sources should be read. Don’t trust me or gossip – trust news reports that are dated from 2016,2017,2018 & 2019. The reports from before the last few weeks are about the budget cuts for the CDC & how this has gelded that agency.
Political placement of science deniers is far worse than political appointment of scientists, even if both are ‘political appointments’. But this last is my opinion.
Allow me to direct you to some hard facts. Fiscal Year 2012 CDC Budget: (PHS = Public Health Sciences / research funding) PHS Funding = $517.462 million Fiscal Year 2013 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $492.508 million Fiscal Year 2014 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $480.989 million Fiscal Year 2015 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $481.061 Fiscal Year 2016 CDC Budget: PHS Funding = $538.809 As you can see, PHS funding declined by nearly $40 million during the Obama Administration. Trump’s first budget reversed that trend with a nearly $60 million increase in direct funding for research. Fiscal Year 2015… Read more »
I truly hate for this to be my first post here, but it needs to be said; 1) The budget for the CDC has not been cut, that much is true. But it literally has nothing to do with Trump. Trump HAS proposed budget cuts for 2021, but Congress hasn’t approved it. 2) The bigger issue here isn’t even budget. It’s the fact that in 2018, Trump fired a LOT of the people who would have been responsible for our policy and reactions to this outbreak… and didn’t replace them. Ziemer left and his team (global health security) were disbanded.… Read more »
1.) Even by proposed budgets that congress hasn’t agreed to, Trump’s requested funding for respiratory disease research and response represents an increase compared to the downtrend seen during the Obama administration. No amount of word salad can change the numbers that prove this reality. 2.) Yes, Trump disbanded a GHS liaison team assembled to coordinate crisis response between DHS and the CDC. As someone who works in the crisis response and incident management field, I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret that experts in our field won’t admit in the press: THEY WEREN’T DOING ANYTHING. That’s right. They… Read more »
MIster GOTFACTS. It seems that a good part of your arument here is essentially: “my dad works at nintendo and told me xyz”. You could easily be a 14 year old trump supporter saying that they werent doing anything and lying about being in crisis management to make unsubstantiated claims they heard on youtube sound more reasonable.
Yeah except the president doesnt set any of those amounts. Its almost like there was a republican congress during those last 6 years of the Obama administration cutting funding for him anywhere they could. I notice you didnt include 2009 the year Obama was president with a Dem congress. Allocation was 8.8 Billion, 2.3 billion dollars MORE than what Trump wants 11 years later. Liberals know how to look things up too and recognize self-selected data.
Exactly. Obama obviously wanted to increase funding but couldnt.
Dear GOTFACTS. I find it telling that you only gave the 2015 and 2020 facts for trumps presidency. This makes it seem like you are hiding something. Even if you arent
Here is the AP fact check on funding the CDC. Wasn’t cut like I said. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
Yeah little changed at the CDC and it’s fully prepared. But hey a DNC candidate said it on stage so it must be true.
It’s TDS sufferers, programmed by the media with an ocean of lies. It’s pointless to argue with them. They’ll just call you a white supremacist or something. Even black Trump supporters get called white supremacists because words don’t have meanings anymore.
I agree, anyone blaming the politicians at this stage is a fool. Even Chinese politicians didn’t cause the damn virus.
@jaq This is just factually wrong. Please do ACTUAL research instead of googling articles by left-wing corporate media. The CDC budgets are publicly available information, allow me to present the actual numbers: 2015 CDC Budget – Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Fund: (Obama’s last budget) $748 million (decrease of $36 million from 2014) 2020 CDC Budget – Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Fund: (Last fiscal year’s budget) $790 million (increase of $700,000 over 2019) 2021 CDC Budget – Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Fund: (Current fiscal year budget) $830 million (increase of $40 million over FY 2020) Clearly, an increase of $82 million… Read more »
You just resposted the same thing twice, and that wasn’t even the main point of this discussion (which, by the way, was about the loss of the strong leaders and epidemiology experts the CDC had under Obama).
I commend you for trying, but making a lengthy and borderline obsessive-looking comment as a reply to a fairly passionate and reasonable set of statements is basically the embodiment of “ignorant pseudo-intellectual garbage”.
I blame it more on Trump than the CDC. He and his administration have been pretty much running on a skeleton crew for years now since Trump is incapable of filling positions and his current budget that has been suggested actually cuts the budget of the CDC.
Except funding ACTUALLY increased. And just because government actually got SLIGHTLY smaller, doesn’t mean it’s incapable. Just many now adults are used to Obama levels of government that got a whole lot bigger.
Oh sure, let me know how cutting staff and increasing the working hours of those that are left works out in literally every other setting.
As I recall our wait time for visa renewals before 2016 was something like year, and after cuts to resources, staff and funding it’s now going onto the third and fourth year for many applicants.
These are people who already were allowed to live and work here by the by.
Those cuts are still in the current budget by the way: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/
The president’s budget is a suggestion. Almost never what’s actually passed. Congress controls the budget, not the president.
Congress didn’t pass the budget for the fucking wall and 4 billion got raided from the Pentagon’s coffers for the fucking thing. Lets stop pretending we’re living in a country where the Checks and Balances still work, eh? Because they *don’t*, the first two years of this damninistration had such a ridiculous amount of non-law policy changes and executive orders that amounted to changes in the law it wasn’t even funny.
You’re a perfect example of TDS. You’re living in a cartoon universe in your head constructed of lies from corrupted information sources.
Really? Instead of looking up actual budget numbers from Congress and the CDC, you go to SNOPES? SNOPES! The “fact checking” laughingstock that “fact-checks” satirical websites and joke memes? SNOPES! The “fact-checking” site that isn’t run by professional researchers or actual journalists, and has no editorial oversight? SNOPES! The “fact-checking” site owned by an advertising agency, and a guy who cheated on his wife with dozens of prostitutes, one of which he eventually married? SNOPES! The “fact-checking” site embroiled in a scandal for taking money from Monsanto to lie in their “fact-checks” about Round-Up, until the known cancer risks were… Read more »
Yeah! Snopes is NO TRUE SCOTSMAN!
@Kaitensatauma, do you realize the number of immigration judges brought in by the Trump administration in two years was more than seven years with the Obama administration? https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-immigration-judges-backlog-20190315-story.html
My point is that every administration has had strong and weak points. I don’t like Trumps overall demeanor and rhetoric but many of his administrations policies have done well for the majority of Americans
Immigration judges *don’t handle visa applications* and those judges are *stuck at the border because of the manufactured crisis*
Trump packing the courts with his judges is the most fucking unaware counter point you could have used
Why do people still just believe everything CNN tells you? You do realize this whole idea of Trump’s administration being a skeleton crew after 9/10 staffers quit, is just leftist fantasy. His administration’s open positions are public record. Go look it up and compare with where Obama’s Administration was during his 4th year. It’s a narrative, not a reality. Besides, Trump has been quite capable of filling the 250+ judicial positions Obama failed to during his tenure. Did you know Trump has filled a HISTORIC number of vacancies left open by his predecessor? I suppose the media didn’t screech loudly… Read more »
The coverage I recall was about how the McConnell led senate refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Obama’s judicial nominees, including one for the supreme court. There absolutely was media attention paid to the fact that the republicans chose to cripple the judiciary. This is also why Obama’s administration had to rely on so many executive orders to actually get anything done (for which he was and is heavily criticized), considering that the partisanship by the majority at the time was in full obstructionist mode. It’s easy to replace empty positions when the Senate is rubber-stamping everything, it’s impossible… Read more »
Trump is amazing, everything is HISTORIC! Starting with his inauguration ceremony…
Lord you are the MOST disingenuous debater! Who approves Judge appointments GotFacts?
Didn’t expect a good breakdown of why the hand washing thing is important while getting my monday funnies.
First cases reported in FL yesterday. 2 near Tampa, in 2 separate counties.
I’m curious, how did the CDC/Trump drop the ball? From what I’ve seen, aside from the BS the media spews, it’s not going badly and it isn’t that harmful. It isn’t spreading fast and even if you get it, the symptoms are often mild. Most the deaths have been old people with compromised immune systems. It’s not the apocalypse the media is making it out to be in order to attack the idiot in chief.
Hmmm! I see that Ethan has his priorities straight…. as usual.
Indeed he does!
As a side note if anyone cares, here is a. Interview with a virologist from February. https://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2020/a-coronavirus-qa-with-a-virologist.php
The article:
The genome is packaged into a protein shell that is icosahedral, resembling a 20-sided die used in board games.
Me: Shut up.
Still me: Don’t write it.
My idiot brain: “Looks like humanity… rolled a one.”
See, now you have to make a meme out of this.
I just don’t get the whole panic about the corona virus. Sure, it’s highly contageous but not really that dangerous. Nearly every patient that has died so far was either old or had some pre-existing condition that in most cases would’ve soon been fatal anyway. Survival rate is around 97%, there are cities where simply walking on the street is actually a lot more dangerous. This pretty much puts things into perspective: https://youtu.be/6dDD2tHWWnU?t=88
The combination of the fact that it’s both highly contagious and has a higher mortality rate than other similar pandemics, and the fact that we don’t have a cure yet for it. Antibiotics also aren’t something that can be just quickly whipped up in a lab and distributed to tens of thousands, or millions. The faster something spreads, the harder it is to contain. Your video is four weeks old. Current estimates is over 89,000 illnesses and 3,000 deaths worldwide. Your video lists Swine Flu as being 76,431 cases and 376 deaths at that point (Day 62). So, it’s more… Read more »
Nope, it still isn’t all that dangerous. Pneumonic plage is dangerous. Ebola is dangerous. So are anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis and malaria. Covid-19 isn’t even close.
BTW, are you aware that antibiotics do precisely zero against a virus? Any virus? Using antibiotics to treat a Covid-19 infection will just make matters worse.
I’m currently writing this on April 6th, one month and four days after my initial post. At the time of my previous entry, we had 89,000 illnesses and 3,000 deaths worldwide. Today, we have 1,328,792 illnesses and 73,801 deaths worldwide. As the video that DarkMatter referred to pegged January 1st as ‘Day One,’ that means that Month 3 of Covid made the total number of cases increase fifteen times where it was before, and the total number of deaths increase by 24.6 times. Experts expect that the apex of the infection will be about two weeks away from today. Not… Read more »
Part of that is that case load to date has not overloaded our medical capacity. about 20% of people that catch it require hospitalization to keep them stable enough to recover and can need it for weeks, the rest get symptoms that range from common cold to moderate flu. It spreads as easily as the flu and has a retardedly long incubation period where someone can spread it but show no symptoms. I’ve heard estimates that between 50% and 60% of the population could contract the virus. Doing the math your looking at 10-12% of the total population geting sick… Read more »
It’s obvious you’re neither old nor immuno-compromised, because otherwise you might have a different view about how dangerous it is. The point of limiting spread isn’t to save the 20-year-old men, it’s to save people in hospitals, people in care homes, seniors, etc.
I’ve seen keyboard warriors bitching hard about GDC being delayed.
Everyone has short memories or don’t give a shit.
I remember when the H1Nerd1 virus exploded in North America after PAX.
Crowd thousands of people into a small space, add someone infected with a highly infectious virus, stir for three days and watch it grow.
Except H1N1 was literally just another flu that the media blew way out of proportion because views are more important than truth. Nobody cares about a flu when it’s just a flu, but give it a name like H1N1 and then the media and various companies are printing money off of scaring the public.
Same can be said for the corona virus. The hysteria being caused by the media is blowing things way it of proportion.
Maybe this issue is a little too sensitive.
It shouldn’t be, I got a laugh out of it and am glad Tim went there. Very Ethan perspective and quite funny.
Or maybe you are too sensitive? (and that is coming from a Canadian).
Different people release stress if different ways. Some people think it’s wrong to make light of a serious situation, while other make jokes because if they can’t laugh about it they’ll be swallowed by depression. Most people are somewhere in-between.
Personally, I think that things like this help lift spirits. I’d rather laugh at a little black humor than live in stoic seriousness.
I’m actually happy that you people are taking the anti-‘safe space’ road
Hello, northern italian here, living roughly 40 km away from the epicenter of the infection. I find it funny.
You know it’s bad when Webcomic artists are talking about it
It’s worth noting that outside of China, Coronavirus seems to be having an even lower fatality rate (it’s about 2% in China IIRC), which were largely in elderly people. This isn’t a Spanish Flu 2.0 scenario, or any form of black plague analogy. However, you can help by remembering to wash your hands with soap and water, sneezing into TISSUE or a napkin instead of your hand, and so on.
I hope you are right. However thanks to the Chines government fencing up the place (albeit a tad late), the rest of the world got a preparation period. Meaning we (I am not in China) are about 6 weeks behind China in the growth curve. It would seem that China has successfully slowed the contamination by quarantining millions. The rest of us are shrugging it off as a no-risk pandemic, and are not willing to take the extreme measures pandemics need. Tourism, mass-events, should be stopped for 4-6 weeks to stop the pandemic in its tracks. Yes this will lead… Read more »
I hope E3 gets canceled. One, E3 has sucked for years now. Two, the ESA shouldn’t be able to dox E3 attendees if there’s no E3.
Arguably, the reason why it’s “sucked for years” has everything to do with Sony. I’m sorry, but Sony’s 2017 was a repeat of their 2016; half of 2018 was a repeat of 2017/TGA, and they legitimately showed nothing 2019 because they had no interesting first party games coming out 2019. Their most hyped exclusive was a walking simulator in which you waste huge chunks of time balancing boxes across terrain in the hopes of maybe, MAYBE getting a tidbit of story. As soon as it was clear to Sony that they were in the lead, they legit just stopped trying.… Read more »
I disagree. From my perspective, E3 has been on the decline long before 2017. It went from “Hey! Check out all the new and cool gaming related stuff coming!” to “Hey! Look at all these names we’re paying to be here, regardless of what they have to show!”
Sony isn’t Nintendo, it doesn’t live or die by its first party offerings e3 has problems because 1. It’s been shifting more and more from an insiders event to a commercialised public facing event 2. We don’t need a big event to show us what’s coming, we can all watch the trailers online and the rapid pace of games news means everything gets leaked instantly. e3 mattered when print journalism ruled games news and they needed something like this to see what was coming, now its just another convention and we have a lot of those that are arguably better… Read more »
Everyone lives or dies by their first party offerings and exclusives, Dan. I mean, look at Microsoft. Coming in last place this generation, the same generation that had the WII U. Reason? Where’s the quality first-party offerings? Being outsider-focused rather than insider-focused is more of an effect rather than a cause. But you do make a good point about leaks. Sabi’s leaks before almost every presentation took a lot of the ‘bang’ out, but also just kind of revealed that what WAS there wasn’t all that exciting. Do you remember 2015? I sure do. Everyone had something amazing. Fallout 4,… Read more »
I gotta chime in here, 3 days late, but as I agree with you that Sony not showing at E3 brought it to peoples attention that there was something wrong with E3, there has been some things to back that up, like Geoff Keighleybacking out as well. Regardless of if Sony had anything to show or not, the ESA shouldn’t have to rely on publishers to make their show great. They are supposedly changing the formula to make it more fan friendly but it seems to be taking away from the reason the publishers went and shown there games. At… Read more »
ha..ha…ha.. ?
I’ve gotta ask but is that a tv in the background between the 2 posters in the first panel cause whats on it keeps changing
That’s a ‘magical flatscreen poster,’ a present from when Analog and D-Pad helped fight Voldemort at the Battle of Hogwarts.
You know i’d pay to see that fight
Keeping your priorities straight.
Like the in-character joke … and joking about something horrible, that you have no influence on what so ever, is a human coping mechanism. If anything, it’s better then denying the whole thing even exist and is ‘nothing more than the flu’.
You’d think Lucas wouldn’t be surprised by the things Ethan says by now. At least he seems to know why he receive the “WTF Ethan” look.
First time back in about 5 years, man the quality of the comics has changed!
This isn’t funny.
Well i mean gdc being canclled is going to affect a lot of indy developers who might have to let ppl go because of this so
What have you done?! Ethan, you jynxed it!
What a different world 2020 was.