Kylie Minogue - "Magic"

Call Him

The Advance of Covid-19 in Europe is Beginning to Slow

But the disease continues to accelerate in United States:

Aztec Death Whistles

Like Erik says: "Aztec Death Whistle is the name of my next band":

When odd, skull-shaped grave items were found by archaeologists decades ago at an Aztec temple in Mexico, they were assumed to be mere toys or ornaments, and were catalogued and stored in warehouses. However, years later, experts discovered they were creepy ‘death whistles’ that made piercing noises resembling a human scream, which the ancient Aztecs may have used during ceremonies, sacrifices, or during battles to strike fear into their enemies.

That Absence of Shared Sacrifice

Casting about for meaning:

That same call for the sacrificial spirit of the Greatest Generation has echoed across the media landscape, as both a rallying cry and a censure: urging Americans to sacrifice to save lives and deploring how selfish we have become. Yet this appeal to the past misunderstands just how reluctant Americans in the 1940s were to abide by the new restrictions of the wartime economy. Understanding today's self-centered, rule-breaking, comfort-craving Americans in accurate relation with our past matters, because it reveals that the problems we're facing now reflect a failure not of American spirit but of American leadership.

Conservatives are a Bunch of Weirdos

Perverts:

Hospital administrator Kyle Hansen told the Provo City Council this week that about five people have attempted to get inside because they question whether the ICU is as full as some say.

A few of them also brought video cameras.

"We have individuals trying to sneak into the hospital to visualize and videotape this themselves," Hansen said.

So far, it seems no one has been successful getting in.

However, Hansen said what the conspiracy theorists did has forced the hospital to take extra precautions when it comes to visitors and people being admitted.

"You really can only get in if you're here for an appointment yourself or you have to be listed in a log that we track as a designated visitor for a patient. But we've had some people get pretty creative in how they've lied about coming in for an appointment or other things," Hansen said.

I've Always Been Attracted by the Idea of Cliodynamics

It's nice seeing that others are attracted too:

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst. 

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical model­ing unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”