How A Society Can Survive A Pandemic

*Lots* of info but this is the best explainer I’ve seen on how a society can deal with a pandemic. And by “society” I mean a functioning government concerned with prioritizing both minimizing the loss of human lives and preserving its economy.

Changing the Structure of Power in the U.S.A.

Two important points in this article:

1) The CDC recommends that the elderly and physically fragile people should not fly on commercial airlines.

And

2) Trump/Pence don’t want you to know that.

I think the unitary executive branch needs to end. The legislative branch has the Senate and the House of Representatives and neither one can tell the other what to do. The Judicial branch has the Supreme Court at the top and they can choose to override some lower court rulings but they don’t run the various regional circuits. Likewise, I think that the Executive branch should not be in thrall to the whims of one person (no, not even a Democratic president). In California we directly elect the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and several other top posts. If several of the cabinet departments (State, Justice, Treasury, and Defense, for starters) were walled off from direct control of the president and we directly elected people to those posts we could avoid this CDC problem, not to mention the Barr problem!

Yeah, yeah, I know, constitutional convention, ratification, yada, yada. But it can’t ever happen if we don’t start talking about it.

Also, the prospect is very scary because there are people who are pretty well organized who want to consolidate power along more nationalist/supremacist lines.