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Rick Santelli is sick and tired of the coronavirus. In fact, he hates the coronavirus so much that hes willing to infect everyone on the planet with it including you. That way, we can bring the spread of Covid-19 to an early end, and the global economy can return to normal.

Im not kidding; this is exactly what Santelli wants (via Twitter):

In a bizarre rant on CNBC yesterday, he railed against the precautionary measures nations and businesses are taking to protect people from coronavirus. He says authorities should force everyone to contract Covid-19.

Following some short-term pain, the economy can return to normal in a month or so. Minus the estimated 261.8 million people who would die from the deadly disease, of course.

Being a key figure behind the Tea Party movement, I guess this is what Santellis means by free market economics: The U.S. government kills off a bunch of old, sick, and/or poor people so that the stock market recovers and corporations continue making billions.

Unsurprisingly, Rick Santellis moronic diatribe attracted a considerable amount of flack on Twitter. And with good cause, because it was utterly insane.

Santellis primary argument is that wed never quarantine everybody because of the common flu. So why should we do it for the coronavirus?

Obviously, the editors at CNBC (they have editors, right?) forgot to remind Santelli that flu has a death rate of only 0.1%. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization confirmed that the coronavirus has a probable death rate of 3.4%.

So Santellis argument is already beginning to fall apart. Assuming a global population of 7.7 billion, infecting the entire world with the coronavirus would result in roughly 261.8 million deaths.

Not great. But the icing on Rick Santellis blood-stained cake is that he thinks infecting everyone at the same time would be a good thing.

Because the mortality rate of this probably isnt going to be any different if we did it that way.

Um, thats not quite right, Rick.

Yes, certain experienced and reputable virologists have said that as much of 80% of the worlds population will sooner or later be infected by the coronavirus. So the coronavirus will infect everyone (used here very loosely) anyway. So why not give it to everyone now?

If everyone on Earth had coronavirus at the same time, the shock to the global economy would be catastrophic.

For one, the strain on the worlds hospital systems would be unthinkably immense. Not only would an estimated 261.8 million people die from the disease, but hundreds of millions more would need medical attention.

Meanwhile, the worlds economies would come to a virtual standstill. Millions maybe billions of people would be unable to work. And yes, the stock market the very thing Rick Santelli is trying to save! would likely fall off a cliff as a result. Assuming it isnt closed altogether.

Still, we should thank Rick Santelli for making such a harebrained proposal. Its perfectly emblematic of the libertarian politics he represents: superficially logical, ridiculously self-interested, and hard-nosed but actually illogical, self-defeating, and superstitious.

After all, whats the one way to ensure that everyone contracts coronavirus? By calling on central governments to take the lead. But in Rick Santellis libertarian fantasy world, shouldnt governments be as small as possible?

Ah yes, I forgot: Whenit comes to protecting finance and capital, government should be as big as possible.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.

This article was edited by Josiah Wilmoth.

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Tea Party Mastermind Wants to Give You Coronavirus to Save the Economy - CCN.com

90.5 WESA's "The Confluence" for Tuesday, Mar. 3, 2020

On today's program: Three decades into the ADA, Pittsburgh still has a long way to go; how fracking could influence the 2020 election; a new book explores how grassroots organizing is upending the democratic process; and questions remain about whether Allegheny County is pursuing facial recognition technology.

Celebrating the ADA, while making Pittsburgh accessible for all(00:00 10:15)

Thirty years ago, Congress approved the Americans with Disabilities Act to end discrimination in employment, housing and access to spaces open to the public. Advocates are celebrating the anniversary today at the Disability and Mental Health Summit in Pittsburgh.

Prior to 1990, if you were in a wheelchair and went to a movie theater, they could deny you entry because you were a fire hazard, says former California Congressman Tony Coelho, who wrote the original legislation.

Coelho, whos keynoting the event in Pittsburgh, says hes excited about the progress hes seeing in old Rust Belt towns like Pittsburgh, where accommodations like sidewalks, arts programming and building design are more thoughtfully considered than in years prior.

They make accessibility a key part of what theyre doing, as opposed to trying to provide accommodations after the buildings are built, he says.

Coelho, who has epilepsy, says the No. 1 need nationwide is jobs. According to Cornell University, 37 percent of Pennsylvanians with disabilities are employed, which matches the national average.

People need to look at us and see what we can do, as opposed to assuming what we cant do, Coelho says.

He says hed like to see the ADA expanded, but hes hesitant to push for any amendments since the House voted in 2018 to weaken the law.

Could an anti-fracking candidate win in PA?(11:26 17:52)

Climate change has become a key issue in the Democratic presidential primary, but it's tricky in Pennsylvania where fracking has become a controversial part of the economy. For StateImpact Pennsylvania, the Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier reports.

Political activism is flourishing in the 21st Century(17:54 30:31)

Since President Donald Trump's election in 2016, anti-Trump activists have responded by running for office, knocking on doors and building homegrown political organizations. A new book takes a look at that wave and the divisiveness that's affected nearly every corner of our democratic process.

For The Confluence, WESA political editor Chris Potter talks to co-author Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, and essayist Lara Putnam, a University of Pittsburgh history professor who's been studying grassroots political movements in the Pittsburgh area.

Both will discuss Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, now out in paperback, in person at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 19 at Riverstone Books in McCandless. Co-author and fellow Harvard historian Caroline Tervo will also attend. Tickets are free, and books will be available at the door.

What does the DAs office want from its surveillance network?(31:35 40:00)

Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala has built a five-county network of more than 1,000 cameras using $1.5 million in drug forfeiture money, and old emails acquired by the Harrisburg-based newspaper The Caucus suggest Zappala was considering enabling them to scan and store faces as far back as 2016.

Data journalist Mike Wereschagin reports that Zappala engaged the private facial recognition technology firm Biometrica in conversation that summer. An email immediately following an August meeting with Biometricas CEO asked whether its products were compatible with the Pennsylvania Justice Network, or JNET, which includes photos and personal data of people whove never been arrested. Only law enforcement agencies are permitted access to JNET, not private entities.

Wereschagin says theres evidence to suggest a potential partnership, which never materialized, between the county and Biometrica involved using facial recognition software to keep juveniles who are on probation out of certain areas, according to the reporting. Zappalas office has since said that the network doesnt employ facial recognition, and there are no plans to use it, but Wereschagin writes its the latest story to alarm privacy advocates, cybersecurity experts and civil libertarians.

He explains more about the network, the Chinese technology that supports it, and what he expects from a hearing Friday with the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, which could compel Zappala to release more information.

90.5 WESAs Caroline Bourque contributed to this program.

The Confluence, where the news comes together, is 90.5 WESAs daily news program. Tune in weekdays at 9 a.m. to hear newsmakers and innovators take an in-depth look at stories important to the Pittsburgh region. Find more episodes of The Confluence here or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tracing Political Counter-Movements, From The Tea Party To The Resistance - 90.5 WESA

CNN host Don Lemon reported Wednesday evening that many Republicans wanted to be arrested for storming the secure room where the House Intelligence Committee depositions were taking place.

Fox News reporter Chad Pergram tweeted that he was told there was never any chance [members] who barged into SCIF would be arrested by [capital police], but some members asked to be arrested. They wanted the optic of being frog-marched out of the SCIF in front of TV cameras. That would help w/GOP narrative of Dem process abuse.

Commentator Wajahat Ali called it the perfect example of martyrdom for snowflakes.

We laugh, I laugh, but we have to realize that we are looking at a Republican Party beholden to Trump which is not beholden to democracy, the rule of law, process or ethics, Ali continued. Its going to get a lot worse because Donald Trump they got him dead to right on the Ukraine crisis. They got the quid pro quo. Ambassador Bill Taylors opening statement is devastating. The phone call transcript is devastating. I just want to remind people that Donald Trump released that transcript thinking that would exonerate him. Just pause for a moment and reflect upon that.

He predicted that in the next year, Americans would see more obstruction of justice and more pundits willing to say whatever it takes to defend Trump.

We are going to see people like [former acting Attorney General] Matthew Whitaker come out and say that people like him cant abuse power, Ali continued. And were going to see his attorney come out and say something like, Oh yeah, Donald Trump can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue because he is president and above the law, which is by the way what Donald Trump said in 2016. Thats whats scary.

He went on to call the Republican Party an extremist minority party leaning authoritarian and predicted that it would ultimately sink everything for the president. He also predicted things would get a lot worse.

Opinion columnist Catherine Rampell explained that a full quarter of the boneheads that stormed the secure room are members of the committee and have access to participate in the depositions.

They didnt need to bust down the door figuratively or otherwise. They were allowed into this hearing, she said.

Republicans are basically turning into sort of a funhouse-mirror caricature of the left-wing cancel-culture college student that they love to make fun of, she continued. They claim to be all about not only free speech but also law and order and stand for all of these principles. And they condemn the snowflakes who cant take criticism of whatever their precious ideas are or their heroes are. And yet they are the ones who when the law isnt on their side and facts arent on their side just shout down the opposition.

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Trump Installs Homophobic Racist Tea Party Birther Who Promised to Send Obama Home to Kenya as New Chief of Staff - The New Civil Rights Movement

Newport, N.C

March 1, 2020

TO THE EDITOR:

As Im writing this letter I am a candidate for school board. When it is published, I will be a past candidate or the Republican nominee for Carteret County Board of Education, District 2.

I spent years educating myself studying legislation, educational policy, spending hours a week at the school and in our classrooms. Ive attended every Board of Education meeting for four years, since my oldest child entered Kindergarten. Ive worked hard to raise thousands of dollars for our schools. Ive advocated for the students and teachers, and Im willing to speak out even if I know it will be hit with opposition. Ive also been very open that I support non-partisan school board elections. Education isnt political. Kids arent political. School safety isnt political. Curriculum - not political. Kids arent partisan. And every one of them, every teacher, janitor, cafeteria worker, teacher assistant, librarian, administrator all deserve more. More than the pay they get and much more than the respect they get.

Saturday night, the Crystal Coast Tea Party made the decision to email, and post to their website, a Photoshopped image, of me (and Andrea Beasley) with Nancy Pelosi. They included the verbiage dont be fooled by fake Republicans promising to work with Democrats on Carteret County School Board in non-partisan school board elections. That would be like Senator John McCain promising to vote to end Obamacare, or these two Republican school board candidates shredding the Presidents State of the Union Address.

Not that I feel the need to defend my political history to the Tea Party, but political affiliation is public knowledge, as is which primary you vote. Therefore, its public knowledge, since I registered at age 18 Im a Republican. In addition to my conservative values, that I raise my three small children on, I have a couple things some members of the Tea Party are lacking -Decency and Morals.

With this campaign I was able to show my kids (ages 5, 7, and 8) how to play fair when we stopped to pick up signs that had blown over, we also picked up our opponents. I ran on my qualifications and strengths, not someone elses weakness. The most important thing I showed my three kids is that I will ALWAYS be their voice. I will fight for what is right, and I will fight to always give them the best.

To the Tea Party thank you for giving me the chance to teach my children not to trust anything without doing their research. Thank you for allowing me to teach my kids that you respect people until they give you a reason not to, and after that respect is no longer a privilege its now earned. Thank you for giving me a chance to show them not all people are what they claim to be and for them to be sure they associate with people that will build them up, and cheer them on. If at any point my children realize that their circle isnt cheering them on, they know its okay to walk away and find a new circle.

To the Republican Party Im sorry the Tea Party carries our name on their back. I stand with you disappointed that the Tea Party portrays themselves as true representatives of our party. We all know that the actions of a few on Saturday night do not represent the morals and values that we hold true.

We can do better, and our kids deserve it.

KATIE STATLER

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Letter to the Editor: Morals and decency | Letters To Editor - Carolinacoastonline

This article is part of our latest Museums special section, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.

Tea.

And politics.

The connection goes back centuries. But perhaps there hasnt been a better time to consider it than now, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has seized the moment in the recently renovated British Galleries. A whole room is devoted to the drink from China that became the quintessential British symbol.

Tea shaped British government policy and trade and, of course, it figured prominently in what happened in the American colonies.

Showcasing teas place in British history allowed the Met to address a subject we hadnt addressed before, said Wolf Burchard, who was the lead curator for the new galleries. That was the expansion of the British Empire, and it seemed an especially timely topic as Britain pressed ahead with Brexit, its withdrawal from the European Union.

The Met tells the story of tea and politics with two semicircular cases filled with 100 teapots, all made in Britain.

They are midway through the new galleries, a suite devoted to British decorative arts, design and sculpture from 1500 to 1900. Past the tea display are three 18th-century interiors, one from a mansion that was the residence of two British prime ministers and, for two years in the 1890s, of William Waldorf Astor, the heir to an American fortune who became a British subject. Also in the new galleries is a 17th-century staircase with elaborate carvings of pine cones, oak leaves and acorns. It was rescued from a Tudor manor demolished in the 1920s.

But about tea.

It became a quintessentially British symbol the national drink, Dr. Burchard said amid what he called dueling definitions of empire. There were the heroic moments of an artistic golden age in the 17th and 18th centuries, as craftsmen became innovators in silver and porcelain.

But their progress was accompanied by the steady rhythm of growth through exploitation, he said.

Tea let British dealers, and the British government, reach the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and the American colonies. Tea sent unimaginable riches back to Britain and created, among a new consumer class, a desire for exotic goods.

Iris Moon, another Met curator who worked on the British galleries, said that telling that story let the Met move away from an aristocratic, privileged, upper-crust narrative and really turn the focus to the entrepreneurs, the merchants and the middle class, and think about whos making the stuff that became the backbone of commerce and in many ways British identity.

But the wall texts in the Mets new galleries also point out that the riches from tea were built on the labor of slaves and on resources appropriated from colonies.

We are thinking deeply about the stories told in our galleries, said Max Hollein, the director of the Met, and how every object on display is an outstanding work of art but also embodies a history that can be read from multiple perspectives: A beautiful English teapot speaks to both the prosperous commercial economy and the exploitative history of the tea trade.

Two takes on a single object: That is how complicated the history of something as mundane as tea is.

Lets go out for a cup of tea sounds pretty harmless, the British culinary historian Seren Charrington-Hollins said in an interview, but tea has a far more illicit history than any drug or hard liquor or anything. It was really dark because of the harm it did to people if you look at the conditions on the plantations. They were shocking, but nobody cared.

She said Britain used every bit of protocol and propaganda to be sure tea was seen as a British product.

Tea was almost unknown in the West before the 16th century. When it reached Britain, it was expensive and exotic and, according to The Book of Coffee and Tea, was served as much for its strangeness as its taste.

But profit-minded explorers had heard about it. And the British East India Company, chartered in 1600, became the face of Britain in much of the world as it set up trading routes to send tea back to Britain.

It took longer for tea to reach the American colonies, and eventually Britains efforts to tax tea both for the revenue and to bring the colonists into line backfired. Americans boycotted British tea for a while, and after Britain dropped the tax mandated by the Tea Act of 1773, the East India Company did not help matters. It shipped tea to several cities including Boston and New York tea that, by some accounts, was old and stale. That was what that famous clandestine raid dumped into the harbor in what became known as the Boston Tea Party.

The porcelain manufacturers in Staffordshire, England, who made teapots understood that tea was helping to drive the colonies away from Britain, and they did not wait to exploit the rift. No Stamp Act was the inscription on a teapot made specifically for export to the colonies. On the other side, it said America Liberty Restord as if the ceramist had run short on vowels.

What we are seeing is teapot makers pick up on topical issues, Dr. Moon said.

That is apparent with a George Washington punchpot on display (larger than a teapot and made for a drink with wine and spices).

Yes, the face of the general who defeated the British is on one side of a British-made object. It was a sign that the Staffordshire porcelain makers were also shrewd marketers. They made the punchpot for export to the new nation across the Atlantic, just as they created a teapot showing Frederick II of Prussia, better known as Frederick the Great, for their home market. A hero in Britain after the Seven Years War, Frederick was lionized on the teapot with the inscription Semper sublimis still towering.

The Washington punchpot was a contrast to the bombast of Frederick, Dr. Moon said.

Washington is in civilian garb with that quite delicate lace cravat, Dr. Moon said, and Martha Washington is on the other side.

This was a moment when George Washington was not interested in cultivating a military hero persona, but in reassuring the public that he was a civilian president, she said.

He reminded people on both sides of the Atlantic of the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, who, she said, was plowing his fields when the Romans were having a crisis.

Cincinnatus dropped his plow, helped out and went back to his plow, she continued. The British thought Washington was going to become a dictator, he was going to become a king.

But on the punchpot, destined for export to the new nation across the Atlantic, Washington was depicted as dignified, even statesmanlike not, she said, as a stark raving mad general.

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Ah, Tea. So Relaxing. But Its History Is Another Story. - The New York Times