There was a clip of Angela Merkel that circulated on Twitter this week. Worth watching: https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800 https://twi

There was a clip of Angela Merkel that circulated on Twitter this week. Worth watching: https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800 https://twitter.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1250563198081740800 Night and day when compared with the grandstanding and gaslighting that we're seeing from Trump. It's what burnt me about the Marc Andreessen article that generated a lot of discussion on HN yesterday and opened with this premise: Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation. The assumption that a Clinton, Kasich, or Obama administration would not have managed this more competently is stupefying. We can just look at how H1N1 was handled by Obama in 2009: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-wait-swine-flu-n1h1/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-wait-swine-flu-n1h1/ And here we have clear evidence of a Western country whose response to the present crisis has not been failure (ignoring all together South Korea, where the response appears to have been even more successful). How are we going to make radical systemic changes in society when we pretend like the people in charge make no difference?