Day 201…
Quarantine - Day 1.
I am back in New York City from my family road trip down south. Unlike my trip to North Dakota, this time I actually stayed in Florida and North Carolina for several days each.
The New York state guidelines state “If you have traveled from within one of the designated states with significant community spread as defined by the metrics above, you must quarantine when you enter New York for 14 days from the last travel within such designated state, provided on the date you enter into New York State that such state met the criteria for requiring such quarantine.”
The metrics that are mentioned are that the state must have a positive test rate of higher than 10 per 100,000 over a seven-day rolling average or a testing positivity rate of over 10% again over a seven-day rolling period. As of this week, every state I was in except for Maryland fits that criteria.
“The requirements of the travel advisory do not apply to any individual passing through designated states for a limited duration (i.e., less than 24 hours) through the course of travel. Examples of such brief passage include but are not limited to: stopping at rest stops for vehicles, buses, and/or trains; or lay-overs for air travel, bus travel, or train travel.”
That’s what I did on the North Dakota trip, but that’s not what I did this time. The only people I that I really came in contact with this past week, were my family. My niece and nephew are, however, the wildcards in this. There is really no way to be sure about what they are really doing when they leave the house. They are teenagers after all. That’s why I visited my mother first.
The fact that I accepted and took the risk with my niece and nephew doesn’t mean that I have the right to then pass that risk along to the people I come into contact with here in Manhattan.
The guidelines that apply to me say, “The individual must not be in public or otherwise leave the quarters that they have identified as suitable for their quarantine.”
So, I am stuck here for the next two weeks. Michael is staying at the apartment of friends of ours in midtown so that I don’t have to be trapped in the bedroom the whole time. We planned for this when we first decided that I should do the trip. He needs to be available to take work if it comes up.
Michael wants to make sure that he gets a daily walk in, so he’s going to come uptown and drop off groceries and whatever else I need. He’ll take away the trash, and I’ll be able to hand him out things that he’s forgotten.
When I got in last night, I dropped the car off in midtown and walked home. I, of course, wore my mask and stayed well away from the few people I passed on the sidewalk. The only person I really came in contact with was the guy in the garage. I left the keys on a counter, so we never actually came within any proximity to each other.
Even at the worst of the shutdown, right at the beginning, I always left the apartment to go for walks and rides. This will be different. I am in here to stay. A lot of people never left their apartments at all in those early days for much longer than two weeks so I’m not complaining. I am looking forward to it with an equal measure of interest and dread.
There is certainly no dearth of news to watch.
We are just about to hit a million deaths worldwide from a virus that the President has dismissed as a hoax.
That is slightly more than the total population of San Jose, California and slightly less than that of Dallas, Texas. Those two cities are the 9th and 10th largest cities in the United States in terms of population. Imagine one of those cities entirely gone.
After flattening somewhat here in the US, we are now back up to 40,000 new cases EVERY DAY. We have a total of 7,117,830 reported cases. 204,778 people here have lost their lives to the virus.
The first debate is tomorrow night. It will be moderated by Chris Wallace, a Fox News journalist. Wallace, unlike some of his other colleagues has a history of being almost as hard on the President as he is with anyone else, so it’s not a disastrous choice.
The topics will include the two men’s records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy and the integrity of the election. He’s also added one called “Race and Violence in our Cities”.
That one, unlike the others, is already slanted. Bend the Arc is a movement of progressive Jews in the US who function as a kind of societal watchdog. They called the wording of that topic "barely-coded language that reinforces anti-Black fear mongering."
The other topics are obvious. The Supreme Court is an important topic because the President wants to push through his nominee as soon as he can. He is trying to end Roe v. Wade as well as Obamacare and thinks his pick will help him do that.
While those moves may please his base, a majority of Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are actually in favor of both. This move, interestingly, could potentially hurt him. The President has repeatedly promised that he would replace Obamacare with a cheaper, better alternative, but in his fourth year in office, he and his supporters have yet to come up with any such proposal.
Were the Court to decide to repeal Obamacare in November, it would be replaced with… nothing. Taking away the insurance of millions and millions of US citizens in the middle of a global pandemic seems ill advised, to say the least.
56% of Americans feel that the next President should appoint the new Justice.
Then there’s the elephant that’s just charged into the room. The President’s federal tax returns.
The New York Times has gotten their hands on the President’s federal tax returns for much of the last two decades.
In the days ahead there is going to be a lot of dissection over what they actually show. Various financial experts have already flooded the airwaves with theories and ideas.
The immediate and obvious takeaway is that in 2016 and 2017 the President paid a total of $750 in taxes for each of those years. For eleven of the other years he paid no taxes whatsoever.
He seems to have managed to avoid paying those taxes because of staggering financial losses which he was able to write off.
The IRS audit that the President has continually used as an excuse for not being able to release his taxes, turns out to be because of a refund of $72.9 million that he claimed and received. The IRS is disputing the legality of some of what he’s claimed were business deductions.
One such claim was $70,000 for hair care. He also paid his daughter $700,000 to consult which he claimed was a business expense. At the time she was an employee of the organization. You cannot hire someone to consult who is already an employee.
One of the more alarming revelations the Times uncovered is that he is in debt for $421 million in personally guaranteed loans. Those loans all come due within the next four years. It is not at all clear who loaned him this money and who, as a result, he is beholden to.
If he is re-elected, he will need to repay these loans while he is working as the President. Almost all of his businesses are losing money and his Presidential salary comes nowhere close to being able to touch this debt. His golf resorts alone have reported $315 million in losses. In name, he has turned over the running of the businesses to his sons, but these are his debts.
The conflicts of interest ramifications are potentially monumentally huge. The prospect of creditors suing a sitting US President is somewhat unthinkable, but here we are thinking about it. The conflicts multiply exponentially if the creditors turn out to be foreign nationals.
Predictably the President is claiming that this is all fake news. He is also claiming that the New York Times obtained the returns illegally. If they are actually fake, why would he say that?
These returns could shed light on every single action that this man has taken while in office.
On the way home from North Carolina yesterday, I detoured through western Virginia and drove up on part of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The parkway was established right after World War II and runs for 469 miles through North Carolina and Virginia. It links up the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the boarder with Tennessee with the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. The whole thing is part of the National Park Service. The Blue Ridge, along which it runs, is a chain of mountains that is part of the Appalachians.
It’s a stunningly beautiful drive.
I entered the parkway at the Peaks of Otter. The Peaks of Otter are three separate mountain peaks. One of which, called Sharp Top, is an almost perfect isosceles triangle.
Thomas Jefferson had rock from the peaks of all three mountains worked into the Washington monument in D.C.
The peaks are located less than an hour away from Lynchburg which is where my grandparents lived. It was a favorite day trip when we went down to visit them.
When I was really young, maybe ten or eleven, my grandmother gave me a Brownie Box camera. The first picture I ever took was with this camera and is of Sharp Top reflected in the lake at its base. It’s a black and white photo and I have it framed in the living room. I’ve been drawn to reflections ever since.
After my father died, his ashes sat on top of my sister’s refrigerator for several years. We finally decided that we needed to spread them somewhere.
He ended up in several places but one of them was in the lake at the Peaks of Otter. Another was at a beautiful rocky overlook up on the parkway.
Since I visited my mother and my sister and her family, it seemed only right to swing by and visit my dad as well. I took some pictures, but the light wasn’t right to be able to get the mountain reflected in the lake. The one I took forty some odd years ago is still better.
It was good to spend some time with my Dad.
My father would have been disgusted by the man who is now sitting in the White House. This man is running the country the way he runs his businesses - at a loss. He will run us into the ground and just walk away when he’s done.
Will his base care about the tax returns?
The President ran in 2016 on being a successful businessman. These returns paint a completely different picture. He’s a bottom feeder exploiting failure to his advantage. We’ve all suspected it ever since he refused to divulge them.
Will this change any of their minds?
We will be hearing a lot more about this and I will be right here on the couch listening. At least for the next two weeks.
I am almost certain that this quarantine isn’t necessary. That word ‘almost’, however, is what’s going to keep me here.
If it were just about me, I would take the chance and go out. But it isn't just about me, it's about everyone else.
So here I'll sit.
“it’s about everyone else”
❤️you rock
If only everyone could think about others first. What an interesting trip you had and to see your Dad topped it off. What a beautiful gentle soul he was xx