Erdoğan has canceled last year's local election defeats by kicking out opposition party elected officials and appointing unelected replacements.

After crushing opposition with repression, there is no one he can rationally blame now. But he will blame Gülen, rational or not.

The UK is considering imposing a 14-day quarantine on people who enter the country. Businesses object.

Is such a quarantine useful?

Imposing quarantine on people entering your country makes rational sense for reducing the spread of Covid-19 in two situations, as far as I can see.

• They are coming from countries where coronavirus is more prevalent than it is in your country. In that case, they might transmit the virus more than the people who were already in your country.
• Your country has an effective system of tracing contacts and quarantining people who get exposed. Since you can't track the previous contacts of people who enter, you need to consider they may have been exposed before they came.

Outside of these two situations, quarantining people for entering the country is a pointless nuisance that serves only to help politicians scapegoat foreigners. Maybe that is why Bogus Johnson wants to do it.

*It is time to create a European republic.*

Rural states in the US are eliminating the practices meant to slow the spread of Covid-19, and this is leading to an increase in cases.

Rural areas in the US have hardly any hospitals left, and the people there can't afford them anyway. Those states tend to be controlled by Republicans, who refuse to help sick poor people (they were supposed to avoid being poor). Thus, people there who develop a severe case are likely to die.

Finland reports that its experiment with a universal basic income (for 500 people chosen at random) was a success: it made their lives better and reduced the frequency of various kinds of problems. It did not lead people to choose not to work.

This could be a good way to help people survive the depression now starting and shorten it.

With almost 1/5 of American children not getting enough food, the US needs this urgently. I suppose plutocrats relish the idea of stunting poor people's children through malnutrition, because the effects will reduce their capacity, when adults, to oppose plutocracy, and provide an excuse to dehumanize them.