Tag: Trump

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Down the Rabbit Hole — Alas in Blunderland

July 20th 2020

Not much doubt we’ve stumbled into a meth-driven Hunter S. Thompson fugue state these days. I’ve sometimes wondered what old Hunter would have made of Trumpenstate 2020. He would have been either rolling on the floor, convulsed with laughter and scribbling furiously, or he would have blown his brains out. Can’t really imagine him scratching a cheek and languidly asking, “Wow. How ‘BOUT that?”

But then, it’s not a languid era. You can cry, you can laugh, or you can get your rifle. None of them are particularly good signs of mental health, but our psyches aren’t really equipped to deal with the madness that pervades our lives today.

You have clowns in camo snatching up peaceful protesters and hauling them away in unmarked vans. The Supreme Court has just ruled that those rounded up by the gestapo can be held indefinitely, a system that the Soviet Russians used to refer to as “the Gulag Archipelago.” We have a demented president and a mafioso-corrupt attorney-general praising the gestapo’s actions in Portland, Seattle and now Chicago, and promising to attack other peaceful protesters, presumably in hopes of sparking full-spread rebellion, a Reichstag fire of protest than can justify a Nazi coup against America.

And once they’ve rounded up protesters and thrown them into camps, what next? Well, the administration has been consulting with vicious dirtbag and justifier of torture, John Yoo, on how best to torture their prisoners, and while they’re at it, flout executive law through executive order. Trump wants to issue decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. He finally had to back way from his preposterously cruel plan to deport all foreign students from the nation’s colleges. A pity. That worked so well for Hitler, ending the war years earlier than if he had maintained a brain trust.

Trump is pushing to open the schools. He’s pretending it’s for the children, but really, he wants to make it possible for parents to return to jobs that may or may not exist. To that end he’s stonewalling on extending unemployment benefits, further cruel coercion meant to prop up an economy that more and more is a vicious joke meant only to serve the very rich. He’ll consider an extension of a month or so if Congress agrees to utterly gut Social Security and Medicare. How fucking kind of him.

Betty DeVos wants to return the kiddies to class, even if it means ten thousand or more of them will die. DeVos, who has never sat in a public classroom and has no educational training of any sort, wants churches and corporations to take over training the brats, and get them past the awkward stage where they’re too little to be of any use in the work camps.

Speaking of demented presidents, we have one that just boasted of “acing” a cognition test. The only time people are administered such tests is when medical personnel are concerned that a person is so far gone mentally that he is a hazard to himself and others. It’s scary enough that they would feel a need to administer such a test to a man in charge of the American military and nuclear weapons, but it’s even scarier that he boasts of “acing” it, even though the final five questions were “very hard.” The sections he found challenging included memory (given five simple words, asked to repeat them back, then and five minutes later) attention (Trump was always notoriously bad at this, and it’s hard to imagine him being able to count down from 100 in increments of 7, ie, 93, 86, 79, 72…), language (accurately repeat simple declarative sentences), abstraction (what pairs of words such as apple and banana have in common) and orientation (present date, month and year, and the name of the place they are in as well as the city). Test providers then praise the subject, no matter how they did on the test as positive reinforcement for future sessions using such tests. The test is 30 points, 26 is considered borderline cognitive decline, and 20 a sign of significant cognitive decline, so Donald could have scored 15, and been praised for how he did on the test. That Trump was even given the test is disturbing; that he boasted about how well he did is horrifying.

He wants to cut billions of dollars for COVID-19 testing and tracking even as the number of cases in the US alone approaches 4 million, because having a raging pandemic is hurting his reelection chances. Back in 1945, the Nazis shot German citizens who made the mistake of wondering aloud how well the war is going. This is the same mindset.

He still refuses to mandate masks, encouraging a destructive, dangerous and foolhardy anti-mask cult who have been attacking people for wearing masks, or for requiring them before allowing people into their homes or places of business. The anti-maskers are becoming more and more belligerent, and they’re playing with fire: public rage against them is mounting. I expect to hear about some anti-masker getting shot, either by a security guard or an armed customer. Only a matter of time.

Speaking of shooting, has anyone noticed how fast the clowns in the NRA all vanished when government thugs started rounding up civilians and carting them off to camps. This is exactly the situation the NRA said it existed to avoid. Well, I always thought they were nothing but thugs, bullies and cowards. Guess I was right. Fuck the NRA, and fuck anyone who’s a member.

Meanwhile the Roberts Court, tossing a few bones to progressives, has quietly destroyed laws designed to protect people against predatory loan sharks, removed more of the limitations on Wall Street instrument manipulations like the ones that caused the 2007 crash, and removed transparency from hedge fund trading. Just another service provided for the greater fascistic control of American.

Remember: this election is our last best chance to avoid a Fourth Reich. If we don’t take the country back in November, our future is very violent and dark.

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Oklahoma Crude — Repulsa in Tulsa a Fiasco

sadclownTrump

Oklahoma Crude

Repulsa in Tulsa a Fiasco

June 21st 2020

South of the equator, yesterday was the day of the Winter Solstice. So cheer up, fellas! You’re over the hump. Don’t lose hope. (Note to self: don’t mention that for the rest of us in the northern hemisphere, it’s all downhill from here.)

I was keeping a wary eye on the news yesterday, since the Trump campaign kick-off rally took place in Tulsa, OK. There was a confluence of so many factors that I was concerned that it could prove a flash point leading to a very large social explosion.

It may well have been on the minds of all those gathered: the Trump supporters, the protesters and counter protesters, and the police. Aside from a few minor incidents, the event concluded peacefully, which was a credit to all sides. Even the ones who might have been looking for trouble seemed to have second thoughts.

Trump was determined to stir the shit, and brought his full arsenal of race-baiting, xenophobia, and defamation of any who oppose him to the show. But he gazed around the half-empty stadium, doubtlessly thinking of his campaign’s boasts that a million people had expressed an interest in attending (only 6,275 did, according to the stadium gatekeepers), and gave his two-hour speech in a listless monotone, and just fifteen minutes in, his enthusiastic audience of true believers were beginning to look openly bored. Outside, the stage for the planned-for overflow rally was being dismantled (the campaign seriously expected between 100 and 300 thousand people to flood into Tulsa for this event) and millions of viewers were gifted with the eerie sight of a twenty-four foot screen in the parking lot showing Trump addressing the audience inside, with an audience of exactly nobody. You would think that there might be some old guy, taking his dog out for an evening stroll, who stopped to see what the asshole was saying while his dog relieved itself, but no. Just one lonely, bored tech whose job it was to make sure nobody stole the screen or the equipment running it. And he wasn’t even watching it.

Trump, apparently determined to keep the public attention focused on his mental and physical health, ranted for 15 minutes about the news noting his difficulties maneuvering down the ramp at the West Point ceremony (It didn’t help that someone found an old video of Obama ascending the same ramp with the carefree grace of a teenager). Trump then essayed to show his audience that yes, he could indeed drink a glass of water using one hand. The audience cheered—one of the few things they really had to cheer about on this sad night—but everyone watching on television could see it was a tiny 6 ounce glass, half-full, and even then his movements were slow and considered. If it was a sobriety test, he would have failed. He went on to rant about poor old lazy and demented Joe, apparently unaware that the Biden campaign had just put out an ad showing Biden jogging, where he pauses to tell the camera, “I would like to see Trump do this.”

Trump also made the extraordinarily stupid boast that he asked for testing for the coronavirus to be slowed down, leaving people to wonder if he really thought less tests meant less cases. That’s a bit like eating 4,000 calories a day, convinced that so long as you don’t step on the scales, you aren’t putting on weight. It’s magical thinking, and about the lowest and most self-destructive form of magical thinking there is. This should be in every Democratic ad between now and November, if they have any sense at all.

Speaking of which, one online correspondent told me that the sparse turnout may have saved thousands of lives. Given the exponential nature of contagion, I’ve little doubt that he’s right. Horowitz, of course, had the mot juste: “Coronavirus disappointed by small turnout.” Trump’s campaign slogan ought to be “Donald: Because he’s killed a lot less people than he might have.”

Finally, there were the images of the Donald alighting from the Marine helicopter on the grounds of the White House in the predawn hours. Exhausted, haggard, obviously depressed, he had his tie undone and hanging from around his neck like a suicidal rattlesnake, and his pose could only be described as ‘abject.’

Fingerpointing for this undeniable fiasco began at once. Brad Parscale, man most likely to be unemployed by Monday night, opined that the campaign based its inflated projections of attendance on thousands of K-Pop fans on TikTok who reserved most of the tickets and flooded the “interested in attending” page. Someone finally noticed the hideous optics of a professional campaign getting scammed like that by a bunch of teenagers in Korea (you don’t put a $25 deposit on reserving a ticket, for crissakes?) and decided that some 300,000 committed Republicans were going to show, but were scared off by AntiFa(scists) and BLM protesters. There were about 300 anti-Trump protesters there, consisting of the usual suspects—school teachers, college students, and (shiver violently as I say the words) people who hate fascists. If they really scared off 300,000 Republicans, then they made the Battle of Thermopylae look weak by comparison. The Trump campaign just blamed the poor attendance on widespread cowardice within the party. That should play well with his supporters.

Trump looked like a cornered rat, and you know what they say about cornered rats. He, and his party and followers, are going to be more dangerous and extreme going forward, now unable to entertain the belief they are an unstoppable popular front.

One indication of this came in the form of an unbelievable full page ad in the Nashville Tennessean. In fairness, the paper did immediately repudiate and pull the ad once the blow-back began, saying, “The ad is horrific and is utterly indefensible in all circumstances. It is wrong, period, and should have never been published. It has hurt members of our community and our own employees and that saddens me beyond belief. It is inconsistent with everything The Tennessean as an institution stands and has stood for and with the journalism we have produced.”

Fair enough. But the ad was beyond belief, written by some end-times crackpot who claimed that “Islam” was going to explode a nuclear weapon in Nashville sometime during the month of July. Quite aside from the hateful nature of the speech, there’s the fact that not everyone in Nashville is that tightly wound, and an ad like that could cause a panic.

There’s never a shortage of end-times crackpots around. I know several personally. Generally, they’re harmless. But some have both money and malice. And it’s not unusual for papers to have various nuts show up, money in hand, demanding that the local paper vouchsafe whatever demented and paranoid fantasies they have to the populace. Generally, papers have enough sense to tell them to bugger off.

Someone in a position of responsibility at the Tennessean thought publishing this was a good idea. Maybe it would get a few Moslems lynched. Maybe it would help Trump. Someone thought something this extreme and foolish would help the cause.

The right is crowded with people like that, and they are starting to panic.

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Can America Defeat Trump? — We’re at war. Pick a side.

Can America Defeat Trump?

We’re at war. Pick a side.

June 4th 2020

A lot of us have been saying for some time that when it comes to Trump, it’s going to boil down to either Trump prevailing or America. Trump does clumsy, weird huggings of the flag, and occasionally waves a bible around (in his latest photo-op stunt where he gassed peaceful protesters, he was holding it upside down and backwards) and that’s enough to convince the utter fucking morons that he’s a patriot and devout, but he has never shown any interest in the Constitution, the rights of the People, and openly expresses hatred for various target groups. As he accumulates power, that collection of groups will grow to include not only the ones his bigoted supporters already hate, but pretty much anyone who doesn’t support him.

He’s already had a falling out with Faux News for the crime of failing to jump to their collective feet and shout “Jawohl!” at all of his pronouncements. Now he’s getting harsh criticism for his recent actions from the military, former members of his cabinet, members of the GOP, and even the servile and amoral leaders of the evangelical right. Even some elements of the neo-Nazi right are getting restive; I saw an amazing political cartoon the other day in which Trump had a knee on the neck of Lady Liberty while a black-clad figure labeled “AntiFa” held her legs. I’ve always joked that when members of the far right started blaming the left for Trump, that would mean he’s finished. Well, here we are.

His actions over the past fortnight have been nothing short of grotesque. The PR stunt at St. John’s Episcopal (yes, backwards and upside down) may become a defining Moment of his political career, much the way holding up a toddler to protect himself from bullets became the Moment of Greg Stillson’s political career in Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone.”

Not that there weren’t others. The empty threats that he bleated from the bunker under the White House where he cravenly crouched; turning off the White House lights (last done in 1940), building the eight foot fence around the White House (a joke making the rounds is that Mexico might just be willing to pay for THIS wall), and the comparison of Trump crouching afraid, underground and in the dark, to Winston Churchill. (Churchill famously would go out during Blitz attacks so that he might personally observe the atrocities committed against England by Hitler). His craven posturing even invited negative comparisons to Richard Nixon, who, some 50 years earlier, was also in a White House surrounded by protests. Nixon went out late in the evening to talk to some random protesters face-to-face to try and get a dialogue of some sort going.

The stunt of putting anonymous clowns in full soldier kit—dozens of them—in response to minor vandalism perpetrated the night before at the Lincoln Memorial was both ludicrous and sinister. Who were those clowns? Were they soldiers? Cops? Secret Service? Blackwater? Were they even American? Fortunately for all, they were content to just stand there and look stupid, since the protesters weren’t targeting the memorial and the spray paint was probably just done by one asshole looking to stir the pot.

The stunt of flying a helicopter between buildings to use the backwash from the blades to disperse the crowd was dangerous beyond belief. Any helicopter pilot pulling such a stunt other than under direct orders from the President would have had his license to fly permanently revoked. I’m guessing we’ll never learn the name of the war criminal who flew that chopper at the behest of Trump.

Oh, did I say war criminal? Yes. The chopper was marked with the red cross, making that a violation of the Geneva convention. Medical insignia means “non-combatant” both for their protection, and when a cowardly little Nazi sits in the White House, for the protection of unarmed American civilians.

The act of gassing a group of peaceful demonstrators in order to stage a painfully awkward PR stunt meant to drum up support from the religious right was also a war crime.

Tom Cotton, a sitting Senator from Arkansas, wrote an editorial for the New York Times, one which the Times utterly disgraced itself by running, in which he called for siccing the airborne infantry on the protesters. Yet another war crime, and Cotton should be expelled from the Senate and tried for advocating mass slaughter of Americans. As for the Times, just remember that in critical moments, this is a paper that will lie to you in service to the GOP. Now they are willing to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, Habeas Corpus, and presumably the first, third and fourth amendments just because Cotton wanted the world to know that there might be people opposed to fascism in the crowd.

Some of Trump’s desperation and panic is warranted. Not only have his actions caused schisms in his previously unshakable base, but the Pentagon has made it as clear as the law allows that it is not prepared to fire on unarmed American civilians.

Keith Ellison, the District Attorney for the state of Minnesota where the Floyd murder took place, announced charges against the four police involved in Floyd’s death; Murder-2 against Chauvin, and accomplices and accessories to murder against the other three.

I thought that might defuse the situation a fair bit. Ellison is well-trusted, and this provided a serious promise of the justice the protesters wanted.

But the protests are no longer against the Floyd murder, or the police murders of hundreds of others of African Americans in recent years. Now the crowd has realized that their true enemy, black or white, Christian or non, Democrat or non, is the treasonous wannabee dictator in the White House.

Last night police arrested over 10,000 people nationwide. Since masks and social distancing aren’t available in jail, it’s safe to assume that as many as a thousand of those people may become sick, and three hundred or so may die. All for protesting oppression and treason by the government against the people.

I’m guessing the protests won’t die down, only now, it isn’t just injustice: it’s Americans fighting for their country against an opportunistic and amoral traitor in the White House.

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Taking the Knee — Will the murder of George Floyd shatter America’s emotional paralysis?

May 30th 2020

As I write this, we’re moving into the fifth night of civil unrest and full-on riots in the wake of the video of four Minneapolis police systematically murdering an African American man for – supposedly – spending a ten or a twenty dollar bill that might have been counterfeit. There’s pretty much zero evidence of any criminal intent, and even if Floyd was an evil mastermind producing millions of bogus notes in his basement, that usually doesn’t carry a death sentence.

Under any circumstances, the videos of Floyd’s murder would have been horrifying, but what made this stand out was how calm and collected the four cops were as a man lay dying under their knees. They were chatting, who knows about what? The Stanley Cup round robin? The weather? Lamenting about how the Civil War made killing slaves illegal? It was a cold, calculating murder, of the sort you associate with the Nazis, or Bond villains.

I was scared that America was becoming inured to the willful murder of African-Americans. In recent times, there have been Trayvon Martin, who was shot in 2012 by a murderous cop wannabee, George Zimmerman. Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, and neo-Nazi bigots crowed that he had it coming because he shoved a shopkeeper a half-hour earlier. Brown’s murder sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement, much ridiculed by Donald Trump and other right wing trash. Dontre Hamilton was killed for being schizophrenic in public. Aside from being noisy, he wasn’t breaking any law, but a cop, Christopher Manney, decided to pat him down, and when Hamilton pulled away, Manney shot him.

Eric Garner was famously murdered by New York’s finest for the crime of selling cigarettes on a street corner. He uttered the phrase, hideously echoed this week, “I can’t breathe.” There are still apologists for racist murders who say if he could speak, he could breathe, and that he probably actually died from an ingrown toe nail, or some other hidden medical condition aggravated by having oxygen to the brain cut off for ten minutes. The same fools were saying the same thing six years later.

John Crawford, 22, was gunned down for picking up a toy .22 rifle in a WalMart and walking with it to the checkout stands in order to purchase it.

Ezell Ford, unarmed, was shot in the back by two police officers. He was accused of no crime, and the investigation was put on “administrative hold.”

Dante Parker was tased to death by San Bernardino cops. Tanisha Anderson, 37, died after cops smashed her head repeatedly against the pavement. Apparently they considered that a viable treatment for schizophrenia. Akai Gurley, 28, was shot for no reason at all by a cop. “Accidental discharge” they called it. Gurley wound up accidentally dead as a result.

Tamir Rice, age 12, was just a kid playing with a toy gun. In Cleveland, that, and black skin, is enough to get you killed. The poor panicked cops mistook him for an adult with an AR-15. The one who actually killed Tamir got fired, but don’t worry—he’s a cop somewhere else now, protecting white society from kids with toy guns.

Jerame Reid, 36, was shot and killed by police on suspicion of being black while a passenger in New Jersey.

That just brings us up to 2015. There have been a dozen or more incidents each year since of African-Americans dying at the hands of police where there were images proving that the cops were, at best, reckless, and at worst, murdering swine. Multiply that by dozens, perhaps hundreds of incidents where it was the word of our noble police against that of some black street thug who “reached for his waistband.”

According to the Guardian, in the first five months of 2015, “In total, 478 of those people were shot and killed, while 31 died after being shocked by a Taser, 16 died after being struck by police vehicles, and 19 – including 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore – have died after altercations in police custody.” We were on course for, and eventually met a total of 1,100 dying in police custody or confrontations with police. Over half of those killed were black. Twenty percent were white. It’s only gotten worse since then, led by a fascist regime that values vicious police suppression. Further, there’s no federal law requiring police departments to report fatal encounters to any central agency (the Guardian did its own, private survey), so the number of people killed by police may be double what we know about, or even worse.

Most encounters aren’t caught on camera. Personal webcams some police have to wear have a way of failing at critical moments, so until the rise of smartphones, it was always the word of sorrowful-looking officers against that of some dead guy.

But phones have changed all that. As Will Smith the actor acidly remarked, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.” And dozens of times a year, the viciousness and sadism of our alleged public defenders is put on full display.

Such spasms of rage are nothing new in America, of course. Slave revolts were so common, and so feared, that the Founders put the second amendment in, giving cover to slaveowners to hunt down and/or kill rebellious slaves. Slavery led to the civil war. Tulsa, Oklahoma saw its black community nearly exterminated by a mass lynching some 120 years ago. Lynchings were common, and praised by civic leaders from 1870 to 1960. The race riots of the 60s were sparked by a minor incident in Watts, where police stopped a youth, determined he had an outstanding warrant, and arrested him. They didn’t kill him or even rough him up. But onlookers were tired of constantly being detained on suspicion of being black. Then Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the rage broke wide open.

The only thing surprising about this week’s events is that it took so long to happen. We’ve had three years of a president who has devoted his whole vicious, wastrel life to cheating and defaming African-Americans, a weak, cowardly racist even by the shit standards of the white supremacist.

He demonstrated his hate and fear on the third night, tweeting that that protesters could have been attacked with “vicious dogs and ominous weapons” wielded by the US Secret Service. He also attacked the Washington DC, mayor for supposedly not providing police to protect the White House. Poor defenseless widdle American president. I posted that perhaps the best answer was to put one of those vicious dogs in the Oval Office and put Trump out on the White House lawn to snarl at passers-by. Certainly it would be a win-win for the nation.

“They let the ‘protesters’ scream and rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them,” Trump said. Nothing more pathetic than a blustering, cowardly, racist bully.

In all of this, there was one gleaming, memorable moment that happened after the night protesters burned Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct, the pig pen that housed the four cops that murdered George Floyd. The nearby Gandhi Mahal Restaurant was severely damaged by fire. The owner, Ruhel Islam, told a friend, “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served.” The next day, he stood by that statement, saying, “We can rebuild a building, but we cannot rebuild a human. The community is still here, and we can work together to rebuild.” Mind you, Mr. Islam is almost certainly a Muslim. He’s as much a target of Trump’s fear and hate as any African-American. Nonetheless, he believes in us, whether we deserve it or not.

In the 18th century, a slaveowner, anguished by guilt and aware of the incredible damage slavery and bigotry would do to the country he helped create, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Thomas Jefferson, no Christian, knew the price to be paid because humans value justice. He would be totally unsurprised by the events of this week.

He might have even felt that justice was being served.

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Goldman and Gervais — or, how to deal with Morons.

Goldman and Gervais

or, how to deal with Morons.

April 25th, 2020

William Rivers Pitt on his Facebook page drew my attention to an extraordinary closing line in a column printed today in the New York Times. Ms. Michelle Goldberg wrote, “Chernobyl is now widely seen as a signal event on the road to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Coronavirus may someday be seen as a similar inflection point in the story of American decline. A country that could be brought to its knees this quickly was sick well before the virus arrived.”

As jarring as that paragraph is, Goldberg may have understated the comparison a bit. While noting that the government of the USSR did take responsibility for handling the crisis in the Ukraine, there was a greater element feeding the incompetence.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, chairman, party leader and political center of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was largely kept in the dark about the severity of the accident at the Pripyat reactor for the first five days or so, as terrified underlings did what terrified underlings in all authoritarian regimes do when the shit hits the fan, and told their bosses what they thought the bosses wanted to hear, rather than what they needed to hear.

Gorbachev was neither a fool nor a narcissist, and once he was made aware of the gravity of the situation, acted swiftly and decisively to try to prevent the damage from further spreading.

We’ll never know within three orders of magnitude how many deaths resulted from the meltdown. Officially, 31 died. Unofficially, the toll may have been in the tens of thousands. There’s little doubt that between unheeded warnings (a nearby nuclear plant of the same design very nearly suffered the exact same catastrophe months earlier) and bureaucratic foot-dragging, the disaster could have been largely averted.

At the time (1986) the accident revealed that the USSR was a deeply dysfunctional state, putting self-preservation ahead of the body public. At the time, I opined that the USSR would be gone by the end of the century. It was considered a radical opinion at that time. The USSR collapsed just four years later, ten years ahead of my own estimate.

The USSR had a couple of advantages over Trump America. It was easier to conceal their mistakes. Gorbachev was not a fool, nor a sociopath. And the area directly affected by the meltdown was far smaller than the parts of America affected by the pandemic.

Gorbachev would have been gone within a week if he had ever appeared on state television to inform the Soviet public that he had heard that scientists were looking at treating radiation poisoning with aspirin, washed down with a litre of motor oil. Even in 1986, Soviet children got a better education than their American counterparts, and would have instantly deduced that the Premier was a) a fool and b) a liar and c) both. Even Izvestia and Pravda would have had trouble defending such a show, or even trying to excuse it.

In the US, subservience to the leader is a bit more pronounced in some quarters. It’s not surprising that GOP organs such as Fox and OANN didn’t try to challenge the remarks, and Brietbart, named for a dead right wing lunatic, tried to deny that Trump had said the insane things he said Thursday about treating the virus with disinfectant, bleach, and UV light. But the NY Times – yes, the same paper Goldberg writes for – wrote in a tweet, “At a White House briefing, President Trump theorized — dangerously, in the view of some experts — about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.”

SOME experts? I defy the NYT to find a single expert that thinks injecting yourself with Lysol, drinking bleach, and/or sticking a UV light up your ass would be anything other than dangerous. This is the “balanced journalism” that the fascist right have used for years to convince Americans that economic absurdities are exactly equal to economic realities. Nearly half of Americans believe trickle-down economics is a good idea even to this day. It made a ridiculous moron like Trump possible, pretending his voice was the equal of any expert in any field.

Douglas Adams once wrote of a character who was so intellectually disgusted by the low-grade intelligence of the Western World that his character sealed himself off from it. Wonko the Sane resigned from humanity when he bought a box of toothpicks and found instructions for their use printed on the box.

Ricky Gervais, another English comic, came to a similar, if more immediate conclusion in March 2016, when he said, “Think about it: We live a world where there are warnings on bottles of bleach — we have to tell people not to drink bleach. In that world, Trump can be president,”

A quick glance at the John Hopkins university tracking page for the Covid-19 pandemic show that the US, with 3.2% of the world’s population, has 32.9% of the world’s known cases, and 26.7% of the world’s deaths. This is a country where, until very recently, 40% of the population believes that it was the best educated in the world, and had the best medical system.

The fact of the matter is far too many Americans wouldn’t know how to pour piss out of their boots if you printed instructions on the heel. Ignorance is actually considered a virtue, accompanied by loud sneers at experts and intellectual elites.

I wonder if the New York Times thinks some experts agree that ignorance is dangerous? I’m sure that they can find someone at the Times to write that opinion, although I can pretty much assure everyone that it won’t be Goldberg writing that.

Trump’s utter stupidity and the furtive efforts of his lackeys to hide the extent of the disaster is only a part of the problem. Encouraging stupidity, ignorance and disdain for science is another part of the unfolding disaster that may indeed presage the rapid demise of the US as a functioning country.

You aren’t going to eliminate the influence of idiocy by treating it as being one of several possible ways of dealing with the world and its problems.

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America Burns — Trump makes it his own personal fire sale

America Burns

Trump makes it his own personal fire sale

April 16th 2020

We’re at the point where there are some faint glimmers of hope that the first round of the coronavirus pandemic might be cresting. New cases as a percentage of existing cases have dropped from 15% three weeks ago to just 5% now. New York crested, and Cuomo sent 150 ventilators to states that haven’t been overwhelmed yet. Social distancing has had an effect: back in early March, I estimated we would have 1.2 million cases by April 12 (it was just under 600,000) and between 10 and 20 thousand dead. Unfortunately, I was wrong in the bad way on that one: the death toll was actually 21,500.

However, America has been hit harder than any other country, due in part to the utter lack of a safety net, and partly because the Republican party expects every good American worker to risk his life so that no billionaire should ever have to chance the horror of becoming a mere millionaire. As a result, even as places like New York and California can see a light at the end of the epidemiological tunnel, colonies of infection are erupting across the red and mostly rural states. South Dakota, lightly affected until this past week, had 650 new cases erupt at just one meat processing plant which was under no orders to close down and felt little pressure to protect its workers.

Despite that, there’s a growing resistance from people who are tired of being locked down, which is reasonable, and believe that the disease is a hoax, or want to show the Chinese they can’t infect good Americans, or just want to stick it to the libs, none of which is reasonable.

Incoherence plays a major role in this. In Florida, pro wrestling was declared an “essential business” and allowed to continue business as usual. Pro wrestling. Yes, you read that right. But in Florida, and in most of the country, beaches are closed, even though usage of same is light this time of year. The resistance is also pretty incoherent, as you might imagine. Some of them just want to lock up any politicians they find annoying. Some just want to be able to go to the hairdresser again. I saw a video made by a well-coiffed sorority brat type who sobbed through a glittery blonde frenzy about how without decent nails and lots of good make up, she would have to compete with unkempt and possibly smelly farm girls for the attentions of the boyz. Now, good chance she was just taking the piss, but I took no chances; I suggested we help her out by sending her old “L’il Abner” comic strips as a fashion guide.

I suspect the resistance to shelter-in-place will grow, and as a result, so will the contagion. It’s hard to be sympathetic to these people because while they will find out that you can’t gaslight mother nature, the fact is they’ll also infect relatives, co-workers and friends through their foolishness.

But as all this is going on, we have Trump and his cabal of thieves who are exploiting this. They are encouraging people, and the dimmer state governors, to defy social distancing and get back to work. Avery Bundy and his gang of land-thief nuts declared that no phony government was going to stop him from his self-declared right to steal other people’s property. Various churches rebelled, declaring that Jesus would protect them from the virus. About once a week, I see an amusing article about how one of the pastors or leaders of these little cults up and died from—you guessed it—coronavirus. In Wisconsin, republican judges ruled that voters must cast votes and not delay the primary. Both the state Supreme Court and the federal Supreme Court disgraced themselves in this bald-faced ploy to protect a Republican incumbent judge, and in the hundreds of thousands, Wisconsins turned out to kick that fascist strutter off the court. It was perhaps THE bright spot in all of these. Americans are still willing to fight fascism, and to risk their lives to do so.

The worst part is the people who are defying the lockdowns out of simple desperation. The government response has been mostly pure shit, and many people are out of food, facing eviction, and utterly desperate.

It’s in the interest of the federal government to make this even worse. Trump is staging a coup against America. He reluctantly signed the stimulus bill, adding the signing statement that he felt free to disregard the language that forbade him or his pestilential family from profiting from the crisis, or other language that the government must account for where and how that money is spent. To that end, he fired the inspectors-general, administrative cops that oversee disbursements of funding for fraud or waste. He wants lots of fraud and waste, and he wants it kept secret.

He also is demanding that in the next stimulus bill, funding for the Post Office be cut and the Post Office closed. Never mind that the Post Office is vital; Republicans have wanted it shut down for years so profiteers can take over, and Trump wants it eliminated because without the Post Office, there is no mail-in voting, and Trump has openly admitted that if everyone could vote by mail, no Republican would ever win office again. It’s nice to know that even he acknowledges that most Americans hate fascism.

Now he’s threatening to close Congress if they don’t immediately approve all his appointees. He hasn’t read the Constitution; not only does he not have that power, but neither House can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other House. If Pelosi digs in her heels—and she will—Trump will have to force another Constitutional crisis to get his way.

If he does that, America is only weeks away from widespread revolt and possible civil war.

Between the pandemic and his own lust for power, Trump is hoping, if he can’t simply prevent voting in November, to at least make it so hard and so dangerous to vote that he can get reelected by the surviving members of his cult—the ones out protesting that Americans should bow to no sissy virus whut weighs less than one tenth what a good Amurrkin does.

So even though many other countries have peaked and are containing the virus, America has the wrong government, run by the wrong people, at the wrong time.

It won’t end well.

 

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Nacht der langen Messer — Trump has his Operation Hummingbird moment

Nacht der langen Messer

Trump has his Operation Hummingbird moment

The past couple of weeks, as America burned, Trump has been flogging a drug known as hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) as a treatment for COVID-19. He has been obsessive about this in the face of thousands of scientists who have stated that there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine has any affect at all on the SARS-type virus, but that it has a wide range of side effects, including, per wikipedia, “…altered eye pigmentation, acne, anemia, bleaching of hair, blisters in mouth and eyes, blood disorders, convulsions, vision difficulties, diminished reflexes, emotional changes, excessive coloring of the skin, hearing loss, hives, itching, liver problems or liver failure, loss of hair, muscle paralysis, weakness or atrophy, nightmares, psoriasis, reading difficulties, tinnitus, skin inflammation and scaling, skin rash, vertigo, weight loss, and occasionally urinary incontinence. Hydroxychloroquine can worsen existing cases of both psoriasis and porphyria.” Even by the rushed monotonic disclaimer at the end of all the drug ads on TV, that sounds pretty nasty.

Overdoses are even worse: “Overdose symptoms include convulsions, drowsiness, headache, heart problems or heart failure, difficulty breathing and vision problems.” There’s only a half dozen reported cases of overdoses in the US, since the drug, because of the side effects, is used mostly as a last-ditch treatment for RA, lupus and other auto-immune diseases. It’s main use is as an anti-malarial drug, something not widely needed in the West outside of London, where a mild version of the drug, quinine water, became a popular base for mixed drinks. London had a lot of lead in its air back then.

So for Trump to push this pill is fantastically irresponsible in the first place. Not just because of the threat it poses just by itself, but because people who have symptoms of COVID-19 may ignore standard treatments and seek out black-market versions of the drug. Those might range from sugar pills at $10,000 a pop to chemically active and highly lethal fakes. And for people who already have prescriptions to the drug, supplies of the real thing have already vanished because American medicine follows the profits, not the patients.

Even before yesterday, there was little doubt in my mind that Trump and / or members of his loathsome family had a stake in this, and stood to make big profits off a rush to acquire hydroxychloroquine one way or another. He had no interest in offering the American people hope (he already has a tower of self-serving lies that he broadcasts every day) and he certainly doesn’t have a clue as to whether the stuff would work or not. He’s seeking personal advantage, not national salvation.

Then yesterday he upped the ante in a way that buggered disbelief. Hydroxychloroquine, he proclaimed, could not only CURE COVID-19, but it could PREVENT it.

Prevent it. No need for those silly, ugly masks (and Donald would be caught dead in one, he has haughtily proclaimed). No need for social distancing. Open your business. Go to work. With these babies, you don’t have to worry about that pandemic hoax! Cures cancer and old age, too! Get yours today and eat a handful. In just a half hour, COVID-19 won’t be able to touch you!

Even by his inhumanly vicious, selfish, and stupid standards, this seemed utterly insane. There are millions out there who believe every word he utters, and are willing to fight and die on his behalf. They issue death threats against those who gainsay Donald in any way, and every so often one tries to commit mass murder on his behalf. Just last week a Trumpkin engineering a train in NYC tried to derail his train so it might plough into the Naval Hospital Ship that had just docked a short distance from the tracks. He felt using a freight train to sink a Naval ship with 5,000 on board was a good and appropriate way of showing his love for Donald, and Donald’s America.

These people are the ones who are going to believe Donald, and his vicious lie that hodroxychloroquine can prevent COVID-19. By the millions, they’ll stop taking precautions, and by the thousands they will sicken, and cause others around them to become sick, as well, In the end, this could up the eventual death toll by tens and even hundreds of thousands. Mostly amongst the people who are his strongest supporters.

Trump is stupid and profoundly self-centered, but he does possess a low animal cunning. He knows that he is at a moment where he can permanently consolidate his power in the midst of crisis and confusion. He knows that it’s a make or break situation, and he can’t afford to have his more certifiable followers commit atrocities that might rouse the American people to arms.

2020 is, for him, what 1934 was for Adolf Hitler.

He’s a student of Hitler. For years, he kept a copy of “My New Order” by Hitler on his bedside table. It was, apparently, his notion of bedtime reading, and according to various bedmates of his, he was obsessive about reading it. For a man who normally doesn’t read at all, it was extraordinary, and should have been deeply disturbing. THIS, of all books, excited his literary passion?

Hitler had a problem in 1934. The brass ring was almost within his grip. But his followers, dogmatic, cultic, perfervid, and filled with inchoate rage, had become a potential liability. They had to be brought to heel.

So Hitler plotted Operation Hummingbird, Der Nacht der langen Messer, or, as we know it, The Night of the Long Knives.”

He only murdered a small percentage of his most loyal followers, claiming they were plotting against him. (And it’s the nature of cult politics that a few actually were.) The rest lived, he said, because they were loyal and true and would be richly rewarded, and most were incorporated into favored positions in the SS and other branches of the Hitler government tentacle.

It’s likely that Trump knows his advice will kill a large number of his followers. He probably has his excuses lined up: liberal scientists lied to him about the drug. Mexican cartels made fake and dangerous counterfeits. Obama told people it was good for them.

Amongst his followers, he can avoid culpability. That will be child’s play.

Besides, he’ll assure them that when the dust has settled, they will be found to be the loyal and true ones, and would receive rich rewards and become as On High in his vision of Heaven on Earth.

And they’ll believe him.

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Welcome to the shit-show — Like Armageddon, except Jesus is the clown from “It”

Welcome to the shit-show

Like Armageddon, except Jesus is the clown from “It”

March 24th 2020

Trump wants to end the coronavirus crisis by Easter. That’s always a nice time of year here in the northern latitudes—spring is finally really asserting itself over winter, all the trees are budding, grass is greening, daffodils are waiting to be crushed by the rogue April snow storm. Christians liked it so much they made it the most important day on their calendar.

Now, it’s one thing to offer hope in a time of crisis. Just this morning I told the fellow down at my local grocery story that I thought we might get a half-season of baseball this year, with opening day on the Fourth of July. I don’t have a shred of evidence to support that, aside from a historical tendency of plagues to fade out after about six months, and we’re now in month three. But it cheered the guy up a bit (being a store clerk right now isn’t much fun) and what the hell—I felt a little bit better by saying it, too.

But here’s the thing; I don’t have the power to order baseball to reopen on a specific date, and I wouldn’t even if I had that power. And if an epidemiologist heard me talking to the clerk, he might suggest that I was being a tad optimistic and suggest that baseball wait until summer solstice before making that sort of decision.

If I said baseball should open up for the season on April 12th, he would tell me I would get thousands of people killed, and I was being reckless even suggesting it.

There isn’t an epidemiologist in the country that thinks dropping social distancing and resuming business as usual in just 18 days would be anything short of catastrophic. If the United States is very, very lucky, we might be showing signs of flattening the curve by then. On our present course, which is still accelerating, by April 12th we may have 1.2 million cases, and between 10 and 20 thousand dead. Sorry to scare anyone, but those are the numbers. It’s bad, it’s going to get a lot worse.

That’s even if Americans do batten down and avoid social contact as much as possible from now on. Between lack of test to get an idea of where the disease is or how far it’s spread, and the deliberate refusal by Trumpkins to observe such precautions (many of them still believe it’s all a liberal Democratic plot to hurt Trump) those are the optimistic numbers, the ones that assume everyone will exercise caution and common sense, and in two weeks the curve may begin to flatten.

What I expect to see by April 12th is that things will be at the point where nearly everyone in the country at least knows someone who has caught the disease, and a significant number know someone who is dead or in a weeks-long struggle to live from the disease. By then, even some of the Trumpkins will realize that going back to work is tantamount to a death sentence, and that the only reason Trump is trying to order them back is because some of his billionaire friends are in danger of becoming millionaires. Not all of them—Trump worship is a cult, in its worst form as bad as Jonestown, and we all remember what happened there. Some Trumpkins will die for Trump, because it will SO annoy the libruls. There was even an image of two MAGAts licking a New York Subway turnstile, which they put on line as a way of “sticking it to the libs”.

Unfortunately, it’s a part of human nature. Today’s Gallup poll showed Trump’s approval rating at 49%, and his disapproval rating at 42%–the first time since he took office that his approval rating wasn’t underwater. When people are frightened, they flock to the safety of an authority figure. They want Big Daddy to save them from the vicious noseeums that are so threatening. This is well known, not just to elderly curmudgeons such as myself, but to any competent social psychologist.

Trump is what is known as a Charismatic Authority. Until now, he wasn’t a very good one, only able to command a relatively small fraction of the population through propaganda that he, and they, were targeted and victimized by others, such as liberals, blacks, Mexicans and Moslems. His crises had been all invented, and rather transparently so. Now that a real crisis has arisen, his power to manipulate has grown exponentially.

Charismatic authorities have always come out during crises: some, such as Winston Churchill or FDR, were benign. Others, such as Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, were not.

While Trump is not an intelligent or empathetic man, that does not mean he is not a crafty predator, and he has realized this crisis will work to his advantage. Charismatic authorities feed off crises. He’s already pressed during this one to have Congress give him a half a trillion dollars to spend as he sees fit, without having to account to anyone or even explain where the money went.

Oh, I’m sure he’ll donate it all to charity. That’s just the type of guy he is, right?

No, more than likely that money would make the Trump family an unmovable and insurmountable dictatorship that would afflict Americans for generations to come.

Crises are essential. Hitler, Mao and Stalin not only arose in times of crisis, but maintained states of crises throughout their bloody reigns. Hitler’s proved so catastrophic to his followers that his public adulation only began to fade in early 1945, when it was obvious that Germany was to be destroyed. Stalin and Mao had policies that killed millions, but upon their deaths, the unfeigned mourning and bereavement their respective lands was immense. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, then serving a ten year term for Anti-Soviet Agitation, wrote of the utter tearful loss and desolation amongst the prisoners, many of whom were as capriciously imprisoned as he, upon the death of “Uncle Joe.” Charismatic leaders create crises upon which they thrive.

This may explain why Trump wants to reopen the country April 12th. Not just to support his business buddies, but to maximize the crisis. As long as he has scapegoats to shift blame for, he can cause the deaths of tens of millions of Americans—and it will work to his advantage.

Just as Pennywise benefited from the fear caused in Derry by missing children, Trump benefits from a plague that he didn’t cause and need only pretend to be fighting. It’s in his best interest for the disease to keep expanding.

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A Plague On the Land — Not COVID-19; this is something worse

March 13th 2020

After Trump had his presser in the Rose Garden today, praising big companies and claiming all the massive screwups over the past month never happened (cheering nobody but Wall Street), Pelosi announced that she and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s surrogate, had reached an accord on the “Families First” legislation. The bill offers two weeks’ paid sick leave and up to three months family leave, allocating funds for SNAP, Meals on Wheels and other programs designed to keep people from starving so they can deal with the plague, and a temporary broadening of Medicare to care for everyone who needs care during the course of the pandemic.

Now normally that would be good news. The two sides coming together to face a shared threat to the people of their country.

But Trump has a long and inglorious history of reneging on agreements he or his surrogates have made, and Mitch McConnell feels that after five years of doing nothing, the Senate deserves a break, and they are skipping out on recess, and will deal with the survivors later.

Trump could have contained the threat two months ago when it was clear to any sane person that coronavirus was going to be a threat. But instead, he classified information relating to the disease, and said such things to the public as, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine!” (Jan 22nd) and “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” (Feb 2nd( and “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in.” (Feb 10th).

It’s impossible to tell if Trump ever, at any point, gave a rat’s ass about the harm it was doing people around the country. But the markets started to tank as traders realized the implications of a pandemic, and since then have lost nearly a third of their value. That carnage isn’t over yet, either.

Trump’s reactions have been characteristically grotesque. Instead of reassuring the people and promising swift, decisive response to contain the threat and assist those affect by this disease, he told blatant and stupid lies, and if he was sincere about anything, it was his promised efforts to stabilize the markets. He encouraged the Fed to act, and they did, as best they could. They dropped interest rates, already artificially low because the economic pump needs constant priming to overcome insane Republican policies and misadventures, and the market promptly dropped 500 points. The Fed since has infused $1.5 trillion in quantitative easing, the practice of taking the national wealth and using it to prevent billionaires from becoming millionaires at our expense. That stopped the plunge temporarily, but Wall Street is just now realizing that without workers and consumers, you don’t have an economy.

Trump’s only response to ease the panic has been to suggest that payroll taxes be suspended for a couple of months. Those are the deductions on your paycheck for Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and Medicare. For people still working, it’s a minor increase in pay, not nearly enough to cover the prospect of being out sick for six weeks, or having to care for sick family members. And of course, if you aren’t getting a paycheck, those deductions are of zero benefit to you. But it does promote the long-held Republican dream of destroying the social safety net, thus keeping Americans utterly dependent on their employers for everything, docile and frightened the way good Americans ought to be.

But Trump isn’t the problem; he’s a symptom. Republican response has been equally bad. A bill that Pelosi rammed through to allocate $8.3 billion for testing kits and first response (“Far more than I wanted”, Trump grumbled) was held up briefly in the Senate when members of the Blob Squad (the “pro-lifers”) threatened to hold up the legislation until some Hyde Amendment language further curtailing abortion rights. That quickly collapsed when word got out and the outrage was instantaneous. People, it seemed, weren’t amused at the idea that thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of lives should be put at unnecessary risk just because some demented bible floggers think every sperm is sacred and want to impose that on everyone, no matter how many developed zygotes like us die in the process.

Pelosi had to deal with the reptilian Steve Mnuchin because Trump, butt-hurt over their previous encounters, was afraid to deal with her again. True to type, he wanted to know why the taxpayers should have to subsidize free testing, and felt that if people really cared about their families and friends, they would be happy to shell out $600 for a test. Of course, the tests barely exist, even now, six weeks after they should have appeared in the millions. A Chinese billionaire, Jack Ma, has pledged to donate 500,000 coronavirus test kits and 1 million face masks to the United States. Yes, under Republican rule, the US has become an object of pity and concern in the rest of the world. In California, America would be declared 5150—a potential danger to itself and others. It’s not clear if the US, desperately flailing, will accept the aid, since Trump has been loudly blatting that China “inflicted the coronavirus on America.” Tom Cotton (R-Pencil Necked Geeks) wants to attack China for that ‘infliction.” Responsible, more mature nations, Mexico and Canada in particular, wait to see if their screaming neighbor with all the guns settles down and goes back inside to beat the wife and kids.

America has a massive problem and it’s not just Trump: he’s just a symptom. The country suffers from a vicious alliance of capitalistic fascists, petit authoritarians (most of which were on display in Trump’s last presser, where they all effusively praised the Glorious Leader for his wisdom and competence, a grotesque example of petit authoritarians ability to strut and snivel at the same time) and a sad parade of religious nut jobs.

That is the greater plague afflicting America. All coronavirus did was put it on display.

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Covid-19 — Exploits both medical and political vulnerabilities

Covid-19

Exploits medical and political vulnerabilities

February 28th 2020

I want to talk about the coronavirus, and why while it is more serious than your typical flu outbreak, it’s cause for concern, rather than alarm. So to do that, I’m going to have to throw some numbers at you. They’re pretty important numbers, and while some of them are alarming, others are reassuring, and you need them to make a balanced and informed response.

There are far worse possible pandemics waiting out there, such as ebola, smallpox, the plague and measles. Possibly even worse are the ones that don’t exist yet, or are lurking in the thawing grounds in the far north. Compared to those, coronavirus might be considered a warning shot, since even the worst case scenarios have it killing perhaps one percent of the population. That’s a lot of people—seventy million worldwide, but we have a lot of population.

This specific version of coronavirus (there are many) broke out in China late last year and infected much of the city of Wuhan before it was identified and the seriousness of the problem established.

In some ways we’re still in early days, and so the numbers, like the virus itself, will fluctuate and mutate as we go along. Numbers that are accurate today may not be so a month from now. I’ll go with what we have.

The estimated death rate from covid-19 is about 2%. So if you catch it, there’s a one-in-fifty chance you’ll die from it. That’s about 10 to 15 times the death rate from the various forms of flu that come around every winter.

That said, that’s two percent of known cases. Epidemiologists estimate that only one in five cases is severe enough to require hospitalization, usually because pneumonia has set in. Of the other 80% of cases, most are mild enough that people don’t seek medical attention, and thus go unreported. We don’t know how many cases there actually are, and that affects all the numbers. It’s a complete guess how many people are infected by the virus and show no symptoms at all.

That’s the unknown element that skews all the other forecasts about this disease. A lot of unreported cases would suggest a higher communicability factor (ability to spread from one person to others) but with less consequence.

So put it this way: if it hits you hard enough that you notice you aren’t feeling well, there’s a better than 4-in-5 chance you’ll be fine in a week or so. Even if hospitalized, you might be in a regular room rather than in ICU on a vent—only seven percent of all known cases are critical. And a two percent chance your relatives will be engraving “Better him than me” on your tombstone.

So wash your hands frequently, and if it invades your area (and it looks like it will) then avoid public gatherings and public transportation, especially planes, get some good masks, and if you must work with the public, get some latex gloves as well. Better not to catch the disease in the first place, right? If you don’t get it, than two to three other people who otherwise might have caught it from you will be spared.

If it does become a pandemic, then don’t assume as the cases die down and things start returning to normal, that it’s over. Such pandemics tend to ripple around the world in decreasing waves, (in some historical instances, the second wave was actually worse than the first). And in the case of covid-19, there is evidence that it can reinfect, in the first known case less than a month after the original infection and illness had passed. While that case could be a fluke, it suggests the unsettling possibility of a very high mutation rate, which not only means various forms of this sickness sweeping the global at the same time, but would make developing an effective vaccine nearly impossible. Let’s…just hope that doesn’t happen, OK? If does, we’re screwed, pure and simple.

Americans are more vulnerable than most people in the developed world, partly because of the twenty seven million people who are uninsured, along with a vicious corporate attitude that punishes employees for calling in sick. Other Americans are looking at sizable copays, and aren’t going to live on Ramen for six months so they can see the doctors for a case of the sniffles. You are at the mercy of these people if you are lucky enough not to be amongst them already.

A fellow named Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites tweeted: “Coronavirus makes clear what has been true all along. Your health is as safe as that of the worst-insured, worst-cared-for person in your society. It will be decided by the height of the floor, not the ceiling.”

And we have a nightmare administration to deal with this. Putting the psychotically god-struck Mike Pence in charge is like taking the homeless guy with the filthy rag and the bottle of glass cleaner who stands on a busy street corner and rants about the reptilian people and putting him in charge of the military.

Actually, looking at who IS in change of the military, we already have that. Donald Trump gave a presser that had some of the least convincing lies ever told, even by him (such as there’s only 15 cases and it will be over in two weeks because April come she will) and is more furious at the world markets for panicking then he is worried about containing the virus.

It is fair to blame Trump and the Republicans for our lack of preparedness: they deliberately and systematically dismantled the government pandemic response organization because it was set up by Obama, and they are deliberately destroying anything Obama did. Historians will never understand why this administration is so viciously, self-defeatingly stupid, because minds like Trump’s are so far outside our normal experience.

And they’ve already ordered the remaining public officials to have any and all public pronouncements screened through the administration. So ideology will trump medical necessity, and expect to hear many unconvincing lies from that crowd, that being their only way of dealing with it.

Contamination and training processes were totally blown off when the administration decided to evacuate Americans from the stricken Chinese city of Wuhan. They flew the people, both infected and uninfected on the same plane to Travis AFB. There, untrained government reps interviewed and processed the returnees without benefit of protective gear or even basic sterilization procedures. Then the asymptomatic people, and the people who dealt with them, were free to go their own way. At least one took a commercial flight to Boston. Not surprisingly, a woman in nearby Vacaville developed the disease several days later who had no known contact with Travis or the alleged contagion teams. And as of a few minutes ago, this popped up: The Washington Post quoted Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins centre for health security, as saying:

“I think there’s a strong possibility that there’s local transmission going in California. In other words, the virus is spreading within California, and I think there’s a possibility other states are in the same boat. They just haven’t recognised it yet.” That’s a couple of hundred miles from me, but I’m not worried. After all, Donald’s going to protect me, right?

Don’t trust the government on this, but don’t panic, either. The known numbers suggest that while you are likely to catch it, you’re more likely to get over it in a few weeks. And you can greatly improve your odds of not catching it by washing your hands frequently, and if you must be in close contact with the public, wear a mask and gloves and don’t let your hands (or anyone else’s) anywhere near your face.

We’ve already survived Trump and the Republicans thus far. We can survive this, too.

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