Trump's dismissive denial & lethargy has put us on Italy's curve

Here are today's stats on the Corona Virus:

Worldwide with 177 countries reporting cases:

• 230,588 cases, 219,217 as of last night,
• 9,390 deaths, 8,966 last night
• 86,261 recovered (1/3 of the total cases)

U.S.   

•  10,816 cases, 9,417 last night.
•  161 deaths, 154 last night

(Source: https://factba.se/topic/calendar, their sources are linked.)

Notes CV-19's exponential growth:

1.  The world's first known case of CV-19 occurred sometime in November 2119.
2. The US identified its first confirmed case on January 21st.
3.  By Friday last week, the US had 2,882 cases.
4. According to Rachel Maddow, the US's growth curve is very similar to Italy's
5. No measures implemented now are going to have an effect for at least a month.
6. On the current growth curve, US could expect ~40,000 cases by Thursday next week.   
7. Also on the current growth curve, 10 million cases by this day next month is plausible.

The stats above are already obsolete since I started writing this. See: https://factba.se/topic/calendar for the current numbers.

This is scarier than any horror story I can come up with. I could only say please don't commit suicide. We're going to need every person we can spare to get through this crisis.

Place the blame on Trump. He didn't have to fire the White House Pandemic Response Team in 2017,  nor cut the CDC budget for epidemic response. He knew about it happening in China as early as December, and at the very latest, should have responded to the first US case. Instead, he dismissed it, called it a hoax, called it fake news, and asserted it was all about attacking him. He pissed away at least 9 weeks, then responded at first by appointing a task force for spin control. That time lost will cost us hundreds of thousands of lives, and leave us with an economy that will cost us more. 

Italy, which is suffering the worst from this pandemic reported 470 people died of it yesterday alone. (It's not certain that number includes people who died complications like bacterial pneumonia.) Their medical system is in total collapse, and it was rated as excellent by WHO. Like Trump and the US, they were dismissive of the virus at first. Like Italy, we are two months behind an exponential curve. There's no way we're going to catch up on the curve before our healthcare system collapses from the strain.

Meanwhile, the markets are showing their confidence in Trump, dropping whenever he announces another measure. Never mind that he's using the war powers act to take over industries. Trump's poor administrator, and there's no doubt of this. I also fear that after years of cuts and humiliation from Republicans, the US government is no longer structured to handle such an emergency. Add to that: Trump hires for personal loyalty and nothing else. His other hires have been clueless or careless. Trump putting himself in charge of our industries is like Tsar Nicholas II taking personal command of Russia's military during World War I. All he's going to do is turn it into a clusterfuck and discredit him even further.  

How bad is this?

For those calling the Coronavirus a hoax, reality's rebuttal came fast. The Senate just passed $8.3bil in funding to fight CV-19.

Note 1: It passed 96-1.

Note 2: the Senate is Republican and pro-Trump. They'd blame a conspiracy if they could.

Note 3: By comparison, in 2018 the budget for the entire National Institutes of Health was $37 billion.

Note 4: Also by comparison, the NIH budget for Alzheimer's research was only $1.8 billion.

You might call this funding for CV-19 "significant."

https://thehill.com/.../486147-senate-passes-83-billion...

Also, the WHO has put the mortality rate much higher than initially thought, at 3.4%. [Added on edit: 0.4% for this season's flu, which is moderately severe.] Trump says he thinks it's a "really false number," then quotes his "hunch" as saying it's less than 1%. He says people are getting sick and never go to the hospital. Shouldn't he ask first if health researchers don't consider that before he reports his "hunches"? They're professionals, of course they have.

Ten thousand deaths from the flu this year? That's actually only moderately high for the seasonal flu, which has never been a joke, BTW. Its death rate is only 0.1%. [0.4% this year]. That's news, but not news enough to grab the front pages.

Note: At 3.4%, CV-19 mortality rate is 𝟑𝟒 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 [seasonal] 𝐟𝐥𝐮 [is normally, and [it's] about as contagious. [Note: it's 9 times as fatal as this year's flu.] Take a moment to wrap your mind around that. Unless something lucky happens, the deaths from CV-19 could be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. If 80 million people in the US catch this, a completely plausible number, 2.7 million people could die. Everybody left alive will know somebody who died of this. We are in 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 trouble.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB10MMRK?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Hell of a way to run a government, with a president denouncing expert data because he considers a conspiracy to wreck his own unsullied record more likely; because he presumes people must be thinking about him at all times to the dearth of all other crucial matters. Any possible "shadow government" or "fake news outlet" would also be afraid for their own lives, and therefore would want accurate news about this.

To prevent the spread: wash your hands. I would also recommend using hand-sanitizer. Do your best not to touch your face. Cough or sneeze into your shirtsleeve. If someone coughs or sneezes in your presence and doesn't cover, leave the room or the area. Use disinfecting wipes to clean surfaces other people have touched, otherwise, get some gloves and wear them. This is especially true for shopping carts.

The virus can live up to nine days on surfaces. So, if you get a box delivered, handle it with gloves. I might recommend a mask for opening the box. Otherwise, I generally wouldn't. Tearing the box open will make particles fly, so open carefully. Cutting instead of ripping will reduce airborne viruses. Clean the removed item thoroughly after its unwrapped. Then wash your hands and face.

As an alternative, you could allow the box to sit for nine days before opening.

Given the contagiousness of this disease, everybody will catch it ultimately. However, it's best that it happen later than sooner. Slowing the spread will give it a chance to mutate into less virulent form, and will allow herd immunity to eventually take hold. Or even a vaccine and treatments might come about. 

This is going to be terrible. It's possible that every survivor will know somebody who dies of this, but we will get through this.

PS. I don't write these things to spread panic. And I don't think I'm a pessimist. I think there's a cult of over-optimism in this society, a social pressure toward it, that needs to be confronted. Over-optimism about Trump is what powers his support. Optimism is good for supporting hope which maintains our daily function. Pessimism is good for recognizing when caution is called for. But they're both ill-advised and disadvantages if they're kept as general rules.

I write this so people could take a sober look at Trump and what he's done, and what we might expect in the coming year. Remember this on Election Day.

The Fix is in.

The GOP Senate's going to rubberstamp an acquittal, and the only good thing about it is they've taken a few weeks to refuse witnesses and documents. This gave Schiff and other House managers a chance to lay out the case for the world and for history.

They say history is written by the victors. I hope it's abusive to them. I hope Trump McConnell's names become insults in the future. These people are the worst traitors since Benedict Arnold, and Arnold at least helped the cause before he turned against it. These guys have no redeeming qualities.

The Democratic Party must win in a landslide in November, or else damage to the Republic will be irreversible. Trump will set up Ivanka and Don Jr. to succeed him, and the US will become a monarchy in a very late stage of decay. The US will be unable to lead the world while climate change continues to constrict civilization.  And if the US won't lead, who will? 

The Dems have one clear advantage: Trump can't stop being Trump. He will continue to commit obvious crimes, he will take disgusting revenge on people, he will continue to transparently lie, he will wreck our alliances, create a dire situation at the border, he will tear up the Constitution, he will profit off the presidency, he will continue and escalate the war on women, he will continue to make rash and irrational decisions, never seeing them as mistakes. and he will use the presidency to intervene in things that are none of a president's business. 

Trump can't change his ways. He's hermetically ignorant, unable to learn, an obdurate a-know-it-all, and driven purely by his ego that he now identifies with his country. And he's unable mentally to separate his interests from his country's. This means, among other things, that he can't expand his base. No, all the people who are attracted to such a character are already with him. He can smear his opponent, but he can't make his opponent more smeared than he already is. 

I think he's hopeless. I hope he's hopeless.



 

The House impeached Trump, the Senate is impeaching itself.

Chief Justice John Roberts showing his rapt attention to a historic moment, not to mention his impartiality as a judge. Thanks to sketch artist/political cartoonist Bill Hennessey. I hope Hennessey wins a Pulitzer Prize, and Roberts is remembered for this more than anything else.

The GOP has become a historic disgrace. A report from Raw Story says that GOP Senators were told if they vote against the president, "Your head will be on a pike." CBS broke the story, saying the source was an anonymous Trump confidante. Likely, the confidante was anonymous because he didn't want his head on a pike. That's always a danger for confidants of President Trump, also known by the title, "King of the Orcs."

In any real trial that would be considered jury tampering. The Senators should at least be incensed enough to remove him on that principle. If twenty Republicans decide amongst each other that they will vote to convict Trump, their heads won't be on a pike. Trump will be out of office, the threat removed. They would feel such relief. Trump has been a source of stress for the GOP leadership, though they'd never admit it. 

However, that won't happen because if they even discussed changing their votes, and it gets back to Trump, then they'll also get an artificial wooden neck, and they might not get all twenty to agree.

"Head on a pike" is an exaggerated metaphor for "lose your job." But what it also expresses is the degree of contempt Trump harbors toward anyone who's disloyal. He'd make the term as literal as he could.

I'll repeat what I've said before: most people fear unemployment more than they do death. That's because death carries no stress afterward. Unemployment is fraught with anxiety and weighted with responsibility. It's less abstract than death in most people's thinking. It even presents the fear of death by starvation. And if Trump ostracizes them, nobody will answer their calls. So there's destitution and loneliness to deal with. That's what Senators who vote to remove Trump will face. No wonder defending the Constitution and restraining Trump are a distant second and third place to them behind keeping their jobs.  

Even so, defending the Constitution, presidential oversight, and preserving the relevance of the Congress, are all part of a Senator's job requirements. If Senators won't do those things when necessary, they should be in a different job. They need to be voted out for their poor career choice.

How could Trump generate such terror in others? Simply put, it's his iron-fisted revenge code. Lyndon Johnson was known to be vengeful, but he never leaned into it the way Trump does, and never with such a hair-trigger. Trump will do his best to destroy anybody who crosses him. Also, he's willing to lie big and lie often, even to himself. It's hard to tell how much of his constant deceit is due to guile, and how much is from mental illness. It's plain that he is mentally ill with a psychotic narcissistic personality. Either way, it's given him a fifteen-lie-day habit. 
 
Trump is not intelligent in any way, but he's willing to do those two things to get and stay in power. That's all he's needed to do to wreck our government. It shows just how vulnerable our system has always been. Now that he's done it, more intelligent evil people will likely try it. Our Constitution was obviously overdue for amendments, but now we may never get the chance.

And when I say he's not intelligent, I have a guess that he didn't even come up with the plan to extort Ukraine. The plan seems more like something that Putin would do. So, I think Putin dictated the plan to him, and Trump was checking back with him at every step. Trump has no background with that level of cunning. Putin, on the other hand, was trained by the KGB where conspiracies were part of the job description. For evidence, Trump withdrew the funding from Ukraine again an hour-and-a-half after he agreed to send it. What changed? My suspicion is he talked to Putin.

Senators should be insulted by Trump's threat. They should see it as an attempt to extort them exactly the way Trump extorted Ukraine. It's also a hint as to how Trump is going to govern after the Senate dispenses with the trial. The least GOP Senators can do is look interested. But no, they're treating the House manager's arguments like high-school detention.

 We're seeing one bit of classic satire from the case. Mitch McConnell has banned cameras from the chamber. But have allowed an artist to sketch it to give posterity some visual record of the impeachment. It turns out that the artist Bill Hennessey has been subversively lampooning GOP Senators in a way a camera never could. I hope his pictures make the GOP look like clowns long after the Trump administration is voted out in November. It's grueling to go through this, but if we could laugh at it later, the trauma of it might be softened.

About that impeachment

Unless somebody has a devastating trick up their sleeve, the Senate is going to rubberstamp Trump's innocence. The Republican senators are a disgrace. Take note: the only reason why Trump is able to save his job is he has unrelenting vengeance principle that scares the bejesus out of people. He doesn't just hurt anybody who crosses him, he tries to destroy them. Expect Trump to be unleashed after this. As Barbara Res, who used to work for him running the Trump Organization said, he will exact revenge on a lot of people.

Despite Trump getting Russian election help and being otherwise out of control, I really do think the election is the Democrats to lose. Here's the best advice I've heard about how to defeat Trump by someone who knows how to win elections.

A warning about the Richmond Rally

I hope there's no violence. Antifa and any other. Left-Wing groups shouldn't respond with the least violence. That's not just for their safety. History has shown the Left cannot win that way.

This is demonstrated by history: the Spanish Civil War, and the radical Left movements of the 60s & 70s. It may be fairly argued that the Bolsheviks in Russia not only came to power through violence but they continued to rule by violence afterward. Yes, that's true but it took nothing less than World War to sweep them into power. They were opportunistic. The other communist regimes were variants on the Bolsheviks. Not only that, they didn't really win. The system they created was, in every way, worse than the one they replaced. At no time could you call them liberal in the sense of giving their populace freedom, but the wanted to change an established system, unlike Conservatives who want to preserve it, or roll it back to a time when they thought it worked.  

The mentality of these groups is fed by fear. The fear generates anger and creates delusions of persecution and paranoia, which generate hatred. The only way to stop that, in the long run, is to de-escalate in the face of violence. I'm not talking about this as an absolute. People under physical assault must defend themselves. I'm saying don't meet the threat with threat. Stand in the storm and repeat a message of peace.

Fear and anger aren't evenly distributed in these groups. Some members, especially the leadership, are more paranoid and militant than the others. A small number are intractable. De-escalating won't stop those individuals. However, it will drain the power of their hateful messages, and cause the groups to wither. It's a long-run strategy.

It's not just the RW who's fearful of the Left. The lack of police presence. Some of that might be due to the Richmond protesters being heavily armed and authorities trying to de-escalate. But I think most of it is there's just a universal distrust of the Left, a lingering consequence of the Cold War and 1960s race riots. (Violence against African-Americans was overlooked, but that's a different subject). The Left has to prove its faithfulness and trustworthiness in a way that's not demanded from the Right. By definition, the Left wants to change an established system, where the radical Right is often seen as vanguards of it. This has been true throughout history. In Weimar Germany after World War I, the courts punished Left Wing radicals far more than those on the Right. However, they had the direct threat of the Soviet Union and its agents all over Germany.


No matter how angry these protesters make us, we on the Left must refrain from ANY violent rhetoric. Any word of violence. An Antifa idiot punching one of these guys is all the proof they
need that the entire Left are a bunch of terrorists.

The Left betrays its goals when it resorts to violent means. Brutality and barbarism are antithetical to democracy and ruins trust between factions. It creates a spiraling cycle of revenge and hatred that makes rationality arduous in itself. And rationality is the only good solution conflict.

And we can't afford to fight a civil war with the imminent crisis of Global Warming seizing our planet. It will cost us resources and time we now can't afford to lose.

 

"To war, to War, Fredonia's going to war."

                                                     If only Groucho were president
                                                     

Trump has FINALLY surprised me, not with his assassination of Qasem Soleimani--I expected an atrocity like this sooner--but the fact that he offered Iran peace afterward. That's a new level of cluelessness for Trump. I believe Trump assassinated Soleimani because he still held a grudge for the 1979 hostage crisis. He tipped his hand in a Tweet-storm after the assassination:



Iran being thousands of years old, those sites would be world treasures. Why 52 sites? Because 40-years-ago Iran violated our embassy and took 52 hostages. The crisis dragged out 444 days and was a real humiliation for Carter, and likely led to Reagan winning the 1980 election.Why would Trump refer to an incident that took place so long ago that half of today's Iran and a third of the US weren't even born yet? Because of Trump's revenge creed, documented by David Cay Johnson, who covered Trump for the New York Times for decades:

“Sixteen pages of Think Big [Trump's 1989 book] are devoted to revenge. All of them run directly contrary to this basic biblical teaching. Trump leaves no room for doubt that revenge is a guiding principle of his life—“My motto is: Always get even.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump

Once revenge was just Trump's personal and business policy. Now, it's now part of our country's foreign policy. When I posted the theory on Twitter that Trump still had a vendetta from 1979, I was criticized by the Left. Some people believe Trump was apolitical then and he never cares about anybody but himself. To the contrary, he cares about the US the way he cares about a piece of his property. Proprietorship is his version of nationalism. As for him being apolitical, I remember the 1979 hostage crisis, and I'll swear that even the most apolitical people were enraged by it. Everybody was.

Trump has shown outrage on issues on social/political issues long before he ran for president. One example pertains to the Central Park 5 in 1989, in which a female investment banker, Trisha Meili, was assaulted while jogging Central Park. She was bludgeoned with a rock, beaten, raped, tied up, and left to die. She was found hours later and saved, but suffered severe brain damage. The brutality of the attack stunned the whole nation. She was in a coma for a week during which she was unidentified. She seemed to be a teenager, which garnered even more sorrow and sympathy. When she awoke she no memory of the attack.

The New York Police Department responded in an accustomed way: they arrested every minority male who happened to be in that area of Central Park at the time, some 30 of them. Without any witnesses, the police made a racial identification anyway. They forced confessions out of four unfortunate African-American and one Hispanic youth. The real culprit, a serial rapist with no connection to the youths, came forward and confessed to the crime in 2002.

It's impossible to tell why this crime enraged Trump enough to weigh in on the issue, tipping the scales at $85,000 to buy a full-page ad in the New York Post, entitled "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police." 

The headline is a Tweet. Already he knew how to mislead in a few words as possible

Note that 1989 was not an election year. So, Trump wasn't running for president. Election campaigns weren't four-years long yet. Did Trump buy the ad with his own money? He managed to go bankrupt six times, so he might have. He was attention-seeking, but he always was, so why do this particular thing for attention?

My theory? Trump's outrage here is serious. The black-males-on-white-woman crime triggered him like it would any racist. I have no guess as to what degree classism motivated Trump, the fact that the unfortunate woman was an investment banker, i.e. wealthy. It's also possible Trump was acquainted her, or at least knew people who knew her. 

Trump is without a doubt a narcissist, but attachments to people don't define that disorder, their relationships do. A narcissist is capable of caring for people, but they'll always assert their own interests and needs over their friends and family and are obsessed with loyalty, like Trump.

But I digressed. Right now, it's therefore possible that Trump still harbored resentment over the Iran Hostage Crisis. In all fairness, many conservatives who are less sworn to revenge than Trump feel the same way. This is why his hard line on Iran is one issue that got him elected. Therefore, when his advisers gave assassinating Soleimani as an option, his principle kicked in. I would've thought Trump's advisers would know him better by now that to have offered it. 

The one thing you want to avoid in any simmering conflict is a revenge cycle: i.e. when people get too enraged to desire peace, and where each tit for tat blow exchanged simply creates the desire for more revenge.

Trump got conciliatory the next day because, as far as he was concerned, he got even, and thinking only of his own POV, peace was possible. However, his revenge has always been aimed at people on a lower social rung, those couldn't return his vengeance. He's oblivious to how it feels to be on the receiving end of retribution. Not only that, it's too late for him to learn about it, and unfortunately, he's dragged all of us along for the lesson. He's the one least capable of learning a lesson from consequences.