“Trump the Executioner”
2 Likes
One more and then bedtime:
“I’ve heard people say it’s a black swan. It’s not a black swan,” said one of the former DHS officials. “This is the whitest of white swans. This was absolutely inevitable, and the fact is we didn’t even maintain the capacity that we had or even the records of what we had done so that information could be quickly located and turned over to people who are making the critical operations right now.”
The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.
But the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impacts the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swathes of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/dhs-pandemic-coronavirus-146884
The modeling result were eerily prescient, predicting shortages of PPE, Respirators and hospitals and medical workers being overwhelmed.
6 Likes
President Obama is quietly sobbing somewhere.
5 Likes
No. It’s because a very large segment of our society thinks it’s cool to play stupid.
1 Like
Let us take a moment, shall we, to sing the praises of Don and Melania, Don Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly, Ivanka and Jared, Eric and Lara, and even Tiffany, for selflessly sacrificing their personal protection equipment to doctors and nurses, and for generously giving their time and money to comfort virus besieged COVID-19 patients in hospitals up and down the East Coast. Their altruism can only be described as nothing short of saintly. Most assuredly they will have earned their rightful places when the history of the Trump era is written. What a blessed time we live in.
3 Likes
I’m guessing W is none too pleased with what’s happening either. I always thought Reagan was the worst president of my lifetime and then W came along. I never predicted that we’d have this shithead to deal with, especially in the midst of a global pandemic.
America’s perfect storm.
6 Likes
Don’t mean for this to be a direct personal challenge, but it’s a question I haven’t seen asked or answered. Given that this is a novel virus, can you tell me that all who survive the natural course of this disease do indeed develop immunity? It seems to be the general assumption. I just don’t know if it’s accurate.
2 Likes
Trump and Bolsonaro have a lot in common.
Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick also.
These people have a disease, a mental disease. There is an irreducible stupidity required for them to coalesce around consistently insane and evil ideas.
We are in such a bizarre twilight zone. Not because of the virus that ravages of the planet, but because of the fundamentally parasitic and pathologically dishonest people like Trump & Bolsonaro & Dan Patrick.
So we have two major diseases ravaging the planet. For one of them, there is reasonable expectation that we will have a vaccine before 2021 is over. The other is also lethal, but appears to be incurable – and unpreventable in large swaths of humanity.
Why oh why does evolution allow for the high prevalence of right-wing asshole-idiocy?
2 Likes
We’ve probably passed the peak moment of the version of humanity that we’re used to, one that’s largely US and Euro-centric and based on the post-WWII western alliance, and if we’re to surpass it, we’re probably going to have to undergo a pretty major transformation, like the locus of power and culture moving to the far east. The US is almost certainly past its prime, for good, and that might not be such a bad thing. Maybe we’ll finally grow up and take our proper place in the world, as equals and not crude dominators? Will the next generation speak Chinese as the lingua franca?
2 Likes
Oh please please please, let him not feel anything, for, like, ever.
2 Likes
I’m hoping that, amidst the sobs, he’s helping Joe reassemble the pandemic team they had in place and begin running a parallel response to real world developments. We simply can’t afford to wait for this Trump crew to figure it out.
3 Likes
Check this out, it pretty much summarizes where we are on that front:
1 Like
Still can’t figure out if Trump simply doesn’t care if vast numbers of people die so long as the economy and thus his reelection prospects rebound, is in denial about how many people could die, or actually wants this to happen, in the hopes that it’ll allow him to invoke additional emergency powers that he believes would make the election irrelevant and make him de facto dictator for life or something like it. This is surreal. Meanwhile, his numbers have gone up!
1 Like
Disco Fever!
Takes a fortnite…
Dead people can not vote. When the mega church and tele-pastor grifters start getting worried for their money streams, things will change. I am sure that Paula White put the Easter Business Resurrection in trump’s tiny brain.
The difference between teaching critical thinking skills and teaching standardized test taking skills…perchance?
1 Like
Propagandized News. That’s the problem. We have nearly half the electorate self-selecting to receive right-wing misinformation on an hourly basis.
2 Likes
Then where did I go wrong, as I somehow managed to develop some of the former despite being inundated with the latter? I specifically recall viewing fellow students who studyied to pass tests rather than to actually gain insight and understanding as fools, even if it was likely to serve them well in our society. I’m not saying that I can’t be duped, but it’s harder to do than with most.
You WOULD believe that given that you’ve clearly fallen for librul lies and propaganda.
/snark
Btw some variation of this is how religion is still with us despite being based on nonsense, at least the divinity part of it (some of the stories and moral rules are pretty good, I’ll admit). I.e. don’t listen to those “logical” and “fact-based” Satan-worshippers, they’re trying to trick you with their Satanic “logic” and “facts”. How do you fight that? You basically can’t because it undermines reason and plays on fear and the herd instinct to not stand out and to follow orders from above.
What the widespread availability of crowd-sourced amateur advice and opinions has produced is a “…for Dummies” approach to everything from video blogging to telecomminications security. Back before the internet deluge made professional journals and technical reference manuals obsolete, it took a serious commitment to research and training to gain anything more than a smattering of modern technological know-how. Nowadays, any neophyte can push a button on a smartphone or a tablet and crank out high-quality audio or video recordings, then use dumbed-down editing apps to produce half-assed content suitable for upload to YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Back when experience, training, logistics, and expensive equipment was required to produce commercially-viable media of any kind, amateur use was restricted to semi-pros producing content for public-access media channels. At this point, rank amateurism has overwhelmed media-production industries to the point where for most students, it is no longer a viable career path to pursue as a professional.
2 Likes