There’s a really stupid discussion happening on Twitter and in political analysis about whether Biden really did inherit a vaccine mess from Trump. Here’s the ultimate refutation from TPM, which points out that Trump’s vaccine distribution plan was to basically mail it to the states and let them figure it out. Not to mention that he and his group of dopes didn’t order enough vaccine.
As usual, the wankers who think the obvious fact of Trump’s gross COVID incompetence needs a re-think can only make an argument if they ignore the whole picture. Let’s go beyond the question of what a merely competent response from Trump would have looked like. What if we had decided that we were really going to slay the virus and show the world what we can do? What would that have looked like?
Let’s start with technology:
This is the Abbott BinaxNow home COVID test, made right here in the US of A. Look, it comes with an app! It’s a 15-minute test that requires a gentle nasal swabbing. What if a rock-star President had invoked the Defense Production Act, found some other manufacturers who would work with Abbott, and cranked out millions of these things? Just imagine if, last Fall, we a COVID test was easier to get and use than a home pregnancy test.
This is a KF-94 mask, the Korean standard. The shape is better than the more popular KN95s (better face coverage, in my opinion), the ear straps are adjustable for a better fit, and, most importantly, they come in individual sealed flat envelopes suitable for mailing that makes them easy to store. What if our imaginary rock-star President had something similar to this produced in massive quantities and mailed regularly to every residential mailbox in the country? Call it the USA-94 and put a god damned flag on it.
Of course, this would all be coupled with smart and forward-thinking policies, like subsidies for every business that had to close due to COVID, hazard pay and priority testing for essential employees, and a host of other things that I’m sure we can imagine.
The notion that what could have happened if Trump weren’t President was a merely competent response shows a failure to imagine what we could have done if we had great leadership. Of course, a press that’s committed to status quo ante at best can’t even begin to talk about this kind of stuff, so we’re left with weak defenses of a pathetic, careless almost non-response to the biggest worldwide challenge of the last hundred years.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
The contrast between what we’ve seen since Jan 21 and 4 years of (mal)administration by Hair Furor is truly incredible.
Booger
I wonder what that former doctor and Senator from Tennessee would say about that…what was his name, Bill Frist?
MattF
I recall, long long ago, complaining about the efforts to reduce testing because… virus testing might produce scary numbers. Yes, that actually happened.
frosty
Sigh. A painful thing to read. TFG cost us enormously with his narcissistic head in the sand response.
Mike J
I remember reading that the Post Office had a plan to distribute masks and were told absolutely under no circumstances were they to do anything that might imply there was a public health crisis going on.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/18/politics/postal-service-face-masks-coronavirus-trump-administration/index.html
Mike in NC
We all know that Fat Bastard spent two months calling the virus a hoax made up by Democrats just to make him look bad. Then he spoke to shitbag Tucker Carlson and decided maybe the virus was real but he still needed to personally make a buck off of it. Welcome to TrumpWorld.
Mike J
@Mike in NC: There was also a point in there where trump decided the virus was real, but was only going to kill Democrats, so they became actively pro-virus.
VOR
COVID-19 should have been treated as a serious national threat like WW2. I recall a presentation by Angela Merkel where she positioned COVID as the most serious crisis since at least German re-unification. Instead, Trump treated COVID as a PR problem, something overhyped which was solely intended to make him look bad. Oh, and a grifting (PPE) and branding (name on checks) opportunity.
Cameron
@MattF: Perfect infantile thinking: “If nobody sees it, it’s not there.”
debbie
@Mike in NC:
Even worse, remember when he wouldn’t let the cruise ships with COVID cases dock in California? “I like my numbers low.”
MattF
@Cameron: Actually, if I don’t see it, it’s not there. Playing peek-a-boo with a virus… is an error.
Betty Cracker
Another thing that doesn’t get enough attention, IMO: a finding from the Lancet Commission that estimates 40% of US COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided if our response had matched that of other industrialized nations. If that finding is correct, more than 150K people needlessly died, and that’s if you’re being charitable and just count the death toll through Inauguration Day.
Not only should the orange fuckstick not get one ounce of credit for anything positive related to the pandemic mitigation or recovery, justice requires that he and his entire sorry-ass crew be investigated for every self-dealing, calculated action that downplayed the danger and/or politicized basic safety measures. I’ve accepted that this will never happen, but that’s infuriating.
Baud
Via Reddit, apt.
zhena gogolia
GREAT POST!
Baud
Let’s thank Trump for a vaccine he won’t advise his supporters to take.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Not surprising, considering the continuing argument whether people die from COVID or with COVID. ?
debbie
@Baud:
That he himself took…in secret. ?
germy
Baud
Let’s thanks the kidnapper for feeding the baby he stole.
germy
Scout211
Yes, the media trying to generate controversy in order to get more viewers and more clicks to sell their product is very frustrating and annoying.
But consider just how much worse this would be now if TFG had access to his twitter and facebook accounts. Every wild and crazy tweet would be focused on as if it were written by a not-crazy person and the Biden admin and press secretary would be hounded to respond to all that crazy tweeting and posting. You know, like the past 5 years of the media covering TFG by reading his tweets.
The media is bored right now. I know it’s no excuse but it is a reason for their nonsense. I personally am content with the boredom right now and from the opinion polls since January 20th, the majority of Americans seem to be content with the boredom as well.
Original Lee
@Mike J:
Whereas, in Belgium, socialized medicine Paradise, the post office delivered 2 reusable masks per person.
Omnes Omnibus
@germy: Hey, at least it’s not made of essential workers. To Stephen Miller’s dismay.
MattF
Another TPM post on why there was no plan for vaccine distribution. Short answer: Because it would be very difficult.
Betty Cracker
Over at TPM, Josh Marshall is running a series of reader contributions about their “COVID moment” — when they realized the shit was hitting the fan, what their experiences have been like, etc. Here’s a link to one that got to Marshall, and it is heartbreaking.
Don’t know if it’s behind a paywall or not, but the gist is, the writer’s elderly mom came to live with the family right before COVID hit, and for months the family kept her safe. But then this happened:
The writer adds:
How horrible. TFG is gone, thank sweet merciful dog, but the stupid will be with us always, and with tragic results.
kindness
The media & manipulation of it captures too many minds and turbo spins them. It’s like you know how Ayn Rand devotees think they are deep and enlightened but really they are just selfish shits? Modern/social media is like that but on steroids. The marks never can see they are just marks.
PJ
@Scout211: It’s not just boredom. Writing about Trump was easy – just repeat his lies and outrageous claims, multiple times a day. No need to do any investigation or reporting – the “news” writes itself.
And because everything Trump said and did was bullshit, some of these journalists got a lot of attention for themselves because they had access to the “real” story being leaked by Trump “insiders” (one of whom was
Trump himselfexcuse me, John Baron), even though that “real” story was usually just as much bullshit as the official story.In contrast, the Biden Administration is professional and competent and there are no leaks being spoon-fed to journalists. This means they have to do their fucking jobs, which infuriates them.
germy
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-tesla-reopening-followed-by-surge-in-covid-cases-report-says
Ken
Not as big an error as playing seven minutes in heaven with one.
But yeah; Belarus, Brazil, Iran, Mexico the US — quite a list of “leaders” who thought it was nothing to worry about.
Ken
Maybe we could organize some excitement for them. Has there ever been a serial killer who targeted journalists? Other than Putin, I mean.
Fair Economist
@Betty Cracker:
We could easily have done much better than even that. Washington state, which has a decent size metropolis, serious housing cost problems, and plenty of wingnuts, had a reduction of *60%* from the US as a whole. Without federal help, even. 70% would have been totally doable with President Clinton, or Biden, or Obama.
Cheryl Rofer
And if Trump were president now, we would be having hunger games to get not enough vaccine.
jnfr
The media just overflows with worry that T**** won’t get credit! I can’t believe this. The man was in every way a disaster throughout this damned pandemic. He deserves nothing.
Mike R
@frosty: Does TFG stand for The F***k**g Goon or something else?
PJ
@Betty Cracker: There comes a point where I am forced to conclude that people who are “radicalized” by right wing sociopaths were larval monsters just waiting for social permission and approval to abuse, kill, and destroy to gratify their own terrified egos. I am hoping this teenager did not intend to kill his own grandmother, but he certainly was recklessly indifferent to whether he killed someone else, probably because it made him feel more savvy and powerful.
Ken
@Mike R: The Former Guy. A Biden phrase, I think.
Mike R
@Ken: Thank you
oatler.
On The View yesterday some weary host asked Megan McCain what she thought of Biden’s speech. We got “It was super-good but Trump should have gotten more credit…”
jnfr
@Scout211:
T**** no longer infesting Twitter is one of the best things about our new timeline.
germy
@oatler.:
I wish they’d played her the clip of her husband on Fox, calling Biden a senile fool.
Gvg
A smart President could have slowed it getting going in the USA. Trump closed America to China only well after it was too late and ignored all the other vectors possible, plus no test and trace. I mean hey didn’t even have tests at the airport. And sudden announcements that implied even Americans wouldn’t be able to get in and no set ups for quarantines….he and his coneys just didn’t understand what anything meant so they had no clue what to do.
WereBear
@PJ: Having raised teenagers, I suggest that might apply to certain kinds of adults, but teens do not have working brains. Several vital areas are “down for maintenance” and they literally cannot think; not even as well as they did when they were ten.
Gvg
@Mike R: Biden’s name for Trump “the former guy” is pleasingly contemptuous.
Jay
@Mike R:
The Former Guy,*
*from the Official President Joe Biden Whitehouse Style Guide.
Brachiator
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Pretty much says it all.
The attempts to give the Orange Beast any credit is odious and irrelevant.
ETA: This is also what “first” comments are for, at their best.
Suzanne
One of the elements of the COVID story that just astonishes me is that Trump had this incredible PR opportunity to make himself and his followers look amazing and he totally bungled it. Just totally passed it up. One of the golden rules of PR is to never miss an opportunity to be seen conspicuously doing the right thing and being on the right side. If he had invoked the language and tenor of “the strongest response to this once-in-a-century threat to American lives” and freaking printed up face masks with American flags on them and “this is the real Greatest Generation because we pull together in shared sacrifice against mortal threats” and sold COVID bonds…. he would have been absolutely unbeatable. Instead, his last year in office was just the same as the previous three… petulant and short-sighted and self-absorbed and unable to capitalize and just fucking dumb, dumb, dumb. Dude had an incredible opportunity to remake himself as a (biological) war president AND HE DIDN’T FUCKING SEE IT and so he whiffed it.
Cameron
@germy: The most remarkable thing (to me) about her husband is that he got busted a few years ago for plagiarizing Jonah Goldberg. Is there anything more pathetic than an ersatz pantload?
Jay
On the other hand, the global presence of the Covid variants shows that other than a fews places, we still arn’t doing enough.
CaseyL
Another item that has been washed away from memory in the tidal wave of awfulness thanks to TFG is when his Administration abruptly – and I do mean abruptly – ordered all Americans in other countries to return to the States back in March or April… and did so without making any provisions at all for thousands of simultaneous arrivals at US airports.
There were no extra personnel or entry gates for the arrivals. No screening of arrivals.
News carried stories and photos of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people fresh off the planes – from Europe, mostly, IIRC – standing in tightly packed lines at airports for HOURS.
And all of them eventually went home to states all around the country, to states that also had no protocol for processing people who’d just come back from overseas.
I’ve always wondered what happened to those folks: how many of them were carriers, how many of them came down with Covid, how many died, how many infected others who died.
Suzanne
@Mike J:
Other, smarter presidents would salivate at the opportunity to burnish their reputations on a crisis this large. Never let it go to waste and all that.
Trump is not just thoroughly incompetent, he’s also completely unstrategic.
BC in Illinois
I’m old enough to remember Donald “No, I don’t take responsibility at all” Trump.
ceece
if the Trumpies had been halfway competent on Covid response, they would still be living in DC.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: he couldn’t be filmed or photographed getting a vaccine because it would make him look weak, according to his maladjusted, thirteen-year-old bully’s notion of masculinity. Same reason he was anti-mask.
He couldn’t figure out that getting people money (which I absolutely believe he could have bullied McConnell into) would be good for his campaign, because the idea of bullying and humiliating Joe Biden appealed to those same instincts.
He couldn’t focus on the vaccine post-election because when he was alone at night in the residence, when not even Rudi Giuliani and Judge Jeannine were taking his calls, there was nothing to distract him from the ghost of Fred, staring at him in cold, silent contempt, not even bothering to form the word “loser”. Just filling his brain with it.
debbie
@Suzanne:
Oh, Trump’s always, always been allergic to doing the right thing.
PPCLI
From Nov. 3 to Jan 20, TFG ignored all government functions because he was obsessively consumed with his plan to overthrow the election he decisively lost. During this time the average daily death rate went from under 1000/day to over 3300/day. New cases/day went over 300,000.
Not only did TFG do nothing to alleviate the situation, he actively made things worse in a variety of ways, including blocking the transition to the Biden administration. (He evidently believed that carrying out the transition, as the law required, would interfere with his plan to overthrow the election he decisively lost.)
Despite this handicap, the Biden administration went from 0 to 60 with astonishing competence as soon as it took over, and we can all see the results now.
So yes, Trump’s actions do deserve far more attention than they are getting, but the Biden administration has the good grace not to dwell on that. He should be grateful.
Betty Cracker
@PJ: I agree, but I also think maybe there’s a latent larval monster population that is probably distributed more or less equally across societies, and the trick is to make sure it doesn’t get activated on a large scale. Lies and propaganda are activating it here just as surely as lies and propaganda turned “good Germans” into Nazis a few generations back. I feel like there’s a tipping point, but I don’t know where it is.
MagdaInBlack
@Mike R: Your version works just fine for me.
Mike in NC
I won’t be happy until everyone is saying that Trump is “the formerly breathing guy”.
BruceFromOhio
With the GQP old-timers in the Senate dropping out, it’s a good time to explore the excellent Trumpistas drooling at the chance to be more Trumpista than ever.
Behold, Friend of The Swamp, Josh Mandel: “a mean eight-year-old whose parents wondered where it all went wrong.”
Be advised: behind every single Trumpista candidate running in 2022 for GQP seats in the Senate, there will be a story like this one. And CNN, FTFNYT, et al, will lack the depth and experience of local reporting. If you live in a state where one of these GQP wannabe’s is currently coiled, look to the local news, and please support local journalism wherever possible.
mrmoshpotato
@Cheryl Rofer:
Or the fascist fuckers would be stealing all of it (along with still stealing PPE) for themselves.
Chris T.
Coneys? Am I missing something about calling people rabbits, or is this a weird typo for “cronies”?
A Ghost to Most
tfg is a ghost, still worshipped by some, but facing imminent destruction. Worry more about the 80 million people searching for some new lie to latch onto. It will almost certainly involve religion, and likely involve violence.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That deserved to be seen again.
MagdaInBlack
@Betty Cracker: The fact that they can now find each other and validate each other thru social media is the key, it seems to me. They’re not just isolated crackpots, they’re now a connected mass of crackpots. Is that the activation/tipping point?
Eta: Out of curiosity and maybe in self defense, I watch some of the far right folks on youtube, they get a lot of followers.
smith
In her speech for the Dem convention last summer, Michelle Obama made the point that TFG hadn’t done better at managing the pandemic because he just couldn’t — he didn’t have it in him. She said this in a sorrowful “bless his heart” kind of way, I think meaning to imply that he was simply inherently incompetent.
I agree about the incompetence, but I think there is another factor here: For some people, when faced with something big and scary and uncontrollable, the only coping strategy they have is denial. To acknowledge the true scale of the threat is simply too overwhelming. TFG is one of those people (see: 2020 election results) as are most of his followers (see: climate change).
I think this explains a lot of the really exaggerated emotional response by both TFG and his followers to easy precautionary measures like wearing masks — for some, the overreaction even reached the point of murdering someone. To give in to mask-wearing meant also giving into the terrifying idea that there’s something looming in front of you that you have no control over that could readily kill you.
Jay
@MagdaInBlack:
yes.
Baud
Reddit comment in response to Trump’s press release taking credit for the vaccine.
“Please clap.”
mrmoshpotato
@Gvg:
I sincerely believe the virus might’ve never reached our shores, and some other shores under a President Hillary Clinton.
She definitely wouldn’t have ignored the pandemic response playbook, wouldn’t have pulled the CDC’s eyes and ears out of China, wouldn’t have disbanded the CDC’s pandemic response team, and DEFINITELY wouldn’t have spent months calling it a hoax like an incompetent, traitorous, orange shitstain who sucks Kremlin ass.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PJ: my sister taught high school English for 25 years. She was the teacher the jocks were afraid of and the nerds sought out– she has a sharp tongue and no patience for bullies. She told me the kids who were drawn to Ayn Rand were the smart, socially awkward ones, mostly boys, the type who got impatient when the class had to go slow for the ones they considered dumb. I don’t pay enough attention to Ben Shapiro to know if he appeals to the same demographic, but that’s my hunch. Add to that the class and race and social strata that impact the way Covid spreads, and I can see this happening in the bedroom of a large suburban house where the internet never goes down, and people can isolate pretty easily.
That’s how the story scans– the parent is a “recovering conservative” who believes in science. If you’re a head-up-your-own-ass teenager, and you don’t personally know anyone who got sick, much less died, until you killed Grandma, and this guy the NYT called the “cool kids’ philosopher” is on your computer all day telling you you’re a cool, smart kid, practically a philosopher, and this so-called “plague” is made up by the kind of losers who have to have everything explained to them, like, five times … I can see it.
BruceFromOhio
@smith:
See also: climate change.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: +1
TFG wasn’t just narcissistic, he was overtly malevolent (as we’ve discussed here before – Woodward’s book, etc., etc.). And the damage he did is world-wide. We didn’t hear about the virus early because he pulled people out of China. We didn’t have an effective response because he destroyed the WH pandemic office. We lost time because the first US tests were contaminated and gave false results and it took weeks/months to get that fixed. All of those things are the result of bad management.
Meanwhile, Germany seems to be starting another infection wave, Brazil is a continuing disaster, more infectious virants continue to spread across the globe, etc.
US leadership matters to the world, and bad leadership gets people killed.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Ken:
The media is bored right now.
Outside the US, journalists are regularly targeted for harassment, imprisonment or death. In the US, it’s mainly intimidation, a few physical assaults. There are times when it has been worse.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@A Ghost to Most:
I cannot tell you how relieved I am that you still have internet up in your remote camp of well-armed Folk Who Get It, Man. I hope you’ll find time to keep posting in between your turns training the noobs for hand-to-hand and digging new latrines.
Suzanne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
So true and yet SO FUCKING DUMB. He could have claimed credit for having a vaccine produced! (Not saying that he deserved credit, but he still could have claimed it.) WTF. His completely fucked-up personality made him pass up what could have been, if presented to someone wilier, an incredible opportunity.
I used to think he was good at turning weakness into strength, because he, in fact, was. I remember watching one of the GOP debates, and he was asked if he was too angry, in contrast with all that happy warrior bullshit from Kasich and the others. And his response was something like, “I am proud to bear the mantle of anger”. At that moment, I knew he would win that year, because he was taking what was considered to be negative, but twisting it to be a positive, to be seen channeling righteous anger on behalf of angry people. He lost that ability to pivot.
mrmoshpotato
@Mike in NC: I hear ya there!
Suzanne
@smith:
That’s when she said, “it is what it is”. And truer words have never been spoken. He absolutely could not climb out of his mindset. More nimble politicians would have been able to turn it into a win for themselves.
I still think there needs to be social sanction for Trump’s followers. And for that teenager who killed his grandmother. Jesus Christ.
James E Powell
The members of the press/media who are demanding that Trump get “more credit” shoudl be required to review, out loud, why Trump shouldn’t get “any credit” on COVID. He was a disaster – the occasional Dana Bash “new tone” moments notwithstanding.
These people are still committed to the formula that news = whatever Republicans are angry about today. Some, no doubt, are committed supporters of Trump and all things Republican. But I suspect most are just acting on the base assumptions that they’ve relied on for their whole careers. Republicans are the grown-up, serious, real, and damn near permanent rulers. Democrats are childish dreamers who can never be given complete control of the government because they will destroy America and make us all eat nutritious snacks.
trollhattan
@Mike J:
Utterly galling. IIRC it was April, no, May before I was able to acquire surgical masks for the household. Before that it was home-brewed bandannas and such, and N95s were just a bridge too far.
Two months, just to get masks, sourced from China to be precise, and in the meantime we still had to go to stores, buy gas, go to the doctor, do various life-extending things knowing every trip out was a possible exposure, infection, hospitalization, death (during a time we were still sussing out how the virus behaved and was most commonly transmitted to whom and from whom). As a sideshow the kid was navigating the weirdest senior year since WWII and picking a college and trying not to go teenage nuts.
There will never be a lone item for which I will praise Trump. Not one. That somebody could tunnel beneath George W Bush as worst imaginable president seemed unthinkable and yet we just lived through four years of just that.
CaseyL
@smith:
I’ve never understood this as a long-term strategy when it comes to objective, concrete instances and events. I can understand using denial as an interim coping mechanism. Most everyone does that: An immediate ‘This can’t be happening!” in the hindbrain while the forebrain scrambles to figure things out and make a plan.
But it seems TFG and his adherents never get out of the “This can’t be happening!” stage. That’s what floors me, not least because you would think at some point the refusal to deal with what is should have won them a Darwin Award and removed them from the voter rolls.
Benw
I think some of the “give TFG a little credit, guys” crowd is also – consciously or not – grasping for a way to feel less responsible for normalizing his hollow brutality.
laura
It could have been so different. He could have followed the manual that was left for him. He could have had the post office mail out masks on the regular. He could have marshalled the defense act to address testing, he could have had the government pay people to stay home thus minimizing the risk to front line workers who could not. Could have gotten teachers and students the tools and equipment to salvage some measure of the academic year – maybe focused less on testing and more on art and music and addressing the trauma that children experience. He could have set national, regional and local goals. He could have pushed for bipartisan legislation earlier and he would have gotten it. He would have been reelected in a landslide. Instead, he fucked it all up – every jot and tittle of this. Instead, we had Jared. We had Louis DeJoy. We had sycophants all the way down. He literally said publically that he took no responsibilities.
For me, shit got real in late January after daily readings of Anne Laurie’s posts on a concerning respiratory virus in China and northern Italy. I flew to Fort Lauderdale Florida in mid January for a work convention of the international union we worked for. Probably a thousand attendees. It was so cold Iguanas were falling out of trees. My coworker and I took the brand new Richard Branson Brightline Train to South Beach- where his new Cruise Line was about to launch. Crowds everywhere. Flew back into SFO and on the skytrain to the rental car businesses with stops at each terminal. At the international terminal stop travellers boarded from Asia. Half were wearing masks. On our drive home my coworker and I talked about Covid and what potential exposures we’d had. For two weeks we both fretted and monitored our temps and overall health. We know that we dodged a bullet. When Governor Newsom ordered a shelter in place on March 14th, I was grateful that he made the right call and likely saved lives. Not everyone did.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Most teens go through a phase in which they are certain that the world is fucked up and everyone is stupid, especially their parents. They don’t particularly need Ayn Rand for this. And even here, before Rand, there was Nietzsche.
And in the words attributed to Mark Twain:
Most people come through this phase with a larger, empathetic understanding of the world.
But there is something about some of those yoots who are attracted to libertarian ideas that make them selfish and insufferable as adults.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell:
I used to see some of Alex Witt on MSNBC when I was too lazy/addicted to turn it off after Joy Reid on Sundays. She specialized (still does?) in what I thought of as the “Doesn’t the President have a point?” contrarianism.
See also: Tweety’s “the Mommy party and the Daddy party”. Dude has some issues.
mrmoshpotato
@James E Powell:
Review out loud to people who had family die of COVID and would definitely want to punchisize some talking bobbleheads on live TV.
Suzanne
@Benw: Absolutely.
The people that want to rehab Trump’s image are trying to feel less guilt-ridden. On some level, they feel terrible, and especially if they were loud-and-proud about their votes in 2016, they know the rest of us are judging them.
Good. If you’re that fucking stupid that you couldn’t see disaster coming with a vote for Trump in 2016, then you don’t deserve respect or esteem. You deserve other people thinking you’re a bad person.
Remember that disappointed Trump voter who said, “he’s not hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting”? That’s some sotto voce shit right there.
trollhattan
@laura:
Anybody whose hair wasn’t standing skyward by early-mid January wasn’t paying attention. It was obviously “coming” and because of our ignoring travel restrictions, most likely already here. Remember the Covid cruise ships? Good times.
Betty Cracker
@MagdaInBlack: I couldn’t agree more. Our own Cassandra, aka Hillary Clinton, has been warning us about that for a while. Not just her, obviously. But Clinton talked to Michelle Goldberg a while back and said she thinks dealing with social media algorithms that monetize “engagement” to sell ads by serving up increasingly extreme content is the “problem of our age.”
Ruckus
@Cameron:
You for sure are going in the right direction, I believe that you just haven’t gotten the entire gist of the issue…..
I don’t believe that his “thinking” ranks as high as infantile. And I can’t use the word perfect in regards to shitforbrains without the extra couple words added on there that takes it to perfect fucking asshole.
I’m certain that others might disagree with me on specifics but I think the general concept is that shitforbrains is one of the worst humans to have existed, to put it in some perspective 418,500 Americans died in WWII, 128,650 in Korea and 58,220 in Vietnam, for a total of 605370. Now we aren’t there yet and hopefully we won’t get there but as of right now we are at 545,555 covid deaths in the US.
Three major wars of the last 80 yrs and we are only 60,000 from surpassing that total. Now there would always have been a sizable number of deaths from a worldwide pandemic that spreads as easily as Covid but we are on a roll to have one of or the highest percentage of deaths per population, in the world.
That’s on Donald Trump. It could have been far, far less. He murdered thousands of human beings, with his ignorance, pompous disregard for life, racism, and yes, ignorance gets listed twice.
trollhattan
I’ll give Republicans this, they can certainly stay on brand.
“So say we all.”
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Nominated for rotating tag.
Ken
I recall a study a couple of months ago, based on testing stored blood samples, that indicated the virus was in the US back in late November, around the time (or perhaps even slightly before) China started to notice the deaths. So I don’t think the US could have kept it out in any timeline, but there are definitely plenty where the response was much better.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
Fucking Ben Shapiro. May 100k thousand mosquitoes be his bedside companions for the rest of his life.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: ?? LOL Thank You!
J R in WV
@Mike R:
The Former Guy, to avoid typing his name or even remembering who that was… You know, that former guy?
cain
@Suzanne:
That’s not how this works, Trump was never going to be that person. He won specifically because he had traits these people liked and those traits do not lend themselves to actually seriously working as president.
So glad I don’t have to see his face, or see his too small accordion hands.
Betty Cracker
@cain: Honest to Christ, I don’t know how anyone listens to that Shapiro shit-for-brains for more than 30 seconds. Not because of the dumb and offensive words, which are par for the wingnut course. I mean because of his horrid, high-pitched voice. He sounds like a furious, helium-huffing squirrel. I’d rather listen to Alvin and the Chipmunks have group anger-sex in metal colanders while sliding down a chalk board-covered hill.
PJ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: In Eighth Grade, my English teacher had us read an Ayn Rand book. It wasn’t very long, a couple of hundred pages (I think it might have been Anthem, but I can’t be bothered to check), but it was really boring, and I hated it for that reason but also because it just seemed to be about justifying selfishness. Thankfully, I never had to read any Rand after that, and was surprised when I got to college and encountered the few maladjusted kids who worshiped her, because she was such a terrible, morally bankrupt writer.
My guess is that the kids who are attracted to Rand (and people like Ben Shapiro) are not necessarily smart (and clearly lack some critical thinking skills), but really want to believe that they are smarter than other people, because this makes them feel superior when, in fact, they are really insecure, and, even better, it gives them justification for being selfish pricks.
cain
@laura:
This. 1000x this.
I never can understand the media needing to give the GOP credit for anything. Mark my words later down the line – they media will ask that the GOP get credit for their part in passing the ARP bill too. It’s some wierd bi-partisanship thing that ONLY APPLIES to Democratic presidents and congress members.
You won’t hear one peep out of them about bipartisanship or giving credit when it is a Republican president. Assholes. Bipartisanship is only for Democrats, it’s what they do, other than spend like a drunken sailors and tax people. Shit.
CaseyL
@mrmoshpotato: A President Hillary would have done so much better than what we had, they’re two different universes.
HOWEVER, a President Hillary would have been destroyed in the MSM for whatever number of infections and deaths happened on her watch.
We have had the very expensive “luxury” of comparing real-world data to a hypothetical: Hillary’s most-likely response, and the most-likely MSM/GOP reaction to it, versus what actually happened.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
When I was in high school, early 70s, Heinlein was the gateway drug to Rand.
laura
@trollhattan: You see, you’ve got to keep the people on the boats until everyone has been exposed… and then you get them all together on a bus with medical personnel to ride to the quarantine at a military installation to wait out the inevitable. See also transporting prisoners throughout the entire CDCR because idiots are in charge.
Every workday until retirement was variations on a theme of how to manage the virus on the job – at the prisons, at the Vet’s Home, at the County, at the water districts. The chaos and the fear and the what am I supposed to do with my kids. That I could deal with- mostly due to real time info thanks to Anne Laurie and Amir Khalid, YY Sian, Robert Sneddon, Sloane Ranger et al. What I could no longer deal with was the RWNJ’s who were gleeful to proformatively scoff at the hoax and the denial of observable reality. I retired sooner than I wanted to due in part to my fear of getting sick from an asymptomatic individual or an asshole.
cain
I wonder if it is the fact that by rehab Trump’s image means that they also get rehab in the process? I mean they fluffed that fool – and now that we have competence again – the press wants to make the other guy better because it would make them look good too.
mrmoshpotato
@cain:
Bedside companions, eh? Are they buzzing out bedtime stories? ?
I’d rather they were sucking out all his blood.
mrmoshpotato
@CaseyL:
I know that. She still would’ve managed everything better.
karen marie
@Mike in NC: Unfortunately, he has two sons and a daughter who fully intend to follow in his footsteps.
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
Why do you hate mosquitos so much?
Cameron
@smith: Along with cowardice, incompetence and totally unearned self-regard, Trump’s laziness was a big part of the fiasco. The guy has never done any work in his life, wouldn’t know how to, and wouldn’t want to if he did know how to.
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus: Haha
MagdaInBlack
@Betty Cracker: The day that my boss told me he had been listening to Ben Shapiro, and he was a pretty smart guy, well educated, worth listening to etc…was the day I realized my estimation of his ( my boss) intelligence had been a wee bit off. Oof.
Gvg
@Chris T.: typo. Crony’s. Actually I think it might be spellcheck, because i didn’t think that is what I typed. I leave it on because I really do need the help, but it’s not perfect.
Uncle Cosmo
@jnfr: Even if – even if – the Crime-Family Former Guy got one thing right (jumpstarting vaccine development), he got everything else wrong. Mostly because he saw everything through the bass-ackwards spyglass of “how does this help me get re-elected/put more cash in my pocket?” Blind pig, say howdy to truffle.
You might be able to concede that one point – if the Lamestream Media weren’t so utterly corrupt that they’d TRUMPET THAT ONE POINT TO THE HEAVENS while burying all his fuckups. Because it gets the eyes of imbeciles on the page, where advertisers will pay big bucks to market stupid, useless, wasteful shit to the rubes at yooooge markups.
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: Your description sounds like the brain MRI I had a week or so ago.
Another Scott
@Ken: +1
Also, I recall reading recently that northern Italy was hit so hard very early on because of clothing factories with large numbers of Chinese workers.
“Why should we restrict travel from Europe if the virus is coming from Wuhan??”
:-/
The only way to crush the pandemic early on was to know what was happening when there were dozens or hundreds of known cases. By the time it got to a thousand known cases (mid-late January) with continuing exponential growth, it was too late (because of the paucity of testing) to expect that it hadn’t already traveled nearly everywhere.
LiveScience:
(The story mentions disputed evidence of even earlier circulation in Italy.)
Just as with national economic statistics, world health statistics lag – and might lag for months. It’s clear we need robust monitoring because the world is so interconnected and small now. Once a new virus takes off, we need to assume (unless we have evidence otherwise) that it will be everywhere within weeks unless sensible actions (masking, testing, tracing, etc.) are quickly put in place.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cameron
Brachiator
@Cameron:
Trump thought and behaved like a third rate mobster. He and his henchman Young Jared, sought to hoard medical supplies, and dole them out (or sell them) to friendly states and cronies.
The Orange Beast was a terrible president who did not understand how to use the office and staff at his disposal to get things done. He was only ever interested in the fame and the grift.
mrmoshpotato
@Cameron: Your love of mosquitoes is just weird.
Cameron
@mrmoshpotato: No mosquito ever lied to me.
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
Like?
Dump never wanted the job part of the office.
mrmoshpotato
@Cameron: Or broke your heart?
Eunicecycle
@BruceFromOhio: that’s an excellent article about Mandel. What a little twerp.
Ken
Ugh. This is well-known with online scams — they are often written to be deliberately clumsy or ungrammatical, because that helps select for people who are dumb enough to fall for them. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might be happening in the news industry. It doesn’t even need a conspiracy or deliberate plan; if publishing drivel brings in more revenue, capitalism will select for drivel. And I used to think biological selection was harsh…
Ken
You remind me of a line from a novel with vampires; maybe John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. “Isn’t it the lie young men tell young women — it will hurt for just a moment, and there will be only a little blood…”
Cameron
@mrmoshpotato: Fortunately, none of the ones I’ve encountered have been big enough to do that.
Starfish
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Belief in Ben Shapiro can be knocked down with this.
artem1s
my personal pet peeve is TFG didn’t activate FEMA and the Guard, order all state governors to evacuate the land grant colleges and turn them all into mass production labs for processing tests and set up testing and treatment centers in all the gyms and auditoriums, and use the dorms as quarantine housing for front line workers. Hell they could have set up PPE manufacturing centers in abandoned malls and storefronts in communities that lost local businesses when fucking Walmart rolled into their towns. We could have safely employed so many people out of jobs. let the med, nursing, dental students stay on campus and give them a choice – pitch in on the effort, get paid a stipend, get some life experience, and get a semester of tuition room and board on the house for every semester worked – or go home and sit alone in your room. Anyone caught on video partying in FL loses a semester of credit and fails the current semester.period. Instead we had the fucking NCAA pressuring governors to get back to the business of making campuses act as free farm clubs for the NFL. It was more important to Mike DeWimp that OSU get to play in a asterisk championship game than it was to make sure the rest of the student body was safely sheltering. The rural pandemic in the US can pretty much be traced to high school and college sports last summer and fall. It’s disgusting that the federal agencies didn’t just pull funding and shut that crap down.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
A couple of good articles on why Italy was hit hard from The Conversation.
And Wired.
The travel ban, especially with respect to Italy and Spain, were too late and didn’t restrict Europeans coming form holidays.
germy
(The Onion)
MisterForkbeard
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I kind of see it.
I was a smart, sorta-loner kid in my teens. Had a good support system but didn’t glom on closely to any particular group. I thought Ayn Rand was interesting but wrong and used to think that a lot of the ends justified the means, at least in the abstract. Things like “okay, murdering someone to prevent 100 deaths is perfectly acceptable” even if I’d never actually do it.
But you know, I also grew up with a lot of minority kids. My brother had a gay friend who committed suicide over bullying. I had long hair and was a nerd, so people tried to bully me. So I had some stupid views, but I also had empathy. I think if I didn’t already have a good sense of self worth and if I hadn’t had friends and family I could count on, I might have fallen into this trap.
What a lot of people miss is that Conservatives praise the crap out of young people who agree with them. Ben Shapiro is one of them – he started off as a 13 year old with a badly written essay that went kind of viral, and he was showered with praise. And it’s a hard thing to get out of, too – step out of line and you ostracized and attacked. You go from being a genius and part of the in-crowd to being an idiot communist who hates America. It’s a cult system and rewards you with self-esteem and simultaneously constantly threatens you if you go astray in the slightest.
It’s attractive to a lot of people, and then they can’t get out. They might not even want to. :(
Another Scott
@Brachiator: Thanks. I was thinking more in terms of things like this DW story from May 2018:
International travel for business and pleasure and migration (immigration, guest workers, etc.) is extremely common now. Without accurate and rapid surveillance for new diseases, saying “the virus came from Wuhan” is about as helpful as saying “the rain came from the sky”. Unless we’re looking, we don’t know where new viruses are and flyswatter restrictions are less than helpful.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
MisterForkbeard
…Also, it took me until now to figure out what “TFG” stood for, and I am here for it.
artem1s
@Suzanne:
see Bush, George W. His response to a once in a millennium opportunity to rid the world of the middle east dominance over cheap energy was to tell us all to go to the mall and buy more cheap plastic crap from China. He could have gone down in history as the Father of the Green New Deal – but no – Darth Cheney needed to use 9/11 as the perfect grift opportunity to enrich himself and Halliburton even further. Did the GQP learn anything from his crappy reaction to 9/11? Fuck no. More tax cuts for the rich and more war for the military industrial complex.
Brachiator
@mrmoshpotato:
The Orange Beast was a terrible president who did not understand how to use the office and staff at his disposal to get things done. He was only ever interested in the fame and the grift.
Kinda what I said. Trump wanted to take credit for everything while doing nothing. But he and his cronies actively prevented other people from doing anything effective to deal with the pandemic. And what little he did do was ineffective because he was stupid, vain and incompetent.
I recall some meeting where Rudy G flat out said that the governors of New York and California could get more of what they needed from Trump if they kissed up to him. What an insane and infantile abuse of power.
Barbara
I am convinced that continued efforts to place Trump at the center of the political and cultural narrative are the equivalent of making sure everyone who shows up the game gets a participation trophy, especially the white kids, no matter how badly they played. Many of you have read about the two police officers from a rural Virginia county (Franklin) who were among those mobbing the Capitol, after previously participating in Black Lives Matter protests last spring. Well, NYT had a pretty perceptive article on the impact of both events and Trump’s loss on race relations in the county. They closed with a quote from one of the black women who has been active over the last year:
However bizarre, Trump’s continuing relevance is like reassurance that the mostly white male reporter class still has the right to shape the narrative. I can’t explain it, except that being mostly white, they or their family are fearful of their looming loss of power.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Very true. Do we know whether virus infection was actually high among Chinese workers in Italy?
In other countries, the issues relate to other immigrants, and the common connection is the travel and the social spaces, etc.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: I don’t know whether it was “high” among the Chinese community in Italy, but the LiveScience link earlier talks about Chinese tourists in Rome being discovered to be infected early on.
Obviously, once the virus is circulating, the elderly and infirm are at greater risk.
I think there is a general consensus that the virus originated somewhere in China, but may have been circulating for months before it reached a critical mass. The CPC has tried to put the blame on Italy, (and they obviously tried to control the recent on-the-ground WHO investigation in Wuhan), but I don’t know who regards those arguments seriously.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
@artem1s:
I assure you that Cheney’s motivations were ideological. The Bush administration could have aimed a lot harder at seizing the oil if money was the motivation. Cheney has his name on an academic paper explaining that if you just knock over one Middle Eastern dictatorship, the rest will eagerly line up to worship the US’s wonderful freedom strength. He was a sincere and hardcore neocon with a bizarre fantasy view of the world. He never got over it, either. What struck me in interviews with him after Bush’s term was over was how angry Cheney was that America didn’t understand that he was right about everything all the time.
rikyrah
@debbie:
In secret ??
rikyrah
If Dolt45 had won, the vaccine distribution would look like Florida.?
rikyrah
The national mask mandate by 46 on public transportation has made a difference
rikyrah
@Scout211:
They get a briefing daily by the Press Secretary, but it is full of POLICY, AND, if you don’t like her answers, she refers them to other Departments. But, that would mean WORK. They would actually have to understand the issues,. They don’t want to work like that.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
Uh uh uh ?
Starboard Tack
@Cameron:
I had that same MRI last week and found it oddly soothing. I asked for another 10 minutes and the tech replied “said no one ever”.
It’s started to snow in Denver and the lawn’s completely covered.
rikyrah
@PJ:
Completely on point
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Bravo.
You have the gift my friend….
Now that is a description of modern torture. Of course modern torture would have to include an endless loop of BS. Why that even has the right initials for everything about him.
rikyrah
@Cheryl Rofer: nothing but TRUTH ????
trollhattan
Words I seldom type: good for Texas. Their percent population fully vaccinated has taken a jump to nearly 18%.
rikyrah
@Benw:
Bingo
They spent four years trying to normalize this clown, and when folks called them on it, we were hysterical ???
Dan B
@Mike R: Yes!
And there is The Former Guy. Many three word, and four letter, combinations apply.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
shitforbrains lived completely down to his abilities
He is an example of a complete negative individual. Every single thing he does, thinks or says, is a negative. He has always been a supreme example of negative, one at it’s lowest value. Think of any other negatives and ask yourself, how many of them have killed so many Americans. Hitler didn’t. Hirohito didn’t, even added together. Yes Americans would have died no matter who was president. Far, far more did because of him.
Cameron
@Starboard Tack: Let me guess. They gave you the psilocybin FIRST, didn’t they?
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
They are selfish.
They think they are the center of the universe. And can not understand why everyone else doesn’t see what is so clear to them.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott:
In Southern California, when that happens we call it a miracle.
tybee
@Ruckus:
i seem to recall that number was under 60k
Benw
@rikyrah:
Patient 0 who called T**** voters on their bullshit: Hillary fucking Clinton
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
There are conservatives and some lefties who believe that American power is the only thing that matters, for good or for ill.
But Cheney and his ilk represent a generation of conservatives who believed that if the US had been allowed to do some unspecified thing, then Vietnam would have been “won.”
This false arrogance led them into the Middle East follies.
Ruckus
@tybee:
That’s the number on I got on a search of all of the American war dead since and including WWII. If that is inflated by some 60K then shitforbrains has exceeded the combined total of American dead for 3 major wars. Notice I didn’t count the last 19 yrs of warfare either.
Starboard Tack
@Cameron:
That would’ve been nice, especially if it was covered by insurance. But, no, just my ordinary, weird neurochemistry.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Yeah. That’s pretty much the problem.
sab
One thing I have been very grateful for is that Covid happened in Trump’s last year, not year one or two. So we had an election coming soon, and 60% of us understood clearly what the stakes were. We see from the last four years that nothing could have induced GOP senators to do anything to save us. We’d be worse off than Brazil and taking the rest of the world with us.
lowtechcyclist
@CaseyL:
Shit, I’d forgotten all about that, but yeah, I remember the photos, and how there were all these potentially Covid-infected people crowded together – an absolute nightmare of a super-spreader scenario. Probably didn’t see another one that disastrous until Sturgis.
And of course, Trump’s active undermining of Dem governors trying to do the sane things to control the virus in their states, clearly being on the side of the Michigan protesters rather than backing Gov. Whitmer, for instance. He didn’t just do next to nothing to fight the virus – he aided and abetted the damn thing.
And of course he periodically would get into a groove of blaming it on the Chinese. Well, if this was a hostile attack by China, what was his response? Open the doors, let ’em in, I for one welcome our new coronavirus overlords!
I can’t believe the non-Fox media are giving Trump an ounce of credit. His leadership was a disaster from beginning to end. The only positive thing he did was to provide some financial guarantees to vaccine development programs that started in January 2020, months before Trump (briefly) took the coronavirus seriously, and well before he provided any backing.
Oh yeah, I forgot: he put Jared the assclown failson-in-law in charge of a bunch of Covid-related shit. And of course by then, we’d long known what that meant: fuckups combined with some underhanded plan for personal enrichment. I guess we’ll find out what the latter consisted of eventually.
Robert Sneddon
It’s a pretty general assumption by nearly all Americans of all political stripes that America is the leader of the Free World, an unquestioned assumption and uncaring of any non-American opinions in the matter.
Ken
You sure they didn’t just juggle the numbers? For example, if they decided not to count the under-18 set (since they aren’t getting vaccinated), that reduces the denominator and the percentage jumps.
Starboard Tack
@Robert Sneddon:
Assuming there are approx. 200M potential voters in the US, how many have you surveyed?
?BillinGlendaleCA
So I got a headline on my phone from CNN via Google “Joe Biden can’t quit Delaware, even as President”…really CNN? I don’t remember that sort of headline about TFG…”TFG can’t quit Mar a Lago, even as President”. Never saw that headline. Come on CNN, up your game.
sab
Is it true that Moderna, started in 2010, was a child of the post 2008 stimulus package? Wasn’t Biden in charge of monitoring the distribution of said stimulus package. So that the Moderna vaccine is more his baby than Trump’s? If Mpderna hadn’t been working on a vaccine already we would still be injecting bleach.
Brachiator
@Robert Sneddon:
There are conservatives and some lefties who believe that American power is the only thing that matters, for good or for ill.
It’s more than that. I had a lefty co-worker who absolutely insisted that if the US gave up nuclear weapons, every other nation would do so immediately afterwards.
Similarly, this person believes that if the US became a pacifist nation, no other nation would ever seek to replace the US. So, the US, by having any military at all, is the sole reason that there is not world peace.
Russia and China are belligerent only because the US is evil.
A Ghost to Most
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Seriously, or just taking a shot? As I’ve said many times, I predicted this to my nazi brother in 2002, and broke from him in 2007. That said, I’ve never known how it will end, or indeed if it will end. They always double down.
sab
@BruceFromOhio: My late uncle, from the east of Cleveland suburbs, used to tell me a story about Josh Mandel on Lyndhurst city council when Josh was a young pup. Josh decided, incorrectly, that Lyndhurst was running a budget surplus. So he decided, all on his own, as just one of several councilmen, to send out a letter to the citizens of Lyndhurst that there was a surplus and that they deserved to get tax money back. No consult with the rest of council or the mayor.
And yet, after such a stunt, he went on to become a Republican star.
Chief Oshkosh
@Betty Cracker: The 40% finding is damning enough, but what these studies typically don’t game out (don’t know about this one – I’m too lazy to read it all) is what would have been the effect if the US had simply continued to lead on these initiatives as it had right up through Obama? IOW, it’s not good enough to compare our response to other “industrialized” countries because those countries have looked to us for leadership in these situations, AND WE FUCKING LED!
I think an easy comparo is simply: what did we do with the two epidmeics/nascent pandemics that Obama faced? Contrary to all the rightwing fucktards’ mewlings, we kicked ass.
So, what is Trump DIRECTLY responsible for? Probably about 90% of Covid deaths in the US and some non-trivial percent worldwide.
Suzanne
I am standing outside a store supervising Spawn the Younger’s Scout cookie booth. Some dude came up to buy cookies and started complaining about mask wearing and shouting about wanting a BIG gathering for Fourth of July and not a small gathering and THIS HAS GOTTA STOP and dude just take your cookies and get away from the kids.
A Ghost to Most
@A Ghost to Most: I’m going with gratuitous shot, but then, you were never one of the thousands who were prepared to stand up. Some of us have an over-developed sense of duty to country, I guess.
Chief Oshkosh
@Ken: Sadly, this thought also ran through my two remaining brain cells…
mrmoshpotato
Haha
Chief Oshkosh
@CaseyL:You are so right.
Shit, the Americans returning from Italy, alone, would’ve jumped-started the plague. Add in everyone else and stick a fork in us…
Ksmiami
@Brachiator: I believe to this day that Milan Fashion Week in 2020 seeded a ton of spread in Italy and beyond because the timing was pretty close…
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:
Trump interpreted COVID through the lens of his usual low cunning, as a way to divide Americans into pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps. By signaling that he wasn’t going to wear a mask and implying that people on his team shouldn’t, he turned wearing a mask or not wearing a mask into a visible sign of team affiliation that was literally written on people’s faces, and strengthened the loyalty of his cult members. Sure, he might have gotten more electoral advantage by actually playing this right. But he didn’t have it in him to do that, whereas the division and demonization card, he knew how to play. And he probably did get as much out of it as he could.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I’ve seen people insist recently that racism only exists in European countries because of American influence. And… no. I do not believe this. The character and the targets of it are markedly different from American racism, for one thing.
Robert Sneddon
Why do only American voters get to elect the leader of the Free World? Is it part of that three-fifths thing your Founding Fathers came up with?
They Call Me Blue
@Fair Economist:
Anytime someone complains about the restrictions we have here in WA, I remind them that a year ago the Seattle area was ground zero for the virus in the U.S., yet one year later there are only four states with a lower per capita infection rate. I’d say our governor did a pretty damn good job.
nclurker
@James E Powell:
heinlein could tell a good story.
rand,less so.
i read both.and i didn’t feel like i had to become stridently
selfish.
gateway to rand?
nah.
bcw
The head of biolabs, which built its own PCR test lab and became the lab for half the PCR tests in California made exactly the same point in a talk to my company – tests that take a week are useless and the 15 minute bionex turnaround when combined with places and support for the infected to quarantine away from their families could have been the most effective way to stop the spread of the disease. [Like what other countries like Australia did.] The tested the bionex against PCR and found that the only people the bionex test missed had viral load levels so low that they were unlikely to spread the disease. The also found the highest loads and thus also highest likelihood of spread were from day 3 to three weeks, and that the load was similar across all age groups and whether symptomatic or not.
Steeplejack
@trollhattan:
A-fuckin’-men.