Holy Crap what was that??

Did anyone see or hear that speech last night? Even when things are looking grim, like a virus threatening to wipe out most of the Fox News audience, he just can’t stop the show.

It was bad enough that he framed the problem in terms of partisanship. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by that. But it’s Trump who refuses to meet with Pelosi to work on a package of legislation to help affected Americans. He REFUSES to meet with the Speaker of the House, probably because he’s holding a grudge over the impeachment and her ripping his state of the union speech to bits. Come to think about it, wasn’t that speech delivered in late January-early February right after the impeachment vote when the pandemic was in full swing in China? If Trump was having meetings about it in mid-January and classifying them, what are the chances that Pelosi didn’t know about them? I mean, not the contents but that they were held at all? Suddenly, shredding the speech takes on a whole new meaning.

His speech offered no new information except for the bit about banning flights from the EU. So what’s that all about?

The EU is planning to ban flights from the US and this is a preemptive retaliatory strike?

The WHO in Geneva told Trump to get in line for the tests they’ve given to all other countries because he asked for them too late and they’re almost out? (Something tells me it’s the last thing he’d do. His type of Republican hates world organizations like the UN, EU, NATO and WHO)

Or is it because he still has to play the role of the strong man? Some of his base is starting to remember how to apply logic. They see that Italy is *not* a third world country and its healthcare infrastructure is falling apart. The whole country is on lockdown. It’s one thing when the Chinese were getting it but when Italians start suffering, it starts to get scary.

It’s even scarier because the rest of the EU seems to be keeping on top of the cases. But something went wrong in Italy. We are being compared to Italy.

Therefore, Italians and any of the rest of the free wheeling cosmopolitan EU must be banned from America to keep us safe. Italians have become the new Mexican immigrants, dying to scale our walls and reach our shores in any way they can to spread their dirty, filthy contagion.

Adding EU to the mix is a nod to Putin. And UK is excluded from the ban because it’s no longer part of the EU.

But it doesn’t matter. The disease is already here. It’s out of control because we didn’t test enough people in time so there was no way to isolate and quarantine ahead of time. Our places of business have had to do the pandemic response without much guidance. It’s too late to stop what is about to happen. We are going to be Italy on a much larger scale.

If anything, trump gave the markets even more reason to be worried. They aren’t going to recover until someone in the White House takes control of the situation we’re in.

If there aren’t calls for his resignation before the end of the week, I’ll be shocked.

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This is what we are dealing with. Read the whole thread:

https://twitter.com/christin210/status/1237910702662262787?s=21

A couple of things:

1.)Some people won’t get the message until it slams them in the head like a baseball bat. It’s like having to bomb Dresden or Hiroshima to stop WWII. It has to get that bad before they believe it. Ok then. Nature has a funny way of catching up to you. You can ignore it all you like but sooner or later (probably sooner) the virus will be upon you and your local environment. The results will be very hard to disbelieve. It’s just a matter of time. You have about a week. I used to be fascinated by the plague in 1347-1349 in Europe. Giovanni Boccaccio, a Florentine poet, wrote a famous first hand account. Even though Covid19 is nowhere near as lethal as the plague, reactions to it sound eerily familiar:

Some thought that moderate living and the avoidance of all superfluity would preserve them from the epidemic. They formed small communities, living entirely separate from everybody else. They shut themselves up in houses where there were no sick, eating the finest food and drinking the best wine very temperately, avoiding all excess, allowing no news or discussion of death and sickness, and passing the time in music and suchlike pleasures. Others thought just the opposite. They thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink and be merry, to go about singing and amusing themselves, satisfying every appetite they could, laughing and jesting at what happened. They put their words into practice, spent day and night going from tavern to tavern, drinking immoderately, or went into other people’s houses, doing only those things which pleased them.

…

In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and the executors of the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased.

2.) Think about all the relationships that have been ruined by this. Fox News viewers and Rush Limbaugh listeners will follow their leaders off a cliff even as their friends and families try to throw them a rope to hang onto. They will mock, ridicule and defy reality right up to the point where it can’t be denied anymore. Arguing with them is not useful because they are not thinking with the logical parts of their brains. It’s an exercise in frustration. At some point, you have to disengage and let them deal with fate without your support and concern. That’s what Rupert Murdoch has given us.

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No, I’m not panicking yet. I don’t think sciencey types like us are prone to this kind of panic. It’s because we understand the way nature works. It’s not a mystery. Mysteries can be scarey. This kind of thing is as predictable as the sunrise. It will follow a certain course. Our immune systems will adapt either through a vaccine or naturally. The human species will not die out. But some of the survivors are going to be economically ruined.

What makes me sad is that there’s a good possibility that my elderly aunts and uncles will not make it through this.

And due to my recent travail, I am considered high risk and was sent home first.