Who do we blame for the Restaurant/Bar shutdowns? Maskholes.

The “patriotic” forces for “freedom”. “Liberty” and “personal responsibility” are the ones shrieking the loudest about the poor restaurant and bar workers:

Things escalated quickly on CNBC this morning.

This is fantastic…https://t.co/BMlluNDhE5

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) December 4, 2020

The problem is that if everyone had worn masks and practiced social distancing in the first place and did it consistently, the rate of infection wouldn’t have continued to soar and we could have pin pointed where measures might have to be taken with greater accuracy.

If they didn’t buy into the distracting blame it on China game and realized that you can’t stop a virus from crossing state boundaries, maybe we could have gotten better testing, contact tracing and PPE issues resolved. Then the infection rate wouldn’t be so high.

If the MAGA nuts hadn’t let the Republicans politicize the act of compliance with public health measures, then the infection rate wouldn’t be so high.

But now, the infection rate is increasing quite a lot. Day by day, there is a new record spike in cases and deaths and the healthcare workers are exhausted.

And every time you walk out the door, your chances of bumping into someone with the virus is higher than the day before.

That’s why the restaurants and bars are closed and the workers are screwed once again while McConnell et al try to stiff the poor who are trying to keep their heads above water in this environment.

Don’t get all furious with the rest of us mask compliant sheep that there are thousands a people out of work requiring an even bigger stimulus bill that will wreck your bank accounts, precious investments and tax cuts that you’re about to lose.

All you had to do was wear a fucking mask, stay away from superspreader events and not go into crowded rooms with low ceilings with poor circulation. You should have encouraged your Republican Senators to do whatever it takes to make sure restaurant and bar owners could furlough their workers without catastrophic financial impacts. It should have been easy.

But you didn’t.

So, now the bars and restaurants have to close. More people will be out of work, more children will be at risk of hunger and homelessness. There will not be a Christmas for them this year. Some school aged kids don’t have access to high speed internet so their education will suffer.

Believe me, they will not forget the bad juju that they are experiencing in these formative years. They’re lives will be shaped by it.

Don’t expect to get kindness in return.

Anyway, it’s all your fault, maskholes. You could have limited the spread, bent the curve, been part of the solution. An ounce of prevention would have been worth a whole lot of cure.

Now, we’re going to have to do things the hard way.

Stop the whining and outrage. We’re thoroughly sick of it.

Critics review Trump’s latest straight-to-video movie

I saw it so you don’t have to. Actually, that’s not quite true. I watched the first 7 or so minutes then I started to fast forward 5 minutes at a time. But no matter where I landed, it sounded like the same section of the narrative in the script played over and over again as if the audience didn’t get the important plot devices, symbolism and foreshadowing the first several times and so needed reinforcement at regular intervals. So I skipped to the predictable ending. Sure, even bigger and more terrifying but not very original.

I think that’s a danger for the sane. It just looks like Trump being Trump, trying to outdo himself but still reinforcing the same themes of prodigal son, ne’erdowell, Peer Gint with a soupçon of Atilla the Hun. Think Woody Allen with his latest incarnation of Hannah and her Sisters. The neurosis and sense of alienation is tiresome. In this case, We may be witnessing Trump’s plot turn where we watch him visibly melting, melting, suffering the cruel injustices of the world, what a world. Or he may be getting ready to nuke Atlanta. So hard to tell.

Phillip Bump at WaPo critiques the nuances:

Again, there wasn’t anything new to it. It was a pastiche of so much that we’ve heard so often. It presented no coherent case for the existence of fraud, instead substituting a volume of accusations for an abundance of proof. Having hundreds of people make unfounded allegations isn’t proof of wrongdoing, as any review of those sheaves of affidavits collected by Trump’s campaign from various supporters makes clear. Having one person make hundreds of unfounded allegations isn’t proof either — but Trump’s goal isn’t proving each point. It’s getting Americans to accept maybe just one or two, so that they’re receptive to his broader point: Something Must Be Done.

That something isn’t clear. At first it was to block the counting of ballots which were showing he lost key states such as Pennsylvania. Then it was to block the certification of votes in states such as Michigan. Then it was to try to get state legislatures to appoint new, Trump-friendly electors to the electoral college. Then it was to get a case to the Supreme Court where something magical would slice through the Gordian knot tied by American voters.

In the speech, Trump made vague demand that someone — anyone — intervene.

Golly, who does he have left? Barr has pissed him off, Wray is still hanging onto his job, presumably with enough information to lock him up for a good long time. I guess he could always turn to his new Secretary of Defense. But good luck getting the military rank and file to do his dirty work. This definitely merits some thought about where this story is going next.

One thing is for sure though. Trump’s tragic flaw is he is unable to see others as more than extensions of himself. What’s going on right now must be very frustrating because he’s not getting his way like he usually does. He probably didn’t see that coming so decisively.

He also doesn’t realize that there are a lot of other characters, 80 million of them, who are just as angry, maybe more angry, who aren’t going to let his minions roll over them.

I’d say pass the popcorn but I’m tired of this movie already. I’m just going to go pack my bug out bag so I’m prepared for anything.

*****************

This part is indicative of where he’s going with it:

“This election was rigged. Everybody knows it,” he said. “I don’t mind if I lose an election, but I want to lose an election fair and square. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we have no choice to be doing that.”

Here’s the nub. Or rub.

Overturning the certifications and appointing electors for Trump to the electoral college that negates the actual will of the voters would be very bad in most cases. But in this case, those votes for Biden were cast by very UN-American people so wresting control of the process for the real Americans is totally ok.

And who are the real Americans?

The 73 million people who are extensions of himself, of course.

Where have we seen stripping the rights from certain citizens and not others before? Don’t you first have to make them enemies and somehow alien? And then when you’ve reduced those aliens to less than human, it’s much easier to get the real citizens to commit acts of violence against them, right?

I’m sure I’ve seen this movie before. No, no, don’t tell me.

And another thing…

https://twitter.com/birbigs/status/1334003796951883777?s=21

$170,000,000 could be put to better use.

I’ll bet the donors have a bird about spending tax money on hungry children. 🙄

************

In case you missed it…

The next obstacles on the course

Lots of news tonight. Let’s see. Oh! I know! While we are waiting to find out which criminal Trump associate made a campaign contribution to the Trump campaign in exchange for a pardon, did you hear that the House stripped down its request for Covid unemployment bennies and stimulus and Mitch McConnell still said No? Yeah, that actually happened today.

I think it’s going to be a bleak Christmas for a lot of little kids this year. Maybe we can do something about that.

And then there’s this I found. A lot of people are about to find out that if they make less than $75,000/year, their taxes are about to go up in January 2021. That’s before Biden takes office. And those taxes will continue to go up year after year for the next SEVEN years.

That’s right, we can drag him kicking and screaming from the White House but he’s going to make it uninhabitable for the next president.

Now, how to explain it to the Trump base, who simply refuse to believe that their party is capable of stiffing them for the bill? It’s probably going to go something like this:

https://twitter.com/someknew/status/1333914992899280897?s=21

I am so not looking forward to this.

So what?

CNN reports on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in China. The Chinese didn’t realize they were dealing with a different virus at the beginning. They thought it was just a spike in flu cases. It took them 23 days to verify a diagnosis from a screening test. They weren’t forthcoming with information.

CNN exclusive: Vast trove of leaked documents shows China underreported Covid-19 numbers, took weeks to diagnose new cases and didn’t disclose a December flu spike in Hubei. https://t.co/mtXf3JM7NN pic.twitter.com/azzFFJ5yRO

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) November 30, 2020

It sounds to me like they thought they had a particularly nasty flu on their hands initially and didn’t immediately make the connection to another disease like SARS, which is much more deadly than Covid. It was only when the tests for flu came back negative that they started considering other viruses.

This sounds so plausible I’m not sure why it’s news. I’m not letting China off the hook here. There may be cultural and sociopolitical reasons why the Chinese reacted the way they did. Maybe individuals try to avoid sticking their heads up because they’ve seen what happens to people who deliver bad news. Think of it as the Chinese version of Chernyobal. Yeah, go watch that on HBO. This behavior would be consistent with what I’ve observed working with Chinese colleagues. They tend to keep a low profile but there’s a Chinese Underground that passes information among itself, not for general consumption. Survival mechanism from years of communist rule, re-education camps, and trying to fit in the best way possible without drawing attention to yourself? Or using the new outbreak as a way to settle personal scores? Competition opportunities? A history of scientific or medical sabotage might have participants looking over their shoulders instead of sharing too much of what they knew. I could see those things happening.

But so what? Seriously.

By the middle of JANUARY 2020, while Trump was rage tweeting over his impeachment, the pandemic was already being tracked around the world. The Johns Hopkins tracker was reporting cases in Toronto shortly after Martin Luther King holiday weekend. I saw the two little dots on the map and wondered how close I got to exposure when I visited Canada that weekend.

I’m no freaking genius but if someone like me could be both fascinated and concerned, and if there was already a tracker available, then it’s incomprehensible to me that our governmental agencies that are supposed to be watching for this sort of thing weren’t aware of it also. It didn’t require Trump’s interest in it at that time to summarize that there was a very serious problem on our horizon.

When Biden takes office, we’re going to find out who knew what, when, and who went to the White House with their hair on fire to alert the Trump administration. We’ll learn when they decided to turn the response over to the private sector so they could make money on it. We’ll find out what the plans were with respect to the hoarded PPE and who decided to turn a global pandemic into a political hammer to pin the blame for the response on the Democrats in blue states.

There are some political observers who think that Covid hurt the president. When the dust settles, we may have found that the opposite was true. A change in political “leadership” may have been shown to be more necessary if Trump hadn’t used Covid as a naturally caused smoke screen to keep his other destructive actions hidden. We watched in horrified disbelief as he intentionally hobbled the response to the virus while he deliberately underplayed the seriousness, and confused and mislead his base.

Trump didn’t need the Chinese government in Beijing to tell him what to do or how to screw things up. He did that all on his own. He used Covid to enforce a sense of learned helplessness in his adversaries. Yep, the whole country could suffer illness and economic disaster and it would be impossible to get rid of Trump before the election and there wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do to dislodge him from sitting like a dragon on a hoard of federal response plans and money.

Tell me you weren’t angry and frustrated. That was the point.

So, I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass when, what and where the Chinese scientists knew about coronavirus or how they could have missed the clues. Even if there were no cultural or political barriers to China being more forthcoming, there was still plenty of warning before the virus hit our shores for Trump to mobilize a response. In fact, it would have been better for all of us if he had just delegated responsibility in an area he knew absolutely less than nothing about to the scientific professionals. Getting out of the way and just signing authorizations to trigger built in defense mechanisms would have saved us all a lot of grief.

He didn’t. He used it to his own ends.

Don’t look now but he’s using the outcome of the election in the same way. He’s spreading and reinforcing misinformation intentionally to mislead and anger his base and confuse everyone else. You think that all of the state certifications will put the matter to rest that Biden won? Did you miss the way he persuaded half of the US to ignore and downplay a deadly virus and jeer the rest oh us for wearing masks?

Never underestimate the ruthless and unscrupulous to take advantage of a crisis.

Don’t blame Beijing. To suggest that the Chinese made us behave this way makes us look stupid and powerless before our Chinese overlords.

No American should accept that our government cowered before Beijing while South Korea and New Zealand got its shit together. It’s time to face up to the fact that Trump did this to us deliberately.