Dispatch from the gutter
Dan Scavino, the guy who helps Trump with his tweeting (he spells the hard words except when Trump forgets to ask him), posted on Facebook yesterday:
Sorry, Dr. Faucet! At least you know if I’m going to disagree with a colleague, such as yourself, it’s done publicly — and not cowardly, behind journalists with leaks. See you tomorrow!
Schools and…oh my god…football!!!!!!!!!!!
Meanwhile no of course Trump is not trying to silence Fauci, why would you even think that?
Oh, a Ben Garrison cartoon. “Not a neo-Nazi”, but #1 with neo-Nazis.
What gets me with these people is that they’re panicking about things like keeping school closed and no football with spectators, etc. But they won’t do a damned thing to help this country get to the point where the virus is under control. They won’t wear a mask, and they won’t stop hanging out at bars. They say it’s no worse than the flu, etc.
Flu kills 12,000-61,000 or so per year in the US, depending on stuff like which strains are dominant. Let’s grant close to the high end: 60,000.
Car crashes kill about 40,000 (last number I saw was about 36,500) per year in the US. I don’t think these people complaining about wearing a mask or the other ways to try to stop virus spread are going around ripping up stop signs because of “muh freedum!” and cutting the seat belts out of their cars, but …
Guns kill about 36,000 per year in the US.
So far this year, COVID-19 at 135,000 deaths has killed about as many people as the flu AND car crashes AND gun violence TOGETHER do in a year. And it’s the middle of July. Think about all the things that we do in particular for car safety and the flu. And these jokers can’t even be bothered to wear a mask so that we are less likely to need to do that other stuff that they don’t like … like closing retail and having no football.
Good comment, ARC, very on target. And another thing they don’t think about is the supply chain. Because we aren’t even doing the minimum for safety, because our cases are going up, a lot of countries have cut off travel. That means supply chains are being interrupted. Much of our manufacturing has been moved offshore, so we rely heavily on movement of goods from countries. Grocery store shelves are emptying. There isn’t anything we can do about it, except get measures in place to contain the spread. We are looking at some much more severe problems than no football. Retail stores will close because they have nothing to retail. Sure we can grow our own food, but a lot of Americans have grown accustomed to easy preparation, and have forgotten how to eat locally or even prepare fresh produce from elsewhere. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and Trump has no ability to fix anything.
Trump thinks the BLM protests are bad? Wait until a bunch of heavily armed, hungry white Trump supporters show up at his doorstep demanding he do something.
Biden is far from perfect, he was not my choice of candidate, or even in my top several, but he must win this fall. If he doesn’t, we will truly be a third world country, probably by the end of next year. (We are already well on our way; it’s only the fact that we are rich and industrialized that keeps things like the gaps between rich and poor and the corruption at the top from turning us fully into third world status.)
Another problem with supply chains, particularly in the US, is that they are efficient, which makes them brittle. I’ve read about large cattle farms, where the farmer doesn’t own the animals but grows them on license from (ultimately) some private equity firm. If the capacity for the beef isn’t there further down the chain because restaurants are closed, farmers are left with animals they don’t own, so can’t sell locally. So they’re destroyed. And so we can easily end up with catastrophic cascading failures.
It’s good to have certain types of inefficiency in networks like that because it tends to facilitate redundancy and adaptability.
Not only is the artist a “not neo-nazi”, he is also a shitty artist. He is trying to depict Fauci, but the face is almost a dead ringer for Mitch McConnell.
It’s the middle of July, and deaths only began after two months had gone by. That tally went from 1 to 135,000 in about five and a half months.
Thanks. I was wondering who, and couldn’t think of it for a moment.
It would also be a not-bad caricature of the former British Prime Minister, John Major, a man so bland and instantly forgettable that he had to re-introduce himself to his wife every evening.
AoS:
Don’t forget that John Major famously (if not accurately) ran away from the circus to become an accountant.