Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The Cult Rolls On: Septuagenarians Should Be Willing To Die To Strengthen The Economy; States Need To Be Very Nice To Trump To Get Federal Aid; The Country Will Be Raring To Go By Easter


The Peoples Temple is alive and well, with dual headquarters in the White House and at Fox News.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was on Fox News Trump TV last night. He said grandparents should be willing to die in this pandemic, so the economy can be strong for their grandchildren. Patrick is also the Texas chairman of Donald Trump's re-election campaign.
My message is that let's get back to work. Let's get back to living. Let's be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we'll take care of ourselves, but don't sacrifice the country. ... I'm not living in fear of Covid-19. What I'm living in fear of is what's happening to this country. ... "As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?" And if that's the exchange, I'm all in. ... [I]t's worth whatever it takes to save the country."
That's what Patrick said. What he meant was: He's willing to let tens of thousands (or even millions) of Americans die so he and his wealthy friends don't lose much money in the next few months. (Why say "Let's get back to living" when you want septuagenarians to die?)

If you cannot see that Trump's Republican Party is a cult at this point, I don't think you'll ever see it. Zealous followers are calling for human sacrifice to glorify their Perfect Leader. ... Here are two common features of a cult and some warning signs of a potentially unsafe group or leader:
1. A charismatic leader, who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose power ... who has no meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group and its source of power and authority.

2. A process of indoctrination or education is in use that can be seen as coercive persuasion or thought reform [i.e., "brainwashing"]. The culmination of this process can be seen by members of the group often doing things that are not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of the group and its leader. ...

Warning signs of a potentially unsafe group or leader:
• Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.

• No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry. ...

• Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions. ...

• [F]ormer followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil. ...

• The group/leader is always right.

• The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" ... no other process ... is acceptable or credible.
Well, looks like we got ourselves a cult.

Here is more cult-like behaviour:



Donald "Wartime President" Trump, March 22, 2020:
I think it's very hard for rich people to run for office. It's far more costly. It's a very tough thing. Now, with all of that being said, I'm so glad I've done it. Because, you know, there are a lot of rich people around. I've got a lot of rich friends, but they can't help and they can't do what I've done, in terms of helping this country.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo mocked Patrick's idea:
Well, we'll just sacrifice old people. They're old people anyway. ... What is this, some modern Darwinian theory of natural selection? You can't keep up, so the band's going to leave you behind. ... If it's public health versus the economy, the only choice is public health.
Last Sunday, near midnight, Dolt 45 tweeted (in CAPS, so we know he's very serious):
WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!
Trump, who cares only about big business, is preparing to ease the social distancing restrictions. One senior official said he is losing patience with the period of national self-isolation. It's been only ten days. He's like a little kid who can't sit still for 20 minutes.

Trump got this dangerous idea by obsessively watching Fox, where earlier in the evening, Steve Hilton said:
You know that famous phrase, "The cure is worse than the disease"? That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it is just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people.
Trump's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow (who suggested Americans play the stock market recently, as it was in an unprecedented free fall), agrees:
We'll have to try to do that [ease social restrictions, because the] economic cost to individuals is just too great. But the president is right. The cure can't be worse than the disease, and we're gonna have to make some difficult tradeoffs.
Trump explained [sic] that widespread coronavirus infection is better than people staying safe at home because people at home can get depressed and that could be deadly if they commit suicide. ("You're going to have suicides by the thousands.")

Of course, Trump cannot order or force everyone back to work. He could withdraw the CDC guidelines and the national emergency declaration and veto any further aid to workers - and then blame the states when that phase of this catastrophe hurtles out of control. The state governors have got to speak out, loudly and bluntly, if this actually happens. Maybe the media could do the same. That would be an interesting experiment.

Halting the social restrictions will cause thousands of deaths, which would (as should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain) bring the economy to a halt anyway, as hospitals are overwhelmed and the "elements of medical" run out.

According to one model, with no social distancing, the US could have as many as 9.4 million people simultaneously infected. Hundreds of thousands would die without access to treatment. That's exactly what Italy went through, with the healthcare system massively overloaded and doctors forced to decide who would live and who would die. Italy is finally seeing some results of putting the entire country under quarantine on March 9, as the number of deaths shrank for the second day in a row.

Even Lindsey Graham, one of the world's most noxious Trump sycophants, has distanced himself from Trump's latest asinine comments:
Try running an economy with major hospitals overflowing, doctors and nurses forced to stop treating some because they can't help all, and every moment of gut-wrenching medical chaos being played out in our living rooms, on TV, on social media, and shown all around the world. There is no functioning economy unless we control the virus.
Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2020:
The Trump administration was set to implement a Korean War-era defense mobilization law on Tuesday to expedite the production of about 60,000 test kits for the novel coronavirus, but at the last minute deemed it unnecessary ... Trump, speaking Tuesday evening ... said the Defense Production Act hadn't been used, saying the government hadn't "found it to be the case" that the law was needed.
Trump said the opposite last Friday, claiming he had invoked the Act and "we put it into gear".

VP Mike Pence announced today that McDonald's will be offering curbside delivery for truckers who aren't able to use drive-thru. That may be why Trump claims he can see "light at end of the tunnel".

My eyesight is not quite as keen . . .




Trump: "This experience shows how important borders are." ... Really? The UN recognizes 197 countries and territories and the coronavirus is affecting 197 countries and territories. ... So how important are borders again?

Trump spoke of the pandemic today in the past tense. "We learned so much discipline". ... The US topped 100 deaths in a single day this past Sunday. Yesterday, there were 10,168 new confirmed cases and 140 deaths. Today's death toll is the highest yet (143 and counting).

Happy One-Month Anniversary to this tweet:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been busy contradicting Trump's numerous lies and misstatements. He will be out of a job whenever Trump gets mad enough at being corrected in public. So far, Fauci says: "To my knowledge, I haven't been fired."

Trump thinks it would be "beautiful" to see America's churches packed for Easter (April 12).
I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter. I gave it two weeks. ... We will assess [next Monday or Tuesday] and give it more time if we need a little more time. We have to open this country up. Somehow, the word got out that this is the thing we are supposed to be doing. ... It's been very painful for our country and very destabilizing. We have to go back to work much sooner than people thought.
[Trumpy Trumpy (parody): "Easter is a very special day for me! Every Easter people come to me crying. Last year a big strong man in a Hard Hat said to me, 'Sir, we're saying Happy Easter again, my 401K is up 85,000%, and you brought Jesus back from the Dead!' The man had never cried before."
Lemon Harangue Pie: "13,000 people died of Spanish Flu after attending a Rally the Troops WW1 parade in Philadelphia in September 1918."]

Trump was asked why he's fixated on Easter. He refused to answer the question, saying: "I just thought it was a beautiful time."

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's criticisms of the federal government's sluggish response (which are completely factual) have gotten under Trump's notoriously think skin. Trump implied today that governors of states have to be very nice to him if they want any federal assistance. "It's a two-way street. They have to treat us well, also. They can't say, 'Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.'"
Trump crowed that the federal government sent 400 ventilators to New York State.

Cuomo: "You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators? What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You're missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude."

Trump doesn't care: "He's supposed to be buying his own ventilators."

New York City is now the global epicenter of the pandemic. There are more than 25,000 cases and that number is expected to keep rising. Cuomo: "We're not slowing it, and it is accelerating on its own." New York is projected to need up to 140,000 hospital beds (up from 110,000 only a few days ago); only 53,000 are available.

Cuomo warned the rest of the country: "Look at us today. Where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future."

During the news conference, Dr. Deborah Leah Birx (the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force) was explaining why there are so many positive cases in New York City. She mentioned population density, crowded subway cars, and people returning to the city from Asia after the holidays. Trump interrupted her with a smirk on his face. "Do you blame the governor for that?"
Trump:
We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off. ... We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn't call up the automobile companies and say, "Stop making cars. We don't want any cars anymore." We have to get back to work.
Are automobile accidents contagious now? ... Neither seasonal flu nor car crashes overrun hospitals or threaten the nation's supply of medical masks and ventilators.

On March 6, while at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump unknowingly highlighted yet another facet of his ignorance: "Does anybody die from the flu? I didn't know people died from the flu." Now that Trump has learned that people do indeed die from the flu, he's mentioning it all the time, of course. ("You know, most people don't know that.")

In fact, in May 1918, Trump's grandfather died during the influenza pandemic.
The 49-year-old man [a German immigrant businessman, husband and father of three] had projected an image of robust health. A few days earlier he had been strolling down the streets of Queens with his 12-year-old son. Suddenly, he slowed his gait and told his son that he felt sick. By most accounts, he went to bed and died within 48 hours, on May 30. Years later, that son would recall the eerie scene of a parade marching down Jamaica Avenue as his father was lying dead upstairs, his devastated mother, weeping.

The man's name was Frederick Trump, and he was the grandfather of President Donald J. Trump.

[He was one of 675,000 Americans who died (more deaths than in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined). Worldwide deaths are estimated at 50 million — roughly 2% of the world's population at that time. One out of every four people on the planet was infected. (2% of the today's world population would be 155 million people.)] ...

[B]ecause Frederick Trump failed to do mandatory military service in his native Bavaria before sailing for America, his immigration to the United States may have been legally murky. It's a complex tale, but immigration records show his employment as "none" and that he became a U.S. citizen in 1892. But Bavarian authorities eventually revoked his citizenship.

In America, Trump earned his fortune operating restaurants and hotels in Seattle's red light district during the Klondike gold rush, peddling booze and "private rooms" for women (common shorthand for prostitution at the time). ... Like his son and grandson, he also engaged in questionable schemes to build his businesses, including staking a bogus mineral claim on property in Washington and building a hotel on property to which he had no legal right. ...

The winter following Frederick Trump's death, deaths from the flu pandemic exploded. Public health resources were already strained by World War I, so not much was done to combat it. ...

[Gwenda Blair, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and the author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President, interviewed Fred Trump in 1991 about his father's death. Blair is among the few biographers to have had access to the Trump family and to have investigated their genealogical history. In her numerous interviews with Donald Trump, Blair said he "showed zero interest in history".]
Bonus Stupid: Ann Coulter Cannot Understand A Simple Graph
As a representative of the master race, one would think you'd be smarter than this.
Maybe skipping math class to read Mein Kampf was a bad idea, Ann.
Decimal places — are they a libtard plot?
Graduate of Trump U?
8 out of every 5 people think math isn't your strong suit.
How are you dumber than I thought?
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