Update with some links at end
Enough already. I keep reading shock and horror that the thing in the White House is letting people die, doesn’t care, how can he?
This is what he has always been. His “management style” is to set the underlings squabbling and then extract power or profit or praise, or all three, from the free-for-all. (I’ll get links eventually. That’s in a biography written years ago by ? not sure, Tony Schwarz?)
That’s what bullies do. He’s always been a bully. Bullies work by setting people against each other and then picking off the defenceless with a following of the fearful.
The people who voted for him wanted a bully. They wanted someone who would hurt the “right people” for them. His campaign in 2016 wasn’t going much of anywhere until he stood on a stump and bleated about Mexican rapists. Then his popularity shot up, and stayed up as long as he was dumping on somebody.
The only difference now is that he has the power of the Presidency to amplify him. Of course that leads to suffering and death. It always would have. If not from disease then from one of the other three horsemen of the apocalypse. Plus, they’re still there. A disease doesn’t have to be the end of it.
People don’t and never have meant anything to him. He has always been that way. In his mind, people are about as significant as aphids are to you or me. He is never going to see the suffering or death of aphids as something he needs to consider. Stop being stupidly shocked and start acting on the knowledge of what he is to limit the damage!
Now the structure of his latest crimes against humanity are starting to loom through the fog of chaos.
There’s an epidemic in China, so he (and his cronies, of course) profit from selling medical supplies and protective equipment to them. Once covid-19 is a pandemic and it’s here, the US runs out because too much was sold off overseas. And now he’s using taxpayer money to funnel half the imported supplies to private business. (See, e.g. Katie Porter [1].) They sell at black market prices to the states that he’s made sure have to fight each other for what they need. And somewhere in there I’d bet the entire farm he and his cronies are getting their cut at every stage of the extortion.
Remember what Adam Schiff said? If you give him a pass on extorting Ukraine, next he’ll extort the USA. [Correction 2020-05-20: It was Pam Karlan [2] who said that, not Adam Schiff.]
It’s the truth. It has to be faced. Hoping that ignoring it will make it go away before we die is not working well for us.
News of the transnational crime syndicate parasitizing the government and hijacking — HIJACKING — essential supplies away from hospitals is popping up everywhere. In no particular order:
In Pursuit of PPE | NEJM [3] [The New England Journal of- freakin Medicine!]
Feds are seizing coronavirus supplies, hospitals say – Los Angeles Times [4]
Denver Post, Editorial: Trump is playing a political game with our lives during coronavirus [5]
The Coronavirus and How the U.S. Ended Up with Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags | The New Yorker [7]
Hospitals Face a White House Blockade for Coronavirus PPE. NY Magazine [8]
15 Comments To "Trump is a monster. Just face it."
#1 Comment By Earlynerd On 16 Apr, 2020 @ 04:17
I would love to see the television media, especially, take this tack when reporting on that thing in the White House. It’s the only rational course now.
Something’s got to change.
Have you seen this article about how awful this virus really is? It seems almost Republican in its efficient evil malice.
[9]
(h/t @JoyceWhiteVance)
#2 Comment By quixote On 16 Apr, 2020 @ 15:17
*Very* interesting article. (Also an annoying web site at that link! Link to the actual article: [10] )
I suspect the secret is that this virus has mutated to be a generalist when it comes to latching onto the cell surface receptor it needs to infect cells.
That’s probably what made it good at jumping between species to begin with. And it also looks like it gives it an unfortunate ability to jump around between organ systems and T-cells and GodKnowsWhatElse.
Vaccine! STAT!
#3 Comment By Earlynerd On 17 Apr, 2020 @ 00:28
Sorry about the link. It did look a tad fishy when I checked it for posting, but couldn’t put my finger on why. Good to know the underlying articles were okay.
What’s impersonally amazing to me about this thing is how focused something not even as alive as a bacteria, that doesn’t even have its own DNA, can so faithfully wreak this much precise havoc on species that evolution has assembled into unimaginably more complicated entities.
If I had believed in any anthropomorphic (and androcentric, as are most religions in the good ole U.S. of A.) deity, that right there would kill it.
I mean, prions are just bad engineering. There’s nothing alive at all about a “disease” that steals people’s brains like mad cow disease.
But this virus? To focus on humans’ wonderful self contained systems so freaking precisely, to go after T cells?
I will never believe in a (male, human) god, but just might believe in Pan.
It reminds me of the precision various snakes have for their largely warm-blooded victims: some venoms go after the need to expel carbon dioxide and asphyxiate their dinners that way, others go after the need to take in oxygen. No snake could ever have designed that precision, but it’s what keeps them alive.
The most complex, wonderful, self contained machines evolution ever produced better come up with a solution – stat!
#4 Comment By quixote On 17 Apr, 2020 @ 22:37
Evolution’s motto is Whatever Works. If something works particularly well, the organism that has it tends to survive. On a human time scale, it’s implausible that something so undirected can lead to such astonishing results. But on geological time scales, it actually does make sense that just poking around in any available direction ends in unbelievably perfect adaptations after all the others were pruned off.
Generation time for humans is about 25 years. (Usually more, of course, but that’s the minimum to produce children and get them independent enough to have a chance of surviving. So 4000 generations takes 100,000 years. Even for us, a lot of biological evolution happens in 100,000 years. (See eg lactase evolution)
I don’t know what virus generation times are, I believe they’re incredibly fast, but I know some bacteria have 20 minute generation times. So 4000 generations is 80,000 minutes or 55.5 days.
Geological time for them is “real time” for us. No wonder they come up with mindboggling adaptations in no time.
Kind of fun to look at it from the virus point of view, isn’t it? 😀
#5 Comment By quixote On 19 Apr, 2020 @ 13:27
Added some updated links at the bottom about all the reports of the Feds hijacking supplies away from states and hospitals.
The Dump ranks below bathtub scum in my world, and yet somehow it’s come as a shock to me that he would do this.
A pathetic failure of my imagination.
#6 Comment By quixote On 20 Apr, 2020 @ 23:03
And another one: [11]
He’s pointing to a Politico article by Meyer and Isenstadt, “ [12].”
I don’t know. “Monster” is starting to feel like a weak word.
#7 Comment By Earlynerd On 21 Apr, 2020 @ 03:27
On the evolution vs. popular opinion thing: I believe Darwin’s original heresy was “survival of the *fit*”.
IOW, if it’s alive, it works. If not, not. Almost 180 degrees from the neo-Nazi BS that substitutes “fittest”.
One of the nerdiest nerds I’ve ever known, who once told me “Oh, Faulkner’s a lot of fun” (not!), who just happened to have most of the obscure classical records that were the pride of my collection, who would hold up non-nerds just trying to enjoy a vacation weekend next door with anything from electrical theory, to why the “Well Tempered Clavier” had nothing to do with mood, to incredibly boring Civil War revisionist tactics, whose sister had been a WASP and whose wife was a 99’er – had among his bathroom library Steven Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life”.
You almost certainly know what the Burgess Shale discovery was (last I read, it’s still being discovered!). Gould’s whole point was that life had and has a million dead ends, but is endlessly inventive – and endlessly fascinating.
I’m totally not rooting for this half alive thing, but amazed that it can so easily bring down entities so much more advanced on the evolutionary scale.
If you’ll overlook a little cheap philosophizing, I can’t help but wonder if humans’ outstanding evolutionary advantage, our ability to create culture – if all those cultures’ backward anchors, like male supremacist religions, sexism, racism, all the other counter-intuitive “isms” that come with that creative ability – won’t finally outweigh all its wonders, like art, science, complex language, good government, effective communities, egalitarian law, effective empathy, etc., and give this species a shorter run that that of the “failed” much longer lived dinosaurs.
Also (sorry this comment is so long!) two time things:
Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God” – a scientist creates a tiny universe for proto-humans to act like viruses and achieves dramatic results.
And a very effective presentation of the evolutionary scale of life on Earth, at Fossil Butte National Park in Wyoming.
It starts with placards on the fence lining the road leading up to the visitor’s center, spaced about a quarter of a mile or so apart, that describe the first vestiges, then the distance narrows to less than a few feet for the modern more recognizable forms, all correlated to the time when these first appeared.
Humans are almost in the inches. Viruses couldn’t even be imagined in that scale.
#8 Comment By Earlynerd On 27 Apr, 2020 @ 20:14
Just a short (no, really!) note here.
I thought this was a good take on the very depressing choices women have in 2020, especially Biden:
[13]
#9 Comment By Earlynerd On 27 Apr, 2020 @ 21:56
Also, sigh, one more to make clear I do -not- think Sanders is in any way an alternative.
Still relieved Biden is the nominee instead of BS, and also aghast that Biden is the nominee at all.
#10 Comment By quixote On 02 May, 2020 @ 22:22
“relieved Biden is the nominee instead of BS, and also aghast that Biden is the nominee”
Exactly.
#11 Comment By Earlynerd On 02 May, 2020 @ 22:44
Triple sigh – looks like that allegation against Biden may actually be a rare false one.
Apparently I’m not very good at picking not-sexist states to move to either.
Two nights ago about 12:30 a.m, on the street outside my apartment, I heard a man yelling loudly and violently and a woman trying quietly to get him to leave his curbside shouting and go home. He switched to yelling at her the sexist hate speech that is so culturally acceptable everywhere and perfectly legal in Oregon. She eventually gave up and walked off.
I looked out my window when a police car arrived and saw that she had come back. A smallish skinny thug from the male-only law enforcement in this southern Oregon hole grabbed her arms and and pulled them in back of her. He forced her down onto the ground with his knee in her back and her face on the ground, jerking her arms up behind her and furiously yelling at her to stop resisting arrest, that she was under arrest and going to jail, while she kept saying in a scared anguished voice “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve done nothing wrong”. She was about thirty or so, just an average to small woman of that age.
Stupid me – I still haven’t got it through my head that slaves identify with masters, not each other. I ran down the stairs with the cell phone I had been writing a small script for and held that in front of me.
Another thug drove up, less violent than the first but still one of the salaried thugs here, and helped thug1 force the woman into the police car. I never saw or heard her do anything other than try to walk away and refuse to get into the police car. From inside the car, she kept saying in a perfectly sober but anguished voice “I’ve done nothing wrong. I just walked away”.
The first thug told the second thug the woman had been “resisting arrest”. I said that wasn’t true. Thug1 told me not to interfere. I said I had a right to record this. He said I did, but warned me again not to interfere. I did not say anything else to them.
After the two thugs got the woman in the car, thug1 went over to the almost passed-out man lying on the sidewalk who had been the only one causing a disturbance. Thug1 addressed the drunk in a comforting kindly voice as “Buddy”, called him by his name (“Travis”, a far better white privilege epithet than the sexist “Karen” making the rounds), told him he was too drunk to take to jail and tried to persuade him to put on his shoes and leave. He ignored the drunk’s belligerence and swearing.
Thugs 1 and 2 looked at a small cut on the drunk’s arm, caused no doubt by the smashed liquor bottle next to him, and called an ambulance. The medics bandaged the drunk’s arm and left.
Thug1 gave up trying to persuade the drunk to put his shoes on and to stand up and leave. He said in a resigned voice “Well, I guess we’re going to have to arrest you then”. Both thugs gently put him into a police car and left. There was a report later about someone calling into police dispatch about a man passed out on a road near there, so it looks like they just let him out of the car once out of sight.
I was extremely worried about the woman being alone with in a small town jail with thug1. This all happened from 12:30 am to about 1:30 am Friday morning. She was going to be under his control in this horrible town’s jail at least overnight. I called police dispatch in two somewhat less sexist towns near here, told them what had happened and was reassured that she would be in the county jail, not the city’s, with different hopefully less violent personnel.
I tried to call the county representatives the next morning, Friday, and did get through to one’s assistant, who sounded concerned and said she’d look into it and call back, but did not. I also tried the AG’s office – another of the very useful women liberal Oregonians put into high office – since her agency is the one with the toothless police oversight commission. This and all other state and county offices except the one went immediately to voicemail throughout the day, even though it was a weekday. I left messages describing only the unjustified violence of the “officers” and that I was worried about the woman’s safety. No message I left was returned.
I finally did the last thing I wanted to and called the police station. A women typical of the gatekeepers the exclusively male law enforcement officers use in this area for office staff answered the phone. I told her only that I was worried about a young woman who might have been taken to jail there. She was one of the rare ones who had at least left her hall monitor persona behind and was told me the woman was there and that she was “fine”. I asked to speak to the police chief and was told no one but two officers would be in until Monday. So the thugs had taken the women to their own jail, but at least they knew someone was concerned.
It was exactly parallel to the videos showing vulnerable men being brutalized by police – except that in those videos, the victims at least share the caste “male” with the perps. The woman had been taken to jail. If she is charged, she will need legal help – something hard to get for anyone and impossible for women here.
I may file a report about this on Monday, but then this is Oregon: the showcase state for what happens when women who commit to ignoring the rights of all woman are rewarded with token high office and keep those positions so long as they keep ignoring those rights. Nothing I can do can even make a dent in that.
#12 Comment By Earlynerd On 14 May, 2020 @ 19:02
U.S. women go even farther under religious minority rule – polygamy is no longer a felony in the state where it’s practiced most. Gotta keep them farm animals breedin:
[14]
(Polyandry remains the crime it has always been in law and in practice.)
Also, thie part of Oregon really -is- its own private Idaho:
[15]
Weird to see one’s own experience so publicly confirmed.
#13 Comment By quixote On 15 May, 2020 @ 18:01
(That last got wp-ped into moderation because of two links. I’ll never understand why wp can’t be smart enough to recognize regular commenters.)
The whole garbage with polygamy/polygyny and how it’s A-OK because Cultchah, y’know, has always boggled my mind. Years (decades) ago that was one of the little data points that stuck up like a spike protein on a novel coronavirus and triggered the immune system of my mind to recognize this thing for what it really was.
But not for enough of us. We’ve still got the disease.
#14 Comment By Earlynerd On 23 May, 2020 @ 03:33
Cultures meet in women’s bodies.
Women will never stand up for themselves.
#15 Comment By quixote On 08 Jun, 2020 @ 00:42
I don’t know about “never,” Early. There’s you, for instance. Caroline Criado-Perez. Marstrina (that’s her twitter handle. Marina Strinkovska.) Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels. (I have to admit I haven’t been back to her site in dog’s years. It’s funny how you get your little rabbit runs on the web. She’s good though.)