We Knew it All Along
Every once in a while, the Gameshow President inadvertently blurts out the truth during his streams of unconsciousness. It happened again this last week, when he admitted this:
“If we did very little testing, [America] wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”
There it is. Trump has been promising millions of “beautiful tests” since February. It’s mid-May, and we’re still testing at extremely anemic rates. In Texas, for example, our current testing rate is 2%, and that rate ignores possible multiple tests who have already tested positive. Every single medical expert I’ve heard speak repeats the mantra that massive testing is mandatory for opening economies. Without it, we’re all flying blind.
The problem? Trump is playing a gameshow and in this game, the smallest number wins. The prize is another 4 years to tear the US apart and avoid felony indictments from the State of New York. We’ve been calling this for months, and, once again Trump admits that he doesn’t want testing. He’s literally risking millions of lives for a win.
To give perspective: 44 has a leaked phone call where he states the response to the pandemic has been an ‘absolute chaotic disaster’ and Boss Tweet thinks it is an EPIC scandal. Yet 70,000+ deaths attributed to Covid-19 are things one shrugs one’s shoulders at as part of the price of doing business, with far more to come.
Go figure…
1It is, IMHO, helpful to remember that Trump lives in a cossetted world of wealthy people. If there are no tests there are no numbers to show up where the wealthy people Don thinks of as America will see them and have a sad over.
Yes, Don cares about the wider nation of mostly poor people, but only to the extent it effects the mood of those in power. It is Plato’s cave but the focus is not the shadows on the wall. It is the expressions on the faces of a small wealthy subset of the population as they react to the shadows on the wall.
Don’s skill set is as a pitchman. He engages the emotions of the select audience and feeds their addiction to happy feelings. The fact that more than 80,000 Americans are dead, or that his gross incompetence had a big part in that happening, means nothing if those facts do not come to the attention in an emotionally engaging manner for his target audience. Tragedy versus statistic.
It is a funny old world. Tragic that such a sociopath is holding high office and corrupting everything around him. But as horrible as Don is he is simply exploiting the known flaws in the western psyche.
I’ve known about the strange disconnect between reality and perception, particularly perceptions that people know we understand in a particular light.
It became clearer to me with the story about how this toddler fell down a well and the setup and response that led to and followed. The setup is that people move and abandon wells. These steel-sleeved holes are known hazards and there are programs set up to make sure they are properly closed. Landowners and developers hate the rules and the couple hundred dollars required to have them closed properly and inspected. So it often doesn’t happen.
Along comes a family with this toddler who promptly falls down the well. After finding her it makes national news and several millions are spent on the rescue. I mean … its a kid … down a well. How can anyone countenance not sending whatever it takes to get her out? Human nature that when you are publicly informed, they know you know, you have to react in the proper manner and go all-in.
Of course, similar kids, thousands, perhaps with a bit darker complexion, from an inner city, come up missing all the time. They don’t become a national news item, and very little money is spent finding and rescuing them.
The difference is emotion driven by perception selected by the framing of the story. The facts are groomed, parts emphasized or de-emphasized, to fit the format of one of the few classic story lines. In one case an innocent heroically saved. In the other, a statistic.
Trump frames his own discomfort as a tragic story of the righteous set upon by faceless bureaucrats. It is a tale full of pathos. The fact that 80,000 have died … it is just one of those things. Like the ant eaten by the lizard outside my window.
As long as we are led around by our emotions unguided by reason and proportion we are vulnerable. Don-the-con is just the latest to play this game on a national scale.
2His majesty has handled this pandemic so poorly, what will happen when we get on of Kim’s bombs on HI, or a computer takeover by Russia and so on. He is so out of his depth!
3If someone would just stop monitoring how fast we’re falling…
….we wouldn’t worry so much about hitting the pavement.
4Russia is number 4 in the rankings, behind the US, Spain, and the UK, with 221,344 confirmed cases, up almost 12,000 cases today alone.
They have a bare 2009 deaths. That’s a fatality rate of .9%, 1/6th of the US fatality rate of 5.9%, and I think that’s too low to begin with.
Fat Donnie should try following the Putin playbook, if he wants to “win.”
Oh, and Old Fart? It’s over 80,000 deaths in the US so far.
https://ncov2019.live/data
5The hard numbers are revealing incontrovertible facts. Compare and contrast the numbers for NV and UT since March. Despite the early jump in numbers driven by casinos in Las Vegas and Reno, Utah has forged ahead in the number of novel coronavirus cases. Given the population densities of the two states demonstrating that religion is more deadly than gambling. Factor in CA where one cult alone drove a 70 member contagion vector, meat packing plants are safer than churches.
In Covidiot* 45’s 50 state sweepstakes the ‘winners’ are Republicon governors with covidiot dogma aligned with the ***king moron*.
6Dolt .45 won’t read this because it’s in the Washington Post and it’s much too long. You should read it. It’s terrifying.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05/10/coronavirus-attacks-body-symptoms/?arc404=true
7The only thing keeping him out of prison is the fact that he lives in the White House. He knows that, and that’s why he’s going to pull out *all* the stops to make sure he wins in November. If we think what we’ve seen so far is bad, just wait. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
8The old Enron “keep the bad news off the books” trick.
9