Thoughts on Various Things

The volume of news at present is overwhelming, to me at least. Focusing on any one story seems usually inadequate. Among the mostly bad to awful news, a few things seem to stick in my mind.

From North Carolina to Florida

One item is the move of the republican convention from North Carolina to Florida. The president wants a packed house with people screaming their approval of all the lies and slanders the president plans to spew on them and the rest of us masochistic enough to listen to the spew. No face masks for the president and his screaming patriotic supporters. As we all know, the Covid-19 pandemic is now just a fading memory. The death toll has numbed us and the economic damage will take a year or two to assess. In the president's estimation, Covid-19 was just a bit of a nuisance for a while, mostly a democratic hoax and all Obama's and/or Pelosi's fault if it wasn't hoax. Regardless, now it is gone away because he personally fixed it. The president, in a fair and balanced way, gives himself a well-deserved grade of A+++.

Huh?? If that's the narrative, then why are the RNC and Trump campaign requiring attendees at the convention to sign a waiver of liability in the (almost impossible?) event that they pick up a Covid-19 bug from infected people scattered among the president's rabid screaming, unmasked, hoard? They will be spewing millions of little spitballs of approval for their wonderful president, but that's not anything to worry about. Making the president look good is the only concern.

Hm. Is something amiss here? Could it be that maybe the pandemic isn't over yet? Nah, that's not possible. Germaine is just delusional and irrational, as usual.

Speaking of liability waivers

The New York Times is reporting that the GOP's and president's tactic of shielding themselves from liability is something that seems to appeal to at least some businesses. In an article, Businesses Want Virus Legal Protection. Workers Are Worried., the NYT observes that businesses are (quietly, as usual) lobbying for protection against coronavirus-related lawsuits. The opposition suspects that a liability shield would encourage reckless behavior. Reckless behavior? Ya think? Nah, not possible.

Businesses are anything but reckless. For example, meat packers in Nebraska made the pandemic go away by refusing to disclose testing data. Easy peasy, pandemic squeazy. Poof! The pandemic is gone. Families of workers there have complained that they need to know if their family members are infected or not. The meat packers and Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts dismisses such complaints as just irrational sour grapes whining. In their endless pursuit of sacred profit, businesses are never reckless, much less malicious. 🤢

The hills are alive with the sound of music . . . . . and lies and bullshit . . . . .

But, one must keep in mind the wise words of our president (ALL RISE!). Paraphrasing: "What the hell use is it to do testing for Covid-19? All that does is reveal infections. If you don't test, then there are no infections to report. What the hell is wrong with you people? Are you all idiots?" Of course that's just Germaine recalling what president Bonespurs had to say about it. Vox quotes him directly: “Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They [the media] don’t want to write that.”

Huh?

I'm confused (as usual)

Those pesky Antifa protesters

And, there's the ongoing protests over systemic racism. As we all know, the lawlessness is all due to Antifa. That's true because both the president and the attorney general said so. Darned Antifa.

Unfortunately, the failing New York Times is reporting fake news: "Federal Arrests Show No Sign That Antifa Plotted Protests -- Despite claims by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr, there is scant evidence that loosely organized anti-fascists are a significant player in protests. ..... But despite cries from President Trump and others in his administration, none of those charged with serious federal crimes amid the unrest have been linked so far to the loose collective of anti-fascist activists known as antifa."

As we all know, the neither the president nor AG Barr ever lie to people. 🤣 Clearly the enemy of the people NYT is just making stuff up by analyzing and reporting on federal arrest data. Analyzing data is just a bat shit crazy way to do journalism. This is the right way to do patriotic, red-blooded professional journalism:

I could go on in this vein for quite some time. But it's best to let this sip of political nectar rest on the tongue. That gives it time to burn a hole in it.