Not a Christmas Present Anybody Would Want

 Via Tengrain, we have the disconcerting tale of Christmas travel during this plague year.  It's possible that the recent spike in COVID-19 cases resulted from Thanksgiving travel, so an uptick in travel mere weeks before a major vaccine rollout seems ill-advised.  In speaking with my mother, I put it this way, "Hold out for Easter."  Giving the 'rona as a Christmas present just when there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel seems ghoulish, a wicked twist out of a 'Twilight Zone' episode, albeit a stupid one.

 Tengrain, being a snarky fellow, put it in snarky terms, the only appropriate terms for this tragifarcical age we live in: Gonna make “Grandma Got Run-Over By A Reindeer” look like a matinee as the nation’s MeMaws all keel over dead by new years eve.

 The appropriate response is, you got it, snarky:

 

Grandma got infected by the 'rona,

At the family dinner Christmas Eve

Cousin Rudy don't believe in masking,

And wipes his goddamn boogers on his sleeve.

 

These people really deserve to get coal in their stockings.   Can't they defer their gratification by a mere three or four months?

A Very MAGA Christmas

 In a recent conversation with my Mom, she noted that Christmas shopping for the family just wasn't going very well- the stores are poorly stocked and what is there is picked over.  Since travel is out of the question, presents have to be sent, and the US Postal Service is still a mess because Trump's postmaster general threw a spanner in the works (even getting rid of, and sometimes destroying sorting machines).  I quipped, "Remember that old TV special, The Year Without a Santa Claus?"  She immediately got what I was hinting at.  Soon after, I found a picture comparing Trump and Pence to the not-quite-villains of the Rankin/Bass animated show:




I thought #Pence and #Trump looked familiar. It's Snow Miser and Heat Miser from 'The Year Without a Santa Claus'.#Christmas #1u #tcot pic.twitter.com/AxsUPUgrz3

— Richard Angwin (@RichardAngwin) December 18, 2016

Trump and Pence are a lot more evil than the 'Miser' brothers, and I'm sure they could never pull off a spectacular song-and-dance number:

  

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Rankin/Bass animated classic Santa Claus in Coming to Town, and I immediately thought that the Trump Maladministration would make for a great Rankin/Bass style Christmas special. As our main villain, we have the Callous Queen who hates Christmas:

  

She even uses her magic powers to change Christmastown into a blood-red horror-land while her ogre husband brings plague to the land. I'm going to have to apologize to the late great Paul Frees for this (I'm a big fan), but Sebastian Gorka would make a great stand-in for his classic mitteleuropäische villain Burgomeister Meisterburger:

  

Gorka's burgomeister would, of course, blame Santa Claus for wanting to take away the people's hamburgers, necessitating his hording all of the burgers in his own vault: 

 

There are also the cast of naughty children that Santa will have to punish for their misdeeds... The Trump Maladministration has all of the makings of a Rankin/Bass Christmas special, albeit a singularly dark one. At least the ending will turn out okay... a song and dance number: 

 

Then the Good Guys save the day... truly a post-Christmas miracle.

Cuckoo Coup

 In a year of disquieting news, here's another disquieting item, just in time for Christmas... Trump had a meeting with 'Kraken' crackpot Sidney Powell, who he wants to retain as a counsel for his 'election fraud' cases.  Things took a particularly worrisome turn as Trump inquired about deploying the military in a bid to stay in offic ploy suggested by disgraced former general Michael Flynn:

During the meeting, the president asked about Flynn’s suggestion of deploying the military, those briefed said. That was also shot down.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 19, 2020

Thankfully, our military personnel take an oath to serve the Constitution, not to serve a president. The odds of having the Marines serve as his personal Praetorian Guard are slim-to-none. The real problem is that Trump has always gotten high off his own supply, and his ego is being fed by Powell and Flynn, who occupy a strange, liminal role between the grifter and the True Believer.

Meanwhile, the fever swamps are abuzz with sedition, with calls for Trump to cross the Rubicon, notably from 8chan/8kun administrator, probably 'Q' contributor, and total creep Ron Watkins, who Trump has retweeted.  Notably, Watkins resides in Japan, so he's basically the kid yelling from across the street for two other kids to beat each other up.  The rank-and-file seem to have caught the rally cry, and have responded as they always do, by making ridiculous 'memes' and posting them:

No one tell them how Julius Caesar died pic.twitter.com/phkiPdwsAb

— Coping MAGA (@CopingMAGA) December 19, 2020

The real tell here is that, by crossing the Rubicon with a legion, Caesar was considered to have treasonously declared war on Rome. This forever put an end to the Roman Republic- do the MAGA morons really want Trump to declare himself dictator?  Caesar is said to have uttered 'the die is cast' as he crossed the river... and we all know that Trump failed at running casinos. More cogently, we all know how Caesar ended up, even right-wingers know that. If Trump does decide to cross the Rubicon, casting that losing die, who will be the senator to stab him? Will his last words be Et tu, Marco?

Silly Libs, It's Just a Little Vigorish

The genius of Republican ideology is that, working under the premise that government is the problem, Republicans can govern in a corrupt and incompetent fashion and prove that premise correct.  CHECK AND MATE, LIBS!!!!

The revelation that Trump family insiders formed a shell corporation that looted about half of the 2020 Trump campaign coffers is a prime example of the Republican proclivity to loot... thankfully, only the funds of donors were stolen in this case (this is not to say that Trump insiders didn't line their pockets with taxpayer dollars).  The prolonged denial of the November election results keeps the grift going, as Trump has funneled approximately sixty million dollars of post-election donations into a poorly regulated Political Action Committee.  That vaunted Kraken has been dipping its tentacles in the pockets of Trump dead-enders.

Trump has long been known to have ties with organized crime,  so he's got to be familiar with the concept of vigorish... it's no surprise he liked to wet his beak in everything.  Those shell companies?  The fact that seventy-five percent of donations goes to Trump's organization?  That's just the vigorish, libs!

Brad Parscale's big sin was stealing millions of dollars from the campaign without being a family insider.  How dare a commoner dip into the till?  Also, he didn't steal enough... only a piker would be content to steal forty million when there was over a billion dollars to be had.  No Trump would have settled for such small potatoes.

.

Ghoulish, Simply Ghoulish

 Today's enraging news story is the revelation that Paul Alexander, a science advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services , advised assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo to pursue a 'herd immunity' approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Here's where I shout to the rafters that the very concept of herd immunity is meaningless without a vaccine... from the WHO website: 

‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.

Vaccines train our immune systems to create proteins that fight disease, known as ‘antibodies’, just as would happen when we are exposed to a disease but – crucially – vaccines work without making us sick. Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question and passing it on, breaking any chains of transmission. Visit our webpage on COVID-19 and vaccines for more detail.

With herd immunity, the vast majority of a population are vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population. As a result, not every single person needs to be vaccinated to be protected, which helps ensure vulnerable groups who cannot get vaccinated are kept safe. 

Without a vaccine, herd immunity is not achieved, contagion is.

Getting back to the ghoulish Paul Alexander:

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD."

"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…"

COVID-19, this disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is not well known, and the acute and long-term risks of infection are a mystery.  Children infected with the virus occasionally developed a multisystem inflammatory syndrome similar to Kawasaki disease, and "characterized predominantly by shock, cardiac dysfunction, abdominal pain, and markedly elevated inflammatory markers".  Among a small number of young adult athletes, COVID-19 caused myocarditis and an elevated risk of cardiac arrest.  The pandemic has killed over three-hundred thousand Americans, and it may very well permanently impair the physical fitness of millions more.  When Alexander stated that young and middle aged individuals with no conditions have zero to little risk, he probably wasn't considering the college basketball player who loses his cardiovascular health and his scholarship, or the pharmacy clerk who has trouble walking up the stairs to her second-floor apartment.  

The phrase 'we want them infected' is horrific, inhuman, the utterance of a ghoul devoid of compassion, of public virtue.  The pandemic could have been checked by a strategy of testing, contact tracing, social distancing, and the use of PPE... if a proper strategy had been enacted rather than a reckless plan to infect a majority of the population, masquerading as 'herd immunity', perhaps we could have reopened the economy with a minimal loss of life.  Paul Alexander, like many another Trump Maladministration appointee, really needs to spend some time behind bars.

First Winter Storm of the Season

The big local story here in the NYC metro area is the arrival of a major winter storm which is forecast to dump about a foot (30.48 centimeters) of snow on terra firma.  The winds are supposed to reach gale force (50mph/80.46kph).  Suffice it to say, the roadways are going to be a mess.

The gentleman who is typically scheduled to work the 5PM-9PM shift told me yesterday that he has been tasked to stay overnight at his other job, the one which actually pays his bills.  Accordingly, I have arrived early and, like him, plan on camping out overnight.  I'd rather have my car safely parked in a lot than on the street, and sheltering in place makes a lot more sense than trusting myself to the tender mercies of the roadways.  I anticipate having to work the afternoon shift tomorrow as well, so I made sure that I am well-provisioned.

I made sure to stop by a couple of local grocery stores on my way to work- the first being a major supermarket and the second being a mom-and-pop produce market that has amazing prices on fruits and vegetables.  I decided that the best way to fortify myself for a long haul in wintry conditions would be to make a pot of bigos, which is the sort of dish which lends itself to overnight cooking.

Here's hoping that it will be an uneventful night, just the cat and I hanging out by the radiator while the snow quietly blankets the landscape. This being 2020, though, I am prepared for just about any contingency.

Another Spy Novel, but Stupid

Now that John LeCarré has died, people have to come up with their own thriller fiction, and boy, is it stupid:

Far-right Qanon conspiracy theorists believe the Chinese army just tried to invade the USA, and were bombed to death at the Maine-Canada border. What a time to be alive. pic.twitter.com/JTwSWecCSh

— Nathan Bernard (@nathanTbernard) December 14, 2020

The real mystery is how those trees managed to hold onto their foliage in mid-December, in Maine.

Funny, a Chinese invasion of the US would seem to be newsworthy, especially with Canadian complicity, so I guess the Lamestream Media is in on the plot to overthrow 'Murrica, along with those perfidious Canadians. I dunno, it's kinda weird that fifty-thousand Chinese soldiers could be holed up for so long in a bunker constructed in a town with a population of 574:

50,000 dead would be one of the bloodiest days of fighting in the history of humanity. QAnon is now claiming World War 3 is happening inside America and nobody knows about it and Trump hasn't brought it to our attention. pic.twitter.com/p0Y3IMkXYk

— Poker and Politics (@PokerPolitics) December 13, 2020

Luckily, they were laid low with a single thirty-thousand pound 'bunker buster' bomb... it's really difficult to get proper town-sized bunkers constructed these days.  I suspect that one of Trump's fly-by-night construction contractors built the thing.

The source of this lunacy is a religious fundamentalist who believes that Obama was nominated from Satan's throne, that chemtrails are real, and that cannibalistic giants exist.  The fact that this cockamamie tale has been taken as gospel truth by a not-insignificant cadre of Trump dead-enders is a bit worrisome... I sure hope that the Biden Administration is formulating a plan to deal with the troubling number of Americans who have become completely delusional.