Family Stories

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Wednesday September 08, 2021 · 9:54 PM PDT

2021/09/08 · 21:54

The Morrison Cradles, Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis MO (https://tinyurl.com/yx2xd4r2)

Family stories make us laugh, make us cry, they can teach or often serve as cautionary tales.

In 1902, only 119 years ago, 3 of my great uncles died. One of malnutrition, and 2 of diphtheria, only 6 days apart; they were 3 and 8 years old. If vaccines had been available, they would have survived to adulthood. I reject the claims that vaccines are harmful or ineffective, we certainly don’t see kids dropping dead of diphtheria or any of the other quaintly named “childhood diseases” like measles, mumps, rubella, etc. I don’t believe vaccines are 100% effective, because NOTHING is, but vaccines are a routine way of protecting ourselves and others from diseases that kill. It’s not just about “me”, it’s about “we.” Too many Americans embracing the former over the latter is a potentially deadly turn for all of us.

Americans have been greatly insulated from the processes of birth, illness, and death with the rise of our healthcare system. We all go to that hospital and expect that we will come out okay, that is where our modern-day miracles happen. Even if we don’t understand all that goes on there, but we have a longstanding respect for those who heal.

As an RN, former public health nurse, and Army nurse, I am watching my faith in my fellow Americans face its biggest test. To me, being American has always been a part of being something bigger than myself, living in a place where we understood that to live together, we sometimes have to sacrifice to make it better, for all of us. I look at World War II & the unified effort to win, it took work then, and freedom and democracy still take work. Today it seems everyone wants easy answers that come instantly, sat right in our laps.

We are several generations removed from seeing the effects of real disease and death that was well-known in pre-vaccination times. We don’t have loved ones who lie in the front parlor in their coffins anymore, instead we go to a nice clean funeral home. We forget that children died in large numbers, any old graveyard tells that tale. In the age of mass vaccination, many of us have no real understanding of the difference they have made in terms of child mortality.

The photo above is of the “Morrison Cradles” in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis,MO. The baby girl, Olivia died of measles and whooping cough at 14 mosold. Her brother (born after her) diedat 6 years of age from Scarlet Fever. (pix & story from: https://tinyurl.com/yx2xd4r2)

“In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred in children less than 5 years of age compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. Infant mortality dropped from approximately 100 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1915 to 29.2 deaths per 1,000 births in 1950 and 7.1 per 1,000 in 1999.

This decrease in mortality reflects advances in public health, living standards, medical science and technology, and how doctors practice. Many infants who once would have died from prematurity, childbirth complications, and birth defects now survive. Children who previously would have perished from many childhood infections today live healthy and long lives thanks to sanitation improvements, vaccines, and antibiotics. In the United States, the average life expectancy at birth rose from less than 50 years in 1900 to more than 76 years in 1999… due to reductions in infant and child mortality.” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220806/),

Sadly, healthcare in the United States is failing, life expectancy has levelled off in recent years, and in 2020, it fell by 1.5 years due to the COVID-19 death toll, with African Americans, and Hispanics losing even more years at 2.9 and 3.7 years, respectively. (https://tinyurl.com/rcrk3jr7) Given the Delta variant’s virulence, increased ability for one person to infect others, (https://tinyurl.com/9v6753b4), the high number of unvaccinated people in the United States, and deaths in younger, healthier people, life expectancy is likely to fall again in 2021.

During the COVID surges in 2020, many people were shocked when news leaked out that hospitals were formulating plans for crisis care standards, just in case. Luckily it turned out to be just preparation. Unfortunately, this year, Idaho hospitals are enacting crisis care standards, aka battlefield triage (https://tinyurl.com/47vyc7bx), driven by the Delta surge in a state that has largely fought against mask mandates & other mitigation efforts, even having a protest in March 2021 on the steps of the state capitol in Boise where people gleefully burned masks (https://tinyurl.com/y4b5fcaa) and has currently (as of 7 September 2021) a full vaccination rate of almost 40%, and about 45% for first doses, on July 1^st, the rate were 36% fully vaccinated and almost 40% first doses. (https://tinyurl.com/ruhw66ys).

The actual “IDME” system is now in place as the first level of triage, which means cases with IMMEDIATE lifesaving needs will be seen first, followed by those who can wait and will be DELAYED. The “Walking Wounded” with minor illnesses and injuries will wait longer because their needs are MINIMAL. The category nobody likes to think about, the EXPECTANT, are those who are not expected to survive and will receive comfort care unless “new resources permit treatment.” This hard reality will strike a lot of privileged people in the gut. I personally hope that this crisis system is used fairly and not as a tool of discrimination, but I somehow doubt that will the case.

Now we come to the reality of selfish, spoiled Americans, who think they are entitled and deserving, who also suffer from a lot of overconfidence about what they think they know vs. what they really *DO* know. Too many of us live in a world of cognitive dissonance, which makes us double down on what we think we know, because being wrong is more uncomfortable than admitting error. The vaccine deniers rushing to local hospitals feeling entitled to a hospital bed when *they* need it is a tragic irony: the same sciences that brought them that hospital bed also brought them the vaccine *they* refused to take. It doesn’t matter how many resources *they* use, as long as *they* have the exact hospital care *they* deserve, when they *they* need it. There is also an expectation that nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers will always be there and continue to give of themselves, and that there is an endless supply of these folks… but when these people just quit, or get sick themselves, who will take care of the selfish sick?

The irony isn’t lost on me that these horrific surges and death tolls are more highly concentrated in “red” states that had the laxest masking and mitigation measures and lowest vaccination rates, but I expect to see a lot of anger when people are faced with the reality of crisis care, when they or their loved ones not being seen. People pitch hissy fits over wearing masks or being asked to take vaccines, or the microwave not going fast enough these days. It’s all about them and what they are “entitled” to… and it’s about to crash on the rocks of “IDME” Battlefield triage.

Many influences are at work in the U.S., often at odds with one another. The mythological Rugged Individualism often opposes Uniting when the country is in danger. Neither is particularly bad, per se, and they generally have waxed and waned, one in favor of the other, as needed, thru our history. Sadly, the inherent conflict between these two has been exploited and worsened by our acrimonious tribal politics & the malign influence of foreign actors who know us better than we know ourselves. The conflict has escalated, to the detriment of the country, during the ongoing the COVID pandemic. Only the powerful and the aforementioned foreign actors have gained from this exploitation. Our modern robber barons like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, the Kochs, the Waltons, etc. have made boatloads of money during the pandemic. They also happily keep the seeds of division planted and the crop carefully tended, dividing the little people with petty squabbles amongst each other, therefore unable to unite, recognize what is going on, and see who is really pulling the strings. The bread & circus distractions keep us from noticing Toto pulling back the curtain, while plenty of brave journalists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and others keep on pulling that curtain back. Sadly, the truths they tell are falling on too few ears that are actually listening. As the Ukrainians oligarchs say, “The people are the shit our money grows in.”

Distrust of education, expertise, and authority also run rampant in the American psyche. When combined with the rugged individualism myth, misogyny, and the racism inherent in the fabric of this nation, the brew gets toxic and dangerous, fast. Our education system has been hollowed and only teaches kids to be good little, consenting drones in the corporate & consumerist machines, and it gets even worse. People know instinctively there has to be a better or different way to exist, but all curiosity and critical thinking has been trained out of them. So, they find ways to rebel, when they are really looking for a meaning and a way to fill the hollowness that is left after their school years have left them bereft, especially if they find themselves feeling like square pegs for round holes.

We have created a bunch of people who act like entitled 5-year-olds who run around yelling, “Don’t tell me what to do! You aren’t the boss of me!” *They* want everything immediately, exactly the way *they* want it, and if *they* don’t get it, well it’s someone else’s fault because *they* deserve it. And you haven’t read their minds, it’s your fault. *They* don’t want to work for anything, they just want it sat in their laps. The desire for this immediacy is leading people to try unproven miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.

I understand vaccine hesitancy and refusal, especially in the African American community, which has historically & truly been used as guinea pigs, such as the Tuskeegee experiment and Henrietta Lacks, or forced sterilizations. Dorothy Oliver in Panola, Alabama got 94% of her community to get vaccinated by simply talking to them (https://news.yahoo.com/one-woman-rural-vaccine-hesitant-010041741.html). Unfortunately, too many people elsewhere in the country can’t or won’t be reached because of the pain of cognitive dissonance, machismo, or whatever. Questions are fine, doubts are normal, but when the Grim Reaper knocks on your door and takes your friends and family members, to not reconsider your position is the unhealthiest form self-sabotage. There was even a Louisiana man who was hospitalized for COVID, who was refusing the vaccine because, “Their agenda is to get you vaccinated," he stated that he believes there are "too many issues" with the vaccines.” (https://tinyurl.com/39s97yvm)

As an RN, I saw a lot when I worked at the bedside, in public health, and in my current job reviewing hospital stays for managed Medicare and Medicaid. Plenty of patients direct their own care to the detriment of their own health. I’m not saying that patients shouldn’t be listened to, but sometimes their 2 cents is worth much less than they think it is. As a related aside, patient satisfaction survey scores haven’t correlated to better care, and one large study showed that high patient satisfaction correlated with higher utilization, expenditure, and mortality. (https://tinyurl.com/njv3ts4b)

There is an old adage, “…your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins”. But those refusing masks and vaccines aren’t just making choices for themselves. There are ripple effects for others needing the hospital beds, in Texas an Army veteran died of complications from gallstones because all the beds in all the local hospitals were filled with COVID patients, who are largely unvaccinated. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-us-hospital-icu-bed-shortage-veteran-dies-treatable-illness/). In California, an unvaccinated elementary school teacher took off her mask to read at story time and now half the class is infected with the Delta variant (https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/28/delta-variant-unvaccinated-children-elementary-schools/).

Rights come with responsibilities. If you choose to remain unvaxxed and unmasked, you have a responsibility to stay away from other people. Exercising your “rights” and hurting others is what selfish brats do.

And the politicization of COVID is just an extension of the selfishness and willful blindness, but we have to ask, “what are they getting out of this?” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia is banning businesses from mandating masks on one hand, while calling in the National Guard to help in overflowing hospitals. (https://youtu.be/gzm10DIUsFo)

The damage to the mental and physical health of the pandemic on this nation is manifesting tangibly: we have already lost years of life expectancy across the boards. Social distancing, economic stressors from unemployment all play into this. I think about the effects the loss of 3 children in 1902 had on my great grandparents, grandmother, and mother. What were those effects? It is difficult to calculate, but events like these leave ripples in families… there even being some evidence that trauma can be passed to subsequent generations genetically. (https://tinyurl.com/cdsf3ym4) My great grandfather lost his mind for a period of time and left the home, leaving my great grandmother to have to place my grandmother in an orphanage so she would work. According to my mother’s telling, my great grandfather harbored resentment against my grandmother for surviving when all his sons had died. He didn’t seem to forgive my grandmother until she started having kids of her own. The family did eventually come back together... and my mom had the best memories of her grandparents, but I wonder if this might have been the source of my mother’s bouts of depression (that I recognize in retrospect).

How does such a level of tragedy, loss, and grief ripple out in a country absolutely devastated by COVID and exacerbated by magical thinking that it would just go away?

I have compassion for those who have not had access to, or real information about the vaccines. There are plenty of people with legitimate questions and concerns and they deserve the truth and easy access. But far too many of the unvaccinated are people who have made a stubborn selfish decision in the name of “freedom”.

As a nurse, I am angry. As a mother & grandmother, I am angry. I really just want to go out and slap people until they get it. I am enraged when I see people simply refusing to take simple precautions like masking, vaccination, social distancing because they feel like their freedoms are more important than the lives of those of every single person they come in contact with. They just cannot bear being inconvenienced; it hasn’t got a damned thing to do with freedom…. It has everything to do with selfishness.

Refuse to be the Shit Their Money Grows In

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday January 09, 2021 · 10:16 PM PST

2021/01/09 · 22:16

Unpacking this last week… and it seems like months.

Seditious white supremacist fascists attacked our capitol building, I was trying to work while it was all happening… needless to say, I couldn’t get much done.

I am incredibly sad, angry, worried, frightened… and plenty of other emotions all in an incomprehensible knot. Sort of like riding a rollercoaster that never stops to let you off.

Two things really stood out for me…

I heard a TV commentator say they were shocked but not surprised… and that crystallized the moment really well for me. Any reasonably aware & well-informed person, at even a low level for the last 5+ years, understood this moment has been fomented by this occupant of the white house and his minions.
On Twitter, I saw a post about Trump and his flying monkeys being unable to give the left a short time to celebrate after the wins for (now) Senators-Elect Warnock & Ossoff in Georgia. It was an awesome night and I stayed up late eating Cheetos while the votes were tallied, but the next morning, Trump and his evil minions attempted their coup… more distraction by his orangeness.

The firehose of stress and distraction just never stops with him… because it has to always be **about him**

I am hoping that we have turned a corner with his social media access winking out like a world war 2 blackout, but I fear what is coming may be even worse.

The cancer that is Trump should have been removed long ago, as scholars of authoritarianism & psychiatry have made abundantly clear, repeatedly. People such as Andrea Chalupa, Sarah Kendzior, Timothy Snyder, Naomi Klein, Bandy Lee, Mary Trump, Jared Yates Sexton, Beau of the Fifth Column, and so many others; the have tried to tell us for almost more years than we can count. However, they were treated as doom-sayers or crazy… and then people just kind of got used to Trump and his antics, even though they were continually getting worse. Now they are called Cassandras… the mythological seer that nobody would believe… it brings to mind a favorite ABBA song… Cassandra

Down in the street they're all singing and shouting

Staying alive though the city is dead

Hiding their shame behind hollow laughter

While you are crying alone on your bed

Pity Cassandra that no one believed you

But then again you were lost from the start

Now we must suffer and sell our secrets

Bargain, playing smart, aching in our hearts

It seems so appropriate, especially the part about “hiding their shame behind hollow laughter” as we watch the rats leaving the sinking ship at this late date… and the cabinet refusing to invoke the 25^th amendment. It’s easier to leave than to have courage.

And what of the insurrectionists? Well they are fracturing… some of them are trying to say “sorry” like little kids who know they are in trouble, but who really have no idea what they broke or why it’s important. There are those who are turning on their dear leader after his hostage-kinda’-sorta-maybe concession video.

Overall, they are rebels without a clue or conscious. They are angry and that anger has been used by their dear leader to commit terrorism… it’s classic stochastic terrorism, he managed to maintain a level of plausible deniability, until right before the invasion of the capitol.

I feel a small measure of sympathy for these people because they have been duped to be flying monkeys for the moneyed elites. Their vulnerability caused largely by our shredded social safety net that has left them to fend for themselves and understandably angry. The American dream was promised and taken away, instead they were told to blame their problems on people of color, women, immigrants, anybody else “below them”. My own kids, aged 29 & 25 embody this disillusionment. I find myself relatively lucky, being born early in the post-baby boom generation, of whom some did well and some not so much.

Despite my sympathy, I do not condone their actions in any way. But this was clearly both a backlash against the elites, and a demonstration of deep-rooted white supremacy and the inevitable result of unfettered capitalism. People are angry and done, and the elites are trying to keep the rabble divided and punching each other, rather than up, where the power really is.

The attack on the capitol was planned and the goal was more than just vandalism, considering they had firearms, plastic handcuffs, and erected gallows complete with a noose. Trump told them he wasn’t happy with Mike Pence… and they entered the capitol calling for Pence’s head.

The real truth is the Flying Monkeys are tools of the establishment elite, lied to in order to focus them like a loaded weapon at the final confirmation of the 2020 electoral college vote of Joe Biden’s win, with a focus on Mike Pence, who was resolute that his constitutional role was as a presider, not a decider. The fingers of the corporate America are deep in this insurrection. Donors to the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RDLF: https://documented.net/2021/01/republican-attorneys-general-dark-money-group-organized-protest-preceding-capitol-mob-attack/) include the Koch Industries, Comcast, Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, TikTok, 1-800 Contacts, Chevron, The National Rifle Association, Monsanto, Facebook, Fox Corporation, Uber, Coca Cola, Exxon, and Google. The RLDF is associated with the Republican Governor’s Association was among many right-wing organizations listed as participating in the so-called “March to Save America” and sent out details about the “protest” via robocall. Various well-known and wealthy conservatives funded buses to the March, including Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas…. And interestingly, her Facebook page disappeared after her support for the rally-turned-attack was revealed. (https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/ginni-thomas-facebook-page-disappears-after-media-reports-on-her-support-for-pro-trump-rally-that-turned-into-attack-on-u-s-capitol/)

There is also evidence that the attack was planned, the full extent of which has yet to be seen. Alex Jones of InfoWars infamy paid a half million dollars for the DC “rally” and was told by the White House 3 days prior that they wanted him to lead the march to the capitol. Trump’s last minute DOD acting appointments slow walked requests for aid, the Governor of Maryland was not allowed to send his National Guard, because Trump refused to allow it for 90 minutes. Per news reports, it took a backdoor deal between the Secretary of the Army, Mike Pence, Governor Hogan, and Rep. Steny Hoyer to get the National Guard headed to DC. Trump also shuttered the DHS office that analyzed threats within our borders. And in addition, some capitol police apparently let the mob waltz right on into the Capitol, one being quoted as saying that they just needed to let them “do their thing.” But anyone being honest about this will emphasize that if the protesters had been black or brown, they would have been shot, beaten, and arrested en masse.

But this is where I turn the corner to really call out the elites and how they really feel about us rabble… I wrote the next section about 2 weeks ago and it ties directly into the coup attempt.

The American oligarchs have squeezed the “rabble” to a point at which the pitchforks are coming out, but so far they have been able to redirect their flying monkeys with a smokescreen of lies and conspiracy theories. The question is how long it will be until the pitchforks and torches are turned on those in power. Per things I have seen on Twitter, it looks like some of the Flying Monkeys are starting to realize that they have been used.

“People are the shit our money grows in”… a saying of Ukrainian oligarchs…. And American ones too, if you think about it.

We are the shit their money grows in.

Why are we the shit their money grows in? And why do we let this happen?

Why aren’t we marching?

Why aren’t we striking?

Why are so many of us voting against our own best interests?

Why are so many of us believing the lies and the propaganda?

Fear… they have us living in fear…

Fear that someone else will take what few scraps we have cobbled together into the best living we could

Fear that we will lose our jobs if we strike

Fear of… well… everything.

The powers that be leverage our fear against us.

They use it to soften us up and make us more compliant… for the next thing they want to take from us.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine…

We have been conditioned to give a little more, of our freedom, our security, our privacy after each successive shock or propaganda barrage… some by design, some by happenstance:

9/11

2008-2009 economic crash

COVID, both the pandemic and the economic fall out

Black Lives Matter

Defund the Police

The Trump Administration has been a constant firehose in the face of propaganda and distraction, keeping us bewildered, demoralized, and overwhelmed. Each stage softening us up for the next body blow… leading us to increased compliance and decreased outrage.

When everything is outrageous, you can’t focus, so to survive… you choose fight, flight, or freeze.

I know that I want to fight, but end up doing a lot more flight or freezing… mainly because I have to go on.

I hide in my crafts and listen to music or podcasts and feel the futility of it all. I have to support my family, but I honestly wish that I could just lay down to sleep and never wake back up. But I’m not the kind to act on that… but it’s an honest feeling.

So I go forward trying to find what happiness I can. My grandkids make me smile. I like my work, I like to think I’m helping people. I love the feeling of wool slipping through my fingers as it spins onto the bobbin. I love seeing my hands create things out of 2 sticks and a string. I love filling out my bullet journal daily… little blurbs and vignettes of my life… I love creating my 2021 bullet journal.

I have a lot that makes me happy, really.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid, overwhelmed, tired and just wanting to be done.

There is no light at the end of this tunnel, really.

So many more are going to die.

And none of it needed to be this way.

We are now losing more Americans to COVID daily than the country of Japan has lost in total.

And yet we shrug it off… because… why?

We are overwhelmed by the firehouse of death and destruction in addition to the firehose of lies and propaganda that has only intensified over the last 4 years.

Fight – Flight – Freeze

We also don’t want to believe this is America.

How can this be?

Our institutions have shown themselves much more fragile than we ever could have known, had this not happened.

Yet some things have gone right: the election, the courts, the Georgia run-offs…

But the more basic things upon which our country is built are now dangerously eroded… namely our belief in democracy itself… and make no mistake, the Republican party, by-and-large, has led the charge.

They want power… they offer easy solutions to allay the fears that they stoke… and they promise they are they answer…

“Just give us power and we will take care of you” they say… while shredding the social safety net and the social fabric of our country… and handing most of our tax dollars to the wealthy and large corporations.

Heaven forbid that the little guy ask for help, because all those social problems are too expensive… but if there is a bank that might fail, well we’d better give billions to help out.

But we remain the shit their money grows in.

They really don’t care if we live or die. We are useful until we can’t work anymore. When we cannot give our flesh, blood, sweat, and tears to increasing their bottom lines, may as well let us die of covid. We are cheaper when we are dead… and hey it creates great new growth potential in the mortuary industry. Ivanka can use those Chinese patents on caskets… ship ‘em right on over, Vanky! And Perdue & Loeffler can make a killing on those body bag companies they invested in.

To quote a Janis Ian song, “I went to see my brother on the 32^nd floor in a building down on Wall St., you could hear the futures roar. He said here we make decisions and we trade commodities, if you tell me where there’s famine, I can make you guarantees. I said, “is this all there is, power to the strong? Something’s wrong. Something's wrong in heaven tonight, You can almost hear them cry. Angels to the left and the right saying, "What about the love?”

And water futures are now being traded, but there’s no climate change.

Per the Cree Indians, “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.”

But we continue on… fighting amongst ourselves, as they want us to… fleeing to safe havens either through drugs or pure escapism, as they want us to… or frozen in fear or inaction, as they want us to.

The propagandist’s firehose keeps us distracted from looking behind the curtain… because we are so fucking busy simply fighting for survival at multiple levels simultaneously.

This also keeps us divided and less likely to join together, because we are always punching down

I recall a skit by Michael Nesmith called “Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority”it, “I called NNS and they really helped by inflaming my natural paranoia and reinforcing my territorial imperative…”

We need to start coming together and sharing the truth and punching up or nothing will ever change.

We must refuse to be the shit their money grows in and stop punching down.

We also must bring all of those responsible for the attempted coup to justice, no matter how high or how low their station in life. If we don’t face our racism, our misogyny, our classism and our other societal ills, this will happen again.

We aren’t done yet. Let us pray we are midwives of a better world, not one that descends into madness and civil war, because as the Army Insurgency and Counter Insurgency manual says (via Beau of the Fifth Column), if a civil war does start, it’s a minimum 6-year commitment. And there won’t be Cheetos, Mountain Dew or Netflix in your civil war bunker.

72 days & Afraid

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday November 09, 2020 · 10:34 PM PST

2020/11/09 · 22:34

I was feeling so good on Saturday. But I really wasn’t prepared for the events of today, November 9th. I really just want to crawl into the drawer our cat Penny lives in. It’s safe and dark, she has been terrorized by one of our other cats, so we have to keep her secluded. But instead I wrote this.

I know Trump’s gonna’ keep on Trumpin’ while his feckless lawyers continue to rack up losses in courts across the land… and that his minions continue carrying lies about voter fraud, by which they mean “any votes cast for Joe Biden”… and his cultists continue to believe the firehose of lies telling them the election was somehow stolen or fraudulent.

I know he will go lower, because he has no bottom, morals, self-restraint, or anything that might make him a worthwhile human being. Breathing just doesn’t count when someone is pure malevolent evil.

He remains a bully, a buffoon, a malignant narcissist, stupid, cunning, dementia-addled toddler who will destroy our country because we told him no. Alice Miller’s theory in For Your Own Good is that the child’s rage at the suppression of his or her ability to express their emotions, true feelings, and true self are re-enacted when the child grows up.

After reading Mary Trump’s book about her uncle, it’s pretty clear that Donald, was a bully with animal cunning from his early childhood. He witnessed the abuse his father visited upon his older brother and decided not to be *like that*… which could be called “anything his father determined as weak, loser behavior”.

So, he has taken on the role of his father and is taking out his childhood rage on the country, like we are his inner child. He has never been told “no”, so his toddler rage at his parents, combined with the unfettered powers of the presidency and sycophants willing to do anything to keep the toddler placated is an incredibly dangerous and precarious place for our country. It compounds when you consider his cultists and their love of not being weak losers either.

I’ve discussed this in previous podcasts, but back to today’s news…

Trump has fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who refused to allow the use of the insurrection act, among other things.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who was in charge of the nuclear stockpile was required to resign on Friday.
Attorney General Barr met with Senate Majority Leader McConnell in secret, and shortly thereafter, Barr issued a memo loosening 40 year old rules preventing Dept of Justice interference in Elections. He said that prosecutors can look into “credible” allegations of voter fraud and bypass the usual chain of command via the career prosecutors and go straight to him.
Richard Pilger, the official who oversees election crimes stepped down over Barr's memo, stating, “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications… I must regretfully resign from my role as Director of the Election Crimes Branch.”
Current Georgia Senators Perdue and Loeffler have sued the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and his response was, “Earlier today Senators Loeffler and Perdue called for my resignation. Let me start by saying that is not going to happen. The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me.”
Only 3 of 53 Republican Senators have acknowledged President Elect Joe Biden’s win, being Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Susan Collins.
Meanwhile, Cruz, Graham and others are actively denying Joe Biden’s win.
GSA head Murphy still has not signed off on releasing transition funds due the Biden team.
The Trump/Pence regime tried to claim credit for Pfizer’s successful COVID-19 vaccine trials moving forward, which was quickly struck down by Pfizer, who emphatically did not take part in “Project Warp Speed” and took no government money.
In the meantime, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have already started working on their COVID-19 planning, naming their advisory council.
Also the President Elect spoke to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada reaffirming close relations between the 2 countries.

Where we go from here and into the next 72 days are truly uncharted waters. Trump and his cronies are trying to stage a coup d’etat in plain sight, just like all their other criming.

We must stay aware and awake. We must be prepared to fight in whatever way that we can. (All without going insane of course… I struggle daily to maintain my need to stay informed while maintaining my sanity.)

The next big fight that must have absolutely as much attention as we can spare is the Georgia Senate run-offs. There is a lot going on, but if you can spare a donation or some time. Please consider it sending money, phone banking, text banking, or writing letters & postcards.

Votefwd.org
Postcardstoswingstates.com
Fairfight.org

From here thru inauguration day, I plan to post more frequent updates on what I glean from the news.

In the meantime, stay frosty, stay ready. Keep a pair of shoes and a protest sign by the door.

It’s up to us!!

Podcast version: https://anchor.fm/jennifer-schmidt2/episodes/10-72-Days--Afraid-em9556

The Fight REALLY Begins

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday November 08, 2020 · 10:24 PM PST

2020/11/08 · 22:24

I breathed a little easier yesterday. I took the day and spun a lot of wool for yarn. This is one of my favorite hobbies and keeps me from going over the edge. I’ve spun a LOT of yarn over the last week or two.

But I took a rest yesterday and then got up this morning with the plan to continue the fight. The next battle is for the Senate, which will play out in the two Georgia run-offs. I have already made a financial contribution to both campaigns and to Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight. And I am getting ready to write postcards and letters like I did during the General Election. Links to votefwd.org and postcardstoswingstates.com will be in the comments. I have also shared voter registration information on my social media platforms. Please join me in the effort to get Rev. Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff elected to the US Senate!

Not surprisingly, there are already those across the political spectrum already telling us on the left need to reach out to Trump supporters with compassion because we should know how they feel after our 2016 loss to Trump. They are trying to play into the stereotype of the soft-hearted liberal and expecting us to be all forgiveness and forgetfulness. But in 2016, when we were grieving, we liberals were told us to just suck it up… in the vein of “fuck your feelings, snowflakes,” or things even more vulgar. Now we are told to create safe spaces for the real snowflakes? I emphatically answer NO!

In 2016, those us who were crushed by Hillary’s defeat weren’t just upset because our candidate lost. We were devastated because we *listened* to Trump and his ugly rhetoric, we saw what was happening at his rallies and how hecklers and others with disagreements were beat up and thrown out. We saw how he ridiculed a disabled reporter. We saw how he treated women and heard the names he called them. We heard his not-even-thinly-veiled racism & his really bad history with it, see The Central Park 5 and the lawsuit he and his father lost in the 1970s for refusing to rent to blacks. We heard his disparaging remarks about immigrants, how Mexicans are all rapist and murderers. Many of us also read the stories of the women who credibly accused him of raping and assaulting them. We also paid attention to the stories of him not paying contractors and his numerous bankruptcies. We didn’t let his promises of “JOBS JOBS JOBS” fool us into supporting him. From his words and deeds, he showed us who he was over and over… and yet he was apparently a buffoon, and too many Democrats were resting on their flabby laurels, thinking there was no way that he could win. However, Trump, with his animal cunning, was able to tap into a deep vein of racism and misogyny and disillusion among whites… and for that and many other reasons, he won.

In the four years he has been in office, his cruelty has become even more obvious to those of us who saw it earlier. He revels in chaos and cruelty and has no moral compass. He uses people for what they can give him and then he discards them like used condoms. And for Trump, and his cronies, the cruelty is the point. So when I’m asked to reach out to hurting Trump supporters, I’m like “Not just no! Hell NO!”

These aren’t “forgive and forget” or “agree to disagree” things. These issues mean life and death to large swaths of American citizens. Trump is trying to kill us by destroying the ACA and letting COVID run rampant, we are soon going to be at a quarter million dead. His support of “rough” police tactics is tacit support of law enforcement remaining unaccountable. His support for white supremacists has gotten many killed all over the country, in El Paso, in Kenosha, in Portland, etc. He is a terrorist, he may technically keep his hands clean, but his words incite violence at the hands of his minions. He also hates Muslims, LGTBQ folks, and disabled people, and has made that clear, as well. He doesn’t care about anyone, unless they are useful to him.

Disagreements are for how you take your coffee, or whether you like pineapple on your pizza. But this refusal to reach out boils down to morality, and the value of human life, even if they are different than you.

Along the same vein as those who are saying Joe Biden needs to pardon everyone in the Trump Regime who have broken laws, including Trump himself, ala Gerald Ford & Richard Nixon.

The answer to this MUST BE an emphatic “Fuck NO!”

Prosecutions must happen for transparency, so we know exactly what happened and how deep the corruption goes. We must send the message that this cannot happen again. If we don’t, there will be no deterrent.

Ford’s pardon of Nixon, allowed a bunch of his cronies to walk free. Many of these same figures have resurfaced repeatedly, in Iran-Contra under Reagan, and again they went unpunished. They crimed again under GW Bush and went unpunished… AGAIN… And now they are back criming for Trump.

The next 73 days are bound to be even more unhinged than the preceding 5 years have been. I don’t believe he even has any hinges left, and as he spirals further down, we really don’t know the depths to which he will go. We should all know by now that he has no bottom. The mental illness of this man has made us all sick, families with a member suffering from mental illness tend to pick up symptoms. Trump has been in our eyes, ears, and psyches for 4 solid years… we have been his captive audience with little escape. The days since Biden’s win and minimal media exposure for Trump have been like seeing the sun after weeks of rain and heavy clouds.

Trump’s psychopathy is a toxic stew: at baseline he’s a bully & con man with animal cunning, plus malignant narcissism, overlaid with severe dementia. He also has been, per his niece Mary Trump, “institutionalized” for his entire life… never allowed fail, always coddled, never having had to do anything for himself. His biggest gamble has also turned out to be his biggest and first real loss. This is likely to trigger a worsening in his downward spiral. He continues to need relevance and adulation, so he plans continuing rallies to spew his lies and vitriol from his detached fantasy world. His brainwashed followers continue to receive a steady stream of disinformation from Fox, OANN, Breitbart, Facebook, and other Right-Wing sources. As I mentioned in a previous podcast, they are authoritarians looking for a father figure they can believe in and submit to.

I believe we have entered the most dangerous time since Trump took the reins of power in 2017. We managed to get through the election with minimal issues. But the GOP still widely parrots and supports his assertions about the election being stolen or corrupted. This includes prominent figures such as Graham, Cruz, & Rubio. Ironically this is while the GOP continues to try to steal the election from the American people.

Trump plans to start presenting obituaries of people who have died and accusing them of having voted. Remember, there is no bottom. He can bring up dead people when it’s convenient and useful to him, but he intentionally refuses to do shit about the 1000+ dying daily of COVID. That takes real work.

Trump’s Regime is also working to hamstring the transition in any way possible. His appointed GSA head is refusing to release any transition funding to the Biden team, perhaps waiting until the results are certified by the Electoral College. But, in addition to his 0 for 10 lawsuits, and reasonable expectations of more to come, there is rumored plan to challenge the Electoral College process and results in court. Most likely as a backup should their plan to pressure to enough electors to flip to Trump fail. The Republican Pennsylvania legislature may even attempt to override the voters in their own state & decide who “really” won the election.

We need to buckle up, because as Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project says, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”… and until January 20^th, we are all aboard the USS Trumptanic and we are all locked in steerage.

Donald the Destructor

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday November 01, 2020 · 9:15 PM PST

2020/11/01 · 21:15

7/18/2020

I felt it in the water in the 90s

The great unrest roiling

Beneath a pretty plastic surface

A counterfeit world, eggshell fragile

We have continued on

doing our best to ignore the noise & cracks

blithely jumping over yawning chasms

of hunger, anguish, desperation

Because they weren’t *our chasms*

But now the cracks are everyone’s

Wallpaper & earplugs aren’t enough

We can’t close our eyes & pretend

No one is safe if anyone is unsafe

Election day is nearly upon us and where are we? The nation is as taut as a bowstring. It seems like a good time to look at what is happening with the Dear Leader.

If there is one thing Trump understands, it’s destruction. He is undoubtedly one of the most toxic humans currently walking the face of the earth. He is a toxic stew of mental illness, namely malignant narcissism, and dementia. He also is a bully with a base cunning aka. animal instinct, but he isn’t smart, per se. He also possesses an uncanny ability to con people into believing his lies, especially people definable as authoritarian personality types, characterized by easy submission to established, legitimate authority; high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and a high level of conventionalism. These are personality traits that are much more prevalent in right wingers than Left-wingers. Beliefs can also strongly affect whether authoritarians agree with whether the government (ala “daddy & mommy”) is doing the right thing. (theauthoritarians.org)

Since Trump was elected, the United States has become a shell of its former self. Everything looks normal … but institutions are only functional enough to maintain the illusion: Social Security will fail. The payroll taxes which funds the program has been temporarily suspended by Trump. Should this continue, social security is estimated to end in 3 years. (https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/601197/what-trumps-payroll-tax-cut-will-mean-for-you) Other programs & laws already facing the Trumpist/GOP chopping block include Medicare, Medicaid, & Food Stamps. Luckily the changes to food stamps have been blocked by the courts, for now. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trump-food-stamp-cuts/2020/10/18/7c124612-117a-11eb-ad6f-36c93e6e94fb_story.html) (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/politics/medicare-trump.html) Other egregious destruction includes the rollback of environmental protections, the Clean Water Act, wildlife protections, all under the guise of freeing business from annoying regulations. This doesn’t even begin to address the damage done the USPS, the CDC, the DOJ and many other federal agencies.

So much is happening and yet all the roads meet in the crossroads that is the Orange Menace. He knows nothing but continues to fill his insatiable greed and need while spinning a magical tale that his cultists willingly believe.

We have become, to a large extent, a country of warring ideals: colloquially seen as the “snowflakes” vs. the “patriots”, at least from the Right-Wing perspective. However, that script needs a flip. Kindness and compassion exhibit real strength and resilience, knowing history and our founding documents, admitting our failures & not just touting our triumphs is real patriotism. Men like trump are bullies who are all bluster, but cannot take criticism, & have no ability for self-reflection, they are the real snowflakes.

In her book, “For Your Own Good,” Alice Miller discusses what she called poisonous pedagogy (child rearing practices that repress the spirit of children) and through these practices kids are conditioned to not remember or admit to themselves the cruelties visited upon them. When these children become adults, they act out their childhood frustrations on their own kids or in the case of Hitler, the entire world. She also argues that authoritarian child-rearing practices create adults looking to have the denied childhood needs met. Thus “softening up” entire groups of people who easily submit to political leadership who mirror their authoritarian parents who demanded similar unquestioning obedience and submission. (tinyurl.com/...)

In the United States, childrearing practices have slowly moved away from “tough love”, but the unacknowledged & unhealthy patterns we learned as children remain and get unwittingly repeated. Leaving children emotionally damaged and unable to fight back, they lash out or engage in self-destructive behaviors and don’t know why.

Alice Miller uses Hitler as a prime example of how poisonous pedagogy can go horrendously wrong on a global scale. Hitler was raised by abusive parents and not allowed to express his emotions, deeper self, and needs. When he became an adult, he essentially took on the role of his father, and treated the Jews much the same way he was treated by that father. Donald Trump is not so very different. In his niece Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough, he was mostly ignored by his parents for various reasons; his father didn’t really care about anything except his business and his mother was sick for most of Trump’s earliest and most formative years. Trump also saw the abuse his older brother Fred Jr. suffered at the hands of his father, and apparently decided that he would be the man his father wanted him to be: never showing emotions and learning to “be a killer”… as well as a misogynist & racist. He also reportedly kept a copy of Mein Kampf at the beside.

When you take the comparison to the next step, Trump is still trying to please his father and gain that approval and attention, but the hole in his soul is bottomless. He wants that which he can never have. He also has suppressed anger at his parents, while also continuing to seek a sense of control. His admiration of strong man dictators is telling.

Trump’s father also steeped him in a warped belief in relationships as purely transactional, teaching him that the only value that people had was based in their value **to him**. He himself had no inherent value as a whole person. His value was only in how he reflected on his father. When watching Donald interact with others, you can see how well he learned his lessons. Those around him are only valued as far as they are useful to him. It is all about him. When those around Trump are no longer useful or no longer reflect well on him, they are cast aside because they take too much effort. It’s almost a parallel to his being sent to military school when he was a teenager, because his parents couldn’t handle him. And that is getting off easy… if he’s really mad, he visits the suppressed rage at his parents’ neglect via his made Tweetstorms and wild accusations, or perhaps getting his minions, like Bill Bar, to try and lock up his opponents.

Trump is a broken human being. He does not care about anyone but himself. He has never acknowledged the nearly 230k COVID deaths, thinking that makes him look worse than his deliberate & malicious decisions to downplay the virus and unleash herd immunity on the American people. And please be clear, the COVID response has not been “bungled”, it is deliberate cruelty. He even treats his followers with contempt, he has called the “disgusting people”… and at at least 3 rallies in the last week, in Omaha, Tampa, & Pennsylvania… his campaign left people stranded after the rallies ended, not paying to bus people back to their cars… and this is after people have packed into venues, maskless, in the middle of the pandemic.

And the Trump cultists are broken. They are willing to do what their Dear Leader says because they are believers and to them, the ends justify any means. They care as much about you as they do about themselves, which is apparently not much. They believe in an amorphous myth of a past that we will never return to, let alone ever experienced, and they are willing to believe so strongly they cannot see the present danger right in front of their eyes, because he is their savior.

Things are ugly right now. And they are likely to get uglier in the days ahead.

Stock up with the supplies you might need as though it’s a natural disaster, if you possibly can.

And by all means VOTE.

If Biden wins, we can get the country on the path to recovery. If Trump wins, American democracy is dead.

Public Health, Science, and the 100% Solution

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday October 23, 2020 · 11:54 PM PDT

2020/10/23 · 23:54

In a former life, I was a Public Health Nurse, dealing most specifically with Communicable Disease in a small rural county in Missouri. I held that job for 7 years and I loved my work, but time and tide change people and it was finally time to move on. I had many great experiences investigating communicable diseases, working WIC clinic, and doing all the many-faceted things my job entailed. The county that I worked for was deep red and continued to get redder during my tenure from 2006-2013. I barely talked about my liberal politics and finally left, partially because of that.

My work investigating communicable disease sometimes included asking pretty personal questions. I once was doing a standard interview regarding Giardia, a water-borne pathogen that causes diarrhea and the man I was interviewing decided that my asking where he shopped for groceries was too much. It wasn’t always an easy job, but it was so interesting. I worked a rabies case in a horse that died after being bitten by a bat at a horse show. I investigated a Shigella outbreak involving 40 people. I also worked a norovirus outbreak in a nursing home and a food-borne illness outbreak at a church supper, that came down to what we thought was probably from turkeys that were cooled too slowly after cooking.

I was working in Public Health during the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic, which meant I was there for many tabletop exercises, agency planning, seemingly endless shot clinics, community coordination efforts, and so much more, including the Incident Command System, which is a flexible framework for emergencies of all kinds, developed by the GW Bush administration after 9/11. When our folks went to pick up our county stock of Tamiflu, there were reportedly snipers on the roofs of the pick-up point, stationed there in case of panic. We received numerous calls from a frightened public, one of which really sticks in my mind. An elderly woman called in to harangue us for not offering shots to the elderly at first and I carefully explained to her that people born before 1959, if I remember correctly, were considered to have likely have been exposed to a similar strain of flu and probably had some level of immunity to the virus. She insisted that President Obama was trying to kill all the old people and wouldn’t hear a thing that I had to say. I ended that call by saying, “Well ma’am, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.” Another event I remember distinctly is a group of young women in their 20s coming in to the flu shot clinic and ultimately deciding not to get the vaccine because they “worried about it affecting their ability to have children in the future.” This was after I’d tried to explain that the H1N1 vaccine was made exactly like any other flu vaccine, it was just sped up as much as possible to meet the demand and prevent as many infections as possible. But we couldn’t guarantee 100% safety or efficacy, which wasn’t enough, apparently.

Despite my many disagreements with George W. Bush and his administration, they laid a lot of solid groundwork for Public Health response via the Department of Homeland Security, mostly in response to a bioterrorist attack, but the work really gave the United States a great framework, including the Incident Command System noted previously. The Obama administration took that foundation and built on it, and used it to respond to the H1N1 & the Ebola epidemic. They left a detailed plan for the Trump administration, as well as a specific office to deal with global health concerns. But Trump and his “best people” threw the Obama planning into the trash and disbanded the Global Health office in 2018, for whatever reason struck his fancy at the time… probably his abiding and malignant hatred of Barack Obama.

So fast forward to 2020, and the worst pandemic since the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. So much has gone wrong with the Trump Regime’s response, but I think we all know that… unless we choose not to, of course. There were plans that weren’t just ignored, but trashed. There was a concerted effort to downplay the dangers of COVID-19 and the known airborne transmissibility. Trump admitted it was worse than the flu and that it was airborne on 7 February on the Bob Woodward tapes. (https://tinyurl.com/yyhm86fb) Additionally, per a NYT report, Larry Kudlow, the National Economic Council Director, on 2/25/2020 publicly said that the virus was contained and “pretty close to airtight”, and the next day he delivered a private message communicating concern over the economic stability & uncertainty due to COVID. (https://tinyurl.com/y2o9z9bv)

For months, before the Bob Woodward recordings were released, Trump was often given the benefit of the doubt regarding his response to the Coronavirus Pandemic. The Regime’s response was touted widely as bumbling, misinformed, and many other descriptors based on insufficient or incomplete information. What the Woodward recording lays bare is not a lack of information, but a deliberate & malicious plan to play down the potential severity of the virus on the public health, under the guise of wanting to “prevent panic”. Additionally, Jared Kushner, deliberately and maliciously guided testing and aid away from blue Democratic states that were getting hit the hardest initially. (https://tinyurl.com/y4uftxnb)

Even after the tapes came to light, however, the media has in large part continued with calling the response to the Pandemic as bumbled or mishandled. There seems to be an inability of the national media to call the response what it is: intentional, malicious & deliberate. Decisions were made at the very top of the executive branch to not respond and to confuse the message, all for politics.

Other deliberate actions include the way aid was sent to China: “17.8 tons of donated medical supplies … including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials” on 7 February 2020 (https://tinyurl.com/waofk4l); and in May 2020, 200 ventilators were sent to Russia. (https://tinyurl.com/y7wq37f6). The choice of aid recipients is interesting, given the fact that Trump is known to be deeply in debt to both countries, and refuses to even entertain criticism of the latter. After all this, Trump blamed Obama of leaving the Strategic National Stockpile empty or with defective/broken equipment, but the state department was able to send equipment and supplies to other countries while letting the maintenance contracts for the Strategic National Stockpile lapse in summer 2019. (https://tinyurl.com/wmgltjj) In the meantime, the “blue” states were left to fend for themselves on the open market, which often ended in them being outbid by the Federal Government, or just having their hard-won supplies seized by the Feds (https://tinyurl.com/y455ojmp). This led Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to use connections through his wife to fly in a secret shipment of supplies from Korea. (https://tinyurl.com/y4pe69om)

The question I feel compelled to ask at this point is, “Who is making the money?” The old “follow the money” adage would be revealing, I am sure.

The Trump Regime has been really good at undercutting the experts that they do have on the so-called Covid Taskforce and muddling the message that the government is sending out. Dr. Anthony Fauci has been one of the leading epidemiological experts since the 1980s and has been completely sidelined, but does serve as an occasional whipping boy or prop for Trump. Dr. Fauci is often quoted by Trump as saying we don’t need to wear masks, however that was on 8 March, and is not the current consensus regarding mask use. (https://tinyurl.com/y23whmfd) Per numerous reports, Trump has trouble with focus except where he & his re-election are concerned, Olivia Troye, former Pence National Security advisor, also overheard Dear Leader say that he was glad that he didn’t have to shake hands with all the disgusting people. (https://tinyurl.com/y4kwrbmk).

Trump talks a fantastic game, but remains incapable of following through on much of anything. He likes to take the credit but doesn’t want to do the work. The real work of a proper COVID response would have included mobilization of the SNS, and proper implemention the Defense Production Act to make Personal Protective Equipment for healthcare workers, and test kits, just for a start. He said he did, but very little came of it… the usual fanfare and fizzle.

The bottom line is that Trump doesn’t like to work, or wear masks, and doesn’t like those around him to wear them either, which has led to the White House becoming its own super spreader cell. And since his cultists believe him so implicitly, it really doesn’t matter what the science says, they will follow him off a cliff… some have even tried using bleach (https://tinyurl.com/y9u2wknc), or taking hydroxychloroquine (https://tinyurl.com/v4h9kuf). Now that Trump has recovered from COVID-19, thanks to a team of dedicated doctors and nurses (funded completely by taxpayers, to be clear) and treatments well out of reach of the average American, demand is up for Regeneron, and we don’t even know if it actually works, or if Trump was just fucking lucky. (https://tinyurl.com/y6n7ep8l)

The Regime also continues to tout the vaccine coming really soon, never bothering to mention that most vaccines take several years to produce, the record being the Mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took 4 years. Mind you, the development of a COVID-19 vaccine is likely to be completed in record time, given the scale of the disease and the number of agencies working on it worldwide. However, several companies have had to halt their Phase 3 trials due to adverse side effects and unexplained illnesses among participants. This is normal in vaccine development to make sure the science is right. (https://tinyurl.com/y53naloz) Trump and his crony Alex Azar shut down the Office of Vaccine Safety in 2019, which was responsible in determining the safety of all vaccines, and teased out whether vaccines caused various illnesses after people received them. The important question here is, “How will we know if any of these vaccines are safe?” (https://tinyurl.com/yxcfh4ny) Through his deadly arrogance, he decided that we didn’t need help from the rest of the world and removed the United States from the World Health Organization. This means we are pursuing our vaccine research alone and not sharing information and advances with all the countries around the world who are working towards the same goal. Trump’s politicization of the Coronavirus Pandemic, including kneecapping the CDC, has made his usual lies and promises even more suspect. I know that I, as a nurse and vaccine advocate, would be very wary of taking a COVID vaccine, especially if it had Trump’s gold star of approval on it. I plan to wait to see what Public Health experts say. I do know that 90-95% vaccine uptake is generally required to create the prized “herd immunity” that is able to protect everyone, including those who can’t take it for various reasons, including immunocompromise. I also wouldn’t blame people for being hesitant to take this vaccine.

The other issues I have regarding vaccine development are the things that we *DON’T* know. Given the fact that immunity only seems to last 5-7 months, but we still really don’t know for sure, is a vaccine even a viable option? (https://tinyurl.com/y2acdm94) Additionally, we have several documented cases of confirmed reinfection in which the disease has been worse on the second go-round. A vaccine IS the ideal path to eradicating COVID-19, especially given the possible lifelong effects, such as blood clots, strokes, fatigue, brain fog, heart failure, and other potential nastiness for its victims.

Why anyone would want to tempt fate by not protecting themselves & others from COVID is beyond me, honestly. Most of those folks seem to prefer Trump’s “herd immunity” approach, following him off the proverbial public health cliff. The Swedes took a lackadaisical approach to COVID, and now are slowly and quietly aligning themselves with the rest of Europe. (https://tinyurl.com/y3y9cktu) The US government has all but abandoned doing anything to help bring the spread of infection under control. If we’d had an effective response, we would ramped up widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation of the infected, mask mandates, and strict social distancing for the first few months, like South Korea and many other countries did. Now countries long considered “3^rd world” are doing much better in terms of both infection rates and deaths. Ironically, Trump’s Freudian slip showed when he misspoke at the September town hall w/ George Stephanopoulos calling “herd immunity” “herd mentality”, which seems to be his real goal. Just unleash the mobs of the unwashed and let them get sick, if they die, they die. Also apropos of Trump, he wants to shut down the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic. Again, Trump putting personal profits over the American people… and bringing to mind the Ukrainian saying, “People are the shit money grows in.”

So, here we are, heading into the winter months, with COVID numbers on the rise again, just as the experts predicted. We are also in flu season, which the same experts warn could be deadly if combined w/ COVID. We have already seen a death toll just over half of the total US deaths in WW2 (416k). The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (https://tinyurl.com/y2wmly4u) currently projects another 163,000 deaths by 1 Feb 2021, totaling 386,000. If this trajectory continues and no control measures are put into place, we may lose over 2 million souls to COVID alone, not to mention deaths caused by those who cannot access hospital care for heart attacks, strokes, and other causes due to hospitals being overwhelmed with COVID patients.

The COVID pandemic is here, it is worsening, and it isn’t going to disappear “like magic” as someone has promised us repeatedly. There is no miracle cure, there is no 100% solution. There is science, which can be a messy process, but it will lead us to the best answers, but we have to accept that those answers can and will change as we learn more about the current pandemic. What we do know is that masks, social distancing, and handwashing do work, as well as limiting indoor gatherings. Those who refuse to believe this, like Trump, are harming others with their careless, selfish disregard for others. I have very little sympathy for them, nor do I go so far as schadenfreude… it’s more an attitude of “karma is a bitch and takes no prisoners”. Also, we can’t even begin to get the economy moving again until we address the pandemic.

The Trump Regime has shown itself to be willfully and intentionally malicious as regards human life, especially life in “blue” states and Anarchist Jurisdictions. We must vote Trump out and vote in someone who actually gives a shit about all the American people.

Defiant Joy, Creativity, and Curiosity

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 10, 2020 · 10:48 PM PDT

2020/10/10 · 22:48

I just spent a week house-sitting for friends, and had some delightful alone time, which is a real gift. I took my cat, Mayhem, and we just chilled out and enjoyed each other’s company. I have returned home and feel a bit contemplative, still very aware of the stew that is 2020 politics, but seemingly a good time to talk about Defiant Joy, Creativity & Curiosity, and the woman who nurtured these traits in me. This is mostly an homage to her.

We all love our moms. We all carry traits that we love and hate from our moms. I think the biggest gift that I carry, which was nurtured by my mother, is my creativity and curiosity about the world.

My mom was an artist, she rarely met a creative pursuit she wasn’t willing to try, and even invented some. Her favorites were painting and gardening, but she did so much more and WAS so much more. She was very involved with our church, she redesigned the chancel and pastors’ offices. She also designed & made windows out of plastic crystals (since our church couldn’t afford stained glass), made seasonal banners, created the designs for the pastors’ stoles, made table decorations for church functions, built the life-sized nativity set that sat on the church lawn every Christmas season, and certainly more than I know. At home, she sculpted things out of papier mâché, crocheted, built rock gardens, played the piano, sang, decorated the house for the holidays, and cooked wonderful meals (except for a few unfortunate attempts at turning leftovers into soup). Not only was she the very essence of creativity, she nurtured it in other, while being a great mom, who loved us more than her own life.

She and my dad were also very curious and had a deep interest in world around them. Mom used to say that she and Pop were “just 2 dumb old country kids”, but they read books of all kinds and were keen students of life. What they lacked in formal education, they made up for in self-education. I remember my dad coming in from mowing the lawn, eating a bowl of butter beans for lunch and reading the words of the founding fathers.

Mom always worried about the Middle East and called Rush Limbaugh “Little One-Note Johnny”. I’m glad in a way that my folks are not here to see our country teetering on the edge of the abyss, especially given the way my mom always proudly marveled at the legacy of our peaceful transition of power every 4 years.

This is where I come from, always encouraged in creativity and curiosity.

Perhaps they sound impossible, but they were truly a force of nature, especially Mom.

I am an inheritor of this legacy, and I see shades of her influence of all parts of my life. Being her only daughter, and her youngest child by 6 years, I was afforded a lot of one on one time with her that my brothers didn’t have. She was a gift and I am so lucky to have had her in my life. I strive to live up to her example every day. She has been gone for 15 years, and though I have gone on without her, there will always be a huge hole that will never be filled.

These gifts of curiosity and creativity have given me something to hold onto when things get tough, like during this pandemic and our current political unrest. I learned long ago in a Crisis Risk Communications class, that people need direction for things to DO in a crisis. It allows them a healthy outlet and a feeling that they are helping, but sadly, the mixed messages we have received from the Trump Regime have fed the discord and widened the breach between us and them.

I am lucky in that I have many pursuits that I can turn to, including knitting, spinning wool, bullet journaling, sewing masks, painting bad watercolors, digital scrapbooking, making memes, listening to audiobooks, and now writing & creating podcasts. I find these creative outlets really helpful in dealing with my own anxiety and depression, these seem endemic to this time.

But for those who don’t have this, I have a hard time imagining JUST sitting and stewing and fretting. I think that a lot of folks in my generation who were raised to think that the world would always be stable are really feeling lost right now. We were not prepared for our world to blow up. I know I feel lost enough, I can only imagine how hard it for some of us.

One thing that buoys me up is from the Gaslit Nation Action Guide (https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/action-guide), “Make Art. To say that art cannot make a difference stems from a tone deaf attitude of privilege: Ukraine’s EuroMaidan revolution of 2013-2014 relied on art and artists of all kinds to sustain protesters living in arctic-cold temperatures and under the threat of government-sanctioned violence (http://www.artnews.com/2014/03/31/icons-on-the-barricades-2/); North Korean dissident Yeonmi Park said that Orwell’s Animal Farm helped her heal after escaping the cult-like dictatorship (https://twitter.com/andreachalupa/status/1006368736323006464?lang=en); and in our episode “The Blue Wave Continues: Kansas Rising” (https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/the-blue-wave-continues-kansas-rising) we share Davis Hammet’s account of how painting a rainbow house created a ripple effect in Kansas, leading to major electoral victories (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/davis-hammet-kansas-lgbtq-sharice-davids-laura-kelly_n_5be8ebdfe4b0dbe871ac8dda). We need the artists and storytellers of all kinds more than ever.”

Another place I find inspiration is from Black Women and their absolute refusal to give into despair by claiming joy despite the toxic nexus of racism and sexism that they face on a daily basis. The following quote comes from a very short Bustle article by Ayana Lage (https://www.bustle.com/p/what-black-joy-means-to-7-black-women-15917712), “Being joyful in the face of trauma and tragedy is a radical act.”

I don’t know how many political memes I’ve created during the Trump Regime, but it’s a lot. One of them was pointed enough that a gal told me it was disgusting and blocked me on Twitter. Mostly I get a few retweets and likes, that is fine. I use my creativity as an outlet, and that is the most important thing for me.

Finding joy in these times does feel radical and defiant. Currently I am inking and decorating July 2021 in my Bullet Journal. It feels like I am saying, “No matter what happens with the Pandemic or with the election in November, I plan on being here to fill out these pages.” Some people like to do their Bullet Journals a month at a time, I prefer getting it all done and then going back and filling out those pages lovingly with what is happening in the present moment. I get to enjoy it all over again.

Creating the spaces for next year’s adventures and then deciding that I fucking WILL be here to fill them out feels doubly defiant.

Whatever your choices of what you want to do: find your joy and indulge in it, even if only for a little bit. Don’t let them steal your joy. Don’t give in to their attempts to wear you down. Take up a new skill, try a new recipe, or just spend time with your loved ones (safely of course). Find a bit of joy, because it is in that joy that you prove them wrong and you (and we) win.

Mom always said 2 things, “Every day is a new adventure” and “Every day you learn something new is a good day”.

Elephants

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday October 05, 2020 · 10:17 PM PDT

2020/10/05 · 22:17

We, as Americans, have certain things we like to believe about ourselves… about how we have continually improved ourselves and shed the negative aspects of our past, like racism & misogyny, when we all we have really done it to paper over the holes in the walls without repairing the holes the invading elephants made.

And the elephants remain in the middle of the room, too. We tiptoe around them because we don’t want to upset them and have them make new holes or tear off the pretty wallpaper…. Because then we might actually have to do the harder work of fixing the holes.

So, let’s recognize some of our collective elephants…. And I’m not talking about the GOP, well not exactly…

The other day, I was listening to a podcast and the announcer and his guest were discussing the differences about Biden & Hillary Clinton and why older voters like Joe better. Mind you, both commenters were men so they missed an elephant that any woman will see and many men will simply deny the existence of.

Mind you, Hillary Clinton wasn’t my #1 choice in 2016 for president, she had a great deal of baggage, especially thanks to the Right. They hated her as First Lady, they hated her as a Senator, they hated her as Secretary of State, no matter what she did, she couldn’t do anything right. She also had a lot of referred ick from being married to Bill Clinton. But no matter the baggage, she was certainly the most qualified of the candidates. She wasn’t considered “likeable” and people couldn’t “connect” with her, she was considered cold, aloof, & distant or aggressive & power-hungry. All of this may have been true, but given the generation that Hillary came up in, to advance, women had to develop a certain tough demeanor… but they did so at their peril. Women still walk a tightrope between their feminine sides and tougher sides, and meeting the competing expectations is pretty much impossible. All women want is to be recognized as full human beings first. The biggest issue that nobody want to talk about with the Hillary problem is that she is a woman.

Controlling women is possibly the oldest elephant the human race has tried to paper over. And US likes to think that women getting the vote in 1920 fixed that… but the truth is that by 1970, women still couldn’t have a credit card or own property without a co-signer, or could get fired for being pregnant. These were finally fixed over the course of the 1970s, but that was OVER 50 years after the 19^th amendment. Married women weren’t allowed birth control until 1965 and it took until 1972 for all women to be allowed access to contraception. Congress didn’t even remove references to contraception from federal anti-obscenity laws until 1970. And the there is the eternal fight over Roe v Wade. I’m not going to litigate it here, because it’s just a piece of the women’s rights battle.

So how did I get here after talking about Hillary Clinton, credit cards, and then reproductive rights? Because it’s all the same thing. Women are not seen as full human beings. The fight for reproductive rights is about the control of women, hence the fight against birth control and abortion. Women are considered at a fundamental level to not be capable of making decisions about their lives or their own bodies, like children, we can’t be responsible and need to be controlled. Additionally, our value is measured by our reproductive ability: women get married and the first thing they are asked about is when they will have a baby, women who have had several children or who decide they don’t want children are often **not allowed** to have their tubes tied or other sterilization procedures. My own daughter had a doctor who “allowed” her to have her tubes tied based on his on calculation of her age + the number of children she had had…. It wasn’t because she wanted to stop having children, but because of some rubric he had made up. A friend of mine knew she didn’t want kids and was married, and her spouse was 100% with her… but the surgeon had to sit down with *both of them*.

Beyond all of this is the way that women are treated in the business and professional fields, often talked down, accused of being aggressive for wanting to advance (or accused of sleeping her way to the top). Per Leftronic.com (https://tinyurl.com/y3ho3a96), 29% of senior management is female, 33 Fortune 500 companies are led by female CEOs, 31% of senior roles are held by women in the U.S., 12.5% of American women are employed as Chief Financial Officers in Fortune 500 Companies, and female CEOs are more likely to be fired than male CEOs. These type of statistics are often blamed on having children, not being engaged enough, no giving enough, etc. rather than looking at the structures that either block or support women in the workplace. Women have different needs that are often not incorporated into corporate culture, what they are really saying is that they don’t want to change.

All of the things that I have mentioned here are all examples of how women are controlled, and the major mechanism is via her sexuality. If she dares to step outside the appointed box, she is called demeaning names or accused of demeaning acts, all to shame her and silence her. So we continue to talk about pay gaps, abortion, birth control, but never get to the discussing the elephant of misogyny.

An amazing woman I follow is Dr. Bandy X. Lee, MD, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. Her specialty is violence prevention, and she edited and contributed to the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (https://tinyurl.com/y4xud4e7). She and her colleagues have predicted much of what we have seen Trump do and the pathologies he has exhibited as his presidency as gone on. She was accused by right wing website of “not being licensed” (https://tinyurl.com/y4pdhwfu) and of violating the Goldwater Rule by the APA. She has accused the APA of having her blacklisted, as evidenced by her inability to get booked on most mainstream media outlets including Rachel Maddow. She has been outspoken in her discussion of Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism and how as the walls close in, he will become worse as he tries to save what shreds of his psyche remain (https://tinyurl.com/yxadptyq). She and her colleagues have warned, quite rightly, in my opinion, that Trumps mental health would keep spiraling out of control, possibly eventually taking the country, and perhaps the world, along with him. His uncontrolled & worsening mental state infects those around him, and the country as a whole. He will do anything for his psychic survival… all while having access to the largest military & nuclear arsenal in the world. He also makes clear how he does not care about others, and is incapable of doing so. She posits frequently on her Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BandyXLee1) that until we, as a nation, address Trump’s mental health, analyzing his actions and treating him appropriately from the mental health standpoint, we will get nowhere.

However, Dr. Lee is also Asian and has faced both racist and misogynistic attacks for her speaking out from her expertise.

Here we have to tiptoe around 2 additional elephants, racism and Trump’s mental health. Trump’s mental health has been nibbled at around the edges by the mainstream media, but has rarely confronted the issue head-on, perhaps under pressure from the APA and other groups, but she remains another female, and Asian, voice that is being actively silenced by the powers that be.

The last amazing women I am going to bring up, are Sarah Kendzior (https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior) and Andrea Chalupa (https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa). I have mentioned them in previous podcasts, they have called nearly every step of the US descent into autocracy under Trump. Their podcast, Gaslit Nation (https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/), is a study of where we are as a country every week. They too have not been widely listened to, or taken seriously, until now… all while being faced with threats to their families and persons, up to and including death. And lately I have seen more experts on rising autocracies on the news as the mainstream media seems to finally be cottoning onto the concept that our country might actually be in danger. However, more often than not, those voices are male and not female. But these brave, bold women have been trying to tell us what has been coming for the last 5 years.

So we have some huge elephants sitting in our national living room… and they can’t be ignored anymore. Like so many problems, we have to recognize them for what they are and listen to the people affected by them to begin unravelling the toxic effects they have on us all.

The first and most urgent has to be Trump’s pathological narcissism. This is the most looming danger we face, partly because over 1/3 of the country is it on and taking the rest of us down with them, the problem is that they cannot see where this is heading and they really think this is what they want, please listen to my first podcast “Watch What You Wish For” (https://anchor.fm/jennifer-schmidt2/episodes/1-Watch-What-You-Wish-For-ejs10l) . We are on the USS Trumptanic and we are all locked in steerage. If we don’t deal with this, any semblance of the America we know and love will be gone. The road ahead isn’t easy going to be easy, no matter who wins the election in a month. However, understanding that we are dealing with a very ill individual from a mental health framework will make taking the next steps as a country easier, because we will have a grounded understanding of what is happening vis a vis the president.

The misogyny and racism elephants must also be dealt with squarely and forthrightly. The place to start is by listening to women and communities of color about what THEIR needs are. Don’t assume anything. Don’t treat any gender or community as monolithic. White men are treated as individuals, that is all women and people of color are asking. Nobody has to give up anything, this is not a zero-sum game.

America is an Abuse Victim Fighting For Survival

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday September 29, 2020 · 11:45 PM PDT

2020/09/29 · 23:45

I watched as much of the first Trump/Biden debate as I could stomach, honestly I have a headache and feel queasy. I saw a man standing at a podium, but I FELT a man stalking the stage, raging like a drunk abuser in an a-shirt with his kids and wife cowering at his feet after he has beaten them.

As a woman, I experienced rage, fear, sadness, & humiliation that reminds me of those times I was bullied in high school… but mostly I am filled with rage. I wanted to reach through my computer screen and punch Donald in the face.

I feel white hot rage… for our entire country, but especially for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ+ folks, frontline & essential workers, and anyone else Trump deems “disgusting people”. Sadly this describes many of his supporters and they hear his call to “Stand Back & Stand By”; they will heed his call to civil war should he lose the election. White Supremacy & Racism aren’t even being hidden anymore. Those “proud boys” back him and will die for him, and he really couldn’t care less. We are all just the shit his money grows in.

The Trump threat is real, this man has been telling us since before 2015 who he is and what he wants to do. He wasn’t taken seriously until now because he was viewed as a buffoon. But Sarah Kendzior, author of The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, as well as scholar of authoritarian states, saw what he was and warned us. In her 2016 essay (https://thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-heading-into-dark-times-this-is-how-to-be-your-own-light-in-the-age-of-trump/1611114266432-e23ea1a6), she quotes Trump as saying, “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” In her eyes, “This is what “Make America Great Again” means to Donald Trump.” She also posits that Trump and kleptocrat class want to “strip our country down for parts, often using ethnic violence to do so.” And given what we have seen in the last 4 years under Trump, she was right. She and her counterpart, Andrea Chalupa, host the Gaslit Nation Podcast (https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/) and have been warning of everything we have collectively been experiencing.

Tonight more of the country saw who Trump really is. He is mean, cruel, sadistic, uncaring, and fucking unhinged. It was all about him, what he wants and what he needs. The debate, if you can call it that, became yet another episode of the Donald Trump show that has become a fixture we have been unable tune out for the last 4 years. I really appreciated Joe Biden just telling him to shut up. Trump is a bully and he hates it when someone tells him the truth and when he can’t control the narrative. He acts like an out of control toddler and lashes out trying to regain control. He’s the poster child of “arrested development” and his antics communicate loud and clear to his fellow arrestees. The large swath of men and women in this country who never learned to deal with the emotions in a healthy way, I would say far too many… believe only weaklings show emotions, thanks to the stew of toxic masculinity we have all been steeped in. Our country is emotionally stunted and it’s really no wonder we are so fucked up… Kids get ridiculed for attempting to find emotional wellbeing. And yes, I resemble that remark.

Another important point to consider is the input of Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. She and the other contributors to the book likewise warned us that Trump’s pathology would become a national pathology, as well as pose a danger to the country as a whole. She makes a strong case that as a country, we need to deal with Trump’s mental health issues, because those coupled with the immense power of the presidency, will more than like yield deadly consequences for our fellow citizens, country, and world. Surely they already have, as evidenced by his blasé attitude about the 205,000+ dead from coronavirus and. And conditions like his worsen over time at an acerating pace. Do we really want him near the nuclear codes? (https://medium.com/@bandyxlee/the-accelerated-unraveling-of-donald-trump-702dec03330e)

Biden maintained and exuded a presidential demeanor as best he could tonight, but unfortunately, debating Trump in anything near “normal” is nigh impossible. Biden’s connections came through when he ignored Trump and just talked into the camera to the American people about his own life, about our families’ lives. Biden isn’t perfect, but damnit, we have to get this jalopy of a country back on the road if we are ever going to get to the dream country dealership.

I’m not surprised at how the debate went tonight, not really even shocked. Many of us knew who he was, deep in our bones, our Black sisters and brothers were trying to tell us, as were those who knew what they were looking at….

So really, the question before us is… **What can we do?!?!** This is not the time to sit on the sidelines and assume everything will take care of itself. Donate money up and down the ballot if you can. Donate time if you can: volunteer as a poll worker, write letters, drive people to the polls, hand out snacks and water for those waiting to vote, gather ballots in your state and take them to drop boxes (but check your local laws first!), phone bank, text bank, talk to friend and neighbors, do what you can where you are and with what means you have.

Personally, I hate calling people, but I plan to start textbanking later in the week… and I’m going to be a monitor on social media. I have also written 20 lettesr to voters in Ohio and 200 postcards to voters in Florida. I live in a vote by mail state and plan to grab all the ballots from my household and walk them to the dropbox at the library. A great guide is here at the Gaslit Nation website, https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/2020-survival-guide.

The one thing that is certain is that if we stand up as a country and tell Donald “NO!” & “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” in numbers too big too ignore, he will disappear like cowards & bullies do.

Stand up! Vote!

Cheeto Mussolini & the Magic Sharpie vs. the Notorious RBG

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday September 23, 2020 · 11:53 PM PDT

2020/09/23 · 23:53

I woke up before the alarm this morning, wracked with anxiety. RBG’s passing last Friday, may her memory always be a blessing, has thrown so much more doubt into an already doubtful time. I don’t think many people, myself included, understood viscerally what she stood for, all she had done, and what a bulwark she was … and how much we were depending on her.

Honestly, she reminded me of my mom, seemingly able to absorb every blow and come back fighting… until her frail body just couldn’t take it anymore.

Now with McConnell and Trump working as hard as we knew they would to fill her seat with an anti-RBG, to all intents and purposes, their motivations and lies are laid bare.

For all those who think they want an a world without all that Libtard shit, 40 hour work weeks, weekends off, osha protections, the ACA, a functional CDC, environmental regulations, clean water, freedom to live that “gay lifestyle” (including marrying the one you love, working without fear of being fired, and other “minor” considerations), women’s rights to have a credit card or mortgage without a co-signer, to take birth control without consent of her partner, not lose her job just because she gets pregnant, to have an abortion, equal rights for black people and people of color, trans-rights, and so many other things we have come to enjoy and count on.

The list is voluminous, but the point is that she worked for us all.

The amount of damage our institutions, norms, and laws have sustained under Cheeto Mussolini and his Magic Sharpie in not even 4 years is amazing … unthinkable is how much more he will be able to do with his packed courts and a win in November. Nothing that we have known is safe, especially if you aren’t white or male or straight or Christian.

These movements are like an ever-tightening circular firing squad, with continuous purity testing. It happened in the French Revolution, it happened in Nazi Germany, it’s happening with Trump. As the Dear Leader gets bored or tired or disaffected with a given person, they get tossed aside and the circle gets smaller and the purity tests get harder to pass.

And the faith that so many had in our institutions is now recognized as a false hope. Certainly, those loyal to the rule of law and the constitution remain, but the agencies have been co-opted and corrupted by Trump. The CDC, DOJ, USPS, have all been Trumpified to some level or another… and many other agencies as well.

The rule of law and the constitution are only as strong as our collective belief in the ideals they represent. This includes our elections. Trump has been sowing doubt about the elections, which have been a sterling hallmark of our country since its inception, especially as the franchise has expanded… and now that founding principle is thrown into doubt. He has successfully brainwashed his minions into believing that voting by mail is fraudulent, even though, according to former Republican strategist Rick Wilson, absentee voting has long been the “secret sauce” the GOP used to help secure wins in states like Florida.

And now, tonight, Trump made his plan clear… pack to the Supreme Court with a 9^th justice favorable and (most likely beholden) to him and refuse to accept any election results. Then he will use that favorable supreme court to throw out all mail-in ballots and declare the election null and void so he can just continue on. That’s it. That is the plan.

And the Democrats, after years of bringing tea sets to gun fights, are finally waking up to fact that the old norms and rules were scrapped long ago. Unfortunately, while they were clutching their pearls, and sending scolding letters to Republicans, the playbook fundamentally changed and they have been stripped of many powers. Additionally, they refuse to use the powers that they do, such has the subpoena & contempt powers of the House. It’s just not decorous, it’s not bipartisan, it’s not seemly…. “here have a cup of tea… and be careful not to get it on your lace gloves.” It’s also way past time trying to shame the shameless.

The Democrats have got to get it through their heads that the tea set needs to stay at Grandma’s house, and while dropping it off, they should grab Grandpa’s shotgun. As former Congressman Joe Walsh said on his Monday (9/21) “F*ck Silence” podcast, the question Democrats need to answer is “What are you prepared to do?!”, referencing Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables. It’s a valid question that deserves an answer.

The death of Notorious RBG has made an already complex situation worse for this country. As has been said in several places on social media, it’s a hell of an indictment in this country that the laundry list of things I mentioned earlier were being held up by one 87-year-old woman in frail health. She can’t save us, Pelosi & Schumer can’t (or won’t) save us, Mueller didn’t save us, the Electoral College didn’t save us, Hillary didn’t save us.

Again from Pogo, “We have met the enemy & he is us”.

All we really have left is the vote. This is our last chance to save our Democracy. And we must do in numbers too large to be ignored. And if they try to nullify the election, we must be ready to lay ourselves on the line… just like the Civil Rights fighters in the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter protesters today.

VOTE!

200,000 & Inconvenient Truths

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday September 19, 2020 · 7:57 PM PDT

2020/09/19 · 19:57

200,000. Dead. Small by percentages as far as total US population goes, but huge to those who have lost loved ones… in some cases, almost entire families wiped out… only kids left behind… and the ongoing health effects for the “long-haulers” and those with ongoing heart and memory problems. And the incredibly high impact on communities of color makes COVID-19 even more horrifying. Per the CDC, when compared to whites, the case rate for Black communities is 2.6x higher, 2.8x higher for Native American populations and Hispanic/Latino populations. Death rates are, 2.1x higher for Blacks, 1.4x higher for for Native Americans, and 1.1x higher for Lantinx people.

But after the initial push in March for lockdowns and masks, we pass the 200,000 dead mark with a blasé sigh and seemingly collective national “Whatever”… unless you are out protesting masks and lockdowns as against your rights. Nevermind, the concept of personal responsibility and consideration for others, ie duty to society.

I am a former Public Health RN, I worked in a small county health department in Missouri for 7 years, but continued funding cuts and crappy pay finally forced me out of a job that I loved… and we saw people from the community from birth to death almost. From the WIC program to immunizations to injections for community members and so many other services, what we were able to do diminished over time.

I was primarily the Communicable Disease nurse and did the contact tracing for disease reports and outbreaks. When I see how the Coronavirus Pandemic has been screwed up, I feel it deep in my soul. I know the hard work of the invisible battlefront that nobody appreciates… and used to ask where we were when things got bad. But Trump’s absent leadership now calls into question the very function of public health from those who have no clue of its vital role in healthy communities.

If you don’t know where the disease is coming from, who has come into contact with the infected, or where they have been, controlling the spread is nearly impossible. When messaging is muddled or incorrect, it further diminishes the credibility of any advice, even from the most respected institutions like the CDC. And we have lost any sense of civic duty, rather like the Dear Leader.

So, thanks to the lack of national leadership on the Coronavirus Pandemic, 200,000 is not so much a milestone as a speedbump at this point.

One of those inconvenient truths that Cheeto Mussolini likes to obscure with other scandals, like he does.

The Inconvenient Truth is that we have long surpassed the total number who died in every conflict from Vietnam to present (63,418) AND World War 1 (116,541)… total 179,934… and taking out the 5 years of WW2 at 405,399, it took us 98 years to wipe out that many people in war. We lost an estimated 675,000 to the 1918 Flu Pandemic. (https://tinyurl.com/yb9sz5e2) (https://tinyurl.com/y33v84me)

Or another way to look at it: it’s like the population of Salt Lake City has disappeared over the last 6 months. But many of us are lucky, because we are untouched by the heartbreak of this disease… often because we are white. And these lives have been slipping away slowly, outside our sphere of experience

And it’s not because whites live inherently better lives than people of color, it’s because healthcare isn’t a right in this country and accessibility and affordability is unequally distributed.

Racism is such a part of our entire governmental system, and we have been divided to such a point as to make it impossible for poor people of color to join with poor whites to fight together to make the system more equitable for all of us.

The Dear Orange Leader has an evil cunning for manipulation. As I wrote in 2016, “Trump is a master showman & fraudster ... He builds big shiny skyscrapers, casinos and hawks steaks, wine, his “university”, clothing line, et cetera… All flashy, status-ey things with his name slapped on them… but, truthfully, the core is hollow and the glitter is just spray paint. …Then the spray paint & reality got conflated, and here we are, unsure of objective reality vs. spray paint fumes. …Stuck in the dystopian theme park we can’t leave.” (https://tinyurl.com/y5kbkbar)

His favorite “secret sauce”, if you will, is racism. He knows he can play on the base fears of the rubes, but he doesn’t care about them, unless he can squeeze more money out of them. Per Olivia Troye, who served on the White House Coronavirus Task force, the president said: “Maybe this Covid thing is a good thing. I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.” (https://tinyurl.com/y39gpbau)

Additionally, he lives in a demented fantasy world, one in which he believes he can obscure the rising death toll by just talking his way out of it, or ignoring it, or obfuscating by creating other scandals… he has managed to do for most of his life. He said repeatedly that the virus would just go away and after said cases would drop from 15 to zero, he started equating “a good job” to 50,000-60,000 deaths, then 100,000, etc. Now he just says that he has done a great job and prevented “millions of deaths.” He has also said that he takes no responsibility.

This is the same man who ridicules those who wear masks and practice social distancing…. While packing crowds together at venues all over the country… but at a recent appearance in Nevada, he actually told a reporter that he doesn’t worry about catching coronavirus because “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away”. He also told the same reporter, “I’m more concerned about how close you are, to be honest.” (https://tinyurl.com/y5et7wsl) He expressed no concern for his followers packed illegally into the privately own airplane hangar.

Trump is not particularly book-smart, but has a twisted cunning, as mentioned earlier. In addition to his manipulative cunning, he has a strong sense for self-preservation & short-term gain, but no concept of long-term consequences or strategy. For months, controversy raged about whether Trump understood the severity of COVID-19 and was thusly carelessly bumbling along, but the Bob Woodward tape made it obvious that he DID know and made a conscious choice to play the pandemic down, doing essentially nothing, knowing that people would die…. all to preserve his image. Acting again purely in the moment, again looking only at short-term gain. (https://tinyurl.com/yyhm86fb)

His conscious decision to let people die coupled with his absolute disregard for those lives only leads to the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with him.

Trump does not care about anyone but himself. People are the shit his money grows in (Ukrainian saying, Andrea Chalupa, Gaslit Nation)… or an easy piggybank he can tap with his never-ending cons.

The other part of his culpability in how badly the Federal COVID response has been is how he knowingly disregarded the roadmap left by the Obama/Biden administration, which was built on a sound foundation created post-9/11 by the Bush II administration. But his absolute narcissism, jealousy, and incurable malice against those who don’t kiss his ring run through everything he does as well. So he put Jared Kushner in charge of the response, and didn’t bat an eye blue states were left to fend for themselves, because they refused to bow down to him.

Additionally, he delusionally thinks he knows everything, including epidemiology. So with his “leadership”, real scientists and scientific knowledge has been sidelined, ignored, blocked, or covered up. And now he has Scott Atlas, a radiologist, advising him about a vastly different type of medicine. He’d probably be able to read an MRI and tell us about Trump having deterioration in his brain, but he would only have the most general knowledge of epidemiologic principles. Hint: neither herd immunity nor herd mentality are sound plans right now.

Trump has created, in-effect, a slow-moving genocide of the inconvenient, no gas chambers required. Ironically, many of those likely to die are his own supporters.

As of 16 September 2020, per Rachel Maddow, there were about 6.6 million cases and almost 198,000 dead. And Trump’s “herd immunity” (read as: genocide) strategy will see approximately 215 million – 231 million Americans infected (65-70% of total population). Our current fatality rate is 2.97% of those infected and if that follows, we can expect 6,385,500 – 6,860,700 deaths. (https://youtu.be/UVfxjS1DnBc).

Trump and his sycophants have decided that over 6 million of us are expendable.

The Inconvenient truth is that it didn’t have to be this way.

Watch What You Wish For

oakborn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday September 18, 2020 · 11:58 PM PDT

2020/09/18 · 23:58

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I first learned this piece in junior high, and it has haunted me ever since. I’m a lifelong history/news/politics junkie, thanks to my parents, who considered themselves “dumb old country kids.”

I am glad they aren’t alive right now to see Trump, a wannabe dictator, tearing our country limb from limb all for his own advantage. He incites “patriots” to civil war, incites their territorial imperative, paranoia, and deeply ingrained racism… all to protect himself from his many legal entanglements… but it is never about country, it’s always about Trump

The Confederates in 1861 thought they’d start a Civil War & be home in a month, after they licked the Yankees... 4-5 years later, and nearly 620,000 dead, some of them returned to a ruination of what was. Trump’s cultists exhibit similar sentiments. Trump wants to be a dictator, and he will use any means to that end, even civil war.

Per my fave YouTuber, Beau of the Fifth Column, the US Army insurgency manual states that a civil war is a minimum 6 year commitment. Not days, weeks, or months… but years. How many *more* will die? Trump has already thrown 200K Americans into the ground to protect his fragile ego.

So we really come down to it now.

Watch what you wish for…

You think you want a civil war?

You think you want to go to war for him?

If Trump wins, he will continue to kill us all and sell the whole country for parts, as Sarah Kendzior says.

He doesn’t give a shit about you, you are just the shit he & his oligarch buddies grow their money in.

And watching the un-uniting of the former United States is Putin’s wet dream… and just like Syria, you know they will be happy to sell arms to any and all factions.

You think I’m hallucinating? You think I’m mad?

You still think he cares about you?

He called those who serve in the military losers & suckers.

He asked why our military members serve, since they didn’t get any obvious personal gain from it.

When interviewed after his recent Nevada rally, he worried more about getting COVID-19 from the interviewer and expressed no concern regarding spread amongst the crowd from which he was socially distanced.

So you think a civil war is an easy answer… and you will go out and own the libs in a month and return home….

As stated before… Plan to be committed for 6 years. 6 YEARS.

Not 6 hours, 6 days, 6 weeks, 6 months, but SIX YEARS.

And what happens in that SIX YEARS?

People starve b/c they can’t get groceries
There’s no electricity b/c the power grid is gone
Cell phones will become distant memories
Refugees will flee the fighting in droves

Really I could go on… but why? You think you will go home to your Keurig, Mountain Dew, Cheetos, Netflix and Amazon deliveries?

No.

Look at Syria. Maybe talk to a scary Syrian refugee… they will tell you what it is like to watch their children starve, or have loved ones die in bombed out shelters & hospitals. Only the very rich are protected in their enclaves and even know what electricity, cell phones, food supplies, or any of the things you currently take for granted, are.

I’d urge you to talk to real people who have lived through civil wars… oh, but they aren’t human, they are Muslim Scum, like the Libtards, you love to hate. You want to kill them all, just to make yourself feel better.

Also, you don’t want to have your dreams of manly glory messed up by the truth of how Uncivil war is, any war. It sure isn’t something to be glorified, unless you are insane… or just don’t care.

And make no mistake, your Dear Orange Leader doesn’t care. You are just a tool to him… and if you piss him off, he or his minions will come for you too.

Hell, they have already come for immigrants, locked children in cages, rolled back environmental protections, workers’ protections, they are attacking free speech on the streets of Portland, Chicago, Washington, Minneapolis with unmarked federal troopers. Who will be next? If you aren’t useful, or if you are complaining too loud, it may well be you. If the least of us isn’t safe, none of us are safe.

We have also reached the 14^th point of fascism, elections interference, as our democracy fights for its life in possibly our last election.

When we have lost what is left of our democracy, it will be too late.

Watch what you wish for.

You just might get it.

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