The Thomas Friedman OpEd:
Here’s an excerpt though it appears to me you can read the column without a subscription.
Mother Nature is not only all powerful, she’s also unfeeling. Unlike that merciful God that most humans worship, Mother Nature doesn’t keep score.
Let’s remember, Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics, and the engine that drives her is one thing: natural selection. That is the quest of all organisms, to survive and thrive in some ecological niche as they engage in the struggle to pass on their DNA to their next generation and not end up among those that get returned to the manufacturer and decommissioned.
And that’s what viruses do, too: try to survive and replicate. The coronavirus, for instance, co-evolved with bats in the wild. But it apparently jumped to humans when someone ate an infected mammal in Wuhan, China. When it did, it made a warm home in human cells and tissues in ways that can harm or kill us. Once that happened, the coronavirus became just another one of Mother Nature’s fastballs that she throws at us to see who’s the fittest.
Mother Nature is not only all powerful, she’s also unfeeling. Unlike that merciful God that most humans worship, Mother Nature doesn’t keep score. She can inflict her virus on your grandmother on Monday and blow down your house with a tornado on Wednesday and come back on Friday and flood your basement. She can hit you in the spring, give you a warm hug in summer and hammer you in the fall.
A good companion to Friedman’s OpEd to this is Dana Milbank’s snarky “If Trump likes hydroxychloroquine, he’ll love camel urine” which you also may be able to read without a subscription.
Here are a few of the choice suggestions Milbank offers:
- You know what else Trump will love? Covering himself in cow dung and drinking cow urine. Some in India believe this to be particularly effective if done while performing a ritual in front of a fire.
- However, some in the Middle East believe camel urine to be more effective as an antiviral; Trump will be able to settle this dispute conclusively.
- I guarantee that if the president isolates himself in the Oval Office and devotes himself to doing all this and nothing else, he will be safe from the virus. And the rest of us will be safer, too: There’s not much opportunity for mischief when you’re spending your days applying violet-oil cotton balls to your derriere in a room darkened by volcanic ash.
If you missed my Tuesday diary (here) I’d add that one test of just how stupid someone is involves determining whether they believe the wishful thinking that they can challenge Mother Nature to a duel and that they stand a chance of winning.
We shouldn’t be surprised in the least that Trump is hitching his wagon to a unicorn.
Remember this story?
Trump suggested
nuking hurricanes
to stop them from
hitting the
United States.
President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president's private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" according to one source who was there. "They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they're moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can't we do that?" the source added, paraphrasing the president's remarks.
- Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, "Sir, we'll look into that."
- Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall.
- The briefer "was knocked back on his heels," the source in the room added. "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f---? What do we do with this?'”
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