Lawless Politics

“No is a complete sentence.” – Anne Lamott

In order to remain civilized, we have a social contract encouraging the necessary development of healthy boundaries. A boundary marks a limit: geographical spaces, cultural spaces, interpersonal and psychological spaces all include boundaries delineating the manner in which space is conceptualized and utilized. Violating those boundaries is an exercise in deviance, and where some have a difficult time both setting and maintaining boundaries, as well as respecting the boundaries of others, it also marks a level of social dysfunction.

Some boundaries are conspicuous: we don’t threaten others with violence, we don’t engage in harmful felonious activities, and we don’t encourage others to do either of those things without consequence.  What about less menacing social behaviors that can also be terribly inappropriate? At what point do people begin to ignore the social boundaries established for material relationships when they engage other human beings in the virtual world?

Some people will engage virtual relationships in the same manner they engage real relationships in the public sphere: their behavior does not noticeably deviate with regard to personal revelations and conflict management. Others are more willing to reveal opinions, character flaws, and engage combative discourse in the virtual public sphere than they ever would in the real world. And for some, their interpersonal dysfunctions become broadcast across virtual public space because the opaque landscape of the virtual world further hinders their ability to determine social distance for governing the boundaries of appropriate public revelations.

Cognizant adults generally do not reveal private and sensitive interpersonal turmoil in public spaces without experiencing a level of exposure that, depending on the perceived deviance of the behavior being exposed, lends itself to a relative sense of shame. Shame normally evokes a conditioned response of behavioral extinction.

In other words, they don’t do it. They could do it, but they don’t. Most wouldn’t even dream of doing it. They control impulses with unpleasant associations and do not engage the behavior, often as a simple matter of subconscious recourse or a conditioned response.

People with cognitive and/or behavioral issues, including an inability to actualize and respect boundaries, reveal inappropriate personal matters in public spaces.

It shouldn’t be as easy to display your dysfunction like the dirty laundry in your bathroom selfies, but apparently for some, it is a daily imperative. I see inappropriate virtual behavior regularly on social media with varying levels of spectacle. Most of it, I ignore, as one primary impetus for the behavior is attention-seeking: giving it attention just feeds the repetitious dysfunction by rewarding it.

While I prefer to utilize a process referred to as “tactical ignoring” for most of these situations, sometimes I just can’t ignore it. It causes a pain in the right side of my head just above my eye, arousing a compulsory demand to inflict a complementary pain upon someone who desperately needs it.

Virtual spaces often share the publicity of the “public” space without offering the same level of shame associated with questionable public displays in the real world. Manufacturing spectacle is easier online because the social consequences are equivocal and thereby truly innocuous. The virtual stage requires less courage than the exposure of material reality: there’s an imaginary component to virtual space that permits people to forget they are actually revealing themselves to humanity.

I realize it will help very few who actually engage in boorish and discourteous public displays, but just in case one only behaves this way simply because someone forgot to teach you otherwise, let me be clear: it is NOT agreeable to vomit your sensitive personal shit onto social media spaces for all three hundred of your friends or followers to read (and their friends as well, if your friends with loose privacy settings also comment on or share your post). Not all of your virtual friends need to experience the ongoing maladjustment and interpersonal conflict occurring in your life.

Get a journal or a therapist. Learn how to filter. Talk to a close friend or relative. Vet some of that shit in a word doc or scribble it with a crayon on paper from your recycling bin. Hell, get a blog if you really must heedlessly perform, but please understand that social media platforms are really not the place for evidence of your personality disorders.

The people who support your right to “post whatever you want,” even when it’s something you know should be a private matter, are enabling assholes; and those enabling assholes are not the people you should mind when determining how best to conduct yourself in public spaces. Sometimes, inappropriate behavior should be discouraged, especially if the behavior is worthy of judgment and scorn. So, while you do have a right to post whatever you want on your social media account, please understand that you do not have an unmitigated right to do so without recourse. There may very well be consequences, some of which the offending figure will undoubtedly dislike, and thereby routinely provokes an argument about the right to be an asshole in public spaces.

When you have notable problems understanding how the “private” parts of our lives are delineated and handled in a public space, subsequently resent the feedback you receive for putting your shit out there for the world to see, I have to ask what you really expected. You wanted a response. If you didn’t like the responses to your inappropriate sharing in public spaces, that’s probably tough shit. You did it for the attention. You did it to dump your shit on the world. You did it to plead your case. You did it as a declaration of innocence and deniability. You did it to stroke your ego, to justify your attitude, to assuage your guilty conscience. You did it to passive-aggressively attack others or to appeal to a larger voice of public opinion for support and sympathy. You did it to garner an audience. You put yourself on the virtual stage and performed your chosen role for the virtual world. You did it for YOU: a mercurial and maladjusted you.

Once you unleash a boorish performance on the public, the production takes on a life of its own; the dissolute posturing spreads like a highly contagious disease amongst the most benighted and philistine virtual loudmouths. It’s disheartening to see that many assholes.

The repetition of poor behavior and clear lack of social boundaries streamed through a virtual news feed produces a sense of longing for the one thing that cannot be accomplished online, but may be the only thing that would keep the immature, rude, and arrantly shameless from posting their inappropriate drama on social networking sites: punishment.

Since using violence to deal with conflict is objectionable, protracted and discursive censure is as close as you can actually get to putting a virtual foot in the ass of problematic social transgressors. Regrettably, social shaming in the virtual world does not have the same impact and outcomes as in the real world: I despair endlessly searching for the manner in which to effectively extinguish pernicious commonplace melodrama.

“Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.” – Freda Alder

Sitting here, watching you all suffer through the last month of our collective fucking nightmare has been disturbing. I watch this abject reality unfold before me, knowing I am unable to stop the communal train wreck, witnessing how our world is so incredibly flawed, maladjusted, wounded, raging… it is terribly unhealthy, folks.

So, ten months into 2020, I think it’s time to review our year of the pandemic and update the coronavirus timeline once again.

The earliest case of coronavirus disease is traced back to a 55 year old Hubei resident who contracted the virus on November 17, 2019. American intelligence (allegedly) becomes aware of a health issue in China in late November.

December 16, 2019: Wei Guixan, a 57 year old Wuhan resident, one of the earliest noted coronavirus patients, is admitted to the hospital with infections in both lungs.

December of 2019, American intelligence agencies begin to raise normative alarms about a potential health crisis in China while Dr. Li encounters infections appearing similar to SARS and subsequently notifies Chinese authorities of his findings.

Chinese authorities tell Dr. Li to shut the fuck up, and on December 31, 2019, China confirmed cases of a new virus infecting its citizens in the city of Wuhan. On January 1, 2020, the WHO set up an Incident Management Support Team (IMST) in response to China’s disclosure.

Early transmission data reports through January 2, 2020 (compiled and peer reviewed in the scientific medical journal The Lancet) revealed that 41 patients had been admitted to the hospital in Wuhan and identified as having laboratory-confirmed 2019 novel coronavirus infection. 27 of the 41 patients had been exposed to the Wuhan seafood market. One family cluster was found. All 41 patients had pneumonia with abnormal findings on chest CT; complications included acute respiratory distress syndrome, acute cardiac injury, and secondary infection. 13 patients were admitted to ICU and six died.

Again: from November 17, 2019 through January 2, 2020, there were 41 confirmed patients admitted to the hospital for complications of the novel coronavirus; 13 were admitted to the ICU and 6 of them died.  In those first six weeks, if this new, highly infectious and aggressive viral pneumonia had been identified in those 41 hospitalized cases, containment may have been an effective method of disease control.

January 8, 2020, the CDC issues its first warning to clinicians to watch for patients showing respiratory symptoms who had a travel history to Wuhan.

January 9, 2020, China has mapped the coronavirus genome.

On January 10th, as the first coronavirus patient knowingly dies, the WHO assembled their first technical package of information on how to detect, test for, and manage potential cases of the novel coronavirus based primarily on their experience with SARS and MERS respiratory infections.

From January 11 – 17th, the Wuhan health commission insists there are no new cases of the disease and Chinese authorities report that there is no clear evidence of sustainable human to human transmission of the virus. Based on this limited information, the WHO remains unsure about human-to-human transmission rates.

During this time, U.S. intelligence agencies are ringing louder alarms about the serious nature of this impending health crisis.

By January 20th, when the WHO makes its first brief visit to Wuhan, the virus has knowingly spread to Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. More current analysis indicates the virus may also have been present in Europe as early as the end of December 2019.

On January 23, 2020, the WHO determines there is evidence for human to human transmission, but needs to conduct further investigation. On the same day, China quarantines Wuhan and three other cities in Hubei province with a total population of 36 million. Five million people leave the cities anyway without being screened for infection.

On January 23rd, there are 582 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 17 people have died from the virus.

On January 24, there are 854 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 25 deaths. China begins building a new hospital in Wuhan at lightening speed. China knew it was serious, they were going to need another hospital because of it, so the rest of us should have known it was serious as well.

On this day, the President of the United States tweets praise for the Chinese government’s efforts to prevent the spread of the virus, even though it’s already too fucking late to contain the spread from Wuhan.

From January 24-30, China celebrates the lunar new year, and hundreds of millions of people travel around the country; on January 31, 2020, there are 9847 cases of coronavirus infections and 213 patients have died.

On January 28th, Chinese officials finally agree to allow the WHO to bring a team of international scientists into the country in an attempt to get a handle on the virus: something that should have been done six weeks earlier. The following day, Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s Health Emergency Program, said “The whole world needs to be on alert now. The whole world needs to take action and be ready for any cases that come from the epicenter or other epicenter that becomes established.”

On January 30th, the WHO declares a global health emergency. The same day, the president of the United States, while attending a campaign rally in Iowa prevaricates, “We only have five people. Hopefully, everything’s going to be great. They [China] have somewhat of a problem, but hopefully, it’s all going to be great.”

On January 31st, Donald Trump restricts travel from China, which is too fucking late, since the first case from China had already arrived on the west coast fifteen days earlier, and the plague was arriving on the east coast via European travel as well.

Over 200 people have died and almost 10,000 people are infected with the novel coronavirus by the end of January. In seven days, the known infections and deaths have increased ten-fold.

On February 10th, the WHO is finally able to send an international team of scientists into China to begin assessing the situation of the new virus on the ground in Wuhan.

On February 11th, the WHO named the new infection Covid-19, an acronym for coronavirus disease 2019.

On February 13th, there are almost 15,000 new infections in Hubei Province; total infections are now over 60,000. Four days later, Dr. Li, China’s coronavirus whistleblower, dies of complications from coronavirus infection.

February 14th thru February 28th: during this 2 week period, the virus spreads all around the fucking world.  And the stock markets begin their fall.

On February 28th, Donald Trump holds a rally in South Carolina and downplays the virus once again, stating the Democrats are politicizing the virus and making it the new Democratic hoax. Everything for this phony president of the United States is apparently a fucking hoax. This occurs at the same time the president was telling Bob Woodward in a recorded telephone interview that he knew the virus was serious and was intentionally downplaying it.

On the following day, February 29th, the United States records its first coronavirus death (since then, we know at least two people died undiagnosed with Covid-19 several weeks earlier after autopsies).

On March 3, the CDC lifts federal restrictions on coronavirus testing after their own attempt to create a diagnostic test kit failed.

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic, the stock markets continue to drop like a lead balloon, and the president restricts all travel from Europe: too late, again, as the U.S. is its own hotbed of viral infection and the president is in abject and negligent denial of reality.

On Friday the 13th of March, 2020, a full two months after the first infected patient knowingly arrived on the west coast of the United States, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, finally declares a national emergency.

Less than three weeks later, after governors have piece-meal shut down their states without central leadership on how to do so properly, on April 1, 2020, the United States has surpassed everyone else to have the highest number of reported infections and deaths in the world.

There was a time, perhaps back in April, that I would have argued China’s numbers were likely a fabrication, and they may have actually had the lead. I still don’t believe China’s official numbers, but there is no doubt that we have been leading the pandemic pack for almost seven months.

On April 7, 2020, after two months of bungling the country’s response to managing the containment and treatment of Covid-19, the president of the United States criticizes the WHO for mishandling the pandemic. Even at this early and painful juncture, while blaming others for the pandemic, the president still continues to do absolutely nothing to manage and contain the spread of disease in the United States.

On April 14, 2020, in the middle of a global health crisis, the president of the United States threatens to halt funding to the World Health Organization.

On April 19, 2020, the United States has 765,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and has suffered almost 41,000 deaths. The death toll doubled in the past week, but we would soon have armed idiots protesting outside their state house buildings to be allowed to do shit they likely didn’t need to be doing while we fight a pandemic. Simply because it wasn’t all that bad in their states yet, apparently it didn’t make sense to see what was happening elsewhere in the country and take heed: no, the whole thing must be a global fucking hoax…

For the month of April, we watched as the country continued to engage the battle of coronavirus state-by-state, a rather ineffectual method for fighting a pandemic, as evidenced by our inability to ever flatten the curve. Some state governments refused to enact appropriate social and physical distancing policies because they had not been collectively directed to do so by a competent leader. Some began loosening restrictions in public spaces before we had adequate testing and tracing of infections. Some were simply refusing to face the seriousness of this global crisis and significantly reduced our efficacy in keeping the plague from running amok.

We also watched certain actors in the federal government interfere with the appropriation of necessary medical supplies by the states that they had told would have to take care of those needs themselves. The administration couldn’t do anything to assist with the crisis, but they sure as hell could make it worse by trying to ensure somebody would profit from it.

Meanwhile, the president continues to make ignorant, uninformed, and plainly stupid comments while refusing to face the problems of an infectious epidemic like the competent leader we truly need because he doesn’t know how to lead. Encouraging civil unrest, undermining public safety, concerned solely with the numbers on Wall Street’s ticker tape, enabled by our Justice Department and complicit members of both the legislative and judicial branches of governance, the president of the United States really just doesn’t fucking care about any of us.

On April 20, 2020, the price of American Oil turned negative for the first time in history and the stock market followed suit by dropping once again. Two days later, prices rallied a bit after the president of the United States tweeted that he has instructed the Navy to shoot down and destroy Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf.

While the threat of war during a global pandemic isn’t anything if not fucking stupid, it’s all bluster and show coming from the reality-tv president of the United States: the president is derelict in his duty to act in time of crisis, attend to the real problems we face, and has to rely solely on political theater in order to deflect from his raging incompetence. It’s a constant con, a slight of hand, built with impotence on a house of fucking cards: his modus operandi.

Meanwhile, the daily infection rate for the month of April – around the world – begins to climb significantly. From 900,000 cases of coronavirus infection on April 1 to almost 3.5 million cases thirty days later.

By April 2, New York state has more coronavirus cases than the country of China: by the end of April, over 300,000 cases and over 23,000 deaths. New York took a direct and powerful hit to the face early in the pandemic, yet other states chose not to learn from the catastrophe. The CDC warned that reopening states too soon could lead to a second wave of the coronavirus that would be much worse as it would coincide with the flu season in America, but the truth is that America’s first wave has just kept going and growing: a disastrous rogue wave.

Then on May 25, 2020, a police officer pinned to the ground and knelt on 46 year old George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while George pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. He called for his mother. And we all watched the video recording his pleas and murder. On May 27, as coronavirus deaths in the U.S. surpass 100,000, protests against police brutality began spreading across the country, and then across the world, as people step up and out to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter in collective anti-racism action to demand change.

Early protests were plagued by police violence toward protestors while opportunistic rioting and looting muddied the waters conflating grass roots social action with criminality. Protests increased fears of further spreading the coronavirus at the same time the president of the United States announced he would be pulling the U.S. out of the WHO.

By the end of May, the world has 6.3 million coronavirus cases and almost 380,000 deaths.  The U.S. owns a quarter of those numbers.

From May 15th thru June 15th, the U.S. weekly averages about 23,000 new infections per day for a solid month, and the president of the United States plans to begin holding his rallies once again. Meanwhile, daily numbers begin to steadily increase over the following weeks, reaching more than 40,000 per day by the end of June, and by July 10th, daily cases have tripled from where they were a month before as the U.S. hits a high of 68,000 new cases in one day. On July 12, the state of Florida sets a record of over 15,000 infections in one day: were Florida a country, it would have ranked 4th in new coronavirus infections for the day. Disney World opens the very same day.

The month of July sees President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil test positive for Covid-19, President Donald Trump meekly dons a mask for the first time while also formally notifying the United Nations of U.S intent to withdraw from WHO membership, Hong Kong shuts down schools for its third wave of infections, Tokyo raises its pandemic alert level, India reaches a million coronavirus infections, European leaders agree on a new economic stimulus bill while the members of the United States Congress go on summer vacation without arriving at a new stimulus bill needed to assist the five and a half million Americans who have lost their health insurance and the tens of millions remaining unemployed, Herman Cain dies of Covid-19 after likely having contracted the virus attending Trump’s Tulsa rally event both unmasked and not social distancing, and in the middle of a global health crisis that has seen levels of street crime in the United States decrease overall, Chicago has one of its deadliest months on record for violence and shootings in the city.

By the end of July, the World had 13.5 million coronavirus cases with 582,000 deaths. The United States of America had 3.4 million coronavirus cases and 136,000 deaths: with just under 5% of the world’s population, we had 26% of the world’s coronavirus cases and 24% of the world’s coronavirus deaths.

Infections continues to surge and the president of the United States continues to be a totally  incompetent and delusional fuckwit incapable of being anything more than the aging reality television star and habitual hustler who cares nothing for presidential responsibility, the American people, or the consequences of his narcissistic ineptitude.

Undermining of the integrity of the Center for Disease Control, throwing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the bus, and distracting the public by commuting the prison sentence of criminal Roger Stone while upending the moratorium on federal executions and allowing ICE to set up localized training camps for the brown shirts, it becomes clear that the president of the United States would kill us all rather than take responsibility and do his job.

There has been no positive action to combat our social, economic, and health crisis for the past several months. There has only been shifting the narrative and shifting the blame: deflection, weakness, instability, and failure. And the deeper into the Year of the Pandemic we dig, the more political corruption and abuse of power drive the toxicity of our collective dysfunction.

In August of 2020, coronavirus cases in Europe begin a sporadic but upward rise once again, and the United States, which has never had a handle on the spread of infection at all, begins planning for schools to reopen despite the lack of funding and direction for how to do so safely while infections top 60,000 per day on August 7th with America’s sunbelt now leading the country with the highest rates of infection.

The president insists that we have the coronavirus under control, that numbers are getting better, that we’ll have a vaccine before the election, and that the virus will just miraculously go away: all of which are simply outright lies. The lack of leadership continues and the pathological lying and gas lighting appear to have no end, while millions of American imbeciles continue to believe his bullshit and rally for his unqualified reelection.

The month of August also sees the predominantly peaceful protests still occurring in cities around the country demonized and antagonized by the president, as he sends federal agents into cities to interfere with the processes of local law enforcement and violate the rights of peaceful assembly and due process. The mayor of Portland, Oregon chides the president for being the one responsible for the current division, violence, and hate in our country, while President Trump shares videos from white supremacists on Twitter, ruefully claiming to be the law and order president.

At the same time, Joe Biden announces Kamala Harris as his VP running mate, Kanye West’s oddball run at the White House comes to an end when he fails to meet the administrative requirements to get on ballots across the country and misses the deadline to report his campaign funding, and Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention is riddled with lies: the man cannot open his mouth without lies pouring out of it.

By the middle of August, the Wall Street Journal is touting the daily coronavirus infection rate in the U.S. as a new low, even though at 46,000 per day, it’s still twice the average number of daily infections as two months earlier, and President Trump enrages the world by trying to negotiate singular access to a coronavirus vaccine for the U.S. (a vaccine that has yet to be created and that we don’t rightly know if it ever actually will be), while Russia announces it has approved a coronavirus vaccine and will start giving it to health workers as the rest of the world looks on in skeptical, if not incredulous, belief that Russia has managed to safely create and test a vaccine: scientists worldwide condemn the vaccine over safety concerns.

On August 13th, Dario Vivas, governor of the capital city of Caracas, Venezuela, becomes the first currently governing political leader to die of Covid-19.

On August 24th, the first case of Covid-19 reinfection is reported in Hong Kong, casting doubt on the concepts of acquired immunity, herd immunity, and the ability of a vaccine to save us all.

On August 28, New York announces its lowest rate of coronavirus infections since the pandemic began with three consecutive weeks of an infection rate below 1%. Half of U.S. states mark a decrease in coronavirus infection rates, just as alarming spikes of infection increase across Europe, South America, and India. South Korea stops in-person school instruction at over 2000 schools in response to rising numbers of Covid-19 infection, and the U.S. forges ahead with public school openings as Covid-19 becomes the third leading cause of death in the United States with four months left to go in 2020.

On August 31, there are over 25 million infections and almost 850,000 deaths worldwide from the novel coronavirus. The United States has almost 6 million of those confirmed cases and over 183,000 deaths.

By the beginning of September, Covid-19 cases in Europe have returned to March levels, India sets a record for exceeding 83,000 new daily infections for two consecutive days, New York’s positive test rate has remained below 1% for 30 days, and the west coast of the United States is on fire.

On September 9th, as the world’s infection rates continue to climb in an alarming manner, India records another record-breaking 96,000 new infections, and the U.S. announces it will stop screening international arrivals for Covid-19.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence is attending a fundraising event sponsored by crackpot QAnon conspiracy theorists, a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower claims he was ordered to downplay both the dangers of violence posed by white supremacists and the Russian interference in our current election, and skies across the west coast turn an apocalyptic shade of orange.

On September 18, 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the mighty champion of gender equality, loses her ongoing fight with cancer and courageous attempt to live long enough to see Donald Trump thrown out of the White House, and dies at age 87.

Within hours of the news of her passing, Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that Trump’s nominee will get a vote on the Senate floor, making no attempt to hide his duplicitous power grab with even the most basic human decency of honoring the fucking dead. After impeding a confirmation hearing for former President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the United States Supreme Court over four years earlier, McConnell’s single-minded drive to use the worst president in the history of the United States to pack the courts with lifetime judicial appointments at the expense of every piece of neglected legislation sitting on his desk and any hope for even mere pretensions at political integrity reached a deplorable climax by providing the grifter in the White House the illicit honor of appointing three justices to the United States Supreme Court: the third just six weeks before election day and after many citizens had already cast their ballots.

On September 26th, the President of the United States holds a festive coronavirus super spreader event at a ceremony in the Rose Garden to announce his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court wherein over 200 attendees were basically exposed to the plague. Later that day, the president flies to Pennsylvania to attend a rally. Three days later he also attends the televised shit show that was the first presidential debate with Joe Biden. And then the following day, Trump flies to Minnesota for a fundraising event, at which one of his aides begins to feel sick. At least a dozen people in attendance at the ceremony will test positive for coronavirus, with at least 35 outbreaks affecting the White House, which does not engage in contact tracing in order to stop the spread of infection from the Rose Garden event.

At the end of September, there are over 33 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide with over a million deaths. The United States has over 7 million cases and 206,000 people have died from Covid-19. And those numbers are on the rise, once again.

On October 1st, the White House announces that Hope Hicks, one of the president’s close aides, has tested positive for the coronavirus.

On October 2nd, President Trump tweets that he and the First Lady have tested positive for coronavirus, and later that day he is taken by helicopter to Walter Reed Medical Center, which is a place many of us frankly wished he’d have stayed. The following day, an infected Trump left Walter Reed briefly to drive by all of his adoring fans outside the hospital in his armored and hermetically sealed limousine, thereby exposing the two secret service agents with him to a deadly virus, while making a plain mockery of all the people who were unable to visit their isolated loved ones dying in hospital intensive care units all over this country from Covid-19.

Despite the danger of spreading the virus through the halls of Congress, the GOP vows to push through the Supreme Court nomination hearings regardless of the fact that three Republican Senators tested positive for coronavirus and that cases are on the rise once again in the United States, while refusing to take up any stimulus bills to help the American people or attend to the actual needs of our country.

On October 6th, an infectious Trump returns to the White House, promptly removing his mask and waving to his fans from the balcony just like the defective and irresponsible human being that he truly is, hell bent on infecting every staff member in the White House employ without a single regard for their health and welfare whatsoever as the number of infections around him continues to rise.

On October 9th, 13 men were arrested in a terror plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; some of these men were the dipshits protesting with their firearms outside of the state house building back in April because stay-at-home orders meant they couldn’t go out to eat at a restaurant or get a haircut. Meanwhile, President Trump, still sick with Covid-19 but flying high on steroids says that he’s planning to start campaigning and holding rallies once again.

On October 12th, the day Trump resumes his rallies and declares he’s immune from the coronavirus, the first case of Covid-19 reinfection is detected in the United States in a 25 year old Nevada man with no known immune disorders whose second infection with the disease was more severe than the first, which again brings into question the levels of immunity obtained by being infected with the virus and suggests that even if you have already contracted Covid-19, you must still continue taking precautions so as not to contract the disease again. The study of this patient suggested three possible explanations for the increased severity of the second infection: that the second infection resulted from a higher dose of the virus than the first; that the second infection was caused by a more virulent version of the virus; or that previously developed antibodies could make subsequent infection worse.

Meanwhile, the Senate, still unwilling to take up another coronavirus funding relief package, begins hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Included in these hearings is Senator Mike Lee, Republican from Utah, who tested positive for the coronavirus after the White House super spreader event, but spoke in person to the Senate Judiciary Committee without wearing a mask.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who called Amy Coney Barrett a “judicial torpedo” aimed at the ACA in the middle of a mismanaged health crisis, spent his thirty minutes of the hearings not questioning the nominee, but carefully laying out a thorough presentation of what goes on behind the scenes of the Judiciary Committee’s little “puppet theater” to reveal who is really pulling the political strings of judiciary appointments in the federal government and the ingrained corruption of wealthy individuals and corporate money interests silently directing the selection of federal judicial appointments in America.

If you watched nothing else of the confirmation hearings, you absolutely should spend the 28 minutes watching Senator Whitehouse’s presentation.

As we move into the middle of October, Covid cases are soaring again across Europe and Russia, India hits 7 million cases, inching its way toward U.S. pandemic ascendancy, Brazil has topped 150,000 deaths, second only to the United States, and early voting in the U.S. sees long lines, long waits, and some of the highest early voter turnout the United States has ever seen despite the hardships involved in voting in person during a global health crisis.

Coronavirus cases begin surging in communities across the country, reaching record highs in 20 states, hospitals begin running out of beds in intensive care units once again, as Trump holds packed campaign rallies in defiance of social distancing orders, and the recently added fruit loop medical advisor to his administration, Scott Atlas, urges the White House to embrace herd immunity as a strategy for combating the coronavirus, an approach the WHO calls immoral and simply unethical, and would result in at least 2.5 million deaths in the United States alone without actually guaranteeing reliable immunity to the disease, and therefore cannot be relied upon to control the pandemic.

In Wisconsin, a state whose Supreme Court struck down the governor’s stay-at-home order last May, a county judge issued a temporary injunction against the governor’s orders to limit the size of indoor gatherings while Wisconsin officials open a field hospital near Milwaukee to deal with the surge of record level Covid patients, the New York Times reports that the Trump administration gave wealthy Republican donors advance warning about the threat posed by coronavirus back in February as the president was publicly minimizing the threat of Covid-19, and the Trump campaign flouts the health and safety measures in Iowa where Covid-19 hospitalizations are also at record levels.

As the GOP ramps up its voter suppression and disenfranchisement schemes across the nation, from limiting the number of ballot drop boxes in Texas to placing falsely labeled ballot boxes in California and being pissed off that the court said to remove them, and North Carolina rules that absentee ballots submitted by mail require a third party witness signature on the ballots, Republicans fully understand they must cheat to win in America while repeatedly gas lighting the American public about the incidence of voter fraud as if the toxic and codependent relationship we have with politics in America isn’t dysfunctional enough without the abuses of power happening in the light of day to insult our collective intelligence and sensibilities.

As the United States approaches 8 million coronavirus infections and 220,000 deaths from Covid-19, states continue to set new daily records for infections, and the president attacks Dr. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the nation, the Wall Street Journal reports that throughout the pandemic, White House officials have made line-by-line edits to official health guidance from the CDC, altering language on social distancing and rolling back limits on in-person gatherings.

On October 21, with the third surge in coronavirus infections set to rival the first two peaks and thirty-one states now qualifying as red zones under the Coronavirus Task Force’s policies, a House committee on the coronavirus releases a report that states the Trump administration has been aware of an alarming increase in rates of infection for over a month while the president openly downplayed the crisis, became sick with Covid-19, and continued holding crowded campaign events that contributed to the spread of the disease.

On Friday, October 23rd, the U.S. broke a new record as reported coronavirus infections exceeded 83,000 new cases, followed by another record breaking day on Saturday. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 has increased 40% in the past month, many states medical capabilities are stretched to the limit, and health experts warn of a further surge as cold weather sets in and people spend more time indoors.

As a new outbreak in the White House infects at least five members of Vice President Pence’s staff, Pence continues on the campaign trail anyway rather than quarantine like the average American is supposed to do when exposed to the coronavirus, and Trump says that news about Covid should be illegal like the aspiring fascist we all know he wishes to be, the White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, states that the U.S. is not going to try to control the coronavirus, as if they have done a single fucking thing to actually mitigate the pandemic before this revelation, and if somehow stating this now, at the beginning of our country’s third surge of the disease, is a genuinely new approach rather than a simple acknowledgement of Trump’s incompetent strategy concerning the health crisis since the very beginning.

The president of the United States continues to repeat the lie that the coronavirus is going away, that we’ve turned a corner, and that corner doesn’t lead to more sickness and death; as the delusional and incompetent fuckwit he truly is, the president believes that if he ignores the virus, it will simply go away. Every cowardly lackey in Trump’s administration continues to nod enthusiastically like the spineless, pathetic, deplorable excuses for human beings that make up the current Executive Branch of our government, enabling this abhorrent and reprehensible human being rotting at the center of our Constitutional Republic.

A new wave of restrictions are implemented across Europe amid an explosion of new cases, the WHO warns countries are on a dangerous track, hospitals across the United State’s midwest near capacity, and the United States Senate rams through Amy Coney Barrett’s divisive nomination to confirm her unqualified appointment to the Supreme Court just eight days before the presidential election.

On October 26th, the world has over 43.5 million confirmed coronavirus infections and over 1.2 million deaths from the disease; the United States has 8.7 million confirmed coronavirus infections and over 225,000 deaths from the disease. Alarm over the surge of infections and a return to lockdown measures has sent both the stock market and the price of oil falling once again.

Donald Trump has shown the entire world that he is an abysmal failure at being president of the United States, at responsibly protecting citizens from a global health crisis, and at being even the merest shadow of a decent human being. He truly is the worst president and history will be rightfully unkind to him. The millions of cult members who hold on so tightly to their adoration of this dangerously despicable excuse for a human being also deserve no quarter when the nightmare of the Trump presidency is firmly behind us.

So if you haven’t done so already by absentee or early voting, on Tuesday, November 3rd, everyone needs to show up at your polling places to vote: vote to end this incompetent presidency, vote to rid the Senate of entrenched political corruption, vote to change the course of America’s socio, political and economic paths, vote to support science and the well-reasoned health advice of experts in the field of infectious diseases, vote to end this fucking nightmare like your life depends on it. Because the truth is that it very well just may…

“The shortest straw has been pulled for you.” – Metallica

It’s been almost three months since we’ve reviewed our historical pandemic moment, a whole lotta shit has happened twenty-eight weeks into 2020, so let’s update the coronavirus timeline again.

Eight months into the novel coronavirus pandemic, the earliest case of coronavirus disease is still traced back to a 55 year old Hubei resident who contracted the virus on November 17th.

American intelligence supposedly becomes aware of a health issue in China in late November 2019. No additional reliable data is available on earlier documented awareness of illness from the virus at this writing.

December 16, 2019: Wei Guixan, a 57 year old Wuhan resident is one of the earliest noted coronavirus patients admitted to the hospital with infections in both lungs.

Throughout December of 2019, American intelligence agencies begin to raise normative alarms about a potential health crisis in China. At the same time, Dr. Li encounters infections appearing similar to the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2003 and notifies Chinese authorities of his findings.

Chinese authorities basically tell Dr. Li to shut the fuck up, and then on December 31, 2019, China confirmed cases of a new virus infecting its citizens in the city of Wuhan. January 1, 2020, the WHO set up an Incident Management Support Team (IMST) in response to China’s disclosure.

Early transmission data reports through January 2, 2020 (compiled and peer reviewed in the scientific medical journal The Lancet) revealed that 41 patients had been admitted to the hospital in Wuhan and identified as having laboratory-confirmed 2019 novel coronavirus infection. 27 of the 41 patients had been exposed to the Wuhan seafood market. One family cluster was found. All 41 patients had pneumonia with abnormal findings on chest CT; complications included acute respiratory distress syndrome, acute cardiac injury, and secondary infection. 13 patients were admitted to ICU and six died.

Read it again: From November 17, 2019 through January 2, 2020, there were 41 confirmed patients admitted to the hospital for complications of the novel coronavirus; 13 were admitted to the ICU and 6 of them died.

We’re eight months in, and I’m completely fucking astounded by the exponential increases for infection, disease, and death. In those first six weeks, if this new, highly infectious and aggressive viral pneumonia had been identified in those 41 hospitalized cases, containment may have been an effective method of disease control.

January 8, 2020, the CDC issues its first warning to clinicians to watch for patients showing respiratory symptoms who had a travel history to Wuhan. The same Center for Disease Control that the president of the United States is trying to keep from compiling infection, treatment, and mortality data advised clinicians to start watching for this on January 8th, more than two months before the White House began taking the crisis seriously.

January 9, 2020, China has mapped the cononavirus genome.

On January 10th, the WHO assembled their first technical package of information on how to detect, test for, and manage potential cases of the novel coronavirus based primarily on their experience with SARS and MERS respiratory infections.

From January 11 – 17th, the Wuhan health commission insists there are no new cases of the disease and Chinese authorities report that there is no clear evidence of sustainable human to human transmission of the virus. Based on this limited information, the WHO remains unsure about human-to-human transmission rates.

During this time, U.S. intelligence agencies are ringing much louder and bigger alarms concerning the serious nature of this impending health crisis.

By January 20th, the day the WHO makes its first brief visit to Wuhan, the virus has knowingly spread to Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. More current analysis indicates that the virus may also have been present in Europe as early as the end of December 2019.

On January 23, 2020, the WHO determines there is evidence for human to human transmission, but needs to conduct further investigation. On the same day, China quarantines Wuhan and three other cities in Hubei province with a total population of 36 million. Five million people leave the cities anyway without being screened for infection.

On January 23rd, there are 582 confirmed cases of coronavirus disease and 17 people have died from the virus.

On January 24, there are 854 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 25 deaths. China begins building a new hospital in Wuhan at lightening speed. China knew it was serious, they were going to need another hospital because of it, so the rest of us should have known it was serious as well.

On this day, the president of the United States tweets praise for the Chinese government’s efforts to prevent the spread of the virus, even though it’s already too fucking late to contain the spread from Wuhan.

From January 24-30, China celebrates the lunar new year, and hundreds of millions of people travel around the country; on January 31, 2020, there are 9847 cases of coronavirus infections and 213 patients have died.

On January 28th, Chinese government officials finally agree to allow the WHO to bring in a team of international scientists to see if they can get a handle on the virus: something that should have been done six weeks earlier. The following day, Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s HEP, said “The whole world needs to be on alert now. The whole world needs to take action and be ready for any cases that come from the epicenter or other epicenter that becomes established.”

On January 30th, the WHO declares a global health emergency. The same day, the president of the United States, while attending a campaign rally in Iowa prevaricates, “We only have five people. Hopefully, everything’s going to be great. They [China] have somewhat of a problem, but hopefully, it’s all going to be great.”

On January 31st, Donald Trump restricts travel from China, which is too fucking late, since the first case from China had already arrived fifteen days earlier, and was likely already arriving on the east coast via European travel as well.

Over 200 people have died and almost 10,000 people are infected with the novel coronavirus by the end of January. In seven days, the known infections and deaths have increased ten-fold.

On February 10th, the WHO is finally able to send an international team of scientists into China to begin assessing the situation of the new virus on the ground in Wuhan.

On February 11th, the WHO named the new infection Covid-19, an acronym for coronavirus disease 2019.

On February 13th, there are almost 15,000 new infections in Hubei Province; total infections are now over 60,000.

February 14th thru February 28th: during this 2 week period, the virus spreads all around the fucking world.  And the stock markets begin their fall.

On February 28th, Donald Trump holds a rally in South Carolina and downplays the virus once again, stating the Democrats are politicizing the virus and making it the new Democratic hoax. Everything for this phony president of the United States is apparently a fucking hoax.

On the following day, February 29th, the United States records its first coronavirus death (since then, we know at least two people died undiagnosed with Covid-19 several weeks earlier after autopsies).

On March 3, the CDC lifts federal restrictions on coronavirus testing after their own attempt to create a diagnostic test kit failed.

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic, the stock markets continue to drop like a lead balloon, and the president restricts all travel from Europe: too late, again, as the U.S. is its own hotbed of viral infection and the president is in abject and negligent denial of reality.

On Friday the 13th of March, 2020, a full two months after the first infected patient arrived in the United States, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, finally declares a national emergency.

Less than three weeks later, after states have piece-meal shut down without central leadership on how to do so properly, on April 1, 2020, the United States has surpassed everyone else to have the highest number of reported infections and deaths in the world.

There was a time, perhaps back in April, that I would have argued China’s numbers were likely a fabrication, and they may have still had the lead. I still don’t believe their official numbers, but we are definitely leading the pandemic pack today.

On April 7, 2020, after two months of bungling the country’s response to managing the containment and treatment of Covid-19, the president of the United States criticizes the WHO for mishandling the pandemic.

On April 14, 2020, in the middle of a global health crisis, the president of the United States threatens to halt funding to the World Health Organization.

On April 19, 2020, the United States has 765,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and has suffered almost 41,000 deaths. The death toll doubled in the past week, but we would soon have armed idiots protesting outside their state house buildings to be allowed to do shit they likely didn’t need to be doing while we fight a pandemic: because it wasn’t so bad where they were, it didn’t make sense to see what was happening elsewhere in the country and take heed: no, the whole thing must be a hoax…

*This is the point where I would like to point out that we don’t come together as Americans to effectively contain a problem in the real world. We are failing fucking miserably at this humanity shit.*

For the month of April, we watched as the country continued to engage the battle of coronavirus state-by-state instead of as a nation coming together to fight the pandemic. Some state governments refuse to enact appropriate social and physical distancing policies because they have not collectively been directed to do so by a competent leader. Some begin to loosen restrictions in public spaces before we have adequate testing and tracing of infections, and many of them haven’t even come close to seeing their peak rate of infections.

We’ve also watched as certain actors in the federal government interfere with the appropriation of necessary medical supplies by the states that they’ve told will have to take care of those needs themselves.

The president continues to make ignorant, uninformed, and plainly stupid comments while refusing to face the problems of an infectious epidemic like the competent leader we truly need because he doesn’t know how to lead. He encourages civil unrest for the point of undermining public safety for the economic-monkey-on-our-backs as if armed protestors are somehow liberating their states instead of being an actual minority of the population supported and manipulated by right-wing groups funded by wealthy donors to defy public health initiatives that have shut down non-essential portions of the country’s economy.

On April 20, 2020, the price of American Oil turned negative for the first time in history as demand dries up, and the stock market followed suit by dropping once again. Two days later, prices rallied a bit after the president of the United States tweeted that he has instructed the Navy to shoot down and destroy Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf.

While the threat of war during a global pandemic isn’t anything if not fucking stupid, it’s all bluster coming from the president of the United States: the president is derelict in his duty to act in time of crisis, attend to the real problems we face, and has to rely solely on political distractions in order to deflect from his raging incompetence. It’s a constant con, a slight of hand, built with impotence on a house of fucking cards: his modus operandi.

Meanwhile, the daily infection rate for the month of April – around the world – begins to climb significantly. From 900,000 cases of coronavirus infection on April 1 to almost 3.5 million cases thirty days later.

By April 2, New York state has more coronavirus cases than the country of China. By the end of April, they have over 300,000 cases and over 23,000 deaths. New York took a direct and powerful punch in the face early in the U.S. experience of the pandemic. And yet other states chose not to learn from the catastrophe and began to plan the reopening of businesses by mid-May, while their infection rates were still increasing. The CDC warned that reopening states too soon could lead to a second wave of the coronavirus that would be much worse as it would coincide with the flu season in America, but the truth is that America’s first wave has just kept going and growing.

None of these states implemented the sort of public health policies that might actually allow them to reopen businesses, even according to the meager guidelines put out by the White House. They weren’t engaged in significant testing, contact tracing, building more hospitals for the sick, isolating the infected, and requiring the protective measures we need to eventually get back to a somewhat normal life but modified life. Nope. Let’s just open this shit-show back up and let the rubes enjoy it while it lasts.

Then on May 25, 2020, a white police officer pinned to the ground and knelt on 46 year old George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while George pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. He called for his mother. And we all watched the video recording his pleas and murder. On May 27, as coronavirus deaths in the U.S. surpass 100,000, protests against police brutality begin spreading across the country, and then across the world, as people step up and out to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter in collective anti-racism action to demand change.

Early protests were plagued by police violence toward protestors while opportunistic rioting and looting muddied the waters conflating grass roots social action with criminality. And large protests increased fears of further spreading the coronavirus at the same time the president of the United States announced he would be pulling the U.S. out of the WHO.

By the end of May, the world has 6.3 million coronavirus cases and almost 380,000 deaths.  The U.S. owns a quarter of those numbers.

From about May 15th thru June 15th, the U.S. weekly averages about 23,000 new infections per day for a solid month. But that’s all about to change. Daily numbers begin to steadily increase over the next two weeks, reaching more than 40,000 per day by the end of June, and by July 10th, daily cases have tripled from where they were a month before as the U.S. hits its current all time high of over 66,000 new cases in one day. On July 12, the state of Florida sets a record of over 15,000 infections in one day: if Florida were a country instead of a state, it would have ranked 4th in new coronavirus infections for the day. Disney World opens the very same day.

The World currently has 13.5 million coronavirus cases with 582,000 deaths. The United States of America currently has 3.4 million coronavirus cases with 136,000 deaths. We have 5% of the world’s population but 26% of the world’s coronavirus cases and 24% of the world’s coronavirus deaths.

As infections continue to surge in a manner that will likely shut down the economy once again, the president of the United States continues to be a totally incompetent and delusional fuckwit incapable of being an actual leader because he’s not: he’s an aging reality television star and habitual hustler who cares nothing for the presidency, the American people, or the consequences of his narcissistic ineptitude.

Pushing for schools to open in the fall without any direction as to how communities might actually do so safely (and with necessary funding), while also undermining the Center for Disease Control and trying to throw the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci, under the bus for his failure to lead once again, and distracting the public by commuting the prison sentence of criminal Roger Stone while upending the moratorium on federal executions and allowing ICE to set up localized training camps for the Brown Shirts, the president of the United States would kill us all rather than take responsibility and do his job.

Since the American people have clearly demonstrated that we cannot pull together effectively without some sort of real leadership, it’s near impossible to claw our way out of this nightmare: the sense of entitlement coupled with a bottomless sense of fucking stupid ensures that without intervention, there is no indication that we will be able to find our way out of this crisis.

There has been no positive action to combat our social, economic, and health crisis for the past several months. There has only been shifting the narrative and shifting the blame: deflection, weakness, instability, and failure.

So hang on tight, America, because this shit isn’t even close to being over.