Saturday December 19, 2020 (6 days til Christmas)
Election Day -46
33 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
It kind of sad that I am less excited about Christmas and counting down the days and more excited about inauguration Day.
Whatever Satan is or is not he has managed to insulate himself with enough whatever it is to allow himself to rattle around doing whatever he is doing and those that could really stop him are just letting him do it.
When I look at what is going on at The Pentagon, at the hacking of our cyber infrastructure, or at the inability of his administration to get the vaccine from the warehouse to the states the same issues and adjectives keep coming up to explain it. I said them yesterday: Malice, Incompetence, and Stupidity. Although I have to say stupidity is probably not as much to blame as malice and incompetence. There is also a touch of “This is what they intended all along,” and “they really don’t care.”
At the Pentagon Satan has installed I am glad to hear a soldier as the head. However, this man is deemed woefully unequipped to handle the job and he is hobbled by a group of other political appointees who have no idea what they are doing. How much damage can they do in the next month is the question. Will that damage be due to outright mischief or ignorance? Hard to say at this point in time. If the military really pulls back in Afghanistan and Iraq five days before Biden takes office that will clearly be on purpose.
However, the hacking of our cyber infrastructure is another case in point and that seems to have happened because we weren’t paying attention. And let me say this to anyone who says this was sophisticated and complicated – no it wasn’t. It was ham handed. How do I know? The comments made by those who have seen the intelligence who have said, “It has all the markings of the Russians.” Seems pretty simple and straight forward to me. They found a way to inject some back door code into a package that was used by a lot of government agencies. The question there will be did they have someone on the inside? Or as some have suggested, did Satan give them the keys?
Then we get to the vaccine shortages. The states were promised certain amounts in the first two weeks. It seems they got their first week’s allotment then the second week was cut by 30 to 40%. It is not clear to me whether the governors got a letter saying they were being cut that amount or if they got a notice telling them how much they would be receiving in the second week and compared it to what they had been told before, maybe both? Maybe one or the other? The reporting has been excuse-o-rama. I’d like to believe some of the excuses and others I reject out of hand, but in every case my BS meter’s needle is vibrating over “BS” to “OMG! R U F*cking Kidding Me?” (“You want me to believe that crap?”)
When the shortages were first being reported there were two responses from the administration: silence and an offhand comment by Secretary Azar, which was it was Pfizer’s fault because they couldn’t produce enough of the vaccine.
When Pfizer issued a statement saying no no we’ve got millions of doses sitting on the shelf. They, the U.S. Government, haven’t told us where to ship it.
Then we heard silence and the excuse that the general at Operation Warp Speed had been worried about the storm moving up the east coast and that he held back some of the doses because the shippers might have problems delivering the stuff and he didn’t want to lose a shipment. Boy, did that set off the old BS meter. “Rain, or snow, or sleet” oh wait that’s for the post office before DeJoy screwed it up and we are talking Fedex and UPS. Still, what does a storm on the east coast have to do with Washington state not getting their allotment. See what I mean?
But by now Secretary Azar cleared the air once again. It wasn’t that the governors couldn’t read their invoices or maybe it was, I forget, but it was that there was no problem. What? Yeah – no problem. So how did the governors in red states, blue states, north, south wherever get the idea that they were getting their allotments cut? Silence.
Meanwhile we were treated to a video of Pence getting his shot and Pelosi getting her shot and Mitch getting a piece of paper. Somehow this is supposed to inspire confidence. If Pence had keeled over dead maybe. “Oh gee, sorry I mixed up the stuff for the folks who Barr wanted to execute before the courts can straighten out the mess over capital punishment…” Ha ha pretty funny right?
Back to the Pentagon, the temp secretary over there has announced that they are taking a mutually agreed upon holiday break from meeting with the Biden team. The Biden team response? We didn’t agree to any break. This is like the Monty Pithon routine “Not dead yet” routine. Did that poor slob over at the Pentagon think he could just say that and it would be agreed upon and fine? Or was it that as some have suggested Satan in the White House was upset about something, I forget what they suggested, and he told them to stop? Or was it too much for their tiny little brains to meet some more?
It hard to know at this point. I anticipate more excuses, more silence, more lies.
The second vaccine has been approved and could ship starting Monday. Of course, they’d have to be told where to ship it. Maybe the states will just send their own trucks and planes to the warehouses? I mean that was how they were told to handle the PPE shortage back in March? Why not do it now? What could go wrong?
Oh yeah, the Covid relief bill, maybe there’s a problem as they “hammer” out a deal. I always wonder what this hammering business is all about. Personally, I would put them all in a room and say, “You aren’t leaving until we get a deal.” Seems we don’t do that anymore*. Not sure why, I guess the lobbyists can’t get their claws into it that way. Also the bills are hundreds or thousands of pages long. Who’s got time to read them? What, you want me to work?
But the latest round of stupidity was that it was rumored Trump wanted the Covid relief bill to have $1200 or $2000 per family in it. Yeah, right. He could have said that a long time ago if he really wanted it. It’s like Chris Christie putting out that PSA saying “Wear a Mask.” Someone said imagine if Satan had done that in March? Or Christie? Or any of those clowns who have been saying it’s no worse than the flu back then?
The most influential thing I have seen to perhaps influence people to wear a mask is the videos of what is going on inside the hospitals’ ICU wards. The scenes of people gasping for air and flopping around in pain. Actually, most of those videos aren’t in the ICUs because they are full. They are in wards converted for Covid patients, or in hallways or waiting rooms because there is no more room.** Ambulances are waiting six hours to drop off a patient. Hospitals have had to order more body bags. So far, we haven’t run out of those.
The uptick in cases is being blamed on family get togethers at Thanksgiving.
Oh. It won’t happen to you? Not in your family? Got it. So you are willing to take the blame if you kill Grandma? What’s the excuse? “I didn’t know”? Or “I didn’t think …”?
Christmas will be different this year. Not a bad thing, necessarily. Just different.
Be sure to watch the stars every chance you get this week. Saturn and Jupiter will be appearing together for the first time in 400 or 800 years. It’s pretty cool. I went out the other night and saw then in the southern sky, below the Moon and slightly to the right of the Moon. They are supposed to pass under the Moon this week.
PS Here’s my picture taken last night, handheld, lots of ambient light, slight shake (sorry cinema verité). But you can see the two planets below and to the right of the Moon in the evening sky! Something to be thankful for.
- *The last case to everyone being locked in a room to hammer out a deal was in 1907 when J.P.Morgan put all the bankers in a room, sat outside playing solitaire and smoking cigars until they came up with something to end the economic panic. Remember there was no central bank, ie no Federal Reserve. The central bank was Morgan all six feet two inches and 350 pounds.
- When the bankers came out and offered a deal he told them it wouldn’t work and to go back and give him another plan. They did.
- He took the paper that they gave him the second or third time, walked up Wall Street and it not the Stock Exchange held it up said he had the solution and ended the Panic of 1907.
** “We laid grandma down on the sidewalk because there was no room in the hospital. There she gasped and wheezed until finally we could move her to the lobby. We had to make our way through the protestors claiming hoax and steal, but we made it. There she died.
