No One Could Have Seen This Coming

So here’s an angle that I haven’t seen posted anywhere (you read it here first). One of Trump’s favorite talking points these days as he seeks to deflect blame for is ill-preparedness in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic (when he’s not blaming President Obama or the WHO) is that no one could have seen the coronavirus pandemic coming. The Washington Post, among others, has examined this claim and found it to be lacking.

We know, for instance, that in 2018 Trump and his team dismantled the Global Pandemic Office of the National Security Council. We also know that in early 2017, before Trump was sworn into office, Obama administration officials briefed a group of restive, incoming Trump cabinet members on how to respond to a global pandemic.

But one thing few people have noted is that in addition to all that, the year 2017, the very year that Trump took office, was notable because that flu season was the worst, in terms of the number of fatalities, that the US had experience in over 4 decades. 80,000 Americans died of the flu that year. At the time the Associated Press reported:

Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. It was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly….

Fatal complications from the flu can include pneumonia, stroke and heart attack.

CDC officials called the 80,000 figure preliminary, and it may be slightly revised. But they said it is not expected to go down.

It eclipses the estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-1977. Estimates for many earlier seasons were not readily available.

Last winter was not the worst flu season on record, however. The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, historians estimate.

So not only was the Trump administration handed a bureaucracy, tools and playbooks to deal with a global pandemic like the one we are now experiencing (which they either dismantled or ignored) but Trump’s first year in office saw the worst flu season in 40 years. A particularly virulent flu strain triggered over 80,000 deaths in the US. Yet even that wasn’t enough to shake Team trump out of their deep slumber and cause them to consider that maybe we ought to be a little better prepared for when the “big one” comes.

17 Comments

They’re reacting like morons. Added to this is the scummy corruption from the worst havahad grad ever, Jared “Incompetence Defined” Kushner.

No, the solution to this is printing up bumper stickers that say DON’T FUCK THE PANGOLIN! TRUMP 2020!

…20…17?

Ooooh, you mean what we now call The Time Before.

Love the new slogan of a local dope store:

Stay Safe, Stay Healthy, Stay High!

Good advice.

A double-long bus just drove by house completely empty.
It’s rush hour on a Friday.

I’ve been thinking a lot about non-positive interest currencies as alternatives to the dollar.

This will work like airline miles, in which the more services you use, the more credits you receive, or services owed.

Therefore, economies will by definition be built from the local community up, and those that consume and provide the most services, that do the most to support the community, will be at the apex of society. It’d be an incredibly more egalitarian economy and society, wouldn’t you agree?

Each merchant and member (not consumer) would get a number, and those numbers could be matched by NFC chips in mobile phones for security, which would be owned and operated by a cooperative of the people that worked there.
Data would be stored in society-owned cloud servers, so losing you phone/laptop becomes a non-issue.

The governments may be organized as governing councils, democratically elected at multiple levels, and each based on an equally proportional representation of the entire population, both citizens and non-citizens, with a national council and an elected (position title pending).

Healthcare will be society-owned and cooperatively operated, with equal coverage for everyone.

Inflation will not exist. A beverage that cost 2 credits in 2020 will cost 2 credits* in 2120 and in perpetuity.

This organic merging of society, government, and business will create a social structure based on our shared humanity and psychology, which is necessary for harmonious living with authenticity and integrity in the environment, since we are nature.

Each member of society receives a monthly universal basic income payment to be redeemed for goods and services.
Poverty ceases to exist.

Income taxes cease to exist and are superceded by a progressive service contribution. There are no deductions or exceptions.

The primary differences between this new system and communism is that there is still private ownership of property, competition between businesses, and economic stratification, though it’s tempered significantly by UBI and a maximum wage.

What am I missing here, other than humanity’s own self-destructive tendencies?

Instead of a savings account, we’ll have a time bank that allows you to earn additional *credits for volunteer work. It would operate like a non-profit credit union. Sweet FSM, this would allow for an entirely new group of people to be at the top of our society based on how much good they’ve done for everyone else.
I’m just thinkin’ out loud here.

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