Greets and saluts from the heart of darkness NYC metro area. Things are so fucked up here in NYC that the news that there was a deadly subway fire killing 1 and injuring 17 doesn’t even register as significant.

The death toll continues to soar, nursing homes are seeing outbreaks all across the country, and Trump thinks that Cuomo is exaggerating on the need for ventilators.

Trump’s a fucking lunatic whose ego must be stroked or else he thinks he has to destroy you. He’s a sociopath. The GOP are perfectly fine with all of this, because they’re just like him. They agree with the goals and outcomes. Destroy blue states and destroy the federal government, so they get more tax cuts.

Of course, destroy NY means destroy 12% of the US economy. Destroy all the wealth that NY creates and ships off to poor-ass red states that are moochers and takers (the kind of thing that the GOP abhors except when they can get their greedy hands on your money). Idiot governors like in Florida or Texas are all about how they want to stop NYC metro area travelers from coming and contaminating their states, all while their states are in freefall with cases growing exponentially and that neighboring states are having the same problem. The time to take aggressive action to stop air travel passed. It’s too fucking late because Trump didn’t act. He didn’t take any of this seriously and we’re all paying for it.

A couple hundred million dollars a year in pandemic prevention funding looks like a bargain compared to what we’re seeing now. $2 trillion bailout, plus trillions in Fed fund prop-ups. The responsible thing would be rescind the TCJA for the billionaire class but nope, the tax cuts must persist. Actually, the responsible thing would be to increase funding now and going forward for pandemic prevention, because it can happen anywhere and anytime.

Had an argument just last night with a close friend and Trumper who wanted to know why we can’t call it Chinese virus. I told him that the Spanish flu likely started in the US. I told him the swine flu started here. He was absolutely the Spanish flu started in Spain and swine flu started in China.

I told him, there’s an official name for a reason. Use it. Maybe it got through, maybe not. But as the cases continue to pile up around here, it’ll sink in that Trump’s dumbfuckery has made all of this so much worse. Doesn’t matter what China said about the spread or how many cases they’re reporting now - Trump had 2 fucking months where he ignored the threat and the cases went from 15 to 85,000. By the end of the day today, I’m figuring we top 100,000 and 1,400 dead. By next week, it’ll probably be double on both counts.

To put this in perspective, the annual NYC homicide count for 2013-2019 is lower than the total deaths in NYC alone. More people were murdered in NYC in those years than the death toll from covid19. That count could have been minimized with aggressive testing and taking all of this seriously. My friend’s wife is in mortal peril because she works at a hospital where the dead are piling up so fast they need a refrigerated truck to handle the deceased.

Think of it another way. After 9/11, people could grieve publicly. There were entire towns that turned out for funerals and services for those who died. Cops, firefighters had thousands and tens of thousands show up for those services.

Today, if a law enforcement officer or a health practitioner dies from covid19, they will only allow the immediate family to attend. If you’re Jewish, that might not even amount to a minyan. No shiva calls. No wakes. No ability to get comfort from friends and family, because we’re all separated out of necessity.

All of this is directly due to Trump’s dumbfuckery. All of it.

/rant off.