He Knew.

[I’m trying out something new: the Google web stories. I love the concept of tiny stories via images and a few text, but I do think it will be a LOT more work for me since my images are rarely photos. If I do use this tool, I will have to turn toward photos from Pixabay or Unsplash more often because it takes a while to dream up a satisfactory image for a drawing or painting and then to execute it takes about a week (due to my drawing/painting style). It’s beautiful concept though.

I did have problems with it though, so while I tried to put up this post last night, the hour just ran too late to finish because I was trying to figure out how to make the web Google story save. Right now the Google web story won’t save if I use Google’s text tool. I’m going to have to add the text as part of the image before uploading the image into the web story tool.]

The Google Web Story

There is a lot of scary news: the raging fire out in the West, the churning storms in the Atlantic, and soon, the Gulf of Mexico, the slow moving economic disaster, the civic unrest, and the political news drama surrounding the coronavirus.

I haven’t heard a peep from the evangelicals. I guess they condone this lying and this murder.

I haven’t heard any news about his base supporters, so I guess they are okay with this mass murder.

Their silence is confounding. Why aren’t they enraged by this dereliction of duty? Is it because they are okay with all of these deaths because the deaths have nothing to do with them? (I read that 57% of the Republicans ARE okay with 190K in deaths.) In addition, they seem to be okay with the cruelty that flows from the lying and the inaction. All of that doesn’t seem to bother them.

At this point, I don’t think anything will move them; they are wholly all in to the cult (unless something dreadful hits them, then they “get” it). Nothing moves them so these latest news will not move the needle one way or the other with them. You know, they say that who you vote is a reflection of the people. So Trump’s perfidy, cruelty and criminality is basically a reflection of those supporters: those supporters must hold a similar vein of cruelty to accept, no cheer, the immensity of what he has done. When they said in 2015/2016 he’s like us, they really meant it.

We’re heading into the fall and my last post on the coronavirus data from OpenTable/Apple/ Google suggested that during the Labor Day weekend, people went out in full force. I imagine in about 2 to 4 weeks we’ll start to see the consequences of those activities. In addition we have kids going back to school, another potential vector for virus spread. I just read recently where some college students in Florida knew they had the virus, but they still held a house party and outside visitors came to the house.

The latest prediction I read had more than 400K deaths by the end of 2020. We’re almost at 200K, so that means another 200K+ in three and a half months – an acceleration of misery that I don’t think Americans can conceive. During the 1918 pandemic, it is estimated that between 500,000 to 850,000 US citizens died (from Wikipedia) or more commonly 675,000 (Washington Post), so if we reach the lower end of the Spanish flu mortality range, we could very well be facing the same severe mortality.

During my search for the aforementioned statistic, I found these images which I clipped:

So, Halloween was cancelled, there were stacks of bodies, schools and businesses were closed.

Here’s a link to a Washington Post stories about Americans digging up letters written during the 1918 pandemic between then and now. It’s interesting reading that some people are seeing similarities between 1918 and 2020.

Anyway, the next few months look to be dreadful on so many levels. I wonder how we will come out in 2021.