Republicanism - A Multi-Generational Cancer

Republicanism is a multi-generational cancer that will destroy America unless it is destroyed first.

No, I don't mean Trumpism, the belief that laws are for others and "others" are a great wedge to distract the masses from wholesale grifting.

I mean Republicanism, the belief that the only answers to income inequality, gun violence, poor education and public corruption are lower taxes, fewer gun regulations, less educational funding and less transparency. The belief that no crime -- break-ins, arson, ballot stuffing, porn-star payoffs, extortion, campaign embezzlement, solicitation of foreign mass media assistance -- is out of the question if accountability can be suppressed or deflected or if it enriches the participants.

These aspects of Repuplicanism didn't just emerge in the Trump era, they didn't just emerge in the last 5-10 years. They have been present and poisoning public discourse and underlying politics since the Nixon era in the 1960s. The Rumsfeld / Chaney batch of mid-career Nixon diehards came back in the Bush administration to give us the bungled war in Afghanistan and the completely immoral and strategically flawed war in Iraq that cost us $3 trillion. The younger generation of Young Repblicans in the 1970s produced the unholy triumvirate of Lee Atwater, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Lee Atwater perfected the Southern Strategy that replaced outright racism within the Republican party with dog-whistle themes like welfare queens, school choice, etc. that have led to the divisive economic and social policies that have come home to roost in the last ten years with record income inequality, voting rights rollbacks, militarized policing, etc. Manafort and Stone willingly, repeatedly solicited information and material aid from Vladmir Putin to support Trump in 2016 and likely enrich their own pocketbooks.

The only material difference between these five and John Dean, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, Jeb Magruder, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Howard Hunt, Chuck Colson, and Donald Segretti is proximity to specific crimes. They weren't standing next to those particular criminals committing those specific crimes at the time. But nothing separates them from an ideological standpoint. And they have been at work for fifty years, sometimes in the shadows but mostly in broad daylight.

And there is literally nothing of importance distinguishing that cast of willing criminality from the current 2020 generation of Young Republicans on campus. A group called College Republicans United on the campus of Arizona State University are arranging fundraisers to contribute to the defense of the 17 year-old shooter in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/education/2020/08/28/asu-college-republicans-united-kyle-rittenhouse-fundraiser/5662895002/

Consider the facts already know without a doubt:

• a 17 year old individual in possession of an automatic weapon
• traveling across state lines to participate in vigilante wanna-be police actions
• who shot three different people, killing two of them and seriously wounding the third

The shooter was not in his own home, car, office or place of business so castle doctrine concepts do not apply.

Wisconsin does NOT have a law that requires someone deploying deadly force from RETREATING from the point of danger to de-escalate. However, court cases in Wisconsin have ruled that self-defense rules do NOT apply if the person deploying deadly force PURSUES the eventual victim(s) when they are beyond "the castle." IN a 2014 case, a man was convicted of reckless endangerment for firing a rifle at two assailants AFTER they attacked him in his home then fled down the street.

https://www.grgblaw.com/wisconsin-trial-lawyers/wisconsin-self-defense-rule

In other words, you don't have to RETREAT from danger but you cannot SEEK IT OUT and escalate the danger once you encounter it.

Yet these college students want to raise money to defend the indefensible. They want to aid the defense of someone who was already committing a crime by possessing a firearm as a minor and brandishing it in circumstances he CHOSE to seek out and encounter and wound up murdering two and attempting a third.

You cannot say current "Young Republicans" haven't learned a thing. They have learned a great deal. They've watched 50 years of economic, political and legal skirmishes and learned that as long as the right people (our people) are in the right places at the right times, you should be able to get away with anything. Including murder.

WTH

A Key Insight From Mary Trump

I purchased Mary Trump's psychological diagnostic manual, Too Much and Never Enough written about the entire Trump clan and read the entire book. I suspect my take as a reader will be nearly identical to anyone else that reads the book. No one who NEEDS to read this book is going to do so. Everyone that DOES read this book will only learn about particulars but learn nothing in the abstract that hasn't been public knowledge for decades -- the fact that Donald Trump is a liar, a cheater on taxes / laws / relationships, a racist, a misogynist and a narcissistic sociopath.

One key insight or particular IS addressed in the book across different chapters that has a bearing on Donald Trump's future and his fixation on meddling with what might be going on with prosecutors at the Federal or New York State levels.

In the 1989 to 1992 time frame, Donald Trump was struggling to regain financial security after his trio of Atlantic City casino investments all tanked simultaneously. Banks involved with the casino bankruptcies were so deeply exposed that their re-investment plan to stabilize the casinos essentially guaranteed Donald Trump a mere $450,000 per month "allowance" aimed at ensuring he could maintain the Trump mystique and public persona that would continue attracting the rubes into the casinos and avoid spooking second tier creditors, triggering an irrecoverable collapse ("in for a penny, in for a pound…"). During that same time frame, his father Fred Trump was already beginning to suffer cognitive declines from still-undiagnosed Alzheimers.

By 1990, Donald Trump saw a problem (cash flow for Donald), saw a weakness to exploit (an increasingly senile father), saw a benefit to accrue to himself(control of his father's firm Trump Management that was still producing tens of millions in free cash from operating hundreds of seedy real estate complexes) and devised a solution. From the book,

He secretly approached two of my grandfather's longest-serving employees Irwin Durben, his lawyer, and Jack Mitnick, his accountant, and enlisted them to draft a codicil to my grandfather's will that would put Donald in complete control of Fred's estate, including the empire and all of its holdings, after he died. Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert would effectively be at Donald's financial mercy, dependent on his approval for the smallest transaction.

As Gam later told Maryanne, when Irwin and Jack went to the House to have Fred sign the codicil, they presented the document as if it had been Fred's idea all along. My grandfather, who was having one of his more lucid days, sensed that something was not right, although he couldn't say exactly what. He angrily refused to sign. After Irwin and Jack left, Fred conveyed his concerns to his wife. My grandmother immediately called her oldest child to explain what had happened as best she could. In short, she said, "it simply didn't pass the smell test."

That oldest child Maryanne enlisted others with more expertise in estate planning and the rest of Donald's siblings uncovered the entire plan and triggered a complete rewrite of Fred Trump's will that named them all as co-executors and guaranteed all four children -- Maryanne, Donald, Elizabeth and Robert -- received equal amounts.

That's an interesting peek into petty family politics and another confirmation of Donald Trump's predisposition to cheat anyone (including family) out of anything for his own behalf. But, as they say, that's not why I'm writing...

The key insight stems from the terms of that updated will for Fred Trump and the enormous tax fraud that was perpetrated by all of the Trump siblings -- Maryanne, Donald, Elizabeth and Robert -- from that point forward. Niece Mary was exposed to some of the details because of the terms in the Fred Trump will affecting her and her brother. Fred Sr. had completely removed Freddy Trump (their father) years prior but separate language still allocated cash from one affiliate of Trump Management called Midland Associates to the two children of Freddy. Niece Mary and Nephew Fritz were simply trying to ensure the executors were not going to cut off that stream of income -- especially since Fritz and his wife had a newborn child in a hospital racking up huge bills.

Mary Trump and Fritz Trump haggled with the four siblings for nearly two years and finally decided to settle out of court. The stakes were the deceased Freddy Jr's twenty percent share of the Midland Associates assets. The four siblings demanded that Mary and Fritz sell that share back to the four siblings as a means of cashing them out. The book doesn't provide an exact figure for the settlement (maybe due to a non-disclosure agreement?). It does mention that, at the time in 1999, the four siblings were claiming the entire Fred Trump estate was only worth $30 million dollars. However, immediately after Fred Trump's death, youngest son Robert Trump had claimed to the New York Times that Fred Trump's empire was worth $350 million. In reality, it was worth roughly four times THAT amount.

The documents amassed for the legal haggling in 1999 over terms of Fred Trump's will affecting Mary Trump and Fritz Trump were provided by Mary Trump to The New York Times in 2018 as they researched the larger financial history of the Trump empire. Those documents and other information found independently show that back in 1992 after Donald Trump's abortive 1990 attempt to steal his father's estate from under the noses of his siblings, all four of the siblings faced a new problem that encouraged them to partner up with Donald for their collective good. Fred Trump had refused to slowly cede control of his assets to the children during his lifetime as a tax avoidance strategy. Since Trump Management actually generated a lot of free cash (unlike Donald's Trump Organization fiascos...), the firm (and thus Fred's estate) also had enormous sums of cash on hand that would also trigger huge inheritance / estate taxes when he finally died.

The four siblings formed a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance in 1992 and began using that entity to move assets from Trump Management (Fred's core shell company) through All County then into whatever the siblings wanted. By the time Fred's wife died in 2000, the All County shell game was so effective that the paper valuation claimed by the Trump lawyers for Fred's estate was $51 million dollars.

The coup de grace on all of this wheeling and dealing? Donald Trump, in need of ever more infusions of immediate cash to cover other immediate issues, got the four siblings to agree to essentially liquidate all remaining properties being managed by Trump Management, his father's firm, in 2004. Banks involved in the deal had collected appraisals and related material putting the total value of those assets around $1 billion dollars. (And that's AFTER the four Trump siblings had been siphoning off free cash out of Trump Management since 1992.) The siblings left it up to Donald Trump to close the deal. How much did Art of the Deal Donald nab for the fire sale? $705,600,000. Yup, the certified stable genius left $300 million dollars on the table.

The takeaway from all of this is that the game of financial three card monte that Donald Trump and his three Trump siblings played with assets from Trump Management between 1992 and its eventual liquidation in 2004 are still likely resulting in misstated tax filings on current investments and loan paperwork signed since 2004, triggering ongoing criminal acts. One would think those crimes should be simple enough for a law firm summer intern to map to specific criminal code violations, summarize in 100-200 pages for a competent, ethical prosecuting attorney and have that attorney drag all four of them to criminal court and win. These aren't IRS tax audit judgement calls about proper interpretation of job hunting expenses or claiming more than $0.575/ mile for mileage on a personal vehicle used for business. These facts involve money laundering and tax fraud to the tune of $700 million dollars. There's no need for tracking down overseas investors from Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia as witnesses. All of the crimes probably took place within a fifty mile radius of downtown Manhattan across three states. All of the principles and their lawyers who helped them perpetrate the crimes are American citizens. One of them is a really important American citizen. He's President of the United States.

WTH

Missouri Republicans and Biology...

Republicans in general seem to struggle with many, MANY subjects such as math, history or finance but the one that seems to completely flummox them has to be biology.

First, there was Todd Akin, would-be US Senate candidate, who was the first to identify a unique power of the female reproductive system to detect a "legitimate rape" and "shut that whole thing down," thus justifying his opposition to allowing abortion in the case of rape. Akin went on to lose his race and disappear, seemingly to the same place as the doctors he cited when making the comment. No one has located any of those doctors in nearly 8 years.

Now, there's Governor Mike Parson, who publicly commented on July 20, 2020 thusly:

These kids have got to get back to school. They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.

I've put that in bold font so you can just sit back from the screen and fully absorb all of the stupidity.

You don't have to a poet-warrior, rocket surgeon savant to grasp the bare minimum facts required to formulate an appropriate public policy for schools and covid-19. You can learn everything required to make appropriate public health policy by scanning news headlines on your local newspaper's website or a national news website, probably even Fox news. If you did, you'd see headlines such as these:

• Without $600 unemployment, economy will likely tank
• Rising cases prove summer is no barrier to COVID-19
• More than 50 Florida hospitals have run out of ICU beds as coronavirus cases soar
• Coronavirus: 13-year-old dies while self-isolating with Covid symptoms after virus test came back negative

If you exercise just a little more initiative and actually "use the google" and search for the words "covid children" you see stories like these:

• Studies find nearly 300 kids with inflammatory condition tied to coronavirus
• A Florida mother lost 2 children to Covid-19 within 11 days
• Coronavirus orphans: Michigan kids lose both parents to covid-19
• Older children spread the Coronavirus Just As Much as Adults, New Study Finds
• Almost one third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus

You don't even have to READ these stories to come away with an appropriate set of conclusions. You just need a few brain cells.

Even if younger children don't come down with aggressive SYMPTOMS, they can CARRY the disease and infect older children and young adults / parents. We already know the population bracket exhibiting the biggest explosion in case load is 21-35. We know studies of many "long-haul" covid-19 patients reflects systemic damage to multiple organs consistent with clotting and vascular problems. We still don't have a vaccine. We have already forced about 16% of the economy to shutter for three months - triggering a huge financial setback for those workers - under the guise of nipping this thing in the bud. Cities and states re-opened too early and infection rates now are WORSE over a larger swath of communities than they were in April, threatening another lockdown in many states, further tanking the economy for those hardest hit. Even if some promising vaccines pass trials, we still don't have enough manufacturing capacity IN THE WORLD to produce the vials required to distribute the vaccine from the lab to doctors' offices.

And Governor Mike Parson wants to just get it over with, drag all the kids back to school in August and have 'em tough it out and see how students and parents many make it long enough to show up for the Thanksgiving play.

This kind of stupidity isn't funny. It's deadly.

WTH

Crazy or Racist? How Can You Tell?

Multiple outlets have reported a story regarding a woman who approached two different Asian-American people in public and verbally accosted them with a profanity-laced racist tirade.

The woman has been identified as Lena Hernandez, age 56.

The first incident involved a jogger whose offense was using a stairs to stretch. The video makes it clear Hernandez wasn't objecting because the jogger was interfering with HER exercise regimen. The video shows a portly woman who came out of nowhere and began ranting at the young jogger. My initial reaction in watching and listening to the diatribe was "that woman is mentally ill."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/california-woman-filmed-threatening-a-young-filipino-american-woman-exercising-in-a-park_n_5ee3e879c5b65d77bafbd2f0

The Twitter post of the second incident later the same day in the same area confirmed that assumption. She gets out of her car to verbally accost an Asian man who parked his car in the spot next to her -- too close to her car according to her.

As the videos were distributed on the Internet, reports of similar public incidents involving the same woman came out of the woodwork from across the community, including a report from October of 2019 in which Hernandez physically assaulted an Asian woman who had intervened when Hernandez was unleashing a racist rant against a woman working as a janitor cleaning a public bathroom.

Several things occur to me watching these two videos.

Americans have produced a toxic climate in which people of color are hunted down by red-necked, racist troglodytes from pickup trucks - EXACTLY like wild animals on the Serengeti - for merely jogging through a residential neighborhood.

Police forces have TRAINED violence-first techniques to cops resulting in officers calmly choking handcuffed, already subdued suspects for SEVEN MINUTES in broad daylight knowing that cameras are rolling like they are downing their morning donut and coffee. Because they think they can. Communities are paying MILLIONS in damage awards to victims while RETAINING these offices who often have records for abusive arrests longer than the arrest records of those they are apprehending.

The two citizens involved in these videos showed REMARKABLE calm and constraint. Imagine your state of mind if some WHITE woman pops up out of NOWHERE, walks up to you -- a person of color -- carrying a bag -- you don't know if she's armed -- and begins unleashing a racist rant against you. In that moment, you don't know if she's going to stop with only hideous words exchanged, or if she's going to pull out a gun and kill you. In this climate American has unleashed on itself, one would think the same bogus concept that allowed George Zimmerman to perversely claim HE felt his life was in danger after CHOOSING to assault someone else who fought back would apply to these citizens, justifying a pre-emptive assault against Hernandez, even if she was just a crazy lady, not a "real threat."

Let's focus on the racist / crazy lady.

Is she just a racist? Or is she just a crazy lady? It's an interesting thought exercise to consider how far apart those two points are and how a distinction could be made. I tend to think that someone who is racist demonstrates a consistent level of intellectual processing across different domains of thought and decision making and, through those processes, somehow CHOOSES to come to racist attitudes and alter their behavior and choices accordingly.

When you see someone that seems truly crazy who also engages in racist behavior, the motivation that seems to inevitably drive the racist behavior is fear. From a biological standpoint, the layer of our consciousness that seems to have the most leverage over the millennia of our existence (or is it just 6000 years? I forget...) would be fear and the fight or flight response. No matter how crazy you are, any behaviors rooted in fear are likely to continue getting expressed, albeit in less coherent ways as mental illness progresses.

Now put your way-back hats on to 1980 and the beginning of the Reagan Administration. In 1980 prior to the November election, Congress enacted and President Carter signed into law the Mental Health Services Act which continued providing grants to local mental health institutions. By 1981, budget strategies promoted by Republicans and President Reagan completely repealed the 1980 law and established a pattern of "deinstitutionalizing" mental health patients at the state level as well. For FORTY YEARS, the United States has provided virtually ZERO focus on mental health while healthcare costs for treatments in private settings have skyrocketed and income disparity shifted more wealth to the 0.1 percent away from the economic center. How many mentally ill can afford extended mental healthcare? How many people who HAVE a family member with mental illness can afford to provide ongoing treatment for that family member?

Now fast forward to 2015. In a nation with definite pockets of racist / apocalyptic militias scattered across the country but an even large population of mentally ill people living on the social and economic fringe without proper healthcare, medication and supervision, an ignorant, racist, dream candidate floats down an escalator to a podium and announces a run for President. For the next 12-16 months, that candidate gets virtually unlimited free air time as he spouts ideas often indistinguishable from those held by these militants and mentally ill "phantom patients."

Now back to the present. After five years of this un-virtuous feedback cycle operating in clear view every day and ideas circulating perpetually between racists and the mentally ill, the level of open racism and craziness has reached unimaginable levels. Some in the country are trying to draw these ideas out into the open thinking sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant. Others are desperately trying to stuff the bad genie back into the bottle in a futile attempt to preserve a status quo that benefits a narrow few.

America has problems with both racism and mental health because many of our educational, judicial, social and civic institutions are failing to provide proper services for those in need. Bad schools fail to teach history to avoid mistakes in the past. Bad politicians run on get-tough-on-crime platforms and allow abusive cops to terrorize minorities. Bad courts acquit racist vigilantes under bizarre "castle doctrine" laws and acquit bad cops under flawed "qualified immunity" laws. Resources for investigating and curtailing racist, militant militias are cut at federal and state levels while prison funding skyrockets for drug crimes. The only real debate at this point is the extent to which these institutions have strayed from some prior working condition or were DESIGNED specifically to produce the current results.

Think of the outcomes of the American experiment like an air conditioned house on a 100 degree summer day. The segregation of 100 degree air outside and 74 degree air inside isn't accidental. The laws of physics make it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be 100 degrees outside and 74 degrees inside without WORK being done to maintain such a disparity in energy / entropy levels. Something has to pluck the heat out of the inside and push it to the outside. Someone had to DEVISE that process and someone had to INVEST in resources to IMPLEMENT that process and someone has to MAINTAIN that process. For those inside enjoying the disparity, the machinery involved in producing that comfort can be hidden out of sight or earshot in the basement or outside but the machinery MUST be present to achieve that outcome.

America didn't get to the levels of economic, social and judicial imbalance being seen today by accident. In some cases, the country has CHOSEN to dismantle machinery and controls previously implemented to correct these faults. In other cases, the country has chosen to CONTINUE IGNORING machinery dating back 100, 150 or even 244 years that has been humming along the entire time, funneling benefits to the few and keeping the rest outside.

WTH

Why Covid-19 Is Such A Killer

It's May 28 and the first summer holiday came and went, giving Americans an excuse to take back the outdoors (???) then appear on TV answering questions from incredulous local reporters such as "Did you know there were going to be 1500 people asses to elbows in the pool?" and "When you SAW 1500 people assses to elbows in the pool not wearing masks, why didn't you leave?"

How Did Americans do answering those questions?

Not well, I'm afraid. When you listen to the answers, it becomes very apparent that Covid-19 may be the perfect disease for 2020 America.

Here are the answers from one such 'Murican interviewed on a local station.

DID YOU KNOW THERE WERE GOING TO BE 1500 PEOPLE AT THAT ESTABLISHMENT? Heck no, I thought we was gonna show up and there'd be like fifty people there. When we got there and saw all the people, I was like, "wow..."

WHEN YOU SAW SO MANY PEOPLE THERE, WHY DIDN'T YOU LEAVE? Well, they took all of our temperatures when we arrived before they let us in and there was signs all around and the waiters and bartenders all wore masks. And it wasn't like anybody was doing anything bad, ya know. It was a good time.

Wasn't like anybody was doing anything bad, huh?

Okay, Jonas (Dude) Salk Jr., what exactly would constitute doing something "bad" vis a vis coronavirus? What would cross your line of pandemic safety? How about a bunch of drunken hoosier men standing three deep waiting for drinks at the pool bar? How about a bunch of 45+ year old women trying to act like 20-somethings in bikinis while attempting to line dance in the pool?

The biggest concern from "Dude's" answers was his plan for "staying safe" after his possible exposure. "I'll just stay home until I can get tested."

What he was really saying was after Day 0 of known possible exposure, he can just get tested and if the test is negative, he's in the clear and doesn't have to worry.

None of these stories ever STOP the narrative right there and perform a true public service and instantly debunk all of the sloppy thinking about the entire life cycle of this virus and corresponding disease. What's missing is an easy to follow diagram to depict all of the overlapping intervals reflecting critical stages in the disease and an explanation about how those overlaps produce so much ambiguity that results in complacency.

Here is the diagram I've had in my head since March that I thought should be obvious to anyone reading stories about the spread and the progression of the disease for its patients and victims.

It would look a lot better rendered graphically but this is the best I can do in a text-oriented forum. Think of each line as a horizontal bar and the horizontal dimension as time in days.

COVID-19 DISEASE TIMELINE

                                         ????AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
           ???SSSSSSSSSSSSS--------------SSSS???
        ???DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD--------------DDDD????
     ???IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII--------------IIII???
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX--------------XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Legend:
X = point of exposure
I = point of infectiousness to others
D = point where detection of the disease is possible via testing
S = point where symptoms are detectable in SOME patients (some remain asymptomatic)
A = point where antibodies of immune response can be accurately spotted
- = variable period of actual disease at home or hospital
? = statistical uncertainty before or after each stage

The point of this bar chart time-lapse visualization is to highlight a few things:

• no science has established the typical interval between exposure and infectiousness
• no science has established the typical interval between exposure and detectability
• no science has established the typical interval between infectiousness and detectability
• no science has established the typical interval between the end of symptoms and the presence of antibodies
• no science has established the typical interval between the end of testability and the end of infectiousness
• there isn't a fixed "true" day interval for any of these because every immune system differs

You have to stop and really think about what each of those uncertainties mean in relation to the different stages of the disease's progression.

Those uncertainties produce the following problems:

If you KNOW you were in the presence of a COVID-19 case on Day 0, you can’t get a test on Day 1, get a NEGATIVE result and assume you escaped infection. No one can accurately predict how long the exposure will take to reach the point of being visible via a test. Also, it is now clear that some of the tests for active disease detection have a confirmed false-negative rate of at least FIFTEEN PERCENT.

If you DON’T somehow know exactly when you were exposed, you can’t use the date of a positive test and work backwards to find a likely date when you WERE exposed to narrow down the search of contacts.

If you come down with COVID-19, it isn’t clear if infectiousness stops before symptoms stop or vice versa. More precisely, how long should a "recovered" asymptomatic patient continue to isolate to avoid infecting others? No one knows for sure.

If you come down with COVID-19, it isn’t clear when you will test CLEAR of the disease in relationship to when you stop being infectious to others.

Will the disease continue to exhibit more or less this same proportionate timeline over time, once public health officials think they have more statistical precision on these intervals? It isn't clear at all. Doctors believe a spike in cases of a condition with children is actually tied to original spikes in COVID-19 cases in adults FIVE weeks earlier. One theory is that early childhood immune systems are more flexible at fending off the never-seen-before coronavirus but they still can't overcome it every time so by the time it overwhelms a young immune system, it has stressed the body in different ways producing vastly different symptoms.

And one giant final caveat. No one has confirmed how much immunity to a future infection of the same SARS-CoV-2 strain or a mutation of it will be provided by having antibodies. Remember, some of the sailors aboard the Theodore Roosevelt who were originally infected and diagnosed with COVID-19 then cleared returned to the ship only to test positive for the disease a second time.

So there it is. A witch's brew of science, complexity, uncertainty and statistics combined with the need for public accommodation and basic courtesy. And a nation where 10-20 percent think being asked to wear a cloth mask is "stupid" and amounts to an infringement of their Constitutional rights.

WTH