You Will Anyway: Schrödinger's douchebag

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Schrödinger's douchebag

President Donald Trump left Friday’s coronavirus task force briefing without taking a single question just a day after stunning medical experts by using the daily briefing to float bizarre and dangerous ideas about possible coronavirus treatments, like injecting disinfectants.

Reporters tried to shout questions at the president to no avail Friday as Trump ended what was an abnormally short briefing. The entire briefing, which featured Trump talking at the start, lasted roughly 20 minutes.

Daily Beast

He knew what they would be asking. Twenty minutes is a record. These substitute rallies have been lasting as long as 3+ hours.

Still, whatever their private counsel, few, if any, administration officials, surrogates, outside allies, or Trump confidants were eager to go on the record to convey any relief to the possible end to Trump’s relentless domination of the briefings.

[...]

Trump has been told by several top advisers repeatedly that the way the briefings are currently conducted could in fact be inadvertently helping the poll numbers of former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s likely 2020 general election rival.

[...]

[Trump's] suggestions were immediately slammed by medical experts, federal health agencies and even bleach manufacturers, who pleaded with people not to ingest bleach.

The president later backtracked on Friday, claiming he was being “sarcastic.” “I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen,” he told reporters at the White House.

[...]

Neither Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus task force response coordinator, or Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared at Friday’s briefing.

I guess they contradicted him one too many times.

Stephen Hahn, head of the Food and Drug Administration, briefly spoke at the start of the briefing but wasn’t at the podium long enough to be asked out about the president’s outlandish suggestions from the day before.

He took one question from a reporter on the topic of faulty antibody tests. And Vice President Mike Pence gave a presentation detailing progress in different states. But after he was finished, the briefing wrapped and officials cleared the room immediately.

But since neither Birx nor Fauci were allowed to be there, no one could ask if that's true.

Earlier, on Thursday...

And that's why he took no questions on Friday.

h/t Jean

UPDATE:

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.