Joy Harmon was an actress who had small parts in a dozen movies from the late 1950s through the 1960s, and continued to appear in several TV series through the 1970s. Her best known role is as the girl washing her car in Cool Hand Luke, from which this pic is taken. Later, she developed her hobby of baking into a highly successful commercial business, providing cakes, cookies, and other sweets to local studios and businesses.
Anyone may offer speculative estimates of how far the virus will eventually spread, but so far, the danger of contagion in Georgia is infinitesimal, with the majority of the cases in three metro Atlanta counties. Math and logic, however, are powerless to stop hysteria:
Georgia elections officials postponed the presidential primary scheduled for next week because of the coronavirus pandemic, becoming the second state forced to push back a vote in the race for the White House due to the outbreak.
The state rescheduled the presidential vote previously scheduled for March 24 until May 19, the same date as the regular primary for a U.S. Senate seat and many other offices, elections officials told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Saturday. “Events are moving rapidly and my highest priority is protecting the health of our poll workers, their families, and the community at large,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
This is arguably unnecessary, and its efficacy as a public-health measure is dubious, but the new rule is: EVERYTHING MUST BE CANCELLED!
As a matter of speculation, let’s just suppose that by March 24, Georgia’s Wuhan coronavirus cases quadrupled: 264 cases, four deaths. Still, in a population of 10.5 million people, such a number would not be a crisis. If 11 people died, that’s still just a one-in-a-million chance, and you might as well wager a month’s salary on the Powerball lottery, I guess.
Mere statistics cannot prevent panic, however, when the cable-news networks are now 24/7 in their reporting of the DEADLY PANDEMIC! People are reacting on the basis of emotion, not reason, and yet I feel the need to continue citing the actual numbers, so that those who have not yet succumbed to hysteria will at least have access to information that contradicts the media’s incessant drumbeat of doom.
So far, 2,826 cases of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) have been reported in the United States, with 59 deaths. State-by-state:
Washington State …… 642 (40 deaths)
New York ……………….. 613 (2 deaths)
California ……………… 286 (5 deaths)
Colorado ……………….. 101 (1 death)
These four states have more than half (1,642, or 58%) of known COVID-19 infections, and 81% of the deaths reported from the virus. The rest of the country, 46 states, is comparatively unaffected in real terms, yet schools are shut down, the NBA is cancelled, and people are stampeding stores to buy up all the hand sanitizer, bottled water and toilet paper.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) – There has been one confirmed case of the coronavirus in Montgomery County, and after health officials say they anticipate the virus spreading quickly in the coming weeks, locals are stocking up with supplies if they need be quarantined.
Household items like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and bleach are flying off the shelves. Customers are desperate to stash up, leaving stores in Montgomery noticeably empty.
“There is no toilet paper on the shelves so I just got the paper towels and hopefully that will suffice,” said Walmart shopper Vanessa Ball.
Some families are even having to preorder their toilet paper because it is such a hot commodity.
“I feel lucky and probably like we need to get it in the car before we’re mugged or something for toilet tissue,” said Walmart shopper Steven Smith.
But toilet paper isn’t the only supply running out, says Renfroe’s Market Store Manager Clark Psalmonds.
“Disinfecting sprays, wipes, sanitizers are unheard of right now,” said Psalmonds. “You can’t find a sanitizer nowhere in the area.”
Ain’t none of them dadgum sanitizers nowhere in Alabama!
Surgeon general chewed out media for 'finger-pointing' at Trump administration over coronavirus response.
"No more bickering. No more partisanship. Prioritize the health and safety of the American people." https://t.co/a4tMWfjI0s
One symptom of mental illness is magical thinking, “the belief that one’s own thoughts, wishes, or desires can influence the external world. . . . People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) engage in a type of magical thinking. . . . People diagnosed with schizophrenia and delusional disorders may also experience bouts of magical thinking.”
What drives the schizophrenic mad is a sense of helplessness, a lack of agency, the feeling that external forces are controlling their lives. In this condition, they resort to child-like fantasies of omnipotence, where they have the power to fulfill their desires simply by wishing the desired outcome into existence. Such delusional thinking is evident in the behaviors of those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The disappointment of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat had a traumatic psychological impact on Trump’s enemies, particularly in the media, who experienced the election result as a loss of power. Immediately, the anti-Trump media began seizing on anything — a scandal, a poll result, Russian “collusion,” etc. — that might rid them of this demonized figure whose political success symbolized to them their own failure. Thus was born the “walls are closing in” meme of liberal media fantasy, where the latest “bombshell” was always “the beginning of the end” for Trump.
Never mind that 63 million Americans voted to elect Trump, and never mind any evidence of his success in office, the liberal media cannot accept the possibility that they are wrong. No one they know voted for Trump. Everyone whose opinion they respect agrees with them: Trump is Hitler, everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, and therefore, in order that Good triumph over Evil, the walls are always closing in on Trump.
It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.
That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors . . .
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
This is “magical thinking” in action. Because Wehner wants the Trump presidency to end in failure, the coronavirus must be a catastrophic pandemic, and therefore he and his anti-Trump friends are doing everything possible to incite public hysteria over a disease which, as I explained Friday, has so far infected only a tiny fraction of Americans, in comparison to the many thousands afflicted in China, Italy and Iran. As of noon today, the Wuhan coronavirus had caused 1,266 deaths in Italy (population 60.4 million) and 191 deaths in Spain (population 46.8 million), compared to the 49 deaths in the United States (population 327 million). The situation in Italy appears to be spiraling out of control, but the number of U.S. cases (about 2,400) is fewer than in either Germany (4,174 cases in a population of 83.8 million) or France (3,667 cases in a population of 65.3 million). How is Trump guilty of “grave, costly errors” when Americans appear to be so much safer from this disease than are people in many European nations? What happens if the coronavirus panic turns out to be overblown? What if, under Trump’s leadership, the impact in the United States proves to be much less severe than in those European socialist countries that liberals are always praising as superior to capitalist America? Isn’t it possible that the American people will figure out that Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) were deliberately trying to incite a panic for political motives?
Peter Wehner and his friends have not considered that possibility, because they are emotionally invested in the worst-case scenario as part of their “magical thinking” delusion. What they seem to forget — Trump Derangement Syndrome has impaired their memory — is that elections are a choice, and you can’t beat somebody with nobody. Does anyone really believe Joe Biden is the man who will save America from doom?
Spare a thought today for our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press. They’re going through a lot right now. In 2016 they sacrificed what was left of their dignity to drag Hillary Clinton across the finish line, and she failed them anyway. Now they’re expected to spend the next eight months cleaning up after this doddering old fossil, who makes Hillary look like a paragon of competence and health. No wonder they’re so grouchy all the time!
Andrew Gillum, a married father-of-three who narrowly missed out on becoming Florida’s first black governor, was too ‘inebriated’ to speak when cops arrived at the ritzy Mondrian Hotel in Miami’s South Beach party district.
He was inside the room early Friday with two more men, one of them a 30-year-old male escort named Travis Dyson who was being treated by paramedics for a suspected drug overdose.
Cops found three plastic bags of suspected crystal meth and the third man present, Aldo Mejias, 56, told officers that Gillum and Dyson had been ‘under the influence of an unknown substance’, according to a police report . . .
The report also noted that 40-year-old Gillum, a former Tallahassee mayor and regular CNN contributor, was seen vomiting in the bathroom and required a welfare check to see if he was okay.
Police are not pressing charges over the incident and Gillum denies taking drugs, however he later issued a groveling apology over his behavior. . . .
Miami Beach resident Dyson describes himself as a trauma certified ER nurse on social media, where he posts photos of himself working out in the gym, partying at gay nightspots and lounging on luxury yachts.
But DailyMail.com can reveal he also posts explicit photos and homemade porn movies online and has previously had a profile on the Rent.men website, which advertises male escorts and sex workers.
Gillum and his former campaign treasurer Adam Corey were both the subjects of a Florida ethics investigation and an FBI corruption probe, stemming from his time as the Mayor of Tallahassee. Gillum, who is married, and Corey were rumored to have been in a long term intimate relationship.
Former liberal media darling and frequent CNN guest Michael Avenatti was recently held in a “rat-infested” jail cell for a 10-day stretch and “and was able to shower only twice in about two weeks,” according to The Washington Post.
Citing a letter Avenatti’s attorney sent to a judge, the Post reported that the former lawyer to porn star Stormy Daniels had a rough time during a lockdown at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, where he’s being held since last month after being found guilty of trying to extort Nike.
A New York jury found Avenatti, 48, guilty on three counts, including extortion, wire fraud and transmission of interstate communications with intent to extort. He faces up to 42 years in prison [when he is] sentenced later this year. According to the Post, Avenatti’s attorney said inmates lacked soap and or hot water to wash their hands and faced “deplorable” conditions. “Avenatti’s cell was ‘infested with rats,’ and the facility ‘reeks of urine,’ the Post reported.
Yes, let us smile as we recall the Creepy Porn Lawyer announcing — on the Fourth of July, no less — his intention to challenge Trump in 2020:
Media Research Center director Tim Graham wrote last month that “CNN and MSNBC gave Avenatti 230 interviews in one year.”
Back in 2018, an MRC study revealed that Avenatti appeared on CNN a whopping 74 times over a 10-week period and the network’s in-house media critic Brian Stelter famously declared the now-disgraced porn lawyer was a legitimate threat to challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Stelter told Avenatti on air, “Looking ahead to 2020, one of the reasons why I’m taking you seriously as a [2020 presidential] contender is because of your presence on cable news.”
In addition to trying to blackmail Nike, Avenatti has been accused of several other crimes, including fraud, perjury and tax evasion. Oh, I’m sure his friends at CNN and MSNBC will miss their favorite guest, who is now where he has always belonged, in a rat-infested cell.
Students at John Hopkins University have created a COVID-19 (Wuhan coronavirus) outbreak map, from which we may learn that, as of this morning, the disease has caused nearly 5,000 deaths worldwide, of which more than 4,000 were either in China or Italy. Likewise, of the 134,700 COVID-19 cases identified worldwide, four nations (China, Italy, Iran and South Korea) account for approximately 114,000 cases, about 85%. What percentage of COVID-19 cases are in the United States? A tiny fraction. We’ve had about 1,700 cases identified, with 41 deaths.
EVERYTHING IS CLOSED! No more NBA games, major league baseball has proposed postponing Opening Day, and my college-age kids have had their campuses closed down for the rest of the term. In New York, the governor has banned any gathering of more than 500 people, and the debate scheduled for Sunday between Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will take place without a live audience. Nine members of Congress have declared themselves in “self-quarantine” because they may have been exposed to the virus, and Democrats are trying to wedge all their pet projects into an emergency legislative package to deal with the outbreak. All this because of a contagion that has, so far, killed fewer Americans than gunfire in Chicago.
Did I mention that about three-quarters of U.S. coronavirus deaths have occurred in Washington State? Or that nearly all U.S. cases can be traced to those who have traveled abroad? President Trump banned travel to China six weeks ago, and this week banned travel from continental Europe. So between those travel bans and the shutting down of everything — no school! no sports! — we might reasonably expect the spread of the virus to soon begin dwindling. Yet as the actual risk to Americans is decreasing, it seems panic is conversely increasing.
