Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "CNN"
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@classicalaid1 Dostoevsky's book is called Crime and Punishment. It's very long, and depressing; the protagonist is a student who is dirt poor, and his family is dirt poor, and he murders an old woman. He's not trying to see if he's smart enough to get away with it; he thinks that he might be superior and above the ordinary moral laws, and he's trying to test himself to see whether he can break the moral law against murder, without being punished by God or by his own conscience. (SPOILER: He can't. He almost kills himself but eventually confesses. The detective who takes his confession was the inspiration for the creators of the detective Columbo on the TV series of that name.)
There's another book which explores a similar theme - an independent adolescent who commits murder just as an experiment to learn more about the nature of morality, but this one is kind of the opposite of Crime and Punishment ; it's a short, fast-moving comedy about an independent streetwise adolescent who inherits a large fortune. Part of the plot involves a gang of con-artists who pose as priests and raise money from gullible aristocrats by telling them that the Pope has been abducted by Freemasons and been replaced with a puppet/fake-Pope, and they (the confidence-men, posing as priests) need money to try to rescue the real Pope. This beautiful book is called Les Caves du Vatican and it's sold in English translation under the titles The Vatican Cellars and Lafcadio's Adventures (Lafcadio is the name of the protagonist-boy.) The author is Andre Gide, who later won a Nobel Prize in literature for another book.
But these novels are both very different stories from what this guy allegedly did, besides being works of fiction.
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Trump is not crazy. He's doing the smart, correct thing, for his goal. It's just that his goal is different from all other presidents (in my lifetime) so far. Until now, they've all wanted to do as well as they could, either for the country, or for their party, or for their big donors, or for their voters, or for the world, or for their future reputations. They had different ideas of what was good and whose benefit was most important to them, and different ideas of how to achieve the good they wanted, but they all wanted to accomplish something for a community.
In contrast, Trump doesn't care about the country, or about his party, or about his big donors' interests, or about the voters, or about the world, or about his future reputation. Trump's goal is to maximize the amount of money his cult-members send to him (and/or his various corporate avatars), in the very-short term. The theory which best explains, and best would have predicted each thing he has done since he first started his campaign, is: he counts the money his followers have sent in the past two weeks, ("$ received from day -14 to day zero") and compares it to the amount from the preceding two weeks ("$ received from day -28 through day -14"). If the most recent two weeks' takings are more than the takings from the two weeks before, then he thinks to himself "that's good," and he'll go on doing and saying what he was doing and saying, maybe ramp up the volume and intensity. If, on the other hand, the most recent two weeks' takings are less than the takings from the two weeks before them, then he thinks to himself "that's bad," and he will change what he's saying and doing.
This explains why he talks so much about liking authoritarian leaders, but didn't do much to actually make USA more authoritarian. He talked as if he wanted to put journalists in jail for opposing him, but he didn't actually jail any journalists, did he? And it explains why he has so little staying-power. Where's the wall? Where's the funding for a mission to Mars? etc. The talk is what makes the cultists send money. The follow-through doesn't matter; by the time anyone asks about it, he's moved on to some other stimulating fantasy to shout about.
Now, continuing to shout that Biden cheated and he (Trump) really won, motivates his followers to send more $ than conceding would motivate them to send. So he'll go on shouting that Biden cheated, until somehow, his people stop rewarding him with donations. Same with his promises that he will somehow be reinstated: his followers hear that and they send money. That means that in view of what he's going for, what he's trying to achieve, his decision to keep shouting that he won and he's gonna be reinstated, is not crazy. It's a smart and effective way of doing what HE wants to do, which is, to keep those cult-members sending him their money.
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The Chinese government unleashed the virus on us in order to prevent the opera houses in Europe and USA and South America from staging Puccini's last opera, Turandot (if you are familiar with the aria "Nessun dorma", that's from Turandot) because it is set in Peking ("Pekino") and depicts the Chinese people as brutal savages ruled by a sadistic tyrant.
Turandot had become trendy again (the opera world is very faddish) and numerous opera houses, great (La Scala, the Met, Chicago Lyric Opera) and small (Regina Opera in Brooklyn) were getting ready to do it. The current government of China - Xi - couldn't stand for that.
Now that the pandemic has more or less resolved (not just temporarily, we hope) the companies are doing operas by Puccini, but, notably, not Turandot. They're doing La bohème and Il Trittico. So the Chinese strategy seems to have worked.
This is why the pathology of COVID is so harmless, relative to what it could have been. The Chinese government didn’t want to kill a lot of people, only to sicken us enough to shut down the opera houses and get the companies to choose a new repertoire.
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@rdelrosso2001 The point is, if your platelets are already low, then you are already at risk for prolonged bleeding, and, thinning the blood further, by whatever means, increases the danger.
Using anticoagulants is dangerous. That's why, if you are on blood-thinners for some good reason (like, for instance, an artificial heart valve, or a history of stroke), it's so important to avoid overdosing. You don't want internal bleeding in, say, your brain.
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You mean, you won't be able to get on with your normal life YET.
You ask when WILL we be able to get on with normal life? The answer is: when enough people are vaccinated that the likelihood of enountering someone who is infectious gets very low. The vaccine isn't perfect, but it's quite good, so your risk of passing the virus on to someone else, if you have it, is lower if the someone else is vaccinated. When enough people are immune, it benefits the non-immune people too, because they are less likely to get exposed. Eventually, the recovery rate will be faster than the infection rate, and the virus will recede. And THAT, my friend, is what we mean by "herd immunity": when so many members of the population are immunized that the virus spreads more slowly than it dies, so it recedes and leaves us (mostly) in peace.
THAT'S when we will all be able to resume normal life.
(I understand that this is more than one sentence, and you will have to focus your attention on it for more than ten seconds in order to understand it, which may be difficult or uncomfortable for you, but there's really nothing I can do about that. Epidemiology is complicated. That's why we have experts: they learn how to think about this stuff so you don't have to.)
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