More for the charnel house
Considering this, this seems nonsensical:
Texas is also experiencing an 80% increase in COVID-19 deaths (7-day average vs February 20) so Abbott lifting the mask mandate is a bit like taking out traffic lights 🚦 at an intersection where accidents and deaths are soaring 🤷🏻♂️ https://t.co/KYPVKDHmNw
— Khanoisseur 🐶🤦🏻♂️🌎 (@Khanoisseur) March 2, 2021
And other states are following his lead. Mississippi is going to lift COVID controls as well. Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia will probably follow suit.
The people with the money are none too pleased at this turn of events:
Retail Industry Leaders Association opposes Texas mask rule ending:
— Nathaniel Meyersohn (@nmeyersohn) March 2, 2021
Will "unfairly put retail employees back in the role of enforcing guidelines still recommended by the CDC...could also jeopardize the safety of pharmacies and grocers that are gearing up as vaccination centers"
But freedom must be served. As a disgraced small-town Texas mayor declared: Only the strong will survive, and the weak will parish [sic]."
At this point, one can do nothing but aver that Republican "leadership" from Congress down to dog catcher, is nothing but a death cult. Opening businesses can be rationalized on economic grounds, one supposes. Texas especially, which relies on sales taxes to fill its coffers as it has no state income tax, is taking a hit from the pandemic. But the lifting of mask mandates is nothing but admitting that the God they claim to worship so loudly is not the God of Abraham and Isaac, but Moloch, to whom sacrifices of human lives must be made. Lifting the mask mandates, feeble as they were, are their signal that ideology trumps life. Like that disgraced small-town Texas mayor, they're not Christians, but Darwinists, or rather social Darwinists, seeing life as a struggle between the fit and the feeble, and the feeble are unworthy of empathy or concern. And of course, the fact that people of color are more likely to have bad outcomes from the pandemic is merely sauce for the goose. People who will cry rabid tears over a zygote have no compunction about extinguishing actual human life.
The second greatest trick the Devil concocted was convincing people he didn't exist. But his greatest masterpiece was to co-opt the so-called Religious Right. The prince of peace is not their lord, but the sower of discord. People so lost in hatred follow none of the great sages, who stressed the commonality of humanity. There really is no reasoning with persons such as these. Our task as citizens is to minimize the damage they can do. But damage there will be. Moloch must be fed.