Shut up shut up shut up!

So you know how you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theatre? Well you shouldn't and-huh? Oh, they were big rooms full of chairs all facing the same way and people would gather and watch a movie or a play or see a concert. You know, in the before time.

Yup, sat right next to each other, no masks or anything.
Just hundred of people...breathing all over one another. 

To be clear, it's ok to say it if the theatre
is actually on fire. Or full of gremlins.

According to my exhaustive research on wikipedia, the origin of that phrase is actually pretty messed up. It comes from a Supreme Court Case, Schenck vs. United States. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used the analogy of someone shouting fire in a theatre as an example of unprotected speech. That is, things you're just not allowed to say, ever, despite the First Amendment, because saying them poses a clear and present danger to others.

Which, actually sounds kind of reasonable, but the unprotected speech Holmes' analogy was comparing to starting a human stampeded in the middle of whatever passed for entertainment in nineteen-diggities was protesting the draft. The World War One draft. You know, the one with all the mustard gas and trenches?

It was about a hundred years before the invention of streaming so
maybe dying in one of Europe's many trenches was preferable?

Pictured: not a protest so much as a bunch
of armed thugs violating shelter in place orders.
But they're white so evidently they get a pass.

(source: double standards)

Fortunately, this was later limited to instances where the speaker is trying incite people to break the law. Which is why you can protest wars. Although not pipelines. Because Republicans. But back to my damn point: could someone please tell the goon most of us didn't vote for to shut up and stop offering ludicrous, non-sensible medical advice? Because during a Homeland Security briefing on how researchers are testing the effects of disinfectants and UV light has on COVID-19, the President started offering his nonsense opinion on a subject about which he knows nothing at all.

Is he volunteering to insert one
of these to see what happens?
Because he is welcome to try.

"So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous uh, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it? And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body. Which you can do, either through the skin or uh, in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too? Sounds interesting."

-Dr. President Trump

Undeterred by the rapid clicks of reporters' cameras trying to capture for posterity what must certainly have sounded like a man having a stroke, he went on saying:

Above: a tremendous number.

"And then I see that disinfectant knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that? By injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see it does a tremendous number on the lungs so it would be interesting to check that."

-The guy behind the wheel, making 

decisions that directly affect our 

lives-how has it come to this?

"Alas, poor York, he was just tremendous.
Everyone thought so, except the media. Mean
 people. Wouldn't let him have disinfectant."

I mean...what the actual? Somewhere under all that ridiculous hair does he think the stupid gibberish that falls out of his mouth will somehow coagulate into a cure for the pandemic? That he, a man exquisitely unqualified to run a casino much less the Government, is going to come up with a solution that's eluded doctors and scientists around the world for months. It's like his thought process is a living example of a million monkeys at a million typewriters except they're not even aiming for Hamlet, they're just hoping no one notices that he has no idea what he's even saying.

If this was just ruining the economy or starting a never-ending war we'd all just be rolling our eyes and waiting for the next President to come in and fix it (and then the Republican after them to take credit for it). But lives are at risk here. People listen to this man. Dumb ones, but people. And somewhere, right now, one of them is loading a homemade IV bag with Lysol.

Really the only question is do you want your lungs to
smell like citrus or cherry blossom and pomegranate?