Do You Want to Bring a Cultist Back from the Jungle of Stupidity?

Lesson One: Understanding Opportunity Costs.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Jim Jones took his followers to the jungles of Guyana because he was being threatened with arrest in the U.S. Donald Trump, threatened with arrest, won the U.S. presidency. His cult is much bigger and maybe even more deliriously lost than the thousand who drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid on that stifingly hot day in 1978. There might be some ways to get your loved ones back, though, that don’t require violence. Let’s begin.

Cultists now unemployed after 20 plus years working for the federal government look into the camera and answer the interviewer: “No, I don’t have any regrets. I mean, it’s not easy saving America. If firing me will make America great again, then it’s the sacrifice I must make.” Hold onto this ridiculous response for a bit, dear reader. Now, look at the image above. This is what the Ebola virus looks like through a microscope.

Hold onto this horrific image for a bit, dear reader.

At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing — this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens (The Diseases Are Coming).

The teenage tech bros “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola prevention programs. It’s difficult to imagine the magnitude of these words. Ebola.

Ebola disease is caused by an infection with an orthoebolavirus.

Orthoebolaviruses are found primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.

Orthoebolaviruses can cause serious and often deadly disease, with a mortality rate as high as 80 to 90 percent.

There is an FDA-approved vaccine for the prevention of Ebola virus (Ebola Disease Basics).

The response by the Obama administration to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 is a textbook example of how the federal government can work to protect Americans and others from the deadly effects of an outbreak of disease as fatal as Ebola. Public health experts say that there were two key factors for the successful handling of the administration’s response: Obama “accepted and cultivated scientific evidence,” and the time between decisions made in Washington and action on the ground at the point of the outbreak was minimal. 11 Americans contracted Ebola in the 2014 to 2016 outbreak. Nine of them worked at the point of the epidemic. Two died.

Compare this number, two, to the number of Americans who died during COVID thanks to the criminally inept response of Donald Trump. In Trump’s final nightmarish year in office, 2020, between March 2020 and January 20th, 2021, 400,000 Americans died from COVID. Experts blame hundreds of thousands more deaths on Trump’s refusal as president to advise his followers to mask, social distance, and get vaccinated. Overall, by the beginning of 2025, 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID.

A libertarian friend of mine thinks the gutting of “wasteful” things like USAID is good. The government should not be doing things like “that.” When you ask people who, in theory, support the criminal activities of the DOGE-bags, they say stuff like, “Why should we be wasting money on condoms for Palestinians in Gaza?” We didn’t. Not a penny was spent on condoms for Gazans. Musk admitted this mistake during an interview in the Oval Office — you know, that day his son told Trump “he wasn’t the president” and then proceeded to wipe his bratty buggers on the Resolute Desk. (I wonder if Trump removed them with his jacket sleeve or just left them there.)

Some cultists and ridiculously naive libertarians are smart people. Some have accomplished extraordinary things. They are talented, gifted, and funny. Some are friends and family members. There is one thing, though, that unites them all. It is a mental shortcoming in all of them: They don’t understand — or choose not to understand — that when you, say, cut an Ebola prevention program to save $50 million from a federal budget that is in the trillions, the cost of that cut needs to be assessed.

The country has an opportunity to prevent an Ebola outbreak, but instead, it prefers to give massive tax breaks to the nation’s super-rich. The government cuts the Ebola prevention program. A millionaire gets a tax break and builds the walls of his isolated home higher, further isolating himself from a society now in danger of an Ebola outbreak. An outbreak begins, and because the government didn’t catch or react in time, hundreds of thousands of Americans — if not millions — die. Americans, like the conservatives and libertarians who applauded the cut program, then look for someone to blame and say stuff like, “See, government is so inefficient.”

This process repeats itself repeatedly, year after year, tragedy after tragedy.

The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright — declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands (Ebola Disease Basics).

The failure by these same people, and now their president, to understand climate change is a prime example of opportunity-cost mental incapacitation syndrome or (OCIS) — I just coined this term. I agree that it needs some work.

What is the primary and stupidest rejection of climate change that conservatives have? They ridiculously suggest that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy designed to make American businesses less competitive due to the higher production costs of emitting less carbon dioxide. Climate change is a hoax. The lost economic activity the not-so-bright conservatives (remember, these are the same people who still believe that the Laffer Curve — the lower the taxes are, the higher tax revenue will be — makes economic sense) caused by the higher production costs hurts the American economy.

What is the cost of lost economic activity caused by the “100-year storms,” which now happen every three months? What is the financial impact of devastating states by floods, fires, winds, and unbearable heat? How are businesses dealing with the lost productivity of missing or incapacitated workers? For some reason, we don’t hear the cultists on the right and the silly libertarians discussing these opportunity costs.

There is a lot of talk, though, about how letting a transgender woman pee in a women’s room at the Wal-Mart is terrible or how D.E.I. somehow weakens the country.

All I can say is: OCIS! (I know, I need to come up with a catchier term for this.)