Elon Musk Is a Vandal Scrawling His Name across the Heavens

For all his professed love for space exploration and expanding the frontiers of human knowledge, Elon Musk sure has a horrible way of showing it:

The above image, taken with a 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo, shows the tracks that Musk's Starlink satellites make in astronomical observations. Musk is a vandal scrawling his name across the heavens. And this is only the beginning:

SpaceX has so far launched over 600 satellites and OneWeb has launched 74. Both companies plan to eventually launch tens of thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbits and provide broadband to areas that lack fast wired service. Amazon is also planning to launch thousands of satellites. Because of their low-Earth orbits (LEO), the satellites will provide lower latency than traditional satellite networks.

 

A cloud of these satellites in orbit will kill earth-based astronomy. These tracks will make it impossible to image distant galaxies and extra-solar planets. Hundreds of telescopes across the Earth, installed at a cost of billions of dollars to universities and governments, will be rendered useless.

 

We've already got plenty of terrestrial internet access with our existing cellular networks, and with 5G coming out, what's the point?

 

And the idiotic thing is, who really needs this? Is it that important to stream episodes of "The Bachelor" while driving across Montana or sailing your yacht across the southern Atlantic?

 

You could argue that it's important to give internet access to the teaming masses across Africa and the trackless wastes of Northern Canada and Siberia, where there are no land lines and only spotty cell coverage. But how profitable is that market going to be?

I have a hard time believing three different companies will be able to make a go of launching hundreds of thousands of satellites. The launch costs will be, well, astronomical. Because there are so many satellites, they have to be cheap to build, which means each one won't last very long (the intense radiation in space plays hell with electronics), so there will have to be an constant, ongoing program of launches to replace dead satellites.

 

Two if not three of these companies will go bankrupt in the process, leaving the skies littered with useless space junk. There's already too much debris in orbit, and these satellites will make the problem that much worse.

And it's not just astronomy that will suffer. With this many satellites there will eventually be collisions with military reconnaissance satellites, the space station, and manned and unmanned launch vehicles. Such collisions can cause large clouds of debris, potentially causing a chain reaction that could affect dozens of satellites.

Finally, we use earth-bound telescopes to monitor space for asteroids that may run into Earth. Hundreds of thousands of satellite tracks will make it that much harder to predict deadly collisions with our home planet. 

I used to think Elon Musk was sort of cool. He's done good work with SpaceX and Tesla. But now, with his Twitter rants, stock price pumping, and the idiotic submarine/pedo guy debacle, he's turning into a Lex Luthor clone, only with more hair and an accent. But a lot dumber.

At least he won't be able to become president of the United States.

How Defund The Police Works

 

The Lineup of Losers

 

Is This Why Trump Keeps Pushing Hydroxychloroquine?

Despite there being no real evidence that hydroxychloroquine is an effective remedy against the coronavirus, Donald Trump keeps pushing it even though the FDA has revoked its emergency use authorization.

The drug is normally used by people suffering from autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus because it suppresses the immune system. So when it was first mentioned as a treatment for Covid-19 it was somewhat plausible that it might be useful in stemming the violent immune system reaction, or cytokine storm, that some Covid patients suffer from.

But it turns out it takes months for hydroxychloroquine to have the desired effect on the immune system: 

Hydroxychloroquine is a longer acting medication that can take several months to build up in the body and become effective. It can also take several weeks for the medication to “leave the body” or no longer be effective after you have stopped taking it. This is referred to as a medication’s half-life -- the length of time it takes for the medication to reduce to 50% concentration in the body.

So why has Trump been so gung-ho about it? I think it's because of his constant diet of cable TV. For the last 20 years a weight-loss product called Hydroxycut has been hawked incessantly on the late-night TV channels that Trump watches. 

In its ads Hydroxycut uses words like strength, energy, power, and is sold on websites with muscle and strength in the names (like this one). We all know what a sucker Trump is for the magic word strength. Even though this clown is clearly the weakest, most out-of-shape president we've had since FDR and his wheelchair.

Because Trump has heard Hydroxycut being advertised for two decades, and his pea-sized brain thinks all words beginning with the same three syllables are interchangeable, he thinks hydroxychloroquine is a safe and familiar product.

Trump even claimed that he was taking "the hydroxy" (see, only the first three syllables of a word matter), though many doubted he was actually taking hydroxychloroquine. But maybe Trump's doctor was just giving him Hydroxycut. "Sure, Mr. President. This hydroxy is the real stuff!"

The irony, of course, is that Hydroxycut was and is neither safe nor effective. The original formulation included ephedra, a supplement the FDA banned in 2004. Ephedra causes seizures, strokes and fatal heart attacks, and caused the death of pitcher Steve Bechler.

MuscleTech, the company that produced it, covered up research that showed it was ineffective and caused (bum, bum, bum!) cardiac side effects, just like hydroxychloroquine. The company even doctored evidence submitted in an Oklahoma lawsuit.

The company was sold and they came up with a new formulation, keeping the name. But it turns out that one of the ingredients, hydroxycitric acid, causes liver problems, killing one man and requiring at least one liver transplant. So in 2009 the FDA issued a recall order. The company went bankrupt, but they keep on resurrecting this dog of a product.

It was reformulated yet again, with caffeine being the only common ingredient among all the formulations. Which means that Hydroxycut is no more effective than coffee for losing weight.

As much as I like bashing Trump, the real point is that the whole dietary supplement marketplace is a disaster. Companies like MuscleTech can sell worthless garbage as weight-loss and muscle-building supplements, and as long as they weasel-word their ads the FDA can't shut them down until bodies start dropping.

And even then the FDA can't stop them from coming back from the dead with useless zombie products like Hydroxycut.

Now, there are actually drugs out that have proven effective against Covid, including dexamethasone and remdesivir. So what isn't Trump championing those? Does he have stock in MuscleTech, and is he hoping that his followers will starting chugging Hydroxycut since only the first three syllables of a word matter?

Six Presidents

 

Spot the Brit

What with the pandemic and all, people are staying home and watching a lot more TV. And there's a lot more TV to watch, what with all the cable channels and new streaming services.

So here's a little game you can add to your TV watching: Spot the Brit.

Every once in a while I'll be watching a show and all of a sudden one of the actors will say something that sets off my Spidey Sense: "He's not an American!" I will tell my wife. Then I look him up on IMDB and find out he's from London or New South Wales.

I've been a student of language for 50 years, so languages and accents have always fascinated me (I've studied German, Russian, French and Japanese).

One of the hardest things for anyone over the age of eight to do is acquire a natural-sounding accent for another language or region. British and Australian actors are usually trained in what's called "Received Pronunciation," (RP) the "standard" British accent that was taught in schools across England starting in the early 20th century.

RP is the "posh" British accent where they drop the Rs at the ends of words and pronounce the A in "class" and "path" like the A in "father."

In the United States the General American accent is what most TV announcers use, and what the majority of actors in TV shows use, unless they're affecting a regional accent for a show set in the South (Preacher) or a character from Boston (Ray Donovan).

But a lot of actors in American television are not American. Many are Canadian, because a lot of shows are filmed in Vancouver and Toronto (filming in SoCal is just so expensive). But a whole lot of actors are from Britain and Australia, and they don't always maintain an American accent.

Most of the time these clinkers are fixed with looping, or Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR), in post-production. The actor basically lip-syncs the dialog in the studio, rerecording their lines to cover up the slip.

But sometimes the subtler mispronunciations get through to the final cut. Here are the three that I notice most frequently:

Anything: Most Americans pronounce this word "en-ee-thing." Many Britons pronounce it "en-uh-thing." When you hear "en-uh-thing" in the middle of General American dialog, you've probably got yourself a Brit or an Aussie.

Intervocalic R: When two vowels are adjacent in an utterance, such as the A and I in "Our agenda is," people tend to insert some kind of consonant between them, either at the back of the mouth or at the front. Americans tend to do this at the back, inserting a very slight "glottal stop," a closing of the throat. This is often transcribed as an apostrophe:"Our agenda'is."

In RP (and some Eastern American accents) this happens at the front of the mouth: an R is inserted between adjacent vowels, so that "Our agenda'is" is uttered as "Our agenda-r-is."

Dropped syllables: a common feature of RP is the dropping of vowels in certain word endings. For example, "dignitary" is pronounced "dignitry," dropping the A. I was watching 11.22.63 on Hulu and it was particularly jarring when the Australian playing Lee Harvey Oswald dropped a syllable while affecting a Southern accent.

You can also play Spot the Yank, looking for Americans sporting British accents. Americans are notoriously terrible at British accents (Kevin Costner in Robin Hood!). 

The Hulu show "The Great" (a very fictionalized and over-the-top British/Australian production about Catherine the Great) stars Elle Fanning, a Georgian whose RP accent is pretty decent (at least to my American ears), but when she said "en-ee-thing" I pegged her as an American.

I give Fanning credit: most Americans working in British productions don't even try (like Sandra Oh in Killing Eve).

Weird

 

Shit That Pisses Me Off Because Of Rona Volume 1: Masks

Today I’m starting a new series of posts about shit that pisses me off because of the pandemic. I’ve complained about some of this stuff before but now I’m organizing it in a series. Collect them all! First up is masks. 

Americans are addicted to many unhealthy things. Junk food...social media...parades...but there is something about masks that really sends them into an obsessive fervor. Pro or con, doesn’t matter. Combine it with social media and watch the raging flames hit 100 feet. 

It’s massively unhealthy and I wish people would just calmly react to masks. A mandate requires one? Great. Put it on and go about your business. In a crowd or a place, you can’t distance? Good idea to wear one. Someone not wearing one? Oh well. No need to fly into a white-hot rage. How I yearn for an under reaction to masks. I’d settle for a normal reaction! 

People just have to argue about masks even when there is zero reason to argue. Their blood flies up instantly and all rationality goes out the window when the topic of masks comes up. What a crock of embarrassing shit.

Could Churches Please Stop Killing Their Congregants?

It has been obvious since the very start of the pandemic that churches should be closed or their attendance be severely limited, given the large number of superspreader events that have occurred at places of worship. 

There was the infamous church choir practice in Washington, the pastor at the First Assembly of God (great acronym, huh?) in Arkansas who killed three congregants with Covid-19, and the one man who single-handedly infected almost a hundred people at a church in Ohio.

So it's crazy that the Supreme Court decision from a couple of weeks ago was so narrow:

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a request from a church in Nevada to block enforcement of state restrictions on attendance at religious services.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s four more liberal members to form a majority.

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The court’s four more conservative members filed three dissents, totaling 24 pages.

Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in Dayton, Nev., argued that the state treated houses of worship less favorably than it did casinos, restaurants and amusement parks. Those businesses have been limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship have been subject to a flat 50-person limit.

The conservatives on the court mistakenly believed that there was some kind of constitutional separation of church and state problem here:

“The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion,” [Justice Samuel Alito] wrote. “It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine or to engage in any other game of chance. But the governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities.”

Yes, Sam, the governor's priority is saving people's lives. Casinos pay taxes, which the state of Nevada needs to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Churches don't contribute to that fight -- they just spread the disease.

The fact is, churches in Nevada are subject to the same restrictions that similar venues are: identical limits are placed on concerts and theaters. In fact, churches are more dangerous than movie theaters, because people spread the virus when they talk, sing and shout in church. That's frowned upon in theaters.

But what about the "separation of church and state" argument? Well, churches all gave that up when they took handouts from the federal government:

Religious organizations across the U.S. have received at least $7.3 billion in federal rescue package loans, with evangelical leaders tied to President Donald Trump and megachurches tied to scandals pulling in some of the largest payouts.

Treasury Department data released Monday shows that religious organizations, ranging from nearly 10,000 Catholic churches to hundreds of Jewish groups, received 88,411 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans since the program began April 3. Several churches affiliated with outspoken Trump supporters and close associates amassed at least $17.3 million in loans intended to help small businesses and nonprofits retain workers.

Included among the top loan recipients is the megachurch of pastor Robert Jeffress, who last year called Trump a Christian "warrior." Another is City of Destiny, the Florida megachurch run until recently by White House spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain.

Houses of worship across the country, including many tied to sexual abuse and financial scandals, took advantage of PPP, which allows recipients of the government's 1 percent interest loans to have them converted into nontaxable grants. This week's Treasury Department report of payouts through June 30 notes that "traditionally non-profits are not eligible to receive SBA-guaranteed small business loans," but PPP has enabled the aid during the coronavirus pandemic.

The companies that got PPP money will eventually pay taxes again and governments will recoup the money. Churches will never pay a nickel.

Churches already get preferential treatment from the government: they don't pay property taxes, sales taxes or income taxes on payments from congregants. And their congregants can write off their payments to churches as charitable donations, costing governments even more. The annual subsidy for churches in 2013 was at least $80 billion, and likely hundreds of billions if you take into account all the sales and property tax exemptions.

Logically, churches should be the last places to open up: they are a major nexus of disease spread, they don't pay taxes and thus contribute nothing to government efforts to combat the disease. Their services are easily delivered online -- for almost a century some of the most successful Christian ministries in the country have been televangelists using radio and television.

The "Church" of Scientology is perhaps the most egregious example of the scam churches have going: science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard turned Scientology into a religion when he realized churches didn't pay taxes. To cover up the scam Hubbard instigated Operation Snow White, infiltrating dozens of governments and organizations to scrub them of information damaging to Scientology's claims. Eleven Scientology officers were convicted of stealing government documents and property.

All these giant churches are in reality politically active businesses, ready to feed at the government trough like every other company and the guys from Texas and Florida who used PPP loans to buy Lamborghinis and pay strippers. The Trump administration sure is doing a bang-up job administering this program, isn't it?

If churches are going to take billions in government money that they'll never pay back, they should at least have the decency to stop killing their congregants.

Trump Is So Dreamy...

Check out the full interview between the president and Jonathan Swan. Any sane person would look at this and realize that a mentally deranged and incompetent man is in charge of the United States. But let's look at this from the point of view of one of his supporters. 

Great interview! He really showed that elitist, fake news asshole what was what!!! Man, he's so dreamy the way he trolls the libs and makes them squirm. I'm in love...

Seriously, we have millions of these people to deal with...

Have You Ever Noticed...?

Trump Sabotaging Post Office to Undermine Absentee Balloting

Because he knows he can't win this next election, Donald Trump is sabotaging the postal system so he can claim the November election was a fraud, sending the country into chaos for months:

The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.

As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.

Yesterday the nitwit-in-chief tweeted:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

Of course, voting by mail and absentee voting are the same thing. Trump votes by mail all the time. Several states have been voting by mail for years. Trump wants to reserve absentee voting for rich old white people.

There's not a heck of lot of fraud in absentee voting, but if you look at who's doing it, it's Republicans like Leslie MacCrae Dowless, from North Carolina. Is it just a coincidence that Trump's new postmaster general, Republican megadonor Louis DeJoy, is also from North Carolina?

Trump can't delay the election. Only Congress can set the date, as specified in that annoying document, the Constitution.

And, as a matter of fact, the election can't be delayed. Trump's term ends on Jan. 20, according to the 20th Amendment, and he is no longer president if there's no election. There's only two months between the election and the inauguration. There's no slack time at all.

Trump is taking his orders from Moscow. He's turning the leader of the free world into a chaotic kleptocratic oligarchy riven by division and stunned by a pandemic that he failed to control.

At every turn he incites violence, from the right-wing nutjobs in Charlottesville, to the people attending his rallies, to the police who killed George Floyd during an arrest, to the demonstrators who protest police killings, to the Umbrella Man who started the real chaos in Minneapolis, to the Homeland Security agents who kidnap protesters from the streets of Portland, to the deranged "men's rights" lawyer who assassinated his California rival and killed the son of a female Hispanic lawyer during a second failed assassination attempt.

Trump is almost solely responsible for the horrific climate of hate and intolerance in this country. He wants to burn the country to the ground, for what reason I don't understand. Why does he want to be king of a shithole country, like the ones he told Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Presley and Rashida Tlaib to go back to? Considering that Ocasio-Cortez, Presley and Tlaib were all born in the US, one must assume that Trump was referring to his own country as a shithole.

Back in 2012, I think, though I can't remember for sure, Republicans ran a grim black-and-white ad claiming that after eight years of Obama the United States would be a bleak and destitute hellhole, with mass unemployment and violence on the street.

Well, they were off by four years and one president. Every major major disaster for the last century has happened on the Republicans' watch. With Hoover it was the Crash of '29 and the Depression. With Nixon it was the Viet Nam debacle and Watergate. With Bush it was the Afghanistan/Iran quagmire and the Great Recession of 2008.

With Trump it was the surrender of American power to Russia and China, the collapse of the economy, and before it's over, hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

In eight years Barack Obama took the United States from the destitution left him by George Bush and handed Trump a vibrant and growing economy. In just three years Donald Trump turned it all to shit with his hatred, incompetence and greed.

Coronavirus Cavalcade III: Herman Cain Is Dead from Coronavirus

Herman Cain, the black Republican who ran for president in 2012, gained notoriety for being unable to pronounce Uzbekistan, and dropped out of the race when his history of sexual harassment became public, has died of the coronavirus:

Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate and business executive who was hospitalized this month with the coronavirus, has died. He was 74.

Cain attended Trump's Tulsa rally last month, and it may well have been where he contracted the disease (the timing makes it quite plausible), but he was flying all around the country, and frequently did not wear a mask in public.

In short, Cain did what Trump wanted him to do, and now he's dead.

Remember back in 2016 when Trump addressed black voters, asking, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

For Cain, the answer was his life.

So, with Cain's passing, how many Republicans are going to pick up the Black Lives Matter banner? Because African-Americans are dying of the coronavirus in much higher percentages than whites, and all Republicans can do is whine about how horrible it is to be forced to wear a mask for the 10 minutes a week they're in the grocery store.

Coronavirus Cavalcade II: Louie Gohmert Is Infected

A few days ago it was reported that Trump's national security advisor was infected, and it just keeps getting worse:

Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who has frequently refused to don a face covering in the Capitol, confirmed on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus before a planned trip with President Trump on Air Force One, and he blamed his diagnosis on wearing a mask.

The results immediately sent a shudder through the Capitol, where this week Mr. Gohmert has been voting and actively participating in congressional hearings, including a Judiciary Committee session on Tuesday with Attorney General William P. Barr and another held by the Natural Resources Committee.

Goober didn't announce this himself, his diagnosis was revealed by Politico. Politico then received an email from a Gohmert staffer:

"When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that 'we could be an example to America on how to open up safely,'" the aide added. "When probing the office, you might want to ask how often were people berated for wearing masks."

Goober's claim that the mask gave him the coronavirus is ridiculous:

“There are an awful lot of people who think it’s the great thing to do all the time, but I can’t help but think if I hadn’t been wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so, I really wonder if I would have gotten it,” Mr. Gohmert said. “Moving the mask around, getting it sitting just right, I am bound to have put some virus on the mask that I sucked in. That is most likely what happened.” 

It's abundantly clear that the virus is airborne, but he thinks he had it on his hands.Why is he putting his hands in virus particles? Why doesn't he wash his hands, or use sanitizer before he futzes with the mask? Whose fault is it that he keeps touching the mask?

Conservatives like Gohmert are such children. Why can't he just suck it up and admit it's his own damn fault he caught the virus?

Don't blame the mask. Blame the fool wearing it.

Coronavirus Cavalcade I: Turning Point USA Co-founder Is Dead

After months of Trump and his conservative enablers lying about the pandemic, the virus is starting to take a deadly toll on the conservative establishment:

The co-founder of conservative student group Turning Point USA, Bill Montgomery, has died from complications of the coronavirus, according to two friends of his.

Montgomery, who started it in 2012 with young conservative star Charlie Kirk, died at the age of 80 on Tuesday from Covid-19, according to pro-Trump conservative strategist Caleb Hull, who posted about the death on Twitter and his personal Facebook page, and Chicago-based citizen journalist Vic Maggio.

“I really wish people would just stop politicizing this pandemic and grow up while innocent people around us are dying,” Hull also said. “You have no idea how painful it is to be forced to sit at home while your loved one dies alone in a hospital.”

Jesus Christ, do conservatives even listen to themselves? They have done nothing but lie about the severity of the pandemic, blasting anyone who wants to take reasonable precautions opening up schools and the economy, and when one of their own dies they whine about how people are "politicizing" it.

The sheer idiocy of the conservative movement is encapsulated in the podcast by that "young star," Charlie Kirk:

“[E]very single time I go into one of these grocery stores, ‘Where’s your mask?’ I say, well first of all, the science around masks is very questionable, very questionable,” he said. “In fact some people, some doctors think that masks actually make you sicker and have you less likely to be able to get oxygen and more likely to infect yourself, and less likely to be able to fight the virus, and actually more likely to be able to die sooner.

This is simply false. If you're just sitting or walking, you will still have plenty of oxygen. My wife just went to the doctor and had her O2 levels checked with a pulse oximeter while wearing a mask, and she was at 100%.

This Kirk guy is just plain stupid. Every day of every year painters and drywall installers wear N95 masks to protect themselves from inhaling carcinogenic particles while performing hard physical labor, and no one dies from lack of oxygen.

What Kirk said next reveals the intrinsic problem with conservatives: they only care about themselves.

“A lot of people believe that. I’ve met many doctors that hold that view,” Kirk added. “Secondly, we have a huge civil liberty issue here. Why do you have the authority to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body? I thought it was ‘my body, my choice.’”

It's not about your body, Charlie. It's about everyone you breathe on. Air is a shared resource. If you're infected and are asymptomatic or presymptomatic, you will spread the disease to everyone you come in contact with.

We don't allow smoking on airplanes anymore because we learned that second-hand smoke causes cancer and a host of other diseases. For the same reason people should wear masks on planes and in grocery stores because they may be infectious, even if they don't feel sick.

What is wrong with these people?

A Self-Inflicted National Embarrassment

This guy played baseball?

Donald Trump is such a pathetic loser. When he heard that Anthony Fauci was throwing the first pitch at a Nationals game, he became insanely jealous, and said this:

“Randy Levine is a great friend of mine from the Yankees,” Mr. Trump, referring to the president of the baseball team, told reporters on Thursday as Dr. Fauci was preparing to take the mound. “And he asked me to throw out the first pitch, and I think I’m doing that on Aug. 15 at Yankee Stadium.”

There was one problem: Mr. Trump had not actually been invited on that day by the Yankees, according to one person with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s schedule. His announcement surprised both Yankees officials and the White House staff.

But Mr. Trump had been so annoyed by Dr. Fauci’s turn in the limelight, an official familiar with his reaction said, that he had directed his aides to call Yankees officials and make good on a longtime standing offer from Mr. Levine to throw out an opening pitch. No date was ever finalized.

So, to no one's surprise, Trump was just talking through his MAGA hat, and his stooges had to walk the claim back:

After the president’s announcement, White House aides scrambled to let the team know that he was actually booked on Aug. 15, although they have not said what he plans to do. Over the weekend, Mr. Trump officially canceled.

“Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday, using a racist name for the coronavirus. “We will make it later in the season!”

Hah. Trump spends all his time watching Fox News and playing golf, and thinks that the coronavirus would just go away if only those damned doctors would stop testing people.

And it only gets worse. On Tuesday Trump devolved into whining self pity on the national stage:

Just over a week after he began a rebooted effort, driven by rising infection rates and sinking poll numbers, to talk about the virus in terms more in line with medical consensus, Mr. Trump was again making unfounded claims and defending discredited medical experts. It was the sort of eccentric, science-deficient performance that many of his aides believe unnerved the public during the spring and has come to gravely threaten his re-election prospects.

Noting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, his administration’s top coronavirus coordinator, have high approval ratings even as his own have sagged, Mr. Trump added, “And yet, they’re highly thought of — but nobody likes me.”

“It can only be my personality,” he concluded.

It's not just his personality, though his constant whining, lying, jealousy, selfishness, callousness, racism, misogyny, vengefulness and narcissism certainly make it impossible for anyone to actually like him. They only toady up to him out of fear, greed or ambition, or "like" him because they find his toxic tirades against liberals entertaining or his racist rants confirming their own predilections. But no one is actually fond of him as a person.

But they also don't like him because of his incompetence, incoherence, inconsistency and ignorance, as perfectly illustrated by what happened next:

When reporters pressed him on a viral video he had retweeted on Monday night that included doctors falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for the virus and that masks were unnecessary, Mr. Trump responded: “They’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it, and she’s had tremendous success with it.’’ 

When a reporter noted that the physician who spoke of “a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel of Houston, also “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens,” Mr. Trump responded, “I know nothing about her,” and abruptly ended the briefing moments later.

First Trump says this "doctor" is spectacular and then mere seconds later says he knows nothing about her. This is the same "doctor" who also says that endometriosis is caused by having sex with demons.

This is not how a "strong and powerful" leader behaves. This is how a thirteen-year-old girl acts. Just ask Roseanne Barr, (formerly?) a big Trump supporter, who says that Trump is the first woman president.

How much more evidence do we need to see that Trump is completely unqualified to be president? In a nationally televised news conference intended to calm American's nerves in the midst of a pandemic he says something in the most confident terms and when confronted with reality just throws up his hands and runs away to pout.

The man is just a demented huckster with the most tenuous grasp on reality, trying to sell snake oil to a country that is in desperate need of real leaders, real doctors and real scientists, not fake presidents like Trump and religious quacks like Immanuel.

Is This Communism

So Much for "Law and Order"

Somehow, it isn't a surprise that the man who murdered George Floyd has been filing fraudulent tax returns since 2014:

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing George Floyd, was charged with multiple tax-related felonies, prosecutors announced on Wednesday.

Mr. Chauvin and his wife, Kellie Chauvin, failed to file income tax returns and pay Minnesota income taxes, and underreported and underpaid income taxes, according to Washington County prosecutors. The investigation into six years of tax filings, prosecutors said, also showed that the Chauvins did not pay the proper amount of sales tax on a vehicle.

When Chauvin killed Floyd it became known that Chauvin owned houses in Minnesota and Florida and was a registered Republican. I speculated that Chauvin was also committing tax fraud and voter fraud because he was working a full-time (and a part-time) job in Minnesota while registered to vote in Florida.

This is the scam that wealthy people like Trump use all the time to vote in multiple jurisdictions and avoid taxes. They live in Minnesota (or New York), and then own property in Florida, and then claim citizenship and register to vote in Florida, even though most of their business is conducted in Minnesota (or New York), and they live in Minnesota (or New York or Washington) they claim residency in Florida to avoid taxes.

I'm waiting for the third shoe to drop for Chauvin, when they file charges against him for voter fraud.

Guys like Chauvin and Donald Trump claim to be for "law and order," but they constantly break the law. Slowly choking a man to death in the street can hardly be counted as law and order, and that murder has predictably sown protests across the planet. Law enforcement has just made the situation more chaotic.

Trump responded by sowing even more chaos, sending jackbooted thugs across the country to arrest protesters in Portland, claiming to restore "order," tear-gassing the mayor of Portland in the process.

But chaos is nothing new for Trump: his own administration is a chaotic dumpster fire, with hundreds of positions still unfilled, and employees being fired for cause, for disloyalty, for leaking, for telling the truth, and -- in the case of the inspectors general rooting out corruption in the Trump administration -- for doing the job they're legally required to do.

Trump has spread chaos across the country and the world over. He has completely destroyed the previous "world order," single-handedly demoting the United States from the leader of the free world to just another banana republic. Now Russia and China are the predominant powers in the world, and the United States economy is in the toilet because Trump completely botched his coronavirus response. He put his toady Pence and his nitwit son-in-law in charge of the response instead of the scientists and experts whose advice countries like Germany, New Zealand and even China took, drastically reducing their case loads while our are mushrooming.

Trump regularly breaks the law and violates the Constitution: Trump "University," the scheme to blackmail the Ukrainian president, the emoluments he receives from foreigners through his hotels and resorts, his asking the US ambassador to get the British Open at his Scotland golf course. So many of his cronies have resigned, fired, jailed, convicted or confessing to crimes that Trump ordered or were done on his behalf (Cohen, Flynn, Manafort, Stone, etc., etc.). And then Trump used the office of the president to further that corruption, pardoning crooks like Roger Stone, Rod Blagojevich, Harvey Milken, Bernie Kerik, even pardoning war criminals like Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who threatened to kill his fellow SEALs if they reported him.

Trump doesn't believe in the law: it's just a tool to use to hammer his enemies (as in the lawsuit he filed against a tiny Wisconsin TV station for running an ad against him).

The only order guys like Chauvin and Trump care about is the social order, with white men on top and women and minorities at the bottom.

Put 2020 Into Perspective

Prior to our current times, let’s say pre-1990, life had a lot of problems. It got worse the further you went back. Disease, famine, war etc...people still got on with their lives. And their capacity to deal with that misery also was greater the farther you go back.

Today, people have better lives. They still do despite the pandemic. But we aren’t used to dealing with any real strife like previous generations. Think about what someone in 1880 or 1935 had to deal with. Most people didn’t live past 50. No one had money except a few people. People starved all the time.

Yes, crappy things are happening. Individuals have it really bad compared to society as a whole. But overall, I’ll take 2020 any day over previous eras in terms of a better world. I just wish we had the gumption that those past generations had. I know I don’t

The Myth of the Secret Trump Voter

“Dear everyone: there’s no such thing as a “secret Trump vote.” What there is is a really high turnout rate for Rep voters- like in the 70s- as compared to D turnout which at best hit the mid 60s in my 2018 voter file analysis.” (Rachel Bitecofer)

 Please give Rachel a follow and stop listening to nonsense about secret or shy Trump voters. Republicans vote more reliably than Democrats. That’s the only way they can win.