A Net-Zero Energy House Case Study

Last year we built a house. It was designed to be "net-zero" energy home -- that is, to produce as much energy as it uses.

To do that the builder put in a lot of insulation: about 14 inches of blown-in insulation in the attic, two inches of foam between the studs and the sheathing, and then three inches of closed-cell spray-foam insulation on the inside of the exterior walls to get a good air-tight seal. To make it even more air-tight they used acoustical sealant on all the seams between the studs on the exterior walls.

We have all electrical appliances, including an induction stove top. I always thought gas was the way to cook, but induction really heats things up much faster -- water starts boiling in a minute or two. Induction works with most steel and iron pots and pans, using an intense magnetic field to excite the ferrous molecules in the metal. The cooking surface only heats up because a hot pot is sitting on it.

For heating and cooling we have a heat pump that provides cooling in the summer and heating in the winter, down to 25 degrees. When it gets colder than 25 a small natural gas furnace kicks in.

To produce energy we installed 39 320-watt solar panels on the south-facing roof, for a total of 12kW capacity (the inverter, which converts the DC from the panels to AC for the house and grid, limits output to 10KWh on the sunniest days). In the 14 months since the panels were installed we've generated 17.8 megawatt-hours of electricity.

The electricity that we generate first goes to power our house, to run the heat pump, refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, etc. For that reason we try to do the laundry when the sun is shining. Any power we don't use goes into the grid, and the power company pays us 7 cents a kilowatt-hour for all the power we generate, even if we use it.

For the period from Sep. 1, 2019 to Sep. 1, 2020, we made about $33. And that's including the hookup fees that we pay the gas company for the six months out of the year when we don't use any gas at all.

Those numbers also include the power we use to recharge my wife's plug-in hybrid car. It's a Kia Niro with a 26-mile battery range (and a 500-mile gas range). I scoffed at the battery range at first, but it turns out that the vast majority of the driving she does fits right in that range. She hasn't bought gas since February. True, we drive a lot less than normal with the pandemic, but the tank is still almost full.

The graph below shows the output of our system month-by-month. December and January were, as anticipated, the worst months: the days were short, it was cloudy much of the time, and it snowed several times, covering the panels. But we generated more than a megawatt-hour of electricity in nine out of twelve months, and almost 2 MWh in June and July.

We had expected snow to be more of a problem than it turned out to be. Depending on how much we got, the snow would start melting on the top panels, and then start sliding off. Within a couple of days the panels would be clear again.

We designed the house specifically for solar -- we have gables on the east and west ends to provide a long south-facing surface for the panels. The house is sited toward the north end of the lot to minimize shading by the trees on the lot to the south. We selected a roof "pitch" (the angle of the roof) to somewhat favor summer power production, since winter days are so short and cloudy. We also placed the garage on the south-east corner to "hide" the panels. If you drove by our house you'd never see them.

So, how much money does rooftop solar save? We generated 17.8 MWh, for which the power company paid us about $1,200. We generated about as much as we used, and the power company charges between 10 and 12 cents a kilowatt hour depending on the season, so we didn't have to pay the power company for almost $2,000 of electricity. The expected lifetime of the panels is 20-25 years, so we should recoup the cost of hardware and installation in a few years and after that the power is essentially free.

Our house is in Minnesota, at 45 degrees latitude, where it can get fairly cold in the winter. Homes in southern states, where it's warmer and they have longer, sunnier winter days, could get by with just a heat pump and could produce more energy than they use. 

Furthermore, if every Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Amazon store or warehouse installed solar panels on the big flat roofs of their buildings, these companies could produce more power than they use.

The criticism of solar power is that there's nowhere to store that excess electricity: batteries are expensive, bulky and immobile. But there's something else to do with excess electricity: turn it into hydrogen through the electrolysis of water.

Other countries (including Australia and Germany) are doing exactly this. Hydrogen is used in many industrial processes, but it can also be used as fuel for cars and electricity production with fuel cells.

Hydrogen-based fuel cell cars (like the Toyota Mirai) have had limited success because there aren't a lot of hydrogen filling stations. Also, most hydrogen these days is produced from natural gas, which sort of defeats the purpose.

But when we start getting a lot of energy production from renewables like solar and wind, we'll be able to store the power we get on sunny and windy days as hydrogen, and then use it either as fuel for cars or to generate power at night with fuel cell power plants like this one in South Korea.

Coal-fired power plants are nineteenth dinosaurs on their last legs. Coal companies are going bankrupt left and right and hundreds of coal plants have gone offline in the last decade because they are simply less efficient and more costly that renewables like wind and solar, as well as natural gas turbines. 

The entire process of power production from coal is filthy and dangerous, from mining it (where miners die in frequent accidents and get black lung disease), to burning it for power (when it releases particulates, sulfur dioxide and mercury, causing lung disease and poisoning the air and water, and CO2, which causes climate change), to the toxic waste left behind (coal ash, which is kept in big holding ponds that frequently overflow, poisoning ground water, streams and rivers, killing fish and sickening people).

Even if you don't think climate change is happening, or that global warming is somehow "natural," or that air pollution isn't a problem, it's clear that renewables are now simply cheaper than coal, and are getting cheaper every day. It also localizes power production, eliminating the need to ship megatons of coal and oil across the country (avoiding the attendant spills and fires), or build expensive and leak-prone cross-continent pipelines. Combined with hydrogen storage, you just can't beat renewables, especially as more efficient photovoltaic, electrolysis and fuel cell technologies become available.

The electrical grid does need to be upgraded and hardened to facilitate the transfer of power from areas that produce it to the areas that need it. But we've needed that for a long time in any case.

In 2020 California started requiring all new construction to have solar panels where it makes sense (the right sized roof and sun exposure). All states, especially sunny southern states, should have similar mandates, along with subsidies and tax breaks to prevent housing prices from spiking.

Even some oil companies are seeing the light. BP is actively involved with several hydrogen projects, including this one in Australia.

Renewables aren't just the right thing to do: they're now cheaper and more efficient.

The Acute Dementia of A Right Wing Blogger

It's been interesting to watch Kevin Baker over at his blog The Smallest Minority slowly lose his mind as realizes what's coming this fall. Now, it's just sad. 

Kevin and followers, did it ever occur to you guys that Trump is going to lose because he's done a horrible job? That having one conviction (trolling liberals) doesn't translate into leading a country? You guys had a shot with your (ahem) ideological vision and this was the result. 

Crashed Economy. Racial strife. Six-figure death county from a virus that was...what?...a liberal plot?

Perhaps you should just own it instead of massively denying reality. And maybe next time don't pick a bankrupt reality show host who owes billions to a totalitarian foreign government. 

Our country is going through a massive change and younger voters are going to define what that means. There are 120 million voters between the ages of 18 and 40. They are the most educated generation in the history of the planet which means they recognize reality. It's no wonder that you continually rail against our nation's education system because it categorically refuses the insanity you preach on a daily basis. And here's the best part...

They are all pissed off at your craziness and are going to show you the consequences of your insane bullshit on November 3rd. There won't be any cheating or anything like that. I get that the cognitive dissonance you are experiencing won't allow you to accept this rejection but it's coming nonetheless. And just like Festinger's UFO cult, you will continue to mouth foam away, spewing sheer and utter nonsense. 

Voters don't accept your ideas because they suck. They don't work. They are failures. They are destroying our country. 

Is that clear enough for you? 

Look What Joe Biden Will Do To The Toilet!

 

Four More Years!

 

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.