Contributors

Thursday, August 13, 2020

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).

Monday, August 10, 2020

Saturday, August 08, 2020

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.

Friday, August 07, 2020

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.

Tuesday, August 04, 2020

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...?


Friday, July 31, 2020

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:
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.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

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?

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

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.

Friday, July 24, 2020

Thursday, July 23, 2020

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.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

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

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

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.

Monday, July 13, 2020

My Dream Last Night

Last night I dreamt that I lived in a country where people still had to deal with the pandemic but it was quite different.

They had leaders who were scientists that relied on facts and evidence, not anecdotes and online gossip. The people admired their intelligence and weren’t antagonistic about their knowledge and accomplishments in a contrarian and adolescent way.

The people were disciplined in their pursuit of solutions and weren’t distracted by irrational nonsense. They helped each other out instead of engaging in petty arguments and pointless debates on social media. They encouraged and supported each other, valuing logic above all else.

They were rational but passionate.

They asked the right questions like:

-How many people have had the virus?
-How many people have it?
-How much of the virus is required to transmit it?

They followed through in pursuit of answers to these questions with comprehensive strategies and gave their energy to goals that actually solved problems.

They were curious in the best possible of ways, wanting clear, positive outcomes for society as a whole while dealing with actual facts and evidence.

And then I woke up and realized what country I actually lived in:

 A CHILDISH SHIT SHOW OF SELFISH AND SELF RIGHTEOUS MORONS.

What the fuck, people? Can we turn this around?

Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Watergate Advice is Still Good: Follow the Money

I've been playing volleyball for more than 30 years. I know a lot of players. When the pandemic started all the gyms closed down, even before the state of Minnesota called for a general shutdown.

As the state opened up this spring I started looking into playing outdoors, which is much safer. The first guy I called, we'll call him D, said he wasn't going to play this year because his wife has a health condition.

This is a guy who plays almost every day in the summer, and in the winter drives more than 150 miles round trip once or twice a week to play at an indoor sand court in Wisconsin.

As infection numbers declined I decided to play sand doubles with a group of guys who (I thought) were being fairly careful. We didn't high five and maintained our distance. But the most important thing was to keep the circle small: no more than 10 people who are taking care to avoid contact with others.

I haven't even been inside a building, other than my house, for the past five months. If I do get infected, I want to make damn sure I don't pass it on to someone who didn't agree to be exposed.

Clearly I'm taking a risk by playing, but I have the explicit consent of everyone I'm in contact with to take that risk. My sister, who has a number of health conditions, was hospitalized with the virus, but she's okay now. So I figured genetics are on my side.

Then a couple of weeks ago one of the guys in the group invited his brother. After I was done playing I found out that the brother had just come from Arizona, a coranavirus hot zone. I was ticked.

So I resumed my self quarantine and stopped playing, assuming I had been exposed. I monitored my temperature and other potential symptoms. I've had none, but that's not uncommon -- about 50% of infected people don't know they've got it. And contrary to what Donald Trump says, the coronavirus is not 99% harmless. Trump might think he has the best words, but he most definitely does not have the best numbers.

According to experts, exercising outdoors while maintaining distance is pretty safe. So I continued to bike. I stopped by a different volleyball court where another group of people I know happened to be playing. One of them we'll call K. K also just came from Arizona. Between games he was citing numbers from some right-wing website, claiming that reaction to the pandemic is overblown.

Today we read that Arizona is experiencing the worst covid-19 outbreak in the country. Ninety percent of the ICU beds are occupied. Arizona is now the first state in history to enact "crisis care standards" for deciding who will receive treatment -- the infamous "death panels" that Republicans accused Obama of creating with the Affordable Care Act.

What's the difference between D and K? D works for a medical technology company and can work from home. K is a regional manager for national car rental company.

D knows that the coronavirus threat is real and is paid to save people's lives.

K is paid to entice people into flying around the country, rent cars so they can go to Disneyworld and the Grand Canyon, where they patronize bars and restaurants.

When it comes to the pandemic, you just can't trust people who are literally paid to say that things are fine, that the coronavirus is just the flu, that's it's not airborne, that only old people die, that only a tiny percentage of people suffer long-term effects.

All of those things are false: the coronavirus is not a flu virus and a flu shot provides no immunity whatsoever.

Experts may argue about droplets and aerosols, but it is crystal clear that people get the disease by breathing the same air as infected people. The evidence has been there since the beginning: the well-documented case from a restaurant air conditioner, the Washington state choir practice, and the superspreader soccer match in Italy.

Younger people with no underlying conditions do die (Nick Cordero, a Broadway actor, just died at age 41), and children are coming down with an inflammatory condition similar to Kawasaki disease.

About 20% of infections require hospitalization, which means spending thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many victims suffer strokes, heart attacks, limb amputations and long-term neurological and lung problems because Covid-19 causes severe clotting throughout the body (that's what killed Cordero). That's not "harmless."

Trump makes his money from hotels, resorts and golf courses, all of which have been hammered by closures from the pandemic. The booming economy that he inherited from Obama has gone down the toilet, and the stock market has been gyrating madly as gamblers who usually bet on sporting events, all now canceled, turned to stocks to sate their addiction.

So, who do you believe when it comes to the pandemic? The people on the front lines who staff the hospital wards, ICUs and labs, or the hucksters whose income (and reelection) depend on lying about the severity of the crisis?

If Trump had acknowledged the severity of this pandemic from the beginning and really locked down the entire country with a coordinated federal response, the way Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany did, we would have been done with this in May. (How much better would this country have fared if we'd had a woman president during this crisis?)

But all Trump cared about was promoting himself and his properties. The disease would magically go away by summer, he said, because that's what happens with flu, and this was just the Kung Flu. So now it's summer, and the disease is running rampant in the south -- Florida, Texas, Arizona and California -- because everyone flocked to air-conditioned bars after Trump demanded the states open up.

All these years later Deep Throat's advice is still good: follow the money. If someone's future depends on denying the reality of the pandemic, don't believe a word they say.

Best. Ad. Ever.


Monday, July 06, 2020

Friday, July 03, 2020

Metastasized Right Wing Blogger

The swift changes to our country's social fabric have left folks like Kevin Baker coming completely unglued from reality. His latest exercise in attempting to sound smart is merely one long away of saying, LIBERALS BAD. His reasoning is based on a failed ideology that perpetuates in tiny bubbles of self-referential confirmation. 

It's a petty and insecure dogma that refuses to accept outside information (facts, reality) that completely contradicts it. Essentially, it's a cult with members like Kevin and his followers engaging in bizarre thought processes that can best be described as unhinged. They hide like cowards from challenges because they want to keep up their fantasies regarding how the world works. 

It's also worthy to note that he doesn't actually write much of his "uber posts" at all. Most of the words are cut and paste jobs with no original thought whatsoever. If he had gone through formal schooling and achieved higher levels of education, he might have been capable of critical thinking. Of course, he would have had to get over his short man syndrome-like issues with academia which will likely never happen. 

Back when I was allowed to post on his site (before everyone became afraid of my intellect), I pondered the possibility of one of their own running the country. He keeps obsessive track of my posts there, even having an entire subheading (containing 20 posts!) dedicated to yours truly, so it would be easy to find it. I predicted that such a leader would result in American deaths, a crashed economy, and marked deafness of tone to major issues of the day like racism that would result in social unrest. 

Donald Trump has proven this to be EXACTLY the case. 120K dead because a child (just like Kevin) didn't want to admit that liberals were right about something

Running a country on the one conviction of "owning the libs" demonstrates a massive ignorance and utter stupidity in terms of how effective and necessary our federal government is to the working machinations of our republic. You can't fake you know wtf you are doing when lives are on the line. 

Kevin and his ilk don't get it because all they have is adolescent retorts. They are about to be judged on that philosophy and are going to be relegated to the ash heap of history forever. Thank God, because we can't afford to lose any more American lives due to their childishly insecure and petty bullshit. 

Read


Thursday, July 02, 2020

Who'd a Thunk?

Two weeks later, the chickens have gone to the hospital to roost:
Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate, announced on Twitter on Thursday that he had been hospitalized with the coronavirus.

Mr. Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, learned Monday that he had tested positive, was hospitalized Wednesday, and on Thursday “was resting comfortably in an Atlanta-area hospital,” according to a statement posted on his Twitter account.

Mr. Cain attended Mr. Trump’s indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20. A few hours before the event, the Trump campaign disclosed that six staff members who had been working on the rally had tested positive for the virus during a routine screening. Two members of the Secret Service also tested positive there, people familiar with the matter said.

In a video on his website, Mr. Cain described the rally and he said he had worn a mask while in groups of people. But he also posted photographs of himself on social media that showed him without a mask and surrounded by people in the arena.

“People were concerned, because of the media, about whether or not this was going to turn into another uptick in number of cases of Covid-19,” Mr. Cain said in the video.
Are Republicans congenitally stupid?

The media aren't responsible for your Covid infection, Herman. You are, for running around the country pretending that everything is hunky dory.

Defeating the coronavirus should really be easy, and we could have done it if someone other than that idiot Trump was president. New Zealand did it. Most Asian countries are doing far better than we are. Even France is. The EU has banned travel from the United States because Trump has totally blown it.

If we had clamped down really hard for three weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, then controlled all entry into the country, it really would have burned itself out. But not like magic. Like science. Quarantine with rigorous testing and contact tracing is the only way to stop the spread of the virus.

But no. Trump had to pretend it would go away magically. Then have press conferences every day for a month, blabbering about injecting bleach and shining UV light inside your lungs.

Then he wanted to open the country up by Easter. Now he's blaming the record number of cases and hospitalizations, mostly in Florida, Arizona, California and Texas, on too much testing.

Today Florida reported more than 10,000 new cases, 325 hospitalizations and 68 deaths. Testing didn't put those people in the hospital or kill them.

So what should we do? Those four states should be quarantined, at a minimum. Their airports should be closed for all but essential travel because they are huge vectors of infection.

But to really stop this pandemic we'd have to take real action, by shutting down the country again. That, of course, would require a federal response. But Trump is a coward, afraid of looking like a pussy.

If he was really a tough guy he would say:
You know, I was wrong. I totally blew this. I was afraid the numbers would make reelection impossible. But it's too late for that now. I know I'm gonna lose in November, and I deserve to lose. I might as well put America first and save some lives. So we closing the country down again, for the entire month of July. If everyone but the people who provide essential services stays home, we can beat this thing.

When the stay-at-home order is lifted, I will resign the office of the presidency. I'm directing my people to begin vetting candidates to replace Mike Pence when he takes my place on August the first.
Thank you, and God bless America.
On August 2nd Pence can pardon Trump and he can shuffle off to Mar a Lago, hit the golf course with his buddies, contract the coronavirus, and spend his last days in a Miami ICU, writhing in agony, rasping, "I can't breathe..."

Profiles in White Privilege

Check out these idiots.






















They are Mark and Patricia McCloskey of Central West End St. Louis and they are this week's poster children for white fragility. 

Protesters marching to the mayor's house walked through an unlocked gate to travel on the private street by the home of the McCloskey's. Mark and Patty got a little freaked out when they saw the black folk and went for the heavy armaments. Don't they look completely fucking ridiculous?

Yes. Yes, they do. 

My family is from Missouri. I was born there and my sister lives close to this neighborhood. I'm very familiar with how people view race in this state. Essentially, they think all black people are criminals and when their white privilege is threatened, look out! 

In so many ways, this is a perfect illustration of how out of step some white Americans are with the times. The world is shifting rapidly before them with statues and flags (see also: participation ribbons, prizes for second place ) of losers, racists, and traitors coming down, police departments being reimagined, and the majority of the country supporting Black Lives Matter. The McCloskeys watched the future pass by their house last week and they looked completely impotent to do anything about it. The fear and the desperation on their face is FUCKING HILARIOUS... 

They are afraid and feel insecure so they go to their blankey (ArmaLite Rifle) to make them feel all better and stuff. Sorry to disappoint you, fragiles, you aren't relevant anymore. 


Sunday, June 28, 2020

Is Trump a Senile Idiot or a Liar? Yes!

Two stories in the news today highlight how senile and out of touch Donald Trump is.

First was the excuse he gave for retweeting a video of a geezer in a golf cart yelling "white power!"
The White House said Sunday that President Trump didn’t hear someone shouting “white power” in a now-deleted retweet of a pro-Trump rally in Florida. 
“He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said.
Yeah, Trump's excuse is that he can't hear.

The second was the story about how the Russians have been paying the Taliban bounties to kill Americans. The White House was briefed on this months ago in the PDB (presidential daily briefing), but Trump says nobody told him:
President Trump is denying a New York Times report that he was briefed on an alleged Russian effort to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill Western forces — including U.S. troops — in Afghanistan.

Citing unnamed officials, the Times report, published Friday, details how U.S. intelligence officials reached the conclusion about the secret payments and then briefed the president in March. The White House National Security Council conferred an interagency meeting that same month to discuss the matter, according to the report. The finding was also included in the President's Daily Brief, according to the Times.
The same people Trump is negotiating a peace deal with are being paid to assassinate Americans by a Russian dictator that Trump kowtows to at every chance. A dictator that helped get Trump elected.

And Trump says he had no clue this was happening. He's blaming his staff for not telling him, when he can't pay attention to his briefings for more than a minute unless they have lots of pictures and constantly fluff his ego.

It's like this all the time with this clown: either he's a deaf, oblivious idiot who can't hear someone yelling "white power" in a video and can't remember being told the Russians were putting bounties on American soldiers, or he's lying.

It's really that simple. He's a senile idiot or a liar.

Either way, this is exactly the sort of thing that disqualifies him from the presidency.

It's been clear from the get-go that Trump's dementia and mendacity were not either-or, but a double-dose of both.

How can any self-respecting conservative still support this senile, narcissistic piece of garbage?

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Shrinking

The Lincoln Project, a conservative group organized to defeat President Trump, has put together some fantastic ads that will be airing from now until election day. Here is my favorite so far. 

 

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Trumpbo

If you want to get a peek into just how deep the delusions are among Trump supporters, look no further than this little diddy.

Trump as fucking Rambo? Really? He pussed out of Vietnam (a war he "wasn't a fan of") because of bone spurs. He has visited the troops how many times?

Seriously. Fucking. Insane.

Monday, June 22, 2020

Sunday, June 21, 2020

A Perfect Summation of Trump Supporters Right Now




















Some rally last night. Really packed the house, right? 

This image really shows how isolated his supporters are from the rest of the country. 

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Trump is the Poster Boy for White Privilege

Last week there was a Black Lives Matter protest in southern New Jersey. This was the scene:
[A]s the diverse group marched along Monday, waving signs and chanting slogans in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was met by several white men who had gathered near a sign that said “All Lives Matter” and in front of a pickup truck draped with an American flag and a pro-Trump sign.

One of the men yelled at the marchers angrily while kneeling on the neck of another who was facedown on the ground — an apparent attempt to mock the killing of Mr. Floyd, a black man who died in Minneapolis after a white officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
In addition to mocking Mr. Floyd’s death, [the men] had yelled, “If George Floyd would have complied he wouldn’t be dead”; “Go cash your checks”; and “Black Lives Matter to no one.”
So this is their argument: If Floyd had complied, he wouldn't have died? He was in handcuffs, helpless on the ground. How much more compliant can you get?

Also, since when is the punishment for disobeying the police on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill the death penalty? And since when do we try cases on the street, with cops acting as judge, jury and executioner?

Not long ago Rayshard Brooks, a black man from Atlanta, was friendly and complying with the police after being found asleep and drunk in his car at Wendy's drive-through. He fled when they tried to cuff him.  Given the large number of men who have died in police custody (Floyd, Eric Garner, and hundreds of others), this is a completely reasonable response.

The cops shot him in the back. Brooks was not a danger or himself or anyone else. The cops had his car, they knew who he was, but when he disobeyed and ran they murdered him. One of the officers has been fired, and the other has been suspended. The death has been ruled a homicide.

The underlying issue with these problematic cops is that they think their authority is limitless. If you disobey them (by talking back or running away), they feel disrepected and respond with deadly force.

The counterprotesters in New Jersey seem to think that killing someone for disobeying and disrespecting authority figures is just fine.

Can we think of someone else who constantly disobeys and disrepects authority figures such as federal judges (Gonzalo Curiel), the FBI, the attorney general of the United States, the many inspectors generals who have found him and his cronies breaking the law, and flouting the Constitution itself by accepting foreign emoluments?

If Trump had been born poor and black and displayed this attitude in his interactions with the police, he would have murdered on the street long ago. But since he's white and his daddy was rich, he could get away with opening his big fat yap as much as he likes.

This is what white privilege is all about. Ignorant rich white folks can get irate when the cops stop them in their expensive cars and there are no consequences, but if a black man says the wrong thing (Philando Castile: "Officer, I've got a legal concealed firearm"), the cops shoot them or they're down on the ground, getting the life choked out of them.

The police are public servants.They work for the people that they arrest and detain. In their dealings with wealthy white citizens the cops usually (though not always) remember to be courteous and fair. But when they deal with poor black and brown citizens the pretense of civility quickly falls away.

There should be no double standard.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Every State In The Union

There is still a minority of people in this country (mostly right-wingers) that falsely believe that this movement isn't a big deal. Time to remove your head from the sand and look at this map.

People are done. DONE. The system is going to change and it will do so rapidly. This is a good thing. Don't fight it. Don't cling to the lie that this is a "liberal" agenda.

It's an agenda for everyone and it's a winner.

Monday, June 15, 2020

Trump's Drinking Problem

Donald Trump has a history of using the military as a prop for his political campaigns. He insisted on bringing West Point cadets back for a graduation ceremony in the middle of a major pandemic, forcing the cadets go through airports and fly on airplanes that are proven vectors for the coronavirus. Sixteen cadets tested positive upon returning for Trump's speech.

During this dangerous, stupid and useless stunt, it became obvious (again) that Trump is not a well man. He slurred words (again) during his rant, and clearly had difficulty drinking (again), needing two hands to raise a small glass of water to his lips.

Afterwards, Trump clearly had difficulty walking down a ramp, looking like some pathetic geezer who had had too much to drink.

All this would probably have gone ignored, as it has many times before, except that Trump himself had to tweet about it, whining that the gently inclined ramp was slippery (it wasn't -- the general beside him had no problems), and claiming that he ran the last three steps. Trump is the only person I know who thinks that a shambling stumble is "running."

For years now people have debated whether it's appropriate to diagnose Trump's mental and physical well-being from symptoms exhibited at public appearances. Others, like David Graham at The Atlantic, think his physical ailments are irrelevant -- it's the lies and Trump's abysmal performance in office that matter.

The fact is, your physical health has a direct impact on your mental health. Trump's difficulty drinking and walking are probably indicative of some kind of neurological deficit. He might have trouble raising his arm because his rotator cuff is trashed from years of swinging a golf club incorrectly. He might have trouble walking because his ACL was torn, like Tiger Woods. Or maybe Cadet Bone Spurs' bone spurs were acting up.

Or his neurological symptoms may be due to Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, both of which affect mobility, or because he had a stroke. Diabetes causes nerve damage, which could also explain his difficulty walking and drinking.

Trump is famous for bragging about how little he sleeps, as if it's a badge of honor. Sleep is how the body takes out the trash in your brain. Get too little sleep and the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's start clogging up the brain. Sleeplessness is a classic sign of dementia, according to the Mayo Clinic.

We know Trump is lying about his health, because the summaries of the physicals he provided the media are just puff pieces written by him or his campaign. His personal physician admitted this two years ago.

Trump is 74 years old and is obese. Joe Biden is 77 and is not. Six years ago Biden was able to jog around the White House with Barack Obama for a puff piece for Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. At about the same age Trump was unable to walk up a hill in Sicily at a G7 summit.

Trump is constantly talking about strength, yet it is clear that he physically weak and clumsy, as demonstrated at West Point. More to the point, he is mentally weak and extremely erratic, as demonstrated by his constant kowtowing to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim ("We fell in love") Jong Un, his inability to take any kind of advice or criticism from advisors who know far more than he does about subjects critical to the future of the United States, and the chaotic state of the White House, where everyone is walking around in fear that Trump will lash out and blame them for his latest gaffe.

We have had presidents in the past who suffered strokes in office (Eisenhower and Wilson), had severe physical problems (FDR and JFK), and were even suffering from Alzheimer's (Reagan). But they didn't act impulsively, tweet blathering insults at everyone, and constantly display complete ignorance about every subject important to the presidency, from the nuclear triad strategy, to how long it takes to mount a mission to Mars, to injecting bleach to stop the coronavirus.

How can anyone think this clown should be president?

Friday, June 12, 2020

There Is No Mystery...

I rode my bike over to a friend's house a couple of weeks ago. We got to talking about the coronavirus (what else?), and the people we knew who had been infected.

I told them about my sister: she had a stroke a decade ago, resulting in aphasia and paralysis on the right side of her body. She lives in a group home with four residents. The place had been in lockdown since early March, but one of the workers brought the virus in and my sister got sick. She was in the hospital for a weekend, but didn't need a ventilator, and she's recuperating now.

One of the guests was skeptical about the disaster that was unfolding in New York, especially in minority communities, certain that something else was going on there, insinuating some dark conspiracy or what, I don't know.

There's no mystery. The virus was brought into the city by business travelers coming from China, and vacationers returning from Europe. It didn't start in minority communities.

On the plane travelers infected flight crews and fellow passengers. At the airport they infected gate agents, janitors, rest room attendants, porters and other travelers. On the way home or to the hotel they infected Uber and cab drivers. At hotels these travelers infected check-in clerks, concierges, and maids. Residents of the city infected their doormen, maids, cooks, nannies. And their wives, husbands and kids.

Once in the city they went to stores, bodegas, bakeries, bars and restaurants, where they infected shopkeepers, stock clerks, bakers, bartenders, busboys, waiters and maitre d's.

Notice how most of the people travelers come into contact are working low-paying service jobs, which are very frequently staffed by minorities.

The population density in New York is the highest in the country, over 70,000 people per square mile in Manhattan. People, especially poorly-paid minorities, don't have cars, they ride the subways, crammed into standing-room-only trains.

So, if there's one place in the United States where you'd expect a disease to run rampant, it's New York.

An Ohio state senator was fired from his job as a physician this week for saying that "colored people" don't wash their hands as well as other groups:
State Senator Stephen A. Huffman, a Republican and a doctor, made his remarks on Tuesday during a hearing of the Senate Health Committee about whether to declare racism a public health crisis. They came as he speculated about reasons black people might be more “susceptible” to Covid-19.

“Could it just be that African-Americans or the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups or wear a mask or do not socially distance themselves?” he said. “Could that be the explanation of why the higher incidence?”
It's incredible that this guy would make this statement after literally months of news reports about Walmart and Amazon not giving their workers personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant. Most of these jobs don't offer health care or sick leave. Many employers demanded that workers show up even if they were sick.

The people who work at group homes like the one where my sister lives, and the nursing homes where the coronavirus has killed tens of thousands of elderly residents, are usually women, often minorities, almost always poorly paid, and very frequently working two or three different part time jobs at different facilities.

The very nature of their jobs prevents any kind of social distancing: they have lift elderly residents out of bed and put them in wheelchairs, put "transfer belts" on them to hoist them up, sit them on the toilet, give them baths, comb their hair, and even feed them.

Another major vector for the disease in the Midwest has been meat-packing plants, where the lines have workers standing shoulder to shoulder hacking chickens, cows and pigs apart. These jobs are difficult and horrible, poorly paid, and mostly staffed by immigrants and minorities. And then Trump issued an executive order to force workers to show up at these "critical infrastructure" jobs. I guess he can't survive without his Big Macs.

And as for masks: doesn't Huffman remember anything? At the start of the pandemic Trump told us the virus would disappear "like magic." Then the Trump administration told us all that masks wouldn't help. Then they said that masks should go to medical professionals instead. And then those same medical professionals couldn't get hold of masks! And then there was the price gouging by companies selling masks on Amazon. And the story about the faulty masks being passed off by a Trump crony to the Indian Health Service.

How can this guy possibly criticize the "colored population" for not wearing masks, when Donald Trump absolutely refuses to wear one, and many of Huffman's fellow Republicans in Congress and dozens of state legislatures categorically refuse to wear them?

Not wearing a mask, going out to bars and restaurants and ignoring social distancing rules have become a rallying cry for rabid Republicans, and yet somehow the "colored population" is at fault for getting sick because they work jobs that force them into close contact with people, their employers make them work when sick, and there were no masks to be had by anybody?

And once they get sick, American minorities are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus because they have a greater incidence of medical conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, which increase the likelihood of dying, because they're poorer, live in "food deserts" and eat poorly, and have less access to health care.

There's no underlying secret conspiracy or racial predisposition behind New York's infection rate or the deadly toll the pandemic has had on minority groups. If you just open your eyes to the realities of life for the working poor, it's obvious that these people are sicker because American society has chosen to pay people working essential jobs next to nothing under terrible conditions.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

We Broke The Contract

White people need to understand exactly what the fuck is going on right now. Watch this video.
 
 

Get it now? Or are you still going to deny or blame others?

Acton. Change. Now. 

Monday, June 08, 2020

Minnesota is Being Overrun by Idiots from Florida

Minnesota has been the epicenter of a world-wide protest movement over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was callously murdered by four cops while bystanders recorded the crime and repeatedly told them they were killing Floyd. The killer, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on Floyd's throat for more than eight minutes, slowly choking the life out of him, while three other cops just stood by and watched.

To coin a phrase, this cop is a male Chauvinist pig.

I could not figure for the life of me figure out what Chauvin was thinking while doing this cold-blooded murder, given the uproar over the killing of Eric Garner under similar circumstances in 2014. People were recording Chauvin while he calmly lynched Floyd, an act of domestic terrorism. It was even more egregious than Klan lynchings because it was committed under color of authority.

Then I read that two of the cops were trainees under Chauvin. Why was Chauvin choking the life out of a man so brazenly, in full view of the public and his trainees? He was making an example of Floyd for the public, and completing the other cops' training, showing them "how it's done."

This is the hard and fast truth about the systemic nature of police brutality against blacks in the nation's police forces.

Are all cops this bad? No. But it's not just a "few bad apples," as so many conservatives love to say. The underlying attitude is "the only thing these blacks understand is violence, so that's how we're going to treat them."

It irks me is that Chauvin is getting all Minnesotans branded as racist pricks, when the guy isn't a real Minnesotan:
On Friday, protesters gathered in front of another Chauvin home in Windermere, Fla., which he has owned since 2011 with his wife, Kellie, a Laotian refugee, realtor and former Mrs. Minnesota pageant winner.

Both Chauvin and his wife have registered to vote there, rather than in Minnesota, records show. Chauvin last cast a ballot in Florida in November 2018. His wife’s registration is listed as inactive. Both are Republicans.
Trump is constantly yapping about voter fraud. How does this racist Republican have a full-time job for 20 years as a cop in Minnesota, a part-time job busting heads outside a Minneapolis club, and still be voting in Florida? Huh? This is voter fraud and tax evasion, Derek.

Don't get me wrong, we've got plenty of racist dickheads native to Minnesota, like my dad. But it seems that police departments should require their employees to be residents of their cities (or at least their states), so they feel some sort of responsibility for their conduct on the job, instead of just hiding out in the suburbs after knocking a few heads downtown.

Shortly after Floyd's death, massive Black Lives Matter protests began, culminating one night with the burning of the Third Precinct police station, and then rioting, looting and more arson across the city and country. Everyone condemned the black community for the violence.

Well, the police have caught the guy who started the fire at the Third Precinct: a white guy named Branden Wolfe, a (former) security guard for home improvement chain Menards, who was arrested with a full set of police riot gear, including a baton and handcuffs.

And where is Wolfe from? Florida!

Another white guy, this time from Illinois, put photos of himself looting an Office Depot on Facebook and a video of himself saying, "Let's start a riot!" and the invitation: “I’m going to Minneapolis tomorrow who coming only goons I’m renting hotel rooms.”

Across the country have been widespread reports that cops have been beating peaceful protesters and reporters, shooting and blinding people with pepper balls and rubber bullets, indiscriminately using tear gas that makes people cough and gasp and wheeze during a pandemic, and knocking down old men in the street, and then lying about it.

Then a bunch of sheriff's deputies from Anoka County (a northern Twin Cities suburb) and state troopers were out slashing car tires, including those of at least two reporters! Are these cops or hoodlums?

Jesus H. Christ! How can anyone possibly defend this as good policing? "State Patrol troopers strategically deflated tires … in order to stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement," one spokesperson offered lamely in police-speak. Oh, you mean like the cop in Brooklyn who slammed his SUV into a crowd of protesters?

If this country needs a wall it should be around Florida to keep all those goons down there.

It should be noted that the attorney general of Minnesota, who upgraded the charges against Chauvin to second-degree murder, is Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim. Ellison won his office in 2018 with 49% of the vote (to 45% for the Republican), in a state that is 85% white. He was previously a congressman from the Fifth District, which is 63% white, and won 69% of the vote in 2016. His successor in Congress is Ilhan Omar, a woman, a Somali immigrant and a Muslim, who won with 78% of the vote.

So we Minnesotans are not all racist dicks.

C or P?


Sunday, June 07, 2020

Trump Built His Wall

I can't think of a better metaphor for Trump and his followers.



They are walled off from reality. They haven't a clue what's coming this fall and they have deluded themselves into thinking there is a "secret" majority of Trump voters that will help him in 2020 as they erroneously believe they did in 2016. 

He barely won in 2016 and now he has to run on his record which is terrible. The election of 2020 is going to be a referendum on him and it will result in massive losses. What's even going to be more shocking is how he and his supporters are going to blame everyone else but themselves. 

I'm actually more worried about 2022 if the Dems get complacent again. 



Wednesday, June 03, 2020

A Man Living In Arizona Thinks He Knows More About My Hometown Than Me

Kevin Baker has been dishonest again on his eternally unchallenged, insecure bubble of self-referential confirmation web site. This time it's personal, though, because he's lying about Minneapolis, my town.

The police, like they have in Minneapolis, abandoned the city.

The Minneapolis police department did not abandon the city. A classic lie from a gun humper who is so insecure about his ideology that he feels the need to make shit up. 

Kevin, if you want to know what actually happened (and how those events make your arguments for AR-15s even weaker), comments here are completely open. Post whatever you want and it will not be deleted. That goes for anyone, btw. And, Kevin, I apologize to you unreservedly for deleting your comment. That will never happen again to you or anyone else (spam excluded).  

Further, I think you should invite me back to post on your site. Running back from an argument you lost on Quora to get back pats and high fives must not be very intellectually stimulating. I think you need someone to check your manufactured reality once in a while, especially with the coming election which I am certain is going to make your head explode.

I do understand, of course, if you refuse. It is hard to face reality:)

Monday, June 01, 2020