There Is No Planet B

A while back I was playing an online game and the guy I was with started talking about colonizing Mars. He thought the Earth was done, with all the pollution, climate change and social discord, and that humanity had to start over on another planet just to survive. He thought independent, go-it-alone entrepreneur types would be the salvation of mankind. In other words, he had drunk the Elon Musk Koolaid.

He was wrong on every level.

First, the facts. Even in the worst possible climate scenario we've got, Earth is far more hospitable than the moon, freestanding space colonies, Mars or Venus. 

Venus is right out because it's suffering from a runaway greenhouse effect: the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide with a dash of sulfuric acid. The surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead. The air pressure is 90 atmospheres, equivalent to being half a mile below the ocean. You might be able to live in the clouds of Venus (making a floating habitat would be relatively easy because of the dense atmosphere), but then access to raw materials would be difficult.

The moon has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, which means it is constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation and high-energy particles from solar flares. Radiation exposure is 200 times what it is on Earth. The temperature varies from 280 degrees below zero to 260 degrees Fahrenheit. Apollo astronauts traveling to the moon were only gone about a week, so they suffered only minimal damage. But long-term residents would have to either build electrostatic shields (which need a lot of power), or live underground (which is problematic because lunar soil also emits radiation, like some building materials on earth). Water would be a problem, though there might be some under the surface at the poles. And of course you have to make your own air. It's not clear what the implications of lower gravity would be on human health and childhood growth.

Freestanding space colonies, like the O'Neill cylinders, are a neat idea, but they are fixed size and can't be totally self-sufficient. They require constant maintenance, import of raw materials and ongoing trade with Earth and other colonies for supplies and exchange of genetic material.

Mars has a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide (.006 of Earth's atmospheric pressure) and no magnetic field, making it only slightly better than the moon in terms of radiation exposure. The average temperature is -81. However, it can get up to 70 degrees at noon in the summer, but it gets to -200 at the poles.

There was probably water on the Martian surface billions of years ago, and there might be some left below the surface over much of the planet, and there's water ice at the poles. In the winters about a quarter of the atmosphere freezes out at the poles, forming a crust of dry ice that sublimates in the spring.

Clearly Mars is the most Earth-like planet and the best candidate for human habitation. But people would probably still have to live underground, surrounding themselves with radiation shields of one sort or another. Surface excursions would have to be severely limited to reduce radiation exposure to prevent an epidemic of cancer and rampant genetic mutations. Food production would always be a struggle with the lower solar radiation (less than half of what Earth gets).

But the biggest challenge wouldn't be the harsh environment: it would be the people. The kind of people who are attracted to such a barren frontier -- the fiercely independent, go-it-alone, rule-breaking entrepreneur types -- are the worst kind of people to make a home on Mars.

On Mars everyone has to follow all the rules, all the time. In a place where punching a hole in the wall will kill everyone in the room, there's no place for anger or pettiness. One or two people could sabotage a Martian settlement's food, water or air supply, killing everyone.

On Mars there would be no room for rebels and malcontents. Every marriage and birth would have to be approved by the government because resources would have to be so tightly controlled. Because a Martian colony would be a completely closed system, every aspect of your life would be dictated: how much power you use, where you live, how much space you get, what you eat, what you drink, what you excrete, even what you breathe. It would be like living on a nuclear submarine your whole life.

There would essentially be no freedom. Mars would not be a libertarian utopia: it would be a communist dictatorship. The survival of the group would override every other consideration.

The thing is, even if Earth suffers the ultimate disaster scenario -- worst-case climate change, massive sea level rise, global thermonuclear war -- Earth will still be more hospitable than Mars. People survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl. People survived multiple ice ages. That's because no matter how bad it got on Earth, there has been air, water and food in the form of plants and animals, even in places as desolate as Antarctica.

None of that is true for Mars.

There's no shortage of failed attempts at colonization here on Earth. The Vikings made two settlements in Greenland, but abandoned both. The Vikings' North American colony in Vinland failed. The first Roanoke colony, led by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585, failed and everyone returned to England. The second Roanoke colony just disappeared, leaving the enigmatic word "Croatoan" carved on a fence post. And on and on.

Given the number of robotic missions to Mars that have failed (two-thirds), it's clear that crewed expeditions to Mars will result in numerous failures and numerous deaths, just as our attempts to reach the north and south poles did. We lost 14 astronauts in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, and three astronauts in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire. People will die in our attempts to reach Mars. 

That's not to say we shouldn't go to Mars, we most definitely should. The risk of death is just the reality of exploration of any new territory. Just look at how many people die climbing Mount Everest. But for the foreseeable future Mars will be like an Antarctic research post. Not a place to raise a family.

Maybe, someday, thousands of years in the future, we could terraform Mars, creating a biosphere, and humans could survive on the surface without artificial aids. But not in time for us to write off planet Earth. A self-sustaining Martian colony is basically impossible for centuries: the level of technology required for basic survival mandates the huge industrial base of the Earth. 

It basically comes down this: there is zero room for error on Mars. People and technology are simply not reliable enough for Mars to be the sole repository for mankind. And even if we do manage to terraform Mars, the solar wind would eventually blow the atmosphere away, like it did billions of years ago.

So the upshot is: there is no Planet B. There is only Earth. 

Last year an Australian group published a study that said civilization will collapse by 2050 if we don't stop mucking with the climate. That's just 30 years from now. It was immediately pooh-poohed by conservatives. But as we've seen, last year Australia was burning out of control, and this year the West Coast is burning out of control and the Gulf Coast is getting hammered by hurricanes once or twice a month. Miami is sinking into the sea. This is not sustainable. And it's only getting worse.

Obviously we should stop screwing up the climate right now. Because if we don't, there's going to be a huge exodus from the South to the North and from the coasts to inland areas, as oceans rise and swallow cities like New Orleans and Miami and New York, and entire states and countries are destroyed by fires and droughts and hurricane after hurricane. If we don't stop fouling our nest, competition for breathable air, arable land and potable water will result in endless wars, which will eventually go nuclear. 

Yeah, some small part of humanity will survive the cataclysm, like we survived the ice ages. But that means the industrial base will be destroyed, rendering all our cars and guns and air conditioners and furnaces useless, and the seven or eight billion people who depend on that industrial base are going to die, including most of the United States.

Who will survive? Ironically, those people who are used to living in squalid conditions, who eke out a subsistence living in those "shithole" countries Donald Trump loves to hate. 

In other words, the meek shall inherit the earth.

How Republicans understand power, Democrats don’t and Jill Stein voters need to be continually reminded how they fucked this up too.

How Many Trump Supporters Will Die on the Altar of Trump's Vanity?

Donald Trump's victims keep piling up since the coronavirus outbreak. Now there have been 6 million American COVID-19 cases and 200,000 deaths, a death rate much higher than other comparable countries. Many of these infections and deaths are directly attributable to Trump supporters doing what he told them to.

There was the Arizona guy who died from taking chloroquine phosphate after Trump gushed about hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure (it isn't).

Then there was Herman Cain, who died not long after attending Trump rally in Oklahoma.

Now a pro-Trump anti-mask pastor is in the ICU after trying to pray away the virus:

When coronavirus cases began increasing in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in late July, Pastor Paul Van Noy prayed with his congregation that the city council would not pass a mask mandate.

“I don’t want to be told I have to wear a mask,” he said at the lectern. “We’re adults and we don’t need the government to tell us what to do.”

A little over a month later, he and his wife contracted the virus and he has landed in the hospital’s intensive care unit struggling to breathe, he said in a statement this week.

“I haven’t taken this Covid seriously enough,” his wife, Brenda, said on Facebook Sept. 4, shortly after her husband was admitted to the ICU.

Trump has been leading the country in opposition to mask mandates, even as the head of the CDC says that masks are better at preventing the spread of COVID-19 than a vaccine will be.

Then we found out that Trump admitted to Bob Woodward that he has been lying about the severity of the pandemic this whole time. What's amazing is how easily Trump admits to Woodward that he lied. This guy is an idiot.

Trump has politicized vaccine development, trying to force drug companies to get a vaccine out much sooner than is safe or feasible.

The crazy thing is, face masks should not be at all controversial. Look at this clip from the Flintstones, aired in 1966, in which wearing a face mask is mentioned in a simple, off-handed manner:

People wore face masks during the 1918 flu pandemic, and it was no big deal. Many western states had mask mandates.

The problem is that Republicans have decided that they must oppose absolutely everything that Democrats endorse, no matter how reasonable the Democrats' proposals are, from climate change, to the Affordable Care Act (which is now completely obviously a necessity, what with all the people who have lost jobs -- and their health care -- due to the pandemic), to keeping schools closed until the virus is under control, to wearing face masks indoors.

Thousands of people are getting violently ill, racking up huge hospital bills, suffering life-long physical disabilities, and dying, all because Trump doesn't want people in masks reminding everyone what an abysmal job he has done as president.

Infection rates are down in blue states and skyrocketing in red states. In the end how many Trump supporters die on the altar of Trump's vanity?

Will Climate Change Kill the Republican Party?

When Donald Trump went to California amid one of the worst fire seasons in history, he continued to deny the totally obvious: man-made climate change is causing havoc across the globe.

In the American West drought and unprecedented heat have caused the entire west coast to burn, from California to Washington state. Half a million people were evacuated from their homes in Oregon, where it's usually quite wet. Dozens of people have died since August, and smoke from the fires spread across the entire northern half of the United States, dimming the sun in Minnesota, New York and Washington, DC.

The Atlantic hurricane season, barely half hover, is in full force. Louisiana has already been hammered by two hurricanes that dumped several feet of rain. Almost a million people lost power in Hurricane Laura,  and less than a month later Hurricane Sally dumped more rain and hundreds of thousands of people lost power in Florida and Mississippi.

Five hurricanes are spinning up in the Atlantic, all at once, only the second time this has ever happened. Cyclone Ianos is hitting Greece today, something which almost never happens.

Why are there so many hurricanes and cyclones? Climate change has heated the oceans up, and the hotter the water gets, the more hurricanes form. It's just physics.

A 42-square mile chunk of the Greenland ice cap just broke off into the ocean, after a record year of melting in 2019. Arctic sea ice extent dropped precipitously in the last 40 years, and the pace of decline in 2020 is the fastest ever. This year is the second lowest on record (2012 holds the record).

The melting of the Greenland ice cap is a major contributor to sea level rise, which is causing constant flooding throughout Florida and other coastal states, and making storm surge during hurricanes and even normal storms expensive disasters, eroding beaches and destroying property values.

All of this is happening, and yet Trump and his cronies still pretend nothing is wrong. 

Even if you believe that some natural process caused climate change, you cannot deny that by continuing to pump carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and by cutting down forests for farming and logging, we are making it that much worse. If you're standing on a tree limb and you hear it cracking, you don't jump up and down on it.

We are simply making the world uninhabitable. Temperatures in Death Valley reached 130 degrees in August, and similarly high temperatures have been recorded in Kuwait and Pakistan. How long can people continue living in these places?

People in Louisiana are getting hammered by hurricanes about once a month during the season. How long before insurance companies say enough is enough, and refuse to cover homes along the Gulf Coast?

The exodus from California is already starting, with people heading for other states across the west, including Utah, Idaho and Texas. 

This may be for the best. In many states Republicans have gerrymandered congressional districts to take an outsized majority of seats, even though they receive a minority or slight majority of the vote total. An influx of a relatively small number of moderate voters to the right districts could swing currently Republican states into the Democratic column.

Human-caused climate change is driving thousands of species to extinction. If there is such a thing as karma, Republican politicians will be its next victims.

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.

Is This Communism

So Much for "Law and Order"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put 2020 Into Perspective

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

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

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

The Myth of the Secret Trump Voter

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

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

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?

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.

Betrayed

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. 

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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.