Trump's American Carnage Hits His Own Supporters the Hardest

When Donald Trump ran for president he campaigned on the idea of "American carnage," that eight years of Obama had wrecked the country.

Yeah. Right. The stock market was at record highs. Unemployment was at record lows. Under Trump things just kept going in the direction that Obama had set them. Trump's economic successes were all built on the recovery made possible by George Bush's decision to bail out big business and Obama's careful stewardship of the country despite endless obstruction by Republicans in Congress.

The carnage started with Trump's endless trade wars. Thousands of businesses are struggling and millions of farmers are on the precipice now, holding on solely because of government aid they've been forced to take to survive. Trump thinks this will buy their votes, but how many farmers relish the idea of living on government hand-outs for another four years?

But this year the carnage has hit America with full force. Because of Trump's incompetent and malicious leadership, the coronavirus has killed 221,000 Americans, and eight million have been infected. The toll is more likely about 300,000, if you compare the excess deaths this year, direct and indirect from COVID-19.

For the people who made Trump's election possible the carnage started much sooner than that. The list of those who have been convicted or charged with all manner of crimes is very long: Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for numerous tax evasion and money laundering scams. Trump's national security advisor, Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI about the Russians. Trump's campaign advisor, Roger Stone, for lying about Russia and Wikileaks. Trump's campaign advisor, Steve Bannon, for defrauding contributors to the private wall on the Mexican border. Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for lying to Congress and lying about paying off Trump's former mistresses. Trump campaign operatives Rick Gates, George Nader and George Papadopoulos, for various other crimes. Trump fundraiser, Elliot Broidy, who pleaded guilty to illegally lobbying for Chinese and Malaysian interests.

The list of for Trump appointees who have been fired or left in disgrace numbers literally in the hundreds, from Jeff Sessions, three chiefs of staff, the Mooch, John Bolton, Rick Perry, to Tom Price, etc., etc., etc. This administration has been the most unstable and chaotic in American history.

And we can't forget Herman Cain, one of Trump's few black supporters, who caught COVID-19 campaigning for Trump and promptly died.

But it's not just Trump's direct hires and surrogates who have crashed and burned. Many of Trump's loyal followers, regular Americans, have committed crimes either in Trump's name, or prompted by his rabble rousing. 

There was Cesar Sayoc, a big Trump supporter, who sent pipe bombs to Trump critics. There was Patrick Crusius, who killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart. There are literally dozens more documented cases of attackers citing Trump directly as the motivation for their assaults and crimes. On a less deadly note, there was Cheryl Hall, a big Trump supporter, who was charged with voter registration fraud in Florida.

Then there's the recent high-profile conspiracy in which 14 men were arrested for plotting to kidnap the governors of Michigan (Gretchen Whitmer) and Virginia (Ralph Northam). Trump has tweeted numerous times against measures these governors had taken to limit the spread of the coronavirus, broadcasting to the world his support for attacks on these governors. After the arrests Trump did what he always does: tried to pin his own crimes on his enemies by claiming Whitmer was the one inciting terrorism.

It's like a mob boss accusing the FBI of murder when he kills their informant. "Hey, if you hadn't gotten him to squeal he'd still be alive!"

Then there's case of Randal Thom, who is a living metaphor for the disaster of the Trump years:

A southwestern Minnesota man whose passionate support for President Donald Trump took him to dozens of political events around the country and recently to the White House was killed in a highway crash while returning from a political celebration in Florida.

Randal J. Thom, 60, of Lakefield died in a collision shortly before 4:30 p.m. Monday on Hwy. 169 north of St. Peter, the State Patrol said. Thom was driving his minivan south and hit a pickup truck that also was heading south, the patrol said.

Evidence of recent alcohol use by Thom was detected at the scene, according to the patrol. Thom was not wearing a seat belt, the patrol added.

 

The other driver, James A. Mollenhauer, 67, of nearby Le Sueur, survived his injuries and was taken to a Mankato hospital. 

 

This guy was driving drunk down the highway, practically hollering "I don't need no fucking seat belt!" and he got himself killed, almost killing another man.

Donald Trump has been holding meetings at the White House and rallies across the country, yelling, "I don't need no fucking face mask," and he got himself infected with the coronavirus along with hundreds or thousands of others at his meetings and rallies. Eight million Americans have been infected because of his stupidity, and hundreds of thousands are dead, and in the end the bill for this disaster will be over $16 trillion.

Meanwhile, countries like New Zealand and Japan have basically to returned to life as normal.  

 

In Japan a movie opened in theaters to the biggest box office in history. All because the Japanese government and people took the coronavirus seriously, acted quickly and decisively and together, and wore -- and continue to wear -- masks in public.

Trump's Coronavirus Immunity Is Another Lie

Donald Trump makes a habit of getting other people to do his work for him. His supporters claim he's a genius for his tax avoidance scams, but he didn't actually do his own taxes. He hires guys (usually short ones wearing yarmulkes) to do his taxes. 

According to his own sister, Trump had someone else take the SATs to get him into Penn.

And Trump has a long history of getting other people to finance shaky projects, like his casinos, when he declared bankruptcy and left his investors holding the bag while he earned millions.

That's not smart. That's criminal.

Trump has been parading around the country after his bout with the coronavirus, claiming that he's immune even as the virus was still in his system, exposing everyone he came into contact with. 

And it's not even true that being infected with the coronavirus makes you immune: viruses mutate (which is why there's a new flu vaccine every year), and there are already numerous cases where people have been reinfected with the coronavirus.

Trump's idolators think he's got some kind of god-like immune system. Needing oxygen to breathe and being rushed to the hospital in a helicopter doesn't sound very god-like. But like everything with Trump it's a lie: he got someone else to do the work.

He announced his diagnosis early on Oct. 2, and a test did not pick up any antibodies in his blood, according to a report released by his physician, Dr. Sean Conley.

The lack of antibodies that early in the course of illness is not unusual. It can take from 10 days to three weeks for powerful antibodies to surface.

“If he had tested positive, then we would know for sure that he has his own antibodies,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“Since he was antibody-negative, it is less likely but not ruled out,” he added. “He could have been in the early stage of generating his own antibodies.” (Dr. Barouch is an investigator for Regeneron’s trial of the cocktail for preventing coronavirus infections.)

On Oct. 2, Mr. Trump received eight grams of a cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies made by Regeneron. These antibodies are infused into people — like those of Mr. Trump’s age, sex and weight — who may struggle to produce an immune response of their own.

A test on Oct. 5 confirmed the presence of the antibodies, according to Dr. Conley.

But Dr. Barouch noted that “the antibodies detected in the bloodstream are not his antibodies. They’re antibodies that were administered. Those antibodies will wane over time.”

“If you get the antibodies early on, and you either prevent or rapidly treat infections,” Dr. Barouch said, “then you probably will actually inhibit the generation of your own body’s antibodies.”

Mr. Trump was also treated with dexamethasone, a steroid that is known to suppress the immune system. And he received it much earlier in the course of his illness than usual. 

 

That means Trump is likely not immune to the coronavirus, and since he's taking steroids, he's more susceptible to being infected again.

Trump supporters, take note: the guy did not take hydroxychloroquine when he got infected, even though he kept hawking that as some kind of miracle treatment, nor did he inject bleach or ram a tube down his trachea to irradiate his lung tissue with UV. He did what the experts said to do, ignoring all the nonsense advice he spouted before he got hit by the virus because of his rank stupidity.

Also of concern: more than half of all coronavirus patients suffer long-term neurological effects from the disease, which means Trump's already tenuous grasp on sanity has a 50-50 chance of slipping even further.

Why would anyone trust this clown with their health, when he can't even protect himself, his staff, his visitors, the supporters at his rallies, his wife, or his son Barron?

They Die

 

Quote of the Year

Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.

When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.

It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale.

And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office.

---Steve Schmidt, GOP Strategist. 

Will a Barrett Confirmation Doom Trump's Reelection?

I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Most of my friends were Catholic and went to "parochial school," as we called it. A lot of them were Mexican. They all went to church every Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, though I never did.

My mom had been a Jehovah's Witness, and the battles between her and my dad over religion convinced me that religion was basically a scam, a way to control people and extract money from them.

If Barrett is confirmed, pro-life Catholics can vote for Biden with a clear conscience, knowing that the future of abortion will rest in the hands of seven Catholics on the Supreme Court.

My first girlfriend was Catholic. I went to mass with her because I was over at her house on Saturday afternoons. It was kind of funny because Father Esterka, the priest who gave the mass (he was Czech), sounded like Bela Lugosi when he said the words "the bahdy and blahd of Christ." Even back then the whole ritual vampirism and cannibalism of the eucharist seemed kind of creepy to me.

My best friend in high school and college, and best man, is Catholic.

My wife was raised a Catholic and we were married in a Catholic church. The priest who married us didn't care that I wasn't baptized, and I found out years later that he left the priesthood and married a former nun.

When I was a kid all my friends' families had five or six kids. It wasn't just a Catholic thing, my family had six kids too: birth control was just coming out in the Sixties. My wife's brothers and sisters, all good practicing Catholics, have zero, two or three kids in their families. Which is to say that all of them practice birth control, completely ignoring the dictates of the Catholic Church.

My step mother-in-law is an even more devout Catholic than my father-in-law was. But when they left their house for an assisted living facility, they gave their house to her gay grandson and his partner. Even though the Church itself still preaches against homosexuality it's an open secret that perhaps half of all priests are gay, and this has been the case for a thousand years.

This is all to say that pretty much everyone I knew growing up was Catholic, so I know Catholics. The reality is that the average Catholic is just an average American. That is, they're just like Joe Biden.

They probably wouldn't have an abortion if they got pregnant unexpectedly, but they also don't want to force anyone else to have an unwanted child. Like Joe Biden. But there are Catholics who have a much more doctrinaire stand on abortion.

Which brings us to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Specifically, Barrett was a member of a fringe Catholic group called People of Praise, where she held the creepy title of "handmaid." More disturbingly:

Also, while in law school, Barrett lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles. The group was one of many to grow out of the charismatic Christian movement, which sought a more intense and communal religious experience by embracing such practices as shared living, faith healing and speaking in tongues.

 

When Republicans claim that Democrats are demonizing Barrett for her religion they imply that Democrats are anti-Catholic. Which is false. The Democratic party platform, with the exception of reproductive rights, tracks much more closely with Catholic teaching than the Republicans, especially on questions such as the death penalty, guns, social justice, immigration, etc., etc., etc. Republicans are mostly Old Testament reactionaries who completely disregard Christ's moral teachings, while most Catholics are New Testament Christians who embrace tolerance.

It is Barrett's relationship with this man Ranaghan that brings up the question of undue religious influence of this fringe group on the judge, not Catholicism in general. The Supreme Court currently has five Catholic justices, one Episcopalian/Catholic justice and two Jewish justices.

Which brings up an interesting question: why aren't there any Protestant justices? (Episcopalians are basically Catholics with the serial numbers filed off.) You'd think that all the Baptist Trump supporters in the South and would be asking this question. Why should there be seven Catholics on the Supreme Court? Especially since Baptists like major Trump supporter Robert Jeffress think Catholics are Satanists.

According to Pew Research, Catholics are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But as I mentioned above, the teachings of the Catholic Church are much more in line with the Democrats than the Republicans on everything except abortion. 

 

Abortion is the single issue that I think convinced a sufficient number of Catholic voters in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which Trump took by only a few tens of thousands of votes, to hold their noses and vote for Trump on the promise that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

 

Now, imagine you're a pro-life Catholic. If Barrett is confirmed, a six-to-three conservative majority will be ensconced on the Supreme Court, which could spell doom for Roe v. Wade.

 

Catholics will have no further use for Trump. The man clearly has no use for religion: he just uses it as prop. Remember Trump's Two Corinthians debacle, his religious tests for refugees, how he secretly mocks his religious supporters, and how Trump sicced the military on protesters so he could cynically stand in front of church with a Bible?

As police sirens blared in the background, Mr. Trump, his lips set in a thin line, stood with his back to the boarded-up, graffiti-laden facade of the buttermilk yellow church.

He cradled a Bible, bouncing it in his hands as if testing its weight.

“Is that your Bible?” a reporter yelled.

“It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump responded, and hoisted up the book so reporters could see. 

Trump's racism, immorality, selfishness, greed, mendacity, vengefulness, arrogance, hubris and vulgarity are the antithesis of everything that the Catholic Church -- and every other church -- stand for.

 

If Barrett is confirmed, pro-life Catholics can vote for fellow Catholic Biden with a clear conscience, knowing that the future of abortion will rest in the hands of seven Catholics on the Supreme Court.

 

It would be irony of ironies if Trump sabotaged his own reelection bid by actually carrying out a campaign promise. Especially since it's the only one he's kept.

What Has Donald Trump Done To America?

 

Trump Has Lost the Suburbs

One of the things that is mostly unchanged during the pandemic is going on walks and bike rides. No one ever wears masks, including us, and there's really no reason to. The main difference is that we step into the street when we meet people on walks, and we ride more on streets than bike trails.

We live in a second-tier suburb west of Minneapolis, an area that was reliably Republican 20 years ago. Our representative for the longest time was a decent, moderate Republican, who was replaced by a toady Republican, who was replaced by a Democrat a few years ago.

Riding around the western suburbs you see a lot of campaign signs in people's yards. The most common yard signs are for local races -- city council and school board. The next most common signs are for state legislative races. Then Black Lives Matter signs. Then federal House and Senate candidates. Then signs for the presidential campaigns. (Higher state office elections are in two years, so there are no governor or attorney general races.)

Now, this is a fairly wealth area, with mostly white residents, a fair number of Asian Americans, but few African Americans. But there are a lot of Black Lives Matter signs in the yards, and most of those homes are owned by whites.

The majority of campaign signs are for Democrats, with a smaller number of Republicans. The most common sign for a Republican is the sacrificial lamb they put up to run for the House of Representatives: that living oxymoron, a Black Republican. I can imagine how he pitched his candidacy at the convention: "Hey," he must have said. "We got to at least pretend Republicans aren't racist. So pick me!"

I've seen a large number of Biden signs, far too many to count, often in a yard along with one or two signs for local Democratic candidates. I've even seen half a dozen punny "ByeDon" signs. But I've only seen two or three Trump signs in all my travels through the western suburbs, even to the western-most suburbs, which are semi-rural and often very wealthy with giant estates and horse farms.

One of those suburbs I ride through is Shorewood, where Trump held a fundraiser and exposed rich Minnesotans to the coronavirus the day Hope Hicks was symptomatic and the day before he announced he was infected.

Now why are there so few Trump signs? I assume that a lot of the signs for Republican city council and the House candidate are in front of houses owned by Republicans. But they don't have Trump signs. That's not the case for Biden: most Biden signs are in yards with other Democratic signs.

Now, usually supporting a Republican for the House or city council means you'd vote for the Republican presidential candidate, and usually that would mean putting that candidate's sign in your yard. That's how it was in 2012, with Romney, and even 2016, with Trump's first go-around. But not this time.

Why not? It can't be that Trump has written Minnesota off: he's come to Minnesota twice, one a while back and again a couple weeks ago, right before he came down with COVID. 

By the way, nine COVID cases have been traced to that Trump rally in northern Minnesota, and as of two days ago one of Trump's victims was still in the ICU.

I think three things are going on with the signs. 

First, Republicans are ashamed to show their support for Trump. They know what a scumbag he is, how horribly he has botched pretty much everything in this presidency, from his tax giveaway to fatcats like himself, to foreign policy giveaways to Putin and Kim Jong Un, to the trade war fiasco, to his attempted shakedown of the Ukrainian president that resulted in his impeachment, to his insults to the military (calling service members suckers and losers and saying that Gold Star families infected him while bragging about how much they hugged and kissed them), to the cataclysmic failure of his coronavirus response.

Second, Republican candidates don't want their signs next to Trump signs. They don't want their names to be associated with the dumpster fire in the Oval Office. They're hoping to squeak by anonymously based on how normal their name sounds.

Third, a lot of these Republicans just aren't going to vote for Trump. They have grown tired of the antics and the outrage. They know the outrage and unrest in Minneapolis is in large part because of Trump.

Now, there's definitely some support for Trump in rural Minnesota, and support on the Iron Range because of his support for expanded copper and nickel mining there. But it's not clear how widespread that support is -- the Boundary Waters Canoe Area will be ruined if those mines go forward, and a lot of people's livelihoods depend on tourism in that pristine area.

Foreign companies are behind the mining proposals, and they'll bail as soon as they've ripped all the metal out of the ground, leaving the BWCA a toxic waste dump. 

What Trump won't tell you is that in 2017 Ivanka and Jared got a sweetheart deal on a house in the Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, DC, which was owned by the Brazilian billionaire who was suing the US government over the Minnesota mine.

Again and again, the Trumps are guilty of one huge conflict of interest or another. The guy is a giant security risk who is just not fit to be president. 

And I think that fact has finally sunk in with suburban voters.

Did Trump Try to Infect Biden at the Debate?

The first thing Donald Trump did when he got back to the White House from Walter Reed, where he'd been hospitalized with COVID-19, was take off his mask.

By doing this he shows that he doesn't give a damn about the people that he is closest to, the people who work at the White House day in and day out: his staffers, his aides, the cooks, the maids, his own family.

We already knew that he doesn't care about the health of his donors and supporters. He went to a fundraiser last Thursday at his Bedminster golf club after he knew that Hope Hicks had tested positive. By this time Trump certainly knew he was infected, but he needed the money for his campaign, so he went anyway.

It became obvious that Hicks was infected during Trump's trip to Minnesota on Wednesday. That means the Trump campaign exposed hundreds of people to the virus.

It is also likely that Trump knew he was infected before the debate with Joe Biden on Tuesday: he arrived too late to be tested, so they let him in on the "honor system." Huh? Since when does Trump have any honor?

The White House has given incomplete and inconsistent details about Trump's COVID testing history in the days leading up to his hospitalization.

Which brings up the question: did Trump intentionally try to infect Joe Biden at the debate?

The White House has been hit by a flurry of coronavirus infections, including Trump, Melania, Hope Hicks, Kayleigh McEnany, various staff members, etc.

The cluster of infections appears to have come from the superspreader event that Trump held for Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court. Several attendees have tested positive for the disease since then, including three Republican senators, Kelly Anne Conway, Chris Christie and Rev. John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame.

Ironically, these infections may derail a Senate vote on Barrett's nomination.

Now, if Trump cares so little for the people that work directly for him on a daily basis, and his allies in the Senate, and the people who fork over millions of dollars to his campaign, and the rabid supporters who come to worship him at his rallies, how much does he care about the average American who's still on the fence about whether to vote for Biden or Trump?

Trump does not give a flying fuck about you, your kids, your grandmother or your grandfather. He wants everything back to normal so that people can go to his golf clubs and hotels and spend tons of money there because he is going broke. 

He only cares about himself, and with his resistance to wearing masks at large public events, you gotta ask: is this whack job suicidal?

Has there ever been a more worthless piece of garbage sitting in the Oval Office?

Trump Throws Military and Cops Under The Bus-Again!

"It is very, very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement and they come over to you," Trump said. "They want to hug you, and they want to kiss you because we really have done a good job for them."

Is Trump Really Infected with COVID? Or Is It Another Trump Lie?

The hallmark of Donald Trump's presidency is the constant stream of lies. He spews forth dozens of lies a day: by July of this year he had uttered 20,000 falsehoods in his presidency.

Last night the White House announced that Hope Hicks tested positive. This morning they announced that Trump was infected.

When Trump said that he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent infection, many people did not believe he was taking it. He supposedly took a two-week course of the drug and then stopped. Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work too well, now does it?

So, we gotta ask: is Trump really infected, or is this just another of the thousands of lies this guy tells day in and day out?

Is this the "October surprise" that Trump promised us?

Now you might ask, why would Trump lie about this? It exposes him to ridicule and a nation-wide chorus of "I told you so" from Democrats. 

Here's why: if he's not really infected, he won't show any symptoms, and he won't get sick. Then he can continue to claim that the disease is harmless, it's just a hoax, no worse than the common cold. Even though it kills completely healthy 19-year-old college kids.

Then he would claim that his superior genetics saved him, or that the prayers of the evangelicals and divine intervention saved his life so he can carry on the Lord's work and kick all the Mexicans out of America. All these precautions against the disease are a waste of time and invasion of our privacy and an attack on our freedom.

Given Trump's record on denying embarrassing things, like paying off two mistresses before the last election, why would he announce he was infected before he was showing any symptoms? It only invites an avalanche of scorn.

If it is a lie and the Democrats fall for it and heap the ridicule that Trump so richly deserves upon him, he can play the victim. "Oh, they're so mean to me, they just want me to die!"

And when he comes out unscathed, because he was never infected in the first place, he can claim moral superiority because of all the vitriol the Democrats unleashed on him. 

He can claim to be the victim and get the sympathy vote from the millions of Americans infected by COVID. It's an ever-growing demographic!

This is the problem with having a con artist in the oval office. You can't believe anything that comes out of there. They're always working some angle, spinning one lie or another, changing their story. 

That's gotta take a toll on you. Like it did on Trump's former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, whom police tackled when he threatened to commit suicide.

Nope. You just can't trust a man who cheats at golf.

Word to Describe Donald Trump After Last Night's Debate

Asked to describe Trump in one word or phrase, the responses were: “horrid,” “chaotic,” “unpolished,” “crackhead,” “ehh,” “puzzling,” “un-American,” “unhinged,” “an ass, but a confident ass,” “classic Trump,” “forceful,” “unhinged,” “bully,” “arrogant,” arrogant,” “typical.”

What's more disgusting is all the people of this country that are OK with this because they are just like him. 

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...?