Teachers: This one neat trick could save your life

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This is for all teachers, but only some of you will be able to do this. Depends on your topic. This may pertain mostly to biology teachers, maybe stats or math, but by extension, any science or empirical topic including history.

Never mind that the first thing bio students to know is about Hydrogen bonds, or that the first thing stats students need to know is basic probability theory. You already probably do some sort of introduction thing that gets the students oriented to your subject, with a “get to know you” component, etc.

Replace that with this. The first thing the students should encounter in your classroom is some sort of topic appropriate, level and age appropriate, encounter with pandemic reality. Many of your students are not taking this pandemic seriously. They’ve been hanging round mask-less and in close quarters with their friends all summer, maybe practicing on a team, whatever. They are not going to properly manage their own viral shed or the possibility of someone else’s pathogenic effluence. They are going to be gobbing all over each other, their desks, and you.

Now is the time to use your mad teaching skills to push at least some of your students in the direction of being more careful, and possibly, slowing the spread of the Covid-19 causing disease.

I know, I know, you are saying “we are doing distance learning, this does not matter.” But it does matter. The back to school outbreak is going to happen whether or not you, or your school, is doing distance learning, and your small part of the learning community overlaps with the rest of it. And, you never know when your college, HS administration, or school district is going to send the students back into your room. This is your chance. Take it.

Can’t think of an example of a lesson that would smart up your students, to enhance the behavioral part of their innate immune system? Don’t give me that! Of course you can, you are a great teacher! In face, once you’ve thought about it, I want to hear your ideas. Let’s get moving on this!

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126 thoughts on “Teachers: This one neat trick could save your life

  1. History class:
    Ask every student to write or type or say what they would do in each of the following situations:
    1. In 1935 Germany you work in a printing shop and you are asked to print just 100 copies of a comic that says terrible things about Jews and Gypsies and leave them in a playground.
    2. In 2020 in America you are driving past a maximum-security prison (where violent offenders are housed) and a sign says, “don’t pick up hitchhikers.” Would you pick up a 30 year old white man in a pair of tan coveralls who wants a ride?
    3. In Minneapolis in the autumn of 1918 you know that close to 600,000 Americans and 50 million humans worldwide have died during the influenza pandemic. You are the pastor (like a priest or rabbi) of a Lutheran Church and local doctors recommend that you stop holding services until the winter to save lives. You know that quarantining sick patients has helped slow the spread. Do you keep the church closed on Sunday mornings?
    Have students share their answers and their reasons and respond to the occasional student who says they would print the venomous comic, pick up the escaped assailant or open the church during an epidemic.
    Then ask, how are these cases similar to and different from not wearing a mask today? What is the definition of “being a good person” in these situations? Do the following facts change your mind?
    A recent study published in Health Affairs, for example, compared the COVID-19 growth rate before and after mask mandates in 15 states and the District of Columbia. It found that mask mandates led to a slowdown in daily COVID-19 growth rate, which became more apparent over time. The first five days after a mandate, the daily growth rate slowed by 0.9 percentage-points compared to the five days prior to the mandate; at three weeks, the daily growth rate had slowed by 2 percentage-points.
    Another study looked at coronavirus deaths across 198 countries and found that those with cultural norms or government policies favoring mask-wearing had lower death rates.
    Two compelling case reports also suggest that masks can prevent transmission in high-risk scenarios, said Chin-Hong and Rutherford. In one case, a man flew from China to Toronto and subsequently tested positive for COVID-19. He had a dry cough and wore a mask on the flight, and all 25 people closest to him on the flight tested negative for COVID-19. In another case, in late May, two hair stylists in Missouri had close contact with 140 clients while sick with COVID-19. Everyone wore a mask and none of the clients tested positive. Source: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent

    1. Jim Crider, masks for hair stylists is one thing, but the customers should not be wearing masks, as this will more likely send air back to the barbers.

    2. … customers should not be wearing masks, as this will more likely send air back to the barbers.

      References, please.

  2. Tell them to visit a hospital, someone with COVID, over winter break. They should have time to get infected and cleared before school starts.

    Schools have been open in many places, some without distancing, without outbreaks.
    The US has not reduced prevalence as much as these other countries, so it remains to be seen how much things will be different here. The reduced risk of kids is being ignored in all these protocols, except for Massachusetts which is doing 3 feet of social distancing(AKA pretending to care about social distancing but really prioritizing parents not wanting to keep their kids at home).

    1. Schools have been open in many places, some without distancing, without outbreaks.

      And some with outbreaks. Full disclosure: my wife is a teacher and will be back in school next week. She will probably get infected and then so will I.

      I would like to take this opportunity to tell you to the nearest thing to your face I can get over the internet to fuck yourself sideways.

    2. I’ll be dealing with schoolkids next week as well. Though probably not as high a risk as your wife, due to less duration. However, there will be less adhering to social distancing protocol, and if infected I would be probably at higher risk of severe consequences. I’m counting on kids not being likely to spread, though some will be close to 15.

    3. Well I guess if you don’t see me here in a few weeks you’ll know why. I don’t plan on wearing a mask or enforcing any rules on the kids.

      Does the new infections among kids in Florida mean you are now predicting another exponential burden on hospitals?
      The last one didn’t work out so well with hospitalizations down more than a third from a month ago. Are you going to hang your hat on reinstituted lockdowns in AZ and TX, or will you concede that the new cases are not as serious as the ones in April and May?

  3. “Tell them to visit a hospital, someone with COVID, over winter break. ”

    “as this will more likely send air back to the barbers.”

    Your stupidity knows no bounds.

    1. “I don’t plan on wearing a mask or enforcing any rules on the kids.”

      Thanks for demonstrating again that you are fundamentally an awful person. What asshole was stupid enough to allow you anywhere near kids in the first place, even before all of this started to happen?

  4. Yes indeed Dean, MikeN adds more utter rubbish to his lexicon. I had to do a double-take when I read his second comment – telling children to visit a hospital to deliberately get infected with COVID over the winter break so that they are ‘cleared’ (I assume he means healthy again and immune), when the school term starts up again. This remark is so far beneath contempt that to call it merely stupid is not enough. What about the child’s parents? Grandparents? Does MikeN have a shred of decency or humanity when developing his ‘logic’?

    The problem is that society is full of people who think like MikeN. They actually think they have something worthwhile to say, that their comments have some merit. That is what is so alarming.

    1. JeffH, my original suggestion was to send kids to summer camps. But alas, there is no time for that now.

    2. This remark is so far beneath contempt that to call it merely stupid is not enough

      “mann’s hockey stick is wrong — it’s in the code”
      “russia didn’t support trump in 2016 and they aren’t now”
      “cambridge analytica didn’t do anything wrong with the data it got from from facebook”
      etc., etc., etc.,

      When has mikeN ever said anything that wasn’t 180 degrees to fact or simply flat out stupid?

  5. Young people as a group are both much less aware of risks and less risk-aversive than older people are. That’s what makes the young prime military material. They certainly need something extra from their teachers in such dangerous times as these to make up for these lacks.

  6. Florida confirmed 9K new COVID-19 cases among children within 15 days as schools reopen

    From the article (headline is above)

    As of Monday, the state has confirmed 17,311 cases among those aged 14 to 17, 8,248 cases among those aged 11 to 13, 12,946 cases among those aged 5 to 10, 7,616 cases among those aged 1 to 4 and 2,609 cases among those less than 1 year old.

    To the right wing scum who will push this off as no big deal: fuck off.

    1. Out of these 50,000 cases(8% of all cases), less than 30 deaths, less than 1% hospitalized.
      For some reason, this is harming kids less than regular flu.

  7. I have a daughter who is a teacher, two more who are at the drip face plus two granddaughters also at the drip face.

    I really wish MikeN would shut the F up and give up dropping in these brain farts.

    1. Now, upstream, he’s bragging about his intention to purposely endanger kids and their families. He seems to be trying to out asshole himself all the time.

    2. Wishes are free – so you can wish for whatever you like. I wish we would generate 80% of the world’s needed power with nuclear power. See – totally free. Hell – I wish we would find out parts of America have already reached herd immunity (hello New York City). Another totally free wish.

    3. No, I don’t intend to purposely endanger kids and their families. I think the risk is low for them and will not bother with telling them not to socially distance. Kids spreading to adults is also rare as the viral load is too low. I suppose my spreading to them is a possibility, but again the risk to them once infected is also low.
      Of course for this to happen, that would require me to be asymptomatic and spreading, which Fauci said was unlikely, and still no one has answered if this is incorrect.
      It’s not just a January statement. I read that NIH put out a study on this later which at the time I thought was Fauci covering for himself but now I’m not so sure.

    4. Kids spreading to adults is also rare as the viral load is too low.

      If you have some evidence for this I would very much like to see it. As in published study, not opinion.

      If this assertion is wrong – as many suspect is is – then there will indeed be an eventually exponential rise in hospitalisations in Florida, TX, AZ and elsewhere after the academic year begins.

      You are grabbing for a quick rhetorical victory in the face of an epidemic numbers game which is deeply unwise.

  8. Given the very recent finding that a fellow from Hong Kong was reinfected by a different strain of Covid-19, your wish for herd immunity, RickA, absent a vaccine, is a great big fart in the wind. Add to this the enduring cardio-vascular damage experienced by many people who have recovered from Covid-19, and your excrutiating series of herd immunity posts over the past several months look more ridiculous than ever. They have not aged well, but alas, not much of what you write ever does. If Trump gets booted out in November, as anyone with half a brain hopes, and as looks increasingly likely, then another one of your lame predictions will bite the dust.

    1. NYC, FLA, TEX, CALIF, other countries and locaities have shown similar patterns of spikes then drops.
      Herd immunity is a plausible explanation.
      Now in certain cases this was not well managed, and the death toll is horrific. A slum in Bombay near the airport was tested, and they found 57% antibodies. However, the number of cases was never reported, because they were just burning dead bodies quick.

    2. “No, I don’t intend to purposely endanger kids and their families.”

      Given your earlier comment there is no way this is anything other than a bald faced lie.

    3. “No, I don’t intend to purposely endanger kids and their families”

      Your previous comment shows that this comment is a monumental lie. A very obvious lie, even for a serial liar like you.

    4. NYC, FLA, TEX, CALIF, other countries and locaities have shown similar patterns of spikes then drops.
      Herd immunity is a plausible explanation.

      And exactly as I predicted you are now trying to misrepresent the effects of social distancing, masking and hand hygiene as ‘herd immunity’.

      I knew you would try this.

      Busted.

  9. Jeffh says “. . . your wish for herd immunity, RickA, absent a vaccine, is a great big fart in the wind.”

    Maybe – but as I said, wishes are free.

    I wonder if the vaccine we are all waiting for will be effective against both strains of Covid-19 or just the one strain? If you can get sick with both strains, I am guessing the vaccine will only protect against one strain – but maybe that isn’t correct. We will see.

    Also, have you done the math yet? We are at over 6 million confirmed cases in the USA now. Given the estimated 10 to 20 times undetected cases, that means 60 million to 120 million people have had COVID-19 or have it now. That is 18% to 36% of the population of the USA. Some more recent science shows herd immunity as low as 24% or maybe 43%, depending on the different groups of the population (some partially immune and so forth). So we may be closer than you think to herd immunity.

    My guess is we will reach herd immunity before the vaccine is deployed in the USA. We could have reached it faster if we had managed it – but alas we are probably just going to get there in an unmanaged fashion.

    As to many people getting sick from each strain of COVID-19 – I guess I am skeptical that will be much of a problem. We will see of course – but only one confirmed instance so far – not a big deal. Since some people are partially immune just from other coronaviruses, I am guessing many (if not most) will be partially immune to the second strain. Time will tell!

    Not much we can do about it, except wait and see which happens first – herd immunity or the vaccine. And even then, we have to worry about the 2nd strain. The fun just keeps on coming in 2020.

    1. RickA, there is a problem with your math. As the number of cases explodes, either because of or just coincident with more testing, the 10x-20x ratio shrinks.

    2. MikeN:

      You are correct – of course. I was doing a rough back of the envelope calculation, and as R0 declines, the ratio of people infected versus detected would absolutely decline.

      Still – my crude calculation is enough to show that, depending on what the actual herd immunity level turns out to be – we could actually be pretty close!

      Which is why I suspect we will reach herd immunity before we get a vaccine.

  10. No MikeN, spikes and drops is not plausible evidence for herd immunity at all. According to who? You? Bzzz. Wrong answer. It is plausible evidence that other reactive measures – enforced social distancing, mandatory wearing of masks, and stopping indoor mass gatherings pushed the infection rate below 1.0. Note how many countries are experiencing rising infection rates again following the relaxing of these measures. France, Spain, Germany etc. France and Spain went through a huge first wave despite the lockdowns. Wave # 2 looks like it may eclipse wave # 1. Herd immunity will not happen until there is a vaccine or when tens of millions are dead.

    Once again, the herd immunity crowd are out to sea, and always were. Nobody in their right mind wants to be deliberately infected with this virus. As I said, it leaves an abhorrent legacy on many survivors. RickA and MikeN write as if those who have recovered from it are all healthy, robust individuals again. It is not so.

  11. The monster RickA wants to be returned to power, total disengagement with the report whilst looking as if he is anally retentive:

    Video: POTUS Non-Engaged on Laura

    he will do nothing but more harm for the USA and Americans and the wider world. USA get rid whilst you still have a chance.

  12. Sorry RickA, there will be no herd immunity without a vaccine. And even then, the recent finding of short-term reinfection throws that into doubt too. Herd immunity is being tossed out the window. And even if it did occur, it would mean tens of millions of deaths around the world and hundreds of millions of recovered patients with serious physiological legacies.

    As usual, you do not have a clue what you are talking about. Clueless indeed should be your middle name. It does not matter whether you are discussing politics, science, history etc… everything you write is clueless. I am glad that you generally add the caveats, ‘In my opinion’, ‘I think’, ‘I believe’, because your views are worth jack s***.

    1. Jeffh:

      I bet you a quarter you are wrong. Lets check back at the end of the year and see where we are at (assuming we are both still alive, of course).

  13. RickA, no country on Earth has adopted the herd immunity approach. And before you blurt out ‘Sweden did’, the fact is that it didn’t. Recent studies suggest very low percentages of populations with Covid-19 antibodies. Sweden was as low as France, which had a tight lockdown.

    Nobody in their right mind wants to be infected by this novel virus, with all of its abominable side effects. Because of that, almost every country is miles away from anywhere close to an infection threshold that might confer immunity. A minority of idiots refuse to adhere to masking and social distancing rules, and many of them are paying the ultimate price with their lives. I have no intention of joining them. When are you or your family going to deliberately infect yourselves as a magnanimous gesture to build up herd immunity? Of course you won’t. You will be at the back of the queue.

    The only people who still believe in herd immunity absent a vaccine are right wing ideologues, deluded libertarians and a tiny number of discredited epidemiologists. You fit snugly into the first or second category.

  14. I bet you a quarter you are wrong.

    RickA you would lose your bet for you are totally wrong.

    What is the threshold for reaching herd immunity?

    Lipsitch: It depends on the virus, the population and on the nature of immunity. The more contagious the virus, the higher the threshold for herd immunity. Some populations have more transmission than others because they’re so densely populated and have more interactions with one another, so that also affects the threshold for herd immunity. Last, it is a question of how good the immunity to this virus will be. If it’s not very effective or short-lived, then herd immunity becomes much harder to achieve.

    Is herd immunity the only way to end a pandemic?

    Rasmussen: Not necessarily. The [2002–2004] SARS outbreak could be considered a pandemic in that there were outbreaks outside of Asia. But only 8,000 people were infected, and it was not transmitted pre-symptomatically. It was controlled using classical epidemiological methods, like testing, tracing, quarantine and isolation.

    But for this pandemic, there’s so much transmission around the world, I think it’s the only way it ends is with a vaccine.

    Is there any possibility that we could achieve natural herd immunity to Covid-19?

    D’Souza: The data suggest that nationwide, maybe 10% of Americans have been exposed. We’re not even close to achieving herd immunity through natural infection at this point.

    Rasmussen: The idea that, “Well, we’re just stuck with it, so let’s all just get it over with and we’ll all have herd immunity”, is just not done. It would cause the deaths of millions of people and potentially the permanent disability of millions more. We can’t afford to pay that type of epidemiological price for herd immunity. We need to wait for a vaccine.

    Lipsitch: The problem is that we’ll suffer in the process. So, it’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we don’t want to do it, given the damage that we now know that it can cause.

    I don’t think it’s scientifically wrong, I think it’s morally wrong.

    Source

    Now stop being such an intellectual lummock RickA.

  15. Thanks Lionel. A complete demolition of RickA and his herd immunity argument. Those who still advocate it cannot think deeper than a puddle. It was initially discredited back in April; by now it is annihilated.

  16. JeffH, I am talking about Tex and FLA after relaxation of lockdowns. Texas reinstituted partial lockdown after cases rose, but I think Florida stayed open.

    Still the same spike then drop as NYC, with higher(recorded) caseload and lower level of deaths.
    Consistent with theory of herd immunity at a low percentage, but yes there are other explanations.

  17. More evidence of the democratic news silo you live in:

    https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2020/most_disagree_with_biden_s_false_memory_of_trump_s_charlottesville_remarks

    How could anybody still think Trump called white supremacists fine people? Trump specifically clarified in the very same speech that white supremacists should be condemned totally!

    To bad Biden is wrong about this AND has made it a big part of the campaign. His memory isn’t so good.

    Trump and his supporters will pound this to death between now and election day.

    Along with the disinfectant hoax accurate information also (i.e. inject light not bleach).

    The Russian collusion hoax fell apart and I am sure that whole mess will end up hurting democrats by election day (i.e. Dunham).

    Trump is looking pretty good for reelection (in my opinion).

    1. Trump has never been sufficiently consistent nor emphatic in his repudiation of the extreme right element of his base. Because they are a significant part of his base. Please, don’t be daft enough to deny this.

      The Russian collusion hoax fell apart

      Except that it didn’t.

    2. “The Russian collusion hoax”
      Yup, hoax, except for every intelligence agency agreeing it happened and the most recent report tripling down on it. Keep lying rickA — you’re the type of dick that does it smoothly.

  18. I suppose RickA will next deny that Trump called El Salvador, Haiti and African nations, ‘shitholes’, that he said that QAnon members ‘love their country’ because he was afraid of alienating his brainless base of deplorables by calling them what they truly are (batshit crazy), that he has never heard of Yosemite National Park and does not know the real name of the city of Minneapolis (which he has repeatedly referred to as ‘Minneanapolis’), that, despite the clear racist rhetoric espoused by groups like ‘Cowboys for Trump’, he looked forward to these clots attending his rallies, and that he was serious when he said that the injection of disinfectant into the human body was an interesting way of combatting Covid-19 that should be looked into, and that trading Puerto Rico for Greenland was a good idea because he said that‘Puerto Rico is full of poor, dirty people’ according to a senior former FEMA official who overheard Trump saying this. Trump treads a fine line whenever he opens his wretched mouth. He knows that 30% of Americans will vote for him no matter what abominable things he says or does. The remaining 20% he needs to win are the ones he has to convince and he does this through his scripted speeches (given how vacuously ignorant Trump is, this must be a daunting challenge for his speech writers). But Trump won in 2016 by the skin of his teeth – several big states went to him by less than 2%. By this stage he was not 8 points behind Clinton. The election is Biden’s to lose, and Trump and his awful family are trembling in their shoes, knowing that should Trump lose, indictments will follow.

    Trump and his administration are vile, criminal scum. No administration in history has been so stuffed wiith lawbreaking felons. Nixon’s crew were squeaky clean by comparison. And RickA knows that Trump isn’t looking good for his re-election at all. His bullshitting fools nobody here. Biden’s speech had much higher viewer numbers than Trump’s lie-ridden rant. Indeed, for a nomination acceptance speech, it tanked.

    Trump and his kleptofacists are bad for the poor, bad for the environment, and bad for the world. I am no big fan of Biden, but when he wins even I will celebrate.

    1. I will bet you a quarter that Trump wins in November!

      Then we will see who’s estimate is more correct. That can then be our proxy for who has a more reasonable view of (and understanding) of the world.

      Or we can just wait and see.

  19. RickA, if Trump ‘wins’, in November, the poor, the environment, and the world loses. We have not got time for four more years of government fire sales and looting of the Treasury that primarily benefit the rich, more mass deregulation to enrich the corporate and ruling elites, and more policies that drive climate change and environmental destruction. You really are one of the most ignorant, naive, shallow people I have ever encountered on a blog. What is worse, you revel and wallow in your ignorance. Several of us here repeatedly take apart everything you write, yet you persist. Clearly a huckster like Trump suits your level of intelligence well. If the malignant orange blot indeed wins the election, this will not be a vindication of him or his policies. Instead it will merely be more evidence of the stupidity of much of the US electorate. As a Canadian-British citizen, the below-basal level of discourse by many Trump supporters is a terrifying thing to behold. That a significant proportion of non-Americans know considerably more about American politics, economics, geography and history than many Americans is, or should be, profoundly embarrassing. It is almost beyond belief that many foreigners know more than the current POTUS about one or more of these areas, but it is certainly a fact. What this shows is that many of those worshipping the cult of Trump not only are ignorant, but that they celebrate their ignorance. Truly alarming.

  20. RickA

    I will bet you a quarter that Trump wins in November!

    Then we will see who’s estimate is more correct.

    You have your wires crossed you stupid @r$£, that was not the point of the post. You must be a crap lawyer. What have you worked on in engineering for it is best to avoid getting anywhere near whatever?

    Whatever, still hoping for another Trump term, you can bet the Repuglicans will throw democracy away completely then, makes you an enabler a regime no better than the Brown Shirts of 1930s Germany. If Trump wins it will be by fell means, we already know what a lying cheat he is.

    It was John Stuart Mill who said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

    But then you are aligning yourself with bad men, for you there is no ‘good’ excuse. Trying too make you look good is like polishing a turd.

  21. Yes indeed, Lionel, the fear is that Trump is so wrapped up in himself that he will not leave the White House when he loses and that he may actually have to be physically removed. He is a sick man – mentally that is. A clinical example of extreme, rank narcissism. The Republican convention did everything in its power to portray Trump as an empathetic, sympathetic individual, but it didn’t wash. Everything – EVERYTHING – is about him and his tender ego. Again, he is not right in the head.

  22. For those advocating lockdowns to get control of the virus,
    Should air travel be closed?
    Should subways and buses be closed?

    1. Should false dilemmas be outed as logical fallacies?

      Back in the real world:

      Should masks be worn?

      So simple and cost-effective.

      Why are the free market folks so agin?

      Weird.

  23. The Trump fits here:

    In some cases, narcissistic individuals can also exist in a chronic state of victimhood, and are sullen, resentful, petty, oppositional, and constantly aggrieved. There are different styles and severities of narcissism, and it exists on a continuum—from milder, annoying, and arrogant, to more menacing, malignant, and dangerous. At their core, narcissists are insecure, and the way they argue is designed to protect their fragile egos.

    Source

    Anybody, RickA, who gives such a creature a free pass is likely of similar disposition.

  24. Actually RickA, you exhibit classic denialism – no matter how much evidence is produced obliterating your various memes, you stick with them.

    Whichever way one looks at it, Trump is repugnant. Vile. A compulsive liar. A bully. Massively insecure. And vacuously ignorant. Yet these traits are what endears him to his base, because they are simply a reflection of themselves. Note how carefully Trump steps around criticizing the despicable, racist, sexist, misogynist and plainly crazy ideas of groups like QAnon, Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys and the other quasi-fascist groups that worship him. Without these dangerous morons supporting him there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of him winning the election in November. So he tipsy-toes around any questions put to him about what he thinks about them. “They like me very much and love their country” is his standard refrain. Trump called Biden a socialist in his embarrassing RNC speech a few days ago. Trump clearly doesn’t have a clue what socialism is, because Biden is very conservative. His views would snugly fit in center-right parties over in Europe. He is anything but a socialist. But heck, Trump lies like a rug, so what is just another lie to add to the long list?

    RickA may well be right that Trump ‘wins’ the election in November. But again, this is just more evidence of collapsing government institutions in the US and the crumbling of US empire. Trump’s election is not an indication of a healthy democracy. It is proof of a dumbed-down, politically illiterate electorate. An embarrassment.

    1. Jeffh says “RickA may well be right that Trump ‘wins’ the election in November. ”

      Thanks for your vote of confidence in my prediction. We will have to wait and see what happens (of course). I hope for the country that Trump wins by a large margin – because a close election will be a disaster for America. I will do my part to make that wish happen.

      A lot of people do see medicare for all as veering towards socialism. A lot of people see the green new deal as veering towards socialism. The riots and looting bother quite a few people. Some rioters and looters are saying that looting is a form of reparations – many see that as veering towards socialism. I think it is fair to say that the majority of people see looting as just crime – people capitalizing on the situation to take stuff that doesn’t belong to them and which they didn’t earn.

      Do we want an America which is evolving towards a colorblind society? The Martin Luther King vision of being judged by the content of your character, rather than the color of your skin.

      Or do we want an America which pays attention ONLY to skin color? The claim of white privilege, BLM, quotas, affirmative action, and the attempt to force equal outcomes, no matter the merit of the individual (or lack thereof).

      I know which America I prefer. I prefer Martin Luther King’s vision of america. BLM and antifa will not get us there, as can be plainly seen by the riots and looting.

      The rule of law is key. Equal and colorblind application of the rule of law – that is what we should strive for. Is every police action just and an example of equal and colorblind practices – no. But are we getting better? Yep – we are better today that we were in the 1900’s and a lot better than the 1800’s, which was better than the 1700’s.

      Adults should teach their children not to resist arrest – that would cut way down on police shootings. Adults should teach their children the importance of education and to go to school and try their hardest to learn – and not to take up a life of crime. After a generation or two of 6% of the population NOT committing about 50% of the murders in America, cops will stop being so afraid whenever they pull over or arrest a young black person – and that will cut down on police shootings also.

      But lets be honest. As long as one group (young black men) commit such a high per capita number of crimes (in America) – if would be foolish for people in general and cops in particular not to be afraid of that group. Of course not every member of a group share the traits of the group – so we should all be willing to give the benefit of the doubt. But unfortunately, cops tend to run into the members of the group which tend to be the criminal element of the group, more than the average person.

      Here are the arrest stats for 2016 for murder:

      https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21

      Whites were arrested for 44.7% of the murders and manslaughters, blacks 52.6%, American Indians 1.2%, Asian 1.2% and Native Hawaiian .3%. I have trouble breaking out Hispanics, as they count that as ethnicity and not race – so I am not sure how the Hispanics are distributed throughout the race numbers – but the same line of my link shows 20% of the arrested were Hispanic and 80% not Hispanic.

      So – the fear is not racism – it is common sense, born of experience. Our brains are trained to pattern match and react based on reality – so we cannot ignore reality. Should cops be trained to overcome their fear – YES. Better training is required. Cops should wait to shoot until the person actually turns with the weapon and attacks them (or others). To many cops do shoot to soon (in my opinion). Because they are afraid. And who wouldn’t be afraid of that criminal in Kenosha – shrugging off a tazer – ignoring the police – resisting arrest and going to the car to get a weapon! Any reasonable person would be afraid in those circumstances. Still – wait for the guy to turn with the knife and attack! Of course, that is easy for me to say as a Monday morning quarterback and not so easy in practice.

      There will be more riots and looting. The cops in Minneapolis will probably be found not guilty of the charged crimes at trial. The cop in Kenosha will probably be found not guilty at trial. The 17 year old kid at Kenosha will probably be found not guilty by reason of self-defense. Why? Because in each of those incidents their actions will be found to be reasonable and not criminal by a jury (that is my prediction). They are all being overcharged in an attempt to placate the mob. Will it work? Nope – in fact overcharging guarantees the loss. Will the riots and looting be justified – Nope.

      You better get your guns and be ready to protect yourself, your family, your property and your businesses. Because many cities have shown they are not ready to enforce the rule of law and do their job – but in fact are pandering to the mob and encouraging the mob and therefore encouraging more violence. So I expect many many more instances of self-defense killings. Just be aware of the rules of engagement. Wait to be attacked before you shoot. Since mobs operate on the level of the dumbest member – they will attack, so there will be plenty of chances to defend yourself from the mob (unfortunately).

      At least the 2nd amendment is safe for the foreseeable future.

      I think the riots and looting, and the weak pandering democratic city responses have locked up the election for Trump. I hope it is a landslide for Trump.

      The most dangerous time will be election eve. Republicans will vote in person (on average) and democrats will vote by mail (on average). So the vote will at first be over-represented by Republicans, and we won’t find out the total vote for weeks, while we wait for the absentee ballots and votes by mail (were allowed). Then you can expect massive numbers of the mail in ballots to be disqualified because people cannot follow the instructions (see the primaries).

      So I expect lots of anger and the crazies will be out in force, election night and every night for weeks afterward.

      Another good time to have your guns ready and prepare for the riots and looting. Maybe do a little prepping before election.

      Good luck everyone!

  25. What a truly obnoxious and frightening polemic that was RickA, if only you were only trolling but that screed looks truly believed. I have only just stopped myself puking seeing Trump on the steps of Air Force One ranting about the protesters being the source of the violence. There he was, the Criminal in Chief stoking the violence as people suffered and died, he isn’t human.

    Here is the real problem laid out:

    The real threats to American law and order are Trump’s craven enablers

    and that clearly includes you.

    1. Dehumanizing your opponent. Classic.

      Well – whatever – you are entitled to your opinion. Not that it is worth much, being foreign. I am a bit closer to the heartland than you are – being from Minnesota.

      Naturally, I don’t agree with your opinion. It seems to me it is the democratic governors and the democratic mayors who are stoking the violence. Allowing businesses to burn and rioters to riot and looters to loot. But your mileage may vary. And I guess it depends on what your news silo shows you about what is happening on the ground here in Minnesota and Wisconsin (or Portland or Chicago, etc.).

      I am only 15 miles from Minneapolis – so I bet I have a better feel for what is going on locally than you do. I probably have the same problem you do with Portland, as I am further away and so probably don’t have as good a feel for the local conditions. But I do watch a variety of Portland podcasts which cover the daily riots and give some local info.

    2. True Lionel, but rickA has posted his white supremacist full of lies about screeds before. He was a little bolder this time, claiming

      I know which America I prefer. I prefer Martin Luther King’s vision of america.

      when all of his rants show the opposite.

      But when a person is a large enough ass to imply BLM and Antifa are the dangers is a large enough ass to think someone will believe him. His ranting and conflating protesters with rioters is a classic racist move, as is his crap about danger posed by young black men. No dog whistle there, just pure KKK/white supremacist/Trump/Reagan calls to ignorant whites. No wonder he pulls out his “get your guns to protect you” line despite the evidence showing guns in the home are more of a threat to the homeowner than a deterrence to crime. If you were to attempt to make a case that American education has failed people it would be people like him you’d use as your primary evidence. The only thing we can conclude about his education is that the checks cleared on time.

      So rickA, when Kenosha police shoot a man who wasn’t threatening them 7 times in the back, then refuse to arrest for a half hour a white kid who shot 3 protesters, told them he did it, and showed them the rifle, why shouldn’t people be upset?

  26. ” NYC, FLA, TEX, CALIF, other countries and locaities have shown similar patterns of spikes then drops.
    Herd immunity is a plausible explanation.

    And exactly as I predicted you are now trying to misrepresent the effects of social distancing, masking and hand hygiene as ‘herd immunity’.

    I knew you would try this.

    Busted.

    You said the hospitalizations and deaths would explode from the new cases. There’s a lag time of 3-5 weeks and then hospitals would be overwhelmed by the exponential. Drop in cases does not affect this, as the previous 70,000 cases per day already happened(I think you said it when it was just 50,000 cases per day).
    I asked above if you would hang your hat on reinstated lockdowns. I KNEW YOU WOULD TRY THIS.

    BUSTED.

    1. You said the hospitalizations and deaths would explode from the new cases. There’s a lag time of 3-5 weeks and then hospitals would be overwhelmed by the exponential.

      That misrepresents me so badly as to pretty much be a lie. The relationship between the rate of increase in infections and the rate of hospital admissions is key. US-wide, if this gets out of control again – you know, like it was before distancing, masks, hand hygiene and all that got the numbers down – then it will trigger an exponential increase in hospital admissions. As it did earlier in the year.

      I asked above if you would hang your hat on reinstated lockdowns. I KNEW YOU WOULD TRY THIS.

      If it gets out of control again, you will have absolutely no choice but to lock down or you will begin to see health service provision collapse in the worst-affected areas. This is so obvious I shouldn’t have to labour the point.

      I just told you a comment or two later that you were grabbing at a rhetorical advantage too early in the game.

      Did you er, miss that comment?

    2. So, I repeat: exactly as I predicted you are now trying to misrepresent the effects of social distancing, masking and hand hygiene as ‘herd immunity’.

      Just like in your dishonest, self-serving world of rightwing bullshit all children are under 10. Just by way of another example of what you are doing here.

  27. RickA, Trump will win by a large margin in your dreams. He will most likely lose, and for the good of the country and humanity anyone with common sense should pray that it is by a large margin. You clearly are a complete knob, and constantly twist the words of what I and others write on here. Your right wing screed above is pure bile, all of it. It is because of blinkered idiots like you that your country and indeed the world is balanced on a precipice, and that explains why Trump might actually win. It will not be because of an informed electorate who vote based on actual policy. It is just another example of the pathological dumbing down of America, a virus of deeply-rooted stupidity and ignorance that is spreading across much of the industrialized world. The real reason lies at the heart of the neoliberal capitalist system, that is morally, ethically, politically and economically bankrupt. This system has hollowed out vast swathes of the US industrial heartland, and has ravaged the lives of millions of ordinary citizens as wealth was siphoned from the middle and bottom sectors of society to the top. It has annihilated nature across much of the biosphere, pushing many terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems to their breaking point.

    Trump, and Biden for that matter, are embedded in this wretched system from top to bottom. Biden at least offers a glimmer of hope in that his administration might slow the rate of destruction and hold some of the corporate elites that run US government at bay. Trump and the Republicans have unleashed the capitalist monster and have no intention of slowing it down. Anthropologist Jason Hickel quoted a new study by a leading economist yesterday who said that the only way we are going to keep the global surface temperature under 2 degrees C is for China and the OECD to accept zero or even negative growth economies. Which plutocracy is going to accept that? Trump and his kleptocrats are intent on reducing whatever time humanity has left on this planet to a minimum by ensuring that the monied classes can at least have their final days in the sun. His idea of a new green deal is to open up a new golf course somewhere.

    But I digress. Again, you are a complete moron, but what else but weasel words and bullcrap should we expect from a lawyer? I read through your polemic above several times to give myself the chance to ponder how someone who claims to have an education could possess such a neutered, blinkered, abhorrent mind set. You really epitomize the word I used to describe you the other day: clueless. Utterly clueless. Add in a dose of selfishness and that sums you up perfectly. Nothing you wrote has even a hint of humility or humanity. Facts were absent. Common sense and logic were missing. Your view of the world is so jaded and naive that one might as well be replying to a brick.

    The tragic thing is that there are quite a lot of simpletons like you out there who think the same way that you do. I find it incredibly difficult to envisage what kind of environment could generate such ignorance about the world. But it clearly explains how a lying huckster like Trump could appeal to a large sector of the electorate.

    1. Jeffh pointed out once again:

      It has annihilated nature across much of the biosphere, pushing many terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems to their breaking point.

      You would have thought any intelligent thinking person who bothers to carry out due diligence would appreciate the truth of that, but no not our resident Trump passing, republican voting reality illiterate.

      Here is more evidence of the bad things we are doing.

      Animal populations have plunged an average of 68% since 1970, as humanity pushes the planet’s life support systems to the edge

      Wildlife populations are in freefall around the world, driven by human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture, according to a major new assessment of the abundance of life on Earth.

      On average, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% between 1970 and 2016, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s biennial Living Planet Report 2020. Two years ago, the figure stood at 60%.

      Humans exploiting and destroying nature on unprecedented scale – report .

    2. A drop from 60% to 68% means that in two year population of all mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, dropped by 20%.

  28. Jeffh says “Facts were absent. ” Because of your cognitive dissonance, you must have glazed over my facts.

    I had the murder arrest stats for 2016, in which I reported that 52.6% of the murders and non-negligent manslaughter arrested were black. The vast number of course being black males – so about 6% of the population (black males) were arrested for 52.6% of the murders.

    Since you couldn’t absorb those facts, I have compiled the same stat for other years:

    2018 53.3% blacks arrested for murders
    2017 53.1%
    2016 52.6%
    2015 51.1%
    2014 51.3%
    2013 52.2%
    2012 49.4%
    2011 49.7%
    2010 48.7% (notable because this year whites were higher at 49.3%).
    2009 49.3%
    2008 50.1%

    So for more than 10 years, a minority of 6% of the USA has been arrested for about 50% of the murders and non-negligent manslaughter. And that is the basis for the fear by cops, which often leads to police shootings (even by minority officers).

    Those are facts. Another fact is that the entire basis of the BLM protests is a lie. Actually, more white people are killed by cops than black people. The false perception that blacks are being gunned down by cops is totally false. The real problem is resisting arrest. How many arrested by cops, who didn’t resist, were killed in police shootings? Many young black men, fed a diet of lying statistics and a victim mentality have a bit of an attitude, leading to resisting arrest and more police shootings. Those are also facts.

    To stop this we need to:

    1. Parent better. Thats right, bad parenting is the start of this problem. Parent(s) need to make their kids go to school and learn. That is a parent responsibility, not a school responsibility. The parents need to go through their schoolwork and make sure the homework is being done every day. That is called parenting. The parents need to quiz the kids on their spelling, on their addition facts and multiplication facts and so on. Know when the tests and quizzes are and make sure the kids study for them. This is all on parents.
    2. Kids need to try in school. You can get a good education in any school in America if you are motivated and try. That is on the parents and the kids. If you are a minority poor person with good high school grades, you can very very likely go to college on a free ride. Then you can get a good high paying job.
    3. Stop engaging in crime. Crime is easy money (that is the perception) – but go to school, get good grades and get a good job. That is the harder, but better path. That leads to two parent households and better outcomes for kids.
    4. Stop resisting arrest. If kids had a better education they would understand the lies being fed to them by mostly democratic leaders who need them to be victims for their own political power. That would tamp down the attitude and lead to less police shootings.

    So was slavery evil – YES. Did America stop it – YES.
    Was Jim Crow evil – YES. Did America stop it – YES.
    Things are better in America than they ever were before, and getting better all the time.

    A good free education through high school is available in America. A good mostly free college education is available for poor minority students with good grades. So good paying jobs are available in America – if desired and worked for.

    So we need good parenting and motivated kids and we can solve this decades long problem in one generation.

    I think liberals and progressives have veered far off course in America and that is why Trump will win in November.

    1. RickA’s view obtained from only sources tuned to his epistemic bubble:

      Actually, more white people are killed by cops than black people…

      That is a lie. Whether a lie by yourself or you believing lies from others here is a corrective:

      US police kill up to 6 times more black people than white people

      There is more than that, in fact I have downloaded a huge spreadsheet which makes your assertion even farther off the reservation.

      Trump is evil, and by cheerleading for him in the manic manner that you do makes you evil too.

      Portland clashes: Trump accused of encouraging violence after shooting

      That caravan of Trump supporters disrupting a generally peaceful gathering, a caravan enticed into confrontational antics by Trump’s rhetoric.

      RickA, your mask has not so much slipped as fallen off, and the sight is ugly.

    2. Lionel:

      You cherry picked data is for “some parts of the country” – while I am talking about the entire USA. Why don’t you report the data for the entire country for a couple of years (since you have a giant spreadsheet, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you).

      Lets see the data for all of America!

    3. Circling back to an earlier point that Lionel says I lied about, namely that more white people are killed by cops than black people – Lionel said “That is a lie. ”

      Here is a source which shows that this is not a lie:

      https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

      In each year 2017-2020, more white people were killed by cops than blacks.

      So I am certainly not lying – or even wrong.

      Lionel is awesome at debating.

  29. RickA, you are so deeply ensconced in your own ignorance and indoctrinated racism that you are unable to understand how lame and empirically and morally bankrupt your opinions are. I don’t know why I even respond to your posts, with their sophomoric level of analysis. You and I exist on very, very different intellectual levels. You frequently comment on science, politics, economics and society on this and other blogs, but your views are essentially at the basal level of simplistic discourse. That doesn’t stop you from spewing vacuous diatribes as if they contain nuggets of wisdom. They don’t – far from it.

    The US is an institutionally racist country. Period. You can espouse the simplistic, linear bullshit all you like on here, citing statistics ad nauseum while habitually ignoring a wealth of factors that underpin those statistics. Climate change deniers do it all the time, so you are in good company.

    Everything that I say in response to your wafer-thin analysis will sail right over your pin-sized head so why bother? You are a textbook-level example of an indoctrinated right wing fool. Your modus operandi explanation of why Trump will win in November is so utterly puerile that I did a double-take reading it. You honestly think that ‘liberals and progressives have veered far off course’ in a country run by corporations, where neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out the industrial heartland and where the richest 1% control almost 50% of the country’s wealth? What has veered off course, you nitwit, is a political-economic system that commodifies everything including life itself and which is like a snake slowly devouring itself from the tail. Those paying the biggest price for this system are the poor and the environment.

    I seriously find ignoramuses like you tiring. Again, we exist on very different intellectual levels as well as in our basic respective humanities. Your jaw-dropping ignorance is exasperating and I am sick of reading your worthless screeds. Your epitomize everything that is going wrong in the world. It is hardly surprising that you support a dangerously unstable, selfish, sexist, misogynistic, ignorant, anti-environmental, extremely narcissistic individual as POTUS.

    1. … Your epitomize everything that is going wrong in the world. It is hardly surprising that you support a dangerously unstable, selfish, sexist, misogynistic, ignorant, anti-environmental, extremely narcissistic individual as POTUS.

      +1 for that and your previous. You have now hoist RickA by his own petard over a half dozen times on this thread alone. One cannot have an informed discussion with such an educationally limited, intellectually challenged and selfish ideologue.

    2. Then skip over my posts and don’t respond. I find your name calling tedious as well. I am writing for the lurkers here, not for you anyway. I think it is important to inject a little of the opposing viewpoint into this tiny bubble. So I am performing a public service here. You are welcome!

  30. ” I am writing for the lurkers here…”

    The lurkers you target are people like you: racists, white supremacists, bigots, misogynists, and right wing scum in general.

    “So I am performing a public service here”

    You don’t perform a public service by repeatedly lying and supporting tyranny.

    1. Well said, Dean. By lurkers I assume that RickA meant people with similarly racist, bigoted, pro-corporate, anti-environmental and anti-humanity views like his own.

  31. RickA

    You cherry picked data is for “some parts of the country” – while I am talking about the entire USA.

    Did you bother to read the New Scientist article without prejudice? Clearly not.

    From earlier:

    Well – whatever – you are entitled to your opinion. Not that it is worth much, being foreign….

    My being foreign has sod all to do with this, especially given that what happens in the USA affects all across the world to some degree. It is clear that those such as myself have a deeper understanding of what drives the USA than you do. From outside the USA appears mentally ill. This is clear from a being such as Trump can actually reach the post of POTUS. He is just a front man, a puppet, being used by evil people in the background. The very fact that one family has managed to gather the ropes of power, even if by a form of proxy, is a sure sign that the USA is sick in the head and people spouting the morally bankrupt stuff that you do is evidence of that. That you double down with BS rhetoric when shown reality is evidence of how sick you are.

    Shame that you cannot achieve the morality that he after whom your state capital is named espoused.

    The psychotic rarely realises how mentally ill they are, it takes an outsider, a specialist in the field, or one widely read to make an accurate diagnosis.

    1. You sound a bit unhinged yourself – calling an entire country mentally ill. But again – you are entitled to your opinion. Just as I am entitled to my opinion.

      The difference between us is that I get to vote in November 2020 in the USA, while you do not.

  32. RickA claims to write for the ‘lurkers’ who read Greg’s blog.

    What a load of nonsense. If anyone believes a thing RickA writes, with its puerile oversimplicity and a total lack of depth or dimension, then they are are truly naive and gulllible. RickA writes some of the most nauseatingly simple piffle I have ever read. In a face-to-face debate several of us here could take him apart. I am reading books by scholars like John Ralston Saul, Sheldon Wolin, Chris Hedges and Jared Diamond right now. I can just imagine the authors that RickA consults: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other right wing hacks. Again, RickA lives in a fantasy world. He has no humility, humanity or knowledge. He is about as deep as a puddle.

    1. You cannot help but respond to my posts. Here I thought you were going to ignore me – but you cannot.

      I get it. You are afraid to leave my posts uncontested – because my point of view is so accurate and reasonable. So you have to insult and name call – because what if people read my posts and agree. You perceive my posts as dangerous and have to reply and comment on them.

      Of course, you name calling does nothing but undercut your own arguments – while my posts enhance my arguments.

      Rather than fantasize about face-to-face debates, why don’t you beat me here – in writing. So far you are not doing a very good job.

      By the way – I like science fiction authors.

  33. Rather than fantasize about face-to-face debates, why don’t you beat me here – in writing. So far you are not doing a very good job.

    Said the Red Queen, or was it the Mad Hatter. That really is looking glass stuff RickA.

    BTW calling somebody for what they are is not name calling.

    As for calling a whole country mentally ill, I didn’t for the implication was that it was the rogue government you have, and those who believe in it, that are mentally ill, this is obvious and so true.

    1. You said “From outside the USA appears mentally ill.”

      I don’t see anything there about the government – but whatever gets you through the day.

      Your debate skills are awesome, by the way.

  34. RickA, one response to your last post: BULLSHIT. Given that you are an intellectual lightweight, the reason I debunk your nonsense repeatedly is in case someone does meander in here who might just believe some of your piffle. You are a linear thinker. Every one of your ‘factual’ posts lacks in-depth analyses. Every damned one. You are unable to think outside of the box. Again, I could obliterate you in a one-on-one debate because you couldn’t selectively delete inconvenient truths. Your post about liberals and progressives was as insidiously stupid as anything else you have written. To be fair, liberalism has been dying a slow death since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Neoliberal capitalism accelerated its demise because, instead of challenging the evolution of the US into a corporate state, the liberal elites supported it. They openly embraced expansionist wars, tax cuts for the rich and attendant redistribution of wealth, austerity programs, mass de-regulation and perverse corporate subsidies. To be honest, I am not at all convinced that Biden will challenge the corporations that run US policy. All indications are that he will continue what Clinton and Obama dud and ensure that government there remains beholden to corporate power. They control every lever of US government, rendering the citizen impotent. Trump tapped into the discontent generated by 36 years of unfettered neoliberalism by promising to confront it and to take back and revitalize communities across the US heartland. But, as is now clear, he was lying. Just one of many. Trump has turned over mre and more of polucy-making decisions to corporate lobbyists. His malignant administration is stuffed with a record number of them. He is gutting the Treasury and gutting longstanding laws and regulations thar were put in place by both Republican and Democrat administrations over the past 50 years. None of this is aimed at revitalizing the US heartland, it us aimed at further enriching the corporate elites, many who fled the US in the 1980s via offshoring and outsourcing to set up polluting sweat shops in poor countries desperate for foreign investment. Regulations in many of these countries – the ‘shitholes’ Trump referred to in one of his many obscene moments – were virtually non-existent. Instead of working towards global harmonization so that corporations could no longer flee to poverty-ridden countries to do as they liked, Trump instead lured them back to the US with promises that they could set up their sweat shops here, through the evisceration of long-standing laws protecting human health and the environment, tax cuts and other perks. At the same time, instead of blaming neoliberal capitalism and mechanization for America’s terminal decline, he instead lashed out at soft targets: migrants, immigrants and refugees – the tried and trusted method of scapegoating – to garner support from the ranks of angry unemployed coal miners, auto assembly line workers and others from the gutted industrial heartland. Trump has had to carefully walk a fine line between this wretched scapegoating, which has a racist taint, and appearing not be be racist at the same time. His base soak up the attacks on foreign nations and on socialism for America’s decline because scapegoating works. It worked for Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and Mao. People are angry, but their anger is misdirected: the real culprit is neoliberal capitalism and its rapacious lust for profit maximization. Trump supporters, at least the majority of them, do not have a clue about much of anything, let alone politics and economics. Trump and the Republican Party are the party of the ruling elite. The fact that Trump, in another of his insanely myopic moments, suggested trading Puerto Rico for Greenland because ‘Puerto Rico is filled with poor, dirty people’ says everything one needs to know about his mindset. Ignore the fact that this statement was despicable all on its own; what it shows is that he is completely out of touch with the real world of poverty. What makes Trump’s base so ironic is that a great many of them are ‘poor and dirty’ as well. They are just too ignorant to connect the dots.

    The fact that Trump’s administration is stocked from top to bottom with rich bankers and corporate lobbyists is proof that he is not remotely interested in alleviating poverty or in creating a socially and economically just nation. Again, this is hardly rocket science, yet when I read gumbified statements from grade-school thinking neophytes like you it makes me realize just how deep in the shit we really are. People with your mindset are everywhere and are a product of the dumbing down of society. You hardly read anything outside of your simplistic bubble and the views you express are no higher than sophomoric.

    Here is an example of your mindset. Trump repeatedly says outrageous things and lies as much as he breathes. Two years ago, as I said above, he referred to El Salvador, Haiti and various African nations as ‘shitholes’. Notwithstanding that a statement like this from any head of state should require their immediate dismissal or at least reprimand, in the following days I saw frankly pathetic attempts from his right wing base to defend it. Indeed, his base are constantly busy, because Trump makes vacuous, innane, childish, factually incorrect statements every day. The point wasn’t whether the nations Trump described as ‘shitholes’ were that way or not. For sure most are desperately poverty-ridden. The point was to better understand why they are that way and the important tole that the US and its proxies have played in creating and fomenting these abhorrent conditions. There are volumes of empirical evidence to prove this, but of course people like you are not remotely interested in understanding more nuanced truths. Your worldview is simple and an illusion. It was quickly evident to m e reading your opinions that they are as deep as a puddle. No in-depth thought or analyses, just wafer-thin ideological posturing.

    1. Jeffh:

      You call bullshit – but then admit ” the reason I debunk your nonsense repeatedly is in case someone does meander in here who might just believe some of your piffle.”

      That is pretty much what I said:

      “You are afraid to leave my posts uncontested – because my point of view is so accurate and reasonable. So you have to insult and name call – because what if people read my posts and agree.”

      Your debating skills are also awesome.

  35. Predictably, the orange narcissistic stain weighed into the problems in Kenosha by defending the 17-year old shooter who murdered two people. But of course he did. According to Wisconsin law, the shooter was underage and illegally crossed state lines with an assault weapon. It is clear that he wasn’t in Kenosha to protect property (he lives 20 miles away) but to get the opportunity to use his gun on someone. Note how the police drove by him as he raised his hands in the air while bystanders were pointing at him and shouting that he killed two people. Now imagine if the shooter had been an African-American teenager. The police would at least piled onto him, or more likely would have shot him. This is Trump’s America, folks.

    Trump will never, ever criticize the vile scum that support him because he is afraid of offending his deplorable base, and thus he will tipsy toe in his responses to questions about any extreme right wing, Nazi sympathizing militia group that shoots and kills people or violently attacks them.

    Jason Klepper’s videos at Trump rallies are informative. Indeed, Trump may be the first POTUS with a truly cult base that worships him and would vote for him no matter what he says or does. This means that he and the Republican Party can forever push policies that harm the people who slavishly adore him so long as Trump pushes the right buttons: gun control, immigration, security, Antifa, religion. Trump could shoot an innocent person in broad daylight and they would support him; he could repeatedly use racial slurs in a speech and they would support him; he could openly support the dumping of highly toxic wastes in rivers and wetlands, or allow mining in every National Park, and they would support him; he could delist every endangered species or population of wildlife in the United States, and pass a law allowing for the hunting of Bald Eagles and they would support him.

    I am sure that RickA is one of them. He is a part of the cult. It seems that many, perhaps most Trump supporters are. They don’t realize or don’t care that they and most Americans are being shafted by Trump and the Republican Party. All Trump has to do is to deflect attention away from his systematic looting of the Treasury and the mass re-distribution of wealth to the monied class with rants about socialism, security, immigration and guns and his base are like rats to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

    1. Jeffh

      It is clear that he wasn’t in Kenosha to protect property (he lives 20 miles away) but to get the opportunity to use his gun on someone. Note how the police drove by him as he raised his hands in the air while bystanders were pointing at him and shouting that he killed two people. Now imagine if the shooter had been an African-American teenager. The police would at least piled onto him, or more likely would have shot him. This is Trump’s America, folks.

      I look forward to our protagonists excuse for such biased behaviour. I doubt it will be worth reading as he will simply ‘wibble’ again.

      As I remarked up thread it was Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric at the top of the steps of Air Farce One two days ago that made me retch, and yet our resident Repuglican gives Trump a pass. This is why I have now re-classed him as ‘evil’ (he did crow too soon for he cannot help his abhorrent ideology). Trump is the epitome of evil so any that give him a free pass must be classified similarly.

      I admire your stamina in keeping his toes to the fire. I know we will never change him, all we can do is show him up for the distasteful individual he is. One who thinks skating around the truth is evidence of good honest debating technique.

    2. ” because my point of view is so accurate and reasonable”

      You’ve never told the truth in your life — nobody who sees what’s going on thinks you are accurate and reasonable — except for the people who are, like you, hard core racists who want the days of segregation back.

  36. RickA

    I don’t see anything there about the government – but whatever gets you through the day.

    You don’t see anything because you are blind to nuance and allusion. Think of it another way, that the USA should elect one so devoid of any human decency, any sense of responsibility allowing corporations and the wealthy to further hollow out the life of the people of the USA is indicative of a mental malaise.

    This is not helped by decades of patchy and incoherent, at times illogical, education policies across the US as a whole. When education is not well rounded the propaganda can take over. It is clear that you fit in this too, even though you think of yourself as well educated you are not. The fact that there are more who think like you at the top, in the upper echelons of state legislatures too, means that this lack of an understanding perspective on all the issues facing humanity right now is pervasive.

    Not everybody in the USA is mentally ill (although from outside it appears that the shrinks make an excellent living in the USA) but as a collective the behaviour of many and the psychosis demonstrated by more than a few suggests that as an entity the USA is mentally ill.

    As for debating skills, I have long since given up any real debating with one who shifts the goal posts, avoids actually answering pointed questions and evades answering points they don’t like (cognitive dissonance), now I simply lay out the facts and describe how morally challenged you appear.

    1. Thank you for your clarification that not everybody in the USA is mentally ill. Very kind and gracious of you to concede that.

      And yes, shrinks do make an excellent living in the USA. How sad that they must not wherever you live (I have a vague recollection it is the UK perhaps?).

      The 17 year old who was protecting a car dealership in Kenosha was attacked each time he defended himself. So the videos make out a very convincing case for self-defense. So I don’t think the 17 year old will be found guilty of murder – but we will see.

      Meanwhile, in Portland an antifa terrorist hunted down and killed a Trump supporter in cold blood (again video and audio is very helpful in showing this). The killer had previously been arrested for carrying an illegal gun at an earlier protest/riot but was released and not charged by the city. So it will be interesting to see how Kenosha handles the illegal gun the 17 year old was carrying – he might get charged with a misdemeanor for that.

      Trump is headed to Kenosha today and I bet he will once again pick up more support. It is almost as if the democrats are handing him the election, by supporting terrorists who are attacking people defending private property (Kenosha) and counter-protesting against the terrorists (Portland).

      Law and order always trumps chaos and lawlessness – and the democrats are going to learn that lesson (once again).

      It will be fun to see all the usual suspects defending antifa terrorists and excusing their murderous behavior, while at the same time attacking people for defending themselves and their property from those very same terrorists.

      Go ahead – make my day!

  37. The 17-year old was not defending a car dealership, you klutz. He had no reason for being in Kenosha other than to be looking for trouble. If a mob had attacked him, they would easily have overcome him. The first man he murdered was trying to disarm him and was shot in the head. Others pursued him and tried to take away his assault rifle and he shot one of those in the chest (who later died) and another in the arm. Once again, if a mob of protesters had wanted to beat up the 17 year old kid, it would have been easy for them. That was not their intent. They tried to take away his weapon and he shot them in cold blood. For being underage and illegally crossing the state line with a loaded assault weapon, the teenager is guilty as charged. But he is a murderer and deserves to be locked up for a long time.

    When I was 17 I was playing baseball, hockey, birdwatching, camping and hiking. This 17 year old kid gets his kicks playing with lethal weapons and apparently looking for people to shoot. You are a complete idiot, RickA. Each of your posts stoops to vile depths of depravity. You can’t debate yourself out of a soaking wet paper bag. I routinely debunk the garbage you write on here but when it comes to politics, science and economics you ignore 99% of what I and others write, for one simple reason: because it obliterates your one-dimensional drivel.

    Your worldview fits snugly in with the sick mindset of neo-Nazi groups like Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys and others who adhere to their brownshirt philosophies. You know and care diddly squat about neoliberalism and its malcontents. Your politics is solely based on the kind of right wing bilge spewed out by Fox News. You have the audacity, the gall to talk about law and order in a country run largely by right wing Republicans.

    You are a pathetic.

    1. Well good luck with your theories. I am happy to wait out the courts and see what happens. I suspect you will be very very disappointed.

    2. “The 17 year old who was protecting a car dealership in Kenosha was attacked each time he defended himself.”

      Protecting a car dealership? Where did you come up with that bullshit? The news stories state he was wandering around with his rifle (22 caliber) and happened to shoot someone while they were near a dealership. He showed up in kenosha because a group of organized scum, some militia, put out a call for bigots and racists to join them. He was allowed to leave — ignored by police after he and others told them he had shot people — even though they were arresting others for being out after curfew, which he was as well. They even gave him water before he left.

      Why? Pretty effing obvious to anyone with a functioning brain: he wasn’t black. The danger of people like you is not just your racism, or your willingness to make up pure bullcrap to defend things that no moral person would defend: it’s your willingness to do it all the effing time.

    3. dean:

      You might want to view some of the actual video and educate yourself about what actually happened.

      Here are some links which show and analyze the video that is available:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSU9ZvnudFE&feature=youtu.be&bpctr=1598980802

      https://concealednation.org/2020/08/video-in-depth-video-analysis-of-kenosha-wi-shootings-involving-kyle-rittenhouse/

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7SooO03bJ8&t=1757s

      Hopefully these video compilations will be helpful to you in learning what actually happened, and more importantly to shed light on the self-defense case that appears to exist from the video and audio evidence so far.

  38. RickA

    Do you really believe the crap you post? I guess you must or is it just plain ol’ fashioned trolling?

    The 17 year old who was protecting a car dealership in Kenosha was attacked each time he defended himself. …

    Correction:

    Kyle Rittenhouse, a “Blue Lives Matter” fanatic, Donald Trump supporter and militia member, has been charged with murder. It is alleged that having travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin to point his assault rifle at unarmed protesters, he shot two people dead. He was later heard claiming: “I just killed somebody.”

    While the Trump campaign quietly disavowed this enthusiastic supporter, insisting he had “nothing to do with our campaign” (as though anyone had suggested otherwise), the president himself defended Rittenhouse, saying he appeared to have been acting in self defence.

    Source

    By repeating Trump who is most assuredly bad news for the USA makes you as bad as you are so fond of cheer-leading for him. You are repeating Trump’s lies, which in turn makes you a liar. Now stop whinnying about name calling and own the labels which you earn time and again.

    Another example:

    Meanwhile, in Portland an antifa terrorist hunted down and killed a Trump supporter in cold blood…

    You are clearly, to use an old expression, off your rocker as such biased bilge shows. There are no such things as antifa terrorists. Peaceful protests yes, until a large gang of armed thugs decides to drive through spraying the protesters with nasties from assault rifles. Driving through in huge pick-ups and causing pain and discomfort to peaceful protesters as you go is certain to provoke a response. Now that is not to say that the deadly shot came from a protester, it probably did not. I am sure the Trump criminal regime is organising agents provocateur to infiltrate to mkae peacefull protests look malign – a trick as old as repressive regimes.

    Patriot Prayer, which has reportedly provoked and engaged in clashes with protesters since it was founded in 2017, has regularly held demonstrations in Portland.

    The governor of Oregon slammed Patriot Prayer and other far-right groups that took part in the caravan in a statement that they came to the city “looking for a fight”.

    “Every Oregonian has the right to freely express their views without fear of deadly violence. I will not allow Patriot Prayer and armed white supremacists to bring more bloodshed to our streets,” Democratic Governor Kate Brown said. “Time and again, from Charlottesville to Kenosha to Portland, we have seen the tragic outcome when armed right-wing vigilantes take matters into their own hands. Gun violence is never, ever the answer.”

    Source

    Your arguments really are puerile RickA.

    1. ” He was later heard claiming: “I just killed somebody.”

      He actually called a buddy in his hometown and told him that.

      Yes, rickA thinks antifa is an organization, despite there being no evidence of such (because they aren’t). He thinks they are terrorists because he claims they wear masks. Odd that he doesn’t recognize any of the white supremacist groups who actually are organized, causing violence, carrying guns, and wearing masks, the same way. What could be the difference? If only there were some clear, simple, visual distinction he draws between the two sets: one that opposes oppression, racism, bigotry, and restriction of rights, the other that actively support it because the criminal in chief wants them to.

    2. “You might want to view some of the actual video and educate yourself about what actually happened.”

      Sorry shithead: stories written by people at the scene say he was wandering around and happened to get in an argument near the dealership. None of the people there say he was protecting it.

    3. Ha ha ha – you are so funny. Peaceful protests? Sure, before curfew – but then almost every other night, after curfew the protests turn into riots and looting.

      Portland police declared riots 24 (at least) of the 90 or so nights of “peaceful protests” – and the fires, looting, riots and attacks are anything but peaceful. Your calling riots peaceful protests is hilarious.

      Meanwhile, a counter-protest triggers a cold blooded murder and you defend murder as “provoked”. What about the pain and discomfort caused by the antifa terrorists? Oh – I get it – you only defend protests which support your point of view. That makes sense – as you are foreign and don’t understand the 1st amendment or free speech.

    4. dean:

      I heard he was calling 911 to report that he had just killed somebody. If so, the 911 records will support that. Then I heard he ran after hearing someone yell something like “Get him . . .” or words to that effect.

  39. Yes Lionel, unfortuneately this blogs’ right wing fanatic and Trump cult member RickA is deluded enough to believe the crap he writes.

    Imagine his refrain if an armed 17-year old Antifa supporter had confronted a mob of neo-Nazi Proud Boys, and had shot three of them (two to death) that were trying to take away his assault rifle. RickA would be baying that the 17-year old was a terrorist and that he should be locked up forever. His hypocrisy knows no limits.

    The real terrorists in the US are, and have always been, those on the far right. Those who loathe government, like Timothy McVeigh, and the current crop of fascist-worshipping, Trump supporting extremist groups. An American friend of mine says that the biggest terrorist organization in the US is the NRA. Antifa isn’t an actual organization at all – just a very loosely affiliated bunch of people who oppose the neo-fascist direction that the Republican Party seems to be embracing.

  40. Trumpista dirty work.

    The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions. It was an elegant solution to a complicated problem.

    The Trump administration has a long history of protecting coal companies, and unfortunately for Novacheck, a representative was sitting in the audience during the talk: Catherine “Katie” Jereza, then a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity.

    Jereza fired off an email to DOE headquarters—before Novacheck had even finished speaking, according to sources who viewed the email—raising an alarm about Seams’ anti-coal findings. That email ignited an internal firestorm.

    Apart at the Seams: Trump Thugs Blocking Clean Energy Transmission

    Non so dirty as a Trump backing Republican and dirty energy companies.

    Americans wake up and ditch Trump, for your own good and the remainder of the planet.

  41. “like Timothy McVeigh”

    Don’t insult rickA’s heros. I don’t need to be made sicker by his defense of McVeigh.

  42. “Self-defense” the Trump cultist opines.

    What was Rittenhouse, a 17-year old gun nut, doing there is the first place? Again, if he was an armed African-American teenager protesting police and right wing militia violence (of which there are volumes of examples) and he shot to death two people trying to disarm him RickA would be screaming for his head. But since RickA is a right wing fascist-sympathizing bigot, there are only good fascists and evil left-wing extremists in his opinion.

    As an aside, more irony: Trump is trying to claim he is the security candidate for POTUS while deliberately inciting violent unrest among his base. Republican strategists know that this is their only chance of winning the November election: get Trump to incite violence and anger and then claim to be the best ones to restore law, order and calm.

    What a despicable lot the Republicans are.

  43. RickA, you are so awesome at debating that you habitually ignore points I have continually raised about the devastating evfects of neoliberal capitalism, about Trump’s regime being filled with corporate lobbyists, his regime’s record on a range of environmental laws and regulations, his regime’s attempt to lure outsourced corporations back by gutting laws protecting biodiversity and human health and by slashing taxes for the rich, and the textbook number of humuliating gaffes he makes. You live in Minnesota and Trump cannot even pronounce the name of Minneapolis properly – he constantly refers to it as ‘Minneanapolis’. How embarrassing. As I have said before, he needed to read slowly off cue cards to describe Yellowstone National Park and Old Faithful, and clearly never heard of Yosemite or Giant Sequioa trees. He lives in a right wing intellectual void. His regime us filled with more felins than any other administration in US history and by a wide margin. But to return to the most important point, he blames immigrants, migrants, refugees, minorities and socialism for America’s terminal decline. Not once has he ever hinted that neoliberal capitalism and the ‘Washington consensus’ as well as mechanization have taken away the illusory greatness he claims to want to make America again. One corporation after aother showed nada loyalty to the communities they grew on, because their overriding – indeed sole – priority is profit. So decades of laws that were implemented to protect the health and welfare of workers and to attain a cleaner environment reduced profits and increased overheads, so thousands of companies, who didn’t give a damn about the communities they served, upped and fled to the underdeveloped south. Many were still making healthy profits in the US, but since profit maximization was all that mattered, they closed US operations to set up their sweat shops in Haiti, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Honduras or whichever country would alliw them to pay slave wages under inhumane working conditions and to dump their toxic wastes cheaply into the air and water instead of the more costly but environmentally safe means of disposal. Many if these poor nations are goverened by corrupt regimes that are under the thumb of the US and its proxies. When World Bank head Lawrence Summers famously said in a leaked 1991 memo that the ‘it is logical that the US should dump its toxic wastes in less developed African nations’ he was simply expressing the true attitude of developed nations towards the poor nations of the south. Jason Hickel has written extensively about this in his recent book, ‘Divide’, but there are others: ‘Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor’ by Tom Athanasiou, ‘Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation’ by Patrick Bond, and others. You have noy got a clue how the real world works RickA, because your head is firmly rammed up your butt with your meaningless statistics that lack any kind if in-depth analysis as to why.

    As I said, Trump has stuffed his regime with corporate lobbyists to head agencies tasked with protecting human health and the environment. If it wasn’t so absurd, it would be funny. Bernardt, a coal and oil lobbyist as Interior Secretary; Perry-Pendleton, a corporate lawyer to head the Buerau of Land Management; Wheeler, a coal lobbyist to head the Environmental Protection Agency; Skipworth, a former executive at Monsanto to head the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Their job is to dismantle and destroy any impediments to corporate profit. They are gutting environmental laws as part if Trump’s grand plan to lure back those corporations that fled the US in the 1980s and 1990s to set up their polluting sweatshops in the south. Period. No ands, ifs or buts. The media hardy says anything about it because they are as beholden to this sick, depraved, ecocidal borderline genocidal political/economic system as the governments that are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. Trump supporters are too brazenly stupid to understand what Trump and the Republican Party’s endgame is. I read their gumbified comments on social and mainstream medua outlets and they are being played like a fiddle. The masses are indeed asses, to coin a well-worn phrase. A few progressives can see the abyss towards which we are heading, but they are swamped by a sea of ignorance and stupidity. RickA epitomizes it with his puddle-deep comments that lack any kind of rigorous analysis. Instead, he throws meaningless statistics at us without looking even remotely for the more complex factors that underpun them. It us impossible to debate or even discuss relevant issues with someone with a grade-school level understanding of important fields. RickA’s woeful ignorance explains why democracy is in deep

    1. I guess because the rhetoric has stepped up lately because the election is close – so there have been lots to say. Also, the peaceful protests, which turn into riots almost every night in Portland, and which are permitted and even encouraged by the local democratic politicians are quite irritating. Seeing the local business being burned out with the tacit permission of the politicians, who have ordered the cops to stand down, is extremely troubling to me.

      Also, the fine people hoax attack has been on the rise lately. I heard it again this morning on my local MPR station. They insinuate that Trump called white supremacists fine people, when if you look at the transcript you can see very plainly that he was calling the people who came out against tearing down statutes as fine people – but he condemned totally the white supremacists (white nationalists and neo-Nazis).

      Here is the portion of the transcript which shows this:

      REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

      TRUMP: I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

      REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

      TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

      REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

      TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.

      REPORTER: I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?

      TRUMP: No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call ‘em. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country. Does anybody have a final – does anybody have a final question? You have an infrastructure question.

      So once you know that the fine people hoax is fake news, you cannot help but see it everywhere. It is a central plank of the Biden campaign – and it is not true. The President didn’t call neo-nazis fine people – he condemned them totally – and yet the fake news has brainwashed millions and millions of people by editing out Trump’s condemnation of new-nazis and the portion of the speech where he clarified that the fine people were against tearing down statutes.

      I cannot help but find that irritating. So maybe that makes me post more and push back against what I believe is incorrect information and erroneous beliefs.

      Ditto for the drinking bleach hoax – also fake news – and yet millions wrongly believe it.

      Ditto for Russian collusion – also fake news and yet millions wrongly believe it.

      You, on the other hand have been fairly quite lately – I wonder why?

    2. You, on the other hand have been fairly quite lately – I wonder why?

      Busy.

      As I said upthread, Trump has never sufficiently distanced himself from the far right because they are part of his base. I asked you not to be stupid enough to deny this well-documented fact. So you dodged the point instead.

      Your dishonesty is as loathsome as ever.

  44. “Your dishonesty is as loathsome as ever.”

    One presidential candidate has condemned violence from both sides. One has lied about BLM and antifa, while defending Q-Anon and failing to speak out about proud boys, boogaloo, and the other white supremacist terrorists.

    a) Any guess which candidate is which?
    b) Any guess which poster here also lies about BLM and antifa, and defends the white supremacists and neo-nazis on the right? (Hint: he’s a hard core racist and congenital liar himself)

  45. RickA who lives in an alternate universe.

    Ditto for the drinking bleach hoax – also fake news – and yet millions wrongly believe it.

    There is no doubt that Trump suggested using disinfectant by injection, and his rambling mutterings included mention of bleach, also with allusions to ingestion.

    For your lying eyes RickA:

    President Trump Suggests ‘Injecting’ Disinfectant as Coronavirus Cure | NBC New York

    As if that isn’t enough there is more here:

    During Thursday’s coronavirus briefing the president floated the idea of ‘an injection inside’ – and medical doctors were quick to denounce it

    Now how will RickA weasel out of being shown to lie? Will he wibble over the use of words such as ‘ingest’ and ‘inject’?

    1. “Now how will RickA weasel out of being shown to lie? Will he wibble over the use of words such as ‘ingest’ and ‘inject’?”

      He’ll lie, as he always does.

    2. Lionel:

      I will “weasel” out of it by citing to a debunking of the drink bleach hoax:

      https://www.statesman.com/news/20200713/fact-check-did-trump-tell-people-to-drink-bleach-to-kill-coronavirus

      Trump was talking about injecting light inside the body to disinfect – not drinking bleach. The edited video cited by the people promoting the hoax edit out the first part and the last part which clarify Trump was talking about light.

      This is how most of the hoaxes are done nowadays – edited video removing bits and pieces to mislead from the original context. You see it with the fine people hoax and with the drinking bleach hoax. Millions of people don’t even know the videos are edited to remove bits.

      Here is another link to a debunking:

      https://www.dailywire.com/news/fact-check-no-trump-did-not-tell-people-to-inject-themselves-with-disinfectant-or-drink-bleach

      Check them out and you will see you have been mislead by your news silo.

    3. Trump has peddled denialism and snake oil since this thing got going instead of taking control of a co-ordinated national response. Something you weirdly omit to acknowledge in your trolling.

      It doesn’t matter how hard you try – you cannot defend Trump effectively. It simply isn’t possible.

      All that happens is that you look more and more dishonest and, frankly, deranged.

      But we’re used to it. Carry on by all means.

  46. Dean and BBD once again demolish RickA’s attempt to defend the orange stain.

    RickA’s style of debating is this: cite some statistics, probably found from a right wing source, and copy-paste them up here with absolutely no context. None. Nada. I don’t even bother to respond to these posts because they leave out important factors like grinding poverty, a history of institutionalized bigotry and other vitally important criteria.

    RickA’s other style of debating is to selectively ignore 99% of what others write. Here are some examples of Trump’s abominable (or hilarious) comments that shed considerable light on the man’s character. He is repugnant for sure, but also mentally ill. The longer he has been in office, the clearer that his deeply narcissistic pathology has become. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is always about him. His niece nailed him to the floor in her book. He is indeed a dangerous individual. Some examples:

    In his recent interview he could not bring himself to praise the legacy of the late John Lewis. His only snarky remark was that ‘he didn’t attend my inauguration’. So what? Trump is only wrapped up in himself.

    Throwing rolls of paper towels during a press conference in Puerto Rico after the island was devastated by a hurricane. Then later telling a group of Fema employees that he would like to ‘trade Greenland for Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico is full of poor, dirty people’. Yes, he actually said that. Some of his staff were utterly disgusted.

    Calling El Salvador, Haiti and African nations ‘shitholes’. As if this was not bad enough, the man is too blatantly stupid to understand the role played by the US and its proxies in creating and maintaining these ‘shitholes’.

    Deliberately inciting violence by blaming Antifa and left-wing extremists for unrest in many cities while continually praising the neo-fascist groups that are a core of his base. Whenever these groups are clearly shown to be involed in violent acts he either ignores it or blames it on left wing provocation. He pays tribute to members of neo-Nazi groups like Patriot Prayer or Proud Boys when one of their members dies, but he is notably silent when police are involved in violence against protestors or African Americans die during interrogation.

    He makes outrageous statements like suggesting that disinfectant may be injected into the human body as a treatment for coronavirus, with a sudden spike in deaths from people ingesting bleach over the following days. Then he lies and says he was joking when he was clearly serious.

    He has never heard of Yosemite National Park, that is obvious, and he cannot even correctly pronounce Minneapolis, referring to the city as ‘Minneanapolis’ on multiple occasions. He hilariously praised his interior secretary, David Bernhardt, at a press conference, saying how much ‘David loves the interior!’ Again, it is clear that Trump has not got a clue what Bernhardt does. He probably thinks he reupholsters the interior of cars.

    Worst of all is that no administration in US history has been so stuffed with corporate lobbyists from the banks, pharmaceutical, chemical and energy corporations. Trump claimed that he intended to ‘drain the swamp’ of corporate insiders, but all he did was add to the corporatization of the US government. Of course the US is no longer a democracy but an out-and-out plutocracy. Trump has gone farther than ant previous administration and has taken it into the realm of a kleptocracy. His base is too pig-ignorant to notice how government has been handed over to vested interests.

    Neoliberal capitalism hollowed out the industrial heartlands in the 1980s and 1990s, as one big corporation after another uprooted to seek pastures anew in desperately poor undeveloped nations in the south. In doing so, these corporations showed no loyalty to the communities that had spawned and nurtured them. Profit maximization overrides everything, so these companies set up their polluting sweatshops in Haiti, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Honduras and any other countries that would allow them to exploit cheap labor and non-existent health and environmental regulations. In the US, years of effort by people had led to laws and regulations that created more equity and resulted in humane wages, clean air and water and nature conservation.

    What the world needs are harmonized laws and regulations that prevent the current system of giving huge multinational corporations the opportunity to loot, plunder, exploit and pollute with impunity. Trump decided that to make America great again he needed to make it a polluting sweatshop again – in order to lure back the corporations that fled the US because of humane laws and sound environmental practices. But instead of laying the blame for America’s economic demise where it belonged – at the feet of the neoliberal capitalist system – he instead took a page out of Mussolini’s book and began the age-old practice of scapegoating illegal migrants, refugees, immigrants, and nations like China. This appealed to his politically illiterate base who were anxious to apportion blame to people and countries rather than to an ecocidal, genocidal, unsustainable political system that they didn’t understand. It is easy to hate skin and bone but harder to define antipathy to a system in the ether.

    Then Trump set about dismantling laws and regulations that had been implemented over the past 50 years by both Democrat and Republican administrations. To effectively dismantle environmental regulations, he appointed David Bernhardt, an oil and coal lobbyist to oversee federal public lands as Interior Secretary; to assust him he appointed corporate lawyer William Perry-Pendleton to head Bureau of Land Management; to oversee environmental regulations he first appointed oil lobbyist Scott Pruitt and then coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler; to head the fish and wildlife service he appointed Monsanto executive Aurelua Skipworth. Their collective job is to dismantle, brick-by-brick, these agencies, pull their teeth and make them impotent. Underlying all of this is corporate profit, which Trump promised his elite supporters that he would prioritize. Tax cuts for the rich, and a hefty corporate tax cut, were only the beginning.

    As I said, Trump’s base, including RickA, are politically illiterate. They focus on peripheral issues like security, guns, religion, immigration and related themes and are utterly clueless and ignorant when it comes to the real agendas at the heart of Trump’s regime. Debating RickA on any of this as well as global economics is useless because his world is so myopic.

    1. Irony meters bust all over the country when rickA accuses people of living in a “media bubble” when he says what was broadcast live never happened and at the same time links to disinformation sites like dailywire.

      Prediction was: rickA would lie
      Reality is: rickA lies and quotes other liars

  47. Just as a reminder about the lead rickA is following with his lies: when trump made his PR trip to Kenosha his team asked the man who’s camera store that had been burned to be interviewed by trump. The owner refused saying it would be a clown show with no real purpose. The liar-in-chief’s team found the man who owned the building (who used to own the store) and passed him off as the man who currently ran the business, in an interview that simply pushed trump’s false narrative of what happened.

    So yes, rickA is following at the feet of a master when it comes to blatant lies and dishonesty

  48. Here is Politifact’s debunking:

    https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/24/context-what-donald-trump-said-about-disinfectant-/

    This also makes it clear Trump was talking about light and not injecting disinfectant’s.

    Just another data point to support that this is fake news and another hoax, which millions of democrats (never having seen the full unedited video) wrongly believe.

    As we get closer to the election and these fake news hoaxes get repeatedly exposed, more and more democrats are going to experience cognitive dissonance and go to the original transcripts to read these questions and answers for themselves. This will lead to even more democrats walking away from the party, once they find out they have been mislead by their favorite news sources, such as PBS, NPR, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times. The full unedited videos and full transcripts are out there for those who want to find them and read them and decide who is lying to whom.

    1. Still dodging the point that Donald “I take no responsibility” Trump has done nothing but denialism, snake oil peddling and blame-shifting throughout the Coronavirus crisis. You can quibble the details but it makes exactly zero actual difference.

      Once again:

      It doesn’t matter how hard you try – you cannot defend Trump effectively. It simply isn’t possible.

      All that happens is that you look more and more dishonest and, frankly, deranged.

      Over to you, again.

    2. This will lead to even more democrats walking away from the party, once they find out they have been mislead by their favorite news sources, such as PBS, NPR, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

      Whatever you are taking, you are overdoing it.

    3. “As we get closer to the election and these fake news hoaxes get repeatedly exposed”

      Anybody else running out of empty “rickA bullshit bingo” cards? Mine get filled up with every 2 of his posts.

    4. BBD says “It doesn’t matter how hard you try – you cannot defend Trump effectively. ”

      Maybe not. I leave that for the readers to decide. I don’t try to defend every Trump tweet or action – I just pick out the attacks I think are fake and try to expose them.

      The fine people hoax – which has been debunked, but which was cited by Biden during the DNC convention.

      The drinking bleach (or injecting disinfectant) hoax – which has been debunked, but which is widely believed to democrats.

      The Russian collusion hoax – Trump never colluded with Russia to interfere in the election.

      All fake news pushed by outlets which edit videos to try to mislead and hoodwink their viewers and readers. If I can get just one reader here to review the transcripts and realize they are being manipulated and misled, I feel my time here has been rewarded.

      Who knows – maybe even one of the regulars, who relied on others opinions of what to believe will have actually read a transcript and realized they didn’t have an accurate handle on reality – but had misunderstood what had really happened.

    5. If I can get just one reader here to review the transcripts and realize they are being manipulated and misled, I feel my time here has been rewarded.

      Good luck with that.

      The much more likely outcome is that they will continue to view Donald “I take no responsibility” Trump as a failed ‘president’ who has done nothing but peddle denialism, snake oil and blame-shifting throughout the Coronavirus crisis.

      I repeat: yYou can quibble the details but it makes zero actual difference.

      Once again:

      It doesn’t matter how hard you try – you cannot defend Trump effectively. It simply isn’t possible.

      All that happens is that you look more and more dishonest and, frankly, deranged.

  49. RickA’s blindness WRT Trumpista’s global harm:

    The United States is one of the most polluting nations in the world – its factories, power plants, homes, cars and farms pump billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. By the end of this century, the earth’s temperature will rise by several degrees, many scientists say, if highly polluting countries like the US don’t control their output now.

    The Guardian’s US environment reporter, Emily Holden, tells Anushka Asthana about Trump’s environmental policies over the past four years, which have included reversing many of the pledges made by Barack Obama – most notably dropping out of the Paris climate agreement. She also looks at the proposals from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which include putting Americans back to work installing millions of solar panels and tens of thousands of wind turbines, making the steel for those projects, manufacturing electric vehicles for the world and shipping them from US ports. What the American people decide in November, Emily believes, is critical for the future of the planet.

    Source

    Before he moans about me singling out the USA, I am not I fully realise that other countries are not making sufficient change to provide a chance of us avoiding causing our own extinction.

    Martin Rees, UK’s Astronomer Royal, wrote book with the title of this TED talk

    Is this our final century?

    RickA should listen up for the Coronavirus pandemic is just one of many dominoes which will topple at an increasing rate if we don’t mend our ways and that mend could start by the US ditching Trump. Maybe Ricky is a Kremlin agent undercover, it would suit the Vlad to have another session of Trump. Now where is the patriotism in that?

  50. “Carbon dioxide is not pollution”

    What an asinine comment.
    My mikeN monumentally ignorant bingo card is now full.

  51. Yes Dean, just when MikeN could not appear to be any more stupid, he comes up with this ludicrous one-liner. Given that a rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 (probably due to a spate of intense volcanic activity) was concomitant with rapid climate change and the extinction of as much as 75% of terrestrial and 95% of marine biodiversity at the Permian-Triassic boundary, anyone claiming that ‘carbon dioxide is not pollution’ is not only wrong but stupidly wrong. The comment is hardly worthy of a response. BBD said it well. Trolling.

  52. In this post above:

    https://gregladen.com/blog/2020/08/23/teachers-this-one-neat-trick-could-save-your-life/#comment-896558

    I cited an article which linked to the Living Planet “020 report, here is the intro:

    8 BILLION REASONS TO SAFEGUARD NATURE

    At a time when the world is reeling from the deepest global
    disruption and health crisis of a lifetime, this year’s Living Planet
    Report provides unequivocal and alarming evidence that nature
    is unravelling and that our planet is flashing red warning signs of
    vital natural systems failure. The Living Planet Report 2020 clearly
    outlines how humanity’s increasing destruction of nature is having
    catastrophic impacts not only on wildlife populations but also on
    human health and all aspects of our lives.

    This highlights that a deep cultural and systemic shift is urgently
    needed, one that so far our civilisation has failed to embrace: a
    transition to a society and economic system that values nature,
    stops taking it for granted and recognises that we depend on nature
    more than nature depends on us.

    This is about rebalancing our relationship with the planet to
    preserve the Earth’s amazing diversity of life and enable a just,
    healthy and prosperous society – and ultimately to ensure our
    own survival.

    Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in millions
    of years. The way we produce and consume food and energy,
    and the blatant disregard for the environment entrenched in our
    current economic model, has pushed the natural world to its limits.
    COVID-19 is a clear manifestation of our broken relationship with
    nature. It has highlighted the deep interconnection between nature,
    human health and well-being, and how unprecedented biodiversity
    loss threatens the health of both people and the planet.

    It is time we answer nature’s SOS. Not just to secure the future of
    tigers, rhinos, whales, bees, trees and all the amazing diversity of
    life we love and have the moral duty to coexist with, but because
    ignoring it also puts the health, well-being and prosperity, indeed
    the future, of nearly 8 billion people at stake.

    https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-09/LPR20_Full_report.pdf

    Trickle down economics, or economics of year on year growth ignore the realities here. This is why it is essential to get rid of the Dumpf Trump else we will be talking more about the United States of Trumpistan.

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