The Red Pill: It Is What It Is
California is one state that is managing the epidemic relatively well. They have a plan, they have a governor who is taking active leadership, they have kept the numbers down, especially in the Northern part of the state. The people worked together, followed the protocols; looking good.
Elon Musk had to shut down his California Tesla factory for the epidemic though, and he hated that. He called the shutdown "fascist" and reopened the factory against county orders, putting more than 10,000 people back to work in one plant. He did not feel he should have to wait for local leaders to follow the careful steps of their successful strategy, he should not have to wait for the reopening criteria to be met -- he was losing money and he wanted to get his workers jammed into a factory so they could risk their lives making billions more for him.
This week Musk sent out a tweet that said "Take the Red Pill." The Red Pill, in The Matrix, is the one that reveals the hard-to-take truth and breaks you out of the illusion of the computer simulation you are living in. He got a reply from another serious seeker of truth, Ivanka Trump: "Done."
The Red Pill is not just a trope in a nineties movie, it has become a banner for certain especially-nutty rightwing types. The Red Pill subreddit is one of the ugliest, most antisocial stains on the Internet. The Red Pill is a codeword for men who believe that feminism has ruined their lives, and that it is foolish to try to treat women fairly. As one Republican state legislator wrote there, "I treat women like they're subordinate creatures, and suddenly they respect me." They believe this is the natural order of things, and the insight that we have been brainwashed by liberals is, to them, like taking the Red Pill in the Matrix and facing the uncomfortable, eye-opening Truth. Basically, the red pill tells guys that it's feminism's fault they can't get laid. It's not that they themselves are deplorable and have no social skills; the problem is that women are bitches. See how easy that is?
Religions, ideologies, peer-group norms often lead individuals into a kind of blindness, and the idea of an exercise or technique to let us see through the delusions, to Truth, has popped up many times over the millennia. Maybe it would be a mystical conversion of some sort, or a spiritual practice -- there are those who believe that LSD and other psychedelic substances can do this, can tear away the illusion and reveal truth. Accepting Christ into your heart, same thing, opening your crown chakra, whatever. People have often talked about transformational moments in their lives. Usually these are moments that make them a better person, more caring, more understanding. Somehow rightwing politics works the opposite way. For every Enlightenment in America you get an equal and opposite Great Awakening.
The Red Pill is a simplification of the concept that we can choose to remove the veil of illusion and see the world for what it is.
But it is not ordinary truth that is revealed by the Red Pill. This is a special, obvious kind of truth that says "It is what it is." Your feelings are right. Liberals will tell you otherwise, they'll label you and try to shame you, but the Red Pill gives you Truth. You can put all kinds of restrictions and rules on it but the impulse to grab women and kiss them, for instance, is Truth, it is obvious, and nature obviously intends for us to obey those kinds of impulses. If some people seem weird to you it is because they are weird. Blue-pill libtards can philosophize about it all day but it is obvious to those who see the truth directly that there's something disgusting there, and the right thing to do is to mock and bully weird people. This is the Truth you see once you take the Red Pill and your blinders are removed. It is what it is. And what it is, is obvious.
The Red Pill Truth is that human beings are self-centered animals. Therefore your own self-centered ignorance is perfectly justified. It is what it is. Easy peasy.
Red-Pill capital-t Truth rejects the liberal idea that other people's needs are equal to your own. The Truth is that other people are often obstacles to your ability to get what you want. They could be serving you, praising you, pleasing you, rather than pursuing some irrelevant and misguided Blue-Pill goals of their own.
The Red Pill offers a kind of Truth without empathy.
Looking at it from outside the bubble, the rightwing Red Pill is a shortcut that lets you get by without actually thinking about things, because you see Truth directly. It is that unexamined life that Plato talked about. You don't have to learn anything new, because it is what it is, which anybody can see, once their eyes have been opened. Conveniently, Truth is always the belief that makes your own group look better, always the belief that supports their own impulses in the first place. Red-Pill Truth never provokes self-doubt or makes one question one's assumptions; the Red Pill awakens you to the fact that your assumptions are True already.
The Red Pill offers a kind of truth without facts. It is nothing more than a justification for ignorance.
Elon Musk had to shut down his California Tesla factory for the epidemic though, and he hated that. He called the shutdown "fascist" and reopened the factory against county orders, putting more than 10,000 people back to work in one plant. He did not feel he should have to wait for local leaders to follow the careful steps of their successful strategy, he should not have to wait for the reopening criteria to be met -- he was losing money and he wanted to get his workers jammed into a factory so they could risk their lives making billions more for him.
This week Musk sent out a tweet that said "Take the Red Pill." The Red Pill, in The Matrix, is the one that reveals the hard-to-take truth and breaks you out of the illusion of the computer simulation you are living in. He got a reply from another serious seeker of truth, Ivanka Trump: "Done."
The Red Pill is not just a trope in a nineties movie, it has become a banner for certain especially-nutty rightwing types. The Red Pill subreddit is one of the ugliest, most antisocial stains on the Internet. The Red Pill is a codeword for men who believe that feminism has ruined their lives, and that it is foolish to try to treat women fairly. As one Republican state legislator wrote there, "I treat women like they're subordinate creatures, and suddenly they respect me." They believe this is the natural order of things, and the insight that we have been brainwashed by liberals is, to them, like taking the Red Pill in the Matrix and facing the uncomfortable, eye-opening Truth. Basically, the red pill tells guys that it's feminism's fault they can't get laid. It's not that they themselves are deplorable and have no social skills; the problem is that women are bitches. See how easy that is?
Religions, ideologies, peer-group norms often lead individuals into a kind of blindness, and the idea of an exercise or technique to let us see through the delusions, to Truth, has popped up many times over the millennia. Maybe it would be a mystical conversion of some sort, or a spiritual practice -- there are those who believe that LSD and other psychedelic substances can do this, can tear away the illusion and reveal truth. Accepting Christ into your heart, same thing, opening your crown chakra, whatever. People have often talked about transformational moments in their lives. Usually these are moments that make them a better person, more caring, more understanding. Somehow rightwing politics works the opposite way. For every Enlightenment in America you get an equal and opposite Great Awakening.
The Red Pill is a simplification of the concept that we can choose to remove the veil of illusion and see the world for what it is.
But it is not ordinary truth that is revealed by the Red Pill. This is a special, obvious kind of truth that says "It is what it is." Your feelings are right. Liberals will tell you otherwise, they'll label you and try to shame you, but the Red Pill gives you Truth. You can put all kinds of restrictions and rules on it but the impulse to grab women and kiss them, for instance, is Truth, it is obvious, and nature obviously intends for us to obey those kinds of impulses. If some people seem weird to you it is because they are weird. Blue-pill libtards can philosophize about it all day but it is obvious to those who see the truth directly that there's something disgusting there, and the right thing to do is to mock and bully weird people. This is the Truth you see once you take the Red Pill and your blinders are removed. It is what it is. And what it is, is obvious.
The Red Pill Truth is that human beings are self-centered animals. Therefore your own self-centered ignorance is perfectly justified. It is what it is. Easy peasy.
Red-Pill capital-t Truth rejects the liberal idea that other people's needs are equal to your own. The Truth is that other people are often obstacles to your ability to get what you want. They could be serving you, praising you, pleasing you, rather than pursuing some irrelevant and misguided Blue-Pill goals of their own.
The Red Pill offers a kind of Truth without empathy.
Looking at it from outside the bubble, the rightwing Red Pill is a shortcut that lets you get by without actually thinking about things, because you see Truth directly. It is that unexamined life that Plato talked about. You don't have to learn anything new, because it is what it is, which anybody can see, once their eyes have been opened. Conveniently, Truth is always the belief that makes your own group look better, always the belief that supports their own impulses in the first place. Red-Pill Truth never provokes self-doubt or makes one question one's assumptions; the Red Pill awakens you to the fact that your assumptions are True already.
The Red Pill offers a kind of truth without facts. It is nothing more than a justification for ignorance.
posted by JimK at 11:03 AM
107 Comments:
Well, this is plan and simple ignorance from the blog dedicated to ignorance.
Those who have swallowed the blue pill have quite a bit of problem believing the truth.
Look at this guy:
"Liberal churches seem to have no issues with managing both worship and the current plague. It’s only the fundamentalists of every stripe that do."
Truth is, virtually all churches in America have complied with governmental guidelines and went to virtual services.
They will re-open in a safe manner.
As for "liberal" churches, the Lutheran and Catholic churches in Minnesota have announced that, beginning Tuesday, they will ignore that governor's order to stay closed.
TTF says that they reject that anything metaphysical can represent truth. But the TRUTH is that they have simply CHOSEN different unseen values.
Empiricism is not the only avenue to discovering truth. Life is not possible with such an outlook. Those who say they believe it, are lying.
I think I found the problem here - you think the Catholic church is "liberal!"
BAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAAH!!!
When you're far-right enough to think the Catholic church is liberal, you lost touch with reality decades ago.
Better take some hydroxychloroquine.
"I think I found the problem here - you think the Catholic church is "liberal!"
BAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAAH!!!"
actually, the Roman church is very liberal
but your lack of knowledge isn't THE problem, it's not even much of a problem at all, considering your insignificance
"When you're far-right enough to think the Catholic church is liberal, you lost touch with reality decades ago."
since you've got such a crystal view of reality, gives us some examples of how conservative Roman Catholics are
that don't assume that the world centers around homosexuality
when you're finished tripping
Dude, this is a political blog... when someone talks about something or someone being liberal vs. conservative, it is in the political sense.
If this was a religious blog, then you maybe you could have a discourse on liberal Christianity, its influences from the Enlightenment period, its growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, how it affects Protestant and Catholic churches today, and how they differ from the conservative "fundamentalist" Christians.
But that's not the kind of topic we cover here. Usually it's just conservatives desperately bashing gay people with every excuse they can possibly muster, mentioning God every once in a while, but fastidiously avoiding mentioning him too much to try and pretend that there is a more secular (and larger, more popular) motivation for your rampant, obsessive-compulsive gay bashing.
But you're not fooling anyone.
"Have some hydroxychloroquine - what have you got to lose? LOL!"
you say that to all the malaria victims?
"Dude, this is a political blog... when someone talks about something or someone being liberal vs. conservative, it is in the political sense."
well, in that sense, the Roman Catholic church is politically liberal
they love big government and encourage wealth redistribution through taxation and entitlement programs
"If this was a religious blog, then you maybe you could have a discourse on liberal Christianity, its influences from the Enlightenment period, its growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, how it affects Protestant and Catholic churches today, and how they differ from the conservative "fundamentalist" Christians."
I never intended that, although didn't Jim bring the Enlightenment up?
and didn't some other TTFer bring up liberal v fundamentalist religion?
"But that's not the kind of topic we cover here. Usually it's just conservatives desperately bashing gay people with every excuse they can possibly muster, mentioning God every once in a while, but fastidiously avoiding mentioning him too much to try and pretend that there is a more secular (and larger, more popular) motivation for your rampant, obsessive-compulsive gay bashing.
But you're not fooling anyone."
maybe you could provide some examples of all this "gay-bashing"
my view of this blog is that it's a discussion of the proper role for science in public policy decisions
if you want a rational, civil conversation, let's discuss that
"you say that to all the malaria victims?"
Of course not. Just to obsequious devotees of the pathological liar and sexual predator in the Whitehouse.
"they love big government and encourage wealth redistribution through taxation and entitlement programs"
You forgot to include free health care - you know, like Jesus kept giving to all the poorest and most maligned people that came to him.
"I never intended that, although didn't Jim bring the Enlightenment up?"
Maybe he did, he's been doing this blog for a number of years. It's certainly possible.
"and didn't some other TTFer bring up liberal v fundamentalist religion?"
That's certainly possible too. Someone might have brought up progressive religion as well, or perhaps even Satanism, just to mix things up a bit.
"maybe you could provide some examples of all this "gay-bashing"
Of course I COULD. But I'm not about to duplicate your obnoxious drivel for you. You repeat yourself quite often and anyone reading this blog for more than a day can regenerate the "wheel of gay insults" you like to spin through.
"if you want a rational, civil conversation, let's discuss that"
You're welcome to start any time. You've been given plenty of opportunities.
"Of course not. Just to obsequious devotees of the pathological liar and sexual predator in the Whitehouse."
thanks for confirming you have no problem with someone who is ill taking a drug that may have side effects
this is one has been in use for decades, but it is only Trump Derangement Syndrome that has made that any problem
of course, if Trump takes it, it's a personal choice, affecting no one else
"You forgot to include free health care"
actually, I mentioned entitlements
"- you know, like Jesus kept giving to all the poorest and most maligned people that came to him."
Jesus advocated individuals taking care of the poor. He never suggested that his followers do this by confiscating the assets of some and redistributing it to others
"Maybe he did, he's been doing this blog for a number of years. It's certainly possible."
actually, it's not only possible, it's factual. he did in this very post so your assertion that I could discuss that if this were a religious blog, is a kind of inane thing to say
"That's certainly possible too. Someone might have brought up progressive religion as well, or perhaps even Satanism, just to mix things up a bit."
actually, it's not only possible, it's factual. one of your friends here, or perhaps you, made the false claim that only "fundamentalist" churches had a problem with bans on live worship services. I made you aware of the fact that the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches have announced that they will not comply with the orders of the governor of Minnesota. Neither is considered a fundamentalist church by anyone. They rightly point out that the church is being judged by the government there as non-essential while the Mall of America is being allowed to open. That's an unconsitutional judgement for any government in America to make.
"Of course I COULD."
actually, you couldn't
because I haven't
the problem is that you, and your friends here, consider it "gay-bashing" to not agree with the gay agenda
to say that gay "marriage" is not real marriage because marriage is for the kind of arrangement that produces life is not "gay-bashing"
neither is the idea that it is not government's place to use anti-discrimination laws to artificially intervene in interpersonal relationship and arrangements in order to enhance the social standing of homosexuals
neither is the idea that government has no place advocating the status of normality for homosexuality
"But I'm not about to duplicate your obnoxious drivel for you."
yes, we understand you can't defend you irrational position
"You're welcome to start any time. You've been given plenty of opportunities."
you passed up one right now
We've heard repeatedly over the last couple of weeks that if the shutdown had been started a week earlier, so many lives -it varies in various press echoes- would have been saved. The truth is, the toll in America would have been halved if NEW YORK had imposed a shutdown a week earlier. Another third could have been avoided is every governor in America had taken the same actions Gov DeSantis in Florida took to protect the elderly. Blue state government has utterly failed in this crisis, the Dem Party will pay the price in November.
"Andrew Cuomo may be the most popular politician in the country. His approval ratings have hit all-time highs thanks to his Covid-19 response. Some Democrats have discussed him as a possible replacement for Joe Biden, due to Biden’s perceived weakness as a nominee. And there have even been some unfortunate tributes to Cuomo’s alleged sex appeal.
All of which is bizarre, because Cuomo should be one of the most loathed officials in America right now. ProPublica recently released a report outlining catastrophic missteps by Cuomo and the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, which probably resulted in many thousands of needless coronavirus cases. ProPublica offers some appalling numbers contrasting what happened in New York with the outbreak in California. By mid-May, New York City alone had almost 20,000 deaths, while in San Francisco there had been only 35, and New York state as a whole suffered 10 times as many deaths as California.
Federal failures played a role, of course, but this tragedy was absolutely due, in part, to decisions by the governor. Cuomo initially “reacted to De Blasio’s idea for closing down New York City with derision”, saying it “was dangerous” and “served only to scare people”. He said the “seasonal flu was a graver worry”. A spokesperson for Cuomo “refused to say if the governor had ever read the state’s pandemic plan”. Later, Cuomo would blame the press, including the New York Times for failing to say “Be careful, there’s a virus in China that may be in the United States?” even though the Times wrote nearly 500 stories on the virus before the state acted. Experts told ProPublica that “had New York imposed its extreme social distancing measures a week or two earlier, the death toll might have been cut by half or more”."
read a detailed analysis of the failure and incompetence of Andrew Cuomo's management of this crisis here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/20/andrew-cuomo-new-york-coronavirus-catastrophe
"this is one has been in use for decades, but it is only Trump Derangement Syndrome that has made that any problem
of course, if Trump takes it, it's a personal choice, affecting no one else"
It's funny how conservatives like to dismiss everyone who disagrees with the incompetent draft dodger, one time America's biggest loser (in terms of corporate losses), serial company bankrupter, and self-admitted and proud pussy grabber as having "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
The Derangement Syndrome belongs to those who thought he'd make a good president - and especially those who still defend him. Many Americans voted for this xenophobic misogynist because they wanted to say "FU" to this country's political establishment - they have watched it funneling more and more of the country's wealth to the richest and left them behind. They didn't care if came apart and went down in flames.
This is what that looks like.
"actually, it's not only possible, it's factual. he did in this very post so your assertion that I could discuss that if this were a religious blog, is a kind of inane thing to say"
I had to go up and search for it, but indeed he did. It is not a line that stood out for me when I read it. But once again you have misread what I stated. I was only pointing out that the historical details of various religious movements were not typically the topics in a blog like this, especially one that has been targeted by conservative trolls for gay bashing and quite liberal, liberal bashing.
"the problem is that you, and your friends here, consider it "gay-bashing" to not agree with the gay agenda"
No, I consider all of your ant-gay propaganda, constant demeaning of LGBTQ people, and collective slander of LGBTQ people to be gay-bashing.
"to say that gay "marriage" is not real marriage because marriage is for the kind of arrangement that produces life is not "gay-bashing"
There are plenty of straight marriages that's don't produce life as well. There are now gay parents that take care of the discarded children of straight couples who could't be bothered, or simply couldn't handle the responsibilities of child rearing.
Some of those straight couples performed their duties so terribly that the government had to step in and and take the children away from their heterosexual parents for their own safety. The 13 Turpin children and their abusive, heterosexual parents using religion and chains to control their children being just one of the more recent and most heinous examples.
Fertility has never been a requirement for getting a marriage in the US; not all straight couples can produce children, and not all of those who can even want children. In fact when some of them have children by "mistake," they decide to abort them.
Everyone knows that gay couples aren't going to produce children on their own. There is no reason to demean them or their marriage for basic biological facts. I don't see you harassing straight couples who can't or don't want to produce life. Your unsolicited and persistent denigration of gay marriages however does amount to gay bashing, no matter how you like to rationalize it.
You complain about abortion all the time, yet I have never heard one negative word from you about the heterosexual marriage that could have come from. It seems to me, if you're really adamant about marriages producing life, any heterosexual couple that aborts their child should have their marriage license revoked.
At least then you'd be consistent about the importance of creating life within marriages.
But we've never heard a peep about something like this from you. You never pass up a chance to denigrate gay marriages though, even though there has never been one to abort a child.
According to the USDA, there are more than 11 million children in the US that live in "food insecure homes" - the euphemism for kids going hungry. With the coronavirus, it has been estimated that number may increase to 18 million.
Their are happily married gay couples who are happy to step in and help those needy children.
You should be thanking them, not denigrating them.
"neither is the idea that it is not government's place to use anti-discrimination laws to artificially intervene in interpersonal relationship and arrangements in order to enhance the social standing of homosexuals"
This country was founded, and a war was started on the principle that "all men men are created equal." It has never been perfect in that regard, but over the years it has come a long way to making that become more true, by freeing slaves, giving women the right to vote, acknowledging its historically unfair treatment of minorities and trying to rectify that.
It is NOT the government's place however to enshrine in law the "moral" code of religious groups that want to keep LGBTQ people and their relationships in a permanent second- or third-class status. LGBTQ people pay taxes (i.e. have their wealth confiscated by the government) the same way that straight people do. They deserve the same rights and privileges everyone else enjoys.
The government is NOT here to force your religious beliefs about how society should be structured onto everyone else.
The US will hit about 100,000 dead people today thanks in large part to Rump's ineptitude.
So what is Capt. Clorox doing to help fix the situation?
An Illinois Republican congressman warned President Donald Trump Sunday to “just stop” with his outrageous insinuations that MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough is a murderer.
“Completely unfounded conspiracy. Just stop,” a frustrated Rep. Adam Kinzinger tweeted, lashing Trump’s attack on Scarborough, a frequent critic of the president. “Stop spreading it, stop creating paranoia. It will destroy us,” he added, apparently referring to Republicans and future elections — or possibly America.
Too late Adam, too late.
Thoughts and prayers for you bud, thoughts and prayers.
We'd be better off if Rump lost his phone in a water hazard and he spent the rest of his failed administration golfing.
"The US will hit about 100,000 dead people today thanks in large part to Rump's ineptitude."
the number would have been less than half of that, except for mistakes made by Andrew Cuomo, possibly much less
aside from the fact that the number of cases in the NYC area make up more than a third of US cases, the disease was seeded across America by New Yorkers escaping Cuomo's land of horrors
even with that, most red state governors kept the toll to a fraction of the NYC area totals
locking people up in dark apartment was not helpful
letting people leave their houses and encouraging more activity in the open air and sunshine appears to work better
remember the Spring Breakers in Clearwater?
if everybody had an ocean
across the USA
then, everyone would be safe now
like Falori-D-A!
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump kicked off his Memorial Day weekend by visiting his club in Virginia, marking the president's first time back at one of his private golf courses in 75 days, the longest stretch of his administration without spending time at one.
He was seen leaving the White House on Saturday morning wearing a white hat, white shirt and no mask as his motorcade made its way to the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
Trump last visited his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida the weekend of March 6 where he hosted several Brazilian officials, one of whom tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after the trip.
"locking people up in dark apartment was not helpful"
Funny, just the other day you were ranting it was because they didn't clean the subway system.
People who are locked up at home in the dark don't use the subway system.
If you're going to throw all that blame around, at least TRY to be logically consistent. Maybe some of it will stick then.
"letting people leave their houses and encouraging more activity in the open air and sunshine appears to work better"
There is a recent (reported on May 7th) study:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200507121353.htm
That indicates Vitamin D may play an important role in CV mortality rates. It has not been replicated yet (as far as I know) but certainly lights up a way for more potentially helpful research and possibly treatments. It may even explain why northern cities suffered far worse that southern cities, as skin exposure to sunlight facilitates vitamin D production in humans.
Unfortunately this information comes far too late to inform decision makers back in Jan - Mar when it could have been particularly helpful.
Of course, if Trump had told governors about the intelligence reports he was getting in January about China down-playing the CV-19 risks, while publicly praising China's handling of the situation, governors all across the country could have taken steps to prepare for the looming catastrophe. There mistake was in believing what was coming out of his mouth.
They should have known better - the truth is more likely to be exactly the opposite of what he says.
"Funny, just the other day you were ranting it was because they didn't clean the subway system.
People who are locked up at home in the dark don't use the subway system."
actually, they do
you're ignorance is evident
again
"If you're going to throw all that blame around, at least TRY to be logically consistent. Maybe some of it will stick then."
let's see
you said "The US will hit about 100,000 dead people today thanks in large part to Rump's ineptitude."
and you say I'm playing the "blame game"?
"That indicates Vitamin D may play an important role in CV mortality rates. It has not been replicated yet (as far as I know) but certainly lights up a way for more potentially helpful research and possibly treatments. It may even explain why northern cities suffered far worse that southern cities, as skin exposure to sunlight facilitates vitamin D production in humans.
Unfortunately this information comes far too late to inform decision makers back in Jan - Mar when it could have been particularly helpful."
open air, sunshine, and warm weather have always inhibited respiratory viruses
there were reports this was so with the Wuhan Flu, back in early March
the history should have alerted experts there was enough to try it
there is no evidence lockdowns work
"Of course, if Trump had told governors about the intelligence reports he was getting in January about China down-playing the CV-19 risks, while publicly praising China's handling of the situation, governors all across the country could have taken steps to prepare for the looming catastrophe. There mistake was in believing what was coming out of his mouth."
amusing rewrite of history
Jan. 24, Twitter:
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Feb. 7, Remarks at North Carolina Opportunity Now Summit in Charlotte, N.C.:
"I just spoke to President Xi last night, and, you know, we're working on the — the problem, the virus. It's a — it's a very tough situation. But I think he's going to handle it. I think he's handled it really well. We're helping wherever we can."
Feb. 7, Twitter:
“Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days … Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!
Feb. 7, Remarks before Marine One departure:
"Late last night, I had a very good talk with President Xi, and we talked about — mostly about the coronavirus. They're working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job. They're in touch with World — the World — World Organization. CDC also. We're working together. But World Health is working with them. CDC is working with them. I had a great conversation last night with President Xi. It's a tough situation. I think they're doing a very good job.”
Feb. 10, Fox Business interview:
"I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that's a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard."
Feb. 10, campaign rally in Manchester, N.H.:
“I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s all going to work out fine.”
Feb. 18, remarks before Air Force One departure:
“I think President Xi is working very hard. As you know, I spoke with him recently. He’s working really hard. It’s a tough problem. I think he’s going to do — look, I’ve seen them build hospitals in a short period of time. I really believe he wants to get that done, and he wants to get it done fast. Yes, I think he’s doing it very professionally.”
Feb. 26, remarks at a business roundtable in New Delhi, India:
“China is working very, very hard. I have spoken to President Xi, and they’re working very hard. And if you know anything about him, I think he’ll be in pretty good shape. They’re — they’ve had a rough patch, and I think right now they have it — it looks like they’re getting it under control more and more. They’re getting it more and more under control.”
Feb. 27, Coronavirus Task Force press conference:
“I spoke with President Xi. We had a great talk. He’s working very hard, I have to say. He’s working very, very hard. And if you can count on the reports coming out of China, that spread has gone down quite a bit. The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days. As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller.”
Feb. 29, Coronavirus Task Force press conference:
“China seems to be making tremendous progress. Their numbers are way down. … I think our relationship with China is very good. We just did a big trade deal. We’re starting on another trade deal with China — a very big one. And we’ve been working very closely. They’ve been talking to our people, we’ve been talking to their people, having to do with the virus.”
"there were reports this was so with the Wuhan Flu, back in early March"
This is a Coronavirus, not a Flu virus - they are completely different strains of virus.
"there is no evidence lockdowns work"
Right... nearly all of the planet went on lockdown because... they wanted to stick it to China? Everyone thought it would be a great time for a stay-cation?
Lockdowns are S.O.P. for contagious diseases, and have been for decades. Don't they teach that in homeschool? Or were you expecting "thoughts and prayers" to make this go away?
Oh, I forgot, you were waiting for Captain Clorox's miracle!:
“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”
On February 28, Trump said that coronavirus will “disappear” like a “miracle” while speaking at a press conference for his coronavirus task force. On Tuesday, he told reporters on Capitol Hill that coronavirus “will go away.” In late February, he speculated that warm weather would kill the virus and stop its spread. None of these statements are backed by science or infectious disease experts within his own administration. (Though some diseases — like the seasonal flu — do diminish in warmer seasons, there is currently no evidence the novel coronavirus will behave this way.)
"This is a Coronavirus, not a Flu virus - they are completely different strains of virus."
what's fascinating is the importance you place on the irrelevant
"Right... nearly all of the planet went on lockdown because... they wanted to stick it to China? Everyone thought it would be a great time for a stay-cation?"
That's your response to the FACT that there is no evidence that lockdowns work? Not exactly a Mensa candidate, are you?
There have been a number of responses around the world and the result has been the same regardless of the approach, except for the US, which had more cases than any other place, despite a near total lockdown. On a more local level, the few states that didn't lockdown did better than those that did. Arkansas never shutdown anything and, in deaths per million, they come in 46th among he states.
"Lockdowns are S.O.P. for contagious diseases, and have been for decades."
Actually, that's not true. Lockdowns were concocted in 2004 when George W Bush asked some experts to devise a plan for a pandemic. But that plan was supposed to be for a highly fatal contagion. The Wuhan flu has a very low mortality rate. You probably weren't born yet but, in 1969-1970, there was a global pandemic that also began in Wuhan. Society didn't shut down. Thousands gathered in Florida to watch a Saturn rocket blast off on a manned mission to the moon. The President was with them. A half a million people under thirty crammed into a farm in upstate NY to camp out and watch music for three days. Social distancing was not practiced. Your statement is ignorant.
"Don't they teach that in homeschool?"
Homeschoolers, of whom I am not one, score higher on standardized tests than those in public school. They tend to learn facts, so your delusions would not be taught to them, no.
“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”
yes, it will
that's been happening around the world
in Britain, they aren't sure they will be able to complete work on a vaccine because there are so few cases to test
as the portion of the population that have immunity, already close to 35%, grows, the virus will have a harder time spreading
and, yes, when people are outside more, the virus will continue to decline
"Lockdowns are S.O.P. for contagious diseases, and have been for decades."
Wowee!!
We have a true imbecile commenting now.
Here's a history lesson for the guy that appears to not know much about history, not know about biology...
"Our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focuses on containing the spread of the disease at all costs, instead of “flattening the curve” and preventing hospital overcrowding. Although well-intentioned, the lockdown was imposed without consideration of its consequences beyond those directly from the pandemic.
The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.
Pandemics have afflicted humankind throughout history. They devastated the Roman and Byzantine empires, Medieval Europe, China and India, and they continue to the present day despite medical progress.
The past century has witnessed three pandemics with at least 100,000 U.S. fatalities: The "Spanish Flu," 1918-1919, with between 20 million and 50 million fatalities worldwide, including 675,000 in the U.S.; the "Asian Flu," 1957-1958, with about 1.1 million deaths worldwide, 116,000 of those in the U.S.; and the "Hong Kong Flu," 1968-1972, with about 1 million people worldwide, including 100,000 in the U.S. So far, the current pandemic has produced almost 100,000 U.S. deaths, but the reaction of a near-complete economic shutdown is unprecedented."
the rest can be read here:
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life
Rep. Ilhan Omar became the most prominent Democrat to say she believes Tara Reade’s sex-assault accusations against presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden.
The Minnesota Democrat made the remarks in an interview on Sunday.
“I do believe Reade,” Ms. Omar said. “Justice can be delayed but should never be denied.”
Joe Biden has said if anyone believes Reade, they shouldn't vote for him.
President Trump has won the lockdown wars as coronavirus-related restrictions on businesses are eased across the country, so far with few signs of dire health consequences for the population.
Just weeks ago, the question was whether to reopen, with the first states to press ahead accused of engaging in human sacrifice and killing their residents to appease the “Trump death cult.” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked, “How many will die for the Dow?” as recently as Thursday.
Now, the debate is primarily over how quickly and to what extent reopening should take place, with the stragglers mainly blue states. Anthony Fauci, considered by many the public face of stay-at-home policies, now says the country can't stay locked down forever. When Trump’s Easter target date was deemed unrealistic, Memorial Day weekend was floated as another possibility — and the grand opening is beginning.
Whether Trump wins reelection now depends substantially on how the reopening is perceived. Voters are still nervous about returning to normal too quickly, including key Trump demographics such as senior citizens, who have been trending Democratic during the pandemic, and religious voters, among whom there has been some slippage in favorability for Trump. But a Harvard/Politico poll found that 60% of Republicans now want nonessential businesses to open up in their states, following the president’s lead. Trump is betting heavily that reopening will lead to an economic rebound without deepening the public health crisis.
Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett predicted “a very strong second half of the year” on Friday. “We expect ... the third quarter will be the highest growth quarter in U.S. history,” Hassett told reporters at the White House. “We expect that output is going to recover relatively quickly ... Employment lags that a little bit.” This tracks with Trump, who has repeatedly said the third quarter will be a “transition” to a robust end to the year’s growth.
“This is a country that’s meant to be open, not closed,” Trump said at a Ford plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He defended the decision to engage in the initial lockdowns to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system but said the time had come to end them, adding of the COVID-19 outbreak, “And if there’s a fire, an ember, a flame someplace, we put it out.”
In addition to the virus fears and over 90,000 deaths nationwide, nearly 40 million people in the United States are out of work. This has combined to put Trump in a hole in recent polling against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, with the president trailing 48%-40%, according to Fox News, 47%-42%, according to the Economist/YouGov, and 50%-39%, according to Quinnipiac. The RealClearPolitics polling averages show Trump trailing in three of four major battleground states, except for North Carolina, where he is up by 1.
The question is how much the economy and public morale will need to improve, without any deterioration in coronavirus containment, to lift Trump’s standing. It could require a combination of better numbers and shifting expectations.
“Once the resistance crumbles, every voter will know that the president was pushing to reopen the economy, while the Democrats were pushing to keep everything, especially schools, closed,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “Joe Biden’s basement bravado is both comical and tragic. The American people prefer strong leadership in a crisis, not whatever Joe is offering.”
Trump is also pressing states to reopen churches and other houses of worship, frequently still prevented from offering regular services due to social distancing requirements. “Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential but have left out churches and other houses of worship,” he said at the White House on Friday. “It’s not right. So, I’m correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship 'essential.'” It’s not clear what authority he would invoke, although the Justice Department has indicated it will intervene when it sees religious liberty violations.
The president’s supporters are confident he will be rewarded by a public that is increasingly chafing at the restrictions as summer approaches, even if the pol
ling continues to reflect high levels of popular anxiety about the coronavirus.
“Democrats forgot that polls were a snapshot of a specific moment. They went all-in on endless lockdowns because they believed it would be a political winner,” said conservative strategist Chris Barron. “Early on, when Americans were crippled with fear, Democrats looked smart."
“Now, every single opinion poll shows the momentum turning against them,” he continued. “President Trump smartly listened to the medical experts but balanced that with an understanding of the economic realities for working Americans. Come November, if Democrats allow this to be a referendum on endless lockdowns, Trump will win in a landslide.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Exposes Trump's 'Colossal' Lie About Obama
President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed former President Barack Obama for his own administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The last administration left us nothing,” Trump said last month.
But the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found that Trump’s own budget documents show the opposite ― exposing what it called “a lie of colossal Trumpian proportions.”
The newspaper’s editorial board said the Trump administration told Congress that the Obama administration left it with everything needed for a pandemic ― and sought big budget cuts from the programs as a result.
Trump’s 2020 budget asked Congress to cut the pandemic preparedness budget by $102.9 million, part of $595.5 million in requested cuts to public health preparedness and response outlay.
“Obama left office with an unblemished record of building up the nation’s pandemic preparedness,” the newspaper said. “Trump systematically sought to dismantle it.”
Trump has since blamed his predecessor for lack of personal protective equipment and testing supplies, saying “our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.”
But the newspaper said a chart provided by the Trump administration with the budget shows that by 2016 ― Obama’s final year in office ― the nation’s public health emergency preparedness was at least 98% on every key measure.
“That’s by the Trump administration’s own assessment,” the Post-Dispatch said. “If the cupboard was bare, it’s because Trump swept it clean.”
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous claim they aren't trolls, but look at them still advocating for people to use hydoxychloroquine when they know several studies show it does nothing to help with Covid-19 and it increases the rate of death of patients with Covid-19 who use it.
Obviously only trolls would do this.
We’ve listened intently as mainstream media outlets, both print and broadcast, have lectured us and the rest of America on the lifesaving virtues of the Wuhan virus lockdown. While it may well be true that it saved lives from the virus, what about the lives lost to the lockdown?
The economic devastation from the lockdown has had brutal consequences, in particular for small businesses, their owners and their often low-wage employees. With 38.6 million suddenly unemployed and applying for benefits, jobless rates shooting toward 20%, and bankruptcies crushing major industries, such as retailing, the near-term outlook is grim if the lockdowns continue.
Contrary to the now-trite progressive chant of “we’re all in this together,” those at the struggling bottom rungs of our once-thriving economy bear the brunt of the lockdown — not the privileged minority with secure government jobs or stable stay-at-home telecommuting gigs impervious to such things as shutdowns.
No, we’re not “all in this together.” And doctors, economists and others are concluding that the costs in lives lost may actually exceed the benefits, a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.
A group of 600 doctors recently signed a letter sent to the president seeking an end to the lockdown. These doctors braved the opprobrium and possible political harassment from some of their fellow citizens to warn us all that the number of suicides from the lockdown’s crushing economic and psychological effects appears to be soaring.
“We are alarmed at what appears to be the lack of consideration for the future health of our patients. The downstream health effects of deteriorating a level are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error,” the letter said.
“The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure,” the letter continues. “In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.”
As Dr. Mike deBoisblanc, head of trauma at John Muir Medical Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently told a local ABC affiliate: “We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time. I mean, we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
Worse, badly needed medical procedures have been put off due to shutdowns.
A recent news story predicted “thousands” of cancer deaths due to postponed cancer surgeries in England. Expect nothing different here. Many Americas with life-threatening ailments also have had treatments “postponed” so that we could flatten the curve.
Those arguing loudest for a continued shutdown of our cities and towns and the enormous economy they represent are among the first to scream “science!” when anyone questions their bad ideas, including the lockdown.
Well, doctors are on the cutting edge of health science. So why don’t lockdown supporters heed their words?
In fact, we may be on the verge of a far more serious long-term plague than COVID-19: a wave of what social scientists and doctors now call “deaths of despair.“
How serious is it?
An early May study by the Well-Being Trust and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care predicted 75,000 added deaths from COVID-19 lockdown-related stress and depression. But, if the economic recovery is slow and unemployment remains high, the number of deaths, the study warned, could shoot as high as 154,037.
For the record, that latter death toll is well more than the Wuhan virus is likely to kill.
“The collective impact of COVID-19 could be devastating,” according to the report, which blames lockdown-related factors such as “economic failure with massive unemployment, mandated social isolation for months and possible residual isolation for years, and uncertainty caused by the sudden emergence of a novel, previously unknown microbe.
“The economics of COVID-19 have already caused a massive jump in unemployment: job loss leading to personal and professional economic loss across all business sectors. Hourly workers as well as salaried professionals have been laid off and furloughed indefinitely.”
It's now obvious, the predictions of disaster in states reopening have been wrong. Georgia, Florida and Texas so far are doing fine, and their economies are starting to perk up. Las Vegas, taking their lead, plans to reopen casinos in early June.
New data from the Centers for Disease Control show that coronavirus infection fatality rates (IFR) are basically only slightly worse than for a bad flu season. The current IFR rate of 0.26%, based on CDC data, is way below the 3.4% (and higher) rates that the World Health Organization and others used to scare us and shut down much of the global economy.
The lockdown may turn out to be one of the worst policy mistakes in American economic history. If so, it prompts the question: Did we really need to shutter our powerful economic machine to control the virus?
It sure doesn’t look that way. Not only will we be saddled with lower incomes, lost revenues and trillion-dollar deficits for years to come as a result of the lockdown and uncontrolled government spending, but working Americans who had made such nice economic gains in recent years will start slipping down the income ladder.
That will lead to a tragic, but sadly predictable, uptick in depression, drug use, alcohol abuse and suicide, among other outcomes, as we recently wrote. It may well be those, and not COVID-19 deaths, will be the lasting, tragic legacy of the Wuhan virus.
To repeat: It’s time we ended this insane national lockdown, if only to restore some sense of normalcy to America. And maybe save tens of thousands of lives while we’re at it.
America is starting to reopen for business across the country -- except for a handful of states where lockdown orders are expected to remain in place for weeks to come. With very few exceptions, the cities and states that have ordered their businesses to remain comatose and their millions of workers to go without paychecks are blue, blue, blue. This list includes New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California and Oregon. They all have Democratic governors.
Once great and mighty cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Manhattan are ghost towns. They all have Democratic mayors.
These governors and mayors say they are relying on "science" and the advice by public health officials. But there is no "scientific" consensus on this terrible virus, and what was thought to be "scientific" fact three weeks ago is now in great question.
For example, last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us that the disease could be spread on metal surfaces. Now they say never mind, we were wrong. They said masks should be worn, and then they said they aren't helpful, and now they are pivoting back to masks. Well, which is it?
It turns out the politicians hear what they want to hear -- whatever confirms their preexisting bias. The bias of liberal Democrats is to shutter -- to put government ahead of business and to put the nanny state ahead of the rights of individual workers.
In Washington, Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., bulldozed through the House a massive $3 trillion pork-barrel spending bill to combat the negative effects of the lockdown they fervently support. Pelosi's bill would offer blue states and cities locked down hundreds of billions of dollars of aid from red states. So, the states that are working with Republican governors have to now subsidize the Democratic states that aren't working. This is called "enabling," and President Donald Trump and the Senate would be foolish to appropriate these taxpayer dollars.
With or without this aid package from Washington, come September and October, there is going to be a massive amount of human misery and suffering resulting from what mostly blue state politicians have done to their citizens. Americans are likely to observe an economy that is getting better in the red states than in the blue states. They will see chaos and economic ruin in cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. These cities may start to look like Caracas, Venezuela, in the weeks ahead
Meanwhile, red states like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas will be doing much better in jobs and business conditions.
Democrats have foolishly defined themselves as the lockdown party. With many Americans, this is popular -- for now.
But it is a downer ideology. Modern liberalism is a "can't do" movement, while the free market conservative movement is a "can do" crusade.
For the last 20 years, red states in the South and Sun Belt and Mountain States have been growing at about twice the pace of blue states with high taxes and heavy regulation. My prediction is that blue states are now facing a change or die choice, and no amount of free money from Washington will change that cold reality.
Usually, it’s necessary to wait until after a presidential election is over before it becomes possible to identify the point at which the dynamics of the contest began to favor the eventual winner.
Occasionally, however, the turning point is blindingly obvious.
President Reagan’s 1984 reelection, for example, was all but assured when Walter Mondale included a promise to raise taxes in his speech accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Likewise, former Vice President Joe Biden almost certainly handed the 2020 election to President Trump last Friday when he told an African-American interviewer, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
That blunder not only unmasked Biden’s condescending attitude toward a bloc of voters without whose support he cannot hope to win, it also revealed that his campaign is worried about poll numbers they’re seeing for those very voters. A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of African-Americans support Biden. If that seems high, remember that Clinton won 88 percent of the black vote in 2016 and lost the election. African-American turnout was also down in 2016. In other words, Biden must turn out more black voters than did Hillary and win a larger percentage of their votes. Biden can’t win with 81 percent of a tepid African-American turnout, and his campaign knows it.
This is why the candidate condescended to be interviewed by Charlamagne tha God on “The Breakfast Club.” Biden’s campaign recently rebooted his outreach to the black community, and the interview was part of that effort. Charlamagne has real influence in the African-American community. “The Breakfast Club” is among the most-listened-to morning radio shows in America, reaching millions of listeners every week, and Charlamagne boasts 2.1 million Twitter followers. Biden’s remark, for a lot of his listeners, reinforced the view that the Democratic Party takes the black vote for granted. Sunday morning, Charlamagne was asked on MSNBC if he believed that this was the Democratic attitude:
I know that’s the attitude. That’s why I don’t even care about the words and the lip service.… It has to come to the point where we stop putting the burden on black voters to show up for Democrats and start putting the burden on Democrats to show up for black voters.… They have to worry about voter depression, people staying home on Election Day because they just aren’t enthused by the candidate.… You can’t act like this is the most important election ever but run a campaign from your basement, not make some real policy commitments to the black community, and not listen to some of the demands that the black community is making.
Friday, Biden’s campaign first attempted to clean up the mess by claiming that the remark was a joke. This was the line taken by Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign who tweeted, “The comments made at the end of the Breakfast Club interview were in jest, but let’s be clear about what the VP was saying: he was making the distinction that he would put his record with the African American community up against Trump’s any day.” This balderdash quite literally fails the laugh test. President Trump’s pre-pandemic job creation initiatives and criminal justice reform have done more for blacks in three years than Joe Biden accomplished in half a century backstroking around the swamp.
After it became clear that the “just kidding” strategy wasn’t selling, Sanders simply refused to answer further questions. When NBC’s Chuck Todd, not exactly a purveyor of GOP talking points, tried to ask her a question about the issue she interrupted him thus: “Chuck, I’m not going to do this. Chuck, I’m not going to do this.” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was less reticent: “Joe Biden’s comments are the most arrogant and condescending thing I’ve heard in a very long time. I am offended but not surprised.” Nor was Michigan GOP Senate candidate John James who, like Sen. Scott, is black. Indeed, the latter was moved to explain what really motivates the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee:
The Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted for decades, but on Friday former Vice President Joe Biden took this view to a new and very hurtful level.… Biden has shown clearly that he thinks he knows better than black people what is best for us, and that if we don’t support him we are denying our own racial identity and heritage. Worse, I don’t see Biden’s Democratic colleagues holding him accountable for his comments. Instead, I hear silence.… Biden’s views have been exposed and stand in stark contrast to President Trump, who visited Michigan Thursday and actually listened to the needs of black people from black people.
Oddly enough, there is a certain symmetry to this. Biden wants to lead the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. President Trump leads the party that ended the “peculiar institution,” granted citizenship to former slaves, and recognized their right to vote. The Republicans did these things, as well as passing the 19th Amendment, despite the frequently violent objections of the Democrats. The best-kept secret in American politics is that, for these reasons, 95 percent of African-Americans voted Republican from the end of the Civil War until the 1930s. By that time, however, the GOP had come to take the black vote for granted. Sound familiar? If not, go back and read that quote from Charlamagne tha God.
Michael Chertoff, former secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, went on Face the Nation this past weekend where he opined that K-12 schools should not reopen until there is a vaccine for the Wuhan virus. His opinions on this topic should carry no more weight than mine or yours.
The reality is that it is time for the evidence and common sense to determine what states do in the fall in terms of reopening our public schools. Virtually all of the evidence on the Wuhan virus indicates it has little impact on the five-year-old to 18-year-old school age population. Most states have had few, if any, deaths of school-aged citizens. For example, according to the Ohio Department of Health Coronavirus Dashboard, of the nearly 1,800 deaths in Ohio, not one person under 19-years-old has died.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted that ‘relatively few children with COVID-19 are hospitalized, and fewer children than adults experience fever, cough, or shortness of breath.’ The CDC reports that nationwide, of the more than 93,000 deaths, 0.0 percent occurred in the 0-14 age range and 0.1 percent occurred among those 15-years-old to 24-years-old. Based on this evidence, it is safe to say that our kids are simply not at much risk of harm from the pandemic. At worst, they face less risk than they have faced for decades from the seasonal flu, which has killed 174 kids this flu season.
As Purdue University President Mitch Daniels stated when he reported that Purdue would be fully open in the Fall, the focus for the university is on protecting the professors and workers with risk factors such as obesity, diabetes, and respiratory conditions. Most of those adults working at Purdue, like America’s K-12 teachers and staff, are under the age of 65. For those between 24-years-old and 64-years-old, the percentage of deaths nationally is just 20 percent of the total. Most of those dying from the pandemic are retired senior citizens, with 59 percent of all deaths occurring in those 75-years-old or older.
Instead of stunting the education of millions of kids with a distance learning system, school districts should identify which teachers and staff are at higher risk from the virus and replace those teachers with lower risk teachers. After all, many teachers can maintain social distance away from a full classroom of masked students by simply using the educational space wisely. To facilitate this process, the high-risk teachers should be kept whole financially and assigned to assist the replacement teachers with their duties from outside of the classroom. State legislatures should reform the regulatory requirements to allow subject matter experts without teaching degrees to serve as fully compensated replacement teachers during the pandemic.
And, no one should kid themselves that distance learning is anywhere close to the quality of learning that occurs in the classroom. While I’m sure the teachers did the best they could, most kids didn’t learn much new material in the two months of the lockdown. Most of elementary school work consisted of very basic assignments that take less than an hour to do, thereby depriving kids of roughly five-plus hours of teacher-aided learning each day. High schoolers have more to do each day, but learning complex new mathematical and scientific material just wasn’t possible.
Anyone can see the negative impact kids being separated from their friends have had on their mental health. One must wonder if we are doing more harm by keeping children in a bubble than we do by getting back to normal. This same rationale applies to restarting kid sports in the fall. Protect the referees, but let the kids play.
Keep in mind, I write from the perspective of a suburban parent whose kids attend a very good school district and who already make the mark in terms of proficiency and achievement. Consider less fortunate kids already behind the learning curve. It is clear those kids will fall even farther behind, thereby likely leading to even greater inequality post-high school.
Even more problematic, many kids have parents who, unlike me, can’t work from home. Many of those families already struggle to make ends meet. Adding new childcare costs to their plate simply isn’t realistic.
The reality is that we can make changes to protect teachers, keep our kids in school full time, and avoid both the deficiencies of distance learning and the financial burden such learning would have on millions of families across America. Based on the science and common sense, opening schools in the Fall should be an easy call.
Sometime in the next few days, the official coronavirus death count will likely exceed 100,000. The true count is even higher — probably closer to 130,000. This larger number includes people who had the virus but weren’t diagnosed, as well as those who died for indirect reasons, such as delaying medical treatment for other illnesses.
Either way, the toll is greater than the combined death count from every war that the U.S. has fought in the past 60 years: Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Rump's too much of a pussy (grabber) to wear a mask in public.
In this way he's leading those who support him to death.
"Sometime in the next few days, the official coronavirus death count will likely exceed 100,000. The true count is even higher — probably closer to 130,000. This larger number includes people who had the virus but weren’t diagnosed, as well as those who died for indirect reasons, such as delaying medical treatment for other illnesses.
Either way, the toll is greater than the combined death count from every war that the U.S. has fought in the past 60 years: Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan and elsewhere."
so sad
in those wars, the deaths were mainly kids who would have had a full life ahead of them
now, it is mainly among the elderly, at life's end
it didn't have to be that way
if all the governors in blue states had taken the decisive action to protect the elderly that Ron DeSantis in Florida did, deaths would be about a fourth of what they are
as of this morning, approximately 77,000 of those deaths have happened in blue states, whose citizens will also suffer economic hardship and deprivation as a result of the excessively lengthy shutdowns
look for a huge sweep of blue states in the fall election
"Rump's too much of a pussy (grabber) to wear a mask in public.
In this way he's leading those who support him to death."
well, a look at the stats, you know, facts show that a high percentage of the deaths have occurred in states that didn't support Trump
Biden wore a mask in the open air and when he was no closer than 12 feet from anyone
and he was very unlikely to have been contagious anyway since he hasn't left his basement in over 2 months
it was a show
studies and experts are unanimous, if only Andrew Cuomo had acted a week earlier, much of this could have been avoided
but, silver lining alert, he did get to do a banter TV comedy show with his brother every night
so, he can probably get a job at CNN when New Yorkers toss the bum out
"Rump's too much of a pussy (grabber) to wear a mask in public."
just to be clear, the CDC guidance is to wear a mask in situations where you can't avoid being physically separated from others by at least six feet
this moving of the goalposts by the media, and TTF media sycophants, is pathetic
MSNBC sent a crew to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to catch all the yokels running around outdoors without a mask
unfortunately for them, the crew was filmed by an amateur and the crew was not wearing a mask
typical of the media, and TTF media sycophants
here's the story:
https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/05/27/unmasked-msnbcs-double-standard-elitist-mask-shaming-faceplant/
The battle lines on the issue of ending the economic shutdown are drawn more sharply each week. The terror campaign conducted by the media when the coronavirus outbreak began effectively compelled President Trump and most governors to follow the advice of the audible scientists and “flatten the curve” with a comprehensive shutdown requiring huge numbers of people to stay at home.
As the unemployment figures that resulted mounted swiftly toward 40 million, the American Left, now including almost all the official Democrats and almost all the national political media, became instantly addicted to the prospect of holding the president responsible at the election in November for creating an immense economic depression.
When the president recognized the extent of the alarm over the virus in March, he decided he had no alternative politically (and probably none in terms of public health, either) but to shut the country down, acknowledging the authority of the governors to decide exactly how extensively in each state. He took care to announce, as he did this, that the shut-down would be reversed as soon as possible and that his objective was a V-shaped economic recovery: a return almost as vertical as the inevitable decline.
Starting in early April, the president moved more or less subtly to encourage governors to begin reopening their states. Predictably, Republican governors tended to respond positively and promptly to this proposal and their Democratic analogues were more or less sluggish. For a time, both sides moved with relative caution to preserve the fiction that this was a matter of lives, public health, national welfare and, above all things, was beyond politics.
Of course, every observant person knew that in this presidential term nothing has been above politics, (and little has been beneath politics, either). The president cautioned the Republican governor of Georgia Brian Kemp about a general opening of almost all small businesses, but the governor seems to have been justified in taking that step and the president subsequently has applauded it.
The apparent Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden—the personification of the shutdown, now lumbering determinedly through his third subterranean month in Delaware—urged caution.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was at pains to emphasize that the status of New York as a “hot spot” required him to go slowly, though the debate in New York was overtaken by allegations against the Democrat of responsibility for the deaths of thousands of elderly people by requiring COVID-19 sufferers be returned to nursing homes.
At the outset of the coronavirus crisis there was what proved to be an exaggerated fear that the hospital system would be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. As a result of that belief, surplus capacity was quickly built in or moved to the larger cities and, instead of the homes for the elderly being protected and insulated from the start, they were in many cases allowed to become infestations of the illness swiftly transmitting the infection among residents. We now know that about one-third of the country’s fatalities from COVID-19 happened in long-term care facilities.
As President Trump has steadily encouraged relaxation of the economic shutdown, public opinion—which once appeared committed to the shutdown and responded so uniformly to the calls for sacrifice—has drifted back to approval for a reopening somewhat timidly. But the tactical trap is closing in slow motion on the Democrats. Since the president’s greatest vulnerability would be if he could not get the shutdown lifted in good time for the country to see the economy reviving before the election, the Democrats have lost the opportunity to flop back to complaints that are now becoming quite audible, that the shutdown should never have been imposed in the first place.
This weekend the president stated that had the experts known more about the virus in March, this comprehensive shutdown would not have been imposed. The Democrats thus are stuck with the shutdown and are stuck with an argument for continuing the shutdown that rests entirely on the continued propagation of exaggerated and unseemly fear.
So far, where the return from the lockdown has proceeded quickly—as in the Republican-governed states of Texas, Florida, and Georgia—the incidence of coronavirus has not risen. (Meanwhile, in Georgia, there has been the leitmotif of Democratic gubernatorial candidate and inveterate seeker of this year’s vice presidential nomination, Stacey Abrams, that she won the election which she lost by 55,000 votes to Kemp).
The rabidly Democratic media who effectively are conducting the campaign for the beleaguered official Democrats, are left clinging to an indefinite shutdown that only panic can justify and that an increasing number of people, now including the president, believe should not even have been imposed.
The president said that his most difficult decision would be when to lift the shut-down, and he now has his principal scientific adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, supporting a relaxation and the leading Democratic governors, Cuomo and Gavin Newsom in California, affirming the president’s cooperation and efficiency. This makes the Democratic claim, launched by former President Obama as a truism with no need for further explanation that Trump has bungled this crisis, very difficult to sustain. Neither Obama nor habitual media Trump-bashers such as A.B. Stoddard last week in RealClearPolitics, offered a word of explanation for the unqualified assertion that the administration’s performance has been a disaster.
As the United States has done substantially better than any large Western country except Canada and Germany, the claim that it has been a disaster is a false argument. Trump was clearly wise to close down direct air travel between China and the United States at the end of January, for which he was much criticized by the Democrats. His mobilization of the private sector, and particularly the swift development by Abbott Laboratories of an instant testing method, and the mass production of ventilators for which there was widely claimed to be an acute shortage, were very effective.
The results of Trump’s calling on states to relax the shutdown in April make it hard to criticize that move. The Democratic media appear at this point to be reduced to representing the loss of nearly 100,000 American lives as a tragedy for which Trump is somehow responsible. When he took the measures that he did, the so-called experts had not yet reduced their prediction of fatalities in the United States from over 2 million to between 100,000 and 240,000. The daily fatalities continue to decline and have fallen by over 60 percent in the last five weeks.
If this trend continues as the country reopens and there is distinct progress on bringing the unemployed back to work, it is going to be extremely difficult to run against the president on this issue. The polls reflect Trump’s difficulty in moving from the president of the shutdown to the president of the reopening while brushing off the imputation to him of putting “soon ahead of safe.” But he is moving between strengths and the polls do indicate a large lead for Trump over Biden on the issue of restoring the American economy.
With a brisk revival and continued retrenchment of the virus, it is going to be increasingly difficult for the Democrats to win this argument.
the sad thing for Dems is that their nominee, Joe Biden, increases in popularity whenever the public doesn't see much of him
in abstract, he seems a stable alternative to Donald Trump
whenever he gets out, it's clear he has no charisma, says stupid things, and makes a fool of himself
his interview on a black radio show last week revealed how he really views blacks
and the mainstream media is scrambling to find some way to spin the derision he's receiving for his ludicrous mask walk on Memorial Day
he doesn't personify our best
plus, he'll be 78 in January
there's a good chance he won't serve 4 years, much less 8
so the VP is vital to the voters' decision
he's already boxed himself in by eliminating 90% of the viable candidates who could step up as President
can anyone imagine voters wanting Stacey Abrams or Gretchen Witmer or the Police Chief of Orlando as President?
when the time comes to make a choice, rather than an endorsement, no one will vote for him
Back in the late 1980s, there was little doubt that religious freedom was an important right that must be robustly protected. After the Supreme Court constrained the use of strict scrutiny for religious liberty claims in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), Democrats and Republicans came together to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. The act passed without a dissenting vote in the House, 97-3 in the Senate, and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Around 2009, this consensus began to collapse. I remember clearly the day when a professor asked “why should religious convictions be specially protected?” Shortly thereafter, academics started to publish books and articles with titles such as "Why Tolerate Religion?" and “What if Religion Is Not Special?” Some major media outlets even began to put scare quotes around phrases like “religious freedom.”
In the political arena, the Obama Administration showed little concern for religious freedom when it required businesses to provide contraceptives and abortifacients to employees, even when owners had religious convictions against doing so. It also offered a rare challenge to the doctrine of ministerial exception, a legal protection ensuring, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, that churches are free to decide “who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith, and carry out their mission.”
The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty, edited by Michael D. Breidenbach and Owen Anderson, does much to set the record straight. Collectively, its 15 substantive chapters written by leading scholars make a strong case that religious liberty is an important right that must be safeguarded.
In the first three chapters, Anderson, Janice Tzuling Chik, and John Finnis respond directly or indirectly to scholars such as Ronald Dworkin, Brian Leiter, and Micah Schwartzman who contend that religious convictions should be treated no differently than non-religious ones. These philosophers make different but interrelated arguments demonstrating that, in Chik’s words:
Religious liberty is a unique human right: It is not reducible to or identifiable with other rights, which may share similar aspects but in fact refer to fundamentally distinct human powers, such as the right to free speech or the right to espouse certain metaphysical or ethical views. Religion therefore is special, and it deserves respect and protection as such.
In the second section, Glenn Moots, Chris Beneke, Breidenbach, Jonathan Den Hartog, and Zoë Robinson provide an excellent overview of the history of religious liberty and church-state relations in America. By placing early colonial practices in their historical context, Moots shows that it is unfair to condemn colonial leaders for not embracing modern notions of religious liberty and church-state relations. Yet his and Breidenbach’s essays suggest America’s early civic officials did a better job of protecting religious liberty than is often realized.
Contrary to the claims of some contemporary scholars, Chris Beneke’s and Philip Muñoz’s essays leave little doubt that America’s founders thought that religion is special and that religious freedom must be protected. Beneke also debunks the canard that the founders desired to strictly separate church and state.
Since the mid-20th century, advocates have had a tendency to defend religious liberty in terms of indifference and subjectivism.
Den Hartog’s essay on church and state in the 19th century and Zoë Robinson’s on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the religion clauses demonstrate that the freedom of religious minorities was often not respected, but few readers will come away from these chapters with the conclusion that this was a good thing.
Robinson contends that since 1980, the Supreme Court’s religious liberty jurisprudence “roughly mirrors contemporary public opinion, the views of the political branches, and the positions held by powerful social institutions (e.g. corporations).” Specifically, she is troubled by the “8-1 decision” in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (2012) (it was actually unanimous) which insists that churches and other religious entities must be free to decide “who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith, and carry out their mission.” But if the religion clauses do not protect the ability of religious entities to choose their own leaders and teachers without government interference, what do they protect?
In her haste to describe the Supreme Court’s move to “privilege” majority views, Robinson ignores Gonzales v. O Centro (2006) (protecting a small Brazilian-based church’s use of hallucinogenic tea); Holt v. Hobbs (2015) (requiring a prison to permit an Islamic inmate to grow facial hair as required by his faith); and EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch (2015) (holding a corporation accountable for refusing to hire a Muslim woman because she wore a headscarf as mandated by her understanding of Islam). She also neglects the many lower court cases that have protected religious minorities. Majorities obviously can and do discriminate against minorities, but fortunately, they also protect and honor them with increasing frequency.
The third section of the book, entitled “Law, Politics, and Economics,” contains excellent essays by Paul E. Kerry, Vincent Philip Muñoz, Anthony Gill, Steven D. Smith, Donald L. Drakeman, Marc O. DeGirolami, and Gerard Bradley. Drawing from a variety of disciplines, each of these essays argues directly or indirectly for religious liberty.
Particularly relevant in light of Robinson’s essay, Smith offers an excellent response to academics and others concerned about the rise of “corporate religious liberty” as represented by cases such as Hosanna-Tabor and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014). He shows that this concept is not at all a new development, as religious liberty advocates have long fought to free institutions such as churches and denominations (which, since the 19th century, have often been incorporated) from state control. He also points out that few academics or activists deny that non-religious corporations such as the New York Times Company should be protected by the First Amendment.
Unlike Robinson, Smith does not ignore Gonzales v. O Centro. Instead, he asks a brilliant question about it: “Was the religious group that sued under RFRA leading to the Court’s unanimous decision . . . incorporated? Did anyone care? Should anything have turned on the question?” He later observes that “corporate status is a legal construction that promotes the interests of the human beings who create and use” them. There is no good reason to deny First Amendment rights to a group of people who choose to incorporate.
Other highlights from this section include Gill’s intriguing argument about how rational choice theory can help explain the rise of religious liberty, Muñoz’s account of how Supreme Court justices repudiated the founders’ natural rights understanding of religious liberty in favor of one grounded on human autonomy, and Drakeman’s demonstration that an originalist understanding of the Establishment Clause prohibits little more than the creation of a “Church of the United States.” Noteworthy as well is DeGirolami’s contention that recent theories that the Establishment Clause should be interpreted as requiring religious equality or nondiscrimination reflect the “view that Christianity is at best irrelevant and at worst obnoxious to the secular state.”
In the volume’s final chapter, Gerard V. Bradley observes that since the mid-20th century, advocates have had a tendency to defend religious liberty in terms of indifference and subjectivism. These are flimsy foundations, and among the consequences of this strategy is that over the past few years, “for the first time in American history, it became respectable to oppose religious liberty and its overarching value in our political order.” The remedy to this situation, Bradley argues against the prevailing winds of the academy, is that “[f]riends of religious liberty must yank its subject, religion, out of subjectivity and irrationality to which it has been consigned. They must reconnect religion and truth.”
The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty provides a wonderful overview of religious liberty and church-state relations in America. Six of the essays argue directly and forcefully in favor of robustly protecting religious liberty, but even those essays that are more historical in nature suggest excellent reasons for offering substantial protection to what many founders called “the sacred right of conscience.”
an examination of how TTF and other alarmist Dem outlets ignored facts and evidence to massively damage our economy:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/28/how_media_sensationalism_big_tech_bias_extended_lockdowns_143302.html
"in abstract, he seems a stable alternative to Donald Trump
whenever he gets out, it's clear he has no charisma, says stupid things, and makes a fool of himself"
And yet Biden has NEVER said anything nearly so stupid as suggesting we should be injected with disinfectant as a treatment for CV, or "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
If "saying stupid things" is the measure, Captain Clorox will lose every single time. Wake up and smell the covfefe.
If you can't see that, take another suggestion from the Rumpster and shine some UV light... umm... "internally."
Who knows, maybe it will even kill off that cancer from the windmills.
"an examination of how TTF and other alarmist Dem outlets ignored facts and evidence to massively damage our economy:"
A Republican runs the White House.
Republicans control the Senate.
Conservatives have a majority in the Supreme Court.
26 states have Republican governors, only 24 have Democrats.
"Fox News Channel finished the quarter with its largest audience in network history among both total day and primetime viewers. FNC was the most-watched network among all of basic cable for the 15th straight quarter, averaging 1.9 million total day viewers."
( https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-ratings-2020-best-history )
We know that about half the country only follows liberal media to call it "fake news" and troll the libs.
And yet somehow, this is the Democrats' fault.
"If "saying stupid things" is the measure, Captain Clorox will lose every single time. Wake up and smell the covfefe."
ah, you miss the point
Biden is being offered as an alternative to Trump
if he's just the same, the issues will be the focus
Trump, who polls show America trusts with the economy, wins
"A Republican runs the White House.
Republicans control the Senate.
Conservatives have a majority in the Supreme Court.
26 states have Republican governors, only 24 have Democrats."
health departments are local institutions
they aren't run by the President, the Senate, or the Supreme Court
and the 26 state governments run by the GOP have a tiny fraction of the cases that those run by Dems do
if Trump were a dictator, he could have appointed Ron DeSantis to run New York, but we have a democracy
"And yet somehow, this is the Democrats' fault."
they advocated that borders shouldn't be closed, that nursing homes would have to admit contagious COVID patients, that everything be shut down for months
they were wrong
they own their error
Great news! Today, the U.S. Department of Education ruled that a policy letting boys play in girls’ sports is a violation of Title IX, a federal law that ensures that no one can be denied equal access to educational opportunities on the basis of sex. This is a significant win for female athletes across America: it sends a message that fairness in girls’ sports does matter.
In Idaho, where we helped pass the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, ensures that only girls play in girls’ sports. Fairness in Women’s Sports is based on the idea that sports should happen on a level playing field – and that letting biological boys play in girls’ sports is decidedly unfair. Males have numerous physiological advantages that make it hard or impossible for even the top female athletes to compete against. That’s why this law ensures that only girls play in girls’ sports.
As you know, the ACLU recently sued Idaho over that law, claiming in their initial filing that Fairness in Women’s Sports is a violation of Title IX. Today’s ruling from the U.S. Department of Education suggests otherwise and sends a supportive message for female athletes across the nation.
It’s a message that together, we can Save Girls’ Sports.
"and the 26 state governments run by the GOP have a tiny fraction of the cases that those run by Dems do"
Look at the map again and you'll see that the highest infection rates follow the states and cities with the highest population density - which also happens to be largely where the country's wealth is generated.
The virus needs people to infect new people - the more people you have around, and the more time they spend together in things like public transit, the more people that are going to get infected. That's how a virus works - it's not because conservative trolls try to blame everything on democrats.
"they advocated that borders shouldn't be closed"
No, they advocated not being racist about closing the borders. And we now know that the Rumpster closing the borders to just the Chinese was too little to late, especially since we now know we got infected by Europeans - Rump wasn't even looking in the right direction for stopping the virus. It's not like we didn't know Europe was having a problem with CV-19.
For Rump to have been effective he would have needed to shut down all travel, or at the very least test everyone coming over - from anywhere - and quarantine anyone with a fever or cough. He didn't though. He just shut down Chinese coming from China - but a virus doesn't care what nationality you are - it's an equal opportunity infector. So that shutdown didn't do a damn thing and he and all of his obsequious followers praise him for it.
"that nursing homes would have to admit contagious COVID patients, that everything be shut down for months"
Well, they could have pushed those patients out into the streets with no care at all, or forcibly taken over hotels and shoved them in there where the cleaning crews could have tried to keep them healthy. Which do you prefer?
Not putting them in nursing homes was a luxury afforded to those who didn't already have patients filling up the hallways in their hospitals.
"Trump, who polls show America trusts with the economy, wins"
Trump also wins the "Most Civilians Dead Under a President's Watch" since 1918.
Rump's biggest economic accomplishment is pushing Bush II's economic disaster down to number 2 on the list. Anyone who still thinks this serial bankrupter has a clue about how to run an economy, much less a country, is an idiot.
Are you tired of "winning" yet?
The never-Trumper Republican Lincoln Project has set its sights in a scathing new ad on Senate Majority Leader “Rich Mitch” McConnell of Kentucky, contrasting the plush life he’s forged for himself while in office with his state’s poor in various social metrics.
The 60-second spot features several shots of the Republican’s signature cat-who-swallowed-the-canary smile while noting that he’s made tens of millions of dollars since first winning his Senate seat in 1984, when he “didn’t have much money,” says the narrator in a folksy Southern drawl.
McConnell, seeking his seventh term in November, has “spent most of his time making deals for himself — not so much for Kentucky,” the spot says.
Kentucky ranks 40th in job opportunity in the nation, 45th in education, and 43rd in health care, the ad says. “After 35 years, Kentuckians are still waitin’ for the kind of opportunities Mitch worked so hard to give himself,” the narrator concludes.
The political action committee for the Lincoln Project, a group comprised of several prominent GOP figures who adamantly oppose President Donald Trump, intends to spend more than $300,000 this week to run the spot on TV and in digital ads in Kentucky, reports The Louisville Courier Journal.
McConnell was picked as a Lincoln Project target in part because of his actions to stymy Trump’s impeachment trial stemming from the president’s pressure on Ukraine to launch an investigation into political rival Joe Biden, said attorney and group co-founder George Conway.
“When he fixed the impeachment trial by blocking evidence of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, McConnell violated and abased the solemn oaths he took as a United States Senator,” Conway, who’s married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, said in a statement. “Add in the fact that, as our ad shows, he’s managed to do much better for himself than for the people of Kentucky, and it becomes a no-brainer: McConnell has to go.”
"Look at the map again and you'll see that the highest infection rates follow the states and cities with the highest population density - which also happens to be largely where the country's wealth is generated.
The virus needs people to infect new people - the more people you have around, and the more time they spend together in things like public transit, the more people that are going to get infected. That's how a virus works - it's not because conservative trolls try to blame everything on democrats."
FLorida has two million more people than New York
Ever hear of Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas? All in the top ten most populous US cities
How about Austin, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Colummbus? All in the top fifteen most populous US cities
8 of the 15 most most populous US cities are in red states
blue state governors own this calamity and the way they handled it was catastrophic
"No, they advocated not being racist about closing the borders."
they howled as loudly when Trump closed the Europe border
stopping Chinese was racist sine the Wuhan flu started there and was raging there at the time
"And we now know that the Rumpster closing the borders to just the Chinese was too little to late, especially since we now know we got infected by Europeans"
so bizarre that Dems think this is an argument in their favor
the fact that few infections here came for China shows that closing the border with China worked
if only Europe had done the same
"So that shutdown didn't do a damn thing"
actually, it did
places like Italy and Spain and Iran were ravaged by cases from China and, as you point out, we weren't
"Well, they could have pushed those patients out into the streets with no care at all, or forcibly taken over hotels and shoved them in there where the cleaning crews could have tried to keep them healthy. Which do you prefer?"
How about the huge boat docked in NYC with a thousand beds that never got used or the under-utilized beds at the Jacob Javits Center or the tent hospitals set up in Central Park?
"Not putting them in nursing homes was a luxury afforded to those who didn't already have patients filling up the hallways in their hospitals."
just because a Dem imagined something was going happen doesn't mean it did
"Trump also wins the "Most Civilians Dead Under a President's Watch" since 1918."
this pandemic looks like it will have about the same death toll as the previous ones from China in 57-58 and 69-70
"Rump's biggest economic accomplishment is pushing Bush II's economic disaster down to number 2 on the list. Anyone who still thinks this serial bankrupter has a clue about how to run an economy, much less a country, is an idiot."
also, anyone who looks at the evidence thinks Trump has a clue
just a few months ago, Trump had the lowest minority unemployment in history
the entire world is suffering economic distress at the same time, Dems won't be able to blame it on Trump, especially since they advocate lengthening the shut down while Trump is urging blue state governors to stop harming the working class and open up
"Are you tired of "winning" yet?"
the best is yet to come
"The never-Trumper Republican Lincoln Project has set its sights in a scathing new ad on Senate Majority Leader “Rich Mitch” McConnell of Kentucky, contrasting the plush life he’s forged for himself while in office with his state’s poor in various social metrics."
I doubt Kentucky's voters will be swayed some fat cat lawyer from NY, who is a constant embarassment to his wife, trying to stir class resentment in the heartland
"FLorida has two million more people than New York
Ever hear of Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas? All in the top ten most populous US cities
How about Austin, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Colummbus? [sic] All in the top fifteen most populous US cities
8 of the 15 most most populous US cities are in red states"
Of course I've heard of those cities - well, all except for "Colummbus"!
And either you can't read, or you don't understand the term "POPULATION DENSITY," which you did at least manage to copy. It's not the raw number of people that's the problem - it's how closely they're packed together, idiot. It's called "POPULATION DENSITY."
The closer people are packed together, the more people the virus can infect - basic virology stuff. But I keep forgetting, you guys don't believe in science, unless you can cherry pick a single data point to help shove through your agenda.
Here is the list of US cities ranked by POPULATION DENSITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density
The topmost table on the page list the top 133 US incorporated areas by POPULATION DENSITY.
Here are a few highlights:
Phoenix: Not on the list.
San Antonio: Not on the list.
Austin: Not on the list.
Jacksonville: Not on the list.
Houston: Not on the list.
Fort Worth: Not on the list.
"Colummbus:" Not on the list, nor is Columbus.
Meanwhile, 10 of the top 11 incorporated areas are in New York and New Jersey - number 9 is in California.
Dallas: Not on the list, but it does have 1 incorporated area that is #74 on the list: Mobile City, with a population density of 11,911.3 people per square mile.
For comparison, Guttenburg New Jersey has 57,116 people per square mile, or nearly 5 times as much.
These 4 New York City boroughs all have densities far higher than the Mobile City area in Dallas:
Manhattan: 69,467.5 people/sq. mile - Nearly 6x the pop. density.
Brooklyn: 35,369.1 - nearly 3x
Bronx: 32,903.6 - 2.75x
Queens: 20,553.6 - 1.73x
The problem isn't city SIZE, it's POPULATION DENSITY.
"The problem isn't city SIZE, it's POPULATION DENSITY."
actually, the problem is neither
it's inept blue state governments
your graph over-emphasizes red states by breaking cities up into pieces
by city, Miami comes in third on your list
they have done fine because their GOP governor didn't go the total shutdown route
Los Angeles is second
they are one of the few blue states to manage this well and their governor will have no lasting political damage
but, it just goes to show how badly the other blue state governors have done
it's not the density, it's the management
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, May 29 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is trusted more than Democratic nominee Joe Biden to handle the economy, polls show, even with more than 40 million Americans filing jobless claims and growth stalled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden supporters fear that vulnerability could intensify if Trump becomes the face of an economic recovery as the country re-opens after shutdowns, giving the Republican president's re-election prospects a boost when he needs it most.
Biden is expected to take his own sweet time releasing a large-scale recovery plan in the coming weeks. Democrats are watching closely to see if his message matches the moment, saying the party's presumptive nominee needs to become much more divisive and ramp up criticism of Trump's response to the pandemic, thinking that shows "leadership."
Biden, who has held awkward online events from home during the shutdown, "stayed in his basement and did the safe thing, but now it's different," said a leading Democrat in Michigan's Macomb County, a suburban Detroit county critical to Biden's hopes of taking the state back after Trump's stunning 2016 win there.
Biden should be out in communities across the country demonstrating how to reopen businesses, said the Democrat, who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly. "He needs to show what life is going to be like and how we are going to do it."
Trump has focused on the economy, pushing a return to normal as U.S. deaths from COVID-19 topped 100,000 nationwide.
Biden has preached caution, endorsing a meek and mild re-opening approach but saying this week the country could not revert to normal until there is a vaccine.
Reuters/Ipsos polling this week showed Trump with a 42% to 34% lead over Biden in terms of which candidate was trusted more on the economy.
An improving economy would play to Trump's strengths, said Ian Sams, an adviser at Navigator, a polling organization.
To better compete, Biden must advocate policies to hurt the economy and "put Trump's mismanagement of the economic fallout of the coronavirus on the front burner," said Sams, who was a spokesman for Senator Kamala Harris' 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.
Democrats should amplify concerns about whether unemployed workers and small businesses have been given enough help, he added.
Biden said he has solicited governors for input on their re-opening approaches and some ideas on economic recovery plans, since he's plum outta ideas.
A Biden adviser said re-opening should be dictated by public health concerns and that economic considearios ar irrelevant.
Economists see a strong recovery beginning in the third quarter, with job gains expected at millions, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia survey.
"The unemployment rate will probably be falling relatively quickly later this year," the Biden adviser said.
Another prominent Michigan Democrat, Vaughn Derderian, the chair of the Oakland County Democratic Party, worries a rosier economy will benefit Trump. But he said there is little Biden can do now to thwart economic progress.
"by city, Miami comes in third on your list"
No. By CITY, Miami is 23rd at 11,153.5 people per square mile, while New York City is 1st at 27,015.3/mi^2, or 2.4 times more dense.
You apparently were confused by the "Metropolitan area" table, which shows the densities at 56,012 and 20,267 for the NY and Miami areas respectively, or 2.76 more dense in NY than Miami. What you omit however is the column that shows the NY area has 55 places with 10K+ people, while Miami has only 7 - a factor of 7.86 lower.
So even if the infection rates were EXACTLY THE SAME for places over 10K+ people, you'd expect the NY metro area to have (very roughly) 21.7 times the number of cases than Miami.
Given their density and size, even given EXACTLY the same infection rates (for areas over 10k people), the Miami metropolitan area would only have to deal with roughly 4.6% of the problem the NY metro area did. But that assumes only a linear increase of cases with density, and it is more likely to be exponential.
Your problem is math.
The fact of the matter is that the Miami metro area simply isn't dense enough and large enough to have ever competed with NY on infection numbers.
"actually, the problem is neither
it's inept blue state governments"
This is what conservatives have to keep telling themselves to keep drinking Rump's Kool-Aid. The simple fact of the matter is that viruses don't discriminate by voter affiliation, political boundaries, or religious belief.
Their fuel is human bodies, and the denser you pack them in, and the more you have of them, the more people are going to get infected and possibly die. That's the basic operation of a viral spread.
"they have done fine because their GOP governor didn't go the total shutdown route"
No, Miami did fine because they amount of human fuel and how densely it was packed meant it was inherently less than 5% of the problem of NY.
Until there is a vaccine, the only way to keep the virus from spreading is by keeping people away from each other, wearing gloves, masks and other PPE, and keeping fastidiously clean.
Shutting down earlier would have been by far the best defense.
This is all vey fascinating trying to find the right base to help blue state governors rationalize their incompetence, but the bottom line is each governor has to play the hand they are dealt. Red state governors adapted well to their circumstances, blue state governors didn't.
"This is what conservatives have to keep telling themselves to keep drinking Rump's Kool-Aid."
They don't have to. The public is slowly beginning to realize the national lockdown was never justified. The GOP has the videotapes for their fall commercials.
"The simple fact of the matter is that viruses don't discriminate by voter affiliation, political boundaries, or religious belief."
Thanks for repeating the demagoguery but no one disagrees with this obvious statement. It's irrelevant to what you are saying.
"Their fuel is human bodies, and the denser you pack them in, and the more you have of them, the more people are going to get infected and possibly die. That's the basic operation of a viral spread."
With the exception of Newsome, blue state governors failed to find an adequate way to deal with their reality. The only group likely to die if exposed are nursing home residents whose population density was increased by the NY and NJ governors. Deadly morons.
"No, Miami did fine because they amount of human fuel and how densely it was packed meant it was inherently less than 5% of the problem of NY."
no, they did fine because their governor focused on protecting the vulnerable
one thing you fail to grasp is that Main Street in the Magic Kingdom and the beaches at Spring Break were every bit as packed as midtown Manhattan in early March
"Until there is a vaccine, the only way to keep the virus from spreading is by keeping people away from each other, wearing gloves, masks and other PPE, and keeping fastidiously clean."
funny how the Dems have moved the goalposts again
a couple of weeks ago, we couldn't possibly return to normal without "robust" testing
now, we have it
everyone is taking all these precautions on their own
there is no need for governmental fiats shutting down civil liberties
truth is, whenever government is granted emergency powers, they always fight like hell to resist restoring freedom
that's what allowed Barack Obama to surveil the Trump campaign, the overreaction to 9-11
"Shutting down earlier would have been by far the best defense."
as your numbers show so well, that was only justified in dense areas
sorry, the Dems have been caught screwing up the economy unnecessarily
minorities won't be thinking Dem in the fall
MAGA Cultist: “I Make Shit Up All the Time” to Make Democrats Look Bad
Last summer, right-wing Trump cultist Brenden Dilley gave away the entire MAGA strategy guide when he said spreading fake news was perfectly fine for conservatives because “it doesn’t have to be true; it just has to go viral.”
Yesterday, he lashed out against everyone who calls him out for his lies reiterating that lying to promote Donald Trump is perfectly fine.
“I don’t give a f*ck about being factual,” Dilley said. “I make shit up all the time.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he continued. “My objective is to destroy Democrats, OK? To destroy liberals, liberalism as an idea, Democrats, and anything that opposes President Trump. That’s my goal. I’ve never made any bones about that.”
“You don’t have to fact check me because I don’t give a f*ck,” Dilley added. “I fucking make up shit sometimes, from time to time. I don’t care. I don’t care. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. I don’t mind admitting it. I don’t give a shit … When I get a chance to shit on the left, I don’t mind making shit up. No, not at all.”
It’s the entire Republican platform in a nutshell. Honesty is irrelevant. Posturing and pretending to care about governance is all that matters. They just care about #Winning, not what it takes to do it. It’s the party of family values as long as your family is made up entirely of bullshit artists.
The sad thing is that far too many Americans are either ignorant to the fact they’re being lied to… or fully supportive of it. Republicans know that they can dupe white evangelicals into voting for them as long as they pay lip service to Jesus and promote anti-abortion judges. If 100,000 people die of COVID because the Trump administration is too incompetent, it’s not like the “pro-life” people will ever raise a fuss.
Dilley knows it. And he’s weaponizing it. And he’s saying it out loud. And Republicans who know he’s telling the truth won’t do a damn thing about it because admitting their lies might mean giving up their power.
"If 100,000 people die of COVID because the Trump administration is too incompetent,"
there's not a shred of evidence for this
it's a big diverse country and the areas run by anti-Trumpers had a catastrophe
those areas that are conservative did fine
when DeSantus let Spring Breakers on the beach, liberals howled that Florida would be the next Italy
Florida never even became a "hot spot"
when Georgia's governor opened up in late April, Dems portrayed him as satanic
Georgia is doing fine
Arkansas never closed anything
no problems have developed
governors control states but those who followed Trump's advice most closely came out great
meanwhile, as Dems continue to push for extended lockdowns, evidence mounts that lockdowns accomplish nothing
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Sending children back to schools and day care centres in Denmark, the first country in Europe to do so, did not lead to an increase in coronavirus infections, according to official data, confirming similar findings from Finland on Thursday.
As countries across Europe make plans to exit months of lockdown aimed at curbing the virus outbreak, some parents worry that opening schools first might put the health of their children in danger.
Following a one-month lockdown, Denmark allowed children between two to 12 years back in day cares and schools on April 15. Based on five weeks’ worth of data, health authorities are now for the first time saying the move did not make the virus proliferate.
“You cannot see any negative effects from the reopening of schools,” Peter Andersen, doctor of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the Danish Serum Institute said on Thursday told Reuters.
In Finland, a top official announced similar findings on Wednesday, saying nothing so far suggested the coronavirus had spread faster since schools reopened in mid-May.
The number of infected children aged between one and up to 19 has declined steadily since late April, Andersen said, following a slight uptick immediately after the reopening of schools.
But this was too early to have anything to do with the reopening and could be explained by an increase in tests performed, he said.
“Based on preliminary experiences, it does not look like there has been a negative effect on the spread among school children or in the society in general,” Andersen said and called Denmark’s reopening strategy “prudent”.
A steady drop in daily infections, hospital admissions and deaths since early April has led Denmark to continue its reopening, with shopping malls, bars, restaurants allowed to reopen in May
maybe Denmark and Finland ain't dense enough for Dems
to be really dense, you have to be a Dem!!!!!!!!!!!
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Honesty is irrelevant."
this is why Dems treat Andrew Cuomo like a man for all seasons
and Gov DeSantis like the evil genius of a Bond movie
Dems don't care about honesty as long as they can imagine they're hurting Donald trump
It's been amusing to watch the TTFer claim that blue state governors are not cuplable for the tragedy that struck their states because it was just population density. If never occurs to such morons that if that's a get-out-of-jail-free card for Cuomo, it would also apply to Trump, who they endlessly blame for the pandemic. Further, the density factor also shows why the national lockdown was a bad idea of catastrophic proportions. In most of America, it was unnecessary and has brought lasting damage to people's lives. By continuing to push for extended lockdowns, Dems own this catastrophe and will be held accountable in November.
And how about that assertion that Trump has mismanaged this whole thing? Well, let's compare him to past Presidents.
We'll leave out Edith Wilson, who was the first female President during the Spanish flu.
Three Presidents have had to deal with Chinese viruses.
During Eisenhower's term, the first Chinese virus killed 116K Americans. The US population was 170M so the death rate was .07%.
During Nixon's term, the second Chinese virus killed 100K Americans. The US population was 200M so the death rate was .05%.
During Trump's term, another Chinese virus looks like it may kill 120K Americans. The US population is 329M so the death rate will probably be .04%.
So, Nixon did better than his former boss but Trump has trumped them both.
Remember that next time TTF blames this on Trump and then says they are committed to "Teach the Facts"
Last week, the Florida National Guard offered free COVID-19 testing in Collier County, but they weren’t overwhelmed with panic-stricken residents seeking tests. Located on the state’s southwest coast, Collier has not been a viral hotspot, and there seems to be little danger of a major outbreak there. With a population of about 385,000, the county has reported 1,334 coronavirus infections since March. Only 178 of those cases required hospitalization, and as of Wednesday, the county had recorded 46 deaths from the disease.
Invoking the authority of “experts” has become habitual in the media’s partisan warfare over the coronavirus. Their objectives are (a) the promotion of irrational fear and (b) blaming Trump and other Republicans.
Overall, Florida has been one of the safest states in the country during this pandemic, confounding all the media “experts,” whose dire predictions for the Sunshine State have failed to materialize. For a couple of weeks in late March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incessantly denounced in the media because he was reluctant to issue a statewide “stay-at-home” order. DeSantis’s argument was that the state’s outbreak was largely confined to three counties — Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward — on Florida’s southeast coast. Local officials were implementing their own lockdown policies to contain these outbreaks, while state officials were concentrating their efforts on ensuring that Florida’s elderly population was protected from the virus. Given these circumstances, shutting down all “nonessential” business statewide was not necessary, DeSantis argued.
Pressure from the media, however, proved insurmountable, and finally on April 1 — amid reports that President Trump himself had intervened — DeSantis announced a statewide lockdown order.
Whether or not that made any difference in the trajectory of the COVID-19 outbreak is disputable; several analysts have questioned the effectiveness of lockdown policies.
For example, after analyzing data from 17 European countries, Elaine He at Bloomberg concluded that “the relative strictness of a country’s containment measures had little bearing” on the coronavirus death rate.
Marko Kolanovic of JP Morgan crunched the numbers and found that infection rates actually declined after stay-at-home orders ended, indicating that the pandemic had “its own dynamics unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures that were being implemented.”
Even if you don’t share that skeptical view, however, is there any real science that justifies imposing lockdown orders everywhere, on a one-size-fits-all basis?
The unwillingness of the media to acknowledge the success of DeSantis’s policies is dismaying.
It is obvious that politics, rather than science, was the basis of this animosity.
The governor is not only a Republican, but a close ally of Trump, whose endorsement helped DeSantis win the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary against Adam Putnam.
Because this is a presidential election year and Florida is a crucial swing state, it served the partisan interests of the anti-Trump media establishment to treat DeSantis as a villain.
In a March 23 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, for example, Mike Barnicle declared:
Joe, if you talk to a lot of experts — I was fortunate enough to spend most of Friday afternoon around one of the greatest hospitals in the world, Brigham and Women’s here in Boston — you find out their view of what they’re looking at and what they’re dealing with every day. And in the case of Governor DeSantis of Florida, he’s going exactly the opposite way from what the experts, the people on the front lines, indicate ought to be done. The first thing we need is the fact-based truth from public officials. That’s what they will tell you. You get it here in Massachusetts from Charlie Baker, you’re getting it from Andrew Cuomo in New York, Gavin Newsom in California, the governors of Illinois and Michigan, and you’re getting fact-based truth.
Invoking the authority of “experts” this way has become habitual in the media’s partisan warfare over the coronavirus. Their objectives are (a) the promotion of irrational fear and (b) blaming Trump and other Republicans.
In this view, Democrats possess a monopoly on “fact-based truth,” with scientific expertise unanimously in favor of what I’ve called the Cult of Eternal Lockdown.
In addition to their one-size-fits-all prejudice — everyone must be placed under government-imposed quarantine, regardless of local conditions — the lockdown cult also exhibits a more-lockdown-is-better attitude toward virus containment.
The earlier a community went into lockdown mode, the better; the more stringent the prohibitions against “nonessential” activities, the better; and the longer these measures are continued, the better.
That such beliefs have nothing to do with science can be easily demonstrated by actual data, but what’s important to understand is that the media institutions promoting this belief system are motivated entirely by politics.
Why else would Barnicle have demonized DeSantis while heaping praise on such Democratic politicians as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer?
Anyone can consult the state-by-state breakdown of COVID-19 statistics and see for themselves which of these governors has done best in coping with this pandemic.
Florida’s per-capita death rate from the coronavirus is 93 percent lower than New York’s and 80 percent lower than Michigan’s.
If “fact-based truth” really matters, why hasn’t Mike Barnicle apologized for his dishonest smear of Ron DeSantis?
Beyond partisan politics, however, there is another aspect of the media’s Cult of Eternal Lockdown that deserves critical scrutiny — namely, selfishness.
Having consecrated themselves as a sort of High Priesthood, claiming authority to lecture the rest of us about science, Barnicle and others in the media pretend to possess a moral and intellectual superiority to others.
The media insinuate that those evil Republican governors who want to reopen their states’ economies are servants of corporate greed.
But the interests of gigantic corporations (including Comcast, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate that owns MSNBC) have been less affected by lockdown policies than have small businesses and service-industry workers.
Lockdown orders have never prevented anyone from shopping at Walmart or Costco, but your local tavern or hair salon?
Those are “nonessential” businesses, according to the High Priests of the Cult of Eternal Lockdown.
Media millionaires with TV contracts seem indifferent to the plight of out-of-work beauticians and waitresses.
No matter what the actual “fact-based truth” about the coronavirus pandemic might be, TV pundits insist that anyone in favor of ending the lockdowns is advocating mass suicide.
So if you watched MSNBC or CNN this week, you could see talking heads tut-tutting over video clips of crowds enjoying the sunshine on Florida beaches over Memorial Day weekend.
On Fox News, meanwhile, Tucker Carlson lit into those media hypocrites:
For reasons that no one in authority has ever really explained, cable news yappers have been classified as essential workers from the very first day of lockdown.… They didn’t lose their jobs. They have not been quarantined. If anything, they are thriving in the midst of this disaster. They feel more essential than they ever have. Your suffering has been the best thing to happen to them since impeachment, when they got to spend a full month pretending to know where Ukraine is. So, you can imagine their rage when they saw you outdoors this weekend, enjoying time with your family. The fact that you disobeyed them drove them insane.
Carlson cited chyrons by which CNN conveyed their fear-mongering attitude, such as “Memorial Day Crowds Spark Fear of New Outbreaks” and “Americans Flock To Public Places As Death Toll Nears 100,000.”
Are such fears justified?
Will those “new outbreaks” actually happen?
Your guess is as good as mine, but given the past record of such media predictions, skepticism is certainly justified.
Two months ago, while Mike Barnicle was denouncing Ron DeSantis on MSNBC, the chyron onscreen was “Breaking News: Florida Sees Coronavirus Cases Top 1,000 Over the Weekend.”
At that point, Florida’s outbreak was running ahead of the numbers in Massachusetts, where Barnicle was getting advice from “experts.”
Such expertise, however, apparently did not stop the spread of COVID-19 in Massachusetts, which as of Thursday had reported a cumulative 94,895 cases and 6,640 deaths from the virus.
The coronavirus death rate in Massachusetts is 950 per million residents, and the state reported 74 new deaths just Wednesday.
What about Florida?
Their per-capita COVID-19 death toll is 89 percent lower than in Massachusetts; Florida reported 45 new deaths Thursday, more than half of those in the three-county area of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward.
People dying from a virus is not good news, of course, but the fact that Florida’s COVID-19 death rate is so much lower than states like New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan deserves some acknowledgement.
The anti-Trump media decided two months ago to make a villain out of Ron DeSantis, however, and it seems that no “fact-based truth” will ever change their minds
Maybe Pigs Do Fly: Austrian Catholic Bishops Advocate For Same-Sex Relationships
Rather than the Catholic Church changing LGBT people, LGBT people are changing the Catholic Church.
Maybe.
The bishops of the Catholic Archdiocese of Salzburg in Austria have commissioned a book to teach that gay love comes from God, and reveals God’s “goodness and humanity.”
The book, titled The Benediction of Same Sex Partnerships, calls on the global Catholic church to change its teachings on gayness.
Good of them to join us here in the third millennium. Seriously. It’s a start.
I can sort of understand why a catechism change OK-ing same-sex unions is a big deal to conservative Catholics. Looking at it from their side, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. With every passing year, the current Catholic prohibition on LGBT relationships will seem more out of step with the seismic changes in the real world, where, to my delight, countries are increasingly enshrining marriage equality in the law (currently, 29 nations). This lack of modernity will drive down Catholic recruitment.
On the other hand, changing the catechism would show that it doesn’t reflect eternal truths after all, and exposes the rules to be a collection of arbitrary-seeming, man-made guidelines that can be altered according to the moral winds of the time.
But liturgical scholar Father Ewald Vollger, who contributed to the book, said that changing Church’s teaching on gayness “can be not only discussed, but also demanded.” In an interview with… the diocesan newspaper of Linz, Vollger said that providing official blessings to same-sex couples would “of course” require a change to the catechism.
He said: “There has been movement in the topic. The teaching of the church is receiving less and less resonance in society and within the church, and moral theology in particular is in favor of new approaches to evaluating same-sex relationships.”
I’m happy to hear him speak the language of equality, especially if it’s truly heartfelt and it isn’t just a ploy to stanch the slow, quiet exit of the faithful.
“Just as marriage between a man and a woman is an image of God’s creative love, so is a same-sex relationship an image of God’s attention to human beings. If partners live the gift of mutual love in faithfulness to one another and live their lives with the spiritual gifts of God such as kindness, forbearance, patience, reconciliation, etc, their relationship is also an image of God’s goodness and humanity.”
Trump: President of the white people of the red states of America
"President of the white people of the red states of America"
let's see
Trump pushed through a criminal justice reform bill that corrects Bill Clinton's egregious bill which created a permanent jail sentence for a huge swath of young black Americans
Trump produced the lowest unemployment among minorities in history until Dems pushed through a universal lockdown that destroyed opportunity
Trump is right now fighting to restore opportunity while Dems argue to keep the economy shutdown
Trump has championed school choice to provide opportunity to underprivileged minority citizens
and what have Dems done?
create dangerous hellhole inner cities that minorities are trapped
"After President Trump tweeted to raise concerns about states mailing all registered voters ballots, Twitter added a “fact check” label to those tweets Tuesday for the first time, stating that “there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”
Besides setting a dangerous precedent that will no doubt infringe on free speech, Twitter isn’t the authority on elections – the Committee on House Administration is. Committee Republicans recently produced a report on the fraud that exists in certain instances of vote-by-mail.
What most people don’t know about voting by mail is that there's a vast difference in states allowing voters to request an absentee ballot and what the Democrats in California are trying to do, which is the same thing that House Democrats tried to do with their political wish list disguised as coronavirus relief.
ZUCKERBERG KNOCKS TWITTER FOR FACT-CHECKING TRUMP, SAYS PRIVATE COMPANIES SHOULDN'T BE 'THE ARBITER OF TRUTH'
Democrats want to force states to mail all registered voters live ballots, whether or not voters request ballots.
While this may seem like a good way to vote that allows everyone to stay home during the coronavirus pandemic, forcing states to use an entirely new vote-by-mail system comes with its own problems – especially less than six months before the presidential and congressional elections.
How can you send every registered voter a live ballot in the mail when you don’t keep accurate voter registration lists?
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requires states to have a uniform, nondiscriminatory voter registration list maintenance program. This requirement was part of the NVRA because the drafters foresaw the way public confidence is undermined when these lists are not maintained properly.
But many states have simply ignored or not had the resources to comply with this requirement, leaving states with inaccurate voter registration lists and certainly ill-prepared for voting by mail.
Allowing states to send all of their recorded registered voters a ballot without making states update their lists of registered voters would unquestionably invite fraud into elections.
Ballots would be mailed to addresses of individuals who have moved or passed away. The new residents may not be eligible to vote but could see the ballots in the mail and try to vote anyway.
At the beginning of May, California and Los Angeles County were required to remove 1.5 million inactive voters from their registration lists when a Judicial Watch lawsuit said Los Angeles County has more registered voters than citizens. You read that correctly – Los Angeles County has more registered voters than citizens.
If Democrats can federally mandate a nationwide all-mail election in November, election officials will be sending out more live ballots than voters, which will lead to fraudulent ballots being returned.
What Democrats are also not telling you is that California allows for ballot harvesting – meaning that any individual can pick up any number of ballots for any reason, completely unchecked.
These harvesters picking up ballots don’t have to show an ID, they don’t have to be a citizen, and they don’t have to be eligible to vote. You expect Americans to believe that having someone who can’t vote picking up ballots won’t invite fraud in our elections?
No one is keeping track of who is picking up thousands of ballots, so how do we know they’re being delivered? How do we know the harvesters aren’t altering votes or pressuring people on how to vote?
Also, why are Democrats pushing to allow for ballot harvesting when all these mail ballots will supposedly have prepaid postage? If voters can mail ballots in for free, then they don’t need “ballot brokers” coming to collect their ballots, unchecked.
This raises questions in my home state of Illinois, where the state Legislature just passed a bill to allow ballot drop boxes in Champaign County. These ballot boxes have no checks on who would be dropping off ballots or how many are turned in to these boxes, not to mention no supervision of the ballots once they’re dropped off.
Practices like these raise many red flags and leave our election systems ripe for fraud.
Democrats say vote-by-mail is our only option to make sure everyone can vote, but what about the Americans who are unable to easily vote from home?
The Native American Rights Fund, an organization that provides legal assistance to tribes and individual Native Americans, outlined potential obstacles for Native Americans in an entirely vote-by-mail election, like issues with access to traditional mail services, a lack of broadband connectivity, and cultural communication barriers.
Democrats, who blame everyone but themselves for suppressing voters, are now going to allow a practice that will discriminate against thousands?
The fact of the matter is, transitioning to an all vote-by-mail election wouldn’t even be possible at this point. States without the vote-by-mail infrastructure are not equipped to transition to an all vote-by-mail election.
A Bipartisan Policy Center review revealed that 34 states had fewer than 15 percent of their ballots cast by mail during the 2018 election, with many in the single digits.
Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, whose state has been using vote-by-mail for many years, has said if states are not already at 60 percent of ballots or above being cast by mail they are unlikely to be prepared all-mail-in elections in November.
States that have successfully implemented vote-by-mail did so over the span of several years with intense, focused statewide training for state and local officials who are actually conducting elections.
A successful transition to an election by mail requires major technology and staff upgrades, managing resources between in-person and mail voting, adjusting ballot return deadlines, configuring prepaid postage, and setting realistic ballot processing expectations.
If states try now to implement an entirely vote-by-mail system and mail every voter on their outdated registration lists a ballot, they are inviting fraud into our elections.
President Obama implemented various programs to deal with systemic racism in the police forces across the United States. Trump of course eliminated these programs intended to stop police killings of unarmed black people
Trump is as responsible for the riots in the United States as anyone.
Latest poll has Joe Biden 10 points up on Trump.
Wyatt and Regina: "This means Trump is sure to win in November!"
When you read Wyatt and Regina Hardiman's posts remember they are on record saying "Most people lie all the time" and "He lied, so what?"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Trump has championed school choice to provide opportunity to underprivileged minority citizens"
This is a perfect example of gaslighting.
"School Choice" means eliminating public schools which would force families to pay for their children's education and result in vast disparities between the quality of education between rich white neighbourhoods and poor black neighborhoods, if poor black children can get an education at all.
The euphemism "school choice" will eliminate free public schools and prevent poor black children from getting any education whatsoever.
These are the kinds of lies Republicans like Wyatt and Regina spread without shame.
The average black family's net worth is 10% of the average white family's net worth.
Trump has done nothing to help with this grotesque disparity.
Trump absurdly says "MAGA loves black people" which shows he considers MAGA to only be white people.
Trump is only the president of white people in red states.
George Floyd's brother says Trump "didn't even give me the opportunity to speak" during Trumps so called consolation call.
"He kept pushing me out, like "I don't want to hear what you're talking about"
That's Trump, just going through the motions of pretending to be sympathetic and concerned.
Trump hates black people and his pretending otherwise doesn't change that.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Anti-gay bigot Lou Sheldon founder of Traditional "Values" Coalition has died.
The world just became a slightly better place.
If this was happening in Iran, every network would be wall-to-wall with expert panels about how the regime has lost legitimacy and we'd be calling for their leadership to step down and implement democratic reforms.
Lift every voice: The Biden plan for black America
The Biden Plan for strengthening America's committment to justice
Highlights from Joe Biden's Agenda for the black community
Joe Biden is bringing back the programs President Obama put in place to deal with systemic police force racism and the killing of unarmed black men. These are the programs Trump eliminated when he got in power. Trump obviously hates black people and supports their abuse and oppression.
Kentucky has 58 counties with more registered voters than live adults. California only has one. Suspicious?
https://publicinterestlegal.org/blog/244-counties-have-more-registered-voters-than-live-adults/
(INDIANAPOLIS, IN.) – August 19, 2019: The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is spotlighting jurisdictions across 29 states for in-depth inspections of voter registration records and local list maintenance practices in preparation for the 2020 presidential election. At least 244 counties across 28 states plus Alaska and D.C. report bloated voter rolls to federal officials. In response, public records research, voter roll audits, and various litigation activities are now underway.
States with counties of concern are (# of counties):
Kentucky (58),
Michigan (29),
South Carolina (25),
Mississippi (22),
Colorado (19),
Alabama (14),
Illinois (13),
South Dakota (11),
Kansas (8),
Texas (8),
Nebraska (6),
Georgia (5),
West Virginia (4),
Iowa (3),
Montana (3),
Missouri (2),
Washington state (2),
Louisiana (2),
Florida (1),
New Mexico (1),
Arizona (1),
Arkansas (1),
California (1),
Indiana (1),
New York (1),
North Carolina (1),
Virginia (1),
Wyoming (1).
Alaska and Washington, D.C. also join the list.
"Kentucky has 58 counties with more registered voters than live adults. California only has one. Suspicious?"
they both are
and this demonstrates why mail-in voting will result in fraud that will impact election results
Nancy Pelosi: the new way to spell ignoramus
"Lift every voice: The Biden plan for black America"
the Dems have had many such plans over the years, from LBJ to B Hussein O
the result?
huge swaths of young black men in permanent lock-up
inner cities, all run by Dems for decades, are dangerous hellholes
public schooling in inner cities that minorities have no choice to send their kids to, are failing, worthless, dangerous hellholes
until Trump, no progress on minority opportunity and employment
There is no evidence whatsoever of voter fraud from mail in ballots. Many states have been doing mail in ballots for decades, including Republican states.
Remember Trump's Voter Fraud Commission?
They found nothing and then all resigned in disgrace when they were caught trying to fake voter fraud.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "until Trump, no progress on minority opportunity and employment"
40 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits and Wyatt and Regina are trying to claim things have never been better for black people.
Their lies are absurdly ridiculous.
Minnesota Officials Link Arrested Looters to White Supremacist Groups
Meanwhile corrupt attorney general Bill Barr and Trump are blaming "antifa"
Who are Antifa? Antifa is short for Anti-fascists. This group was formed as a response to the white supremacists marching and killing innocent people in Charlottesville. You heard that right, Trump is designating a group formed to oppose white supremacy as "terrorists".
Trump considers people opposing white supremacy as terrorists.
Trump is the president of white people in red states.
Last October, the head of the Minneapolis police union, which days ago warned against a "rush to judgment" of the officers involved in George Floyd's death, spoke at a Trump rally and praised him for ending the "handcuffing and oppression" of police under Obama.
Historically the more people who vote the more likely it is that a Democrat wins.
This is why Trump and Republicans have mounted vast voter suppression efforts and why they oppose mail in voting.
Republicans know they can't win when people get to vote freely.
Today Florida has had its highest coronavirus case count since mid April.
Today Arkansas had its highest daily case total ever.
The mayor of Montgomery, Alabama says hospital capacity is maxed out and case numbers continue to rise. And yet the Republican governor is opening up more of the state.
Nebraska has had steady growth upwards in hospitalization "a worrying upward climb" and yet the Republican governor is removing more virus mitigation measures.
We're finding ourselves in the midst of a major political realignment that is being fueled not only by race, but by age as well. It doens't bode well for the Republican party
Finally, older voters are starting to move away from Trump. It looks like his mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak might have done the trick.
Canadian Catholic college to hoist rainbow flag for Gay Pride Month
In a “historic first,” Canada’s St. Jerome’s University, a public Catholic institution in Waterloo, will raise the gay pride rainbow flag in honor of June’s Pride Month.
According to Kitchener Today.com, the 155-year-old school’s interim president said not raising the flag would be “sending the wrong message; that SJU did not welcome the LGBTQ community.”
President Obama implemented various programs to deal with systemic racism in the police forces across the United States. Trump of course eliminated these programs intended to stop police killings of unarmed black people
Trump is as responsible for the riots in the United States as anyone.
Eliminating the programs to deal with police racism is not an action of a friend of black people
Trump and some of his advisers calculated that he should not speak to the nation about the unrest because he had nothing to say, according to a senior administration offical
As activists and scholars have emphasized over and over, there is no such organization as "ANTIFA". It does not exist! Antifascism is a practice and a philosophy; sometimes people organize themselves into autonomous groups to take action.
President Trump is criminalizing dissent.
Antifa is people protesting white supremacy.
Trump considers people protesting white supremacy as terrorists.
Trump is no friend of the black community.
Obviously black people are not protesting at the White House because they think Trump is their friend.
Meanwhile,our next President fearlessly went into the streets of Delaware to meet and speak with demonstrators.
The contrast could not be more stark.
"Where is Joe Biden?" Meeting with protestors.
Where is Trump? Trying to start a race war.
One is not like the other.
Don't expect people to obey the law if the authorities from cop level up through the White House are themselves lawbreakers.
you may wonder why you see so many things being said by Randy that you don't hear anywhere else..
it's because, more times than not, seriously, he's lying
The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.
"In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy," said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy's coronavirus contagion.
"The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago," he told RAI television.
Zangrillo said some experts were too alarmist about the prospect of a second wave of infections and politicians needed to take into account the new reality.
"We've got to get back to being a normal country," he said. "Someone has to take responsibility for terrorising the country."
A second doctor echoed Zangrillo's observations. "The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today," said Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in the city of Genoa.
Remember the howling by Dems when demonstrations against the lockdowns threatened everyone's
lives?
What a bunch of hypocrites as they stood by while days of protests erupted in their cities.
The coronavirus lockdown is seemingly down and out, as many Democrats in charge of big cities -- including several who once insisted on strict quarantine measures -- line up to champion the nationwide mass demonstrations over the in-custody death of George Floyd, sans social distancing.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo lashed out at protesters calling to reopen the state earlier this month, saying at a news conference, "you have no right to jeopardize my health ... and my children's health and your children's health." Cuomo's directives have been enforced throughout the state: A New York City tanning salon owner was fined $1,000 for reopening briefly last week, calling the situation "insane" and saying he already was "broke."
On Friday, though, Cuomo said he "stands" with those defying stay-at-home orders: "Nobody is sanctioning the arson, and the thuggery and the burglaries, but the protesters and the anger and the fear and the frustration? Yes. Yes, and the demand is for justice."
In April, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told the Jewish community that "the time for warnings has passed" after he said a funeral gathering had violated social distancing guidelines. On Sunday, the mayor asserted, "We have always honored non-violent protests."
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, meanwhile, had warned that in-person worship services would be a "public-health disaster," disregarding constituents' concerns that he was violating their First Amendment rights. Now, his administration has been distributing masks to rioters, even though public gatherings of 10 or more are still ostensibly banned. Frey also allowed a police station to burn, saying it was necessary to protect police and rioters.
"The city encourages everyone to exercise caution to stay safe while participating in demonstrations, including wearing masks and physical distancing as much as possible to prevent the spread of COVID-19," a news release read. "The city has made hundreds of masks available to protesters this week."
The mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser, vowed $5,000 fines or 90 days in jail for anyone violating stay-at-home orders. This weekend, though, Bowser defended the protests: "We are grieving hundreds of years of institutional racism. ... People are tired, sad, angry and desperate for change." An angry mob of rioters in the city turned its rage on a Fox News crew early Saturday, chasing and pummeling the journalists outside the White House in a harrowing scene captured on video.
And, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti threatened in March to cut power and water for businesses that reopened, saying he wanted to punish "irresponsible and selfish" behavior. In recent days, he has encouraged mass gatherings, even as he condemned violence. "I will always protect Angelenos' right to make their voices heard — and we can lead the movement against racism without fear of violence or vandalism," he said
I was 14. At a family pooje I got my period. I was not accompanied by my mom so I nudged my aunt sitting next to me and worriedly informed her of it (because I was not carrying a sanitary pad). Another good natured lady sitting close, saw me worried and overheard me and said to me smiling reassuringly "Don't worry child, God will forgive you" (for being part of the Pooja while menstruating). That's the day I became a feminist and a non-believer. I was 14.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you may wonder why you see so many things being said by Randy that you don't hear anywhere else.."
Duh, of course you don't hear the truth when all you consume is right wing propaganda.
Intel Agencies Have Hired Consultants To Learn How To Keep Trump’s Attention During Nat’l Security Briefings
May 21, 2020 Dementia, Donald Trump
The New York Times reports:
Mr. Trump, who has mounted a yearslong attack on the intelligence agencies, is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings. The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information.
He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive. Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.
Journalists Under Attack Show How Trump’s Hate for the Press Has Spread
Journalists have been attacked all over the world while on the job covering protests for years, but never like they were this week in the United States during the George Floyd protests.
At least half a dozen incidences of arrests and attacks were reported in protests across the United States this weekend. Some were high profile, like the live-on-air arrest of CNN journalist Omar Jimenez and his crew Friday morning. Others got less attention, like Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske getting pelted with rubber bullets and tear gas or the two Los Angeles Times photographers who were briefly taken into custody.
Police have been more violent since Trump got into power and started telling them to be more brutal with suspects and bang their heads against the police car when putting them in it.
Last October, the head of the Minneapolis police union, which days ago warned against a "rush to judgment" of the officers involved in George Floyd's death, spoke at a Trump rally and praised him for ending the "handcuffing and oppression" of police under Obama.
President Obama implemented various programs to deal with systemic racism in the police forces across the United States. Trump of course eliminated these programs intended to stop police killings of unarmed black people
Trump is as responsible for the riots in the United States as anyone.
Trump Death Clock
62,833
Estimated U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Due To POTUS Inaction
In January 2020, the Trump administration was advised that immediate action was required to stop the spread of COVID-19. According to NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, “there was a lot of pushback” to this advice. President Trump declined to act until March 16th. Experts estimate that, had mitigation measures been implemented one week earlier, 60% of American COVID-19 deaths would have been avoided. (For further reading, click here).
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