Trump Tests the Idea of Delaying the November Election

A Washington Post article published today, Trump floats idea of delaying the November election, a power granted Congress, as he ramps up attacks on voting by mail, comments:

President Trump on Thursday floated the prospect of delaying the November election, as he ramped up his attacks on mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that its widespread use would be a “catastrophic disaster” that could lead to fraudulent results.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump tweeted. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

WaPO goes on to point out that Constitution gives congress the power to regulate the “time, place and manner” of elections. Only congress can change that. The constitution does not grant the president any power to change anything about elections. The constitution also specifies that a president’s term ends on Jan. 20 in the year after a presidential election, i.e., Jan. 20, 2021 in this case.

The president was unclear about how the election would be moved, either by congress according to the constitution or by unconstitutional executive order. If by congress, the chance of that happening is nil. If by executive order, the US would enter a period of intensified constitutional crisis relative to what it is now.

As usual, the idea was floated in a Tweet. The tweet came after a government report showed the U.S. economy shrank 9.5% from April through June. That is the largest quarterly decline since data began to be published by the government 70 years ago.

 

Given the president's bitter animosity to voting by mail (70 attacks since late March), it is reasonable to assume that he will intensify his efforts to throw the election into chaos in any ways he can. By doing that he can create false grounds to attack the legitimacy of the outcome if he loses. 

This election is probably going to be ugly and messy.

“Damn those negative emotions,” she said angrily.

Emotions can be real killers, sometimes literally.  We all have them and some of us are in much better control of our emotions than others.  I’d say the level of control depends on how one is wired. Some have pretty short fuses.  Others, it takes some serious doing to get them all riled up to the point of finally reacting negatively.  It’s all in the person.

Where do emotions come from?  What is their ultimate source?  Does it go deeper than our wiring?

Just to take a trip down Philosophical Lane, according to the theists, God is the fundamental source of who we are as a species, and further that humanity was created in “His” image.  Atheists would, of course, disagree.  But no matter your religion/non-religion, we all know of the God creation narrative.  And the bigger, overarching idea of “God the Entity” is as ubiquitous and cross-cultural as the oxygen we collectively breathe.

Whether you’re a denying agnostic atheist like me, a practicing theist of whatever stripe, or somewhere in-between, the idea of God is universally known.  And the going (common) idea is that God (e.g., First Cause) made us who and what we are; whether crawling up from the evolutionary primordial slime, or as a full-blown, packaged and ready-to-go human being.  (Work with me here on this, hardcore atheists/theists. This is not yet the question. ;)

Sooo, back to our emotions, that got me fantasizing and thinking about how great it would be to be able to “play God” and wipe out all those nasty emotions.  So here it is… your opportunity to play the role of God:

For argument’s sake, you, as God, get to un-contaminate humankind with one negative emotion.  You only get to pick ONE, that’s the caveat.  So which one would it be?  Would it be, for example, greed, hatred, jealousy, anger, envy, other?  Is there one overarching negative emotion that would “take care” of the others, all in one fell swoop?

Your challenge: Play along with this hypothetical.  What emotion, as God, would you fix/undo?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Evidence That HHS is Corrupting COVID-19 Data for Political Reasons

Pillars of Creation in the Crab Nebula

The 24 minute video below describes how a scientist (astrophysicist), Jeff Hester, who is not an expert in infectious diseases or epidemiology analyzes the CODIV-19 data coming from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) up until July 16, 2020 and then by the HHS (Health and Human Services) thereafter.

Hester has peer-reviewed publications, e.g., this one about the Crab Nebula. He worked on the team that helped repair the Hubble space telescope. He was a tenured professor at Arizona State University. He is now a public speaker, 'Thought Partner' (whatever that is) and whatnot.

The reason Hester focused on July 16 is that it is the date the president required COVID-19 data to be sent to HHS for analysis and reporting, thus removing the CDC as the main federal data analysis and reporting agency. At the time of the transfer, various people were suspicious that the move to HHS was for the purpose of tampering with the data for political purposes.

Based on Dr. Hester's analysis, and assuming it is correct, it looks like the president has required that HHS manipulate the data for political reasons. Two main caveats are that (1) this is one person's analysis and it has not been peer-reviewed by experts, and (2) Hester is not an expert and thus not able to assess whether there are legitimate reasons for the inflection in the data beginning on July 16 that a non-expert might not be aware of.

The reason I am posting this is because of the stark change in data that occurred starting on July 16. It is hard to understand why the data would change so drastically the day that HHS started doing the analysis and reporting. It could be that HHS is doing a different kind of analysis but if I recall correctly, HHS claimed it was doing the same analysis that CDC did (can't find a link to that).

For people who do not want to watch the video, three screen shots below summarize the gist of what his analysis shows.

Screen shots

On July 16, the US infection rate stopped increasing sharply 

and it flattened off

The curve flattening happened only in states that voted for Trump in 2016

Trump has corrupted data before and lied to try to get away with it

Thanks to Larry Motuz for bringing this video to my attention. 

Coronavirus Update 12

Arizona patriots protesting in May against the tyranny 

and horror of social defenses against COVID-19

The New York Times reports on data from various experiments and anecdotal observations strongly suggesting that wearing a face mask could have two major beneficial effects for the mask wearer.

• First, wearing a mask appears to reduce the number of new COVID-19 infections in uninfected people compared to people who do not wear a mask

• Second, wearing a mask appears to reduce the number of viruses uninfected people take in and that postulated reduced virus dose (inoculum) appears to correlate with new infections being both significantly milder and less commonly lethal

Those two tentative hypotheses are not backed by enough evidence to make them proven to the normal standard of statistical confidence for ‘proven’ conclusions concerning infectious diseases. Nonetheless, evidence from various kinds of experiments and observations all strongly suggest that both of these observations are in fact true.

The evidence

At a basic level, common sense suggests that the first benefit is very likely true. That is because infected people who wear masks have been proven to reduce the number of uninfected people they infect. The only way to explain that is to postulate that masks trap some of the viruses that infected people shed into the air. If that is true, and it undoubtedly is, then there is no reason to believe that a mask an uninfected person is wearing would not also trap some viruses in the air, thereby reducing the virus dose and the likelihood of becoming infected.

If that reasoning is sound, then it also suggests that the second benefit is might also true. Some evidence indicates that lower COVID-19 doses tend to lead to less severe disease.

Experiments with animals indicate that when cages are separated by face mask material compared to no mask material, the transmission rate from infected animals in one cage to uninfected animals  in the adjacent cage dropped significantly.

The NYT writes:

“Some indirect data has been accumulating from people as well. Researchers have tentatively estimated that about 40 percent of coronavirus infections do not produce any symptoms. But when some people wear masks, the proportion of asymptomatic cases seems to skyrocket, reportedly surpassing 90 percent during one outbreak at a seafood plant in Oregon. Wearing a face covering doesn’t make people impervious to infection, but these trends of asymptomatic cases could suggest that masks lead to milder disease, potentially reducing hospitalizations and deaths.

Particularly compelling, Dr. Gandhi said, is the data from cruise ships, which pack big groups of people into close quarters. More than 80 percent of those infected aboard Japan’s Diamond Princess in February — before masking had become common practice — came down with symptoms, she noted. But on another vessel that left Argentina in March, and on which all passengers were issued surgical masks after someone onboard came down with a fever, the level of symptomatic cases was below 20 percent. 

The idea that face coverings can curb disease severity, although not yet proven, ‘makes complete sense’, said Linsey Marr, an expert in virus transmission at Virginia Tech. ‘It’s another good argument for wearing masks.’”

Once again, all of this points to at least two unhappy things. First, wearing a mask during the pandemic should have nothing to do with politics in any way. The fact that it is political for tens of millions of Americans shows an unforgivable failure of political leadership mostly (~90%) by the president, the GOP in congress and some GOP governors and state politicians. Instead of being politically neutral, our self-centered narcissist president and some (most?) GOP politicians are simply incapable of dealing rationally with the pandemic.[1] Their ideology betrays and blinds their minds to reality and reason.

Second, the presidential and GOP failure in putting politics over science and rationality has needlessly cost tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. All of these people should be impeached, removed from office, prosecuted for criminal negligence, fined into bankruptcy and imprisoned for at least 15 years. After all, that is just being fair and balanced.

Footnote: 

1. A NYT article today describes a planned school reopening in Georgia: “In-person classes without a mask requirement are scheduled to begin on Friday in Jefferson, worrying some parents, students and teachers as the state confronts the coronavirus. .... An online petition created by two Jefferson High seniors calling for a mandatory-mask rule has garnered more than 600 signatures. But a competing petition demanding that masks remain a choice for students has attracted more than 200 signers, some of whom have left comments that underscore the politicized nature of the disagreement. ‘Only liberals can get rona and I’m not a liberal’, wrote one, using a slang term for the coronavirus. ‘TRUMP2020 no mask fo me.’”

In some places, the politics of COVID-19 has gone from merely grossly incompetent to stupid and literally lethal. The rigid ideology and savage tribalism of most of conservative and populist American politics is mostly responsible for this colossal stupidity and the misery, deaths and costs it imposes on everyone. The ideologues who instigate this sort of anti-mask stupidity are responsible for the consequences of their acts.

Some of these patriots are going to get their wish -- 

unfortunately, they are going to kill some innocents as they 

joyfully exercise their freedom to live and die free 

(that freedom includes the freedom to kill innocents via stupid behavior)

STUPID BEHAVIOR KILLS