Looks like a worthwhile read.  Thanks!

Some of the more pessimistic models (like the one from Trump’s own alma mater) are saying that we might be facing upwards of 350,000 deaths. That’s over 1/1000th the entire population of the US. Dead. From a single event that may not have been preventable, but sure as fuck could have been mitigated with the resources…

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the root cause lies in a democracy that was founded explicitly to avoid being too democratic; that favors the owner class and lightly populated former slave-holding regions. That, plus pernicious aspects of human nature that have been well-stoked over the last few decades: a ne…

Organize. Voting isn’t enough. We’ve got a couple generations who still believe that cable news is a neutral ground that exists to inform them, rather than to further its own capitalist interests. These people never heard about Biden’s history of disturbing personal conduct, (legal) corruption, and bad judgment; and…

“Party of personal responsibility” = party of interpersonal recklessness

What I wanna know is: why do they always ask him for self-assessments and open-ended opinions? Anybody who doesn’t eat paint-chip sandwiches for lunch knows the answer is going to be a combination of self-aggrandizement and shifting blame. If you’re going to ask him questions, make them questions that require a…

Hard to say how 10 years ago Squire would have taken that astounding future news. On the one hand, the years of Bush the Lesser and our slow march to a fascist dystopia driven by the dumb were fresh in mind. On the other hand, I would have been riding the optimism of the early Obama years, tempered by the fear I…

On the plus side, Trump is so bad I think, with hard work, we just might be able to get Biden across the finish line. If Republicans actually had the good sense to put up a pile of rusty tin cans, I’m pretty sure we’d lose the Midwest for a generation.

Here’s a link to that article because this whole debacle is screwing with my sense of reality.

I like this fantasy. If I ever find a genie lamp, one of them is definitely going to be: news (including “news,” hereby defined as punditry, opinions about the news, and “entertainment” that styles itself after the news) can now only be expressed in a text medium and in blocs of no fewer than 500 words.  Attempts to…

Well said.  Ah, poor ethicists, you were too good for our reality TV watching asses.

Indeed. Usually with these things where Trump says something despicable that will cause real-life pain and suffering, it’s worded just vaguely enough to give him plausible deniability that he meant something less harmful. But “Take it. What do you have to lose?” is not that. If there’s not a lawyer somewhere filing a…

He’s less explicitly advocating people inject disinfectant into their lungs than just being a rambling old jackass thinking aloud, “I heard we could use UV and disinfectant in peoples’ lungs. Wouldn’t that be cool? We should try that.” His comments on hydroxycloroquine, on the other hand, absolutely should see him…

If the tantrum throwers that decided to have their “let’s do everything possible to make sure we get a summer resurgence” parties are any indication, that’s a keen insight into the minds of dipshit-Americans and I look forward to the accompanying quote from the White House podium.

After hearing that, I had to look it up for myself. I try to just tune him out and observe the administrations actions because nothing he says has informative value and I like to think I’m desensitized to the shock and stupidity. But holy fuck, he does have a gift for reaching astounding new depths of spectacular…

Dunno if you caught this one, but that is definitely part of the plan. They’re offering states federal dollars for elections, but only if they can match 20%, which is one of those things that would be dumb even under ideal circumstances, regardless of what Klobuchar had to say. Punishing states unable to afford safe…

I rarely indulge in the “can you imagine if Obama did X” line of frustrated thinking, because that way lies madness, but the other day when Trump retweeted an MEK sock-puppet account, I couldn’t help myself. Can you imagine what would happen if Obama had given even the slightest passing nod to the words of a Muslimey…

Despite an effort to have him censured for being - and this is a term of art here - a complete fucking quack, he retains his board certification and his faculty position at Columbia. This AMA journal of ethics paper actually wrestles with the notion that this suggests medicine is entirely incapable of self-regulating,…

Definitely the flaming pitchforks. He did always claim to be an originalist.

Bit of a shame she couldn’t hang on another ten days to kamikaze Biden in the next debate. She has a proven track record of eating Biden’s lunch and it seems like such a missed opportunity she didn’t deploy that skill at some point in this race. But I guess she wanted to save face over the next round, which I can…