The flag should have been burned in 1865, we’re just now getting around to it. Have you got any other symbols of treachery and racism we could set on fire?
It’s also about time that the Daughters of the Confederate Revolution closed up shop in shame.
As much as one can be, given that antifa is not an organization. I don’t have a membership card. I’ve never paid dues. I’ve never attended a meeting. I’m not part of a cell. There is no hierarchy. I have failed to punch any Nazis.
I am thoroughly anti-fascist though, so I guess the president is going to have to send some cops to my door.
The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020
I will, as a certified academic pedant, have to explain to them during the whole ride to the prison that being anti-anti-fascist means you’re a fascist. I’m not too worried, though, since the threat is just blustering bullshit from a bully.
The president has his solution: DOMINATE!
What he’s really worried about is that he looks weak before all those nations he respects: Russian, North Korea, any random dictatorship out there.
It’s a start. I don’t have high expectations that the court will do anything other than give him a big attaboy.
It doesn’t look like much at the beginning, but this dam failure in Michigan led to thousands of people being evacuated, destruction of bridges and homes downstream, and some houses were flooded to a depth of 9 feet. All it took was a little rain. OK, a lot of rain.
Here’s an analysis of the failure. There was something more going on.
This video is going to be a classic in the teaching of geotechnical failures, but it also clarifies the events that led to the Edenville Dam failure. It would have been simple to ascribe this to a simple overtopping event that occurred when the capacity of the spillway was exceeded. But in reality the events are are more worrying than that – the dam appears to have undergone a slope failure; a failure of its integrity. This should never occur, and to me it suggests that the problems at the Edenville Dam went further than known issues with the spillway.
So not just rain, but also negligence by whoever had responsibility for the dam. It turns out that this dam was privately owned, by absentee landlords with a criminal history who neglected it, refused to do necessary repairs and expansion, and had their federal license to run the dam revoked for their greedy refusal to do what was needed. I guess it is unsurprising that Lee Mueller is a Randian Trumpkin who lives in Las Vegas.
America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t helped by the parasites and rentiers who’ve taken it over.
I haven’t watched the History Channel in years, since I have little interest in UFOs, Hitler, or pawn shops, but I may have to see if the tuner on my television works tonight. In celebration of Memorial Day, they’re showing a documentary on US Grant, based on the Chernow biography (which is very good), that is getting good reviews.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the Confederacy getting a good whuppin’. Again.
Trump claims to be taking hydroxychloroquine.
President Trump told reporters Monday that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for about a week and a half and that the White House physician knows he is taking the anti-malaria drug despite the fact that he continues to test negative for the coronavirus.
Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients, particularly those with heart problems. Trump dismissed those concerns, saying he has heard about the drug’s benefits from doctors and others he has spoken with.
You have to be closely monitored if you take this dangerous drug — there are all kinds of potential side effects. So we know he’s lying his ass off.
It’s also a lie that can get other people killed, if they believe him and try to emulate him.
On the other hand if he’s not lying, I hope he decides to quadruple his dose. Please.
When they claim they want the economy to get back to work, what they really mean is they want the service economy to service them, the worthless fuckers.
Zach Vorhies: “ex Google employee turned QAnon fan and committed anti-vaxxer”. He has a video in which he takes credit for Judy Mikovits “going viral” with her idiotic claims, and lies about her history in science.
In the video, Vorhies claims that Mikovits’ research was “derailed by Anthony Fauci,” who, as he puts it, “saw to it that her career was destroyed.” That’s flatly untrue: after Mikovits’ research—which claimed that a mouse retrovirus called XMRV caused chronic fatigue syndrome—was called into question, the National Institutes of Health funded a $2.3 million study at Fauci’s request to definitively settle the question of whether XMRV caused chronic fatigue. As part of that study, Mikovits was given more funding and a chance to replicate her original research, which she couldn’t do. In a press conference announcing the findings of the study, Mikovits acknowledged, “It’s not there,” and thanked the NIH.
That’s a far cry from the narrative Mikovits, Vorhies, and others now promote. In the unlisted video, Vorhies says that Mikovits “discovered that the vaccine supply and the blood supply was contaminated with zoonotic retroviruses coming from mice,” and, in a series of graphics, suggests that “hundreds of millions of Americans may have received vaccines contaminated with XMRV.” The idea that vaccines are contaminated with XMRV or any other dangerous retrovirus has been repeatedly debunked; the pro-vaccine site Vaxopedia has a list of the many studies that have confirmed that. Nor did Mikovits’ work have anything whatsoever to do with vaccines, though her supporters have more recently claimed that it did.
I hang out with a lot of smart people (at least I did, before about 2 months ago), and that used to fill me with optimism about our future. I suspect that Vorhies is also an intelligent guy. But it turns out that being smart isn’t necessarily a good defense against bad ideas. Suddenly, Snow Crash seems incredibly prescient. Has someone been wandering around Silicon Valley tech companies handing out hypercards with a mind-wiping virus encoded on them?
