A hilarious and clever offering from Roy Zimmerman. It is definitely a must see/listen.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Reporter’s were stunned when at Friday’s White House coronavirus Task Force briefing, where Trump usually rambles on for a couple of hours spewing lies and dangerous nonsense, he and Pence left after making a few comments without taking any questions. The briefing was over in less than 30 minutes. One report says Trump had been told by his advisors that his popularity is going down and that these briefings may be the cause.
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Josh Marshall writes how Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp was rebuked by Donald Trump for licking his boots too vigorously, something I would not have thought possible. Trump has been saying that the country should start re-opening soon and no doubt Kemp thought that he could curry favor with trump by being the first to do so. But it backfired.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been outstripping the sizable competition in the race to become President Donald Trump’s biggest, and most thoroughly rejected, flunky.
…On Monday he mounted his flashiest maneuver yet, announcing that he would fling wide the doors of the state’s gyms, nail salons, barbershops, bowling alleys — bowling alleys — by the end of the week, about three laps ahead of even the cadre of his fellow Trumpy governors.
…But Kemp was left alone on the front porch, clutching his boutonniere, as Trump slammed the front door in his face.
“Would I do that? No. I’d keep them a little longer,” the President said of the social distancing guidelines at his Wednesday press briefing. “I want to protect people’s lives.”
“I’m going to let him make his decision,” he added, of Kemp. “But I told him I totally disagree.”
Donald Trump is a menace to people’s health. There is no other way to describe his ridiculous suggestions about treating the coronavirus at yesterday’s White House briefing where he floated the kinds of crazy rumors that float around the internet as worth testing, such as injecting oneself with bleach or disinfectant or somehow ‘hit’ the body with light inside it, no doubt because he heard somewhere that bleach kills bacteria and viruses and that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I have argued in multiple posts that I think that the Spelling Bee contest is not a good use of young people’s intellect. The skills it teaches are not commensurable with the time, energy, and resources that the children’s families put into it. The format of the contest is not designed to even produce the best spellers, because luck plays a significant role in determining the final outcome. The contest is designed to produce TV drama (and ratings) by putting these young children under enormous pressure.
So I can’t say that I was sorry to hear that this year’s contest, like so many other events, has been cancelled. I do feel sorry for all those young people who had been devoting so much time to preparing for it because those who think that they can be winners pretty much give up everything else for years on end in pursuit of that goal. Perhaps being released from the pressure to memorize the spelling of obscure words will allow them to explore other areas of creativity and discover new pleasures in life. I hope so.
Will the Spelling Bee recover after social distancing ends and make a come back? Sadly, it seems likely because there is money in it.
There was this news report in the last few days about the price of oil going negative to -$40 per barrel, giving the impression that oil producers were now paying people to take their oil. Of course, that could not be strictly true. It is not as if your local gas station was paying customers to fill their tanks. In actuality, gas prices were trading normally, though the prices have been dropping due to the lowered economic activity because of the pandemic leading to an oil surplus.
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The horrific massacre by a lone gunman in Nova Scotia is even worse than originally reported. It now appears that he killed 22 people during his 12-hour rampage dressed as a police officer and driving a replica of a police vehicle. The increase in numbers is because authorities have found bodies in buildings that he set on fire.
It appears that he had targeted his first victims who were known to him and then went on a killing spree on anyone who had the misfortune to cross his path as he drove around.
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A recent news report suggests that time–reversal violation may have been observed in neutrino reactions. (You can read the paper on which the report is based here.) Why is this important? Because it may shed light on a long-standing puzzle and that is why it is that in the universe we inhabit, matter is vastly more abundant than anti-matter.
Why is this a puzzle? Because when matter is created out of pure energy, it seems to be always the case that the amount of matter and anti-matter are identical. So in the Big Bang when energy was transformed into all the matter and anti-matter now in the universe, there should have been equal numbers of both. But since we now see so little anti-matter, it has been argued that this is because of the violation of what is known as ‘time-reversal symmetry’, that causes anti-matter to decay at a different (and faster) rate than matter, leading to its current depleted quantities. [UPDATE: See a correction to this in the comments.]
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