Amateurs.

Oct 5, 2020 at 11:40 AM Phil Clarke

How does Peer Review work in Climate Science? Shuffling papers and signatures in exchange for money has been very lucrative

Was it really Covid-19, or just precautionary, or even publicity.

Satire (?)..

Take her out of orbit, Mr Sulu.

(Ask your Dad)

#ProudBoys

"This is a moment that ‘feels Biblical’, says Maureen Dowd at the New York Times. She is talking, of course, about President Trump being struck down by the plague, by Covid. Going full Leviticus, Dowd marvels at the karmic retribution of this chief doubter of Covid now being infected by Covid, of this blasphemer against experts now suffering the fate that experts warned would befall him if he didn’t comply with their rituals of mask-wearing and lockdowns. ‘The implacable virus has come to his door’, Dowd writes, giving Covid-19 sentience, power almost: the power to smite its unbelievers. Implacable: that means something which cannot be appeased. That’s Covid, apparently: the insatiable beast, the terrible god, who will brook no questioning.

Dowd isn’t the only Trump-basher getting all Biblical over Covid’s visitation upon the White House. Across the commentariat and the Twittersphere there is much Schadenfreude that the man who scoffed at the idea that he should change his entire life in response to a virus must now meekly, weakly watch as the virus has ‘come to his door’. ‘It’s hard to overlook the symbolism of Trump’s positive test’, says one writer. The president who ‘recklessly and flagrantly disregarded science and factual information’ has had his viral comeuppance. We have some ‘justification’ for considering Trump’s contraction of coronavirus ‘to be a kind of karmic retribution’, says a writer for the Guardian. It is retribution, he suggests, for Trump’s ‘irresponsible pursuit of partisan advantage over the national interest’.

‘Karmic retribution’ is of course only a slightly more PC, hippyish way to say what people in medieval times thought about plagues: that they were divine punishment. Punishment of avaricious individuals or of entire sinful communities. A key metaphor in this pre-modern understanding of plagues-as-retribution was that these judgmental diseases were inescapable. No one – not Pharaohs, not the wealthy, not even a reality-TV star who becomes the most powerful man in the world – could hide from their pox-ridden reprimands. As Susan Sontag writes in her masterful AIDS and its Metaphors (1989), the pre-modern view of disease as retribution was an ‘essential vehicle for the most pessimistic reading’ of humanity’s capacity. ‘[T]he standard plague story was of inexorability, inescapability’, she wrote. This insistence on inescapability, on the plague as discoverer of all sinners, wherever they cower and lurk, infuses the cynically joyous commentary on Trump’s illness. ‘Fate leads the willing, Seneca said, while the unwilling get dragged’, writes Dowd. Fate. That pre-Renaissance idea. It’s back.

This is all ‘karmic irony’, says a writer for CNN. In this ‘plague year’, he says, ‘the president who downplayed the pandemic for so long and dismissed the wearing of masks has come down with the disease’. The inhabitants of the Twittersphere have been even more unrestrained in their pre-modern relish at Trump’s smiting by coronavirus, including a former staffer for Hillary Clinton, who said she hopes he dies. Well, he deserves to, right, for his blasphemous questioning of the seriousness of Covid and the efficacy of masking and locking down? In the words of Dowd, the most retributive of the new priestly class, ‘the president’s pernicious deceptions [have] boomeranged against him’. Nancy Pelosi says Trump’s bristling against expert advice on Covid was a ‘brazen invitation’ to the sickness to visit his own home. Question and ye shall be visited…

And so shall a plague cover the land of Trump. That is what these people are saying. They have imbued Covid with moral power and even political authority. For the sins that Trump is apparently being judged for, apparently being sickened for, are fundamentally political ones. It is not merely that he has refused to wear a mask or has questioned the wisdom of lockdowns. Enforced masking and the shutdown of economic life that we have seen across much of the Western world are strategies about which it is entirely legitimate (or ought to be) to have differing points of view, to have reasoned, rational debates about efficacy and impact. No, Trump’s chief sin is a larger one than that: it is that he has bristled against the rule of experts and the contemporary liberal orthodoxy that says science has all the answers to our political and moral problems. This is the true thoughtcrime for which Covid has apparently infected Trump.

‘Reality bursts the Trumpworld bubble’, as the New York Times’ headline put it. ‘The one-time reality-TV star has run smack into scientific reality’, says CNN. This might sound modern and sciency, but it is little different to when priests of old insisted that visitations of the pox were a case of people’s sinful behaviour crashing into God’s judgement. And it isn’t only Trump who has sinned, of course; so have his allegedly clueless, scientifically illiterate supporters. Much of the ‘karmic retribution’ commentary sees them as being reprimanded by the plague as much as Trump. It is Trumpworld that might finally be aroused to normalcy by Trump’s sickness, in the words of the NYT. Hopefully Trump’s smiting will be a ‘wake-up call’ to his supporters, says CNN with typical sniffyness. ‘Perhaps Trump’s illness will… be seen to have provided a much-needed national wake-up call’, says Geoffrey Kabaservice in the Guardian. Lord knows, the masses of ‘Trumpworld’ need a wake-up call, those maskless, expert-questioning brain sinners. They are to the technocratic, ‘evidence’-led rule of the new clerisy what the deviants of Gomorrah were to God’s writ.

CNN cut to the chase in one of its commentaries on Trump’s Covid diagnosis. The true sickness in America, it said, is the ‘sickness of hyper-partisanship’. And of course Trump is most responsible for this diseased form of politics which ‘too often elevates cruelty and justifies lies, through a vision of politics as a version of civil war’. Covid might be a serious virus, but what America really needs is ‘healing from hyper-partisanship… if we’re going to see something resembling real healing in the American body politic’.

This is what’s really going on here: Covid’s judgment, this plague-like retribution, is being marshalled by the old technocratic elites as a cudgel against what are presumed to be Trumpworld’s chief moral errors. The scepticism about lockdown, the broader doubting that experts have all the answers to our moral and political dilemmas, their temerity to clarify the huge political differences between ordinary people and the woke elites (what CNN refers to as ‘the sickness of hyper-partisanship’) – this is what the plague is apparently admonishing. Isn’t that funny? That a random virus should give retributive voice to the pre-existing views and prejudices of the liberal elites? The progressive view embodied by Sontag – that disease is ‘not a curse, not a punishment, not an embarrassment – without meaning’ – has been replaced by the view of Covid as lethal reproachment for the sins of Trumpism, the ills of politics, and the thoughtcrimes of dissenters in 21st-century America.

Strikingly, this isn’t the first time that Biblical metaphors have been deployed to chastise Trump and his supporters. Just a couple of weeks ago, the fires on the west coast of the US were heralded as heated punishment for Trumpworld’s thoughtcrimes against science. These flames were the direct consequence of Trump and his supporters’ temerity in questioning climate-change alarmism, we were told. In mid-September the New York Times – which then viewed fire rather than plague as the master reprimander of the inhabitants of Trumpworld – discussed the fires in the context of Trump once again ‘rejecting science’. Joe Biden went further, calling Trump a ‘climate arsonist’. Trump’s doubt about the manmade climate-change narrative will set America ‘ablaze’, said Biden. Suburban neighbourhoods will be ‘flooded out’, suburbs will be ‘blown away in superstorms’, and homes will be ‘burned in wildfires’."

This is the guy we really need in the White House:

"https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/05/and-a-plague-shall-cover-the-land-of-trump/

From Trotskyist Marxist to the White House. That would be quite a trajectory. Does Spiked disclose its funding these days?

Who is this "Trotskyist Marxist"?

Where does Spiked get money? Are you angling for a "Save Greta" tee shirt?

Brendan O'Neill is a British columnist. He is the editor of Spiked and has been a columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue.

Once a Trotskyist Marxist, O'Neill was formerly a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and wrote for the party's journal, Living Marxism. O'Neill self identifies as a Libertarian Marxist[1][2] and writes for a range of publications.

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_O%27Neill_(columnist)>

Spiked received $300,000 from the Koch brothers in the three years to 2018. The point is transparency. I thought it relevant to know who is paying for these pieces, and you won't learn that from Brendan. The Koch brothers are clear about what they expect from their media spend:

If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding

So if you are reading a Spiked piece or watching a Koch-funded Spiked video, it would great to be told about the intent of those who funded it, but - even in articles that mention the Kochs, or defend their interest (for example attacking the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline) - no conflict has ever been disclosed.

Zelinsky admitted he had applied for a job on the Democratic staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recommended Zelinsky for Mueller’s “Get Trump” Squad. Zelinsky was also a columnist for the left-wing Huffington Post.

Looks like Zelinsky lied under oath to Congress

DNI declassifies Brennan's notes on Clinton / Obama...

Clinton as innocent as Climate Scientists when it comes to framing the innocent.

https://youtu.be/OJpvZJ2Jq2A

In order to determine what attracts flies to your home, it is important to identify the species of pest you are encountering. Common house flies are attracted to decaying organic filth such as feces and rotting meat,

Common house flies are attracted to decaying organic filth such as feces and rotting meat,
Oct 8, 2020 at 12:01 PM Phil Clarke

That would be Hockey Teamsters?

Q201. Regardless of which candidate you happen to support, who do you think did the best job in the debate: Kamala Harris or Mike Pence?

Harris 59%
Pence 38%
Both did equally well 3%

Q102. Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Kamala Harris?

Pre-Debate Favourable 56% Unfavourable 41%
Post-debate: Favourable 63% Unfavourable 34%

Q102. Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Mike Pence?

Pre-debate Favourable 41% Unfavourable 58%
Post-debate Favourable 41% Unfavourable 58%

SSRS for CNN.

The gender split is striking, too. Looks like the mansplaining went down badly.

The first claim that Vice President Pence made in the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday night was not true. He claimed that President Trump had “suspended all travel from China” in order to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States. The travel restrictions were sufficiently porous that nearly 40,000 people traveled from China to this country after the restrictions went into place.

Pence’s second claim wasn’t much better, insisting that former vice president Joe Biden had called the restrictions “xenophobic.” Biden did call Trump xenophobic, but not obviously in relation to the restrictions that had been announced only minutes before and of which Biden was not aware.

Hitting two-for-two on false or misleading claims right out of the gates is hardly a novelty in the Trump administration. The difference between Pence and Trump is largely one of style.

Philip Bump in the Washington Post.

Don’t you think it’s simply marvellous of POTUS to promise the whole of the United States population access to the cocktail of expensive drugs (some in very short supply) that he received to combat his Covid 19 infection and free of charge? What a wonderful man, I gather he personally selected his own medications. Is there no end to his expertise?

Assuming he means the monoclonals (Regeneron), these are experimental and unlicenced and so hard to price. Similar treatments are about $100K. Add in his age, obesity, dedicated team, private suite and helicopter rides and the total insurance cost to the average American would almost certainly be north of $1 million.

All this for $750 a year. Is this what he meant by The Art of the Deal?

Imagine a debate where Trump or Pence have huge smiles and laugh as a response to questions

- wouldn't that be really weird?

Harris seems to have had some training....

Socialists: "Trump should have access to the same medical care as everyone else"

Trump: "Everyone should have access to the same medical care as me"

Choose wisely, folks.

Providing Trumpian level healthcare to every US citizen would cost 15 x the total US GDP and require the construction of a sizeable helicopter fleet.

Even just giving all COVID patients the same drugs as Trump (impossible for the foreseeable future) would cost $765 billion or about 25% of the entire US Health care budget.

Trump will lie about anything to get elected. Choose carefully.