the choice was between me having ready to eat tacos within walking distance, and an incompetent president who tanked the economy, who emboldened white supremacists, who siphoned off millions if not billions of public money to himself and his friends, who has let russia take whatever territory they wanted, end whatever treaties they didn’t like, who gases peaceful protestors and does nothing to stop violence by his supporters, who’s sunk about 18billion dollars into what’s amounted to about a mille of a new wall that mexico was supposed to pay for…
oh yeah, and that virus that’s been killing a thousand americans a day. a virus that any other administration could have brought under control.
Hildmann needs qualified help, and that is a statement I stand by. And others need to be warned about that he isn’t in any state to be reasoned with, argued with, or believed.
He uses his platform, and he is endangering others by it because he is not capable of considering the results of his actions.
I am willing to defend this statement, but not in this thread.
Also, I have first-hand experience with people suffering from him. Not related to Covid-19. Calling him a “conspiracy theorist” like the media currently does is not going to change this.
I am very much aware that BB BBS is cautious about mental issues. I chose to highlight this, because it is important. This is not just one person playing this for gain, or using CT. This is a true believer.
Relations of mine worked with him for a short while. And as I told in the hidden post, I know someone who works at his publisher.
This is dangerous. Mostly, for him. But also for many, many others.
There are a lot of evil people who have fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Assigning that sort of thing to mental illness is not fair to those who do suffer from mental illnesses as well giving these evil assholes a “get out of jail free” card. Evil is just evil, stupid is just stupid. And there is no connection to true mental health issues from either of these.
This week free surge tests are being offered in my state; I think this is common across the country, as the Federal Government tries to feed the myth that testing is available to all. I dutifully made an appointment for a test, and showed up to the walk-in site well before my appointment time. The test site was also taking people without appointments, and funneling everyone – appointment or not – into one line, which stretched on off to infinity. The conspiracy theorist in me says that people running it aren’t stupid, so it must have been an intentional decision to break the system. Since I have better things to do with my time than get a bad sunburn, I turned around and left.
Anyway, if any Trump supporters point to this surge testing as fulfillment of Trump’s promise of testing for all, don’t believe it.
My boss brought 2 of her daughters to college a couple weeks ago. They each had to be tested and have evidence of a negative result within 2 weeks before arriving on campus (which…that’s already an issue).
The older daughter made her appointment and got the test. Then somehow funding to that test center was cut, so she never got her results.
The college gave her a test: positive. (Thinking now, based on the rest of the family getting tested since and being negative, and other evidence, is that she got it from her new roommate.)
This is a happy story, though. The daughter noticed the college’s dashboard was really misleading. She made a video and posted it, and before my boss even knew about it, the college had updated the dashboard to be more complete and representative. Go, young people!
All of this provides plenty of reason to worry, but we now come to perhaps the most troubling development of all. President Schlissel said he is guided by U-M’s values as a public institution. But when the decision was made to reopen, U-M’s Board of Regents was chaired by one of Ann Arbor’s largest landlords, Ron Weiser — a billionaire Trump megadonor who has given more than $100M to U-M in the last six years. He closed a new $30M gift within days of U-M’s decision to reopen. In one of the biggest conflicts of interest imaginable between public health and private wealth, Weiser’s company McKinley, which he founded and of which he is majority owner, stands to take a financial hit if students didn’t come back and pay rent.
To sum things up, President Schlissel said this would be a “public health informed in-residence semester,” but the public health experts are upset and afraid. Thousands of community members are upset and afraid. And our megadonor landlord regent is satisfied that he’ll profit from the students told to return to campus by President Schlissel.
People will soon begin dying avoidable deaths from COVID-19 and the University will be culpable. Why did it come to this? Thousands of us were shouting warnings and demanding answers all summer, but we were ignored, silenced, made to feel powerless in our isolation.
I think people outside of the US may not understand how deeply fucked up our public education system is. It was terrible when I went to college (we (“we”) hired a president who said on accepting the job that his goal was to wean the University of Arkansas off of its “dependency” on public funds) and it has done nothing but get worse in the following two decades. And now, because I am generally a failure in life, I am stuck working for a fucking public university, when frankly at this point I would rather just not know anymore.
But it’s not all about killing black people. As the stock market proves, pretty much everyone except the elite and their self-driving cars is expendible.
One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.
You are the herd. They are not. They think the herd needs a good culling.
Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser on Trump’s 2020 campaign, wildly took the misinterpretation as proof that “there is no pandemic.”
In reality, the country under his leadership hit its grimmest milestone yet on Monday: over 6 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 183,000 people dead.
What was the recommended formulation for reporting on Trump? Something like:
Trump Lies
Trump is a liar.
Examples of Trump’s lies with immediate rebuttal.
Trump is a liar and it is damaging America.
If you’re wasting money on the NYT, consider TPM instead.
“We know that what happened across the South [in June] was primarily driven by 18-to-25 year olds, across the South, with asymptomatic spread,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “Sending these individuals back home in their asymptomatic state to spread the virus in their home town or among their vulnerable households could really recreate what we experienced over the June time frame in the south. So I think every university president should have a plan for not only testing but caring for their students that need to isolate.”
The comments represent one of the most explicit acknowledgments to date that the White House’s aggressive push to bring students back to campus this fall has created serious risks for increased COVID transmission. It also underscores just how fragile the current situation is at college campuses across the country.
Administrators are going to blame the students, the Trumpkins are going to blame the administrators, and, in a few weeks we can restart the 3 months clock again as cases begin spiking everywhere.
