#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Out of Control" The New Yorker, September 7, 2020.

"But the thesis of the Republican Convention was more extreme. Forces larger that the media, more various than the media, variously identified as socialists, anarchists, 'wild-eyed Marxists,' 'woketo-pians,' and 'globalization fanatics,' are gathering to bring down the country." "The notion that white Americans are in danger of being 'replaced' is a trope of the far right."

"Public-heath imperatives were suspect too. Senator Marsha Blackburn Tennessee said 'if the Democrats had their way they would keep you locked in your home until you become dependent on the government for everything. That sounds like Communist China to me!" "Social distancing measures weren't just misguided; the coronavirus was a convenient excuse to promote socialism."

#Hua Hsu, "Starving Artists," The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

"The vast majority of American artists are like DeMans  (the musician Venus), essentially freelancers, who generate little in the way of profits. According to a 2018 study conducted by the Music Industry Research Association, Music Cares, and the Princeton University Research Center, American musicians earned a medium income of twenty-one thousand three hundred dollars from their craft in the previous year." "Before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2013, it was estimated that forty-three per cent of artists lacked health insurance."

"Art in the wake of the Enlightenment, became a kind of secular religion, and, consequently, artists began viewing themselves as independent from the powerful or the holy." "The Internet's monopolization of leisure and the tech companies' passive attitude toward piracy gutted the traditional culture industry." "Today, seventy-seven per cent of music-industry revenue goes to the top one per cent of content producers." 

#Eric Tucker and Deb Riechmann, "US officials: Russia vs. Biden, China vs. Trump." The Albuquerque Journal, August 8, 2020.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats believe that the intelligence community has been withholding from the public specific intelligence information about the threats of foreign interference in American politics. Trump has routinely resisted the idea that the Kremlin favored him in 2016, but the intelligence assessment released [recently] indicates that unnamed Kremlin-linked actors are again working to boost [Trump's] candidacy on social media and Russian television."

#Amanda Petrusich, "Meeting the Moment," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

["Dixie"] "Its use as as a dating nickname for the Confederacy was popularized by 'I Wish I Was in Dixie Land,' a minstrel song published in 1860 and usually performed in blackface." "Dixie songs --which typically expressed nostalgia for the antebellum South -- continued to appear throughout the longtime framing of the word 'Dixie' (or any other paean to a South) that was reliant on slaves as a type of gaslighting."

ADDENDUM:

*Last month, President Trump said he would create a commission to push more "pro-American" history. He said that "left-wing rioting and mayhem was the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools."

Vitamin D Conundrum; Food Table; Vitamin D; and Still More

 #Sara Vigueris, "The Vitamin D Conundrum," AARP Magazine, August/September 2020.

"The paradox is that you can get vitamin D three ways -- via sunlight, your diet or supplements -- but many of us don't get enough. But a big part of the vitamin D paradox is that we've been told that those UV rays act like the plague, for good reason: sun rays (or tanning beds) are the primary cause of skin cancer, which affects roughly 5 million Americans every year."

"White people have 29 times the incidence of melinoma  compared with African Americans, and 62.9 percent of Hispanics." "Vitamin D helps regulate inflammation..."

#Ruth Reichl, "The Changing American Table," AARP Magazine, August/September 2020.

"Food prices have come down so dramatically that the average American spends a mere 7 percent of their budget on it -- less than people spend in any other nation on earth. That seems like progress, but just look at us! Three-quarters of us are overweight and 6 out of ten of us suffer from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma, and hepatitis."

"TV' Food Network started on a shoestring, but within 15 years had become a juggernaut that has changed America's ideas about food and cooking, and made chefs the  coolest people on the planet." "People who care about the environment, for instance, have driven the cause of organic farms, whose numbers have doubled in the past 10 years."

#Brooke Jarvis, "Your Body Is a Wonderland," The New Yorker, August 3 & 10, 2020.

"The French historian Jules Michelet described the European Middle Ages as 'a thousand years without a bath.' " "Last year, the beauty-and-personal-care market in the U.S. was valued at nearly a hundred billion dollars, which makes it hard to imagine a time when people had to be persuaded to use soap."

"In an effort to show how laxly we regulate the ingredients in cosmetics, fifteen hundred chemicals are banned or restricted in personal-care products in the E.U., compared with only eleven in the United States."

Experts "want us to think of hygiene -- more expansively -- as a matter of health and balance than one of sterility and purity. Excess hygiene can be a problem for one's skin, which has an ecology that we're just beginning to understand." "Skin care, whose market value grew by some  twenty billion dollars between 2014 and 2017, has become the most profitable sector of the cosmetics industry."

" 'One person's skin is home to a thousand species of bacterium, not to mention fungi viruses,' [Mority] Lyman writes." Lyman is the author of "The Remarkable Life of the Skin" (Atlantic Monthly Press).

#Diane Dimond, "The good and the very bad..." The Albuquerque Journal, August 8, 2020.

"Murders have spiked in 36 of the 50 biggest American cities that were studied during a newly released Wall Street Journal analysis of crime stats. On average, the nation's homicide rate is up 24% for this year, compared to the same period in 2019." "According to the WSJ, homicides are  rising at a double-digit rate in most of the big cities run by Republicans, including Miami, San Diego, Omaha, Tulsa, and Jacksonville, Florida."

#Valentine Faine, "Man and Beast," The Nation, August 24/31, 2020.

"Thirty years after the Chernobyl disaster and the subsequent evacuation of 350,000 people, the site has become [home] to a population of wolves, bears, and bison, and now host to more than 200 bird species." "This practice is now known as dewilding, a conservation method that instead of protecting nature and what remains of it, aims to re-create extinct ecosystems without human interference, through the reintroduction of key species." "Predators are an essential component of any ecosystem, where a stable population presupposes a balance between births and deaths. But now, animal rights organizations, following in the bootstraps of the influential utilitarian philosopher, Peter Linger, are campaigning to alleviate the suffering of wild animals as well."

#Adam Gopnik, "Measuring Man," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"He [Josef Mengele] went on to write another doctoral dissertation, in medical genetics, studying the heritability of cleft palates, which reinforced Nazi legislation requiring the sterilization of Germans with genetic disorders." "Reading about Mengele's prior training, one is struck by the enormous investment of resources, intellectual and financial, that were poured into this weirdly misruled and futile science of racial difference." "Mengele's career is a reminder that Nazism was not, as the left long insisted, capitalism with the gloves off. It was craziness with a white coat on -- a faith driven, as most big historical movements are, by passionate ideas, not passable interests." 

"David G. Maxwell, author of "Mengele" (W.W. Norton) surveys with a kind of aghast wonder, the comforts of life for Nazi doctors living amid so much death."

"Mengele made his way, in 1949, to South America, with the help of the Red Cross -- along with the Catholic clergy's 'ratline,'  one of the two most efficient escape routes for ex-Nazis." "From France through Poland and then into Romania and Hungary, each country had, in the nineteenth century, an anti-Semitic establishment, often anchored in the Catholic right, but just as often in the Socialist left,  which was, in its language, as virulent as the later, Hitlerian kind." "We can see how tightly the elimination of the Jews was bound to a hatred of cosmopolitanism." "The main enemy, as Mengele understood it, had always been the educated Jews of Western Europe." "The masses of poor religious Jews in Poland were almost accidental to the effort; the real target was the elite, who brought with them the bacillus of cosmopolitanism."  

#"Fight for the  Post Office," The Nation, September 7/14. 2020.

"The opening that Trump has created not just for the defense of the post office at this critical moment , but for its expansion to address the challenges of the 21st century. Democrats should seize that opening and make the promise of the post office's renewal central to their fall campaign." "There must be a big-picture response that addresses the roots of the Postal Service's fixed problems: a draconian congressional mandate that it funds pensions 75 years into the future and severe restrictions on how it can operate in competitive markets." "If it is a fight over the future of the Postal Service that Trump and the Republicans want, give it to them."

#Jeffrey Kluger, "The kids are not alright," TIME, June 8, 2020.

Children, however, my be at particular risk. living in a universe that is already out of  their control, they can become especially shaken when the securities they count on to give the world order -- the rituals in their lives, the very day-to-dayness of living -- get blown to bits." "Loneliness in lock-down is common for kids separated from their friends."

"In the U.S., 71.1% of children in the 3-to-17 age  group have been diagnosed with anxiety, according to the CDC."

ADDENDUM:

*Last month, President Trump said he would create a  commission to push more "pro-American" history. He said that "left-wing rioting and mayhem was the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools."

A Miscellany of Important Issues

 #Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Ayar announced that President Trump will sign an executive order declaring that it is "the policy of the United States" that people with preexisting conditions will be protected. Ayar admitted that the order holds no legal weight. In 2017, Trump wrote an executive order that allowed for the sale of junk plans that would have raised costs for those with preexisting conditions. Trump has made many promises that a health care plan that will cover preexisting conditions and cost less will be coming shortly. Before the 2018 general election, he predicted that the health care plan would be rolled out shortly after the election, and then as the election neared, he said it might be enacted "before" the election. He made the same claim in an ABC townhall on September 15, and continues to promise a health care plan if he is reelected.

#Kali Holloway, "Back Trans Lives Matter," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

"While a quarter of white trans- and gender-nonconforming people report being treated disrespectfully during interactions with police, that figure skyrockets to 47 percent among Black trans- and gender-nonconforming people, according to a 2011 report by the National Center for Transgender Equality." "Nearly one-third of Black trans- and gender-nonconforming people who have spent anytime in jail or prison, report being physically assaulted there." 

#Eric Alterman, "Ad Nauseated," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

"With an estimated 2.6 billion users and $70 billion in annual profits, it [Facebook] is the most effective purveyor in history of right-wing hate, bias, lies and incitement against vulnerable people and the planet." "Most negative information (62%) was about Democrats or liberals." Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, has said: "Facebook can, by tinkering with its rules for political ads, gives itself a special, unregulated power over elections."

#Rachel Rebouche, "Reasoning About Abortion," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

In its 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Louisiana law must be struck down because the requirement that abortion doctors must have admitting privileges at hospitals, would have closed all but one clinic in the state, presenting a significant obstacle to pregnant women seeking abortions.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts reiterated that "Louisiana women have already difficulty affording or arranging for transportation and childcare on their days of clinic visits, and that increased travel distance would exasperate this difficulty."

#Elie Mystal, "Playing a Long Con," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

"Roberts is entirely willing to adopt the hardline Republican agenda; he's just unwilling to embrace harebrained conservatives on the court [who] are ideologically dedicated to ending abortion by any means necessary."

#Republican lawmakers are calling a lawsuit brought by New York City Attorney General Letitia James on August 6 against the National Rifle Association for "fraud and abuse." House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweeted: "Violent crime is skyrocketing in NYC, while New York's Democratic Attorney General focused on launching politically motivated attacks against the Second Amendment & NRA. Make no mistake. Making it harder for law-abiding Americans to defend themselves is the far-left's agenda."

#Oliva B. Maxman, "The uncertain future of places..." TIME, June 8, 2020. 

"Based on a survey of 760 museum directors released July 22, the American Alliance of Museums     says one-third of institutions are not confident that they will survive past the next 16 months, and the  same number expect to lose 40% or more of their budgeted operating incomes for 2020."

#Abigail Abrams, "80 years after a landmark disability law..." TIME, June 8, 2020.

"The majority of  disabled Americans still struggle to find jobs, most affordable housing is still not accessible, and disabled Americans, as a group, experience much higher rates of poverty and incarceration." "Disability-related complaints remain the largest category filed with the federal agencies that enforce fair housing, and employment laws, and many businesses and institutions remain inaccessible."

"Access to employment, one of the central promises of the ADA, is perhaps most out of reach. Disabled people are still roughly twice as likely as nondisabled Americans to be unemployed and to live in poverty, and these numbers have persisted over time."

#"Space Force," page 61, TIME, June 8, 2020.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated it would cost up to $3 billion in one-time  expenses over the next five years to set up the Space Force, and an additional $1 billion or so to set up the new management and administrative positions.

"Space Force is still seen as a joke by many Americans." "Russia and China say it is the U.S. that is militarizing space. Both have lashed out about the creation of the Space Force as a violation of the international consensus on the peaceful use of outer space, which may undermine global strategic  balance and stability." The 1967 Outer Space Treaty forbids countries from deploying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction. President Trump is intent on turning space into "a war-fighting domain." He is just violating another treaty.

ADDENDUMS:

*On September 1, 2020, survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacres and their descendants filed a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa which has never compensated victims of the brutal event in which white mobs burned down more than 1,200 homes and killed as many as 300 people.

*Definition of Socialism: It is the theory or system of the ownership and operations of the means of production and distribution by society or the community rather than by private individuals, with all members of the society or the community sharing in the work and the production.

Good Biden Vote; Using Prison as Silencer; and Affirmative Action

 #S.E.Cupp, "I'll vote Biden because his a good person: that matters," The Albuquerque Journal, September 12, 2020.

#"But this year, it feels like merely being a good person takes on more weight. After four years of a corrupt, unethical, narcissistic, racist, sexist,  bullying, shaming, vengeful, spiteful, greedy, needy, lying jerk in the White House, goodness has been gone far too long." "Trump's lack of goodness is evidenced by his knee-capping and silencing of his critics, including in the media. It's in his sexist attacks on women. It's in his shameful smears against his own public servants, military heroes and American heroes -- even dead ones."

"Trump's disregard for goodness has seeped into the fabric of the nation, as he has encouraged Americans to turn against Americans, to blame our neighbors for our hate, to hate the media, the establishment, the left, the right, immigrants, foreigners, the NFL, the FBI, and anyone else who makes a useful target for him." Goodness matters more than ever now. I know his fundamental goodness will guide him -- and the country -- down a better path."

#Mike Konczal, "A Serious Plan," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"According to the Tax Policy Center, Biden's plan would raise upwards of $3.7 trillion over 10 years, similar to the amounts that would be raised by a wealth tax." "It would also remove the cap on Social Security payroll taxes on those making above $400,000, generating revenue for this vital program for low-income retirees."

"Biden's plan would tax the capital gains and dividend income of those earning more than $1 million as regular income at the increased 39.6 percent rate." "All told, Biden's plan would reduce that after-tax income of the top 1 percent by about 17 percent." "Taxes don't just raise revenue; they also structure the income distribution. And raising taxes on the rich would stop the economy from simply channeling income to executives and owners."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "If You Know Joe,"  The New Yorker, August 31, 2020.

"[In] speeches that  grew darker and darker as the week progressed [about a month ago], Trump pounded on the same theme: Biden was a 'puppet,' a 'Trojan (sic) for socialism, 'the smiling, cognitively unsound prop of a left-wing mob intent on tearing the country down.' "

"Standing onstage in the empty Chase Center, on the Wilmington waterfront, delivering remarks that were both genial and forceful, Biden said that Trump has put America on 'a path of shadow and suspicion. Instead of protecting the country, he had projected it to his deviousness, his bigotry, his selfishness, and in his botched response to the pandemic, he had [revealed] his deadly incompetence.' "

#Evan Osnos, "Man in the Middle," The New Yorker, August 31, 2020. 

Osnos says of Joe Biden: "To be born in America in 1942 as a white heterosexual male was, generally speaking, to win a cosmic lottery. Because of low birth rates during the Depression and the war, the generation was exceptionally small -- the first in American history to be smaller than the one before it. Its members enjoyed more attention and resources from their parents, small class sizes, and high rates of college admission. The New Deal and the G.I. Bill gave the benefits, loans, and federal work programs, which thrust millions of white Americans into the middle class."

#Nicholas Goldberg, "Using prison to silence Cohen," THE WEEK, August 17, 2020.

" 'Jailing citizens who dare to criticize the dear leader happens in authorization countries, not the U.S.,' said Nicholas Goldberg. But President Trump's long-time fixer, Michael Cohen, was hauled off to prison as 'retaliation' for writing a tell-all memoir about his former boss, federal District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled in early September."

#Elie Mystal, "DOJ v. Affirmative Action." The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"The Department of Justice has not filed a single case to defend the Voting Rights Act during the Trump era. And it all but stopped conducting investigations into biased policing, and greatly reduced the number of investigations into hate crimes and disability rights cases."

"The argument against affirmative action is never really about merit or fairness, or any of the buzzwords conservatives use to mask their racism. It's always about promoting the chances of white kids over everybody else." "At this point, [Attorney General William] Barr will have opened up another opportunity for some conservative judge to issue a sweeping ruling that would end affirmative action, thereby throwing various university programs into disarray, and wait for the conservative-controlled Supreme Court to sort out the mess."

"Moe than a third of those admitted to the Harvard Class of 2022 are legacies."

ADDENDUMS:

*Sheelah Kolhatker, "Dollar for Dollar," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

"Many early cases of COVID-19 were later shown to have come into the U.S. from Europe." President Trump has said many times that the major source of the virus infection was from Chinese travelers.

"Kolhatker also writes that there were 'problems with the [CARES legislation] implementation, including the fact that may large companies and chains received funding that had been intended for small businesses.' "

*The Navy is considering a fleet size increase resulting in 480 to 534 warships. Although Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the ships will be smaller in size, the increased  cost will still be in the billions.

*U.S. District Judge John D. Bates concluded that the Trump commission on law enforcement be halted for failing to include members with outside views, and open meetings to the public.

*Trump said on "Fox and Friends" on September 15,that he previously wanted to order the assassination of Syria's President Basher al-Assad, and "had it all set," but [Defense Secretary James] Mattis opposed the idea. Two years before, Trump said an assassination "was never contemplated, nor would it be contemplated." 

Barr Agonostics

 #Elie Mystal, "The Lowest Possible Barr," The New Yorker, July 27, 2020.

Attorney General William Barr "has surpassed every institutional metric in his quest to become the worst attorney general in US history." "The Republican Party has so thoroughly committed itself to the lawlessness of the Trump regime that it does not have the moral strength to remove one of the president's chief henchman mere months before the election." "Republicans have been politicizing the Department of Justice for decades, but every time the Democrats retake power, all they do is nominate decent people, while leaving the structure in place for indecent people to do great harm when Republicans regain control."

#"Barr battles Democrats in Capitol Hill defense," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020.

" 'Indeed, Barr has contempt for the elected lawmakers, because he answers only to Trump and his twitter account,' said Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. He derided protesters as a mob, 'dismisses the idea that there is systematic racism in policing,' though 'black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police,' and tried to 'pin violence on protesters.' "

#The Trump Presidency has been an escalating series of insults, each enabling greater violations of norms, ethics, and laws. This year, he has removed five inspector generals from their posts, and, with the assistance of Attorney General William Barr, corrupted the Department of Justice to such a degree that we are now unsure of the legal meaning of "guilty" when applied to a Trump-connected defendant. 

#Tom Philpott, "Playing Chicken," Mother Jones, December/October 2020.

"The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a division of the Department of Labor, is legally obligated to compel employees to provide workplaces 'free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or severe physical harm.' " "Previously, the agency's reporting forms required employers to record any muscularskeletal injuries in the catchall category of 'All Other Occupational Illnesses.' " "Between 2012 and 2014,inspectors from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health made alarming findings inside the poultry plants seeking to speed up their lines: In [the two plants investigated],  more than a third of employees showed 'evidence of carpal tunnel syndrome,' along with high rates of  other muscularskeletal maladies."

#Denise Fort and Kyle Tisdel, "Crashing industry hobbles NM," Rio Grande Sierran, July/August/ September 2020.

"New Mexico has put itself into a box with its heavy reliance on oil and gas revenues -- now approximately one-third of the state's budget -- a percentage that increased significantly after tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations were passed." "Every new well that is drilled adds to the legacy of industrial pollution. In New Mexico alone, there exist almost 100,000 historic oil and gas wells, representing billions, if not tens of billions, in clean-up costs."

#Tim Murphy, "True West," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

"In reality, the [Texas] Rangers instigated a reign of terror in which between 300 and several thousand Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans were killed." "After statehood, Rangers hunted fugitives and committed atrocities against civilians during the Mexican-American War."

"In the decades that followed, the force continued to act as enforcers for Anglo dominance, infiltrating NAACP chapters, blocking desegregation efforts and cracking down on striking farmworkers. In a pattern that repeats itself today, officers fired for abuses often signed on with other law enforcement agencies."

#"Portland protesters and agents claim that 'one day it will go away," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020.

" 'Trump's incursion into Portland is an act of 'stunning overreach,' said 'The Seattle Times.' "  " 'Protecting the federal courthouse is defensible, but sending agents into city streets to use brutal tactics veers into dystopian governance. This is Authoritarianism 101,' says Trudy Rubin in 'The Philadelphia Inquirer.' Rubin goes on to say: 'Despots stoke violence and civil strife to scare their people into supporting leaders who would "protect" them. When faced with peaceful protests they "provoke   chaos," as an excuse to unleash their own violence.' "

#"Homeschooling," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020.

"So many families are organizing 'pandemic pods' of between five and 10 children each, where the parents either take turns teaching lessons or pool their resources to hire a full-time tutor." "They have 'Black Lives Matter' signs in their yards and windows. Parents are going to team up with 'people they know and trust,' said Clara Totenberg in The New York Times. This 'rational impulse' will lead affluent white families to pod together and exclude any black and Latino families. The result will be a society that's more stratified and more deeply riven by 'racial inequalities rooted in white supremacy.' "

#Patricia Williams, "The Color of Contagion," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"Disability rights advocates have been working hard to push those concerns to the front burner." "It is not by accident that Trump's targeted rhetoric to white suburban housewives so neatly sutures race, riot, and disease as ways to channel the existential fear to which we are all so vulnerable right now." "We can divide ourselves up into races and castes and neighborhoods and nations all we like, but to the virus -- if not to us -- we are one glorious, shimmering, and singular mess."

#Jelani Cobb, "Violent Winds," The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

"But he, [Donald Trump] has said that Rittenhouse [the seventeen-year-old, who fatally shot two protesters, and wounded another in Kenosha, Wisconsin] was likely acting in self-defense, claiming -- without offering any evidence, as is President Trump's habit -- that Rittenhouse would 'probably have been killed by protesters,' so he acted in self-defense."

#The poetess Miya Angelous said that one should trust the first time one hears from a person on a subject. She has said she makes her first impression based on eye contact. "When someone shows you who they are believe them: the first time." This advice applies especially to Donald Trump, who routinely changes his positions if what he initially said draws strong negative reaction. 

ADDENDUMS:

*Attorney Sidney Powell admitted to Judge Emmet Sullivan, after first trying to claim executive privilege, that she briefed Michael Flynn's case to Trump, and she urged Trump not to pardon Flynn.

*The U.S. military has engaged in wars or other combat in all but 11 of its 244 years of existence. The claim comes from a book entitled "The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts" by David Vines.

    

More on the Pandemic

 #Yoshua Yaffa, "Believe It or Not," The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

"A 2017 Yale study found that labeling Facebook content 'disputed' increased the share of users who judged it to be false by less than four per cent." "In April, after Trump suggested that disinfectant could be injected into the body to treat COVID-19, health officials in several states  reported spikes in calls to poison-control hotlines." "Disinformation cannot be targeted with precision -- to release a falsehood into the world is to lose control over its trajectory and impact." "When it comes to COVID-19, the apparent      result of the combined disinformation campaign of Trump and Fox News have been devastating."

#Alana Semuels, "After job losses, power cuts loom for millions," TIME, September 21-28, 2020.

"In September, after a pandemic-prompted pause, power companies serving tens of million of Americans will resume service cutoffs to customers who are behind on their bills. In some states, moratoriums are ending; in others, utility companies' pledges to keep customers connected are winding down." "Carbon Switch, an energy efficiency startup, estimates that 34.5 million people will lose shutoff protections in 14 states in the next month [October in this case]." "There are still 29 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week ending August 15, according to Commerce Department data."

#Amy David Sorkin, "The Shifting Pandemic," The New Yorker, July 6-13, 2020.

"Since the coronavirus first took hold in this country, Donald Trump has heedlessly promoted the idea that it can be treated solely as a political, or even a cultural problem. But the rising umbers of cases, coupled with the listlessness of the Administration, suggest that the respite may be  brief, and that we are squandering whatever advantage we gained by the ebb in the states first affected." "Trump is trying to "jam the pandemic into the nativist, xenophobic, rhetorical framework that helped him get elected in 2016."

#Charlotte Alter, "Down the Rabbit Hole," TIME, September 21, 2020.

[QAnn conspiracy theory] lets "its followers believe President Trump is a hero defending the world from a 'deep state' cold of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, Democratic politicians, and Hollywood  celebrities who run a global sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood of children for life-sustaining chemicals." "Whitey Phillips, a professor at Syracuse University, has said: 'You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very least occupying the same solar system.' "According to the Pew Research Center, 25% of Americans say there is some truth to the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was intentionally planned."

#Senator John Thune said that any bill over $1 trillion would risk fragmenting the GOP. Senator Mitch McConnell said that $2.2 trillion is "outlandish." Senate Republicans had initially offered $1 trillion for the next stimulus package, but then voted on a $300 billion deal. McConnell was quoted as "begrudingly" saying that he could get enough votes to approve the $1.6 trillion offer by Treasury Secretary Munchin, but a McConnell spokesman disputed that McConnell had made that claim.

ADDENDUMS:

*After stopping negotiations on a stimulus package until after the election, Trump called on Congress to pass relief for airlines, small businesses, and stimulus checks in a piecemeal fashion.

*A Pew Research Center survey published on June 25, 2020, found that 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said masks should always be worn in public, compared with 29% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. "While 43% of Democrats told Pew in 2019 that they had a 'great deal' of trust in scientists, only 17% of Republicans said the same.

*Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Failing Schools," The New Yorker, August 17, 2020. - "In Israel, the reopening of middle schools and high schools with relaxed social distancing preceded outbreaks [of the coronavirus] in the wider community." "In Los Angeles alone, a quarter of a million households with school-age children lacked a computer with broadband."

*Tom Philpott, "Playing Chicken," Mother Jones, September/October 2020. - "By late May, rural counties that had meatpacking plants with COVID-19 outbreaks had average infection rates five times higher than the rest of rural America. As of mid-July, at least 167 meatpacking workers had died from the disease."

*The GOP-controlled Senate report "admits that it couldn't conclude that Hunter Biden's employment with Burisma had any material effect on U.S. policy."

Winning U.S. Senate as Defining Struggle; also, Some Foreign Policy Concerns

#John Nichols, "Lost Without the Senate," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020. 

"McConnell had the GOP Senate as a fully owned subsidiary of the corporate interests and billionaire donors that fund campaigns." "The Republican lawmakers and his [McConnell's] cadre of obedient partisans have made it perfectly clear time and time again that they will not be moved by the fact that a legislative initiative is essential." "Democratic candidates, strategists, donors, volunteers, and voters all talk about the need to fundamentally alter the direction of our governance and our country. If fundamental change is the point, winning the Senate has to be understood as the defining struggle of an election year."

#Dexter Filkins, "The Uncounted," The New Yorker, September 7, 2020.

"In 2018, according to an analysis by the Dartmouth [University] professor, Michael Herron, about two hundred thousand ballots arrived on Election Day or the day before, and more kept coming after the deadline passed." "In the 2018 race, according to Herron, about eleven thousand ballots were rejected because their signatures did not match, or because they were not signed." Former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson told Filkins: "Those were my votes." After recounts by machine and hand, Rick Scott won by ten thousand and thirty-three votes -- one tenth of one percent of the eight million cast.

#Vera Bergengriven (sp.) and Lissandra Villa, "Homegrown threat," TIME, September 21, 2020.

"Gallup found that last year, 59% of Americans were not confident in the honesty of their nation's elections, third worst among the word's wealthy democracies." "According to an August WSJ/NBC poll, just 11% of Trump supporters said they planned to vote by mail, compared with 47% supporters of Democratic nominee, Joe Biden." "More than 35% of registered voters say they are not confident the election will be fair, according to an August, Monmouth University poll."

#Kallem Hawa, "Present Absences," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

Kallem Hawa quotes Rashid Khelidi, author of "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine," to the effect that "the British mandate established two parallel realities in Palestine: an embryonic nation-building project for the Jewish minority, and the continuation of colonial policy for the Arab majority, whose question of self-determination was left unaddressed." "First, by conditioning Israeli's withdrawal from the lands it had seized from Jordan on the establishment of secure frontiers, it provided Israel with an opportunity to run roughshod over the resolution's intent, enlarging its borders in perpetuity by claiming security as an excuse. Second, by authorizing a negotiated settlement to come between Israel and 'Arab' parties, the resolution allowed Israel to exploit its language and ignore the existence of the Palestinians."

#Charlie Campbell, "TikTok, on the chopping block," TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

"Beyond tech supremacy, Beijing and Washington are feuding over trade tariffs, the detention of 1 million ethnic Uighur Muslims in China's Xinjiny region, the erosion of freedom in a semiautonomous Hong Kong and the militarization of the COVID-19 pandemic." "As a national-security argument it's 'pretty weak,' says Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'The reality is that the Trump administration is acting primarily on commercial concerns,' he says. " " 'TikTok is the first social-media platform out of China that became truly global.' "

" 'Some in the administration want to burn down as much as possible,' Segal says, 'so that it's very hard to reset the  relationship.' "

#David Klion, "Will the Left Get a Say in the Biden Doctrine?" The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

Stephen Werthaim, a cofounder of the Quincy Institute, a think tank that launched last year, with funding from George Soros and Charles Koch, told David Klion that the "pandemic illustrated a lot of what we've been saying for sometime -- that our main challenges from the perspective of US interests are planetary and transnational, not military threats from rival nation-states." Kate Kizer, the policy director of the advocacy group, 'Win Without War,' expressed similar fears. "I'm seeing the different paths ahead -- either one of authoritarianism, driven by xenophobic nationalism, or an internationalist response that is rooted in cross-border solidarity and cooperation." 

ADDENDUMS:

*A Washington Post analysis of data collected in three vote-by-mail states found 372 possible cases of double voting on behalf of deceased people out of 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections.

*While in California on September 14, President Trump said of that state, "It will start getting cooler. You just watch. I don't think science knows, actually."

*"Briefly noted," TIME, August 3/10, 2020. "Hot Springs, Arkansas was once a casino that rivaled Las Vegas, despite a state law criminalizing gambling. As this history shows, from 1870 to 1967, businessmen openly disregarded the law, with the connivance of the police and lawmakers."

*The New York City Police Department has endorsed Trump for president. Why would it endorse a serial-law breaker?

*A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from ending transgender health-care protections.

*Trump said of the F-35: "You sell it today and its obsolete tomorrow." U.S. warplanes average 27 years of service.

Business, Jobs, and Related Matters

 #Alana Semuels, "Fewer Jobs, More Machines," TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

"One study estimates that about 400,000 jobs were lost to automation in U.S. factories from 1990 to 2007." "The U.S. shed around 40 million jobs at the peak of the pandemic, and while some have come back, some will never return. One group of economists estimate that 42% of the jobs lost are gone forever."

"Robots could replace as many as 2 million more workers in manufacturing alone by 2025, according to a recent paper by economists at MIT and Boston University." "Even before the pandemic, a study by a global consulting company estimated that automation could displace 132,000 Black workers in the U.S. by 2030. Gabe Delport, the CEO of a company named Vdacity, estimates that one billion people will lose their jobs over the next ten years, due to AI, and if anything, COVID-19 has accelerated that by about nine years."

#Karen Voght, "Tipping Point," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

"Service industry worker made up the largest group of Americans who filed for unemployment in March and April in 2020." About 100,000 new restaurants opened their doors in the 2010s, the journalist Kevin Alexander wrote in his 2019 book, "Burn the Ice."

"Dishwashers, food preparation and hosting jobs consistently rank among the worst-paid positions in America. Restaurant workers in many states have no health insurance or paid leave, and rely on tips for much of their salary. Without tips, these workers make as little as $2.13 an hour -- the legal minimum in 19 states."

#Andrew R. Chow, "Now playing at drive-ins..." TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

" 'Drive-ins are being contacted like they used to be, from everything in the community,' says filmmaker April Wright, who directed the documentary "Closing (?) Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace." 'They're hosting church services, weddings, graduations, dance recitals, concerts, stand-up comedy.' "

"Some 300 independent drive-ins operate across the U.S.  They typically make most of their money during the summer, when students are on break, and blockbusters roll in every weekend."

#John Walcott, "How Maine and its lobsters..." TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

"Maine's lobster sales are sinking fact. China was the industry's best customer until 2018,when Beijing retaliated for U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods by slapping a 25% levy on the elite treat, while reducing its tariffs on Canadian catches." "Not only have Maine's lobster sales plummeted, keeping a lobster business running has become harder as Trump's tariff wars have escalated."

#Sasha Abramsky, "Bad for Business," The Nation, August 24/31, 2020.

"Now US business interests are beside themselves with anger over the Trump administration's recent efforts to shred the H-1B visa program and protections under the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, and deny visas to international students whose colleges have moved to online courses during the pandemic."

#Dan Kaufman, "The Last Stand," The New Yorker, August 17. 2020.

"Five years ago, the price of milk fell precipitously, accelerating the long unrolling of rural Wisconsin. Since 2010,the population in two-thirds of the state's rural counties has decreased, leading to a shrinking workforce, fewer jobs and businesses, and slower income growth rates than in metro counties."

"Wisconsin has seven thousand dairy farms, roughly half the number that it had a decade ago." "Ninety per cent of Wisconsin's milk is used to make cheese; if the state were a country, it would be the fourth-largest cheese-producing nation in the world."

""As in many rural areas, suicides in Wisconsin have increased dramatically in recent years, reaching a record of nine hundred eighteen in 2017."

#David Gauvey Herbert, "Silver Lining Dept. FLUSH," The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

"This spring, the bell tolled for the porta-potty industry. The S. & P. 500 lost a third of the value. Unemployment hit fourteen per cent. Events were cancelled, from film festivals to flea markets and fun runs. Who would need toilets now?"

"Portable toilets are a two-billion dollar industry, but it's a tough business."

#Justin Nobel, "A Physician of Faith and Reason," AARP Magazine, August/September 2020.

"Only about 7,000 physicians in total have the specific  training needed to attend to the unique combination of ills that can haunt the approximately 49.2 Americans who are 65 and older."  "According to a 2018-2019 American Board of Medical Specialists report, Louisiana has just 55 geriatricians. The shortage of geriatricians in the United States has many causes: Older people are projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history, reaching 77 million by 2034, the Census Bureau recently reported, and the number of doctors-in-training going into geriatric medicine isn't keeping up."

"A 2017 survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that medical students are typically graduating from four-year programs with debts of around $190,000. That motivates new doctors tp avoid choosing to become geriatricians, whose pay is significantly lower than that of other specialists."

ADDENDUMS:

*In his most recent book, Bob Woodward quotes President Trump telling his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, that "my fuxxing generals are a bunch of pussies, because they care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals."

#Rudy Giuliani is working with Andriy Derbash, a Russian-linked election interference actor.

*Trump says he will put down an "INSURRECTION" within "minutes."

*Fox News host Jeanine Pino has accused Joe Biden of taking performance-enhancing drugs: "I think there's probably --possibly -- drugs involved. That's what I hear."

*According to Media Matters for America, about twenty candidates are on the ballot for the Senate and the House this fall, [and have] expressed an affinity for QAnon.

Pandemic Matters

 #Sonua Shah, "How to Define a Plague," The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

"The  pandemic, in popular discourse, is an act of external aggression, an assault by an 'invisible' enemy that 'attacks' people so savagely."

"The majority of pathogens that have emerged since 1940 originated in the bodies of animals , not because they invaded us, but because we invaded their habitats." "Smallpox is the only human pathogen that we've eradicated through a purposeful campaign of vaccination, yet it ravaged human population for centuries before we succeeded." "In this story, pandemics would be cast as both a biological reality and a social phenomenon shaped by human agency." "Instead of blaming outsiders and waiting for magic bullet cures, we could work to enhance our resistance and reduce the probability of pathogens reaching us in the first place."

#Jamie Duchamme, "When COVID Doesn't Go Away," TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

"A July 24 report from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that out of about 300 nonhospitalized but symptomatic COVID-19 patients, 35% were still experiencing symptoms like shortness of breath and fatigue up to three weeks after diagnosis. But there is emerging evidence that some are sick for months, not just weeks. Dr. Michael Poluse, who is studying long-term COVID-19 outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, says about 20% of his research participants are still sick one to four months after diagnosis." "If even 10% of the more than 5 million (and counting) confirmed COVID-19 patients in the U.S. suffer symptoms that last this long, half a million people are already or could become ill for the foreseeable future." (Note the numbers used here are as of August).

#Bioloist Carl Bergstorm and biostatistician Natalie Dean pointed out in a New York Times oped in May, that without a vaccine, most of the population -- 60% to 85% by some estimates -- must become infected to reach herd immunity, and the virus's high mortality rate, means that millions will die. If herd immunity is reached during an ongoing pandemic, the high number of infected people will continue to spread the virus, and ultimately, more people than the herd immunity threshold will become infected.

Scientists don't know the extent to which people who recover are immune from future infections. Proactive mitigation like social distancing and wearing masks flatten the curve by reducing the rate that active infection generates new cases. This delays the point at which herd immunity is reached and also reduces casualties.

#The White House's leading physician, Sean Conley, acknowledged at a news conference on Sunday, October 4 that he intentionally withheld information about Trump's blood oxygen levels plummeting in order to put a positive spin on the president's condition. "I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude the  team, the president, that his course of illness has had." "I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction."

Trump has been treated with a steroid, the antiviral drug remdesivia, and a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Medical experts called it a kitchen-sink approach that suggests the president is in worse shape than the White House has been claiming.

#Sasha Abramsky, "Dangers..." The New Yorker, July 27, 2020.

"The New York Times reports that the country's five largest cluster of coronavirus infections are in prisons and jails." "At the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona where several hundred immigrants are being held by Immigration and Customs, the number of confirmed positive test results increased more than 400 percent from June 1 to June 14."

#Bernrd J. Clark III, The New Yorker, July 6-13, 2020.

Clark quotes Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer, as writing that by mid-May,  Iceland had tested 15.5 per cent of its population for COVID-19, which amounts to sixty thousand people. Meanwhile, the U.S. had tested only 3.4% of  its population -- eleven million people.

ADDENDUMS:

*The Washington Post's contributing columnist, Leana Wen, says: "Trump has touted the daily testing he and his aides receive as the reason they don't feel the need to follow other precautions, such as wearing masks and avoiding crowds." "How any more people will test positive as a result of this cluster of infections, and will the American people be informed?"

*The White House's handling of the period between the appearance of symptoms in one of the president's aides, and the confirmation of Trump's coronavirus infections is what experts have considered to be a case study in irresponsibility and mismanagement.

#Zeke Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist who served in the Obama administration, tweeted: "You do not give a patient - much less the President of the United States -- a drug that is not yet approved by the FDA (to say nothing of one with 'mild symptoms').

#According to a new study released by Cornell University, which analyzed over 38 million articles in English-language media around the world, the American president is this planet's most toxic source of misinformation about the pandemic.

Racial Disparities

#Sarah Remick, "Double Exposure," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020. 

"From the antebellum period until the end of Jim Crow, countless black Americans crossed the color line to pass as whites -- to escape slavery, or threats of racial violence, or to gain access to the social, political, and economic benefits conferred by whiteness."

#Luke Mogelson, "The Uprising," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Today, Minneapolis appears on lists of the 'best places to live,' even as its racial disparities ran among the worst in the country. The medium annual income of black residents in the Twin Cities is less than half that of whites, and, though about seventy-five percent own their homes, only about a quarter of black families do."

#Jelani Cobb, "American Spring," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Today, the weight of grief and poverty in this country still falls disproportionally on black shoulders." "Race, to the degree that it represents anything coherent in the United States, is shorthand for a specific set of life probabilities." "Seventy-one per cent of white Americans now say that racial discrimination is a 'big problem.' "

#Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, "It's All Out in the Open," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

Part of that underlying cadence is white supremacy, the foundational injustice of our country and the core of our president's reelection message." "His [Trump's] determination to enrich himself and his cronies at the country's expense is so brazen, it has made visible what previously hid behind a veneer of legality." "Yes, our political system's were designed by and for the advantage of the rich, white, and well-connected."

#Patricia Williams, "The Color of Contagion," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"One may wonder, in other words, why minority's disproportionally lower survival rates couldn't be more accurately attributed to homelessness or dense living or lack of health insurance or inadequate food supplies or environmental toxins or the ratio of acute care facilities to the numbers of residents in the ghettoized locations that have become such petri dishes of contagion." "Needless to say, Black and Latinx patients with the same symptoms as their white counterparts, end up being referred for specialized care much less often." "The reconfigured overlay of race as a debilitating, resource- consuming morbidity risk worsens the situation."

#Charlotte Alter, "Down the Rabbit Hole," TIME, September 21-28, 2020.

"When enslaved people were freed after the Civil War, they had  reason to expect that the government would grant them land as delayed payment for generations of labor exploitation. The phrase '40 acres and a mule' derives from General William T. Sherman's 1815 field order to distribute 400,000 acres of land to newly freed families in 40-acre plots." "Everyone involved carefully avoided using the  word 'reparations,' even though [there was a reparations law from 1988,] in which Congress awarded $20,000 to each Japanese American who was forced into an internment camp during World War II."

ADDENDUMS:

*Lara Friedman, president of the non-profit Foundation for Middle East Peace, is pessimistic about a Biden administration's willingness to listen to pro-Palestinian activists.

*A Jama Cardiology study published in July suggested that many recently recovered patients have lingering heart abnormalities, with inflammation the most common.

*The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute demanded [in early September] that President Trump's reelection campaign stop using Reagan's name and likeness to solicit funds. The campaign was issuing commemorative coins to those who donated $45 or more.

*Adam Ramsay, "Scotland would fare better alone," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020. "When Scotland held its independence referendum in 2014, 55 percent voted to remain part of the U.K. Now, 54 percent of Scottish voters back secession..."

*"Back to School," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020. "Of 13 countries analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation -- including Germany, South Korea, and Israel -- all but two had positivity rates below 4 percent when they resumed classes. In the US the rate was approaching 8 percent as schools began to reopen, with some states -- including Georgia, Florida, and Arizona -- topping 10 and even 15 percent."

 Luke Mogelson, "The Uprising," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Cummins [Prison in Arkansas] has had the  tenth-largest coronavirus outbreak in the nation -- nine hundred and fifty-six people, including sixty-five staff members have tested positive -- but the Division of Corrections has made only minimal steps to contain it." The Arkansas attorney general had stated that the risks to prisoners were not "so great that they violate standards of decency," nor were they "ones that today's society society does not tolerate." Meanwhile, in a state prison thirty-five miles from Cummins, there was a outbreak: Two hundred and twenty-eight inmates have tested positive.

"Between 2012 nd 2017, Arkansas's prison population grew more rapidly than any other state's, with  the number of elderly prisoners rising more rapidly than any other age group." "Prisoners are hidden in most realities of life, but, when it comes to infectious disease, the harms of incarceration become visible. Political leaders must  reckon with the fact that prisoners are part of our communities. The risk of tuberculosis, for instance, is twenty-three times higher inside prison walls -- poor ventilation, social density, and minimal sun exposure are fertile conditions for the spread of disease..." 

Dexter Filkins, "The Uncounted," The New Yorker, September 7, 2020.

Florida's ban on ex-felons disenfranchisement affects one out of five Black adults in the state. "Six months after Amendment Four passed, the Republican-dominated legislature approved a law dictating that ex-felons could only vote if they first paid all the fines, restitutions, and fees imposed at their sentencing. The law may affect as many as seven hundred thousand of Florida residents, about half of them Black."

Felons were also affected as the 2000 election approached: Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, sent lists presumed felons to the supervisors of elections in the state's sixty-seven counties, advising them to purge the names from voter rolls. David Klausner, a computer-forensics expert who worked with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, told Dexter Filkins that almost inconceivably sloppy methods were being used: Flagging voters with different Social Security numbers, and even genders, from the felons they were being matched with. The rosters were being expanded by using names of felons from ten other states. "There were infants on the lists he [gave] me," says Filkins.

Bryce Covert, "Defund the Police," The New Yorker, July 27, 2020. 

Spending on the police jumped from about $2 billion in 1960 to $137 billion in 2018, unadjusted for inflation. "The Center on Budget and Policy projects a $615 billion shortfall in state budgets over the next three years." Focusing on New York City, ensuring the settlements come out of the NYPD's budget, "gives them some incentive to address misconduct."

"In addition to less spending, advocates want the police to stop dealing with things like mental health crises and school safety."

Jelani Cobb, "The Matter of Black Lives," The New Yorker, July 27, 2020.

"The Human Rights Campaign noted that between 2013 and 2015 there were fifty-three known murders of transgender people, thirty-nine of the victims were African American." "If Black  Lives Matter has been an object lesson in the power of social media, it has also revealed the medium's pitfalls."

Bryce Covert, "Has McDonalds a Real Sexual Harassment Problem?, The Nation, August 10/17, 2020.

Women who have worked at McDonalds report similar experiences with coworkers who grabbed or pinched their buttocks; groped their breasts, hips, or groin; or touched their hair or shoulders. An estimated one in eight workers in the United States have been employed at McDonalds at some point. "In 2016, 40 percent of women in nonmanagerial fast food jobs said they had experienced unwanted  sexual harassment at work. But harassment at McDonalds appears to be of a different degree. In a survey of 782 current and former nonmanagerial employees conducted this April, three-quarters said they had experienced sexual harassment at work, with the majority dealing with multiple forms at once. Half were subjected to sexual comments; a third were touched, groped, or fondled and 12 percent were sexually assaulted or raped. Many experienced these things multiple times." 

"Just 7 percent of McDonalds's global locations are owned by the company and thus are under its  direct control; the rest are owned and operated by franchises."

ADDENDUMS:

*Although some media sources used "both-sidedness" and "equivalence" to  describe the first Biden-Trump debate, polls show that Trump disappointed even his supporters, and that Biden gained on demographics and issues.

*Zeke Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist, who served in the Obama administration, tweeted: "You do not give a patient -- much less the President of the United States -- a drug that is not yet approved by the FDA (to say nothing of one with 'mild symptoms')."

*According to a new study released by Cornell University, which analyzed over 38 million articles in English-language media around the word, the American president is this planet's most toxic source of misinformation about the pandemic.

*After learning that one of his top aides had tested positive for Covid-19, President Trump still went to a fundraiser in New Jersey without informing anyone.

Living High on the Taxpayers' Dime

I.) "Trump: a policy of self-enrichment," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020. - " 'The Trump era is at heart one one massive grift,' said Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times. 'Since he took office, visits to his campaign spent $380,000 for facility rental/catering services' at his hotels. In all, his campaign and various Republican committees have spent more that $22 million at Trump properties since 2015." 

2.) Russ Choma, "In the Rough," Mother Jones, September 2020. - "The year before purchasing the Aberdeenshire estate, [Trump] was ousted as CEO of his thrice-bankrupted casino business in 2008; in 2008 he defaulted on a large Deutsche Bank loan tied to a development in Chicago. Like other Trump wagers, his Scottish gamble has so far not worked out. Both resorts are bleeding millions annually." The question: Where did the hundreds of millions Trump poured into his Scottish courses actually come from?

"In 2018, the most recent year for which numbers are available, both courses -- Turnberry and Aberdeenshire -- lost more that $15 million combined. And that was a good year. A golf industry expert familiar with Trump's operations says he expects that 2020 revenues at [both courses] will be down 80 to 90 percent from 2018."

After it was determined that Trump was "using a stolen [Scottish] coat of arms, he was barred from using it. Trump eventually sued the Scottish government but lost so resoundingly that in 2019 he was ordered to pay the legal fees."

3.) Ivanka Trump received consulting fees of over $900,000 each year from the Trump Organization as a senior executive of the family business. The Trump Organization deducted $70,000 to style Donald Trump's hair when hosting "The Apprentice," and nearly $100,000 was paid to a favorite hair and makeup artist of Ivanka.

4.) Ivanka Trump had sent hundreds of emails to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants, using a personal account, many of the uses in violation of federal  rules. President Trump used an over-the-top defense of Saudi Arabia's MBS to divert from the Ivanka email story. 

5.) During a live phone-in to Fox Business on October 8, Trump issued an ultimatum to Attorney General William Barr to indict Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden for the "greatest political  crime of our century," or he will find himself in a "sad situation." He said that includes Obama, and that includes Biden; "these are people that spied on my campaign, and we have everything." 

President Trump followed up by saying: "I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions." Trump said in a tweet.