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.