Blog Overview (Permanent Top Post)

This blog explores politics from a liberal/left perspective but also deals heavily with conspiracy theories and various unusual topics. Although I started this blog to research 9/11, my most pressing issue of concern now is anthropogenic climate change.

If you have doubts about the science of climate change, this website is a very useful resource to get educated.

I'm happy to have people comment and contribute ideas here. I don't censor comments except in rare cases where there is abuse or private information. Google/Blogger does sometimes censor comments for reasons I don't understand and I have no control over. Lately, I am not able to even find comments that Google/Blogger has blocked. Sorry about that.

I post kind of irregularly in recent years but I try to keep this site active. Feel free to use the search engine on the side for older content. You can read about the history of this blog here.

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33 of the Day: Trump's Awful Pandemic Briefings

For some reason, two photos of Trump at two different pandemic briefings display a 33, but remarkably also highlight key things. The first is where Trump used racist language to refer to the virus, over-writing his briefing paper. The second is where Trump obnoxiously went after reporter Peter Alexander, calling him a terrible reporter, when Alexander asked what Trump had to say to people who were scared. Trump is a psycho and the 33 captures it.

Of course these briefings are famous for Trump bullshitting and making everything worse, like he normally does. And they seem to be the replacement for Trump's rallies where he goes to rant, blather, ramble and generally act like a madman to his zombie-like cult.

The COVID-19 Pandemic: LIHOP?

Early in 2017, the Obama administration guided the new Trump administration through table top exercises that, among two other types of crises, had a major pandemic.

There were 3 role-playing scenarios: hurricane, pandemic and cyber incident.  

Obama team discussed need to anticipate requirements, stay ahead of challenges and provide resources quickly. 

The goal was to acquaint Trump officials with how to coordinate around major incidents.  

The pandemic role-playing scenario involved:
 -"Novel influenza" with infections in Asia and Europe
-Efficient person-to-person transmission
-Insufficient lab capacities
-Travel bans
-Lag time before it comes to U.S.
-Need for vaccine
-Ventilator shortages
 Sound familiar?  

In event of a pandemic, Trump team was told:
-Pandemics can start in other countries and don't respect borders
-Science must guide decisions
-Federal/state collaboration is key
-Consistent messaging needed
-Social distancing recommended
-"Days - and even hours - can matter" 

Thirty Trump officials attended the exercise (Cabinet and senior White House staff). 

See also this piece.

This is very reminiscent of all the warnings to the Bush administration about 9/11 type attacks and the multiple NORAD drills that simulated hijacking attacks.

Like with 9/11 and the Bush administration, the question becomes-- is this really just "incompetence"? Or was there some malice here so they "let it happen on purpose" because they WANTED disaster?

Trump has previously said that only after everything crashes, can America be made "great again".

Trump and Putin Want Economic Collapse

Whole thread here.

Stock market is WAAYYY down this morning.

Partly because of Trump's buddy:

Watch for Putin taking advantage of the chaos and taking over some countries in Eastern Europe in the coming months...

We're so fucked.

The WTC Collapse Still Hasn't Been Modeled in Real Life

I may have posted this before but it's good to revisit it.

The dude puts a lot of work into modeling the WTC destruction and apart from supporting the demolition theory, he does a nice job showing how the official crush down/crush up model is ridiculous.



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I should add that I found this model in the video below after looking at this video above:


This model is extensively discussed at a Metabunk discussion page here.

Obviously there are many aspects to this very complicated WTC destruction event and it's incredibly hard to model the towers properly given scaling issues. But as noted above, one model that's been discussed a lot is the crush down - crush up concept (also see the video above). This model doesn't seem to show that. The top falls apart quite quickly rather than acting as a "piledriver" for the crush down phase.

Also, worth noting that this tower is super flimsy-- does anyone think it could survive the equivalent of a 767 slamming into its side?

Remember When Trump Said How the Virus Cases Would Disappear from the US?

From the WaPo:

Trump has indeed fucked this up, massively in the most disturbing and worst ways, starting years ago.

So Much Winning

8 of the 10 largest stock markets drops have been during the Trump administration.

How to Horribly Mismanage the Response to a Lethal Virus Pandemic

The Trump administration has barred the top US disease expert from speaking freely to the public after he warned the coronavirus may be impossible to contain.



Trump Didn’t Just Botch the Coronavirus Response. He Enabled Its Spread.

Even as China was announcing that its deaths from the novel coronavirus had surpassed its toll from SARS, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget for 2021 that slashed funding for our chief defender against epidemics by 18 percent. Within the overall proposed cuts detailed on Feb. 10 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a reduction in spending to guard against “emerging and zoonotic diseases” from $635,772,000 to $550,464,000. 

Zoonotic diseases are those that have crossed from animals to humans, as the novel coronavirus is believed to have done. 

The $85,308,000 proposed budget cut is less than the cost of 5 miles of border wall. The budget proposal would save the cost of another 2 miles of border wall by zeroing out a $40 million funding line for the Epidemic and Lab Capacity Program. The ELCP supports state labs that monitor health emergencies at the local level. A state lab in Texas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the U.S. in 2014. 

For the cost of less than 7 miles of border wall, the proposed budget would leave all of us less protected against a potential epidemic. 

The Trump administration made its priorities even more explicit when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar discounted a suggestion that border wall funds could be diverted to fight the spread of the coronavirus. 

We might have had earlier warning of the outbreak, but previous budget cuts caused the CDC to end its global security program in China in 2017. 

In another failure of foresight two years ago, the White House eliminated the National Security Council’s position for combating global health crises. The NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats post was held by the highly regarded Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer—whose sudden departure in May of 2018 happened to coincide with a new Ebola outbreak in Africa. That outbreak proved to be no threat to America, so most of us quickly forgot about it. So what if there was no longer anybody on the security council to guard against such threats? And as long as the rich are getting their tax breaks and the stock market is booming, who cares if the CDC is being cut year after year? 

But fear of this new bug caused the stock market to tank this week. And worrisome news came on Wednesday even as Trump was insisting there is little cause to worry because of his bold, prescient leadership. California made the startling announcement that a resident of Solano County had tested positive for novel coronavirus without having traveled abroad or coming in contact with somebody known to be infected. 

The chronically underfunded public health system had needed four days to make the diagnosis, as the swab had to be sent to the CDC, which is hampered both by a shortage of tests and reliability problems with the ones it does have.

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At a rally, Trump says the democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus and calls it “their new hoax”.

This is so deranged, it’s hard to know what to say—other than it’s deranged even for @realDonaldTrump. https://t.co/Zc3cIbtn1q

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) February 29, 2020

THIS MOTHERFUCKER IS SO INCREDIBLY IRRESPONSIBLE HE IS LITERALLY GOING TO KILL PEOPLE WITH HIS NEGLIGENCE AND DISINFORMATION. 

I suppose maybe the only "good thing" is that it's his mindless cult who will believe him and not take enough precautions against the virus and endanger themselves. That might be ok except for the fact that they can also spread it to people who aren't in his braindead cult.

"Wattlegate"-- the Biggest Scandal Yet

#Wattlegate: Is the President Digitally Touching Up His Neck? An Investigation