COVID-19 Trump Administration Response Timeline

JUST SO WE ARE CLEAR ON THE TIMELINE:

Dec 18th - House Impeaches Trump
Jan 8th - First CDC warning
Jan 9th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 14th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 16th - House sends impeachment articles to Senate
Jan 18th - Trump golfs
Jan 19th - Trump golfs
Jan 20th - first case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.
Jan 22nd - “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
Jan 28th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 30th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 1st - Trump golfs
Feb 2nd - “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."
Feb 5th - Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.
Feb 10th - "Again, as I mentioned, by April or during the month of April, the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus."
Feb 10th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 12th - Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42
Feb 15th - Trump golfs
Feb 19th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 20th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 21st - Trump campaign rally
Feb 24th - “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Feb 25th - “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
Feb 25th - “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
Feb 26th - “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
Feb 26th - “We're going very substantially down, not up.” Also "This is a flu. This is like a flu"; "Now, you treat this like a flu"; "It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."
Feb 27th: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
Feb 28th - “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
Feb 28th - Trump campaign rally
March 2nd - “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2nd - “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4th: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5th - “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5th - “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6th - “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6th - “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6th - “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6th - “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 7th - Trump golfs
March 8th - Trump golfs
March 8th - “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9th - “This blindsided the world.”
March 13th - [Declared state of emergency]
March 17th - “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
March 18th - "It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate."
March 23rd - Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93
March 25th - 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.
March 30th - Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16
April 2nd - 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.
April 4th - U.S. has 296,043 *known* cases and 8,007 deaths of Americans from coronavirus.
April 7 - U.S. has 392,285 confirmed cases and 12,627 confirmed deaths from COVID-19.


Copy and paste to share! h/t Tipa TJ Grillo

A Denier's Straw Man Argument Refuted

A treatise by a “Chemistry Expert: Carbon Dioxide Can’t Cause Global Warming” [Published on February 9, 2017 by Dr Mark Imisides (Industrial Chemist)]                              

Comments edited by me, JackAZ

______________________________________________

Scarcely a day goes by without us being warned of coastal inundation by rising seas due to global warming.Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide (my emphasis), when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.

Well well, with the help of a science blog called RABETT RUN here are some comments… 

🍥 No reputable climate scientist attributes the warming of the seas to CO₂ – this is a ‘straw man’  argument upon which this entire treatise is built.

*Energy flows to Earth’s surface from the sun, through the atmosphere.

*Most of it is absorbed by the oceans (which we register as heat). 
[the oceans are ~70%-75%  of the Earth's surface]

*This energy flows away from the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere.

*So, the incoming energy flow must be equaled by the outgoing energy flow to keep global temperatures relatively unchanged.

*all of that energy passes through the atmosphere
 (since at no point on Earth does land or sea touch space).

*The energy lost from the surface of the oceans (both by radiation and convection) passes to and through the atmosphere and is radiated to space.

*The only way energy leaves Earth’s atmosphere is by radiation to space.

*Since the energy flow must be balanced to keep global temperatures relatively unchanged, a change in the atmosphere such as increased greenhouse gases can raise the temperature of the atmosphere.

*If the rate at which the sun heats the oceans increased (i.e., if the sun’s radiation output was getting measurably greater, or stronger,) they would warm, but we know by direct measurement that that is not markedly happening in the short term.

*Yet we know that the net temperature of the oceans is increasing and the oceans are warming.  If solar irradiation is not increasing (and we know it is not) then raising the oceans’ temperatures requires limiting the net rate at which they lose heat, which is what increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere does.

The author builds upon this false premise that Global Warming advocates say the oceans are being heated by the atmosphere’s increasing temperatures:

*“water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much”

*The bathtub / heater analogy

*Later he writes “When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jumper because of ‘greenhouse heating’ of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body.” which is a clear statement that the SUN is doing the work of heating our bodies, and therefore the Earth’s surface, by direct irradiation, which is not what his ‘straw man’ was arguing before.

*so then he writes “If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious, then, by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?” without any apparent knowledge of the irony within. HE set forth the ‘straw man’ that climate researchers are saying that the atmosphere is heating the ocean, then knocked it down.

But climate scientists and other apologists don’t claim any such thing. They know and say that:

- The sun heats the Earth.

- We are in an interglacial warming period which has an unknown cause but is measurable and predictable.

- Atmospheric temperatures are increasing at rates that have measurably exceeded the warming due to the interglacial (i.e., natural) cause of our 10,000 year+ warmup that caused the ice sheets to disappear.

- Long before the controversy, scientists in the beginning of the industrial age investigated and noted that the factories producing the smoke from burning, at that time, coal, were measurably increasing the CO₂ in the atmosphere and predicted that would raise the net temperatures in the atmosphere.

- Their predictions have been surpassed by what we have already measured.

So, how is the sea temperature increasing if the atmosphere isn’t heating it?

§ The sun is still heating it.

§ Greenhouse gases are causing the atmosphere to HOLD more heat than before, radiating less to space,

§ which makes the atmosphere ‘blanket’ the land and the sea better,

§ so the sea cools more SLOWLY than it used to,

§ which has the net effect of making the seas warmer than they used to be.

Surely we have heard of the Arctic Sea Icemelt being much less in recent years, so much so that there is a reasonable expectation of a “Northwest Passage” finally appearing after so many adventurers tried to find it over the centuries (which they didn’t because it didn’t exist then).

This has also heightened the Geopolitical risk of a stronger Russia taking command over the Arctic Ocean and its presumed natural resouces, including oil, which they are actively working toward.

Why, one may ask, do there seem to be more problems with rising sea levels in the lower latitudes than the higher ones?

*Water expands with increased heat.

*The oceans are warmer near the equator, so they have always had a higher sea level than nearer the poles. We just couldn’t measure that phenomenon until modern technology made it possible.

*The increasing warmth of the seas is more marked nearer the equator than near the poles because the water is starting off warmer. Nearer the poles (and deeper anywhere) the water is much cooler and less prone to thermal expansion.

*More people are likely to suffer the effects of rising sea levels in warmer climates because more people live on islands and other low-elevation lands in those latitudes. Along the continents, people have lived on or near the shorelines for a longer period of time than further north, e.g., nobody lived on Scandinavian shores 15,000 years ago because they were under an ice sheet, but the tropics had no ice.

*Yet the seas are warming on the surface worldwide in part because of the blanketing effect of the atmosphere increasing in its effectiveness worldwide, but more so because the oceans circulate across the entire globe, constantly distributing more heat to the polar regions.

✸ And here is the original author’s argument used against him: Those circulating oceans with their increased heat energy ARE, in fact, heating the atmosphere in the polar regions faster than previously expected, BECAUSE the water is denser and holds more heat for a longer time than the air in the atmosphere, and carries it all the way to the North Pole, reducing the sea ice and allowing the exposed water to radiate more heat into the atmosphere and warm it, which it holds on to longer because of the greenhouse gasses it has in more abundance.

*This is more pronounced in the Arctic than in the Antarctic because much of the latter is occupied by a continental landmass, thus less affected by its more limited direct contact with warmer waters.

 A summary from NASA of the main greenhouse gases& their influence on the climate [https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/]

 ·         Water vapor. The most abundant greenhouse gas, but importantly, it acts as a feedback to the climate. Water vapor increases as the Earth's atmosphere warms, but so does the possibility of clouds and precipitation, making these some of the most important feedback mechanisms to the greenhouse effect.
·         Carbon dioxide (CO₂). A minor but very important component of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is released through natural processes such as respiration and volcano eruptions and through human activities such as deforestation, land use changes, and burning fossil fuels. Humans have increased atmospheric CO₂ concentration by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution began. This is the most important long-lived "forcing" of climate change.

·         Methane. A hydrocarbon gas produced both through natural sources and human activities, including the decomposition of wastes in landfills, agriculture, and especially rice cultivation, as well as ruminant digestion and manure management associated with domestic livestock. On a molecule-for-molecule basis, methane is a far more active greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but also one which is much less abundant in the atmosphere.
·         Nitrous oxide. A powerful greenhouse gas produced by soil cultivation practices, especially the use of commercial and organic fertilizers, fossil fuel combustion, nitric acid production, and biomass burning.
·         Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Synthetic compounds entirely of industrial origin used in a number of applications, but now largely regulated in production and release to the atmosphere by international agreement for their ability to contribute to destruction of the ozone layer. They are also greenhouse gases.x

(THREAD) What can we learn from CBS's interview with lifelong Republican and former FBI Acting Director Andy McCabe? A lot. In this thread I break down some of the major revelations—including a few I suspect you won't find elsewhere. I hope you'll read on and consider retweeting. pic.twitter.com/x32jszgUz0

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) February 18, 2019

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Wounded Knee, 128 Years Ago Today, 29 December 1890

Wounded Knee, 128 Years Ago today. If you want to #MAGA, is this when it was?

I weep that so much evil is committed in this world, & I don't feel it's getting better, but I weep most that I am certainly descended from many of its perpetrators.

One ancestral relative of mine was a noted "Indian killer" after the Revolutionary War.
War hero or Murderer? He was punished for at least 2 such murders, but only with a fine or something. So I can only assume that his relatives, including my ancestor, were of similar mind. Pride or Shame?

IDK. Maybe tRump is America's Karma. We non-natives ("settlers!") exist in large part because of the subjugation & murder of the First Peoples. But then, the Normans did so to the Saxons, who did so to the Britains, the Vikings were ruthless toward most of Europe, the Romans were toward almost everyone they met. Yes, most peoples have a past that involves THEIR ancestors being the winners somewhere along the line, the losers having been killed or absorbed.

But still we do it. We let children die in US CUSTODY. We sabotage people who are trying to NOT DIE by coming to the US.

We ignore our own teachings.

100 years before Wounded Knee George Washington thought we were better. But he also owned slaves, so...

Jesus seemed to have an opinion.

He was not, apparently, ready to approve of talking the talk while not walking the walk.

And there may be consequences.

Largely ignored by MAGAs...

(Credit: imgflip.com)

Celebrated, even...

 There're gonna be a lotta surprised people in Hell..

American Evangelical Christians are Deluding Themselves, so Their Confirmation Bias is Total

     American Evangelical & Fundamentalist Christians, in terms they themselves would use, are being tricked by Satan. Like Screwtape, the Devil would use subterfuge and trickery to turn people towards their selfish desires. It is very difficult to convince someone to change their mind when they have a strong confirmation bias in place. But if you are able to convince them that something in opposition to that bias, but with a similar appearance to it, is true, then through that opening you might be able to change their mind  by leading them to think they are NOT changing their mind.

     Hitler knew that there were plenty of Germans who were antisemitic, but the societal norm was to let the Jews be, and take advantage of their skills. So the stereotype of the Jewish financier, lawyer, doctor, helped them to survive in spite of the antisemitism. Hitler didn't think that societal norms could be changed overnight, but he knew that if he could help people to convince themselves that "Jews were the problem" then he would have the public's support. Over time he found numerous ways to make Jews out as the evil he thought they were, so it was no big step at all for the German public to be complicit in support of "The Final Solution."

     Now we have, in 21st Century America, evangelicals supporting the most unChristian acts by people in government, or closely allied with it, that if they were able to reverse what they see and realize how they would react if the perpetrators were Democrat, they would not be fooled. But they aren't able, the blinders over their eyes put there by their "MAGA" hats seem immutable for now. Those MAGA blinders were put there by the desire to see change in D.C. and so, like the promises by populists before, the people are willing to believe that:

-Abortion will be banned. This is their overarching hope. There is no compromise, no alterations in Roe v. Wade, only reversal. There are no extenuating circumstances. This is the cause.
*If Planned Parenthood and all its services for women's health are to be sacrificed because of the small percentage of abortions, so be it.
* Never considered is that abortion could be reduced greatly by a fully funded women's health system, one that makes one good choice more likely: to carry a child to term because it will likely be healthy, and there will be financial aid for as long as the mother needs it, ensuring that the child will not be raised in poverty. Or another good choice: to carry a child to term and put it up for adoption, because the mother will have all the health, spiritual, and financial aid she needs to get her through that time.

 - We are going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it
*This has the appearance of happening, but it's not. Mexico's President has stated very clearly that there is no way for them to be forced to pay for a wall, and a significant plurality, if not majority, of Americans would rather have our bridges made safer, or our health care made more stable.

 - Muslims are the personification of evil, though the evil be perpetrated by a relative few who have twisted Islam to their own purposes, they should all be held responsible, and kept out of this country, and even made to leave if here already.
*Yet domestic terror perpetrated by neo-right extremists is on the rise,

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/aug/16/look-data-domestic-terrorism-and-whos-behind-it/

and 2017 had virtually no Muslim terrorism, but plenty from white males, largely White Nationalists.

 - the announcement early on that the American Dream is dead, and he's going to fix it.

                [“The American Dream is dead — but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

                  — Trump, announcing his candidacy in June 2015.]
*The main thing that has happened from "MAGA" is to put it on hats.

https://gizmodo.com/president-trump-deletes-every-old-press-release-but-th-1795042808

American evangelicals have forgotten this:

Because they pray for this:

The fact that they ignore what they believe Jesus actually said, in order to support a man and his allies on the right because they choose to believe that version of their faith, escapes their notice.
Confirmation bias is total, for the American evangelical Christian.

"Stable Genius" and the Inner Ring

"...my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart."- NEVER said by Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, John Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Richard Dawkins, ...


Perhaps Mr. Trump has always felt to be "outside" the inner circle and always pined to be "in," as C.S. Lewis wrote about the urge to be in the “Inner Ring” that drives good people to do bad things:

"It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

...[Yet] if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it."

Survival of the republic, dangers of democracy, hope of the future.

Just because a candidate is popular with a large plurality, majority, or even an overwhelming majority of voters doesn't mean that candidate is the right one for the job. In 1972 Nixon won with 47,168,710 votes to McGovern's 29,173,222, a 60.7% to 37.5% super majority of nearly 2:1, and a staggering Electoral vote majority of 520 to 17. McGovern only won Massachusetts and DC. Yet 2 years later Nixon resigned in disgrace, thus avoiding impeachment by the House and his likely removal from office by the Senate. So a vast majority of voters were terribly wrong about Nixon. I was one of them - that was my first election I could vote in, and our state was very "red." 

Think long and hard before you vote. There are consequences if a majority of us get it wrong. (Think Germany, 1934. While Hitler wasn't elected, he was VERY popular!)

This isn't deciding whether to order fries or onion rings, and that's part of my point. The other point is that people can be wrong, in great numbers, as I stated, but there is more to this equation: Our constitution was set up to, in part, prevent the "tyranny of the majority", which is why I will always support efforts to maintain our republican form of government and oppose efforts to change to a "pure democracy." The House is set up to represent a limited number of people, so, for instance in Colorado, Boulder County's district is sure to send a Democrat to Washington and El Paso County's district is sure to send a Republican, and so it goes across the states. Denver can't dominate those votes, or all our Representatives would be Democrat. But the Senate is set up so that little Wyoming, Delaware, and Nebraska have as much say as Texas, New York, and California, otherwise the more populous states could take what they want from the smaller states; and make no mistake, they would if they could! So back to the presidential race, we must think carefully about who to vote for for president, but we must think about the House and Senate candidates with equal seriousness. The country probably runs best when there are disagreements between the houses of Congress and the President. Compromise is not a bad thing. It often happens that polls will find that people will vote for both party's candidates, one for President, another for house or senate. Another plus is, terms are of limited length. A lot of people who voted for Bush or Obama the first time didn't vote for the same person the second. We can replace a Representative after 2 years, and a Senator after 6. We often don't, but it does happen. G.H.W only served one term, but his son served two. McCain's reelection is not guaranteed this year, even though Arizonans seem to like him and respect him. Yet Colorado's District 5 Representative, who is disliked by a large number of people, can't lose, no matter how hard the Democrats try, because this district is so very Republican. Usually, the Democrats don't waste much time trying here. Yet our Democrat Senator is likely to win reelection, because his Republican opponent is not very strong, nor strongly supported. 

There is the additional issue of assertions made on Facebook and Twitter and etc. "The sky is really green" becomes #greensky and an online movement that supports the unsupportable is born. I am not so cynical as to lose hope, though, in part because of the many young people I've had the privilege to know as a teacher, many of whom have or will become participants in our society and will, in their own way, continue moving us toward greater sanity. They are far more self-aware and aware-of and inclined to do something about issues that concern them than we are led to believe in our meme-driven Facebook discourse. So are they also far more tolerant than their elders of those who are different from them, whose experiences and views might illuminate life beyond what they themselves have known, and accepting of the power of love: "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." Thus, hope lives.