Trump has been curb-stomped legislatively and politically on the two issues he’s arguably devoted more lies to than any others: immigration and voter fraud. As the heinous (from his perspective) coverage of Friday’s epic cave sinks in, he’s doubling down on both on Twitter this morning:
58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends
We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS
He’s lying, of course, and Americans who don’t sit around mainlining FOX News all day, i.e., the vast majority of us, know he’s lying.
Trump learned no lessons from last week’s unconditional surrender. He’s incapable of learning or professional growth in any sense. He’ll just keep doubling, tripling and quadrupling down.
That was a mostly workable approach during Trump’s business career as a conman with a team of lawyers and giant trust fund to keep the hounds at bay. It seems less successful in one of the most visible and closely scrutinized jobs on the planet.
Open thread!
cwmoss
Mockery and ridicule from here to the end of his days!
Yarrow
Re: the Texas voting thing:
JPL
That is not what the study said. Texas Tribune link
What yarrow said.
I might add that I’m so sick of the assholes lies. fuckem
Baud
Maybe Texas should stop electing Republicans, who have controlled the state since 1992.
Michael Cain
If there are that many (presumably documented) illegal voters and illegally-registered voters in Texas, wouldn’t the arrests and prosecutions be all over the headlines? Almost all of the people in charge of elections there are Republicans, are they not? Being slandered now, accused of not doing their jobs properly?
A few years ago here in my state, one of the Republicans seeking the nomination for Secretary of State (top election official) kept going on at length about all the non-citizens either registered to vote or voting. The state association of county recorders (local election officials), 55 out of 64 or so of them Republicans, took at a large ad in the biggest newspaper telling him to shut up, he had no idea what he was talking about.
EthylEster
Please hold that thought.
JPL
Normally a scandal such as this would be 24/7 news.
https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1089514945656451079
Baud
In fact, the number could be as high as 25,772,343.
Sab
I have known several conmen in my day. Is it just me or is Trump particularly thick skulled in not learning from his experiences?
Baud
@JPL:
Fixed.
Betty Cracker
@Sab: Seems like the ability to move on to a new set of marks is an essential ingredient in a successful scam. Maybe his options are limited in that regard.
Mary G
@JPL: The consulting firm is probably owned by a Republican who kicked back to the president in some way. So they had to charge a lot. How else could they make money?
FelonyGovt
I think the weeks he’s spent largely holed up in the White House have not been good for his already precarious mental state. It’s getting worse and worse. Too bad we all suffer the consequences.
dmsilev
Anyone know where those suspiciously-precise numbers came from? I mean, not reality obviously, but is there some wingnut website that ‘calculated’ the ‘costs’ that Trump is reading?
Emma
@Sab: He’s not anywhere bright enough to be a conman. He is a bully. He used his father’s money to bulldoze small businesses that worked for him. Those things we think of as cons are money grabbers — he usually lends his name to something and scoops up a rental fee on his “reputation.” He’s not involved in the actual running of the scam.
NotMax
Unsaid: And all 25 million are closing in one your nubile white teenage daughter. //
Fear is the mindkiller.. Also the short term political shot in the arm.
Baud
@NotMax: Are you the one who recommended El ministerio del tiempo on Netflix. I’ve started watching it. It’s interesting and fun.
Bruce K
@Betty Cracker: I suspect that part of his lower cunning may have been a sense of when to skip out and stick the mark with the bill; he doesn’t really have that option between now and 20 January 2021.
Well, there are a couple of ways for him to bail out, but both would be utterly ruinous to him. (Three ways out if you count feet-first.)
dmsilev
So, I make that as $735 per immigrant per month. Guessing he’s reading some website that tries to calculate the cost of social services and the like, makes up a bunch of numbers, and then adds in some additional nonsense for good effect.
Kay
Tens of thousands of people get arrested just like he did every month. The difference is they don’t get out on a signature bond and get invited to tv shows as special guests. One would think someone who talks like such a tough-guy gangster in the indictment would know that.
NotMax
@Baud
Yup. It gets funner as it goes along and they become more comfortable with tongue in cheek dialogue. Hardest part is getting past the entirely improbable base premise.
Now that Netflix has the rights for another new season the additional funding will be either a bane or a boon; hard to predict,
SFAW
@Baud:
It’s FAR worse than that. In fact, there are almost 320 million illegal aliens in this country. That’s the current US population (~325M) minus the Native American and Alaska native population (6.8 Million).
Because I don’t recall the Native American in Plymouth, Virginia, and elsewhere saying it was OK for those illegal immigrants from Europe to come here, let alone stay. Without even having an H1B visa!! And once they started, the flood gates were opened.
Sab
@Betty Cracker: @Emma: So conman is not a good career choice for toxic narcissists.
SFAW
@Kay:
I’ll say. He’s fucking lucky he wasn’t “accidentally” shot by the arresting officers, because of his crimes against humanity.
ETA: Especially when I thought I heard him yell “You’ll never take me alive, coppers!!!”
WaterGirl
@Baud: Regardless of what TX says the intent is, this is also surely designed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who is here illegally, regardless of the fact that they have most likely never tried to vote.
These people are surely now going to worry about the DMV giving their information to ICE.
I am so tired of all the HATE. Weary, yet enraged. That’s me.
sherparick
Reference the bullshit (probably a better expression then lies), we are talking about 96,000 possible non-citizens registered to vote in Texas out of 14 million total registered voters. That is .7% of the total, less than 1% of all registered voters. https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/25/texas-flags-tens-thousands-voters-citizenship-check/
Some how the 14 million figure is always left out the headlines and usually out of the stories.
The real story in Texas is low voter turnout, especially in off year elections, with poor people, Hispanics, and working class people discouraged from voting. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/02/23/texas-voter-turnout-electorate-explainer/
Even in 2018, which was the best off year election turnout in many years, it was only 53%. http://dailytexanonline.com/2018/11/07/voter-turnout-soars-in-2018-texas-midterm-election
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Have you seen MAGA Habs latest Kushner tongue bath?
Albatrossity
McConnell, in one of his more lucid moments, quotes this pithy hillbilly aphorism – There is nothing educational in the second kick of a mule.
There are not enough mules in the galaxy to educate Donald Trump.
Baud
@NotMax:
I’m a Juicer in the Age of Trump. The premise of this show is entirely plausible to me.
@SFAW:
More proof that open borders are bad!
Chyron HR
@NotMax:
And there’s only one guy Trump’s going to let touch his nubile daughter.
Well, I guess Jared, too.
schrodingers_cat
@sherparick: Do we know for sure that they are not eligible to vote, I smell bullshit.
sherparick
@Baud: You are counting Melania I take it?
Starfish
@Baud: Texas is incredibly gerrymandered, and they can’t stop voting for Republicans because it is very difficult to do so in the districts that have been created.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Trump’s not even a competent liar. What he should be doing is changing the subject.
RedDirtGirl
Reposting from moribund late-night thread.
I’d like to gauge the interest in having a NYC meet-up in February. To welcome Major Major Major Major and welcome back Helen(nolongerin)Eire. Any takers?
Kay
I read that Manafort dramatically hobbles into court appearances leaning on a cane now. Oh, the humanity when rich white guys enter the justice system. The INDIGNITY of being arrested at their HOMES where their FAMILIES live! Couldn’t this have been taken care of with a phone call, powerful person to powerful person? You mean they have to physically participate and APPEAR? I demand to speak to the management! I demand 500 appearances on cable television or my free speech rights are being trampled!
I especially love the concern for their families. Like other people don’t have families and (most shocking, apparently) they all live in the same house.
Emma
@Sab: I don’t think there’s a career for someone like him. He has no concept of real negotiation, and worse, no rational thought patterns. He’s all “I want, I want, and I will have it if I have to tear down everyone and everything around me.” Toxic doesn’t even begin to describe him.
cmorenc
@Sab:
Both con-men and drug dealers set themselves up for disaster when they dip into their own stash of dope.
NotMax
@https://balloon-juice.com/2019/01/27/area-zombie-vows-to-die-on-same-fucking-hills-forever/#comment-7170108“>Chyron HR
Donald gets the Sabbath, which at his age, dayenu.
(Ewww.)
jacy
To add to the general suckiness of the world, I’ve been really sick, a lot sicker than I would admit to myself or anyone else. I’m been so concentrated on getting the one kid into college and keeping custody of the other kid, I’ve gotten myself in hole thanks to medical bills and lawyer bills and the fact the the chemotherapy has left me with cognitive deficits that it looks like won’t be getting better. It’s hard for somebody who thinks of themselves as high-functioning to realize they aren’t. I would just give up, but I’ve got other people who depend on my and the worst feeling in the world is the feeling that I’m letting them down. So I’m asking for help. I need to raise $16,000 in the next 30 days or lose my house and make all of homeless. I’ve scraped together about $4,500, but that’s all my resources. I’ve started a GoFundMe https://www.gofundme.com/5b5c5m-keeping-my-home&rcid=r01-154860362827-1e06aef6f3be4ca1&pc=ot_co_campmgmt_w
I’m also selling art in my etsy shop — including custom pet portraits — you can get to my shop through the link at my name.
Also, if anybody needs any graphic design, let me know. I have a full slate of clients, but I’m just going to chain myself to my desk until I get thought this.
Or if anybody has an suggestions or words of wisdom, I’ll take those too. Just knowing you all are here is one of the things that keeps me going when it gets really dark.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Oh, I can’t with her. I’m getting wrinkles between my eyes reading her. What about me, schrodinger’s? I can’t subject myself to this :)
I actually hadn’t read the nearing decade-long history of Haberman fluffing the Trumps until someone posted it here the other day. Some helpful busy beaver listed it all on Twitter. It’s worse than I thought. I had no idea it went back that far.
In. The. Tank.
Plato
@Kay:
Except for manny, all the other traitors are out on bail and are on tv. The fucker stone was in and out in less than a day and was on all networks openly mocking Mueller. So much for justice.
Jeffro
@Kay:
Not intended as humor, of course, but POWERFULLY funny (also infuriating) – nice work Kay!
Mr. Mack
CoS Mulvaney just gave a full throated and dare I say effective defense of Trump just now of Face the Nation. He kept spouting imaginary numbers, followed by “again, these are not made up numbers” and I was grudgingly impressed by how well he spun every defeat into victory. The casual observer might just be swayed…
debbie
Stand back and let him dig his hole even deeper. This is almost too easy.
Baud
@Starfish: Sure. But state-wide offices are not gerrymandered.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Right. He’s failing because he has to face the same 300,000,000+ people day in and day out. They were bound to catch on eventually. The supporters he has certainly realize this, but they are too stubborn to admit it.
chris
@jacy: Link busted. Sorry for your troubles. Fix link!
debbie
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
He might be better at lying if his vocabulary was not limited to two or three adjectives.
Yarrow
@Kay: Do you have a link to that Twitter thread? It should be frontpaged here.
@jacy: I am so sorry you are struggling like you are. That’s awful. I tried clicking through to your GoFundMe and it didn’t work for me, so I cleaned up the link and here it is: Jacy’s GoFundMe to keep her home.
Please re-post your GoFundMe in other threads since Sundays can be kind of slow sometimes. Maybe a FPer can highlight it? Sending lots of good thoughts your way.
Plato
If trump were, god forbid, a dem president, wonder if the corrupt media will still treat him with kid gloves.
jacy
@Yarrow:
Thanks, my copy and paste skills are apparently non-existant today. Trying again to see if I can do it. My GoFundMe.
Betty Cracker
@JPL: Retweeted. That’s outrageous. Lies and scams all the way down.
SFAW
@RedDirtGirl:
In honor of Helen, have it at McSorley’s
Miss Bianca
@jacy: Hey, jacy, sorry to hear you are having such a rough time of it. Pretty close to the bone right now myself, but I would love to kck in some bucks when I get paid at the end of the month. Wish I had some words of wisdom for you less trite than “hang in there” as you cope with all the BS.
Maybe Anne Laurie or one of the other FPers could post your GoFundMe?
SFAW
@dmsilev:
That’s SCIENCE!
Suzanne
The definition of insanity, blah blah blah.
Shorter: Fuckem’.
Suzanne
And they want to take YOUR blue-collar job.
I think the funniest thing I read last week was this: the ladder company moving production to Mexico.
Absolutely fucking hilarious.
West of the Rockies
@Kay:
His rage tepls me he was deeply mortified, that his gargantuan ego got rear-ended. Good.
Mueller did far worse than kill Stone. He hurt him. And he wishes to go on… hurting him.
(Tip of the hat to Not Max for inserting the sci-fi theme to this thread.)
JPL
@jacy: I’m so sorry and cancer sucks.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: I sent it to Cole a little while ago after satby posted it.
edit: I didn’t send it in ALL CAPS, though. What was I thinking?
Salty Sam
@Baud:
Dude, we’re workin’ on it.
Yarrow
@Baud: Texas is trending blue. All the cities are blue and a lot of suburbs went blue this time too. Flipped two House seats blue and a few others were very close. All judges in Harris County, Texas’ largest county by population and where Houston is located, are now Democrats. Given the obstacles Texas has created to voting and getting registered to vote, these gains are impressive.
A lot of Democrats in Texas have been working hard for years to make this happen. It has been happening, as these things do, slowly and over time. At some point the tipping point will happen and a Dem will win a statewide race. At that point everyone will be amazed. It’ll be down to the hard work of Democrats on the ground who have been working at very local levels to win small elections and work those gains all the way up.
So while we’re bashing states, let’s talk about Ohio, a state that seems to be determined to turn red. How did the 2018 election go for Ohio? There’s Sherrod Brown and….??
Mandarama
@jacy: I’m sorry you’re dealing with so much!
Another Scott
@jacy: :-(
Here’s a better link:
https://www.gofundme.com/5b5c5m-keeping-my-home
Donated. Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Cheers,
Scott.
cope
@SFAW: @SFAW: He actually said, “Made it Ma. Top of the world!”.
MattF
Trump has his behavioral repertoire, which he always turns to if he feels threatened. Which is all the time.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
OT – Nice roundup in Daily Kos of Democratic candidates for President campaigning in Puerto Rico (or like Mr. Castro, launching their campaigns there!)
Proud to be a Democrat in the 21st century!
Suzanne
@Yarrow:
Seriously. Like…..are they trying to drive away young people?
I don’t think enough of America’s communities realize that they very soon are going to be in competition for talent. The Baby Boomers are rapidly approaching their prime healthcare-consuming years, and there is a growing shortage of healthcare workers. There is already a scary shortage of mental health professionals and infrastructure in rural areas. Rural hospital closures are an enormous and growing problem. Skilled service jobs increasingly only exist in cities. Not to mention, as the Baby Boomers become the dependent olds and they cannot drive, and their kids are busy working and raising their own kids, the only way to have quality of life is going to be to live in a walkable area with services. And those services will have to be funded by…..people with fairly good jobs. Again: competition for talent.
aretino
I’m just going to nickname him Nancy’s Origami, because Pelosi is going to make him fold again, and again, and again
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Yarrow: Word, Yarrow. But sometimes the hard work (thank you, Kay) isn’t enough to overcome the cultural and sociological trends, which are a big part of why Ohio shouldn’t be a Democratic Presidential aspirant’s list of swing states to go after in 2020. Texas is only slightly higher on the list next year, but at least they are heading in the right direction.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: It’s a good thing Mueller gave us such a nice present this week, because this has been a tough week at BJ. Plus the shutdown ended. I think we needed both to help buoy us in the face of hard times.
chris
@jacy: There it is! I got nuthin but I shared a wee bit of it. Good luck and keep us in the loop please.
Salty Sam
@Baud:
I don’t have the exact numbers at hand, but there was a significant red-to-blue shift in statewide representation in the mid-terms. This IS Texas we’re talking about- It’s not gonna happen overnight.
ETA: I see Yarrow beat me to it, and more eloquently, at #63
Raoul
When the scheisser TX A.G. posted that (thru his campaign twitter, not his official one, because he probably has enough sense not to lie so much through the actual office), I vainly joined the folks calling bullshit.
Of course the morons, trolls and jackals were all over his crap. I though of the timing when he posted that, given R. Stone in shackles, was convenient.
nb: I decided to use the original German in my epithet.
marklar
@MattF:
One of the saddest things about visiting a zoo is watching caged animals engaged in stereotyped, ritualistic behavior (rather than goal-oriented behavior). We are watching the human equivalent, although the zoo metaphor breaks down when you are reminded that in this case, the animal made his own cage. Instead of it being pitiful, it is pathetic.
Villago Delenda Est
Jack Dorsey needs to have a cell besides Donald’s once this is all over. Giving this shitstain a platform to abuse is Dorsey’s decision.
RedDirtGirl
@jacy: So sorry to hear about your struggles. Sending a bit of $ your way, as well as lots of good wishes.
hells littlest angel
Yeah, but what I want to know is how many communists are there in the State Department?
Ruckus
@Kay:
Assholes with an extremely over developed sense of self worth, who have been paid a lot to lie, bullshit and cheat for their entire lives have no ability to see themselves as anything other than the greatest beings on the planet.
Roger is an extreme example of one of those assholes.
Miss Bianca
@WaterGirl: You is good person.
Or should that be ‘GOOD PERSON!!11!!’? : )
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: One third of all physicians who practice in the United States are foreign born. Currently physicians path to immigration (permanent residency) is one of the most difficult. This was before the active malice of the current administration. One of the ways to qualify is to serve in areas that have a shortage of physicians, so rural areas are even more hit by administration stunts like the Muslim ban.
debbie
@Yarrow:
Franklin County (home of the state capital) is very, very blue. I think there are a few isolated pockets, but gerrymandering has pretty much doomed the Ohio Democratic Party.
The governor-gnome has promised bipartisanship and even named a few Dems to his administration, but I expect that will all come to nothing.
schrodingers_cat
@jacy: {{{ }}}. I hope things work out for you.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: That makes me nervous, like I might see that in a Mueller indictment. :-)
debbie
@jacy:
I don’t have the wherewithal at the moment, but I know how much anxiety sucks. I hope you can find something to at least reduce it to a manageable level.
Salty Sam
@Yarrow:
One of the very frustrating experiences on the ground here in small town, rural, local politics is the resistance to change by the Dem party officials. “That’s the way we’ve always done it here” was a common refrain, to which the only answer could be “And that’s why you keep losing!”
The new attitude and direction from the new Congressional caucus is a breath of fresh air- hopefully some of that will find it’s way down to the local levels.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: You can also thank the AMA, which has sought to limit the number of medical school admissions over the years in an effort to keep physicians’ salaries high. (I should note that I would love if my professional organization, the AIA, would show such inclination.)
I will also note that one third of my office is foreign-born. The statistic for most skilled service professions is probably right around that.
Intelligent communities are making investments now in things like denser housing stock, multi-modal transportation infrastructure, public K-12 and higher education, and even nightlife, so that they will have the workers they need in twenty years. Dipshit communities that apparently want to have no one around to keep things running are kvetching about factory closures and pressing 1 for English and voting for the GOP. Oh well. It’s literally their funerals.
Baud
@Yarrow:
Not a big believer in trend lines, but more power to anyone trying to turn red states blue.
chris
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL: It’s all about the grift. Three of his Mar-A-Lago buddies are working on carving up the VA for profit.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne:
Truly. Funeral homes and churches will be the leading industries in those communities. And the funeral homes have to invest in extra formulations of embalming fluids to deal with the myriad opiates and other compounds in the deceased’s bloodstream.
Another Scott
@Baud: Yeah, citing impossibly specific numbers is an old tactic of the RWNJs.
When I was a youngster in high school in GA, a friend was into the John Birch Society. Their manifesto – None Dare Call it Conspiracy:
Even as a naive ~ 12 year old, I could see that that number was BS. And it made me wary of overly-specific numbers ever since.
The tactic, it seems to me, is designed to get people to argue about whether the number is valid or not, and to miss what they’re really trying to do. Namely, that we’re not going to build some BS wall and cut legal immigration to try to turn America into a some Stepford, CT paradise for white male RWNJs. Big scary made-up numbers thrown around isn’t going to change that.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
kindness
Trump has serious character flaws. He’s one of those special types that believes their shit don’t stink. We abhor Trump in all his manifestations. Mueller will help us though. To paraphrase: ‘Winter is Coming! (already here for some)’.
chris
Lots more in this thread.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: I believe the AMA is responsible for the restrictive path for foreign born physicians as well.
Yarrow
@Salty Sam: If you haven’t checked into the Texas Organizing Project, take a look. Maybe it’ll give you all some ideas. Perhaps someone can find a local issue Dems can champion and help some low income people. That seems to be how TOP is getting things to change in communities that haven’t typically been voting.
Haroldo
@jacy:
Just threw in some $$$. Good luck.
Yarrow
@Baud: Are you a believer in results? Because Texas had results this past election.
Bruuuuce
@RedDirtGirl: I’d be interested, but with health and mobility issues, I can’t promise to be there. Strong preference for not-a-weeknight, given that I work an overnight shift M-Th.
Baud
@Yarrow:
And we lost all the state-wide races. I hope we win them all next time, but we havent accomplished it yet.
Sab
@jacy: I was just thinking a couple of days ago “where is jacy? she hasn’t posted lately.” keep posting . we can’t buy your art if we can’t find your website.
Salty Sam
@Yarrow: Thnx. I’ve come across it before, but didn’t investigate fully. Will take a closer look.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: The AMA has lobbied the Feds for more H1-B visas, actually. There is much evidence that universities and medical schools actively seek foreign-born students because they pay full tuition.
Another Scott
@Sab: Click on her blue username to get to her shop.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheSpectralObelisk
Some beautiful prints there – I just ordered one.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
CNN is gunning for clicks with a “Hillary might run” headline. Don’t take the bait!
Yarrow
@Baud: These things take time. It’s disappointing Dems didn’t win any statewide races but it’ll happen. Working from the small races up to the big races will make for a much stronger base in the state. It’ll happen.
@Salty Sam: Also check out this Harper’s magazine profile on the Texas voting, which includes a lot about the Texas Organizing Project. More info on what they do and how they get results. Link.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@jacy: I threw a few shekels into the pot. Have heart, Jacy, you’ve raise $1K, 1/12 of your goal and the correct link has only been posted here in this thread (see #50, #52, #65), for about 2 hours.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: You have to be a permanent resident to get into medical school in the United States. Or be on J-1 visa (exchange student/scholar) one of the caveats of J-1 is that you have to go back to your home country after finishing school. One way to get a J-1 waiver is to serve in rural area. Medical students do not qualify for an F1 visa.
Physicians and nurses are typically not covered by H1-B visa. My friend who completed a pediatric heamatology oncology residency from Johns Hopkins is working for her visa waiver by serving in one of the DC city hospitals.
FelonyGovt
Disgusting. Long time employees of Trump golf club fired in sudden purge of ocumented immigrants
Baud
@Yarrow: That is my hope and expectation as well. The sooner the better, but I know Blue Texans are doing their best.
Raven
I have owned 61-66 chevy trucks for almost 50 years. After soaking myself and Lil Bit in gas I smashed the old cap and here’s what the new one looks like!
Raven
oops
Amir Khalid
@Raven:
Linky bad. You fix?
Elizabelle
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I know. That is wonderful to see.
It’s early. Do this fundraiser all week or however long it takes.
And do we have any jackal attorneys who could advise jacy, going forward? She may have some options that us non-lawyers don’t know. Or a local social worker. May be some resources still to be tapped.
Raven
@Amir KhalidDang! Here’s tis.
https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7869/46843485162_9094bcdd50_b.jpg
Ceci n est pas mon nym
OT but sort of on-topic as we’re talking about the right-wing noise machine. Was looking for a version of the geeky joke about “proofs that all odd numbers are prime” to post in a math forum and stumbled on this page at something called RationalWiki.
Here’s the right wing version.
Sab
@Another Scott: I just ordered some I had been intending to buy much earlier. I bet she would have preferred the orders when she was feeling better.
Amir Khalid
Grumble: I’ve been trying to set up an app that lets me check the balance on my phone account. Maxis, the network provider, is supposed to send me the security code to finish the setup as soon as I fill in my name and phone number. But it doesn’t, so I can’t. Grumble.
trollhattan
@SFAW:
Phrase I’d like to most hear uttered by Roger Stone:
“Made it ma, top of the world!”
Hey look, formatting buttons are back. Is this the start of Infrastructure Week?
debbie
@Raven:
Always good to have a reminder!
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: Foreign-trained doctors who want to practice in the US are often on H1-B visas, and the AMA wants to move those along.
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Who knew owning the libs was German in origin?
Oh, yeah. Hitler.
trollhattan
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
“Liberal indoctrination.”
I have a ghoulish curiosity as to how that would be defined by somebody who’s fond of using it. Kind of like talking antibiotics or tooth-brushing with a Christian Scientist.
RedDirtGirl
@Bruuuuce: good to know. Maybe a weekend afternoon. We’ll see how many takers we get.
Immanentize
@Raven:
Ha! It should have a little paw print signature
Immanentize
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: owning the libs in the 1800’s?
I see Baud got there first. I love how the teacher flees the room because, stupid.
Sab
@Another Scott: Thanks for the fixed link.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: The barrier to entry comes before that, physicians credentialed abroad have to repeat their residency and take the USMLE. Many choose not to do that.
ETA: TV Show ER had an entire plot about this. I know at least two physicians who decided to get a PhD instead of the hassle of doing their residency again.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Baud: @trollhattan: @Immanentize: I hope I was clear that’s not a real chain email. Yet. But it so perfectly captures the tone and style of those “chasing the liberal athiest [sic, in so many cases] professor out of the room” emails. Down to the argument by authority with the “Albert Einstein” at the end.
Aleta
@JPL: About that consulting firm, Accenture Federal Services
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contractsawards/2018/12/cbp-issues-partial-stop-work-order-on-accenture-hiring-contract/
Mike in NC
Neighbor posted a picture on Facebook showing Octavia Spencer (from “The Help” movie) serving Fat Bastard a “chocolate” pie sent to him by Mizz Nancy. My comment was “he likes it with two scoops of ice cream”.
pat
I don’t get it. I thought prime numbers were divisible only by themselves or 1.
Nine is divisible by three, therefore not prime.
Right?
So what is the point of the whole thing?
Immanentize
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
You know who was a liberal atheist?
Albert Einstein! — suck on that, Deplorables.
MattF
@pat: It’s an old joke:
Three proofs that all odd numbers are prime:
From a mathematician: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, therefore, by induction… all odd numbers are prime
From a physicist: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error…
From an engineer: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime…
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@pat: 10 million different jokes on different erroneous arguments from different educational backgrounds. They’re all wrong, each one in a way that pokes fun at that profession.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: Are you saying that most foreign trained physicians are on the h1-B visa. I don’t think that is the case. H visas require employer sponsorship. There may be some on H1-B visa or even the O-1 (extraordinary ability) visa but most foreign trained physicians are on a J visa.
pat
@MattF:
Well OK but I still don’t get it. Where does the 2 come in? 2 plus 7 equals 9.
Oh never mind. Since I’m basically a biochemist and not a mathematician, physicist or engineer……
Plato
magat maggie.
m.j.
All the moron Don has to do is go to a government website and look at the voter registration laws of our varying states. I looked at Georgia!
The black market in fake I.D. must be rolling in the dough. I’m surprised Don hasn’t invested.
I guess the original point I wanted to make had something to do with these people wanting to seek some source of stability. They aren’t a threat. I fear gun buggerers more than I fear Mexicans at the laundromat.
tobie
@schrodingers_cat: I could be wrong but I thought medical students from abroad were on J1 visas, but practicing doctors from abroad who don’t have a green card are on H-1B visas sponsored by their employer (i.e., the hospital, university system or practice where they work).
Sister Golden Bear
@Mr. Mack: Casual observers don’t watch Face the Nation. Just us junkies, or those addicted to faux-intellectual mud wrestling.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I’ll defer to you on this. I have seen no evidence that the AMA has ever lobbied in favor of US-born medical students or that the AMA has ever tried to make the immigration process harder or more selective. (That’s not to say that it isn’t really hard.) I have always seen the AMA as nakedly self-interested, not necessarily bigoted. I have seen much evidence that the majority of American universities looooove “international students” because they don’t need/receive financial aid.
This is not really a defense of the AMA, either. It has been evident for years that medical school admissions are artificially low, that society needs more doctors and that there are more than enough qualified students. It is also evident that medical school tuition is a huge barrier to entry that keeps talented and able people out, all over the country. The AMA hasn’t done shit on either of these issues. So spiky, acid-tipped dicks, and all that.
Elizabelle
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
That is laughable.
And 5 and 3 is … not a prime number.
I doubt most of the quotes and anecdotes I see on the internet, unless verified. Including from Occupy Democrats and all the other leftwing echo chamber stuff.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: It is my understanding that most foreign-trained doctors are on H1-Bs, sponsored by their employers. This would match the overall trend in American medicine, which is that the number of physicians in private practice are decreasing steadily, and instead are working for health systems, universities, or multi-practice conglomerates. I haven’t seen recent data on this, though.
Immanentize
I must admit, in my youth, I did love (and still do) the proof that
.99999… = 1.0
1/3 = .33333…
2/3 = .66666…
.33333… + .66666… = .99999…
1/3 + 2/3 = 1.0
Therefore, at infinity, .99999… = 1.0
ETA. Yes, I was in Mathletes; why do you ask?
Sab
@Raven: Old truck. That explains what you done did to that dog because I don’t think you could have done it with a new truck.
Glad you and dog are okay.
MattF
@Immanentize: Simpler:
x = 0.99999…
10*x = 9.999999…
10*x – x = 9.00000 => 9*x = 9 => x = 1
Sister Golden Bear
@FelonyGovt: Also disgusting was that they knowingly turned a blind eye yo hiring undocumented immigrants on the theory — undoubtedly correct — that pricy golf courses were unlikely to get raided, because they were ordered to get the cheapest labor available.
jimmiraybob
@Sab:
“So conman is not a good career choice for toxic narcissists.”
No. A good con would have paced the reveal to cover the 4-year term and then would have initiated the exit plan – could have made a clean haul to a non-extradition nation with untold billions (or bigger denomination). The narcissist known as Individual-1 screwed the con by getting personal – too much ego. Sad.
Immanentize
@MattF: that too!
ETA. I just love that point in/at infinity. Magic things happen
tobie
@Suzanne: I think it might help to address the AMA issues apart from immigration issues. Has the AMA done anything to lower the cost of medical school and to encourage people to go into general practice as opposed to more lucrative specialities? There have been some moves in this direction but they are quite modest when we need something much more robust.
As for this:
This strikes me as bunk. I’m an academic in a recondite field; my husband is an academic in an even more recondite field, and we would love to see more qualified, US trained students apply for admissions. The pool simply is not there at the graduate level. At the undergraduate level, state and federal aid to universities has been so drastically cut, at the very same time that the cost of doing science and maintaining state-of-the-art facilities has skyrocketed, that many underfunded state colleges and universities have started soliciting applications from out-of-state to get the higher tuition. If you want state universities to serve more state residents, lobby for more state aid. You can read books like University, Inc. to find out what has happened to higher education funding in the US. It’s not pretty.
Thaddeu
What does it take to
(1)Obtain these 95,000 flagged names
(2) Verify each of them
(3) Call out this as bullshit
because nothing else will kill this claim.
Are’nt voter rolls public? Can’t someone set up a gofundme to get this going? Crowdsource 95000 names and it’ll be done in a day, ( and triple-checked too). Heck, getting a 1000 legitimate voters identified and raising hell about being called as illegitimate would be enough.
These fuckers win because their claims are left uncontested with facts. They win when it’s a he-said she-said case. Call their bullshit decisively
And there will be the (1) added benefit of legitimate voters recognizing they were tagged as non-citizens, and eternally mad at a the GOP (2) this idiot being called out as an idiot , and (3) no sane person believing this kind of rhetoric again.
Sab
@jimmiraybob: Not so SAD. Someone might nail him to a wall somehow or somewhere. That would make me happy.
He can’t do happy because two syllables.
Sab
@tobie: You sound like my sister, who is an academic in an unnamed midwestern state university. She is in humanities. She was surprised to discover the funding situation is as bad or worse in STEM.
MattF
@Immanentize: There is definitely something… special going on at infinity. I’ll spare you the technical details, but the number of infinitely long decimals is vastly larger than the number of finitely long decimals.
Suzanne
@tobie:
Not that I have seen, as I noted at #143. They exist to keep salaries high for their current membership, and that is really it AFAIK.
Yes, and I have seen evidence that state universities are also actively pursuing out-of-country students for the same reason. I don’t think this is a bad thing, by any means. But it is a result of declining state investment in public higher education, which I firmly think sucks. And I vote and volunteer to increase state funding for public higher education. I know what happened.
Two seconds of googling without my glasses on brings me this HuffPo piece on the issue, which specifically cites my alma mater. Usually I would never cite HuffPo, but there are lots of links and quotes in there that back up the point. Again, I don’t think it’s a bad thing by any stretch to have lots of international students on a college campus. But I do think it sucks that they are increasingly there because states can’t or won’t fund their state universities sufficiently.
tobie
@Sab: I assure you I’m not your sister even if I sound like her! The funding situation in state universities is terrible across the board but I think people in disciplines that have no immediate real world application (which is not just the humanities but also pure mathematics and certain areas of science) are hit particularly hard.
jimmiraybob
@Sab:
I was writing from the point of view of the successful conman. I was using by best Paul Newman voice.
Villago Delenda Est
@Aleta: Total grift. Utterly corrupt Donald Malasstration norm.
tobie
@Suzanne: Thanks for the link. As the article says, “cash strapped” universities look for students who can pay tuition. In some states even the in-state tuition fees are exorbitant. I don’t recall the exact figure but a California friend told me how much he was paying for his daughter to go to Berkeley and I was shocked at the price.
Frankensteinbeck
Oh, I think he did. I think he learned that Nancy is stronger than him.
Sure. He’s a narcissist. People are criticizing him, and he has no sense of self-worth other than praise other people give. But to fix that he lies. He blusters. He screams at the top of his lungs and carries a tiny mushroom-shaped twig. Surrendering isn’t hard for him. Admitting he’s surrendered is the hard part. Having had to do that, he immediately started backtracking… verbally. He still signed the bill. Everyone just saw him beaten in a battle of wills by a woman, and everyone is talking about how he was beaten in a battle of wills by a woman, and everyone knows she will beat him in all future battles of will. It’s agonizing, but the solution isn’t to pick another fight, it’s to lie about the fact that he lost this one. Same way he handles… everything, so far.
Mohagan
@MattF: I was a history major but I did take an Appreciation of Math class (!) in college. I remember a discussion of different size infinities: the infinity of whole numbers is obviously twice as big as the infinity of even whole numbers, even though both sets are infinite. After that I stuck to history. Less confusing. Of course I also had a problem understanding why you couldn’t divide by zero; obviously I don’t think mathematically. I did grow up to be a computer programmer though ?.
Another Scott
@MattF: Math is mind boggling sometimes.
I heard a story once that my dad had a problem to prove that there were no whole numbers between 0 and 1.
Yeah, it’s “obvious”, but how do you prove it??!
His proof involved the fact that squares of whole numbers are greater than the number (8^2 = 64 > 8), but the square of a number less than 1 is smaller than the number (0.5^2 = 0.25 < 0.5), [ magic happens here] so contradiction, therefore QED.
Dunno if that's the standard way to do it.
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
@Mohagan: Welcome to Hilbert’s Hotel. The business about the size of the continuum, though, is much weirder. But not really for amateurs.
MattF
@Another Scott: As a rule, one defines integers before one defines real numbers, so you can’t really even ask that question in a well-posed fashion.
Salty Sam
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Reminds me of this old classic: https://www.theonion.com/christian-right-lobbies-to-overturn-second-law-of-therm-1819565726
AThornton
@pat:
The original was a joke. Like:
How does pyruvate get to work?
On its Krebs cycle!
only some RW morons thought it was real
Sab
@tobie: @tobie: Yeah. She got appointed to some interdisciplinary commitee. She discovered that the STEM guys were terrified about funding of their entry level guys. Her university is rich but broke, so everyone is funded by grants. Works great for the profs teaching grad students. Not so much for the guys teaching intro chemustry etc
This is actually a huge problem that no one is discussing
The young professors going into university work in every discipline can’t afford to do it, so they aren’t. You save up a billion bucks to send your kids to college, but there is no point, because competent faculty won’t be there.
Salty Sam
@Thaddeu: I wish you were right, as we could move the argument along using facts and reason.
Unfortunately, the audience that this “information” is targeted to is completely impervious to facts and reasoning. They will quote those numbers just to pwn the libtards…
Villago Delenda Est
@AThornton: You can troll them very easily by discussing the dangers of dihyrdrogenmonoxide.
laura
@jacy: I glad for the chance to invest in your future!
Trust in the universe to deliver what is required. {{{{LoveHug}}}}
Suzanne
@tobie: Almost all of the public state universities in this country are “cash-strapped”, as I understand it. State funding has fallen everywhere, last I checked. As I mentioned, my (graduate) alma mater is mentioned in that piece, and I was horrified by how tuition and fees have skyrocketed for in-staters in the last ten years. As a result, there are many more out-of-state and international undergraduate students there than there were, say, 20 years ago. And they are being taught by TAs (including me, for three years), not by good faculty.
Brachiator
Yep. It might not be terrible if Trump declares a national emergency and tries to build his wall, as long as he keeps the government going. He will be able to use this as an ongoing campaign issue, but it will be tied up in the courts forever, and the Democrats can show that the wall is useless.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: My friend who is a pediatric oncologist was trying to change her J1 (visiting scholar visa) to H1-B. That was two years ago. The path to get a green card is easier on H1-B since it is a dual intent visa. I haven’t been in touch with her, so I don’t know her current situation.
Almost all other doctors I know of, started working on the J-1. Moving from J to H is not easy from what I gather.
Also, most graduate students in the sciences in doctoral and masters programs get full tuition scholarships.
JR
@Immanentize: You mean, calculus?
Jerzy Russian
@Mohagan:
No, the size of the set of even positive integers is the same as the size of the set of all positive integers. There is a direct one-to-one mapping between them. 1 –> 2, 2 –> 4, 3 –>6, etc.
Sab
@schrodingers_cat: Fucking trump and miller. O f course we don’t needmorepediatric oncologists. This country is currently being run by the less half bright of baboon tribes.
schrodingers_cat
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: This is so stupid that it broke my brain. Word salad with numbers for a garnish.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I just did a quick Google, and I found a piece in Forbes that says that 25% of medical residents are H1-B, and that is essentially artificially low because the Trump admin slowed processing. I don’t know how recent their data is (and their data is only for residents, not all doctors). I know there were also exceptions to the quotas for physicians on H1-B visas if doctors worked for teaching hospitals or nonprofit health systems with a university affiliation. I should note that two of my clients, both of whom are in the top ten health systems in the country, began affiliations with universities for exactly this reason—they are actively recruiting foreign-born and foreign-trained doctors because of the shortage.
One note: most graduate students at professional schools do not get full tuition scholarships or anything even close to it.
Matt McIrvin
@Jerzy Russian: And the size of the set of odd positive integers is also twice as big as the set of all positive integers. So you can map the positive integers onto itself twice.
You can even map the positive integers onto the complete set of all rational numbers. So it’s easy to conclude that all infinities are the same size as that of the positive integers.
But… NO. You cannot map the positive integers onto the set of all real numbers. Given any proposed mapping, it’s possible to construct a real number that you missed (Cantor’s diagonal argument). So the infinity of the real numbers is larger than the infinity of the positive integers.
How big is it, though? Is it the “next size up”, or are there sets with a size in between? Can’t say. That turns out to be unprovable either way with standard set theory.
This stuff is very weird.
The Midnight Lurker
@Baud: What Sam said. All I can add is:
We’re fucking working on it!
Suzanne
@Sab: What kills me is all of the blar-blar-blar about how guns aren’t the problem, mental health is the problem…….but yet we have a massive shortage of psychiatrists, especially pediatric and adolescent psychs.
And yet, as soon as the Trumpy people hear “let’s make college easier to afford”, they respond that college is stupid and only for people who want to major in Transgender Studies (I spent some time at Breitbart this week).
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: It’s a parody of copy-and-paste chain email anecdotes in which a conservative student schools a liberal professor about creationism, or God, or “supporting the troops,” etc.
The Midnight Lurker
Apparently, the ramparts in old San Antone have fallen. Sad.
Alamo II – Santa Anna Strikes Back!
Suzanne
The beginning and end of Trumpism is about restoring relative social status for white dudes who never went to college. Full stop.
FlipYrWhig
@Suzanne: And he doesn’t even need to do anything FOR them. They just want him to help drag the other crabs back down into the bucket. SMH
jonas
So according to Trump, roughly one out of every 12 people in this country is an illegal alien? Roger that.
Suzanne
@FlipYrWhig: Well yeah. That’s the easy way to restore relative social status: make other people’s lives suck somyours looks better by comparison. “He’s not hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting.” Indeed.
catclub
@dmsilev
and purposely forgets the useful jobs they are doing and the Social security taxes they are paying that they will never benefit from.
catclub
@The Midnight Lurker:
Why should Santa Anna strike back at the Alamo? – he won there the first time.
catclub
Post heading left out ‘shambolic’. Isn’t that necessary for all descriptions of Zombies ambulating?
catclub
@Matt McIrvin: I have started enjoying the numberphile youtube vids on the Riemann Zeta function, that gets to all those (infinite sum of positive values) = -1/12 via the analytic continuation of the zeta function.
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne:
I have often thought that the single biggest obstacle to reducing health care costs was the universally accepted truth that all doctors should be rich and, in particular, that all specialists should be absurdly rich.
catclub
@Citizen Alan: This is one of Dean Baker’s regular gripes. We have serious protectionism for rich profressionals.
If Free Trade happened there a lot of oxen would be gored.
It has also made clear that Doctors are more organized than lawyers in constraining the supply of doctors.
Suzanne
@Citizen Alan: Perhaps. The other concern I have is that health systems can essentially say, “This aspirin costs $75” and there isn’t shit that any of us can do about it.
Taking on doctors is doable, though. Taking on the lobbying power of the health systems, though? THAT is an entirely different issue. Hillary Rodham Clinton, back in the early 90s, identified the fact that health systems basically get to name their prices and that there was no competitive device in the market to get them to stop. And that’s why the health systems freaked out.
I should note that many of the big health systems love the ACA.
Suzanne
@catclub:
As I have noted above, that is basically all that the AMA does, as far as I can tell. They are not getting ahead of these shortage issues that America is facing. They are not lowering cost of education or other barriers to entry. They are protecting the salaries of their current membership.
I wish that my own profession had been better about this, in some respects. I’m kind of jealous.
Sebastian
Are sure AOC is not a jackal?
https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1089604364065533952?s=21
Yarrow
@Suzanne:
Didn’t David Anderson have a post just this last week or maybe the week before talking about how hospitals will not be required to show costs in some way? I didn’t get to read it thoroughly but just skimmed it.
Costs like this are a big problem. People don’t have much if any recourse. I don’t know how to fix it except obviously legislation.
Suzanne
@Yarrow: Yeah. A law just went into effect requiring hospitals to post their chargemasters (list of all costs) so consumers can read them. Previously, chargemasters were effectively hidden from consumers, and were only available to insurance companies. And no one ever really paid the chargemaster prices.
But just because we ostensibly now know that Hospital Down The Street charges $300 for an Ace bandage doesn’t mean that there is any market mechanism to get them to actually lower that cost.
catclub
@Suzanne:
Almost no one. uninsured individuals would at least get billed those prices.
Yarrow
@Suzanne: For sure. Our insurance plan may only allow us to go to Hospital Down The Street and not Hospital Across The Street, even though Hospital Across The Street is cheaper and has a better rating.
At least being able to see the chargemasters might cause things to change. There can now be comparisons done and people can be like, WTF? Why are you charging $100 for one Tylenol? Maybe those consumer watchdog reporters local news stations have can do some stories. They’ve done them before but if you can’t compare costs it’s hard to know how out of line a charge is.
Quaker in a Basement
@Baud: Weirdly precise, no?
The Gray Adder
I see the ad with Jesse Ventura on the side while reading this, and shake my head. We have learned nothing. Gov. Ventura make Minnesota a national laughingstock, never took the office seriously, and even ref’ed wrestling matches during his tenure because he was so bored with, uh, being the governor of a state. Why, then, did we let Trump get to the White House? Did we really hate Hillary Clinton that much that we would rather crash and burn as a country than let her save us from Donald Trump?
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I see part of the problem is also that the $300 Ace bandage is really not $300. It’s like the cost of a new car. There’s the sticker price, there’s the price you can beat the salesperson down to and there’s the cost the manager can give and there is the invoice cost, and there is the minimum cost the dealership can make money at. That’s 5 different prices. And usually none of those reflect what is actually paid. That $300 is the sticker price. It in no way reflects the usually paid price. It may reflect the price paid by a few people, it may reflect the amount shown as a tax write off cost for people who can’t pay, but it’s not the usual or even close to the average cost billed.
Suzanne
@catclub: And most uninsured people never paid those costs. They defaulted on their bills, most commonly, or negotiated them down. Such a fucked-up system. The uninsured person who paid off a hospital bill in full is slightly more common than a unicorn. But not by much.
Suzanne
@Ruckus: That is absolutely true. But what I think is the most fucked part of the whole thing is that ***no one really knows how much their healthcare will cost until after they consume it***. If we are to use free-market forces to rein in healthcare costs, we have to have transparency.
Don’t even get me started. The whole healthcare market is unbelievably screwed in favor of insurance companies, who add essentially no value.
Ruckus
@The Gray Adder:
Republicans have wanted to crash and burn the federal government for the last 60+ yrs minimum. Because for them to get rich they have to have less government is their thinking, because less government is less oversight of the things they do to get and stay wealthy. What they have done over the last 30 or so years is to destroy as much of the regulatory system as possible as that controls the level of oversight. And their basic racism has led them to want immigration “reform” and to hate any civil rights laws/judiciary findings. DT was the promise that would all come to a glorious rush of both of those, first through his total lack of any skills but especially in governing/politics and second through his misoginism and racism. It’s difficult to understand that DT is their fair haired boy because he’s everything that we dislike/disapprove of. Hillary was everything they dislike/disapprove of.
Fair Economist
@Sebastian:
In all seriousness, she probably does read leftie blogs. I doubt she posts, though.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
The only value that a healthcare insurance company offers is that you have an extremely rough idea of how much they will pay. And that of course is because they will attempt to lower all costs, at whatever end cost to the consumer because they can.
They don’t add value, they take away value. In their favor.
Health care insurance works when it’s rigidly regulated as to costs, payouts and profits. None of those are rigidly regulated in this country. Not even close, other than with the ACA there were a few good things, their total profit margin, no pre-existing conditions being 2.
Sab
@Another Scott: That’s my point. If she doesn’t post we don’t see her blue username so we can’t find her website.
ETA: TaMara frontpage fixed this for now, but my point still stands. If she doesn’t post comments we can’t find her.
Same for satby, but she comments daily so we can always find her.