So, South Dakota Governor/Failer Kristi Noem gave a convention speech last night. Today, this appeared on the South Dakota State Department of Health COVID dashboard:
Note my highlights in red. The state under-reported in the two-day run up to Kristi’s speech. Wonder why that was. Also note that while cases are way, way up, South Dakota’s testing goals are not. North Dakota, which is roughly the same size as South Dakota, has processed a total of 450K tests. South Dakota has done less than half of that testing.
Kristi is probably a little disappointed because giving Trump a model of Mt Rushmore with Trump’s face on it didn’t make Trump replace Pence with her. Still, as a loyal Trumper, she’s happy to under test, under trace and generally fuck things up to kiss his ass.
Sean
Dollar store Sarah Palin…ouch. But yeah, watching her speak last night did make me wonder why the Palin clan hasn’t made the Trump circuit. They seemed like such a good fit.
cain
@Sean:
Palin is old and not sexy enough anymore for the Trump clan. Her best days are behind her.
Mai naem mobile
@cain: Plus there’s only so much meth that can be provided during such a short period of time without it being detected by LEOs.
Kent
@cain: Palin is also tainted by the association with McCain whom Trump hated. And also not a “winner”
Sometimes the simplest explanations are the obvious ones.
WereBear
Which brings up the thought: most cults collapse when the founder dies. And Trump, at least mentally, is not long for this world. I know HE thinks his genes are magic, but I don’t see the idolatry transferring.
Thoughts?
?BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve been told that the pandemic is over in South Dakota, they’re on full speed reopening, so this is all “Fake News”.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WereBear: Scientology is still a going concern.
Ken
@WereBear: Certainly fits with having all the children and their spouses speaking. Of course that’s also consistent with not being able to find anyone else willing to say nice things about him.
Hoodie
@Kent: Palin wouldn’t be servile enough. She’d demand too much limelight, and that’s a sin in Trumpworld. Mike Pence is the exemplar, total subservience to Dear Leader. Noem fits that much better than Palin.
catclub
Starting with the Sturgis bike rally.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I know some people who still insist a hoax, so “they” (whoever they are) can “control” “us”. I reply, “Well, that’s your funeral, which I will not be attending.”
kindness
Well they can always blame Obama for it. Trump loves doing that.
WereBear
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks to the fellow who took over behind the scenes before Hubbard bought the farm. But like I said: it’s rare.
catclub
@?BillinGlendaleCA: also N, Korea
Sloane Peterson's knee therapist
Still can’t understand why George Zimmerman wasn’t a celeb speaker. He would have been a perfect fit.
VOR
Point 1: Under the wise leadership of Governor Noem, South Dakota rolled out an anti-drug campaign with the tagline “Meth. We’re On it.”
Point 2: South Dakota just played host to a COVID-19 super-spreader event, the Sturgis motorcycle rally. The number of cases are still climbing. Attendees spread to all over the US.
Calouste
@WereBear: The cult leader needs an obvious candidate to take over (in most cases the eldest son), and that successor needs to be promoted as such for a long time. Of course, both the shitgibbon’s sons are fuckwits and he despises them, so we’re fairly safe there.
I also find it somewhat comforting that Putin has no obvious successor (he has two daughters but no son), although it probably means that Russia is going to skirt along if not outright slide into civil war when he dies.
Haydnseek
@WereBear: Hitler still has millions of adoring fans around the world. He did lose a step by being all dead and everything but his legacy is secure.
Roger Moore
@WereBear:
[[Citation Needed]]. It’s true that some cults collapse when the founder dies. Others continue and even prosper when a descendant or disciple of the founder takes over. Look at Scientology, for instance, which survived L. Ron Hubbard’s death just fine.
Betty Cracker
@Sloane Peterson’s knee therapist: FYI, if you use an apostrophe in your user name, your comment won’t show up unless someone approves it. I’m not sure why, but that’s how it works.
Roger Moore
@Sloane Peterson’s knee therapist:
He’s old news, and he would very likely try to hog the limelight rather than praise the Great Leader.
Shalimar
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Scientology conveniently found a 2nd sociopathic leader in a very young David Miscavige not long after Hubbard died. And even then, it seems more like a religious version of Amway under Miiscavige than the much larger paranoid asylum L. Ron ran.
catclub
I did, and I still have no idea what your point is.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@WereBear: North Korea has been run by three generations of freaks. It can be done, but it is hard to see how Trump’s kids can do that. Most likely Trump will be deserted by his voters at some point for a younger and sexier demagogue. I think that’s it’s Trump is convincing argument this is all driven by conservative boomers because Trump is such an 80s retread.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Calouste: Trump has The Golden Child to take over, Trump is a monarchist.
Just One More Canuck
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin): will you send a nice letter approving of it?
Kay
So lazy. The otherwise unemployable son in law with his giant staff is too lazy to find out anything about the school he’s using to attack the guy who funded the school.
Low quality work from low quality hires. Dope can’t even get his dumb attack right.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Roger Moore: Or the Church of Later Day Saints after Joseph Smith got defenestrated. (yes, got to use the D word in a sentence!)
NotMax
@cain
As are beheaded turkeys.
:)
Ken
IIRC the citizens of Sturgis were polled (maybe even a vote?) and about 65% said “no thanks maybe next year”. But the mayor decided to keep the beaches open.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Betty Cracker:
The “apostrophe thing” is because (very short, reductive answer) of the way FYWP’s underlying database delimits text strings (with single or double quotes).
Starfish
The way that South Dakota schools are dealing with COVID is really scary. Masks only required in halls. Only people sitting within 6ft of an infected person will be quarantined along with them. Not letting other people in a class know what is going on.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Sloane Peterson’s knee therapist:
What Betty Cracker said at #20. Maybe use “Sloane Peterson*s knee therapist.”
Hoppie
@WereBear: “Rocket to the Morgue” is amusing and informative.
‘
NotMax
@Steeplejack
So what time is the tanker truck of quaffables scheduled to arrive at Threadkill Lane for tonight?
:)
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Kim Il-sung had a long time to consolidate his rule and set up his son to be his successor. It’s hard to see Trump getting the same setup work done in the time he has left. And there’s no real sign that Trump is even trying. He hasn’t officially, or even unofficially, named one of his children as his political heir and put the effort into making that designation stick. It’s hard to see someone as narcissistic as Trump caring that much about what happens when he’s gone.
Baud
@Steeplejack (phone):
Or the way they do it in Latin languages:
“Knee therapist of Sloane Peterson”
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Or the FLDS, for that matter. They’re a cult if anything is, but they’ve managed to keep going for several generations and over a century since getting booted from the main-line Mormon church.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: He has to stay in power first, then he can anoint his successor.
rp
Scientology was never a personality cult AFAIK. It also has religious trappings such as a belief system, ceremonies, etc., so there was a structure and a set of teachings that could be handed down.
Trumpism is a pure personality cult — it’s 100% about him and his ego. So it will fall apart once he’s gone. Which is why Pence has never scared me; the Trump base doesn’t care about him.
Martin
Willing to bet that by the election US universities combined will have more in-house testing capacity than the rest of the nation.
We’re building new testing equipment now that can do 20K accurate antigen tests a day, designed to support vaccine distribution and prioritization. I’m guessing that’ll only get used internally, and maybe in some other nations as US health care institutions will almost certainly reject it. I understand we’re going to marry that to a similar capacity of viral testing per day before reopening.
This is just a small measure of the failure here. A handful of people at a university assembled 30x the testing infrastructure of a smallish US state.
Steeplejack (phone)
@NotMax:
May try to squeak through with a bottle of Cab. Feeling too lazy to don the tactical gear (pants!) and go out. May change my mind if I read something especially inflammatory.
Frankensteinbeck
@WereBear:
The cult is not about Trump. He thinks it is, and demands MEMEME, but the cult is white supremacy and Trump just happens to be the current leader. A great fit for the job, absolutely. Exactly the mean-as-shit, dumb-as-shit, ranting, corrupt, incompetent Your Racist Uncle the Republican voters wanted. But it is not actually about him, and as soon as he is out of power and cannot deliver the goods, they will go looking for the next Great White Hope.
EDIT – I have no clue who that is. None of the spawn, especially Ivanka, can deliver the red meat. Pence can’t, either. I don’t think Tucker Carlson has the money to get into the primaries.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Trump isn’t interested in anointing a political heir. As far as I can tell, his main approach to dealing with subordinates (including his children) is to play them off against each other so they all hate each other and won’t be able to gang up on him.
WaterGirl
@Martin: The University of Illinois is doing the 2x per week testing of all students, faculty and staff on campus. I read that just a day or two ago they processed 17,000 tests in a single day.
Which I read was 2.7% of the testing in the entire U.S. (I haven’t checked those figures myself.)
So yeah, I think the testing that is being done at some universities may just have a big impact on the way testing is being done across the board.
Ken
@Starfish: Don’t worry, I have every expectation that around January 21 they’ll be blaming the Biden CDC for giving them bad guidance.
markregan
“Dollar Store Sarah Palin” looks like it should be an oxymoron, but it’s not. It’s a tautology.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Roger Moore: Ya, that, and Trump didn’t create The Cult so much as hijack it. I think it’s pretty safe to say The Base would be droning on about awesome Jeb/Rubio/The Zodiac Killer is if they had won the nomination and got elected.
E.
Here in my bright red county, we have a nearly 100 percent recovery rate. This is regularly celebrated by the locals on the County Public Health page. I keep asking why our recovery rate is so astronomically high and then people loudly wonder why I am such a complainer and why can’t I embrace this awesome news and recognize how much tougher our good strong rural lily-white genes are then those dumbass cityfolk’s.
Well, it turns out our County regards anyone who has a positive test to be “recovered” if after ten days they (1) have not heard from them, (2) have heard from them and at least 24 hours have passed since they had a fever.
So you can literally be in the hospital, on a ventilator, and in a coma, and marked down as “recovered.”
And this is something my neighbors are celebrating and using as evidence for why mask wearers belong to a cult.
dmsilev
@WaterGirl: That percentage is in the right ballpark. Eyeballing the national average as about 700k per day (via the COVID Tracking Project), I get 2.4%, so if the comparison was for a day with slightly lower national numbers 2.7% is reasonable.
Kay
Jared Kushner wants to meet with LeBron James so in furthering that Kushner attacked James politically, misidentified the school James is most proud of, and also put it in the wrong city.
Complete lack of respect for others. He doesn’t care enough to spend 30 seconds preparing.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
The Republican party has been a cult looking for a leader for a long time. The whole idea of the Reagan Legacy Project, for instance, was to build a cult around Reagan, but it got started too late. Most of the successful Republican candidates since Reagan haven’t really been interested in being a cult leader. Sarah Palin was obviously trying but was too lazy (and unsuccessful as a candidate) to make a go of it.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Threadkill Lane conjures up an image of a large glass goblet of port and lemon.
;)
WereBear
@Hoppie: Sweeeet! On my list, and I do love Boucher.
WaterGirl
@Martin:
Who is “we”? Your university, or the royal we that encompasses the US or the world?
Jinchi
Dollar store Sarah Palin?
What store did the original come from?
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I’m hoping some of the smarter states will latch onto the technology their universities are developing and use it in the broader population. It’s obvious, for instance, that Gavin Newsom is interested in expanding California’s testing infrastructure; UC just needs to sell him on using the stuff they’re building.
Calouste
@?BillinGlendaleCA: It was hard enough for women in actual monarchies to successfully inherit (see the war of the Austrian succession for one example), and I don’t know of any daughter of a right-wing authoritarian who managed to do that. Mostly they don’t even try, like Franco. Yeah, Le Pen took over the business from her dad, but she’s not in power, and no one really expects her to. Because while not all misogynists are right-wingers, pretty much all right-wingers are misogynists.
Kay
I know Biden has to do it and he’ll do fine but boy you hate to see it after they so screwed Clinton with the town hall with the sex offender/media star. Remember that? Jesus. Horrible.
WaterGirl
@E.:
This makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Repeatedly.
jonas
@WereBear: I agree that his kids probably won’t attract the kind of enthusiasm their father did, but there’s a deep bench of Grima Wormtongues out there waiting to claim the mantel of authoritarian, Russia-loving idiocratic white nationalism he will leave behind. I’m thinking particularly of types like Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Mark Meadows, not to mention DeSantis, Kemp, Noem, that crazy Lt. Gov from Texas who said the olds should just accept their fate to keep bars open. I’m sure Tucker Carlson will throw his hat into the ring at some point as well.
The Lincoln Project has this right. This isn’t over with Trump. It’s *Trumpism* that must be defeated and that will take a while.
Jinchi
@Ken: They’ll start blaming Biden November 4th.
Yutsano
@Frankensteinbeck: Tucker hasn’t collected it yet, but he has some substantial wealth behind him.
Now how substantial is an open question, but I don’t see either Tucker or Hannity being able to take this over. It’s entirely possible the Qanon idiots coalesce around someone prominent in the movement (could be Marjorie Greene but I’m just speculating there) but without Drumpf the movement will most likely fall apart.
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: Sadly, they do not offer the tests to former employees (me) or former students (me).
Oh well. Still, I am thrilled to see them doing this. I was pretty certain that everything was going to go to hell here once the students arrived. Now we shall see what happens, but I am less pessimistic.
WaterGirl
@Kay: I know. It’s mind-boggling that he can be that stupid.
“Hey, let’s talk, It will be to my political advantage if we talk.” Stops to kick the man in the nuts. “Hey, can we talk?”
What a fucking idiot.
randy khan
The comparison with North Dakota actually is worse than the OP suggests – South Dakota’s population is somewhere around 15% bigger than North Dakota’s.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I was noticing the same thing, the way The Base talks about Trump is utterly absurd; self made man and paragon of morality. That’s not the image Trump projects.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@Just One More Canuck: Yes, tied to a brick and hurled through the window. Both note and brick will be disinfected first, of course.
CliosFanBoy
@Frankensteinbeck: Tom Cotton is in the wings awaiting his turn to be Fuhrer.
Starfish
@E.: That is horrifying.
Robert Sneddon
It says much about the US implementation of elective democracy that the concept of “political heir” is both widespread and commonly accepted. Generally the rest of the developed world has sidled away embarrassedly from the idea of political power being handed down as a right within a few dynastic families whereas in the US this throwback to the era of Divine Right seems to be welcomed and approved of by many.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
Oh, I think it’s deliberate. It’s what passes for “clever” in his shitty circles. He feels attacked – racism isn’t cool and sophisticated- so like some whiny, coddled 16 year old he’s poking LeBron.
I’m sure he doesn’t know jack shit about the school (or care) but the pretend “outreach” is deliberate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Calouste: I don’t know, looks like Kim Jo-Yong is posed to break that glass ceiling.
MomSense
@E.:
Wait what? That is so wrong. Has there been any coverage in the newspapers?
Steeplejack (phone)
@NotMax:
On the right occasion, of course. Need cold weather, methinks. These parlous times require something else. Something more than Cabernet, even, but I will have a hard time breaking out of this torpor that has descended upon me.
Actually, I just remembered that I may have enough Hendrick’s left in the freezer for a martini or two. That might be just the thing.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Not that I disagree, but I think Kay’s take is better. It’s disrespectful. These are people who do not respect LeBron, just like they do not respect the rest of us.
Hoppie
@WereBear: Hubbard intended it to be self-perpetuating. That was a big part of the scam. His shriveled little not-soul in the nether world is gratified, if it were.
‘
Baud
@E.:
Sounds like you can also be dead and recovered.
Kay
The Trumps really never tire of attacking things that are much more popular than the Trumps. Imagine how insane they are- they’re truly convinced that they’re beloved. It’s all of them too- even the awful spouses and girlfriends.
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: But Trumps base appeal is ‘I will seize the levers of power for you, my base’. That’s why he is appealing to evangelicals – not because he represents them, but because he promises to protect them. He’s willing to commit violence against democrats for the protection of evangelical power. That’s what Mitch’s job is too. That’s been the whole fucking RNC message so far.
The problem with the core of your pitch being ‘I will seize the levers of power for you’ is that it’s difficult to know where that ends. Trump doesn’t fucking care about evangelicals. He only wanted their vote because that’s how he secured power. But does he need votes to maintain power? He keeps signaling that no, he doesn’t. He says he does, but his actions suggest that no, he’ll use whatever means to maintain power that we allow him.
Elections are not something he is interested in protecting. If they work for him, he’ll use them, but he’s just as happy to make them go away, if he can get away with it.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Ah, martinis. The sophisticated way. In comparison cab is the callow way.
(couldn’t resist) :)
Kay
This is smart and Conway walked right into it. Biden’s campaign doesn’t get enough credit, IMO.
Roger Moore
@Robert Sneddon:
Tell that to Justin Trudeau, Marine Le Pen, Karl von Hapsburg, and Alessandra Mussolini.
randy khan
@NotMax:
That was excellent. Or terrible. Or both.
Chyron HR
@Kay:
WE NEED SPORTS
SPORTS ARE BORING
TRUMP HAS SPOKEN
Ken
@MomSense: Sounds like the kind of county where a newspaper would know better than to try to publish that. You know, what with the mysterious fires that have destroyed other newspapers all the way back to the 1880s.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
It’s more than that in the US, though. It’s too calcified on top. They got so greedy they broke the mechanism that creates competition for them- they stay on top when they should have been knocked off by some scrappy striver.
There’s a reduction in quality! It has to MOVE. Some of these people should have failed long ago.
Kay
@Chyron HR:
It’s weird how the entire Trump Family are taking the basketball protest so personally. They’re really going to lecture elite basketball players on the business of sports? Is there nothing these shitty, lazy, sort-of-dumb people aren’t experts in?
dmsilev
@Kay: I’ve been very impressed with Symone Sanders. She’s been doing a great job.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Hey, Trump used to own a football team, so obviously he’s in a good position to lecture people on the business of sports. Just don’t bother to mention what happened to that team, please.
Martin
@Baud: Actually, that’s how a lot of epidemiological models work.
The most basic model is the SIR (Susceptible-Infectious-Removed) model. ‘Removed’ means you’re immune, dead, left the country, whatever.
It’s very focused on just solving the infection side of the problem, and simplifies things quite a lot by not caring why someone is removed from the model. Your only focus is that they can’t infect any more people.
There’s a zillion variations, including the SIRD which models recovery and death separately, for when you do care how they get removed from the model. I mean, institutionally you always care, but the policies around infection are typically done independently of the policies around reducing fatalities which tends to be more focused on ramping health care infrastructure, treatments, and so on.
Mind you, if your internal epidemiology work is so directly connected to your public information process, you’re really fucking up pretty badly and the county supervisor is really, really not getting how this needs to work.
From a policy making perspective, removing someone from the model due to death or fully recovery may not matter to tell you whether you are making headway or not on infections, but it makes a HELL of a difference to getting the public to understand your policy decisions and to listen to them. There is a massive difference to how policy is interpreted between ‘everyone got sick for a week and then went back to work’ and ‘everyone died’.
Yutsano
@Roger Moore: Y u make Herschel Walker cry? I mean, he gave Herschel another chance at football, y’know? Never mind it collapsed almost right away. It gave Herschel a chance to
bash his brain moreplay the game he loves again! I mean it was barely a season but still…Chetan Murthy
@dmsilev: IKR? A Bernie alumna(or us … gee wonder when we get one of this, *Hmmm* ?) who got it right. Sadly for Bernie, that meant leaving his campaign, but hey, omelet, eggs, shells.
EthylEster
@catclub: I also have no idea. But it made me go look at the South Dakota virus stats. The daily death rate has recently (about last 2 weeks) been alternating between 1 and 2. The daily new case rate has experienced a recent bump but has never been above 250. According to the worldometers site. So it doesn’t look like there is much to hide.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I had the same thought. Unless you notify them that you have died, hey, you’re recovered.
WaterGirl
@Kay: What is that in response too?
Jay
mad citizen
@Kay: Off the top of my head: football team/league, airline, hotels, condos, buildings, golf courses, university, steaks, water, lawsuits, casinos. It is a staggering collection of failures. There is no culture war that is going to turn the tide for trump this year. Enough people can see the incompetence. For the others, what about some incentive program to get them to leave the nation, or let them have their own state, say, Wyoming.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Somehow LeBron James strikes me as the sort of person who’d be more tolerant of idiocy than of disrespect. And knows the difference.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin:But from E.’s description, it sure seems like they don’t treat “recovered” as “recovered or dead”. They treat it as “out of sight, out of mind, recovered! Shazam!” B/c they do no follow-up on positives, assume that patients in hospital can’t infect others, and assume that if you’re no longer symptomatic, then you’re recovered, with no confirming test.
That doesn’t really map to your “SIR” model, I’d think.
P.S. I really like your description of the way that universities are stepping into the breach on testing. What really, really, really angers me, is that the State (all States) didn’t proactively *encourage* this to happen months ago (back when, sure, all we had was the RT-PCR test) like (for instance) Germany did.
Grr. Labcorp. Grr. Quest. Grrr.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Being dead is a valid medical reason to eschew a mask.
//
Calouste
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Kim-Jo Yong can be the power behind the throne as long as her brother is alive, or assumed to be alive. Of course North Korea is in practice a monarchy, but I don’t think it is officially, so she’d still have to make the case for her succession over other candidates like her older brother or her nephews.
catclub
the image Trump gave that he was a billionaire is a huge tailwind in the US. It validates and gets him free airtime. See also, Jon Huntsman,
the starbucks guy, Michael Bloomberg. If they had the same ideas but no money, they would not get taken seriously on TV and media.
Tucker carlson has substantial wealth – that will help him.
Martin
@Kay: Trump isn’t convinced he’s beloved. He has a personality flaw that requires he be beloved. That causes him to contort reality to make that true. Anything that provides evidence that it’s not true is part of a conspiracy against him.
And because Trump is the source of personal success by hauling this train of sycophants into lucrative jobs, all of them know they have to deliver that reality to keep the machine going.
Trump doesn’t work like a normal person because he’s not. He’s got an untreated personality defect. His motivations aren’t the motivations of healthy people.
Sloane Ranger
Kamala Harris speaking on CNN about COVID-19, killings of African American people and hurricanes. Preceded by Anderson Cooper interview of Joe Biden.
Immanentize
@Martin: FYI. Even a small/medium University has done about 10,000 tests this month — almost all since 8/12.
Go Owls!
NotMax
@Martin
Applies copious amounts of Chapstick to his ass.
:)
geg6
Posted in the thread below and I thought I’d bring it up here where all the kewl kidz are. This will be airing on all the networks tonight. I especially like the running up the ramp scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3UsWMbUpF4&feature=youtu.be
Richard Guhl
@Sean: I think Noem would better be nicknamed as Corn Palace Barbie, the Mitchell Corn Palace being a better point of reference.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Apparently breathing while being an entitled asshole is also a reason.
piratedan
@Chetan Murthy: that’s been a corresponding issue with the advent of tossing out the pandemic playbook… clarity. When you have 50 states all doing their own testing and there’s no consensus on what to report or even what to ask, you get data but sifting thru it is no easy task.
Our hospitals have had the reporting guidelines changed at least 5 times over the course of seven months in regards to what to report and what information they need. The fact that anyone in the media purports to speak positively as to “what the numbers tell us” glosses over the fact that we’ve had to change from the CDC to the HHR and now back to the CDC as well as there’s a private entity skimming data and is doing who knows what with it.
I can guarantee you that not every state is tracking the same items.
What we have are best guesses, but no one is bothering to quantify that, it’s just a bunch of numbers on a page and people speculating from there.
The real fallout is going to be in tracking who’s been affected/infected and what the health repercussions from that will be.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Well, you’re not sick anymore.
Johnnybuck
Well, the ratings for night 3 are out- 15.7 million for night 3 vs 21.4 for the Democrats. it’s a ratings loser 3 nights in a row.
SO MUCH WINNING!
Immanentize
@E.: People must know some folks who have gotten sick and maybe died in your county. No?
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Was that directed at moi? I’m many things but entitled is nowhere among them.
:)
Chetan Murthy
@Immanentize: I’m glad to see that Rice is testing. I’m still appalled that they’re going to in-person teaching this fall, in the middle of a charnel house. I cannot believe that this will turn out well, despite testing. Testing can work when there’s no community spread. Texas is almost the definition of the opposite of that. It’s insane, and I’m very, very disappointed in my alma mater.
WaterGirl
@geg6: That’s a good ad!
As soon as the ad finishes, it takes you to remarks Kamala is making BEFORE Trump’s address tonight.
I thought she was going to be speaking AFTER he spoke?
In any case, I was able to drag the bar back 14 minutes and see the beginning of her speech.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Of course not! :-)
Chetan Murthy
@Immanentize: Rice has 4k students. Let’s add in 1k more faculty and staff. In Germany, high school students are tested twice-weekly. IIRC, Germany has no community spread (or at least, not in places they’re reopening high schools). To match Germany, Rice would need to be doing 10k tests /week.
Immanentize
@Kay: You know who really likes the NBA? Many Black men and yutes. And yes, Obama.
Obama praised the NBA — Trump must criticize it.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@Steeplejack (phone): The two of you would appreciate a book called “Convivial Dickens: the drinks of Dickens and his times” a fun tome covering the social history and providing recipes. Your Port with lemon is fairly close to a warm concoction called “Negus” which is in there.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
No worry, was just pulling your chain.
:)
RaflW
Sturgis is turning out to be quite the spreader event. As a Minnesotan, can I just send a very cordial, neighborly Fuck You to Noem, the town, and the organizers.
NotMax
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
Inveigling somebody else to pay for it makes it a Grand Negus.
:)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Or the league it played in.
geg6
@Shalimar:
Ummmmm, no. It may have actually been more “sane” with Hubbard at the helm. Hubbard was a grifter and a con who hit it big. Miscavage is an out and out psychopath. You need to do some research into recent a Scientology history.
catatonia
Might have been mentioned already, but one good thing Laura did is knock down a Confederate statute in Lake Charles.
https://twitter.com/davantelewis/status/1298967952365150209?s=20
RaflW
@Johnnybuck: What, Pence didn’t rivet people to their barcaloungers? I’m shocked!
Mary G
@Immanentize: The owls. In masks. Adorbs.
WaterGirl
@RaflW: That wouldn’t surprise me, but how do we know that?
I would like to be able to share a link with my niece who said that since the protesters were able to be outside without masks, Sturgis should be able to go on.
Booger
@Frankensteinbeck: Tom Cotton.
geg6
@rp:
You also need to do some research on Scientology. It is a cult of personalities and always has been. First Hubbard and now Miscavage.
Ken
I’m having a psychic flash – a window into a sad and deranged mind – the message is coming through…. “NOT ENOUGH ME I KNEW I SHOULD HAVE SPOKEN THE WHOLE NIGHT INSTEAD OF ALL THOSE LOSERS.”
Frankensteinbeck
@Immanentize:
Not quite how it works, because the NBA is a popular organization of people. Obama liked the NBA. Therefor the NBA must praise and worship Trump, to prove that Trump is better than Obama. If this doesn’t happen… there really isn’t a thought process past that point, just general butthurt. Trump is a spiteful motherfucker, but I can’t think of anything he can do to the NBA.
geg6
@Jinchi:
Walmart. One step above Dollar Stores.
NotMax
@Ken
“Most of those millions of boats don’t have cable.”
//
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: It does map. It’s just the result of a simplified model. And that’s not bad – we do that all the time. You might model something in a dozen different ways to tease out different insights without getting so bogged down that you can’t make sense of it.
Ideally, you address all of this on the infection side. How do we keep people who are infected away from people who are susceptible. Recovered is like a nuclear moderator – as that number goes up, those people serve as a shield between the infected and the susceptible. At scale we call that herd immunity.
The base assumption in a SIR model is that ‘recovered’ means ‘immune and returned to society’ so they can serve as these walking shields. That’s a safe assumption because if everyone is dying, suddenly everyones attention and urgency should dramatically change. The policies protecting susceptible from infected should become dramatically more strict, and the statistical model should effectively fail because it’s no longer a stochastic process. That’s what the pivot to contact tracing serves to do in a normal situation – you move from relying on low odds of I running into S to ‘hey I, we’re going to lock you in your house and post a guard so you can’t interact with anyone’. The odds go to zero because we externally enforce that.
So, in the US, epidemiologists have a bunch of assumptions. Those include a competent government response, a populace that will respond with urgency at the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and so on. It should be reasonable to assume that if you hand an infected person into the health care system, you can remove them from your model because the hospital will have adequate PPE to prevent spread, we’ll expand infrastructure to meet demand and all of that. Prior to Jan 2017, it was inconceivable things wouldn’t work that way in the US. Maybe in africa it would, but not here.
Remember, epidemiological models focus on the parts that are not being actively controlled, where you are trying to get answers from a stochastic system. Anything that is controlled can be removed from the model. If the health care system isn’t functioning, that’s not the epidemiologists job – that’s the mayor job or the governors or whoever’s. You have to assume that the other cogs in the machine are doing their job competently.
Mind you, that’s what often gets me in trouble – when I assume they won’t do their job competently because it’s a scenario they’ve never faced or it’s a problem that is ambiguous where authority and responsibility lie. It’s why I am both good at my job, and tend to get nearly fired a lot. I do a lot of not staying in my lane, getting in trouble, and then proving that I was right to get out of my lane.
Kay
@Immanentize:
My husband loves basketball. Loves. I watched The Last Dance with him. I don’t follow sports but I was completely taken by Scottie Pippen in that. I ended up thinking I wanted to see a documentary on him.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: Well, testing has become a victim of Goodhart’s Law.
Testing doesn’t really do anything on its own. It can tell you if your other policies are working, and it can inform what policies should be applied to certain individuals depending on the outcome of the test.
So, testing is a prerequisite to a good response, but it’s not a response. The response is how Rice keeps students social distancing, reduces the odds of infection in certain conditions (classrooms, etc.) and so on. You can have great testing and fail miserably because your policies suck. You can have great policies and fail miserably because a deficit of testing leaves you blind and uninformed.
The public health officials obsession with testing is that we know that before we get to the job of actually tackling Covid, we need the testing infrastructure. We’re still waiting for that.
China’s response was to recognize that they had no ability to test yet, go wildly overboard on policy, essentially eliminating the stochastic elements, and use that time to get testing up and running which would inform them when they could stop the overboard policies.
The US is so lost in the wilderness that we have exactly one effective covid response and that is the NBA and the few other sports that followed them (notably not MLB and the NFL). NY has stumbled into an okay response mostly because the public saw the horror of their earlier failure. I’m worried that progress is durable when it’s not being matched by the rest of the country and their ability to control that population is very limited.
Jay
Ian
@Robert Sneddon:
I don’t think that it is considered uniquely American. The Trudeau family of Canada, Bhutto family of Pakistan, and the Ghandis in India all come to mind. In Europe Marine Le Pen has inherited her fathers political empire. The Fujimori family in Peru also has had multi-generational members in or run for the highest office.
I think it boils down to human dynamics. 1- they are born into a family that is extremely well connected to this sort of thing and committed to it 2- many people end up following their parents in a line of work, and 3- people like the familiar. The jump in name recognition is a huge initial start for a politician.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@NotMax: I’d say you should be sent to bed sober for that, but that’s too awful a thought even for me.
Ken
@Ian: It’s somewhat like acting families. The kids grow up with the connections, and can leverage that to read for a part. Of course sometimes they shouldn’t get the part, but do anyway because of their parents’ influence. Same in politics, or banking, or law…
cain
The person doing the sign language seems quite angry.
E.
@MomSense: “Newspapers.” Surely you jest . . . ?
Steeplejack
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin):
Thanks for the tip.
Miss Bianca
@geg6: Aww. That actually made me a little teary.
#IWantToBelieve
E.
@Immanentize: Rural county, only 150 cases so far, and everyone blames those on protesters. Not that there were any protests in this county, but that’s not how things like reason and evidence and knowledge work around here.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
See #16 above (paragraph 2).
A Ghost to Most
@Frankensteinbeck: The fascists will dump t* for Tom Cotton the second he fails to steal the election.
t* is a symptom, not the disease.
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore: Right now the Bush family has their next Presidential contender, George P. Bush (optimistically referred to by the consiglieres as “47”) undergoing his apprenticeship in Texas in the hereditary post of Water Commissioner, having ticked most of the necessary boxes including (this time around) military service deployed in a war zone — he was a Army lawyer in Iraq for, I think, less than a year. Next step for him will be a couple of terms as Texas Governor before he makes his first run for the White House, possibly occupying a VP slot before the Oval Office beckons.
George P. may at that point be facing off against Joe Kennedy III, a Dem Congressman from, where else, Massachusetts and a similarly polished product of the Kennebunkport “compound” which has spawned Presidents, Senators, Congressmen and a particularly nepotistic Attorney General in its time.
Outside North Korea I can’t quickly think of a nation where there has been such a multigenerational grasp by a few well-connected families on the highest positions in a supposedly meritocratic elected government system.
Ian
@Robert Sneddon:
I don’t think we need to worry about George P. Jeb was touted as the next great bush thing, and besides our friendly troll JEB! got no where. Kennedy is also struggling vs Markey in his primary, so getting to him as a presidential candidate is a stretch, to be generous.
Yes it is possible we nay have two dynastic candidates facing off in the future. I just don’t think either of the candidates you had in mind can fit the shoes needed to win.
NotMax
@Robert Sneddon
That’s properly George P.G. Bush.
For whatever reason (beyond the obvious one) he scrubbed all mention of his other (Hispanic, it’s his mother’s maiden name) middle name from the ‘net the moment he first announced he was running for an office.
Robert Sneddon
@NotMax: Yes, I saw that — GPB’s Wikipedia page has no mention of his Hispanic middle name. I expect that page is heavily curated and any edits/corrections will be reversed with extreme alacrity. I wonder what will happen about his birth certificate if it becomes part of the election zeitgeist that it be published.
The fact his mother is Hispanic is a major plus for him and his family in Texas where the Latino/Hispanic vote is up for grabs. By the time he appears on the national stage it’s likely to be a plus there as well, if the family’s professional manipulators do their job working the press and influencers appropriately over the next decade or so.
RaflW
@WaterGirl: I don’t know if these will just be waived off as liberal MSM, but a couple links
Minnesota’s Sturgis-related coronavirus cases are here. Expect more.
Dozens of coronavirus infections traced back to Sturgis Rally
RaflW
@Ian: On a more pedestrian scale, there’s an element of what you see is what you do.
As someone who has worked in diversifying construction workforces, one of the obstacles has been if no one else in the family is in the line of work. But if your dad was a plumber, or your aunt was a surgeon, you can see yourself fitting in those careers.
My dad was a corporate CEO. My brother, after decades of his own hard work, in an industry unrelated to dad’s, he’s just below C-suite level. I retired as the executive director of a nonprofit. WYSIWYDo, perhaps?
(And yet, with the Trumps, it’s also nepotism.)
NotMax
@Robert Sneddon
Pointed out here at the time his Wikipedia page was altered concurrently with his entrance into politics.
His mother must be so proud (not).
Roger Moore
@Robert Sneddon:
Take a look at Japan. By my count, 4 of the past 6 Prime Ministers were either the son or grandson of a previous PM. Before that, you get a previous term of the current PM (who is the grandson of a previous PM) and a guy who was the son of a previous Defense Minister.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: thanks!
Uncle Cosmo
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: It’s the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
As contrasted with Later-The-Same-Day Sinners, which includes the rest of us.
trnc
@markregan: Exactly. Sarah Palin is Dollar Store Sarah Palin.
trnc
Every outbreak from here on out will be blamed on socialist cancel culture college students. Count on it.
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore: I read an article a while back about a small area of a prefecture to the north of the Tokyo Metropolitan megaburb which has produced a remarkable number of senior Japanese politicians since the end of the War and the big Constitutional changes that resulted. There are a number of important families living in that area, something like the Bushes and Kennedys but more incestuous — it’s not unknown for there to be intermarriages and the offspring groomed for government posts up to and including the Prime Ministership. It’s not ideological, it’s power and bloodline control that drives the process, a hangover from the era of the Tokugawa clans and before.
Uncle Cosmo
Sounds about right: Two generations’ worth of slowly-marinating resentment that they’ve had to grovel before the Librul Eee-lites who’ve stolen their USA Dream (essentially the 1950s minus the civil rights movement) & handed it over to Those (Worthless) People instead.
trnc
@Roger Moore:
Tired: George Zimmerman
Wired: Derek Chauvin
Hoppie
@geg6: He’s fairly famous for telling other genre authors that the way to really BIG bucks was to create and promote a religion.
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
Gotta link it
(The little added touch, alone, when James Earl Jones answers the door is priceless.)
:)