Trump

World's Most Famous Liar

His scam on America continues as he sells a $5 t-shirt for $34. Yes, like his candidacy for President, many will buy his snake-oil and swallow his cool-aid.

Trump’s drumbeat of lies about the 2020 election keeps getting louder. 

Here are the facts

https://apnews.com/article/trump-2020-election-lies-debunked-4fc26546b07962fdbf9d66e739fbb50d

Death of Democracy

The Reuters special highlighted the obvious.

New breed of video sites thrives on misinformation and hate

BitChute and Odysee serve up conspiracies, racism and graphic violence to millions of viewers.

Taking advantage of Big Tech disinformation crackdowns and the rise of Trump, the sites reflect a new media universe – one where COVID-19 is fake, Russia fights Nazis in Ukraine, and mass shootings are ‘false flag’ operations.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-media-misinformation/

Surely, it can’t be bad. It is!

Trump's Insurrection

It will be interesting to see what happens “the day after.” Will Republicans finally root out the Faustian opportunists like Cruz? Likely not.

Trump has made me a cynic. 81 million people think he is a hero.81 million people can’t separate fact from fiction. That has not changed and that is what is really scary.

There will be a bunch of BS speech-making by Republicans. And then they’ll go back to their true hypocritical selves. Most of them have no moral compass. They will go on the search for the next group of crazies they think can thrust them into power. I suspect the Democrats aren’t much different.

Trump’s thrust into politics was based on a lie and a conspiracy theory. He never changed. He never pretended to be anything other than his true self. Only America changed. Yesterday was America’s Krystalnacht.

Having a sitting President incite an insurrection is a first we should hope is never repeated. Yesterday seemed like a scene right out of the past popular program “24.”

Dangerous Medical News from Trump Administration

More fake and dangerous medical advice from the the Trump Administration. We cleaned up a less than professional report from Center for Inquiry that is otherwise accurate.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1331309315882446849.html

Here's a story about fake medicine, why people might use it, and why it’s so dangerous, especially during a global pandemic.

A Lie is a Lie regardless of who tells it

With so much misinformation being passed regarding COVID, the following is worth contemplation. How quick people are ready to “run with a story,” without even a minimum of validation, if the story fits one’s bias. This story is all over the internet. The liberal media is having a field day with it.

Are Covid Patients Gasping ‘It Isn’t Real’ As They Die?

An ER nurse’s anecdote of deranged denialism went viral. But when the media caught wind of the story, reporters didn’t do their jobs.

https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-isnt-real-as-they-die/

As the WIRED author admits, the nurse may be telling the truth, but her tweets are not evidence of the wider politicized story that these biased journalists mostlikely want everyone to believe.

When lies are promulgated at the highest levels of authority, truth loses value and lying becomes weaponized and common practice. The truth takes too long and usually isn’t as sensational. I doubt if America will ever recover from the damage Trump has done. 70 million American voters find it acceptable.

To Tell the Truth

Telling the truth with Trump gets one fired.

Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security director who had spearheaded a campaign to counter rumors about voter fraud, has been fired, President Trump on Tuesday. Trump, in two misleading tweets about the security of the U.S. election, said Krebs' termination was "effective immediately."

The CISA campaign, led by Krebs, was originally intended to target foreign interference. However, as the president continued to repeat dangerously misleading information about the security of the election, the agency's focus turned to rebutting many of the rumors and baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud that Trump had promoted from the White House.

Christopher Krebs has been fired

The firing of Krebs marks perhaps the most upsetting moment for democracy since the president’s refusal to accept his election loss two weeks ago. Trump has since spread disinformation wildly and has prevented the government bureaucracy from beginning a normal, peaceful transition. His increasingly quixotic legal battle has seen over a dozen courtroom losses across multiple states.

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-fires-christopher-krebs-cisa/

Economic Representation of Candidates

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-voting-counties-equal-70-of-americas-economy-what-does-this-mean-for-the-nations-political-economic-divide/

Overall, we rate Brooking Institution Left-Center biased based on donations to primarily Democratic candidates, as well as policy advocacy that slightly favors the left. We also rate them Very High for factual reporting due to strong sourcing and a clean fact check record.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/brookings-institute/ 

FINALLY!!!

President Trump Thursday made unfounded claims that the presidential election was corrupt and fraudulent. In response, we cut off his live remarks and removed the video from our platforms. I want to explain why.

Our job is to cover the news, but our mission is to spread truth and to stop misinformation.

Some things don’t have two sides. Facts are not up for debate. And when the president of the United States, from the White House, tries to tear down one of the bedrocks of American democracy, a fair and free election, that is no longer news. It is propaganda.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/11/06/trump-voter-fraud-election-remarks-president/6189637002/

Another Trump COVID Lie

Trump’s remarks came during an Oct. 24 rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Trump, Oct. 24: If somebody’s terminally ill with cancer, and they have COVID, we report them. And you know, doctors get more money and hospitals get more money. Think of this incentive. So some countries do it differently. If somebody is very sick with a bad heart, they die of COVID, they don’t get reported as COVID. So then you wonder, gee, I wonder why their cases are so low.

This country and their reporting systems are really not doing it right. If somebody has a really bad heart, and they’re close to death, even if they’re not, but they have a very bad heart and they get COVID, they put it down to COVID. Other countries put it down to a heart. So we have to be — we’re gonna to start looking at things because you know, they have things back — they have things a little bit backwards.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trump-baselessly-suggests-covid-19-deaths-inflated-for-profit/

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

Will Rogers

 

New measures to curb the viral spread of pandemic misinformation

In the hopes of curbing the rampant spread of coronavirus misinformation, the WHO announced yesterday that it will grant Wikipedia free use of its published information, graphics, and videos in a first-of-its-kind collaboration.  This partnership also means WHO material will be part of the Wikimedia Commons, and can be reproduced or retranslated anywhere so long as there’s appropriate attribution.

Since the start of the pandemic, Wikipedia—once widely regarded as unreliable—has been a key resource for debunking misinformation about coronavirus. By contrast, researchers from Cornell recently found that President Trump was likely the loudest source of coronavirus misinformation during the pandemic’s early months. As a result of the president’s attitudes, many prestigious scientific and medical journals have published editorials denouncing his handling of coronavirus.

Trump is a Major Source of Coronavirus lies

COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded alongside what the World Health Organization has termed an “infodemic” of misinformation. This study identifies and analyzes the most prominent topics of COVID-related misinformation that emerged in traditional media between January1 and May26,2020 based on a total sample of over 38 million articles published in English-language media around the world. To our knowledge, our analysis is the first comprehensive survey of the traditional and online media landscape on this issue. We found that media mentions of US President Donald Trump with in the context of COVID-19 misinformation made up by far the largest share of the infodemic. Trump mentions comprised 37.9% of the overall misinformation conversation, well ahead of any other topics. We conclude that the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic”. Only 16.4% of the misinformation conversation was “fact-checking” in nature, suggesting that the majority of COVID misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction.

SOURCE:
Coronavirus misinformation:quantifying sources and themes in the COVID-19‘ infodemic’

 Sarah Evanega, MarkLynas, JordanAdams, Karinne Smolenyak

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/evanega-et-al-coronavirus-misinformation-submitted-07-23-20-1/080839ac0c22bca8/full.pdf  

The Cornell Alliance for Science,
Department of Global Development,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Cision Global Insights, Ann Arbor, MI

Hydroxychloroquine Use for COVID Still a BUST

In early July Henry Ford Hospital reported some positive results treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine even after every credible research laboratory declared it to be ineffective.
https://mtskeptics.blogspot.com/2020/07/hydroxychloroquine-cut-covid-death-rate.html 

So what's the story?

Like masks, hydroxychloroquine became associated with political affiliation. Trump hyped it at White House briefings, and even announced that he himself was taking it. The FDA revoked its use.  Nevertheless, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is still pointing to the Henry Ford study, But it was a retrospective one, neither randomized nor controlled. “The Detroit study touted by Navarro has very poor methodology—completely observational, meaning that the choice to give hydroxychloroquine was probably also linked to other factors that explain the benefit,” says Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at UC San Francisco.

"What is the cost of continuing these trials?” 

The politics and social alignments that swirled around hydroxychloroquine made it hard for US researchers to enroll enough participants to make a study work. That slowed things down. An analysis by Stat showed that of the more than 1,200 Covid-19 drug trials underway or planned, 237,000 people—more than a third of volunteers in all the trials—were supposed to be enrolled in hydroxychloroquine studies. That now seems disproportionate, to say the least. “Nobody should get it,” 

Wachter says. “Overall, the evidence against it is strong enough that the drug should simply go away in Covid, and it would have weeks ago had it not been for the politics.”

https://www.wired.com/story/hydroxychloroquine-still-doesnt-do-anything-new-data-shows/

Steve Harvey's Raccoons

The misattributed note "How I feel about Trump" is on circulation again.  It has been debunked so many times one would think everyone know this claim is totally bogus.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/the-raccoon-rant-not-written-by-steve-harvey/

Time is approaching for American Presidential elections so many are pulling out, dusting off, and recirculating old garbage.

Time for a new approach to political fakery - join those who feel obligated to stop the circulation. Democracy can only survive with an educated electorate.

Pence Like Trump Has Alternative Facts

As in the case of Donald Trump, Mike Pence likes to make up his own facts. In his commencement address at Hillsdale College, Vice President Mike Pence said,. "Facts are facts. Faith is rising across America." Actually the opposite is true.

According to Gallup, church attendance is going down, belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is going down, and belief in God is going down. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated are growing as a share of the American population, and according to Pew Research, they are now the second-largest “belief” group in the country at 23 percent.

In addition, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that the nonreligious now outnumber white evangelicals. Between 2003 and 2017, white evangelicals dropped from 21 percent of the population to 13. During that same period, the nonreligious swung the other way, rising from 12 percent to 21.

POTUS SOTU Speech 2018

As expected, the most credible FACT CHECKERS had a field day with President Trump's first SOTU speech.  The general consensus was that it was an unusually long exhortation of exaggerations, hyperbole, and falsehoods.  In other words it was pretty much "standard fair" from what the world has learned to expect from Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address was filled with several repeat claims about the economy, tax cuts and immigration that we’ve fact-checked before, as well as new false and misleading statements on auto plants, judicial appointments and development aid. FACTCHECK.ORG

Trump’s statements cycled through every Truth-O-Meter rating, except for Pants on Fire. We tallied two False statements, three Mostly False, one Half True, three Mostly True, and one True. POLITIFACT.COM

We fact checked 15 Trump State of the Union points. Some rang true, others mostly false or exaggerated USA TODAY 

The obviously biased Main Stream Media and Trump-hater reports were even more merciless.  Also as expected, Fox News cherry-picked a few of less significant and less mendacious aspects of the Trump speech ignoring what was obvious to everyone else.

The Genius of Trump?

      C-span Book TV interviewed the Dilbert creator Scott Adams on his book "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter."   He had another take on why Trump won that has little to do with politics, disgruntled underemployment, or appeals to racism. 
The entire 73 min interview can be seen here.  

     Adams predicted a Trump victory back in 2015.  Without a doubt the video at C-SPAN is a MUST VIEW.

Certainly Trump Has Dangerous Mental Problems

Surely, no one who has seen Trump's recent Tweet with him beating CNN person, can ignore this behavior as not dangerous.  The question is how long should the country tolerate this man?  However, his supporter seem oblivious.  

Adam Roberts says in his July 2, 2018 WIRED article,  The President Does Not Lie Like You and Me, 
https://www.wired.com/story/president-trumps-lies-and-untruths/?mbid=nl_7217_p1&CNDID=48648177 

To Trump and his followers, it doesn’t matter if we can’t believe the President as long as they ensure we can’t believe anyone else, either. Sure, the apotheosis of all this will make traditional governance—passing laws, making treaties, regulating in the public interest—impossible. But the people in charge will be able to do all kinds of other stuff while no one’s watching, or while no one can see. They can change regulations to make them more favorable to allies and donors. They can figure out how to suppress their opponents’ voters. They can embed moneymaking enterprises into governance. The tsunami of lies will recede, leaving behind only the swamp.

Trump has become such an international embarrassment that almost everyone is just trying to ignore him.  What is scary is how Putin is going to play Trump like a fiddle.  Trump's ego is so far out in front of him, Putin only needs to know one tune. Who knows what lullaby Trump responds in return.

Followup Letter From Lindzen to Trump

A follow-up (see earlier post) letter from Professor Lindzen and notable climate scientists to President Trump outline some of the issues with the climate propaganda.

• The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer claims a greater likelihood of significant as opposed to negligible future warming,

• It has long been acknowledged by the IPCC that climate change prior to the 1960’s could not have been due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.   Yet, pre-1960 instrumentally observed temperatures show many warming episodes, similar to the one since 1960, for example, from 1915 to 1950, and from 1850 to 1890. None of these could have been caused by an increase in atmospheric CO2,

• Model projections of warming during recent decades have greatly exceeded what has been observed,

• The modelling community has openly acknowledged that the ability of existing models to simulate past climates is due to numerous arbitrary tuning adjustments,

• Observations show no statistically valid trends in flooding or drought, and no meaningful acceleration whatsoever of pre-existing long term sea level rise (about 6 inches per century) worldwide,

• Current carbon dioxide levels, around 400 parts per million are still very small compared to the averages over geological history, when thousands of parts per million prevailed, and when life flourished on land and in the oceans.

 Click here for a copy of the letter.

It is important to note that the hysteria of the climate crazies is driven by climate models which significantly exceed (factor of 3) reality.  These models rely on arbitrary FUDGE factors (aka tuning) not based on any science. 

Petition by Scientists to President Trump

      Dr. Richard Lindzen and 300 scientist petition President Trump to change course on an outdated international agreement that targets minor greenhouse gases, primarily, Carbon Dioxide for harsh regulation.  Click here for the letter with signatures https://cloudup.com/iHcBpTDmCNu
      Dr. Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist who has published more than 200 scientific papers and book in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photo-chemistry. Until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology^. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has criticized the scientific consensus about climate change and what he has called "climate alarmism."