Sunday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. Bill says:
  2. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Bill:

    “He was banging on the windshield with his hands, and with his forehead,” said Florida Highway Patrol lieutenant Yanko Reyes.
    ………………………….
    Reyes notes that the unidentified man, whose hands and forehead were bloody from punching and head-butting the windshield, has been Baker acted and taken to Wellington Regional Hospital for a 72 hour period of evaluation.

    Bath salts? PCP?

    Reyes says the driver of the tractor trailer “pretty much freaked out” and – instead of stopping – just kept driving.

    Can’t say as I blame him for freaking out.

  3. Sleeping Dog says:
  4. OzarkHillbilly says:
  5. Bill says:
  6. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Georgia camp outbreak shows rapid virus spread among children

    Some 260 cases of the coronavirus have been tied to attendees and staff at a North Georgia YMCA children’s camp in June, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the largest known superspreading events in the state. The report details how COVID-19 spread rapidly among children and teens within the camp and raises questions about the effectiveness of safety protocols as school districts and colleges contemplate reopening for in-person instruction this fall.

    YMCA Camp High Harbour, identified in the report as Camp A, suffered an outbreak at its Lake Burton location in late June. As of July 10, about 85 cases of the virus had been linked to the camp, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported, a figure that has since tripled.

    The CDC study of 597 campers and staff from Georgia found the camp did not follow its guidance to require campers wear masks, though staff did. Three-quarters of the 344 attendees and staff for whom the CDC was able to obtain test results tested positive for the virus. The CDC said the overall attack rate of the virus was 44%, though the agency acknowledged that’s an undercount because it includes more than 250 for whom they had no results.

    “This investigation adds to the body of evidence demonstrating that children of all ages are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and, contrary to early reports might play an important role in transmission,” the report said.

    Brian Castrucci, CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a Maryland nonprofit that assists public health agencies and a former epidemiologist in Georgia, said the report is a warning for local school districts and others about the potential for spread in congregant settings.

    “This should show you how actively kids can transmit it,” he said. “If you have a low prevalence in your community, you can start to do things. If you have rampant and rapid community spread, then there is no opening school, there is no opening colleges. It is not going to work.”

    2
  7. OzarkHillbilly says:

    This will also give you some chuckles:

    Rachel
    @rachellord22

    I have just found out about the Sydney Annual Duck Fashion Show

  8. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Libby
    @libbyjones715

    Welcome to the Freedom Cafe! We trust you to make your own choices if you want to wear a face mask. And, in the same spirit of individual liberty, we allow our staff to make their own choices about the safety procedures they prefer to follow as they prepare and serve your food.

    Thread.

    4
  9. Kylopod says:

    I just read an article thoroughly examining the “karen” phenomenon, including the history of the term and how it’s gained steam recently. It is also one of the first sources I’ve seen to discuss the misogynistic component, which has gotten surprisingly little attention and is not benign.

    She cites, as one of many examples, a male driver who identified a woman he described as a “Karen” and “then followed her home and filmed her as she melted down into hysterics, posting the video online.” Her “crime”? She flipped him off. The man who filmed the video, who is Black and gay and in his 20s, describes himself on his own website as “more than a viral video star.” ….

    Research has actually suggested that men who get angry are perceived as strong and decisive, while women are more often seen as hysterical. That, Dudley said, could go some way in explaining why Karens seem to trigger more social-media viewers than Kens.

    1
  10. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog:
    That’s mindboggling. What does he have on that town?

  11. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Gotta love this: Say cheese.

  12. Kylopod says:

    Dogs are being trained to detect Covid-19.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaJAwi8kSLU

  13. Jax says:

    In relation to KingDaddy’s post on stupidity the other day…I’ve seen this damn thing on Facebook at least 15 times the last two days.

    “The vaccine that is coming…
    As many of you heard Moderna is in stage 3 of their vaccine testing. If all goes well it’ll become federal law to get the vaccine. Here’s something many of you don’t know, guess who the first CEO of Moderna was? A Cornell graduate by the name of Anthony Fauci, who was a roommate with none other than Bill Gates. Are you paying attention? It was at Cornell that Bill Gates designed the RFID (Radio-frequency identification) and patened it under US2006257852. Are you awake yet? Now let’s really go down the rabbit hole. Moderna was a pharmaceutical company that started in Germany under the name IG Farben. IG Farben is infamous for it’s mass production of Zyklon-B, the primary gas used to kill millions during the Holocaust. After Germany fell, IG Farben was dissolved and its assets sold off by a Nazi turned American by the name of, you guessed it, George Soros. Soros rebranded the company as Moderna. And who was the primary stockholder of Moderna until his death? Jeffrey Epstein. His role in Moderna is where he made his fortune and established his connections. Let that sink in.
    Wake up people! You are being conditioned and controlled.”

    How on Earth are we supposed to get these people back to reality after they’ve been immersed in conspiracy theories for so long?!

    9
  14. sam says:
  15. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Jax: I coulda sworn Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, and also is 15 years younger than Fauci.

    4
  16. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    That is what every single piece of biographical information I’ve read about Gates says.

  17. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    No idea. But he comes across as a first rate a hole. If I were the mayor, I’d make him document his hours to ensure that he’s not running his business on town time.

  18. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @CSK: I have to admit that I looked it up. I had thought it was Stanford he dropped out of. Don’t ask me why.

  19. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog:
    I suppose it’s especially shocking to me because I live about eight miles from Methuen, or “Lawrence with trees,” as it is oft described.

    1
  20. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    The notion that Gates was Fauci’s roommate anywhere is even more bizarre.

  21. Kathy says:

    @Jax:

    You may try some quick facts based on very lazy research I did just now:

    Bill gates attended Harvard, where he had no roommates in Cornell.
    Moderna was founded in 2010, long after Trump’s pal Epstein made his billions.
    RFID is real, but was patented by Charles Walton, not Bill Gates.

    Curiously, the patent number cited, which has nothing to do with Bill Gates, Charles Walton, Anthony Fauci, or RFID, is related to the SARS outbreak in 2003. That can be the basis of a much more plausible conspiracy theory.

    1
  22. Jax says:

    The whole damn thing is made up, but people just….believe it. Snopes has a fact-check up about it, but these guys posting this crap have been brainwashed to not trust any kind of fact-checking. The fact-checkers are in on it, don’tcha know!!!!

    Forget the virus….I don’t know how we recover from this level of stupid!

    4
  23. OzarkHillbilly says:

    It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline

    Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie is a sustained attack, both jeremiad and confession, on the Republican party he served for 40 years. His is the hand at Belshazzar’s political feast: “All of these immutable truths turned out to be marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market.”

    Stevens, a consultant, is refreshingly frank about his role and responsibility. “Blame me,” he writes, adding: “I had been lying to myself for decades.” He seeks a new leaf on a “crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility”.

    Unsurprisingly, he starts with race, “the original Republican sin … the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played.” Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans have had difficulty appealing to African American voters. Stevens is not surprised.
    ……………………….
    In short, stripped “of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy”. The first casualty is the truth. “Large elements of the Republican party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth” and that a cause or simple access to power is more important.
    …………………………….
    With one party having failed its “circuit-breaker” role, he cites the “urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy” as Democrats drift left. Though moderate Republican governors remain popular, he is distinctly pessimistic today’s Republicans can be that party, as they have “legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a political party in a country with a unique role in the world”.

    Stevens has little hope the GOP will save itself from Trump or rise to the challenge of adapting to an increasingly non-white America. Losing, badly, is his only hope for concentrating Republican minds to the new reality of American demographics. Absent that, his prescription is definitive: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”

    I’m not much for “political” books but I think I might have to make an exception for this one.

    5
  24. gVOR08 says:

    Bill Gates had nothing to do with RFID, the referenced “paten” number has to do with COVID microbiology, Moderna has nothing to do with I. G. Farben. I don’t think there’s a single statement in that post that can stand two minutes on WIKI. Is it maybe a parody site?

    3
  25. Kylopod says:

    @Jax:

    Snopes has a fact-check up about it, but these guys posting this crap have been brainwashed to not trust any kind of fact-checking.

    One of the most fascinating examples I saw was a meme that’s been going around for years, claiming that FactCheck.org in 2009 “exposed” Snopes as a liberal propaganda site. Accompanying the meme were a couple of photos allegedly showing the Snopes CEO shaking hands with George Soros.

    Of course, FactCheck.org had said no such thing–in fact they praised Snopes as a thoroughly researched site and revealed that it was run by an apolitical couple one of whom is Canadian. As for the photos, the man in both seen shaking hands with Soros was not the Snopes CEO or anyone connected with the company–in the first picture it was a former Hungarian PM, in the second a prominent Democratic fundraiser.

    So the meme was actually citing a credible fact-checking organization, but claiming it said the opposite of what it actually said, in order to discredit another fact-checking organization.

    6
  26. grumpy realist says:

    @Jax: I think this patent was picked as the nucleus of this conspiracy theory because a) it deals with “SARS” in the name and b) it has a ridiculous number of pages to go through not to mention sequences and diagrams and nobody’s going to bother to in fact look up the claims and find out what they actually say. (You can pull it up on pat2pdf.org; make sure you take off the “US” at the front of the publication number and add a “0” after the year.)

    ….also, I am now very very happy that nucleopeptides aren’t my area of expertise.

  27. Monala says:

    @Sleeping Dog: he is running a private security business on town time. The article discusses it.

  28. EddieInCA says:

    @Jax:

    The holes in that BS conspiracy theory are depressing.

    1. Bill Gates never went to Cornell. Had he gone at the same time as Fauci, he would have been 7 years old. I only know that because I know how old Fauci is, and I know Bill Gate is four years older than I am.
    2. Bill Gates didn’t invent RFID.
    3. Moderna, the company, wasn’t founded until 2010. I know this because I’ve been reading about the company due to their lead in the vaccine race.
    4. George Soros was a teenager in 1945, so he had nothing to do with the company IG Farben, which wasn’t “dissolved”. It was seized by the Allies, and it’s assets distributed to various other pharma companies. There are some great books out there on the aftermath of WWII.
    5. Epstein was already a billionaire before Moderna was founded in 2010, and he had zero investments in Moderna.

    I know that much without looking it up. It’s sad that something so easily debunked, and so obviously false, finds an audience of f**king morons who not only believe it, but pass it on to other idiots.

    7
  29. CSK says:

    @gVOR08:
    It does sound like a parody, doesn’t it? A lot of these crazed conspiracy “theories” do.

  30. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    Ha, Lawrence with trees and the Searles Estate.

    @Monala:

    But to fire him and not payoff the contract you need the documentation. He can be fired only for just cause.

    1
  31. Kylopod says:

    @CSK:

    It does sound like a parody, doesn’t it? A lot of these crazed conspiracy “theories” do.

    You have to consider the fact that it’s also an outright hoax. Most conspiracy theories arise from people who are more or less sincere in their beliefs, even if there may be hoaxes along the way (such as Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate). This particular one, though, was concocted by someone who was consciously and intentionally distorting facts. So there’s a distinct possibility that it was some kind of cynical prank (something I’ve long suspected about QAnon).

    I also wonder about the role that mental illness plays in some of these theories. That “demon sex” doctor sounds to me like she might be actually schizophrenic. I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone else raise that possibility. Her beliefs go beyond being simply deranged, and seem bizarre and nonsensical, and do resemble some of the ramblings I’ve heard from people known to have had schizophrenia (such as John Nash).

    1
  32. CSK says:

    Last week when Trump said he’d ban/shut down Tik Tok in the U.S. “as soon as Saturday,” he clearly didn’t mean yesterday, did he? Tik Tok is still accessible in this country, right? So what’s he waiting for?

  33. Jax says:

    @CSK: Maybe there are negotiations regarding an apology from Sarah Cooper? 😉 I wouldn’t doubt for a second that it has more to do with how badly she roasts him with her parodies than TikTok being a national security risk.

  34. CSK says:

    @Kylopod:
    Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind that QAnon is a prank.
    If the Gates/Fauci business is a hoax–and it could well be–it’s a very clever one because it has all the spelling and grammatical mistakes the legit (if that’s the word I want) conspiracists tend to make.
    As for Stella Immanuel, she could well be schizophrenic, but if she is, she’s remarkably high-functioning. A belief in demons appears to be a component of Traditionalist religion as it is practiced in Cameroon, which could have influenced her. when she was growing up.

    1
  35. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Jax: You’re expecting that we’ll recover from stupid? Waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy more optimistic than I am. 😉

    3
  36. CSK says:

    @Jax:
    I’d say it’s a safe bet Trump would love to see the last of Sarah Cooper. She’s his worst nightmare: a young, very attractive woman of color making hilarious fun of him. Everyone adores her. And, as Trump himself said, “Nobody likes me.” Right you are, Lardass. Nobody does like you.

    5
  37. Monala says:

    @Kylopod: good article. In the amusing video Ozark linked in the fourth comment above, an Australian kid creates different personas from English-speaking nations + Russia, all giving updates about coronavirus in their countries, with decent accents for each. The only female persona is the American, wearing a stereotypical lopsided “Karen” haircut, protesting that she has rights!

    1
  38. teve says:

    DAMN LIBERAL STORE! -what an idiot old white man just shouted when we told him he had to wear a mask to come in.

  39. CSK says:

    Didn’t Trump say two weeks ago that he’d release a “comprehensive health care plan” today? What’s up with that?

  40. CSK says:

    @teve:
    Serves ya right, ya dirty Commie.

    1
  41. Teve says:

    @CSK: the global corporation I work for has given millions to Republicans. But elderly white men who live on government checks and watch FoxNews all day become retarded. I’ve had customers who wouldn’t stop attacking Nancy Pelosi while I’m trying to sell them a Samsung Galaxy.

    Me: so with this plan an iPhone XR is free.
    Customer: oh free huh? You sound like Nancy Pelosi! She always wants to give the inner city ones free stuff. But it ain’t free! My tax dollars are paying for all that free stuff! Socialist Bitch!
    Customer’s Wife: Don stop it.
    Customer: what? She IS a socialist Bitch!

    2
  42. Kylopod says:

    @CSK:

    Didn’t Trump say two weeks ago that he’d release a “comprehensive health care plan” today? What’s up with that?

    Well, he just said the other day:

    Q Mr. President — Mr. President, what’s in your healthcare plan that’s coming on Sunday?

    THE PRESIDENT: Well, we’re going to be doing a healthcare plan. We’re going to be doing a very inclusive healthcare plan. I’ll be signing it sometime very soon.

    Q You said two weeks, when you spoke to Chris Wallace.

    THE PRESIDENT: It might be — it might be Sunday, but it’s — it’s going to be very soon.

  43. CSK says:

    @Kylopod:
    Well, that clears things up nicely. Not.

  44. Teve says:

    I have a friend whose dad retired about five years ago and started watching Fox News all day. His wife is very close to leaving him because he’s turned into an angry asshole.

    2
  45. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    He did, it is one word DIE

    2
  46. Teve says:

    Sarahclazarus

    we all laughed at “no malarkey” but have you ever seen more malarkey in your fuckin life

  47. CSK says:

    @Teve:
    This is interesting, because to a true Trump cultist, Fox, except for Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson, I suppose, has proven itself a) disloyal to Donald, and b) extremely left wing. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) The culties were huffing and puffing on Lucianne.com the other day about how Obama is so out of touch that he still thinks they watch Fox.

    They don’t watch Fox. They watch OANN and read The Gateway Pundit, the Conservative Treehouse, The American Thinker, et al.

    2
  48. Teve says:

    @CSK: my store sells TV packages. The most commonly requested channel is the hallmark channel. The second most commonly requested channel is OANN.

    Right-wing media makes people shittier.

    1
  49. Teve says:

    @CSK: A lot of the culties do watch OANN, but Nielsen says 4 million people watch Fox News now, up from 2 million in 2016.

  50. CSK says:

    @Teve:
    I don’t know how anyone can watch OANN and not realize immediately what a crackpot operation it is.

    1
  51. CSK says:

    @Teve:
    Maybe that’s because it’s gotten so…left-wing. 😀

    1
  52. Teve says:

    @CSK: I have a relative who started out smart and then was married to a conspiracy theorist for 50 years. Now she says things like hospitals are making up covid cases to get paid.

  53. Kylopod says:

    @Teve:

    A lot of the culties do watch OANN, but Nielsen says 4 million people watch Fox News now, up from 2 million in 2016.

    Well even conservatives have to glance at the left-wing station from time to time, just to make sure they don’t fall into an echo chamber. /s

    3
  54. Teve says:

    On a different note, the idiot creationists at Uncommon Descent are praising Trump for promoting that quack doctor because incubi and succubi are REAL.

  55. CSK says:

    @Teve:
    Do they have anything to say about our reptilian overlords? Or alien DNA in our meds?

    1
  56. Mikey says:

    Space-X Dragon Endeavour carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley has returned from orbit and splashed down safely. All went without problems, now they’re just waiting for the recovery boats.

    It’s the first time an American spacecraft has actually splashed down in the ocean since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

    3
  57. DrDaveT says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    as Democrats drift left

    This makes me crazy. Democrats are not “drifting left”. Indeed, they have been drifting (or indeed lurching) rightward during my entire life. Barack Obama was to the right of Ronald Reagan on everything except race and trickle-down. Bill Clinton was to the right of Richard Nixon on everything but race.

    This notion that the Democratic Party is wandering leftward is just more gaslighting. Demand evidence.

    (And no, James, statements made by unsuccessful candidates for the party nomination don’t count, unless you can come up with actual evidence that they are now to the left of statements made by candidates in the past. Good luck with that.)

    5
  58. Joe says:

    @Jax And @EddieInCA:
    On what planet can these three “facts” coexist?

    the first CEO of Moderna was? A Cornell graduate by the name of Anthony Fauci

    Moderna was a pharmaceutical company that started in Germany under the name IG Farben.

    After Germany fell, IG Farben was dissolved and its assets sold off by a Nazi turned American by the name of, you guessed it, George Soros.

    Wake up people! (who perpetuate this crap) Take the 2 seconds to realize that, without knowing anything other than the dates of WWII and the current age of Anthony Fauci, none of this makes a lick of sense.

    3
  59. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Teve: Don’t pick on the Hallmark Channel. I watch shows on it sometimes. Of course, I can’t watch very much because I’m prediabetic…

    […]

    “lopsided “Karen” haircut,”–I believe the term is “asymmetric.”

  60. Gustopher says:

    @EddieInCA:

    Bill Gates never went to Cornell. Had he gone at the same time as Fauci, he would have been 7 years old. I only know that because I know how old Fauci is, and I know Bill Gate is four years older than I am.

    You really have to wonder why Anthony Fauci kept a 7 year old boy in his dorm room.

    6
  61. CSK says:

    @Gustopher:
    Well, clearly he was the predecessor of the Pizzagate pedophiles. I mean, what could be more obvious?

    4
  62. Monala says:

    @Teve: so Fox is a sort of “gateway drug.”

    4
  63. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Gustopher:
    @CSK:

    Durn CSK, you beat me to it.

    And did you know that Jeffrey Epstein knew them all.

    3
  64. Monala says:

    Florida, California, and Texas have now each surpassed New York in total number of Covid cases, and Louisiana and Arizona have surpassed New York in total cases per million.

  65. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog:
    Jeffrey Epstein was Anthony Fauci’s math teacher at Dalton.

  66. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Monala:

    Nothing to be concerned about, it’s just a hoax designed to defeat the sainted one. Rambo in a Brioni

  67. @CSK: Beat me to the joke.

  68. CSK says:

    @Steven L. Taylor:
    Apparently it’s less of a joke than I thought. I did some poking around, and found that on March 25 Buzzfeed did a piece on the various QAnon conspiracies involving Fauci, and how 4chan has decided that Fauci is part of a global pedophile ring.

  69. Gustopher says:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/us/schools-reopening-indiana-coronavirus.html

    One of the first school districts in the country to reopen its doors during the coronavirus pandemic did not even make it a day before being forced to grapple with the issue facing every system actively trying to get students into classrooms: What happens when someone comes to school infected?

    Just hours into the first day of classes on Thursday, a call from the county health department notified Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana that a student who had walked the halls and sat in various classrooms had tested positive for the coronavirus.

    Administrators began an emergency protocol, isolating the student and ordering everyone who had come into close contact with the person, including other students, to quarantine for 14 days. It is unclear whether the student infected anyone else.

    At least they had a plan.

    1
  70. Jax says:

    @CSK: That’s what’s been bugging me so much. I mean, WE all know better, we are comfortable in our forum, knowing where the line is between truth and fiction and fully capable of recognizing it. If we’re unsure, we research it.

    There’s a large portion of the electorate who believe this crap, feel no curiosity or desire to know “facts”, and they vote. With their votes, they’re making decisions for all of us, and it’s literally killing people. There’s not a damn thing we can do about it legislatively, because “Free Speech” and all that. I can report that post as false news to Facebook hundreds of times, every time I see it, and they’ll eventually attach a tag to it when somebody shares it that says it’s false, but that’s just “proof” that the right is being censored to the politicians taking advantage of it. So then they get offended and feel aggrieved that their “right” to believe stupid shit is being trampled on….

    There is no legislative way to fix this that I can see. We need one, but we are literally hampered by our own Constitution. We can’t even get people to wear masks, let alone get them all to take a class on “how to recognize actual fake news”. The line is so blurred between “fact” and “opinion” that we can’t save ourselves.

    Sorry to vent, it’s just been bugging the crap out of me since Kingdaddy’s post the other day. We’re hosed, because we’re collectively dumb. The plane is crashing and a good percentage of my fellow passengers refuse to believe we’re even on a plane, this is a ship, damn it, can’t you see the pictures of the ocean taped over the windows?! 😉

    6
  71. Monala says:

    @CSK: I know you know this, but in case anyone reading takes you seriously:

    Fauci attended Regis High School in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he captained the school’s basketball team despite standing only 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) tall.

    (per Wikipedia. Bill Barr’s dad hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach math at Dalton, despite the fact that he was a 21-yo college dropout).

  72. CSK says:

    @Monala:
    We thought alike about that. I got an uneasy feeling as I was typing that that some humorless moron would read it and start a new Reddit about it, despite the fact that Epstein is/was 13 years younger than Fauci. I don’t know how many Trump-loving lurkers OTB has. I remember back in the days of Sarah Palin they’d leap out of the woodwork in order to defend their goddess if anyone here criticized her.

    And…has anyone ever explained why Barr the Elder hired someone without a college degree to teach at a prestigious private high school?

    1
  73. Teve says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker: nobody was picking on Hallmark. Nobody was picking on Hallmark, I would happily sell the Hallmark channel to 1000 people, but I get OANN people. There was a guy today, this afternoon, who told my black assistant manager that he bought a phone three months ago, and my assistant manager asked him if he remembered who sold him the phone, and he said “A Colored lady.”

  74. Teve says:

    The Qanon idea that kids are being tortured by billionaires for Adrenochrome, is the fucking stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Chemists have been synthesizing adrenaline for 116 years. You take phenylalanine, a natural amino acid, and do some stuff to it and you’ve got adrenaline. You oxidize adrenaline and you got Adrenochrome. You could call up Dow Chemical or Bristol Myers Squibb and you could order Adrenochrome by the fucking 50 gallon drum.

    You can buy it from Sigma-Aldrich RIGHT FUCKING NOW

    Adrenochrome

  75. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: Actually, I read an article that addressed the question either in Wikipedia about the Dalton School or somewhere else. From what I recall it amounted to “because… reasons, that’s why!” (There was a rationale, but it didn’t seem to make any sense in my jaded anti-intellectual world view.)

    1
  76. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Teve: Actually, I was, but maybe I was too oblique. It happens sometimes.

    ETA: And I don’t understand what torturing kids has to do with adrenochrome or why billionaires want any. Then again, I don’t read QAnon either.

  77. inhumans99 says:

    @Teve:

    Well, I love watching the Hallmark channel films (I think I have seen every single original film from the past 15 years or more no…seriously), but I would not touch most of the folks on Fox “News” with a 50 ft pole (I never watch the channel), and the other cuckoo bananas right wing sites I do not even like to check out even in a good to know what the other side is thinking capacity because the hate/bile/ignorance on sites like Gateway Pundit would just make me angry and sad at the same time.

    I can appreciate it if you loathe the Hallmark Channel (and similar channels like UP) but quite a few liberals share an affection for watching the guilty pleasure movies/shows from channels like Hallmark and UP TV.

    On the other hand, I sincerely suspect some folks who keep the Hallmark Channel humming would cringe that quite a few of their viewers also love the OAN network…Hallmark does not traffic in hate, rather their bread and butter is sappy films involving only in the movies scenarios where two people meet and fall in love.

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  78. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Jax: So then they get offended and feel aggrieved that their “right” to believe stupid shit is being trampled on….

    Just proving once again that you can’t fix stupid.

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  79. Bjantigua says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: it does not mention at all that kids were actually ILL! First the tests are notoriously inaccurate. Second one can test positive AFTER BEING CURED. Cases really mean nothing but a lot of testing was done. Were there hospitalizations?? Or deaths?? If not then its panikr porn.