Tuesday

Hey Google

An opinion piece on Fox is not Headline News (7/4/2020)

Fear, COVID and Fox.

Fear, Lockdown, and Diversion: Comparing Drivers of Pandemic Economic Decline 2020

"While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection. Traffic started dropping before the legal orders were in place; was highly tied to the number of COVID deaths in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from larger/busier stores toward smaller/less busy ones in the same industry. States repealing their shutdown orders saw identically modest recoveries--symmetric going down and coming back."

This is the second study I've seen showing fear of COVID was the main driver of people locking down. People react when they are scared.

That explains most of the non-COVID headlines on the propaganda channel. Gotta keep the cult afraid of the outside world.

Good example. Fox scaring old white people but no mention of COVID 7/7/2020

Middle East

Seems there is a nation in the Middle East attacking it's neighbors.

Thursday

The Cult

The real leader of The Cult. Trump is just the current front-man.

The data is in: Fox News may have kept millions from taking the coronavirus threat seriously

Those who relied on mainstream sources — the network evening newscasts or national newspapers that President Trump constantly blasts as “fake news” — got an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s risks. Those were the news consumers who were more likely to respond accordingly, protecting themselves and others against the disease that has now killed more than 123,000 in the United States with no end in sight. 

Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed.

Fox and Coronavirus

The Fox site on 7/2/2020, over 25 articles but nothing in the headlines about the virus.

Conservatives and Masks

In the back rooms of conservative propaganda sites around the world, the cleanup must begin.

(stolen from 1984).

"Trump was always for masks. He had had always been for Masks.
A large part of the conservative political literature of the last five months was now
completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books,
pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs--all had to be rectified at
lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that
the chiefs of Fox intended that within one week no reference
to the war on masks, or the alliance with mask-hating, should remain in
existence anywhere." 

Tuesday

Israel vs US Evangelicals

As Odd Bed Fellows Fall out, Israel bans Evangelical GOD TV for Evangelizing Jews

Maybe evangelicals will pull those "We Support Israel" signs out of their Teabagistan front yards.


Israel vs Palestinians

Netanyahu: Annexation will advance peace, not set it back - I'm not sure I understand how annexing land taken by military force advances peace?


MAGA

So Much Winning

The Cult

Hannity is one dumb SOB. Found here: Dear Sean Hannity: Who Owes Whom an Apology?

Four Days in a Row 6/29/2020

Record Coronavirus increases are in the headlines of every news source around the world but not at Fox.

Third Day in a Row 6/28/2020

Record Coronavirus increases are in the headlines of every news source around the world but not at Fox.

Saturday Morning

Men and Hats

Wait, Why Did Men Stop Wearing Hats?



COVID 

You may want to avoid reopened restaurants after reading this new JP Morgan report on coronavirus outbreaks

'.. the "level of spending in restaurants three weeks ago was the strongest predictor of the rise in new virus cases over the subsequent three weeks,"

".. the JPMorgan study also found that increased spending in supermarkets correlated to a slower spread of the virus."

Sounds legit but in a few years we may find this study was paid for by the grocery store lobby. You can't trust anything American Crapitalism says.



Trump, Rs, and the Cult

There Is No Plan. There Is No Second-Term Agenda.- Hell, there was no first term agenda other than feed the hate the rubes had heard Fox News and Rush complaining about during the Obama years.



Misinforming the Cult  

Fox News: What Coronavirus? edition. Two days in a row.

6/25/20 - Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Japan, China, Germany, Belgium, Israel all have front page headlines on the coronavirus surge. Fox doesn't mention it.

6/24/20 - All the major news outlets are leading with the coronavirus surge in the south so Fox runs with this.

Friday

Trump

Trump adviser: Arab backlash against annexation plan is “overblown”

Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday, June 24 at the White House. Downplaying the opposition, she remarked: “He moves the embassy to Jerusalem, the Arab world is going to disappear. Thank God that wasn’t true. There’s always this scare tactic… of all the bad that’s going to happen and then it doesn’t happen,” she noted.

Or... like cops killing black guys for no reason, you reach the point where it explodes in your face. Stupid fucks !

Masks

I'd guess a huge proportion of Trump supporters also believe Israel can do no wrong. Maybe their heads will explode when they see Israel has fines for not wearing a mask.

Fines doubled for not wearing face masks

The coronavirus ministerial cabinet decided on Monday to keep the economy on track for recovery from the covid-19 crisis. Instead, the rising level of infection will be combated by stepping down hard on enforcing health rules. The fine for people caught without face masks is to be doubled to 500 shekels ($145) and places of business closed for lax adherence to the rules. Deputy Police Commissioner Ziv Sagiv said that police officers will be out and about on public transport, road traffic, taxis, night clubs and restaurants to enforce the rules with penalties.

The Cult

No More Mister Nice with a good post on The Cult

Everyone is in a conspiracy against Real Americans. Democrats. A very conservative governor. Even hospitals. Don't they understand that nearly everyone walks away from COVID-19 without a scratch, and the ones who don't had it coming? But as one poster says, all this will be going on "just until Trump is out of office, then the miracle happens, and the virus 'magically' goes away!" 

They believe all this. They believe that everything in life they don't like is fakery generated by evil conspiratorialists. The belief in the tolerability of the virus is theological -- shutting down the economy is bad, a crisis in Trump's reelection year is bad, so they can't believe what the rest of us believe. They have to believe an enemy made all this up specifically to hurt them, out of malice. And people they used to regard as allies are in on the conspiracy, if they don't agree with the nothing-to-see-here-move-along narrative.

Media

I think this is the first time I've seen "pissed" in a headline from a major news outlet. (CNN.com 6/22/2020)

Rogue Nations

Israel-US defense tech cooperation may soon get a big congressional boost

Monday

Trump vs The Cult

Trump is the phony, Not Fox News - Mish with a pretty good take on Trump and polls though he needs to clarify the headline. In this case the Fox poll is clearly in line with other polls so yep, Trump is the phony. Still there is no universe where Fox News is not phony overall.


Media

The Rage Unifying Boomers and Gen Z - Explaining today's protests to the old rich elite who may be wondering what's behind these protests they are hearing about.

Inside The Cult - Explaining the Trump Cult to a younger rich elite who are wondering just who these Trump supporters are.

tnb here.... 

Every person in this is an example of what you become if you watch the world through the Fox News filter. White is good, brown is bad, rural is good, big cities are crime ridden cesspools, media is fake, the Clintons and all politicians are all crooks, the deep state, liberals, hollywood and higher education are against real america, our religion is great others are evil, screaming for freedom (but not for you),  the rest of the world is against us, blah.. blah.. blah, blah, blah.

I know a bunch of people who think exactly like this. I've watched as they've been drawn into the cult over the last 30 years. Most started out as dope smoking freedom loving hippy-types but have spent much of the last 30 years on a steady diet of Fox News, Rush, Hannity, and others, like WLW's Bill Cunningham. Now a huge percentage have become racist, gun toting, Fox-Talking bots, absolute experts in whatever rage topic Fox is promoting this week, believing all others are lying to them. 

Conservative media, with support from the Rs built the cult. For years it was an army of rage bots they could wield for power but Trump took it over. He was rich, famous, looked presidential, said the same things the cult believed because he was programmed by the same cult. He was one of them. They fell for him and the US as we have known it will never be the same.

Good example of leading the cult.

Probably the biggest US news story of the day (6/20/20) is the Trump administration announcing the resignation of a US attorney who has been investigating Trump (and Epstein), That attorney, Geoffrey Berman, then announced that he had not resigned and planned on continuing his investigations.

This is on the front page of BBC, CNN, NBC, NYT, CBS, WP, basically all the major US news outlets. So what is headline news on Fox? An opinion piece by Newt.

The Cult knows nothing about the resignation. Fox will eventually report on this once the Cult leadership has decided on "the story"

Israel vs Palestine

With the World Focused on the Pandemic, Israel Prepares to Annex Large Swaths of the West Bank

"ISRAEL IS PLANNING a move on July 1 that the international community has long regarded as one of the gravest assaults on the international order and international law: annexation of land that does not belong to it. The annexation plan developed by the Netanyahu government in consultation with the Trump administration would declare not only the decades-old settlements in the West Bank which the U.N. Security Council in 2016 declared illegal to be permanent Israeli land, but also other swaths of Palestinian territory, including the Jordan Valley, that is central to Palestinian agriculture."

Related,   REP. ELIOT ENGEL’S POSITIONS ON FOREIGN POLICY ARE HAWKISH — AND SHAMEFUL.

Also related, Israelizing the American police, Palestinianizing the American people

As the US police become “Israelized,” you, the American people, become “Palestinianized.”

Wednesday

Bolton

A Warning - The best take I've seen on Bolton's book. Short and dead-on.



Trump and The Cult

No More Mister Nice Blog nails the R's cult.

"Right-wing elitists tolerated the peddling of this insanity to the rubes on the assumption that it wouldn't be for sale in their neighborhood. But unfortunately for them, one of the rubes ran for president, and won."

I've said this since the early days of Trump. Since the Clinton days, Fox and conservative media built a cult based on crazy conservative theories. The R's liked it because it was an army they could wield against the D's. Trump didn't seem to be a believer in the early, days but was either drawn-in by the constant barrage of propaganda or is a smart opportunist just trying to make some cash but either way he took over the Cult and the old-school R's have lost control. The bulk of the old R party are now loyal Trump Cult members and the Rs, and maybe the whole U.S. is just fucked.

Also, don't worry about his ability to drink from a water bottle, there are more important issues.

TRUMP'S IMPAIRMENTS ARE THE SAME ONES HE'S HAD FOR YEARS

Trump's ignorance, laziness, lack of empathy, bigotry, narcissism, amorality, unwillingness to read and learn, Dunning-Kruger certainty that he's the smartest man in the world are the real problems, along with his head full of Fox News propaganda and his alliances with such loathsome human beings as Mitch McConnell, Leonard Leo, and Vladimir Putin. Let's not get hung up on Trump's neurological state.

Trump Tells The Truth



COVID19

Covid Tracking

Sunday

Trump

The American Virus

George Floyd Protests and Trump's Walk of Shame

Trump is incapable of wielding power


Police

How Police Became Paramilitaries

We Crunched the Numbers: Police — Not Protesters — Are Overwhelmingly Responsible for Attacking Journalists


Media

The Liberal-Media Isn't,  Volume 221

NYT’s meltdown on Tom Cotton recalls its four op-ed pieces justifying slaughter of Gaza demonstrators


Fox Propaganda working hard scare the cult this Sunday morning. Keeping the Cult's favorite enemy, HRC, face up there. They didn't believe Fauci the last few weeks now they believe. Newt lies. Cops are killed. Violence everywhere.

Wednesday

Cops

A good one from Gin and Tacos - THIS IS AN US PROBLEM

DON’T YOU MAKE MY BROWNSHIRT BLUE



I can't Breath

Caught on camera, police explode in rage and violence across the US

America’s occupation by militarized police is in full view

Misinformation

This might be the most bullshit story I've seen the last week.

What is Antifa, the far-left group tied to violent protests?  complete bullshit.

Fox News should not be allowed to use the word "News"

A follow up from The Intercept: White House Forced to Retract Claim Viral Videos Prove Antifa Is Plotting Violence

Fox and The White spread bullshit.



COVID

Masks help stop the spread of coronavirus – the science is simple

found here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/1/1949196/-Cartoon-Winning

Sunday

Misinformation

Hey Google. An opinion piece by a Fox Propaganda person is not headline news.

On the Riots

From the Jerusalem Post

"The conspiracies put forward in the US to lay blame for the protests on a complex organized network is part of a pattern of shifting that has become increasingly common in America. Rather than seeing entrenched racism and police brutality as fueling protests, including police violence against journalists, there is a preference to see a hidden hand that can be more easily labeled as an enemy.

These are tactics that were once more common to the Soviet bloc countries and Middle Eastern regimes when trying to explain protests. For instance, the Assad regime asserted that legitimate protests in 2011 were an imperialist conspiracy. Today, the situation appears reversed: In the US across the political spectrum, there is a preference to see protests as part of a cartel, white supremacists, antifa, Russians and MS-13 gangs, as opposed to local grievances bubbling over after a very visible sign of police brutality."

Who Exactly Is Doing the Looting, and Who’s Being Looted?

"We live in an Orwellian era, in which working-class people pilfering convenience store goods is called “looting.” Rich people stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, on the other hand, is just well-functioning “public policy.”

Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide




Police

I'm not sure we should ever let our police train in Israel.  Israel police kill unarmed Palestinian in occupied East Jerusalem






COVID

Be careful about what you breath!

How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit

Reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2

Catching Up

Trump

Always trying to blame others - Coronavirus: What are President Trump's charges against the WHO?


COVID

People acting like assholes over masks.

A misbegotten, warped freedom obsession is killing us. pic.twitter.com/KbYaTVtR0O

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) May 22, 2020

The Rude Pundit  - Hey, Dumbass Conservatives, We on the Left Want Everything Back to Normal, Too

The Virus Doesn’t Care

The Pandemic and the GOP’s Science Problem

Misinformation

Fox throws out a front page misinformation piece. - Not really mask related but still muddies the waters of the retail asshole-ness that's going on over masks. California retail employee posts photo of her bloody face after alleged customer attack


Israel vs the World

Planning to steal more land while the world fights the virus. Netanyahu says new Israeli gov't should annex illegal settlements

A pretty good summary here. The End of the Oslo Accords: Palestinians pull out of Agreements in face of Netanyahu’s Sudetenland Moment.


2020

Why, oh why, do they love him so much? - If the Ds could bring themselves to offer even a decent candidate this wouldn't be close. Trump vs Biden. not a lot different than Trump vs HRC except the Ds aren't as excited. The corporate establishment cult vs The Fox News Cult. 25% of the people fall into each cult with the rest forced to choose from two people they don't really like.

Friday

Life Lesson #49

Financial Advice - Net Worth vs Liquid Net Worth



Trump and COVID

If the President Tests Positive for the Virus, What Happens?  -  We will never know if he tests positive. He would deny it and scream false news as long as possible. The only way we'll know for sure is if it kills him.



COVID19

The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them

CDC: COVID-19 Can Spread 13 Feet, Travel on Shoes

Every time I see a picture of a crowded store with most people not wearing masks or even attempting physical distancing, I figure my personal lockdown has been extended by two weeks. This is getting old.

Wednesday

Medicare for All

If we had it, you would never read articles like this.

How to Get Health Insurance if You’re Worried About Coronavirus or Have Lost Your Job

Also, A Guide to the Nightmare of Getting Health Insurance in a Pandemic

With a nice flow chart 

A Medicare for All chart

Misinformation

'What are we doing this for?': Doctors are fed up with conspiracies ravaging ERs

".. [social media] .. have struggled to contain the spread of misinformation, some of it coming from positions of authority."

We need a lot more articles like this. Still, it's not just social media, i.e. Fox, Rush, and the right-wing propaganda machine and it would help if these articles would call out those spreading information from "positions of authority".

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Fox News - Keeping their employees away from the office while telling the cult followers to go back to work.

Saturday

Misinformation

About that Pandemic Video

• If You Found That ‘Plandemic’ Video Convincing, Read This Too
• Fact-checking ‘Plandemic’: A documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus

The Pandemic video was all over my Teabagistan Facebook feed. YouTube and Facebook pulled the video and now my Teabagistan Facebook feed is filled with "News" articles with links to the video setting on other servers.

Do I report these as FALSE NEWS? HATE?

Facebook needs a way to report "Misinformation".


WTF?

When science conflicts with your beliefs, just turn the science off. Stupid fuckers.

State health department tells university COVID-19 modeling team to stop work, limits data access10



Smell the Freedom

Anti-Mask Snowflakes Of The Right - A quote below but the whole thing is good.

"Oh for Pete’s sake. Late last year, I sat in a shabby apartment in Moscow, interviewing an elderly man whose father was tortured and executed by the KGB, and who, as a 15-year-old boy, was taken into custody by the KGB one night, and thrown into a prison for years. He cried telling me the story. And now I have to read my local newspaper conservative whine about how we’re living in a police state because of the stupid mask he has to wear when he goes out to buy a six-pack." 

Trump and Russia

Trump’s Transition Team Colluded With Israel. Why Isn’t That News?




Trump and Leadership

"What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now, who are scared?” he asked. Trump refused the opportunity to utter some words of comfort, instead launching into a tirade in which he said the journalist was a "terrible reporter" and that it was a "very nasty question."

More proof Trump is just a dick. 

found here: As Bethany Mandel's 'grandma killer' tweet proves, vice-signaling is the right's newest and most toxic trend

2020

Biden Sides With Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo in Backing Coup Effort in Venezuela - And the Ds want us to be excited to vote for this guy?


COVID-19

A lot of discussion recently about transmission dynamics, most of which are extrapolated from viral loads & estimates. What does contact tracing/community testing data tell us about actual probability of #COVID19 transmission(infection rate), high risk environments/age?
[thread]

— Dr Muge Cevik (@mugecevik) May 4, 2020

Back to Work

Functional Fear Predicts Public Health Compliance in the COVID-19 Pandemic

.. the only predictor of positive behavior change (e.g., social distancing, improved hand hygiene) was fear of COVID-19,

but what if propaganda convinces the rubes that there is nothing to fear? 

You can open the Olive Gardens but you can't make them go.

Americans Didn’t Wait For Their Governors To Tell Them To Stay Home Because Of COVID-19


Cartoonist David Horsey is good.