2020 US Election (Part 3)

[Sommerswerd]

Trump will claim that he ended the virus while at the same time, he will spend the next year attacking Joe Biden for not ending the virus as it continues to ravage the country before vaccines are widely available.

Obstructing the transition was part of this plan. By refusing to transition, Trump hoped that he could deny Biden from having any role in the coronavirus response, and thus deny him any credit for ending the pandemic. What he was hoping, is that the vaccines would be distributed sufficiently for him to declare that the pandemic was "over" during his Presidency, so that no one would give Biden any credit for doing anything. Unfortunately, the clock has run out and the spread is too great. There is no chance that the pandemic will be over before he leaves office. Vaccine distribution may have started by then, but the vaccine is a two-course dosage with 6 weeks between doses, so very few folks will have finished their vaccine doses by the time Trump is out.

Trump would not only deserve zero credit for ending the pandemic, he is largely to blame for how poorly the US has handled it. So its fitting that he has been thrown out of office and won't be POTUS when the pandemic ends, so he won't be able to take credit for ending it. As you point out, that won't stop him from trying to take credit.

I think that how the news media chooses to handle Trump going forward will be very important to determining how his 2024 run goes. If they, FOX News in particular, continue to give him a ton of free press like they did in the 2016 cycle, he will be well positioned to take the Republican nomination again. If they mostly ignore him, he will be relegated to OANN, Newsmax, or his own rumored Trump Network, and he may end up relegated to running an insurgent Conservative party.

 

[innonimatu]

Love to see you recommending someone be out of a job because they don't agree with your political opinions. Very pro-worker.

Recommending fools for a job is not being "pro-worker". It's being a fool.

And it's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact against what you may call, tu use current terms, "fake news". The facts are easily searchable if you disbelieve me.
Being all relativistic, "everything is a matter of opinion" thing, is part of what helped screw up the world to the point we're having to live with now.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, I'm not sure it's really a requirement that a Canadian security guard be conversant on Portuguese politics, and be able to pass some type of minimum threshold in understanding. A person is allowed to be wrong, after-all. I also wouldn't fire a security guard if they were zealous advocates of the gold-standard, Creationism, or the conspiratorial beginnings of Aramco. Sure, there are specific locations where I'd think twice about posting any of those people, but the permission to be horrendously wrong about something pretty unimportant is going to be part-and-parcel of any type of worker protections.

Fools need jobs too. We cannot just keep firing them for being fools. We employ them at their competence.

 

[Kyriakos]

China, North Korea, and which Asian country is the third head?

All three heads are China

 

[Gorbles]

Recommending fools for a job is not being "pro-worker". It's being a fool.

And it's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact against what you may call, tu use current terms, "fake news". The facts are easily searchable if you disbelieve me.
Being all relativistic, "everything is a matter of opinion" thing, is part of what helped screw up the world to the point we're having to live with now.

It is your opinion he's a fool, sure. There are some facts in this world for sure, but your opinions on the EU and the governance of Portugal are not amongst those facts. Simple as.

And regardless of how correct you are or aren't, you're the one suggesting he be fired. Like I alluded to earlier, that's grossly hypocritical and not worth me bothering with further. It undermines anything you've ever said about worker protections, and that's all I need to know.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Seems to be. Hes been getting very upset on (and with) Twitter due to people making fun of him.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...erdon-twitter-trend/ar-BB1bpcJU?ocid=msedgdhp

The video is hilarious. He's really sore about losing

Trump used the news conference to air his usual false claims of election fraud and complain about how unfairly he was being treated. When a reporter tried to ask him a follow-up question, he snapped: “I'm the president of the United States. Don't ever talk to the president that way.”

Which immediately reminded me of:

 

[Patine]

Obstructing the transition was part of this plan. By refusing to transition, Trump hoped that he could deny Biden from having any role in the coronavirus response, and thus deny him any credit for ending the pandemic. What he was hoping, is that the vaccines would be distributed sufficiently for him to declare that the pandemic was "over" during his Presidency, so that no one would give Biden any credit for doing anything. Unfortunately, the clock has run out and the spread is too great. There is no chance that the pandemic will be over before he leaves office. Vaccine distribution may have started by then, but the vaccine is a two-course dosage with 6 weeks between doses, so very few folks will have finished their vaccine doses by the time Trump is out.

Trump would not only deserve zero credit for ending the pandemic, he is largely to blame for how poorly the US has handled it. So its fitting that he has been thrown out of office and won't be POTUS when the pandemic ends, so he won't be able to take credit for ending it. As you point out, that won't stop him from trying to take credit.

I think that how the news media chooses to handle Trump going forward will be very important to determining how his 2024 run goes. If they, FOX News in particular, continue to give him a ton of free press like they did in the 2016 cycle, he will be well positioned to take the Republican nomination again. If they mostly ignore him, he will be relegated to OANN, Newsmax, or his own rumored Trump Network, and he may end up relegated to running an insurgent Conservative party.

I think you, and everyone else here, gives him too much credit. Most on this forum make him out to be a Machiavellian mastermind with actual solid malignant agendas, policies, goals, and convictions. It's obvious, though, he's just an egotistical glory hound, publicity hound, and blowhard where all the policies and tenors of government attributing to his own lovingly crafted ideals are just him telling minions (most obviously chosen by underlings he just gives the nod to without much venting or care - his Cabinet, staff, and Supreme Court Nominations and the motley crew and mixed bag - and, in large part, revolving door, they are show this - except for Bannon and his own family, and that oil plutocrat he had as Secretary of State, who he previously knew) to, "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," as Crowley had said, is the true source of all the awful policies, laws, and actions, save for a few well documented ones out of his own mouth enthusiastically, in the Trump Administration. I really don't see him as the type with true conviction and belief in these matters to mastermind to create these grand schemes. It seems obvious that, to Trump, the Presidency was just a greater and bigger vehicle of self-promotion for him, from his point of view, and, as much as he "complains," outside media excoriation and criticism all the time, and fake news, I believe, and it seems obvious, his intent is to be the "centre of the universe," and have EVERYONE talking about him, and often, whether his supporters OR his critics. And he accomplished that in spades. And we should ALL feel like fools for giving him exactly what he obviously wanted, at heart, and make him the U.S. President - or world leader period - to get the most over-coverage, endless commentary, or gossip contemporary to their actual tenure in power. All of the rest of the atrocious policies and actions, which, as I said, except for a few key ones, seem to come down mostly from Government underlings more invested in those ideas. The greatest evil of Trump is the egotistical showman who apathetically allowed people with true, cold-hearted, cutthroat, vicious, hateful, and criminal agendas to get their way while he played malignant mascot. Understanding this - which should have been easily discernable from 30-40 years previously in the public eye - and not that he's a scheming, Machiavellian comicbook mastermind, is key to truly understanding the Trump Administration I believe, and it seems glaringly obvious. "Know your enemy, and your battle is half-one," is a great quote by Sun Tzu. But who I am I kidding here. In the modern American socio-political divide, no one wants to know their enemy, they want to promote and believe lies, myths, and bad stereotypes about them, and put them in absolutist, bloc-view demographic stereotyped boxes - which I believe gives you a negative start in a Sun-Tzu battle...

 

[Kaitzilla]

Blaming Trump for 250K deaths is a lie. You have told it so often you seem to believe it, but it remains a lie.

Yeah it's probably over 300k when you look at excess deaths

I've looked around for excess deaths in total by year, and this article is pretty interesting.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period.

Note that 2019 total deaths > 2018 > 2017 > 2016 > 2015 in USA due purely to population growth. (I hope )

The simplest way is to take the raw number of deaths observed in a given period in 2020 – say Week 10, which ended on 8 March4 – and subtract the average number of deaths in that week over the previous years, for example the last five.

I'm really not sure why they thought the 5-year average from 2015 to 2019 is what the deaths in 2020 should be compared to?

The closest number of deaths that we should have had in 2020 with no pandemic is simply the 2019 line plus a bit more due to population growth.

I know 5 year averages are appealing to remove noise, but the population growth each year is very noticeable, and the 5 year average puts things near 2017 which was a smaller population.


Anyway, it was very clever to exclude the last month of data due to the time it takes to collect death records.
I had no idea it takes many weeks to record all the people who died on a given day.

**Edit**
Right, so the USA has a population growth of 0.6% per year as of 2018.
I'll just add 0.6% to the 2019 number and compare it to 2020 deaths to get excess deaths.

**Edit 2**
I got 273,869 excess deaths doing it this way from March 15th to October 11th with a spreadsheet.



Huh, that is remarkably close to what they got.
I must have made an error somewhere with my reading or understanding.

Or they included deaths starting from Jan. 1st (before the Covid plague in mid-march started)?


Anyway, the excess deaths number for 2020 should gradually increase as the true number of deaths each week in 2020 is recorded.
And greatly increase as the final weeks of 2020 are included.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

**Edit**
Right, so the USA has a population growth of 0.6% per year as of 2018.
I'll just add 0.6% to the 2019 number and compare the 2020 deaths to that number to get excess deaths.

That's not how those statistics work. The increase in population is a different statistic than the number of deaths, so you can't just add them.

 

[El_Machinae]

It's a useful point to make, but I think that Kait is going to add 0.6% to the 2019 number of deaths.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Yeah, it wasn't clear which number was added, so I removed the example, since it might be what he was doing.

Still, you cannot simply add 0.6%. Most people die of old age. The 0.6% extra population doesn't add up to that. I'm thinking the math is a little more complicated.

Unless of course it's a big ploy to increase the number of deaths to make Trump look bad. Yeah, that must be it.

 

[Kaitzilla]

That's not how those statistics work. The increase in population is a different statistic than the number of deaths, so you can't just add them.

Right, age groups.

Uhh, that is a very complicated calculation to combine population growth + number of deaths properly.

I still think adding a bit to the 2019 line is the right way to go.

 

[Patine]

That's not how those statistics work. The increase in population is a different statistic than the number of deaths, so you can't just add them.

Yeah, it wasn't clear which number was added, so I removed the example, since it might be what he was doing.

Still, you cannot simply add 0.6%. Most people die of old age. The 0.6% extra population doesn't add up to that. I'm thinking the math is a little more complicated.

Unless of course it's a big ploy to increase the number of deaths to make Trump look bad. Yeah, that must be it.

It's a useful point to make, but I think that Kait is going to add 0.6% to the 2019 number of deaths.

I've looked around for excess deaths in total by year, and this article is pretty interesting.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Note that 2019 total deaths > 2018 > 2017 > 2016 > 2015 in USA due purely to population growth. (I hope )


I'm really not sure why they thought the 5-year average from 2015 to 2019 is what the deaths in 2020 should be compared to?

The closest number of deaths that we should have had in 2020 with no pandemic is simply the 2019 line plus a bit more due to population growth.

I know 5 year averages are appealing to remove noise, but the population growth each year is very noticeable, and the 5 year average puts things near 2017 which was a smaller population.


Anyway, it was very clever to exclude the last month of data due to the time it takes to collect death records.
I had no idea it takes many weeks to record all the people who died on a given day.

**Edit**
Right, so the USA has a population growth of 0.6% per year as of 2018.
I'll just add 0.6% to the 2019 number and compare it to 2020 deaths to get excess deaths.

**Edit 2**
I got 273,869 excess deaths doing it this way from March 15th to October 11th with a spreadsheet.

Huh, that is remarkably close to what they got.
I must have made an error somewhere with my reading or understanding.

This number should gradually increase as the true number of deaths each week in 2020 is recorded.
And greatly increase as the final weeks of 2020 are accurately tallied.

In the world today, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Myanmar have negative growth rates due to excess death. VERY few other countries meaningfully do. And that IS in COVID-19 2020 statistics. I don't think a lot of people understand the kind of conditions that cause negative growth rates of national populations due to death.

 

[EnglishEdward]

My information on Portugal is from a Portuguese-Canadian security guard I personally know, who says the issues with Portugal's politics are not actually from it's electoral corruptibility, but from the political culture of the parties themselves, and the VERY significant lack of distinction except on a very few issues -

Let us start at the beginning shall we, how long ago was it that that security guard left Portugal to settle in Canada?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Right, age groups.
Uhh, that is a very complicated calculation to combine them properly.

I was just thinking about that, age groups, health of those age groups, the age of that 0.6% (new borns and immigrant). You'd have to compare those over a period of years, because you can have outliers.

Not straight forward.

I still think adding a bit to the 2019 line is the right way to go.

You do you. Unless I completely understand the math these fellers are using (and I don't) I'm not going to question it. One because I don't really see the relevance outside of having a bigger number to use in a discussion, two if it's a peer reviewed study, I'm going to let the boys and girls who do this for a living have a say.

 

[Estebonrober]

Dominion Voting Systems slams Sidney Powell election lawsuit - Business Insider

It said Powell's document "appears to be a very rough draft" of a lawsuit "alleging a bizarre election fraud conspiracy that — were it possible — would necessarily require the collaboration of thousands of participants."

So yea. . . reality is hard for the conservative these days

 

[Patine]

So yea. . . reality is hard for the conservative these days

Can the relentless and constant partisan bias in every damned statement, will you, please. Life is hard, period, these days. And everyone wearing partisan blinders and endlessly doing partisan scapegoating, and demand everyone not interested in such crap must play along or have their party affiliation decided for them, falsely and disingenuously, is not helping ANYONE at all and only drives things FURTHER down the tubes and killing what remains of any credibility in the proceedings.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Mr Trump’s admission on Thursday that he would leave if Mr Biden won the electoral college made headlines worldwide - despite the fact that it should not have been necessary to state.

The president on Friday appeared irritated by the response, and tweeted: “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous “80,000,000 votes” were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!”

The president’s legal team, led by Rudy Giuliani, are continuing to challenge results in the courts, but their hopes - faint from the start - are fading. They have had more than 35 cases dismissed so far.

I guess Trump can "prove" all his votes in 2016 were legit too.

 

[Kyriakos]

Too much drama.
That said, it is highly likely that Biden (or his handlers) will get involved in an invasion, like previous US administrations since the birth of the US.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Too much drama.
That said, it is highly likely that Biden (or his handlers) will get involved in an invasion, like previous US administrations since the birth of the US.

Sure thing.

Every US President gets to have 1 new war if they want it.

The evil Bush double dipped though.