Police brutality in Minneapolis murdered a black man who allegedly used a fake $20 bill. Petty crimes are adjudicated in a court of law. Police do not have the authority or right to use lethal force when confronting an unarmed person. After a long string of similar incidents where black people were unjustly murdered, the killing of George Floyd ignited protests across the nation. Some of the protests turned violent, and fires were burning in widely scattered cities in the midst of confrontations between police and protestors.
Racism is America’s deepest, most intractable sin.
The explosion of protest is unlikely to lead to any productive change until the racists in the White House are ousted and replaced by people who are determined to fight racism. We currently have a government of old white men who have used their words and deeds to stoke the…
Market Watch reported, “Trump believes coronavirus will vanish with April temps — experts are skeptical warm weather alone is enough.” The evidence from the Southern Hemisphere says Trump is wrong as he often is with the conspiracy theories he hears from Rush Limbaugh or Fox’s Hannity.
If you listen to Trump, what do you have to lose?
The answer is your life, but if you are a gambler that always thinks the odds are in your favor, no matter how many times you have lost, go ahead.
Please, do it!
The meteorological seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are opposite to those in the Northern Hemisphere: Spring starts September 1 and ends November 30; Summer starts December 1 and ends February 28 (February 29 in a Leap Year); Fall (autumn) starts March 1 and ends May 31. The Southern Hemisphere’s Summer happens when the Earth is closest to the Sun, and their winter when the Earth is furthest. This makes their seasons even more severe.
Brazil’s 1st case of COVID-10 was on February 25 (in the Summer) and the first death on March 18 (in the Fall). By May 27, 25,598 Brazilians had died of the virus (and it was still Fall or Autumn). In February, the average temperature in Brazil is 95 degrees Fahrenheit with heavy humidity. In March, the average is 85 degrees with heavy humidity.
As May and Autumn come to an end and winter begins, in South America, deaths from COVID-19 totaled more than 35,000, and, I repeat, this was during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer.
Brazil’s president reacted like President Donald Trump and decided to ignore the virus and treat it like it was a hoax, that it would go away like magic. The BBC reported in April, “Coronavirus advice ignored by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has come under criticism for his response to coronavirus, most recently for attending an anti-lockdown rally where he was seen coughing without covering his mouth.”
The Wall Street Journal recently reported in May, “U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Top 100,000 as South American Cases Surge.” Is that surge because Fall is giving way to Winter?
Australia and New Zealand are also in the Southern Hemisphere and Australia’s first case of COVID-19 was reported on January 25. To date, Australia has reported 103 deaths. Australia, unlike Brazil and the United States, closed its borders on March 20 and also started to close all “non-essential” services like pubs and clubs. The Conversation.com reported, “The effect of Australia’s strict border control measures, implemented relatively early in the pandemic, can clearly be seen in the graph below (click the link in this paragraph to see graph). Federal and state governments introduced strict social distancing rules; schools, pubs, churches, community centers, entertainment venues, and even some beaches were closed.”
New Zealand confirmed its first case on February 28. All borders and entry ports of New Zealand were closed to all non-residents at 11:59 pm on 19 March 2020, with returning citizens and residents being required to self-isolate. Since April 10, all New Zealanders returning from overseas must go into two weeks of supervised quarantine. Politico reported, “How New Zealand beat the coronavirus by isolating itself from the world.” Only twenty-two deaths from the virus have been confirmed in New Zealand.
Who do you trust, Donald Trump or the scientific experts and the facts from the Southern Hemisphere?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
China’s public health bureau recently published a chart showing how important it is for everyone to wear masks in public because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you have not seen the chart, here is a simple translation:
ONE: The risk of infection is 100% when a healthy person without a mask is exposed to an infected person without a mask.
TWO: When a healthy person wearing a mask is exposed to an infected person without a mask, the risk factor is 70%.
THREE: When an infected person is wearing a mask and the healthy one isn’t, the risk factor is 5%
FOUR: When both the healthy and infected people wear masks, the risk factor is 1.5%.
Without the ability to test people weekly to discover who is immune because they carry the antibodies that protect them from the virus, or to learn if they are infected or healthy, individuals that refuse to wear masks in public are playing Russian Roulette with their lives and/or the lives of others.
In fact, the odds are a lot worse than Russian Roulette where you load a five-chamber pistol with one bullet, spin the chamber and then place the barrel under your chin and pull the trigger. The average pistol has five chambers that hold five bullets. With four chambers empty, that means the odds of blowing your brains out are only 20%.
Have you heard of Typhoid Mary? Mary Mallon, also known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born cook believed to have infected 53 people, three of whom died, with typhoid fever, and the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the disease. After she was identified as a carrier, she continued to infect others.
Did you know that mad dogs running loose in public are usually shot or euthanized because they are a threat to other animals and people?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
I have one good reason to support Joe Biden. It can be summed up in one five-letter word: Trump.
Reader Randy Abraham offers more reasons:
The twittersphere has recently been aflame over Bernie Sanders’ decision to suspend his presidential campaign, and then his recent endorsement of frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden.
His most fervent supporters contend that Biden offers them nothing beyond a “not-Trump” candidacy.
This is what I say to them.
How about a sane immigration policy that does not separate families in crisis or lock children in cages?
How about health care policy that would boost subsidies for struggling families, lower the eligibility age for Medicare, provide a public option, and negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical firms?
How about forgiving student debts for low income students that were incurred at state and community colleges and historically black colleges and universities?
George Conway reveals who the real Trump is: “He fears being revealed as a fake or deranged, so he’ll call others fake or deranged. Because he fears losing, he’ll call them losers instead.”
Since the Washington Post is behind a paywall, and since I teased you with Teacher Ken’s brief summary, I thought I would share what Mr. Conway wrote. It was scathing. No matter how low your opinion is of the man who sits in the White House, his is even lower. He sees Trump as the loser and phony that he is. The bottom line is that Trump doesn’t care how many people die. He only cares about himself. He can’t even pretend to care about anyone else.
Americans died from covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month. That ought to keep any president awake at night
.
Not Donald Trump.
Just days ago, the president flipped out at a detailed New York Times article that described how he watches television at all hours, obsessed about how he’s covered in the news. As though…
You may have heard the news today that Trump fired the independent Inspector General in charge of monitoring the $2 trillion coronavirus relief fund.
I want to explain why this is a Very Big Deal.
When I worked in the Department of Education many years ago, I learned that the I.G. was nonpartisan and was respected and revered. As a political appointee, you knew that the I.G. was in charge of monitoring ethics and professional standards. He or she was not an omsbudsman, but the keeper of the rules and the law.
Trump fires Inspectors General as if they were his personal employees. Just last Friday, he fired the I.G. for the Director of National Intelligence, presumably for daring to do his duty during the Ukraine investigation. Trump wants everyone in the government to be loyal to him, not to abstract notions of ethics and norms. If anything shows his…
“Nobody knows what the coming months are going to hold. When asked when life might go back to normal by ABC News on March 15, Fauci stated that it will likely be ‘several weeks to a few months.’ So COVID-19 is going to be with us for a while.”
Today, March 25, we are about 7 months from the November 3, 2020 election, and President Trump has been talking about going back to the way it was to save the economy. In fact, since he made that announcement, the average of all the reputable polls, according to Real Clear Politics, Trump’s unpopularity dropped more than half from a minus 8.5% to a minus 3.5% in a couple of days.
This YouTube video is a news report.
If Trump takes the advice he heard from Tucker Carlson Tonight (to be clear, this Fox show is not news, it is opinion) recently, and is also influenced by the biggest two-or-three day-improvement in his poll numbers, and he decides to go back to normal and let seniors sacrifice themselves as Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (a 69 years old Republican) suggests, then the United States will become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and by November the number of deaths in the United States could reach into the millions.
This YouTube video is an Opinion based in the news
How many Americans could die from COVID-19 if Trump decides to return to normal, thinking that will help him win the election in November 2020?
CEBM Research reports that the global prediction interval for deaths from COVID-19 is different for each country and the current death rate runs between 0.51% to 8.32%.
The United States has a population of 331 million. The death rate from COVID-19 depends on what each country is doing to protect its citizens. Until we know what Trump is going to do, we have no idea, how many will die in the US.
If Trump orders a return to normal, the death rate could reach as high as 27.5 million or more.
If Trump actually listens to the experts and takes every precaution possible to protect the population instead of the economy, the death rate could be 1.69 million or even less, a few hundred thousand.
If Trump returns to normal to save the economy, he won’t stand a chance of winning the election in November. And if Trump listens to the experts and keeps the death count down, he still might lose because Trump’s ignorant, super-biased supporters (most of them are told what to think from Fox News and similar misleading and biased media outlets) think it is possible to return to normal and will think he sold them out since they are the ones that improved his poll numbers in the last couple of days by a dramatic margin.
In other words, the odds of Trump winning the election are slim at best no matter what he does. In fact, if Trump orders a return to normal to save the economy and the U.S. becomes the epicenter of the pandemic, the rest of the world might blockade and boycott the U.S. so nothing gets in or out.
What do you think that would do to the U.S. economy before November?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
