I pity the poor people at SNL who are professionally obliged to come up with parody skits making fun of Trump. If his actual behavior and speeches had appeared in a made for cable TV drama featuring the demented leader of some little banana republic, they would have been rejected as far too ridiculous. The fact that he will remain in control of the nuclear arsenal for another month and a half, and is free to hire and fire senior Pentagon officials as he pleases (already done to disastrous effect), should terrify people. We’ll probably hit 400,000 US Covid deaths by the time he is out of there, but at this point he can probably only slightly increase that if he tries. Which I’m sure he will.

In...two three four
Hold...two three four
Out...two three four
Hold...two three four

Navy SEAL breathing technique. It really works!

Absolutely. I have found that I can drop my blood pressure measurably by concentrated breathing. Alcohol intake also helps, although possibly only in the short run.

Buteyko method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Buteyko

It can stop death.

So, the losing loser who lost claims tonight that he would have lost gracefully if he had lost. But, since in his little fantasy world, where QAnon rules, Fox News is too liberal to count, and he can freely do his daughter because he thinks she’s hot, he won. We’ll just have to wait and see whether we live in that world or not. I’m hoping not, but I don’t see any guarantees. Hopefully, the remaining blood on his hands (while president) will mostly be from Covid.

So just to demonstrate how desperate Trump supporters are, the Attorney fucking General of Texas just sued in the US Supreme Court to eliminate the popular votes In Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. The reason is that he doesn’t like that Trump lost. Of course, he has no standing to sue, but it is perhaps also noteworthy that said states have a lot larger population than his nest of rattlers. By 10 million or so. One sure hopes that anything anybody can do to hurt his future career will be done. We’re only scratching the surface here. The guns are already out, and will presumably be fired soon. Like, by that heavily armed well regulated militia that stopped just short of invading the home of the Secretary of State of Michigan this weekend.

This is the story of the King's new clothes:

Now there was once a king who was absolutely insane about new clothes and one day, two swindlers came to sell him what they said was a magic suit of clothes. Now, they held up this particular garment and they said, "Your Majesty, this is a magic suit." Well, the truth of the matter is, there was no suit there at all. But the swindlers were very smart, and they said, "Your Majesty, to a wise man this is a beautiful raiment but to a fool it is absolutely invisible." Naturally, the King not wanting to appear a fool, said,

So, this feels like the concrete lead-up to the civil war. 17 states have now joined the frivolous suit filed by Texas to cancel all votes cast in the presidential election in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, on the sound legal ground that since Trump won Florida and Ohio, he obviously should have won these states, too. Since he lost them all - cancel!

Now, more than ever it becomes clear what it means to be a Republican. They presumably assume that they can slink back under the rocks they come from if the Texas effort to wipe out US democracy fails. I should hope not.

Swan song

US carries out federal execution despite appeals

https://www.rte.ie/news/us/2020/1211/11 ... execution/

Despite Mr Trump's defeat in the 3 November 3 presidential election - which he has refused to concede - his administration plans to carry out more federal executions before he leaves office.

In between a few rounds of golf.

Yeah - let’s kill us some bad guys! It’s obviously just throwing some raw meat to the Proud Boys (who for the grace of their god do not happen to find themselves on death row). Compared to what he is doing on the Covid front, it just pales into insignificance, though. We’re now running north of 3,000 deaths per day, and still in an exponential growth phase that will probably last through January, in the best of circumstances. Meanwhile, in a quest to do as much damage to the Biden administration as he can possibly manage, he is now trying to undermine public accept of the vaccine by badgering the FDA to approve it before having a chance to review it.

I wonder what those 126 House Republicans will tell their grandchildren?

I wonder what those 126 House Republicans will tell their grandchildren?

Not to mention the 17 Republican state attorneys general. Ken Paxton (the Texas SAG) obviously sued because he needs a presidential pardon to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison for securities fraud. These other clowns will probably plead insanity. They were under the spell, fully believing that Trump would have destroyed them if they didn’t stand up to be counted.

Incidentally, anybody with an interest in statistics should take a quick look at the technical appendix in the Texas suit (starting on page 20) explaining why Trump couldn’t possibly have lost in the four states. It features things like a z score of 396, and claims of probabilities less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power. All derived (by some very old economist) from the assumptions that i.i.d. voter preferences were essentially unchanged from 2016 and that those voting via mail had the same preferences as those voting in person.

There is obviously nothing that can be said about the proper future of Trump. But as for the Proud Boys and his other henchmen, they should just be mowed down like the weed they are. In comparison, the very hard Brexit being engineered by the people pulling BJ’s strings just sets the UK back by 50 years. Trump is, at this point, aiming for more like 250 years. In the meantime, he’s just cheering on a few extra tens of thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths. And hosting the odd Hanukkah party...

Anybody thinking Trump is going away any time soon are sadly wrong. He just retweeted a suggestion that the (Republican) Governor and Secretary of State of Georgia should be sent to jail for not throwing the election his way. Many people will die before he goes away.