Is it too much to hope this is Trump’s Doom?

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the New York Times managed to get their hands on Trump’s tax returns, and we finally learn why, unsurprisingly, he refused to release them willingly. He’s a tax cheat, a fraud, and a loser.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

I pay more in taxes than this “billionaire” — and you probably do, too — which I’m sure his supporters will claim is an example of his canny business acumen. Harder to rationalize with that excuse, though, is that his way out of paying taxes is to lose so much money in the businesses he runs that he is sitting in his office with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, much of which will come due in the next few years. Poor man. I thought I was struggling with a mortgage and legal debts. His daughter is also implicated in the shenanigans, in which he paid her tens of millions of dollars (and paid himself!) that he then declared as losses he could deduct from his taxes.

I’d like to know who he is beholden to, which would have been information we should have had prior to the last election.

And right now, he’s desperate to hold onto the presidency, not for the good of the country, but to escape the financial obligations that are going to splat his griftin’ ass into putrid slimy gibs in the near future. Unless, that is, a lot of bankers see him as representing their just fate and try to shelter him.

As the Wormhat turns, so goes the nation

That was a busy weekend, but I still disciplined myself to crank out a Sunday video, even if it didn’t appear until the 11:00 hour. What I talk about here is the sad case of Hans Wormhat, a YouTuber with a very strange channel.

What’s interesting about him, though, is that he is neither stupid nor crazy — he’s a person with an absurdly strong ideological and religious commitment that he is furiously rationalizing. The world is coming at him with both barrels, but he carries all the baggage of fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity, and his way of reconciling reality and his faith is to deny everything that causes a conflict. Noah’s Ark was real, but couldn’t possibly have held millions of species…therefore, there are Illuminati high schools with sports teams and mascots used to train up puppeteers, fursuit wearers, and animatronics experts who populate the world with fake animals, with the intent of undermining your faith in the simple truth of God, who created a flat plate world with a firmament above and just a few useful, normal animals for people. There are no sharks or penguins, they are demonic creations built by Satan to deceive you into denying Jesus.

He has crazy ideas, but take him and his kind seriously: he’s not crazy or dumb, he’s just way way out there on the spectrum of ideological zealotry. He’s not all that unusual, though. He’s like a QAnon or Trump supporter with the dial turned up to 11. Ignore his kind and next thing you know, you’ll be living in a country that has come totally unmoored from reality.

On a lighter note, if you watch to the end, you’ll see my lovely list of Patreon supporters in the scrolling credits, and I also put in some drone footage shot from 60m above my front yard. It’s fall! The trees are turning all orange and yellow! I think. Unless the local Illuminati high school students have been out pranking us again with paint.

The Matinee of Pain starts in about an hour and a half

At 1pm Central time, I’ll be watching … The Giant Spider Invasion. It’s good, right? It’s one of the ones you guys recommended, so I’m sure it’ll be terrific. The description says,

A black hole hits North Wisconsin and opens a door to other dimensions. Giant 15 meter spiders emerge from it, who have an appetite for human flesh! Dr. Jenny Langer and Dr. Vance from the NASA try to save the world.

Totally scientifically plausible, sure.

Rural Minnesota is problematic

Minnesota was trying to carry out a COVID-19 testing survey — a smart move, because what we desperately need is more information, and doing good sampling and determining what the frequency of infection in the state is will help us design good, evidence-based policy. I say was, though, because the state just called it all off.

A door-to-door COVID-19 testing survey has been halted due to multiple incidents in outstate Minnesota of residents intimidating and shouting racial and ethnic slurs at state and federal public health survey teams.

The CDC pulled its federal surveyors out of Minnesota this week following reports of verbal abuse and intimidation, including an incident in the Iowa border town of Eitzen, Minn., in which a survey team walking to a house was blocked by two cars and threatened by three men, including one who had a gun.

Jesus christ but I despise that kind of ignorant yahoo. They were being offered free testing, and they react with guns and blockades, and then they’ll probably go off to a Trump rally and will vote Republican. We are so fucked by our fellow citizens.

In other news, Minnesota’s pandemic status has been downgraded to “uncontrolled”.

Minnesota has dropped into the “uncontrolled spread” category of the COVID-19 Exit Strategy website, joining neighbors Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas that had been at that lowest rating of pandemic progress for weeks due to rising novel coronavirus infections.

I wonder if these two stories are somehow related?