Update on comments policy

Just a reminder of the new comments policy that I instituted a couple of weeks ago.

That policy laid out certain rules that I expect commenters here to follow. I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to skirt the rules, such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his own pocket. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others.

Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments. If you are not sure if a comment that you are thinking of posting violates any of these rules, that is a good indication not to post it.

I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted.

These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.

Trump continues getting hammered on Arlington visit

Throughout his life, creepy Donald Trump has adopted the strategy taught him by his mentor, the late infamous Roy Cohn, that you never back down and never apologize. You always charge ahead and attack whoever crosses you, throwing everything you have at them. It helps if you have money and can threaten lawsuits. This can result in people being too intimidated to fight back, even when they are in the right. His staff clearly follow him in this.

But in the case of the Arlington cemetery fiasco, creepy Trump may have made a bad miscalculation. What should have been a one-day story if, as I suggested a few days ago, his staff had claimed a misunderstanding and quickly apologized to the cemetery staffer, has now become a multi-day story about violations of the law, thuggery towards government employees, and disrespecting the military.
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America is not great but not in deep decline

America has a lot of problems. It needs to invest far more in education and health care so that everyone gets access to decent quality levels of both. It needs to improve its social safety net so that we reduce the numbers of homeless and the level of food insecurity. And it needs to treat its undocumented immigrants and prison population far more humanely.

But when creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance talk of America’s decline, they are not calling for the improvement of any of those things. What they are describing is a largely fictional set of problems designed to make their supporters think that the country is on the verge of collapse when it is manifestly not.

Kevin Drum looks at eleven complaints they make and compares it with macro-economic markers of the economy and says that the country is nowhere close to being in decline and is in fact doing quite well. What creepy Trump and weird Vance are describing is based on (is anyone surprised?) lies. Drum sums up:
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What do windmills and bacon have in common?

They both occupy an inordinate amount of space in creepy Donald Trump’s brain.

His obsession with windmills is well known. For one, he thinks that that they kill birds in vast numbers. This has a superficial plausibility since some birds do die by hitting the blades. But that number is far fewer than the number killed by cats, power lines, or by flying into windows.

But bewilderingly, he also thinks that windmills kill whales in large numbers and that the sound of the windmills causes cancer.

So why does creepy Trump hate windmills so much to the point of delusion? Back in 2022, Philip Bump ventured an explanation.
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The election numbers games: polls, ratings, crowd sizes, money

American elections, because of their absurd length, tend to focus a lot on various statistics in order to gauge the changing political fortunes of the candidates. But while each measure provides some indication of how things are going, one needs to treat each with some caution.

Opinion polls: These are probably the best measure of where the race stands but there are important caveats. The weird electoral college system in the US tends to have a bias towards red states so national polls have to be treated with caution. There are roughly seven so-called swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that usually determine the outcome of the election. Polls taken in just those states have more significance than national polls. This does not mean that national polls are useless but it is estimated that Democrats need approximately a +4% margin in the national polls in order to have an even chance of winning the Electoral College.

Right now, it looks like Democrats are approaching that 4% margin, making the race even, which is a huge improvement from the situation just a month ago.

A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday showed Harris leading Trump nationwide by 45% to 41% – a margin consistent with other surveys since last week’s boisterous Democratic national convention in Chicago that confirmed the US vice-president’s status as the nominee.
…

A Fox News poll on Thursday showed the vice-president with narrow leads in three out of four southern Sun belt states; 48 to 47% in Arizona, and 48 to 46% in both Georgia and Nevada. In the fourth, North Carolina – which Trump won by just 1.4% in 2020 – the Republican nominee was ahead by a single point, 48 to 47%.

The poll represented a big jump on recent numbers recorded by Biden, who trailed Trump by six points in Georgia in April and by five points in Nevada and Arizona as late as June.

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The cemetery incident is another example of creepy Trump thuggery

David Kurtz writes that the Arlington cemetery incident is a clear example of how creepy Donald Trump and his campaign use thuggery to avoid the consequences of their blatantly wrong behavior.

The cemetery official who was pushed aside by the thugs in creepy Trump’s campaign has declined to press charges and the Army says that it considers the matter closed. Kurtz says that the fear of being doxxed and have the MAGA cult hordes descend on her and her family likely played a role in the decision to drop the matter.
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The creepy Trump campaign is full of boors

Sometimes one accidentally bumps into someone in a public space. What usually happens is that each person immediately apologizes to the other that is the end of the story, with both people moving on with friendly smiles, to indicate that there are no hard feelings. There is the no attempt to determine who is at fault or place blame over such trivialities. That is the behavior of normal people who have basic social skills. But on rare occasions, one might encounter someone who reacts angrily and immediately yells out “You idiot! Why don’t you watch where you going?” or something similar. Such people are boors who lack basic social skills and are best ignored and avoided.

There has been quite a bit of media coverage of an event that took place at Arlington National Cemetery where creepy Donald Trump and his entourage arrived for a photo op at the graves of dead military personnel. The problem is that federal law prohibits political photo ops in certain parts of the cemetery and that resulted in an altercation between creepy Trump staffers and a cemetery official who was trying to enforce the law.
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Noooo! Not chemtrails again!

From my window I see clear blue skies and airplanes flying in an out of the nearby airport and on occasion I can sometimes see thin white clouds trailing behind high-flying jets. One of the weirdest conspiracies is that the government is spraying population control chemicals through the exhaust of planes, leaving those white clouds.. It appears that RFK Jr. believes this nonsense, just like a lot of the other conspiratorial nonsense he believes, and he is trying to use his new-found alliance with creepy Donald Trump to get him to endorse it.

He has also suggested that Trump would join him in seeking to criminalize the spraying of “chemtrails,” promoting a debunked conspiracy theory about the government releasing toxic chemicals into the air to kill off undesirable elements of the population.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is declining to condemn Kennedy’s latest conspiratorial remarks, instead telling Salon that its “proud” to have him on the former president’s “transition team.”

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