ET Williams

The Doctor of Common Sense

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Sissy Don Lemon Says Obama Is Better Looking, And Smarter Than Trump

Sunday night on CNN, anchor Don Lemon accused President Donald Trump of letting former President Barack Obama get under his skin because he is better looking, smarter, and has a more accomplished wife.

After playing a clip of Obama giving a video message on the coronavirus pandemic, Lemon said, “Boy, oh, boy, that’s leadership. That’s compassion. It’s too bad that President Trump can’t show either.”

He continued, “By the way, what is it about President Obama that really gets under your skin? Is it because he’s smarter than you? Better educated? Made it on his own? Didn’t need daddy’s help? Wife is more accomplished? Better looking? I don’t know what is it? What is it about him? That he’s a black man that’s accomplished being president? That he punked you on the whole birth certificate thing? What is it about him? Just wondering.”

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Twitter Will Correct You On How To Think If You Are About to Post A Wrong Thought

Are you about to post a tweet containing “harmful” language? Don’t worry — Twitter is experimenting with a feature that will warn you ahead of time, so you don’t accidentally infect any users with your wrongthink.

“When things get heated, you may say things you don’t mean,” wrote Twitter’s official support account in a tweet yesterday.

“To let you rethink a reply, we’re running a limited experiment on iOS with a prompt that gives you the option to revise your reply before it’s published if it uses language that could be harmful.”

It’s a bit like “precrime” in the 2002 Tom Cruise film Minority Report. Twitter will notice when you’re about to use a bad word, giving you the chance to avoid a rule violation and save your account from the digital gulag.

“We’re trying to encourage people to rethink their behavior and rethink their language before posting because they often are in the heat of the moment and they might say something they regret,” said Sunita Saligram, Twitter’s global head of site policy for trust and safety, in a comment to Reuters.

Twitter’s “trust and safety” department was acknowledged by its then-policy manager, Olinda Hassan to be “controversial,” in an undercover video recorded by Project Veritas in 2018.

In the same secretly-recorded exchange, Hassan said one of the things the Trust & Safety team was working on in 2018 was ways to “get the shitty people to not show up.” (The comment was made in response to an undercover reporter asking her about the prominence of tweets from author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich).

Twitter now appears to be taking a different approach. Instead of trying to get you to not show up, the platform intends to train its users out of their bad behavior, like unruly dogs.

Twitter Will Now Warn You If You Are About to Post Wrongthink

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Texas Salon Owner Gets 7 days in jail for reopening during coronavirus lockdown

A Dallas salon owner was sentenced to seven days behind bars Tuesday for disobeying coronavirus shutdown orders, doing business well ahead of even the aggressive reopening plans in Texas.

Dallas County Judge Eric Moye held Shelley Luther, owner of Salon À la Mode, and her corporate entity, Hot Mess Enterprises, in criminal and civil contempt.

Moye cited “the refusal of the defendants to cease operation of the salon, despite the clear and unambiguous language of the order.”

“The defiance of the court’s order was open, flagrant and intentional. The defendants, although having been given an opportunity to do so, have expressed no contrition, remorse or regret for their contemptuous action.”

Hair and nail salons are eligible to reopen Friday in Texas, where there have been at least 33,369 cases of coronavirus and 906 deaths, according to state data posted late Tuesday afternoon. In Dallas County, there have been at least 4,370 cases and 114 deaths.

Moye remanded Luther to the custody of Dallas County sheriff’s deputies to serve seven days.

A defiant Luther, who faces at least $3,500 in fines, argued that she was trying to prevent her children and employees from “going hungry,” NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported.

“I have to disagree when you say I’m selfish, because feeding my kids is not selfish,” Luther said. “I have hair stylists going hungry because they’d rather feed their kids. If you think law is more important than kids being fed, go ahead with your decision. But I’m not going to shut the salon.”

There was no answer at Luther’s salon Tuesday afternoon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dallas-salon-owner-gets-7-days-jail-reopening-during-coronavirus-n1200836

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Filthy Howard Stern Says Trump Should Resign, And His Supporters Should Take Disinfectant and ‘Drop Dead’

Monday on his Sirius XM’s demonstrate Howard Stern claimed President Donald Trump ought to resign above his remarks about injecting disinfectants.

Stern said, “Boy, oh boy, I acquired to convey to my buddy Donald Trump, Jesus Christ resign from the presidency. Do the planet a favor. You never want to be president. Go function at Mar-a-Lago. Have a pleasant relaxation of your everyday living. This dude is out of his f-cking intellect. I never know what Donald is performing. I indicate, when he retains a push conference, it’s like you go oh f-ck.”

He ongoing, “I never know what to say what is heading on with Donald. I necessarily mean, these statements are idiotic. Hey, I have this plan. Probably due to the fact Clorox operates on surfaces, could not they just pour Clorox into your asshole.”

He added, “I would like it if Donald would get on Tv set and consider an injection of Clorox and let’s see if his idea operates. Permit him, volunteer. Or keep a massive rally, say f-ck this coronavirus, with all of his followers, and permit them hug each other and kiss each individual other and have a major, huge rally.”

Co-host Robin Quivers stated, “A significant cocktail of disinfectant.”

Stern reported, “Yeah, and all just take disinfectant and all fall lifeless.”

He included, “It’s an shame. And then the even larger shame is the insult to my intelligence were being he goes ‘I was becoming sarcastic.’ There was no sarcasm. And if he was being sarcastic, that is even even worse people are dying. This us no time for sarcasm.”

Trump Should Resign — His Supporters Should Take Disinfectant and ‘Drop Dead’

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Andrew Cuomo Says If You Want to Go Back to Work, Get a Job as an Essential Worker

ALBANY NY (WRGB) – When it comes to people wanting to go back to work Governor Andrew Cuomo said, those people don’t have a right to go out and infect others.

CBS 6’s Anne McCloy took the protesters concerns straight to the governor at his daily news conference today and got their reaction to his remarks.

Anne: “These are regular people who are not getting a paycheck and they’re saying that they don’t have time to wait for all of this testing and they need to get back to work in order to feed their families. Their savings is running out, they don’t have another week, they’re not getting answers, so their point is the cure can’t be worse than the illness itself, what is you’re response to them?

Gov. Cuomo: The illness is death, what is worse than death?

Anne: Well what if someone commits suicide because they can’t pay their bills?

Governor Cuomo: The illness may be my death instead of your death. How can the cure be worse than the illness, if the illness is potential death?

Anne: But what if the economy failing is…

Cuomo: Worse than death?

Anne: Equals death, because of mental illness, the people stuck at home?

Gov Cuomo: No it doesn’t. It doesn’t equal death. Economic hardship yes, very bad. Not death.

After Anne’s exchange with the governor, she went to ask some of the protesters outside what they thought of the Governor’s remarks.

Mike Delgallo from Schenectady is out of work because his business is considered non-essential.

“My response to that is, if you’re afraid of being infected by something, then you have the right to quarantine yourself, but I don’t have the fear of getting infected so I have the right to leave my home to work, to not wear a mask and to live my life normally,” he said.

Anne also asked the governor about unemployment and the protesters claims they have a right to work.

Anne: They’re also saying if you can’t afford to pay me unemployment, or your system is not set-up

Governor Cuomo: You will be paid! You will be paid!

Anne: But they can’t wait for the money, they are out of money.

Gov. Cuomo: We are talking about a couple of days of lag and they will get the date of unemployment.

Anne: But is there a fundamental right to work if the government can’t get me the money when I need it. Is there a fundamental right to go to work?

Gov. Cuomo: Yeah, go take the job as an essential worker, do it tomorrow.

Protesters also had something to say about that.

“Where are we supposed to get a job when the entire state is shut down?,” said Deanna O’Hare.

https://cbs6albany.com/news/coronavirus/cuomo-tells-protesters-to-get-essential-jobs-says-economic-hardship-doesnt-equal-death

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Sweden Did Not Close Down For The Coronavirus, But Not As Many Death’s

‘Closing borders is ridiculous’: the epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial coronavirus strategy

Anders Tegnell talks to Nature about the nation’s ‘trust-based’ approach to tackling the pandemic.

As much of Europe imposed severe restrictions on public life last month to stem the spread of the coronavirus, one country stood out.

Sweden didn’t go into lockdown or impose strict social-distancing policies. Instead, it rolled out voluntary, ‘trust-based’ measures: it advised older people to avoid social contact and recommended that people work from home, wash their hands regularly and avoid non-essential travel. But borders and schools for under-16s remain open — as do many businesses, including restaurants and bars.

The approach has sharp critics. Among them are 22 high-profile scientists who last week wrote in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the public-health authorities had failed, and urged politicians to step in with stricter measures. They point to the high number of coronavirus deaths in elder-care homes and Sweden’s overall fatality rate, which is higher than that of its Nordic neighbours — 131 per million people, compared with 55 per million in Denmark and 14 per million in Finland, which have adopted lockdowns.

The strategy’s architect is Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, an independent body whose expert recommendations the government follows. Tegnell spoke to Nature about the approach.

Can you explain Sweden’s approach to controlling the coronavirus?

I think it has been overstated how unique the approach is. As in many other countries, we aim to flatten the curve, slowing down the spread as much as possible — otherwise the health-care system and society are at risk of collapse.

This is not a disease that can be stopped or eradicated, at least until a working vaccine is produced. We have to find long-term solutions that keeps the distribution of infections at a decent level. What every country is trying to do is to keep people apart, using the measures we have and the traditions we have to implement those measures. And that’s why we ended up doing slightly different things.

The Swedish laws on communicable diseases are mostly based on voluntary measures — on individual responsibility. It clearly states that the citizen has the responsibility not to spread a disease. This is the core we started from, because there is not much legal possibility to close down cities in Sweden using the present laws. Quarantine can be contemplated for people or small areas, such as a school or a hotel. But [legally] we cannot lock down a geographical area.

What evidence was this approach based on?

It is difficult to talk about the scientific basis of a strategy with these types of disease, because we do not know much about it and we are learning as we are doing, day by day. Closedown, lockdown, closing borders — nothing has a historical scientific basis, in my view. We have looked at a number of European Union countries to see whether they have published any analysis of the effects of these measures before they were started and we saw almost none.

Closing borders, in my opinion, is ridiculous, because COVID-19 is in every European country now. We have more concerns about movements inside Sweden.

As a society, we are more into nudging: continuously reminding people to use measures, improving measures where we see day by day the that they need to be adjusted. We do not need to close down everything completely because it would be counterproductive.

How does the Swedish Public Health Agency make decisions?

Around 15 people from the agency meet every morning and update decisions and recommendations according to the data collection and analysis. We talk to regional authorities twice per week.

The big debate we are facing right now is around care homes for older people, where we registered very unfortunate outbreaks of the coronavirus. This accounts for Sweden’s higher death rate, compared with our neighbours. Investigations are ongoing, because we must understand which reccommendations have not been followed, and why.

The approach has been criticized for being too relaxed. How do you respond to these criticisms? Do you think it risks people’s lives more than necessary?

I do not believe there is that risk. The public-health agency has released detailed modelling on a region-by-region basis that comes to much less pessimistic conclusions than other researchers in terms of hospitalizations and deaths per thousand infections. There has been an increase, but it is not traumatic so far. Of course, we are going into a phase in the epidemic where we will see a lot more cases in the next few weeks — with more people in intensive-care units — but that is just like any other country. Nowhere in Europe has been able to slow down the spread considerably.

About schools, I am confident they are going to stay open on the national level. We are in the middle of the epidemic and, in my view, the science shows that closing schools at this stage does not make sense. You have to shut down schools fairly early in the epidemic to get an effect. In Stockholm, which has the majority of Sweden’s cases, we are now close to the top of the curve, so closing schools is meaningless at this stage. Moreover, it is instrumental for psychiatric and physical health that the younger generation stays active.

Researchers have criticized the agency for not fully acknowledging the role of asymptomatic carriers. Do you think asymptomatic carriers are a problem?

There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms. In the normal distribution of a bell curve asymptomatics sit at the margin, whereas most of the curve is occupied by symptomatics, the ones that we really need to stop.

Do you think the approach has been successful?

It is very difficult to know; it is too early, really. Each country has to reach ‘herd immunity’ [when a high proportion of the population is immune to an infection, largely limiting spread people who are not immune] in one way or another, and we are going to reach it in a different way.

There are enough signals to show that we can think about herd immunity, about recurrence. Very few cases of re-infection have been reported globally so far. How long the herd immunity will last, we do not know, but there is definitely an immune response.

What would you have done differently?

We underestimated the issues at care homes, and how the measures would be applied. We should have controlled this more thoroughly. By contrast, the health system, which is under unusual pressure, has nevertheless always been ahead of the curve.

Are you satisfied with the strategy?

Yes! We know that COVID-19 is extremely dangerous for very old people, which is of course bad. But looking at pandemics, there are much worse scenarios than this one. Most problems that we have right now are not because of the disease, but because of the measures that in some environments have not been applied properly: the deaths among older people is a huge problem and we are fighting hard.

Moreover, we have data showing that the flu epidemic and the winter norovirus dropped consistently this year, meaning that our social distancing and hand washing is working. And with the help of Google, we have seen that the movements of Swedes have fallen dramatically. Our voluntary strategy has had a real effect.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x