OK just for fun i googled "edible led lights", since apparently we need to get light into the body and such, and there actually were hits. (They are not actual lights as far as i understand it, it's about creating the illusion of them being)

Now if i just knew how to market that.

They'd have to be LED blacklights, remember. I haven't seen any of those yet.

Meanwhile, Trump surrenders. Having finally admitted to himself that his free campaign rallies are not helping, he's announced that he's not doing them anymore. Looks like CNN telling him to go to hell when he tried to hide them in the back of the press room was the last straw, though even his tools in OAN might have a bit of trouble making him look good when he suggests shooting up sodium hypochlorite to kill viruses. Btw, that last link is cute.

One of the problems with having to brief everyone in the professional GOP on what approved lies to tell is that the briefing books can get into the wrong hands. Long story short: blame China and try to tie them in with the Democrats and the liberals. Unspoken but obvious: pretend the GOP hasn't been in bed with the Chinese government for decades and lie that Trump isn't on the hook to Beijing for at least $200 million for a property in Manhattan and god only knows how much for properties in Asia. Whatever you do, don't discuss Trump starting and losing a trade war with China so he can collect bribes for tariff exemptions.

Trump's coronavirus ratings are slightly underwater, but only by the same amount that it's always been. Some 46% of Americans still approve of him, compared to the 50% who don't. 55,000 dead and 26 million unemployed, and still all people care about is that the arsewipe has an R after his name.

Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro's approval rating has cratered due to his stubborn coronavirus denialism. Reality no longer makes any sense.

It's worth noting that when 46% say they approve of his handling of this mess, a significant chunk of them are lying. When the subject turns to voting Trump significantly underperforms his polls, especially in the swing states (of which there are now more, and all but four of the new EVs in play are from his column). Seriously, if he wasn't really hurting his chances of stealing another term he'd never have stopped his free televised campaign rallies. At least for now.

As for the boy from Brazil? He'd probably have done better if he could stop coughing while lying about the virus.

Even if people are lying to pollsters, this is still abnormal. Over here, we are politically polarized over the existential question of whether we should be ruled by an authoritarian regime, and 40% of the population reliably votes for pro-Beijing candidates. 40% of the population is literally fine with not having civil liberties ad long as there is stability and economic growth. This is a far bigger ideological gap than anything Democrats and Republicans fight over.

And Carrie Lam's approval rating is 9%. She didn't get more than single digits of people killed, but even the authoritarians think she's terrible.

And someone like Donald Trump retains an approval rating of 46%? Adjusted for Republican blowhardism, it's still got to be above 30%. Hoooooowwww?

As far as i can see, there is roughly zero chance that if Carrie Lam gets replaced it's by someone from the other side. But there are very few plausible scenarios where Trump is replaced by a different republican.

Thus for pro Beijing Hongkongers the question is more about, will the next pro Beijing leader be better, while for US republicans the question is, if their leader is so bad, that it's worth to give the democrats a victory.

And when it comes to situations, where it's sensible to give the other side a victory, a lot of people like to drag their feet as long as possible, just to communicate what a big concession it was.

So i guess there is a percentage, who secretly hope that Trump is defeated, but would not say so, so the Democrats don't get empowered. No idea what they would do in a ballot box though and further no idea how to poll for them.

Largely because a significant chunk of this country's population hates this country and resents the people who make it work. To the extent that they're loyal to anything it's to a fictional and basically evil nation that supposedly existed many decades ago, in which being socially relevant and politically important was a gift magically given to them (mostly because they're white) instead of being a privilege that people had to earn. Hong Kong isn't really big enough to support a large and politically/socially alien population like that, we've got endless and mostly unproductive regions full of them.

Btw: Trump decided he couldn't live without lying on TV (a process that took two days), and one of his first lies is that he has no idea why poison control calls involving household cleaners (and web searches/information line calls) went up right after he suggested they're medicinal. I doubt many folks are surprised by that.

You mean like the chunk of our population thinks that democracy protesters are traitorous dupes of the CIA/brainwashed by foreign imperialist media/ idiotic rabble-rousers hell bent on ruining all of society, and who to varying degrees buy into China's whole "revenge for a century of humiliation" narrative? People who've cut off their friends and disowned their own children over the last year of protests? We're big enough to have those. And our billionaire class are oligopolistic parasites who make the Koch brothers look like amateurs. We can punch well above our weight in terms of messed-upness.

The US though, has a serious commitment to self-destructive incompetence. I mean wow.

The incompetence of the Republicans marches on...though Trump is supposedly going to order meat plants to reopen (while not giving a crap about medical supplies), his FDA still isn't doing anything to divert food rotting because of the dropoff in commercial orders to retail buyers. 6 weeks after saying they'd buy up dairy products it isn't happening, and nothing is being done to get industries to retool so they can package vegetables for retail sales (though an effort is supposed to be underway). In the interim they announced a three billion dollar scheme to buy food for food banks, but most of that will be on snack foods (because that's all the food banks which have no cold storage capacity can store). And it shouldn't be a surprise that the response is better suited to folks growing soybeans and corn than vegetables, because they don't want to get involved with 'specialty crops' (everything but grains and soybeans).

Oh, and Trump's playing the China card. Apparently the PRC doesn't want an incompetent weakling who is really easy to roll to be reelected. Then again, he also doesn't believe the polls which show he's losing, noting of the American people Presumably Putin told him this, because that's his job.

Just a thought related to the fuss about money for the states. The Republicans in Congress seem to think they'd win if the states get nothing from the Federal Government; that only blue states will take a big hit here. Me, I'm a bit hard pressed to see how the states who's revenue stream is almost completely regressive (most red states) are going to do well when the consumption taxes and fees they rely on dry up with their economies. At least the states with income taxes will be able to get revenues from the folks who keep working. But that's not stopping Trump from trying to extort a bribe from the Blue States for the funds the Red states will need more...then again, nothing would. He's the compleat Republican.

Federalism is an interesting thing. The (Republican) Governor of Maryland deployed state troops and state police to an airport in his own state to keep Donald and Jared from stealing a plane load of masks from South Korea. The choice of airport was, of course, to avoid the shipment crossing state lines once landed. Well, kleptocracy is also an interesting thing.

Well, we're now out of Level 5 lockdown (a.k.a. "stay indoors unless you have a medical emergency or work in food production/distribution") and into Level 4 Lockdown (some further sectors of the economy are starting up again, and we're now allowed to leave home in order to exercise - but only within a 5km radius of said home, and only between 06:00 and 09:00 in the morning, and everyone who goes out of their home must wear a mask).

Some parts of the country have extremely low infection levels. Those parts might drop to Level 3 soon; while the worst-infected areas might even find their way back to Level 5, in the hopes of keeping things down.

I guess we'll see what happens.

Two drugs, hydroxychloriquine and remdesivir. The former is somewhat dangerous and of no proven worth in treating Covid-19, the latter is apparently less dangerous and of some use. So guess which one the creatures of the right are snubbing? If you guessed the one which Trump and his buddies don't own shares in (remdesivir), then you've been paying attention.

It's after hours on Friday. Time to replace another watchdog who called Trump out on his failures. There's probably an app out there by now which alerts the press when the White House tries to bury hatchet jobs like that (it's just so Dick and Ronnie, really).

To no one's surprise, the threat of dying because of his decisions is souring senior voters on Trump. Though buried in that article is a cute detail: Trump's ordering red Trump face masks for the marks in his base, presumably to sell at a vast markup or give as a bonus for big campaign contributions. Coming soon to a violent crime or astroturf lockdown protest near you.

A few days ago someone photo-manipulated one of the signs being carried by an astroturf stooge in Pittsburgh to read Arbeit Macht Frei, JB. Apparently the fact that it didn't happen bothered some folks, so one of them really carried such a sign in Illinois. Because stopped from spreading infectious diseases is definitely equivalent to being herded into gas chambers.

Todays' moment of 'shocked, shocked'...a company selling PPE that had been started by a couple of well placed Republican operatives doesn't deliver the goods. Maryland cancelled a $12 million contract after turning over more than 6 mill because nothing ever came of it, and plans to persue legal action (it's been forwarded to the state Attorney General for review).

It having been noted that Congress doesn't have enough tests for the actual congresscritters, Trump offered some machines and enough supplies for a thousand tests. In what was one of the classic no-brainers, McConnell and Pelosi jointly refused, suggesting the supplies should go to medical workers instead. The story goes on to note that Trump still demands that everyone goes back to work within the next two weeks, which seems unlikely (Mississippi just cancelled their reopening as cases spiked).

A Twitter thread which juxtaposes a mountain of abandoned potatoes with a vast field of cars waiting at a food bank and suggests there's a problem with this picture. Which isn't a bad point; but unfortunately the problem not specifically identified is that Trump and his party don't give a damn, so the solution may be a trifle delayed.

How little do Trump and his party give a damn? Well, the new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services is spending his time lying that Ukraine helped Clinton. That there might be some health related issue for him to be working on never crosses their minds, it seems.

BTW our government played a nice little trick on us. Apearently there was quite a lotof activities, that never really have been illegal, but the governments public relations gave the impression that they were.

For instance private gatherings in private apartments were never forbidden, the government just asked the people not to do them. Corona parties, that have been interrupted by the police, with much reporting in the media about it, well the police acted, because there were complaints about the noise.

I have actually no idea if our media had been tricked too, or if they were in on the game. I suppose a little bit of both. Same for the opposition parties.

Governments, where the right hand is not fighting the left, really have more options.

The phrase is 'acceptable collateral damage'... That's with a daily new case rate of about 200,000. But the Republicans will have gotten their reopening.

Now obviously The Lincoln Project (Never Trump Republicans) are not in a position to hit Trump on corruption and incompetence. But willful neglect works, and they have some decent PR people making their ads.