An erratum or corrigendum (comes from Latin: errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author’s error. Listed under Erratum in Wikipedia

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, there are between 20,000 to 50,000 jobs in, and supported by, the state’s fracking industry. Sep 4, 2020, the first listing under fracking jobs in a Google search.

In the last post, while complaining about Vice-Presidental candidate Senator Kamala Harris saying three times that Biden wouldn’t ban fracking, I said, More importantly, it was unnecessary, nobody, who isn’t in the business really cares except people who are against fracking. While the sentence is pretty much true, the unnecessary part is my opinion. Pennsylvania is a key state in this election and there are somewhere between 20,000 to 50,000 well-paying – mostly union – jobs in the fracking biz in Pennsylvania, the Biden campaign obviously thinks that assuring those people they will not lose their jobs is necessary.

Hot tip to Susan Page: saying “thank you” over and over to try to get a man to shut up never works. They really think you’re thanking them. Tweet by former Congresswoman Katie Hill @KatieHill4CA… Not standing down. Not being silenced

Shoutout to the @AOC who thrust the Green New Deal onto the national stage and made it the framework for debate on climate policy within two years. That’s a hell of an Overton window shift by… “just a bartender.” A Tweet by Emma Vigeland @EmmaVigeland

The Green New Deal is and has been lied about nonstop, and yet is STILL popular. It’s a massive job-creation and infrastructure plan to decarbonize & increase quality of work and life. It’s okay to call the GOP out on those lies just as we call them out on all their other lies. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC

Misogynoir is misogyny directed towards black women where race and gender both play roles in bias. The term was coined by queerblack feministMoya Bailey,  Wikipedia.

Probably the best place to start is with The Fly. For me, the highlight of the debate was watching Kamala Harris react to The Fly landing on Mike Pence’s perfectly manicured hair. The fly landed just when Pence started on a tirade about Law & Order and I was so distracted that I missed most of what he was saying. Because Harris was making notes – probably something along the line of “Don’t lecture me on law and order, I was a Prosecutor, I was a Top Cop” – she didn’t see it land, so, when she looked over to Pence, there was The Fly, just sitting there on top of Pence’s head. Just like me, I don’t think she got it at first – I thought it was a fly in our home, on our screen – and then when she did get that it was a real fly, on HIS head, we could see the recognition crawl across her face, first her eyes and then just the faintest wisp of a smile.

This was Kamala Harris’ first time on the National Stage and she had the higher hill to climb. More realisticly, as a Black Woman, Harris started about as far down the pecking as one can get, so it is more accurate to say that she had the deeper hole to climb out of before even starting the hill climb part. She had to come across as strong but not too rude, or too loud, or too emotional, or too whatever, too something, anyway, while all Pence had to do was be his calm, white, superior, man-self. The Vice-Presidency is and always has been male, after all.

I thought Harris did just fine and, considering the hand he was dealt, I thought Pence did OK too. I know, he did continue talking over Susan Page while she was trying, ineffectively, to get him to stop, but, I’m learning the hard way, that is pretty normal for a white man. I would have been happier if Senator Harris hadn’t stressed, like three times, “We’ll let everybody keep on fracking” mostly because those unequivical statements can come back and bite you in the ass. Think George Bush the Elder saying “Read my lips, no new taxes!”. More importantly, it was unnecessary, nobody, who isn’t in the business really cares except people who are against fracking. But, actually, nobody won this debate, it was unwinnable. By now. almost all of us have chosen a side and the optimists think their side won (the pessimists probably think their side lost, of course).

The deeper problem is that the model is flawed, the model that Conflict Produces Truth. That, somehow, two sides fighting each other will reveal the otherwise hidden truth. It doesn’t, they don’t. It’s even more obvious in our Legal system. I don’t think that conflict as a sort of Universal Answer to everything – the war on terrorism or the war on cancer, even the war on poverty – is only American but we have embraced it whole heartily. I’m starting to think that the conflict model is out dated and is working to our determent. I think it is time to start thinking about what a cooperation model would look like.

Wow!!! NOW DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!! Tweet by Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 45th President of the United States of America

NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT CAUGHT COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE! ditto

Definition of roid rage in Merrium-Webster Dictionary; an outburst of anger, aggression, or violence attributed to the use of anabolic steroids

I’m feeling like I’m losing touch with reality. It started with the New York Times disclosing Donald Trump’s taxes. Everybody seemed to go bonkers over Trump only paying $750 and, to me, that seemed to be missing the point although it does read well in a soundbite. He ran as a genius businessman who would bring his business expertise to running the government but he wasn’t, isn’t, a financial genius. Donald trump’s taxes show he was losing money, his only expertise was turning a very large fortune into a much smaller one.

That disclosure was less than two weeks ago. Then the debate and President Trump – the sitting President of the United States, POTUS – seemed almost out of control, interrupting both Biden and Wallace, even yelling over them. He is the Patron Saint of the Aggrieved and, watching the debate, I could see why.

Then, what? two days later? all of that gone, like mist in the bright sun, when the White House publicly announced that the President of the United Staes has Covid19. He was rushed to Walter Reed and then? then he almost walks home. What? three days later? From almost everything the New York, or Los Angeles, Times tells me this can’t be happening. But it is…sort of. We can only guess, or read somebody else’s guess of what is really going on behind the closed doors and the obfuscation of the official news releases, the details – I’ll go so far as to say the Truth – remains elusive. My guess is that Donald Trump is sicker than we are officially being told. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t always make you stronger, sometimes it leaves you weaker and my guess is that Donald Trump’s tremendous spirit, sheer will power, and an extraordinarily heavy steroid regime are pushing a body that is weaker than we are led to believe. But I don’t really know.

I suppose that should be the lead, we really do not know what is going on. President Trump has gone on several Tweeting storms and all the Tweets do not seem rational. He declassified the Mueller Report when he “fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” and, I suspect, the President Donald Trump that tried to hide the report when he got impeached didn’t really want to do that. We don’t know. Donald Trump has always been impulsive and erratic and the drugs he is on can make him more so. We don’t really know. It is sort of scary.

 

 

Honestly, can you believe this shit? Sleeping Giants @slpng_giants

What if wearing a mask like all the doctors told us to, actually works? Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast Editor at large @thedailybeast.

Nothing says ‘mild symptoms’ like rushed to Walter Reed. Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman

Trump hates hospitals. He wouldn’t even go to a hospital when his older brother was dying in one. He was golfing when his younger brother died in one. This is much more serious than the WH is letting on. Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

Is it normal to give high doses of experimental drugs to a person suffering from a very mild case of a disease? Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I was talking to a friend about – what else – Trump, who, with his constant Tweeting and promoting, has become the center of the world for what? the last fourteen hundred days? About that, I guess. This time it was Trump and Covid and how he seemed to have a mild case. My first reaction was that Of course, they would say it was a mild case, they lie about everything. But the problem is that they don’t lie about everything but trying to figure out what is a lie and what isn’t, what is real and what is spin, is like trying to read tea leaves.

Or like trying to interpret what’s happening in the inner sanctum from the comings and goings of the Pope’s underlings, or a Pasha’s minions, or of the statements of any court swaddled in secrecy. At its core, the Presidency is a dictatorship, the Cabinet rarely, if ever, votes on what to do, the President decides. All presidencies have an inner sanctum and this one has an especially opaque one but it is possible to make a couple of semi-informed inferences. According to the WH press pool, originally they were told they couldn’t photo President Trump getting on Marine One for the trip to Walter Reed. According to Chris Wallace, President Trump and his entourage arrived too late to the Debate to be tested. According to Heather Cox Richardson, whose excellent daily Letters from an American was recommended by my sister Paula, Now it appears that White House officials deliberately withheld information about their condition, directly endangering other people who acted on the presumption that the Trump people weren’t infected. My inference is that the President is way sicker than we are being told and more than several high-level Republicans are also infected.

I know that powerful people often don’t want to admit they are sick, I’ve had personal experience with that once having a major investor who had a heart attack and told everybody he was on vacation. Hell, my dad did that. Still, it’s a little surprising in Trump’s case because, normally, when something traumatic happens to a national leader, their poll numbers go up. That’s what happened when President Reagan got shot and when both Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro got Covid-19. But, even though he is a self-identified germaphobe, like almost everybody, President Trump must have started to believe his own bullshit. He must have started to believe Covid19 was pretty distant, pretty safe, after all, the Kung flue only became the plague after he got infected.

Nevertheless, the President has Covid19, it is probably much worse than we are being told by the White House PR staff, the Presidentail power has not formally been passed on to the VicePresident, and our country is probably leaderless right now.

Meadows [Trump’s Chief of Staff] has now changed his tone, tells Reuters: “The president is doing very well. He is up and about and asking for documents to review. The doctors are very pleased with his vital signs. I have met with him on multiple occasions today on a variety of issues”. Ryan Lizza @RyanLizza Chief Washington Correspondent @politico as reTweeted with comment Donald asking for documents to review? As often as these people lie, you’d think they’d be better at it. by Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

In a new statement, the campaign says VP Pence “will begin a swing through key states following Wednesday’s debate in Salt Lake City, Utah. He will travel to Arizona, before voting early in Indiana and heading to other events yet to be announced.” Betsy Klein @betsy_klein

Remember: coming into this, Biden supporters said Trump is a lying ignorant bully, who supports white supremacists. He confirmed their story. Trump supporters said Biden is senile and suffering from dementia. He clearly isn’t. Everything else is peripheral. Paul Krugman @paulkrugman Nobel laureate. Op-Ed columnist, @nytopinion. Author, “The Return of Depression Economics,” “The Great Unraveling,” “Arguing With Zombies,” + more. New York City nytimes.com/column

Who was more truthful in his answers? Biden 65% (+36) Trump 29% @CNN, Among Debate Watchers #Debates2020

Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY! Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 45th President of the United States of America Washington, DC Instagram.com/realDonaldTrump

Watching the debate, my first reaction was that Trump was winning by beating up on Biden and that Biden had to just get in Trump’s face and stop the carnage by taking control, by saying something like “Shut the fuck up, let me talk when it is my turn and I’ll let you talk when it is your turn”. He had to take Trump on, he had to take command of the room. My reaction was visceral, so visceral that I got up and started pacing back and forth. I seriously considered turning off the TV.

All week I’ve wondered how Joe Biden would take on President Trump. I never wondered how Trump would take on Biden – well, not never, but not very much, although I vaguely expected him to try to rattle Biden enough to him to stutter or stumble I didn’t think of how he would try to do that – so I was rocked back by Trump’s right out of the gate full frontal attacks. Trump’s good at it, – at them – he is a natural gutter fighter, always going for the kill, and Biden isn’t; that Biden stayed coolish and almost civil, except for the few times he struck out like a cornered small dog, bothered me.

As an aside, Biden seems like he believes in government, he believes in being deferential and civil to his superiors, he believes in saluting the uniform, and it must have been excruciatingly hard for former Vice-President Biden to call the sitting President of the United States, “A clown.” End aside.

I felt dismay and anger. I felt Biden was losing. Now, thinking about the debate rather than just blindly reacting to it, and hearing and reading comments from other people , I am feeling much more sanguine. I hope and think that my first reaction was wrong. I hope my first reaction was wrong because it is those white, alpha-dog, male reactions that got us here in the first place. Like almost all of my fellow white guys, I grew up in a binary bubble thinking it was the whole world and I can still feel the undertow of my paternal, European, reactions; the pull of my ingrained European standards and beliefs. The deep down, knee-jerk, core beliefs that the alpha beta hierarchical structure, with the alpha male at the top, is somehow only natural and as it should be. This is the belief structure that has formed today’s world. This complex of beliefs have made our world a physical Eden, and they are now destroying the planet.

I think I was wrong because a big hunk of those beliefs are based on the alpha dog gets the bone so, the fact that Trump’s bullying of Biden did not work to Trump’s advantage, is hope for us all. To me it says that we, as a species, are growing past that behavior. Don’t get me wrong, we still have the ability to wipe out our species; quickly with nuclear weapons or slowly because of our addition to fossil fuels. That we have to change to survive seems self-evident but there are lots of people that admire Donald Trump and change is not going to come easily. Still, that most voters seem to be coming to the conclusion that the kind of cooperation that Biden espouses is better than the politics of anger, hate, and discord, makes me hopeful.