https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1286814475899662336

https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1292996615381250050

Donald Trump accused Barack Obama today on TREASON on NATIONAL TELEVISION and NOT ONE SINGLE REPORTER said a FUCKING WORD about it or INTERRUPTED HIM to object or FOLLOWED UP IMMEDIATELY with a challenge.

WHAT
A
DISGRACE

the double standard that was allowed to flurish in 2016!!! Trump has the same immigrant history as Obama... yet Trump painted Obama as the "other".

will he get away with it with Harris?

In a recently published study, the researchers unveiled a simple method to evaluate the effectiveness of various types of masks, analyzing more than a dozen different facial coverings ranging from hospital-grade N95 respirators to bandanas. Of the 14 masks and other coverings tested, the study found that some easily accessible cotton cloth masks are about as effective as standard surgical masks, while popular alternatives such as neck gaiters made of thin, stretchy material may be worse than not wearing a mask at all.

https://www.sfgate.com/lifestyle/article/Wearing-a-neck-gaiter-may-be-worse-than-no-mask-15475153.php

"Even very small particles can do this kind of (light) scattering," Warren said. "We were able to use the scattering, and then tracking individual particles from frame to frame in the movie, to actually count the number of particles that got emitted."

A fitted N95 mask, which is used most commonly by hospital workers, was the most effective, Warren said, noting that the mask allowed "no droplets at all" to come out. Meanwhile, a breathable neck gaiter, well-liked by runners for its lightweight fabric, ranked worse than the no-mask control group. The gaiter tested by the researchers was described in the study as a "neck fleece" made out of a polyester spandex material, Warren said.

"These neck gaiters are extremely common in a lot of places because they're very convenient to wear," he said. "But the exact reason why they're so convenient, which is that they don't restrict air, is the reason why they're not doing much of a job helping people."

The high droplet count could be linked to the neck gaiter's porous fabric breaking up bigger particles into many little ones that are more likely to hang around in the air longer, Fischer said in the video. This effect makes wearing them possibly "counterproductive," he added.

"It's not the case that any mask is better than nothing," he said. "There are some masks that actually hurt rather than do good."

Other types of face coverings that may fall into that category are bandanas and knitted masks, the study found. An N95 mask with an exhalation valve also failed to measure up.

"Those relief valves are fantastic if what you want to do is protect yourself from the outside world because air doesn't come in through them," Warren said. "If what you're trying to do in this pandemic is protect the outside world from you, it completely defeats the purpose."

Warren encouraged people to assess their face coverings with another basic test.

"If you can see through it when you put it up to a light and you can blow through it easily, it probably is not protecting anybody."

https://www.sfgate.com/lifestyle/article/Wearing-a-neck-gaiter-may-be-worse-than-no-mask-15475153.php

For years, Bryant Park Grill & Cafe in Midtown Manhattan has been one of the country’s top-grossing restaurants, the star property in Ark Restaurants’ portfolio of 20 restaurants across the United States.

But what propelled it to the top has vanished.

The tourists are gone, the office towers surrounding it are largely empty and the restaurant’s 1,000-seat dining room is closed. Instead, dinner is cooked and served on its patio, and the scaled-down restaurant brings in about $12,000 a day — an 85 percent plunge in revenue, its chief executive said.

Five months into the pandemic, the drastic turn of events at businesses like Bryant Park Grill & Cafe that are part of national chains shows how the economic damage in New York has in many cases been far worse than elsewhere in the country.

In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. Many other large brands, like Victoria’s Secret and the Gap, have their kept high-profile locations closed in Manhattan, while reopening in other states.

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Even as the city has contained the virus and slowly reopens, there are ominous signs that some national brands are starting to abandon New York. The city is home to many flagship stores, chains and high-profile restaurants that tolerated astronomical rents and other costs because of New York’s global cachet and the reliable onslaught of tourists and commuters.


A Uniqlo store on Fifth Avenue. Many businesses in Manhattan are struggling because of a lack of tourists and a relatively small number of office workers. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
?quality=90&auto=webp

For four months, the Victoria’s Secret flagship store at Herald Square in Manhattan has been closed and not paying its $937,000 monthly rent. “It will be years before retail has even a chance of returning to New York City in its pre-Covid form,” the retailer’s parent company recently told its landlord in a legal document.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/nyregion/nyc-economy-chain-stores.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8614431/Portland-protesters-gather-75th-day-demonstrations-Trump-says-city-control.html



As night fell chants of 'Black Lives Matter' rose in the air.

'If you're not here for Black Lives Matter, you're in the wrong place,' one speaker told the gathering.

Protesters then set off to march towards the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct, where previous protests have turned destructive.

He Wrote Famous Hymns, Is Accused of Sex Misconduct

Claims against David Haas, 63, date back 4 decades




(Newser) – "There’s practically not a hymnal in existence that doesn’t include Haas songs," a Catholic theologian says of songs by composer David Haas. But the New York Times reports 10 of the 32 Roman Catholic archdioceses in the US have instructed their churches to no longer play his music during Mass due to accusations of sexual misconduct and harassment at the hands of the 63-year-old that date to his 20s; some big-name liturgical publishers have stopped working with him, too. The Times spoke with six of the 38 accusers who have shared their claims with survivor advocacy group Into Account, which brought those claims to church leaders in May. The following month, the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where Haas lives, alerted the other archdioceses, recommending they follow its own lead and stop playing his music.


None of the women—many of them musicians or composers who looked up to Haas and say they kept quiet for fear of damaging their careers—have filed criminal or civil complaints. Among their specific claims against Haas: forced kissing, groping, cyberstalking, and sexual propositioning. One 54-year-old who met Haas as a teen says he took her to a margarita-filled lunch for her 18th birthday and tried to coax her into following him to an adjacent hotel afterward. His ex-wife also tells the Times the accusations mirror her own interactions with Haas, who she says kissed her against her will when she was 16 and he was 24. The National Catholic Register notes the country's biggest archdiocese, that of Los Angeles, on July 30 instructed its parishes to no longer play songs by Haas, including well-known ones like "Blest Are They" and "We Are Called."

https://www.newser.com/story/294750/he-wrote-famous-hymns-is-accused-of-sex-misconduct.html




https://www.startribune.com/popular-catholic-composer-accused-of-sexual-misconduct/572070892/

Twin Cities musician David Haas, one of the best-known music composers in the Catholic Church nationally, has been accused of sexual misconduct toward multiple young women who studied with him over the years.

Composer, performer and teacher, Haas taught at Benilde-St. Margaret's school in St. Louis Park, was composer-in-residence at the St. Paul Seminary, and ran a Music Ministry Alive program for years at St. Catherine University. He's also traveled the nation and the world giving workshops and performing.

The stellar career ground to a halt earlier this year when a Kansas-based victim's advocacy group publicized several allegations of abuse of young women under his tutelage. The organization, called Into Account, notified a network of liturgical music groups about the allegations, and organizations such as the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul halted the use of his music at archdiocese events; longtime music publisher GIA Publications in Chicago suspended its ties. Haas has not been charged with any offense.

"Haas has allegedly targeted multiple women using techniques that abuse prevention experts identify as grooming to create conditions in which women felt obligated to perform sexual favors in exchange for professional opportunities," Into Account director Stephanie Krehbiel said in a letter to Catholic organizations.

"His generosity, we are told, often came with a sexual price tag," she said.

Haas, director of the Emmaus Center for Music, Prayer and Ministry, initially denied the allegations in a statement, calling them "false, reckless and offensive."

https://stmedia.stimg.co/1597109779_16745201+3SHAUGEN0721.89758.JPG?auto=compress&crop=faces&dpr=2&w=525

The Rise of the Creepy Reopening Industry
In the absence of a coherent government response to the pandemic, the private sector has stepped into the void with new disinfecting tools, surveillance apps, and cardboard.

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Some are more or less common household or office items rebranded as tools in the fight against Covid-19. You can, for instance, now purchase a variety of “vital companions to protect against exposure and spread of Covid-19” from the company Go-SafeMate, which include a potholder-like piece of rubber that fits over doorknobs and a small set of tongs with which to pick up potentially contaminated objects. Another company currently advertises “corrugated partitions,” otherwise known as pieces of cardboard, as Covid-19 safety devices to be installed in offices. (“Corrugated board will assist with a safer return to the workplace or classroom as these partitions encourage social distancing and provide a physical, yet removable, barrier,” a press release for the product assures prospective buyers.) Employers can buy antimicrobial polymer wallpaper for offices, antimicrobial I.D. cards for use on cruises—which were early sites of the coronavirus outbreaks—and electronic wristbands for employees that vibrate whenever they come within six feet of others.

Then there are the companies selling Covid-era cleaning services, disinfecting tools, and technological solutions. The San Diego-based HYGIENICA announced that it had recently secured $1 million in seed round funding to support a new version of its proprietary sprayer, an “electro-atomizing” machine that’s worn like a backpack and used to blast away “99.99 percent of viruses, pathogens, and bacteria” on surfaces. A host of management apps intended to track workers’ health and even their movements has also sprung up in the vacuum of uncertainty. In June, for instance, the I.T. management firm SysAid released an app that promised to monitor workers’ locations and self-reported symptoms, including “alerting management to high-risk employees and automatically locking user accounts where needed.” Though billed as temporary safety measures, those types of monitoring apps have at least some potential to become permanent. As Jason Schultz, a professor of clinical law at New York University told The Wall Street Journal, “Employers don’t really have any incentives to remove surveillance once they install it.”

“The proliferation of office-reopening paraphernalia is just the natural extension of the kind of opportunism that first arose in the early days of the pandemic.”

In many ways, the proliferation of office-reopening paraphernalia is just the natural extension of the kind of opportunism that first arose in the early days of the pandemic, when hucksters price-gouged hand sanitizer, peddled pseudoscientific wellness treatments, and pushed various at-home grooming, cooking, and exercise products. Not a few of the tools and services marketed to facilitate reopenings also fall under what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently called “hygiene theater,” or ostentatious displays of disinfecting and scrubbing that ultimately fail to provide protection against airborne transmission of the coronavirus. Such measures, Thompson argues, are “risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/158734/rise-creepy-reopening-industry

https://nypost.com/video/clever-cat-leads-supermarket-shopper-to-the-pet-food-section/

The ‘Blue Shift’ Will Decide the Election
Something fundamental has changed about the ways Americans vote.


As polling places closed on November 6, 2018, the expected “blue wave” looked more like a ripple. Not only had some of the highest-profile Democratic candidates lost, but the party’s gains in the House and the Senate looked smaller than anticipated.

The wave, it turned out, simply hadn’t crested yet. Over the ensuing weeks, as more ballots were counted, Democrats kept winning races—eventually netting 41 House seats. In Arizona, the Republican Martha McSally conceded the Senate race to the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who picked up more than 70,000 votes in post–Election Day counting. Democrats narrowed deficits in races in Florida and Georgia too. Republicans were stunned.

“California just defies logic to me,” then-Speaker Paul Ryan said in late November. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every contested California race.”

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the “blue shift.” In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.



Although it is slowly dawning on the press and the electorate that Election Day will be more like Election Week or Election Month this year, thanks to coronavirus-related complications, the blue shift remains obscure. But the effect could be much larger and far more consequential in 2020, as Democrats embrace voting by mail more enthusiastically than Republicans. If the public isn’t prepared to wait patiently for the final results, and if politicians cynically exploit the shifting tallies to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote, the results could be catastrophic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue-shift/615097/