Monday, August 17, 2020

 

Quarantine Day #153.

Last night I went to bed at 10:45pm and quickly fell asleep. I got up 2-3 times during the night, finally waking/getting up at 6:30.

Last night I played 5* games on Chess.com. In the 1^st game my opponent hung a piece and I missed it and I ended up losing on time. In the 2^nd game I was up a piece to a pawn but lost on time. In the 3^rd game I checkmated my opponent in 25 moves. In the 4^th game I played the London System and my opponent fell into my common trap and then…I lost my internet connection which is an automatic loss for me. In the 5^th game I blundered a piece on the 6^th move but held out for 40 more moves before losing. My rating is now down to 1187.

Today is another holiday – La Asunción de la Virgen (Assumption of Mary).

My new shaver doesn’t have a low battery warning so I kept track of how many shaves I got before it died. I thought it was 13 but today before I completed my 11^th shave it conked out so now I’m down to only 10 before recharging.

The Democratic Convention begins tonight, live (NOT) from Milwaukee.

We got a little rain in the afternoon.

Before today’s championship parcheesi bout Teresa and I are tied 245 to 245. I beat Teresa today 6 games to 5.

One of my blog readers recommended a new location where I can buy the marigold flower extract pills.

 

Donald Trump and his team haven't exactly been subtle in their campaign against mail-in voting, with the president and his allies throwing around baseless allegations of "fraud" for months. Yesterday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was offered a chance to defend the offensive.

Host Jake Tapper confronted Meadows on CNN's "State of the Union" about the White House's false claims regarding mail-in voting, pointing out that Trump himself requested a mail-in ballot this year. "There's no evidence of widespread voter fraud," Tapper said. "There's no evidence that there's not, either," Meadows responded. "That's the definition of fraud, Jake."

 

In a long appraisal of the American conservative movement on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” longtime columnist George Will hammered away at his ideological brethren for blindly following Donald Trump and turning to a “cult of victimization” lacking any principles at all.

Sitting in with co-host Joe Scarborough, author Anne Applebaum, and conservative commentator David Frum, the state of conservatives over the past three and a half years was dissected with Will expressing deep disgust at what Trump has done to the Republican Party.

 

It was in April when Joe Biden first made a provocative prediction about Donald Trump and the president's likely electoral antics. "Mark my words," the Delaware Democrat said, "I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can't be held."

Biden received a fair amount of criticism for floating an accusation like this without evidence, but it wasn't long before the president gave his rival a hand: Trump raised the prospect of delaying U.S. elections in July.

Similarly, in June, the presumptive Democratic nominee made the case that Trump "wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots." A few days later, the folks at FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, rebuked Biden for floating a "baseless" conspiracy theory.

Now, the fact-checking website has been forced to reverse course.

In late June, Joe Biden claimed President Donald Trump "wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots." At the time, we wrote that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had no evidence of Trump's ulterior motive -- but now he does.... We do know at this point that Biden's earlier remarks that Trump "wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots" have been confirmed -- by the president himself.

 

Miles Taylor, a former senior Trump administration official, endorsed Joe Biden's presidential campaign on Monday, becoming one of the highest-ranking former Trump administration officials to do so.

Taylor, who served as chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, also accused President Donald Trump of repeatedly using his office for political purposes, including directing officials to cut wildfire relief funding to California because voters there overwhelmingly opposed him in 2016.

Taylor, a longtime Republican and political appointee at DHS from 2017 to 2019, endorsed the former vice president in a video produced by the group Republican Voters Against Trump in which he also made several allegations about Trump's conduct. He also wrote an op-ed published in The Washington Post calling the President "dangerous" for America.

"What we saw week in and week out, for me, after two and a half years in that administration, was terrifying. We would go in to try to talk to him about a pressing national security issue -- cyberattack, terrorism threat -- he wasn't interested in those things. To him, they weren't priorities," Taylor says in the video.

 

Fearful that voting by mail could be advantageous for former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump is doing everything he can to harm the United States Postal Service. Retired U.S. Navy Adm. William H. McRaven, in a biting op-ed published in the Washington Post on August 16, stresses that Trump’s attack on the USPS underscores his contempt for American institutions.

“As Trump seeks to undermine the U.S. Postal Service and stop mail-in voting, he is taking away our voice to decide who will lead America,” argues McRaven, who headed U.S. Special Operations Command from 2011-2014. “It is not hyperbole to say that the future of the country could depend on those remarkable men and women who brave the elements to bring us our mail and deliver our vote. Let us ensure they have every resource possible to provide the citizens of this country the information they need, the ballots that they request and the Postal Service they deserve.”

Trump, according to McRaven, has attacked one U.S. institution after another.

 

A nurse practitioner in Iowa City, Iowa, uncovered a glitch in the state's coronavirus website that has caused the site to mistakenly report lower numbers of new COVID-19 cases and, by extension, a lower statewide infection rate, resulting in state agencies making decisions based on inaccurate numbers.

 

Donald Trump has called out New Zealand for its recent Covid-19 outbreak, saying the places the world hailed as a success story is now facing a “big surge” in cases.

“The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!.

“Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something,” the US president said at a campaign rally in Mankato, Minnesota.

“Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible, we don’t want that, but this is an invisible enemy that should never have been let to come to Europe and the rest of the world by China.”

On Monday Auckland recorded nine new cases of the virus, and 13 on Tuesday, while the US’s Monday figure was just under 42,000.

 

The US has 5,346,412 ð 5,389,740 ð 5,436,026 coronavirus cases with 168,900+ ð 169,600+ ð 170,100+ deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 456,689 ð 468,332 ð 476,660 cases with 15,372 deaths.  Medellin has 33,551 ð 34,513 ð 35,412 36,055 cases, an increase of 613 from August 16^th to 17^th. Envigado has a total of 1,952 cases, an increase of 24 from August 16^th to 17^th.

 

Joke of the day

In 1900, a father came home from work to find his wife and children at the supper table. 
Today, a father comes home to a note: "Jimmy's at baseball, Cindy's at gymnastics, I'm at gym, Pizza in the fridge."