I am voting by mail for the first time ever.

I received an e-mail from the county clerk stating it was no problem. Ballots are being mailed to me for the primary and the general. The only worry I have is what is Trump doing to undermine my mail-in vote. Most folks normally mail the ballot back without cost. I intend to mail my ballots by Priority Mail with a signature requirement.

I think the voters should be allowed to send them back by e-mail, too. There are tons of problems with a cyber link (ie: Russia) because it is untried, but, so long as it is signed and a picture of an ID accompanies the ballot, there is no reason to prevent that balloting. The e-mail between me and my county clerk is sound and quick. I would love to be able to take a picture of the ballot with each page signed and send it back by e-mail with a picture of my ID.

So, assuming Trump is UP TO SOMETHING with the US Postal Service, a cyber alternative should be offered.

I would like to see all package handling companies offer SAFE AND DEPENDABLE delivery for this year's ballots in primaries and the general. Maybe offer free or low cost to each and every mail-in ballot. It would be nice.

Think of it as a tax deduction and overcoming corruption to ensure the USA Democracy. Be a hero.

January 27, 2020
by Rachel Glickhouse

Mail boxes (click here) taped up near a post office during the coron​avirus outbreak in Virginia on A​pril 12.

We’re 10 months away from the 2020 election. (click here) While the stakes are incredibly high and the electorate is more polarized than it has been in decades, Americans’ faith in the legitimacy of the outcome is low — and not without reason. There’s evidence that the forces that sought to influence the electorate in 2016 are at it again, and attempts to shore up the cyber defenses of local election systems have had uneven results.

Crucially, in a vacuum of trustworthy facts, questions about election integrity, fraud and security can be answered by dishonest players with a stake in the outcome. Local newsrooms, reeling from new rounds of belt-tightening and layoffs, are less able to sustain the effort necessary to cover a fast-moving, complex, technical and data-rich story by themselves.

That’s why we announced Monday that we’re running our Electionland project again, to bring together journalists around the country to report on voting barriers and electoral integrity....

This is all about Giuliani and his lawlessness. He demanded Trump to remove a Ukraine Ambassador.

This is all corruption because Trump's administration does not have control. They sought to control through the corruption of the USA's relationship with Ukraine. Guiliani is at the center of this lawless activity. Guiliani was also doing Russia's bidding. Guiliani wanted to make Ukraine weaker so both Trump and Russia had control and they could exploit that control to defeat Vice President Biden in the November elections.

Trump first tried to demoralize the office to understand the power they had over their activity. Trump wanted to impose a corruption paradigm in SDNY and when all that didn't work, he simply told Barr to get rid of the prosecutors.

June 22, 2020
Adam Klasfeld

When Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman (click here) pushed back against Attorney General Bill Barr’s attempt to oust him late on Friday night, the standoff between a top prosecutor and the Trump administration had a startling sense of déjà vu.

Three years apart, two Manhattan U.S. attorneys refused requests from Washington to quietly step down from their posts in extraordinary flare-ups of rebellion. Both involved whispers of political interference with cases of interest to the president. Both resulted in the prosecutors being fired, and both men wound up replaced by their trusted deputies.

Berman’s crusading predecessor Preet Bharara had lived through this sequence of events in 2017.

Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor who witnessed Bharara’s firing, remembers what happened vividly.

“I was in the office when Preet was fired, and that was a very demoralizing, disheartening moment,” Nawaday recalled in a phone interview on Sunday. “And [Berman’s ouster] seemed even worse because of the way it went down.”...

Pollution is a co-morbidity

Every environmentalist knows that is the case. Rachel Carson of "Silent Spring" died of breast cancer due to her exposure of pollution in our national parks and forests.

So, here we are in the year 2020 and there is a resurgence of pollution that kills, this time it is African Americans carrying the co-morbidity burden of pollution.

...Health care increasingly needs (click here) to address the management of individuals with multiple coexisting diseases, who are now the norm rather the exception. In the United States, about 80% of Medicare spending is devoted to patients with 4 or more chronic conditions, with costs increasing exponentially as the number of chronic conditions increases. This realization is responsible for a growing interest on the part of practitioners and researchers in the impact of comorbidity on a range of outcomes, such as mortality, health-related quality of life, functioning, and quality of health care....

This is a professional article about co-morbidities and the cost of such them. Co-morbidities are a negative spiral. The more chronic health conditions an individual has the more likely they will have others especially when the cause is within their living, working, and home environments. This is the problem the poor and working poor face all the time. Segregation adds to the danger because of the African American ability to move their lives out of their work and home environments are nearly impossible.

I know an African American couple that lives in a neighborhood where primarily the wealthy reside. She stated she would never move no matter how much she and her husband have to work due to the schools affiliated with this neighborhood and the cleaner air and water. The couple has children. These successful couples are too few and far between when it comes to Zip Codes with dangerous pollution.

This is also a very sad sorry by this couple, because, they may be displaced from their home towns. Robert Taylor in the reporting below have lived in the same hometown all his life, regardless of the cruelty of reality. The statistics bear out that African Americans are exposed to far more environmental danger than others.

June 21, 2020
By Luke Denne

Robert Taylor (click here) has lived on the banks of the Mississippi River in Reserve, Louisiana, his entire life. Both of his parents worked in the local sugar refinery when plantations made up this stretch of the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

But where sugar cane once grew, chemicals now spew from smoke stacks.

When the petrochemical industry moved in, the predominantly Black community’s health began to suffer.

“We didn't know why. We were just ignorant plantation hands, you know, the descendants of slaves," he said.

A higher risk of cancer in these communities — surrounded by the densest concentration of petrochemical plants in the country — have led to the area gaining the unwelcome title of “Cancer Alley.” Similar situations have played out in communities across the U.S. in which Black communities have had to endure more pollution than their white neighbors....

It isn't as though the government doesn't know. (click here)

More problems for India while the Chinese are being bad neighbors.

This could be a deliberate escalation of tensions between Pakistan and India with the presence of China on the eastern Indian border. 

June 22, 2020
Edited by Meenakshi Ray

An Indian Army jawan patrolling at the Line of Control (LOC) in Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir. 

An Indian Army soldier (click here) was killed as Pakistan violated the ceasefire in several sectors along the Line of Control (LoC) in Poonch and Rajouri districts of Jammu and Kashmir on Monday, initiating a “befitting reply” from the Indian Army, officials said.

A defence spokesperson said Pakistan army violated the ceasefire in Poonch’s Krishna Ghati at around 3:30am on Monday.

“Pakistan initiated unprovoked ceasefire violation by firing with small arms and shelling with mortars along LoC in Krishna Ghati Sector… Indian Army retaliated befittingly,” the spokesperson said.

The ceasefire agreement was violated again by Pakistan in Nowshera sector of Rajouri at about 5:30am, the spokesperson added....

Trump's pathology is very troubling.

In his rally, Trump stated the fittest children should be the country's soldiers. The USA is now interested in the "breed" of a person. What makes them fit for service where other Americans do not? What are these "fit children/persons" going to be named, the American Aryans? And the USA renamed into the United States of American Aryan Nation?

26 February 2018

The exchange happened during a congress of Mr Erdogan's AK Party

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (click here) has been criticised after telling a girl in military uniform that she would be honoured if killed while fighting.

"If she's martyred, they'll lay a flag on her," he told the sobbing girl at a televised congress of his AK Party.

His supporters cheered "Chief! Take us to Afrin!", in reference to Turkey's operations against Kurdish fighters in Syria's northern Afrin region.

The speech has been described as "child abuse" and a glorification of death.

In the event, broadcast live on state television, the young girl dressed as a soldier seems to catch the attention of Mr Erdogan, who then invites her to the stage....

Donald Trump enjoys the idea of having the power that can cause death. He does not care about the lives of Americans or anyone else for that matter. In case the Trump speechwriters haven't noticed there is a global spike in cases because the USA is setting such a lousy example and calling the World Health Organization "Fake News."

From the beginning of the global pandemic, Trump's agenda was to eliminate the influence of medical professionals. These tactics have existed throughout this administration in most agencies of the federal government. Trump needs to admit his strategy to reclaim the USA from the clutches of SARS-CoV-2 to date has not worked and opening the country will only prove more bad decision making.

22.06.20

The World Health Organization (click here) has reported its highest single-day rise in new cases, as global testing efforts are ramped up. In Germany, the R-rate has spiked 60% to 2.88. Follow DW for the latest....

The R-rate is also known as "R naught" and has yet to enter the dialogue of COVID-19 in the USA.

...Three possibilities (click here) exist for the potential transmission or decline of a disease, depending on its R0 value:

- If R0 is less than 1, each existing infection causes less than one new infection. In this case, the disease will decline and eventually die out.

- If R0 equals 1, each existing infection causes one new infection. The disease will stay alive and stable, but there won’t be an outbreak or an epidemic.

- If R0 is more than 1, each existing infection causes more than one new infection. The disease will be transmitted between people, and there may be an outbreak or epidemic....

While the WHO is alarmed at the one day increase globally, it is not happening globally so much as "certain" countries and the USA tops that list. Spain has made the leap of faith to open it's borders again after their daily cases are nearing single digits.

Graph (click here)

Below are USA daily cases (click here for graph):

Trump's pathology has denied the very poor performance of the administration since the early cases of COVID-19 were exposed. Trump put a false face on this from the beginning in hoping to hide this virus in the statistics of the flu and only focusing on the jet from China as the only known case of Americans. Trump's "strategy of denial" has failed.

If this was a sincere war, the US Congress would be asking for his resignation and begin hearings to the lack of an exit strategy to end the war. Instead of having rock-solid reasons to open the USA, Trump demands the testing to end because that is the only reason there is a growing number of cases reported as if all the new cases were benign and absent of symptoms.

Trump is wrong and the possibility of opening schools is nearly upon us. Children must be protected. Children do not have magical immunity to the virus.

19 June 2020

...Swiss health officials (click here) have insisted that young kids are not vectors of infection or transmission.

“Based on the current knowledge, few children get infected with the Covid-19 virus”, Daniel Koch, former head of the infectious diseases unit at the Federal Office of Public Health said in April.

But there have been cases in Switzerland and elsewhere of children dying of Covid-19.

At the end of May, an infant died in a Zurich hospital, after contracting the virus while in Macedonia.

Also in May, a nine-year-old boy, with an underlying health condition, died in France from the Kawasaki-like disease believed to be linked to coronavirus....

June 20, 2020

In a shocking admission (click here) during his Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally on Saturday night, President Donald Trump said he had told officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing because of the rising number of cases in America, and used a racist term to describe the coronavirus.

“You know testing is a double-edged sword,” Trump said while complaining about media coverage of his handling of the virus. He said that the US has now tested some 25 million people. “Here’s the bad part… when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people; you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please.”

At another point during the rally, he said Covid-19 has more names than any other disease: “I can name Kung Flu,” he said using the racist term, “I can name 19 different versions of them.”...

Racism and blaming the media when he should be blaming himself for the failure of his strategy. Everything he says is propaganda and endangers American quality of life and life itself. If that is not pathological, don't ask me what is?