Category: WTF

Wait – Don Jr has to communicate to his dad through Mark Meadows?

UncleScoopy

“He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough,” Trump Jr. wrote to Meadows.

“I’m pushing it hard,” Meadows replied. “I agree.”

“We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now,” Trump Jr. continued. “It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

WTF? You have to agree with Junior’s thought process – but at the same time, you have to wonder why he did not just talk or text to his father directly. Mary Trump’s answer: “Cowardice. Because Donny knew that the message he was delivering was the message his father did not want to hear.”

Her answer seems logical, but I’d like to hear Junior’s own answer to the same query. Their family dynamic is fascinating. Did Junior first try to contact his dad directly, only to find his call screened? Were there texts from Junior to Senior that went unanswered before the outreach to Meadows? Does Eric know how to text? Inquiring minds want to know.

Sophia Urista pees on an audience member (full HD video, uncensored)

UncleScoopy

The incident happened last Thursday at the Welcome to Rockville festival in Daytona Beach. She is the lead singer for Brass Against, a group that performs brass + sax versions of heavy metal songs. Yeah, that’s right: trombones, trumpets, even a sousaphone. To get the idea, imagine Black Sabbath played by a high school marching band.

(The pee incident starts around the 3:15 mark.)

Many people have called Sophia’s act disgusting, but I just see it as a continuation of a venerable musical tradition. I can remember when Steve and Edie would both piss on the same audience member as their grand finale, and who can forget when Tony Bennett stood on stage and left more than his heart in San Francisco. And of course, in their Vegas days, Sinatra frequently took a shit on Joey Bishop on the main stage at Caesar’s Palace.

Here’s a non-disgusting screen grab of her after the pee, before pulling her pants up.

image host

And you thought American elections were out of control

UncleScoopy

So here’s what is happening in the Philippines:

In the Presidential race, Bong is running against BongBong. Even more fun, Bong’s last name is Go, and BongBong is the son of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Oh, yeah, and there is a third major player in that race. They are running against former boxing great Manny Pacquiao. There are several other candidates as well. This match-up was precipitated by the fact that the current President, Duterte, is constitutionally forbidden to seek another term.

Now it turns kind of weird. Well, weirder. In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected in separate contests. Duterte’s daughter unexpectedly filed to run for vice-president, even though the polls showed that she was the favorite to succeed her father in the #1 job. Meanwhile Duterte himself figured out that the constitution does not bar him from running for vice-president, so he also entered that race, thinking that his daughter would register for the presidential race. If his original plan had worked out, he could have ended up as her veep, with the family still firmly in control of the country, but because she decided to run for VP instead, Duterte was then slated to run against his daughter instead of with her. When he realized what had happened, he withdrew his VP bid and declared for the senate instead.

Do not photograph Alec Baldwin’s bad side

UncleScoopy

There’s no telling what he’ll do.

Snark aside, here are new details:

1. It was a rehearsal. (The gun should have been totally empty, and in fact, Baldwin was told just that – that it was a “cold gun.”)

2. “Before Thursday’s shooting, some crew members quit the production over concerns related to safety issues — including gun safety procedures and Covid-19 protocols not being followed, according to the Los Angeles Times and other media reports.” This happened before the fatal incident: “A colleague was so alarmed by the prop gun misfires that he sent a text message to the unit production manager. ‘We’ve now had 3 accidental discharges. This is super unsafe.'” (The LA Times has been well ahead of everyone else on this story.)

3. It seems that a single discharge of the gun caused both injuries. “The projectile whizzed by the camera operator but penetrated Hutchins near her shoulder, then continued through to Souza.”

4. So far, I have not seen a report of precisely what was in that discharged chamber.

Trump says the single most important thing for Republicans to do is NOT vote

UncleScoopy

On the one hand, he’s told his lackeys and sycophants that he’ll run again in 2024. On the other hand, he’s telling Republicans not to vote in 2024 (or for that matter in 2022). He said that this is the single most important thing Republicans can do.

He told Republicans not to vote unless the election fraud problem is “solved.” Since there is no significant fraud to solve, and Joe Biden will certainly remain in the White House until the next election (unless he dies), that means the Republicans should not vote at all.

But that’s not what he means. Remember that he basically has no grasp of the English language, so he does not express himself precisely. What he is really saying is that his base should not vote for any Republican UNLESS they embrace the election fraud theory. In other words, his base should kick out anyone not personally loyal to Trump himself, and to Trump’s mad assertion that he must somehow have been cheated out of the election.

In reality, it is Trump’s vote count that seems suspiciously high in the 2020 election. Consider:

  • The final polls, averaged and weighted, predicted a Biden victory by 8.4 points, but the final tally showed only a 4.4 Biden victory. Those 4 points represent some 6.3 million votes.
  • In 2016 Trump got 63 million votes.

Negative adjustments: During his presidency he became the only President in the long history of Gallup’s approval polls never to hit 50%, and his average approval rating over the course of his presidency was the lowest ever, and by a wide margin. Because of that, exit polls show that he lost 4.4 million (7%) of the people who voted for him in 2016. It is estimated that 3.8 million of his 2016 voters died before they could vote in 2020.

Positive adjustments: He did pick up 2.6 million (4%) former Clinton voters, 6.7 million (39%) of the people who did not vote in 2016, and 1.9 million (25%) who voted for third parties in 2016, so his vote total should have gone up about three million net after subtracting the 2016 voters that abandoned him or died. So how did the least popular presidency in history, led by a man who apparently gained only three million net voters from 2016, manage to earn an additional 11.2 million votes in 2020? Where did the additional eight million votes come from?

Doing the same calculation for Biden shows absolutely nothing suspicious.

Hillary got 65.9 million votes in 2016. Here are the adjustments from that number in 2020:

  • Biden picked up 4.4 million (7%) former Trump voters.
  • Biden lost 2.6 million (4%) former Clinton voters to Trump.
  • Biden picked up 10.0 million (59%) voters who did not vote in 2016.
  • Biden picked up 4.6 million (60%) voters who voted for a third party in 2016.
  • Biden lost about two million 2016 Clinton voters to the grim reaper. Not as many Democrats die each year as Republicans because of the age differential.

So Biden’s total should have been a bit more than 80 million, and it was a bit more than 81. Given that everything here is an estimate, he got exactly what he should have.

I’m not presenting a point that contains mathematical certainty. I know there are answers to those extra Trump votes that don’t involve fraud. Many of those answers center around people lying to pre-election pollsters, or the fact that one cannot easily conduct an exit poll of mail-in voters, but the point of the observation is that it is possible to argue that Trump’s 2020 vote count seems suspiciously high while Biden’s seems to be what it should have been.

For the moment, let’s assume there was no significant fraud in favor of either candidate, and let’s come back to the real world. Where Trump lost the election was in the voters who did not vote for a major candidate in 2016, but did in 2020. The exit polls show that this amounted to about 25 million voters (about 17 million who did not vote at all in 2016 and about 8 million who voted for third parties), and that Biden won those groups by a mile – 19 points among those who did not vote in 2016, and 35 points among those voted for third parties in 2016.

Bill Gates known for ‘womanizing,’ naked pool parties

UncleScoopy

Step aside, Hef, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Wilt Chamberlain and DeCaprio. The new king of the party dudes is in da house!

It brings to mind the Beverly Hillbillies, when Jethro set his career sights on “Famous International Playboy.”

But then again, I guess a hundred billion dollars could even get Clint Howard some decent trim.

“Bald men are twice as likely to suffer severe Covid” effects

UncleScoopy

“We think androgens or male hormones are definitely the gateway for the virus to enter our cells. We really think that baldness is a perfect predictor of severity.”

Caution: “So far studies have been of relatively small numbers of patients.”

The above headline within quotation marks was from a Brit tabloid, so you can’t treat it with the solemnity you would accord the Journal of the AMA, but they may actually be onto something, even if they have sensationalized the science to create a paper-selling headline.

The company that discovered the link last spring, Applied Biology, more recently ran a study that tested the use of an androgen inhibitor (Proxalutamide) on COVID patients, and it seems to have been very successful in preventing severe symptoms and the progression of the disease.

As sensational as it seems to propose a correlation between baldness and COVID, the whole concept is actually plausible, given that some element of male biology seems to have consistently made males more vulnerable to the virus in country after country. In the USA, about 236,000 Americans under the age of 75 have died from COVID, consisting of 148,000 men and only 88,000 women. Although that disparity may have behavioral components, it seems that biology must also play a part, and it is reasonable (but not certain) to hypothesize that androgens may be involved, since they are only present in females in limited amounts.

That said, Proxalutamide also showed a fairly high level of gastrointestinal side-effects in the test, although a bit of nausea and diarrhea seems to be a fairly good alternative to death. Once again it must be noted that only about 260 patients were studied in the Applied Biology test, although the results were statistically significant even with so few degrees of freedom.

Criminal mastermind o’ the day

UncleScoopy


“Conspiracy theorists on social media wonder if Chinese troops have invaded Maine”

UncleScoopy

“To hear some folks on the fringe tell it, the U.S. Geological Survey, which reported the Dec. 9 earthquake, wasn’t telling everything. What really happened, they say, is that the U.S. military dropped a bunker-buster bomb on a hidden horde of 50,000 Chinese troops.”

It is wise to remember the words of the world’s wisest philosopher:

“There is no idea too daft for people to believe and even take credit for.”

“McDonald’s opens barber shop, offers ’90s-inspired ‘Golden M’ haircut”

UncleScoopy

“An ‘iconic ’90s hairdo’ for men–which involves a center part and face-framing bangs, and was once rocked by celebrities including David Beckham and Leonardo DiCaprio, among other ’90s-era heartthrobs–is making a comeback via the marketing team at McDonald’s Sweden. Why would McDonald’s Sweden care, you ask? Because the hairstyle bears an alleged similarity to the fast food chain’s signature Golden Arches.”

Billie Eilish slapping her own breasts

UncleScoopy

That headline is literally true.

Sorry, she is clothed, but this is kind of a must-see. Odd stuff. It looks like a scene from a lost Luis Buñuel movie. Weird framing because it’s a selfie. Dog in a head cone, staring at the camera. Brother apparently singing to himself in the background. Grammy awards framed in a display. Billie slapping her chest. There must be some story behind it, but I don’t know what it is.

Not that it matters.