'Teeth The Size Of Bananas'; New Study Paints Picture Of 'Terror Crocodiles'


August 12, 2020
GABRIELA SALDIVIA Twitter




A new study of Deinosuchus or "terror crocodiles," led by Adam Cosette, offers a fuller picture of the ancient creature from head to tail. Cossette said Deinosuchus had large, robust teeth, ranging from six to eight inches long, as shown in the photo.Adam Cossette

Enormous "terror crocodiles" once roamed the earth and preyed on dinosaurs, according to a new study revisiting fossils from the gigantic Late Cretaceous crocodylian, Deinosuchus.

The research, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, reiterates that Deinosuchus were among the largest crocodylians ever in existence, reaching up to 33 feet in length. New in this study is a look at the anatomy of the Deinosuchus, which was achieved by piecing together various specimens unknown until now, giving a fuller picture of the animal.

Adam Cossette, a vertebrate paleobiologist at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University, led the study that corrected some misunderstandings about the Deinosuchus.

"Until now, the complete animal was unknown," Cossette said. "These new specimens we've examined reveal a bizarre, monstrous predator with teeth the size of bananas."

Past studies on cranial remains and bite marks on dinosaur bones led paleontologists to believe the massive Deinosuchus were an opportunistic predator, according to the press release. Fossil specimens now make it clear that Deinosuchus did indeed have the head size and jaw strength to have its pick of prey, including large dinosaurs.


"Deinosuchus was a giant that must have terrorized dinosaurs that came to the water's edge to drink," Cossette said.



Deinosuchus were the largest semiaquatic predators in their environments and are known to have fed on large vertebrates, including dinosaurs. The photo shows a Deinosuchus skull in dorsal view (A) and a skull in ventral view (B).Adam Cossette

University of Iowa vertebrate paleontologist Christopher Brochu, the study's co-author, said another important realization from the paper is that there were several species of Deinosuchus that roamed North America between 75 and 82 million years ago.

The study notes Deinosuchus hatcheri and Deinosuchus riograndensis lived in the west, from what is now Montana to northern Mexico. Deinosuchus schwimmeri lived in the east from New Jersey to Mississippi.

"Some of them were separated by a seaway that at one point cut North America in half from what's now the Gulf of Mexico up to the Arctic Ocean," Brochu said. "And that may have driven what we call speciation. There might have been one ancestral Deinosuchus form in North America, and then the seaway cut that population in half and on one side it evolved in one direction, the other side in a different direction."

Despite the nickname "terror crocodiles," Brochu said Deinosuchus were more closely related to alligators than to crocodiles but "didn't look like either one of them."

Deinosuchus had a snout that was long and broad, with the front appearing inflated unlike any other living or extinct crocodylian. On the tip of the snout is a large pair of holes. Researchers are still unsure of their function.

Both Brouchu and Cossette assert this paper disproves the idea that crocodylians are living fossils, or in other words, animals which never evolved.

"There's this concept out there that crocodylians are unchanging forms," Brochu said. "That they appear way back in the distant past and haven't changed since the days of the dinosaurs. That is simply not true."

If you look at the modern species of crocodylian, Cossette explained, there are just a handful and they all look and act very similar. But if you look at the fossil record there is diversity of size, shape, diet and lifestyle.

"Most people think crocodiles haven't changed in 75 million years," Cossette said. "This study shows that the ancestors of today's American alligator didn't look anything like them."

"Crocodiles are actually these incredibly dynamic creatures that have experienced incredible evolutionary histories, have lived in places that modern crocodiles don't live, done things that modern crocodiles don't do and have grown to sizes that modern crocodiles never achieve. That I think is the cool part [of the study], at least for me," Cossette added.

Veteran GOP Strategist Takes On Trump — And His Party — In 'It Was All A Lie'
August 11, 20201:03 PM ET
DAVE DAVIES

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Transcript


"I've never heard any Republican officeholder speak of President Trump as if he should be president," says GOP strategist Stuart Stevens.Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Veteran political consultant Stuart Stevens has spent years working as a strategist for Republican campaigns, including the presidential bids of Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. But Stevens didn't support the party's candidate in the 2016 presidential election — and he wasn't alone.

"In 2016, when I went out and attacked Trump on television," he says, "I would say maybe a third of the party hierarchy would email me and thank me for doing this."

But Stevens notes that many of the Republicans who had privately voiced concern about Trump changed their tune on election night. "I started getting emails like, 'Could you maybe delete that email?' " he says.

"It's an extraordinary contradiction," Stevens tells Fresh Air in an Internet interview.

He notes, "I've never heard any Republican officeholder speak of President Trump as if he should be president. ... They know he shouldn't be president. [But] he is president, and they still support him."

In his new book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, Stevens argues that the party's support for Trump isn't just a pragmatic choice. Instead, he says, it reflects the party's complete abandonment of principles it long claimed to embrace, such as fiscal restraint, personal responsibility and family values.


Stevens acknowledges his own role in the party's shift: "One of the things that drew me to the Republican Party was the concept of personal responsibility. So I don't know where to begin with personal responsibility except to take responsibility personally."

Interview highlights

On why he believes the leaders of the Republican Party became more extreme and anti-intellectual

It's an abdication of leadership on behalf of Republican Party leaders that have allowed these kooks and lunatics and anti-intellectuals to become dominant in the party.

Stuart Stevens

I think one of the conclusions you have to come to is that leaders really matter in helping shape the party. And I think that it's an abdication of leadership on behalf of Republican Party leaders that have allowed these kooks and lunatics and anti-intellectuals to become dominant in the party. It didn't have to be that way.

There was a time when there was an intellectual core to the Republican Party. We used to say we were the party of big ideas and there was some truth to that. And one of those big ideas was opposing Communism. One of those big ideas was the role of society in helping people become less dependent on government. ... So you can make a good case that the Republican Party was a victim of its own success: We won the Cold War. Bill Clinton passed welfare reform.

Enlarge this image
Penguin Random House

And so around 2000, it was a question of how do you formulate a new policy? And we never really came to grips with that. And it has allowed those with the loudest voices to become dominant in the party. I compare it to sports teams. Who is it in the stands that gets the most attention? It's the person that takes their shirt off and runs out on the field. And that's really what's happened in our politics, but particularly in the Republican Party. And the leaders have not stepped in and stopped it.

On the GOP doing an "autopsy" after the 2012 election when Mitt Romney lost to Obama


CODE SWITCH
Why Did Black Voters Flee The Republican Party In The 1960s?

I think Reince Priebus, who was the chairman of the party then, and there's a lot of credit for initiating that so-called autopsy. It's always difficult to be self-critical. And what's fascinating about that is the conclusions were fairly obvious. You had to appeal more to nonwhite, yet appeal more to younger voters who had to appeal more to women. But it was presented not only as a political necessity to win elections — because we'd only won the popular vote once since [the] 1988 presidential votes — it was presented as a moral mandate, that if you are going to deserve the right to be the governing party of this big, confusing, loud, changing country, you needed to reflect that. So then Donald Trump comes along, and you can almost hear this audible sigh of relief and all that got thrown out and go, "Well, thank God we don't have to pretend we care about this stuff. We can just win with white folks and we can just be comfortable with that." And I mean, it just showed how phony it was.

On Trump's campaign strategy for the fall



It is going to be the ugliest campaign we've ever seen by a desperate man.

Stuart Stevens on Trump's 2020 presidential campaign

It's going to be a racial grievance campaign unlike we have ever seen on the national stage. I think it is going to be the ugliest campaign we've ever seen, by a desperate man. So Donald Trump is behind now and he's talking about suspending the elections. Think about a week out if he's behind: If I was a Canadian minister of defense, I'd be worried he's going to invade Ottawa. This is an unstable man who is headed to potentially a historic defeat. And I think he's going to wave the bloody shirt and try to scare white voters, and I think they're going to do everything they can to suppress nonwhite votes. Legal, illegal, quasi-legal. That's what they're going to try to do because they think that's the only way they can win.

On what he believes is next for the Republican Party

I really am extraordinarily negative on the prospects of the party, and it's an unusual position for me because I've always been sort of the eternal optimist and always thought that we could come back from any deficit. I came across a statistic recently that just absolutely blew my mind: Of Americans 15 years and under, the majority are nonwhite. ... And what does that mean for the Republican Party? It's just a stage 4 cancer warning and the party gives no reason that it's going to change.

So I see the Republican Party, [what will] happening nationally, as what happens to the Republican Party in California. So California was the beating heart and soul of the Republican Party. It was an electoral citadel that we based all victory on. And now where's the Republican Party? It's in third place, not second, third [in registration]. ... And the Republican Party, really, for the most part, became irrelevant in the debate of policy in California. They've made themselves irrelevant. And I see the same thing happening with the national Republican Party.

There is a market for a center-right party and a need for it in America. I think something else will evolve. But to get a sense of how deep Trumpism is instilled, there's another Republican Party out there and that's these governors. So if you look at these very popular governors in blue states like [Larry] Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker, Massachusetts, Phil Scott here in Vermont, I work for all these guys. And if the Republican Party had any sense, I'd say, look, these guys are wildly popular in the hardest market. What can we learn from them? Instead, the party kind of treats them with benign neglect. But each of these governors, wildly popular as they are, they can't pick their own party chairman. They're Trump people, and the idea that a governor couldn't pick a party chairman is so mind-boggling, it just shows how deep Trumpism has become in the party.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

BEFORE BEIRUT

On This Day: Port explosion kills 173 in Tianjin, China

On Aug. 12, 2015, a series of powerful explosions rocked the Chinese port city of Tianjin, killing 173 people and injuring hundreds more.

By UPI Staff


Chinese Premier Li Keqiang inspects the blast area and rescue operations from the roof of a building close to the massive fire and explosion zone caused by hazardous materials stored in a warehouse owned by Ruihai International Logistics in Tianjin on August 17, 2015. File Photo courtesy of Government Handout/UPI | License Photo

Read More

UPI Archives: Dead fish pile up on Tianjin shore after deadly blastsUPI Archives: Tianjin residents protest broken laws, demand restitution after explosions

Christian nationalists are willing to toss the Constitution aside because Trump gave them exactly what they want

August 11, 2020 By Nancy LeTourneau, Washington Monthly- Commentary

On Sunday, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro attempted to justify the president’s memorandum on coronavirus relief by suggesting that God had something to do with creating executive orders.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro defends Trump’s executive orders: “I mean the Lord, and the Founding Fathers created executive orders, because of partisan bickering and divided government. That’s what we have here.” pic.twitter.com/exduSYOtGi
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) August 9, 2020

The narrative is that congress is simply a “swamp” and so Trump took action via something that was created by God and our founding fathers to bypass the legislative body. Of course, that is the opposite of what was written into the Constitution when it describes three separate, but equal branches of government. In a sense, Navarro is claiming that our founding fathers created a mechanism for the president to act as king. He backs that up with the idea that God was involved with doing so.

None of that is going to be a concern for Trump’s base among Christian nationalists. Over the weekend, Elizabeth Dias published a piece in which she reminded us of that one time when Trump actually told the truth by saying that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and his supporters wouldn’t abandon him. She noted that it was during that same speech at a Christian college in Iowa that Trump said this:

“I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Trump said.

Christians make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed slightly to stress each next word: “And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have.”

If he were elected president, he promised, that would change. He raised a finger.

“Christianity will have power,” he said. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else.”



Over the last four years, we’ve heard endless attempts to explain why Christian nationalists have been so loyal to a man who has lived the opposite of everything they have claimed to value. But there you have your answer: he promised to give them power. That is precisely why Katherine Stewart titled her book about Christian nationalists, The Power Worshippers. She explains that we miss the mark if we assume that this movement is all about the so-called “culture wars.”

This is a political movement that wants power. I do think it is helpful, in understanding this movement, to distinguish between the leaders and the followers. The foot soldiers may believe that they’re fighting for things like traditional marriage and a ban on abortion. But over time, the movement’s leaders and strategists have consciously reframed these culture war issues in order to capture and control the votes of a large subsection of the American public. They understand if you can get people to vote on just one or two issues, you can control their vote. So they use these issues to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and to enact economic policies that are favorable to their most well-resourced funders.

MAMMON, GEORGE FREDRICKS, THE TATE

In commenting on the Christian right’s comparison of Trump to King Cyrus, Stewart wrote this:

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats…The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times…

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

This is why you’ll find no objections from Christian nationalists to the prospect of Trump upending Constitutional norms like the separation of powers among the three branches of government. They want the tyrannical power associated with an autocrat in order to enact their agenda.

Bishop falsely claims Joe Biden is not a Catholic — and it doesn’t go well for him

BISHOP PEDERAST HOISTED BY HIS OWN PETARD

August 11, 2020 By Matthew Chapman


On Tuesday, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island attacked former Vice President Joe Biden’s faith, claiming that he is not really a Catholic.

Biden-Harris. First time in awhile that the Democratic ticket hasn’t had a Catholic on it. Sad.
— Bishop Thomas Tobin (@ThomasJTobin1) August 11, 2020

Biden is a lifelong, practicing Catholic, and he was also on the 2012 ticket, so Tobin’s claim doesn’t make any sense. But Tobin is an extreme right-wing firebrand with a history of politicizing the church — in 2007 he denied communion to former Rep. Patrick Kennedy for his pro-choice views, and in 2019 he called Gay Pride events “harmful for children” and demanded Catholics not attend them.

Tobin’s attack on Biden’s faith triggered a wave of outrage on social media — with many commenters reminding him that he claimed it was “outside his responsibility” to prevent child sex abuse in the church.

Biden is a Catholic. What is your problem. You’re embarrassing the rest of us.
— Zingamomma

(@tubawidow) August 11, 2020



Step away from the Twitter, @ThomasJTobin1 not only does it remain an occasion of sin, but now you’re tweeting gibberish. Biden was Catholic in 2008 and 2012 and he is Catholic now.
— Jenna Wims Hashway (@JWimsHashway) August 11, 2020

Hey bishop you know what else is sad…. priest diddling little boys
— Tyler Best (@WorldWideBest) August 11, 2020

he’s a duly confirmed and baptized catholic. You don’t get to take that away from him just because you don’t like his politics.
— Aida stayathomesavelives GN

 

(@agninri) August 11, 2020



(1) “a while” is two words
(2) Joe Biden is Catholic
(3) Saying otherwise because you think women are state-owned wombs is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy
— Jedi, Interrupted  

(@JediCounselor) August 11, 2020

You allowed children to be abused for years under you watch. You’re an embarrassment to Catholicism and a truly shameful human being.
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 11, 2020


“In 2018, Tobin acknowledged that he “became aware of incidents of sexual abuse when they were reported to the diocese” between 1992 & 1996 in Pittsburgh when he was the auxiliary bishop of that city… He said, however, that reporting the allegations was not his responsibility.”
— #ICannotWaittoDanceonTrumpGraves (@greeneyesmilw) August 11, 2020

Leaving aside his sincerity, which you obviously doubt, Biden is a baptized Catholic. Catholic baptism creates an irreversible, ontological change. As a bishop you are obligated to understand that and not deny it. Don’t you have a theology degree?
— Tim Spalding (@librarythingtim) August 11, 2020

funny, during the decade I spent as a youth minister and the 40 years I’ve spent on this planet as a Catholic, I was taught that being baptized into the Body of Christ was permanent, I didn’t know bishops were empowered to delete your baptism via tweet
— Claire Willett (@clairewillett) August 11, 2020


You’ve got some nerve. https://t.co/2XT238tkBH

— Cinloou   (@cinloou7) August 11, 2020



Bishop Tobin is opining on the fact that Biden supports “choice”. Biden has also expressed that he would not choose that for his family but women have a right to make their own choice. Bishop Tobin is pretty cool with the current Rapist-in-Chief tho.
— Robert the Spruce (@Bufshuf) August 11, 2020



I suppose when your definition of catholic is enabling child abuse then yeah, Joe doesn’t qualify like you do.
— Mueller, She Wrote Podcast (@MuellerSheWrote) August 11, 2020

VP Mike Pence brings his 'Ignore the Adultery (and Other Sins)' tour to Arizona

HOISTED BY HIS OWN PETARD

Opinion: At least spare us the homily about moral leadership when backing Donald Trump?

OPINION
EJ Montini, Arizona Republic

In the 1990s, when Vice President Mike Pence was a radio talk show host in Indiana, he’d argue that religious faith and moral character were essential to leadership.

Of course, this was before his sold his soul to a serial adulterer who has gleefully violated just about all of the other commandments as well.

PENCE AS COVID TASKFORCE CZAR


Pence is in the Valley on Tuesday to drum up support for the philanderer in chief in the upcoming election, helping to launch what is being called a "Latter-day Saints for Trump" coalition.

I’m sure that Pence and the political sycophants accompanying him will somehow try to sell LDS voters on the "moral" leadership of Trump.


PENCE AS COVID TASKFORCE CZAR

A president for whom fact checkers at The Washington Post have documented 20,000 false and misleading statements. Including some about the coronavirus that no doubt have had deadly consequences.

A man who is more covetous of power, money and fame that perhaps anyone on earth.

A man caught up in a fraudulent schemes like his "university," which have harmed thousands and cost millions to settle lawsuits.

A man accused of sexual harassment or assault by more than a dozen women.

A man who cheated on his first wife with his second, and who, according to The Wall Street Journal, cheated on his third with a porn star only a few months after his youngest son was born.

Then paid the woman $130,000 to keep quiet.

PENCE AS COVID TASKFORCE CZAR

A few words from Pre-Trump Pence

What would Mike Pence have said about all that before making his deal with the devil?

Let’s review.

Pre-Trump Pence once wrote, "Throughout our history, we have seen the presidency as the repository of all of our highest hopes and ideals and values. To demand less is to do an injustice to the blood that bought our freedoms."


Pre-Trump Pence wanted Bill Clinton removed from office for an affair with an intern.

Pre-Trump Pence said on his radio show:

“I mean, is adultery no longer a big deal in Indiana and in America? I’d just love to know your thoughts because I for one believe that the seventh commandment contained in the Ten Commandments is still a big deal. I maintain that other than promises that we make of fidelity in our faith, the promises that we make to our spouses and to our children, the promises that we make in churches and in synagogues and marriage ceremonies around this, it's the most important promise you'll ever make. And holding people accountable to those promises and holding people accountable to respecting the promises that other people make, I, to me, what could possibly be a bigger deal than that in this country?”

For Post-Trump Pence, that would be keeping his job.

Jerry Falwell Jr is the true face of white evangelicals — and dumping him changes nothing

REAGAN & FALWELL SR.'S GOP FAMILY VALUES MORAL MAJORITY REVEALED

August 11, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon - Commentary


One has to imagine that for Jerry Falwell Jr., things feel very unfair right about now. For more than four years, the world of right-wing American Christianity has not only lined up behind Donald Trump — a thrice-married chronic adulterer who bragged on tape how he likes to “grab ’em by the pussy” — but has embraced him as if he were the second coming. White evangelicals’ devotion to Trump didn’t wane after he became president, even in the face of stories about Trump paying off a porn actress and a centerfold model to stay quiet about his compulsive cheating on his third wife. Nor was there any angst on the Christian right over Trump’s relentless grifting or his efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian president into bolstering lies about former Vice President Joe Biden.

On the contrary, the WHITE MALE Christian right’s worshipful attitude toward Trump has only increased over the years, with pastors comparing Trump to Jesus himself and calling Trump “God’s chosen one.” The president’s approval with white MALE evangelicals remains strong, at 72%, and 82% say they plan to vote for him.

With all this Christian love for a president who makes all ordinary sinners look like amateurs, it’s no wonder that Falwell — the president of Liberty University, which was founded by his dad, the legendary Southern Baptist pastor and televangelist — thought it was no big deal to unbutton his pants a little. But when Falwell posted a photo on social media of himself partying on a yacht with those literally unbuttoned pants, holding something that resembled an alcoholic beverage and with his arm around the waist of a pregnant female acquaintance with her shirt rolled up, he did not get the Trump treatment.

NOT MY WIFE, 

BUT SHE IS PREGNANT WINK WINK

SO AM I ALL LIFE IS SACRED 

Instead, Falwell was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence from his job at Liberty University, the right-wing evangelical institution in Lynchburg, Virginia, that his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., founded in 1971. On Tuesday, the school announced that Jerry Prevo, chairman of its board of trustees, would replace Falwell as acting president.

The photo itself, if we’re being honest, was hardly “racy,” as some outlets called it. It looked no different from any other photo of people at a social gathering acting goofy after a few drinks. Still, this was apparently the last straw, after a year of reports that Falwell was getting up to precisely the kind of antics for which Trump apparently gets a permanent pass.

Last summer, a series of titillating stories about the Liberty president, including a report that Falwell and his wife had lavished financial favors on a “pool boy” half their age they met while partying in Florida. Falwell also reportedly emailed photos of his wife in a French maid costume to an employee, later claiming that was an accident and he’d meant to send the photos to her personal trainer. This raised more eyebrows, however, since the personal trainer is another good-looking younger man whom the Falwells have helped financially. Other photos of the Falwells partying in a Miami nightclub in 2014 were published last year.

Giving Falwell the boot only after he embarrassed the evangelical community in public only reinforces the main takeaway from this story: The supposed morality of white evangelicals is largely a facade, propped up in order to justify the Christian right’s real purpose, which is to defend white supremacy and male dominance. It’s worth asking why anyone would bother to keep up the facade, now that Trump has proved right-wing America doesn’t need to hide behind the Bible and the cross to defend its true agenda.

Before Trump, it was actually a pretty good racket that white evangelicals had going. As Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute writes in “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” his book on the racist history of much of American Christianity, “most white Christian churches have protected white supremacy by dressing it in theological garb, giving it a home in a respected institution, and calibrating it to local cultural sensibilities.”

Piety can give cover to racism by positioning white evangelicals as morally superior. By policing sex and prohibiting the pleasures of gambling, partying, drinking or even dancing, white evangelicals can craft a narrative where they are upright guardians of virtue, rather than mean-spirited racists who organize — in distinctly un-Christ-like fashion — to preserve their privileges at the expense of people of color. Indeed, the more white evangelicals defended a racist social order, the more effort they put into portraying themselves as “virtuous” by the way of strict rules governing individual behavior.




It’s the same story with white evangelicals and sexism. The prohibitions on premarital sex, contraception, abortion and divorce mainly serve to control girls and women, channeling them away from living independent lives and keeping them under the thumb of one man or another, first a father and then a husband, for their entire lives. Whenever feminists criticized evangelical misogyny, the Christian right defended itself by claiming that its sexist ideology flowed from “faith,” when in reality, it was the other way around: Male supremacy was the core belief, and religious faith was used to rationalize and justify it.

One of the remarkable developments in the age of Trump has the collapse of any meaningful need for all this Bible-hugging to defend bigotry against people of color, women and LGBTQ people.

Oh, Trump sometimes loves to wave a Bible around, though always with an awkwardness that suggests he’s afraid it may burn his fingers. But it’s unclear that anyone is fooled. With his ham-fisted and sloppy fake piety — and his obvious ignorance about all religious or theological questions — Trump illuminates a fundamental truth about right-wing Christianity, which is that it’s largely a cover story used to defend the otherwise indefensible.

As I argue in my book, “Troll Nation,” the true innovation of Trumpism is a kind of asshole pride, the collective conservative realization that there’s no longer any need to pretend to be moral or virtuous or even to care about other people. It’s become a time to embrace playing the role of the villain.

For the modern conservative, “triggering the liberals” by being a jerk is the highest calling, and “political correctness” is the slur directed at anyone who tries to harsh their vibe by suggesting that overt racism and sexism is uncool. Their president is a witless wannabe insult comic, and the more that Trump resorts to flinging childish insults, the more his supporters love him. Ours is an era where conservatives deliberately go to the grocery store without masks and film themselves harassing minimum-wage workers who are trying to enforce basic public health rules, so they can glory in what massive jerks they are. Their entertainment comes from crude right-wing shock jocks in the Rush Limbaugh tradition. Trolling liberals — for example, by awarding the odious Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom — has replaced pious posturing as the lingua franca of American conservatives.

In other words, the American right no longer feels any need to justify their will to power with over-the-top moralizing. Dominance has become its own justification.

So it’s not surprising that Falwell got a little lackadaisical about pretending to believe all that crap he’s been preaching about the virtues of sobriety and chastity. And more than a little dopey that the board of Liberty University is trying to act offended and going through the ritual of asking him to step aside. The notion that the religious right is motivated by “morality” and “faith” was blown to bits the second they bet their future on Donald Trump. Their massive hypocrisy has been permanently exposed, and dumping one prominent figure to save face won’t change that.

THE APPLE DOES NOT FALL FAR FROM THE TREE
TRIGGER WARNING

 / XENI JARDIN / 11:50 PM TUE MAY 15, 2007

Jerry Falwell talks about his first time.

Link to larger JPEG (1222 x 1608) of the historic parody ad for Campari liquor that once appeared in Hustler magazine. In the fake-interview text, Falwell recalls having lost his virginity to his own mother in a goat-filled outhouse. Wikipedia link to the history of "Hustler Magazine v. Falwell," a legal case that helped defined free speech rights in America, in relation to parodies of public figures. Larry Flynt must be having a pretty happy day today. (image via medialibel)

Here's a statement released today by Flynt on the occasion of Fallwell's death. (thanks to everyone who suggested this)

Previously:

Falwell's stupidest quotes, direct from hell.

Reader comment: BoingBoing reader says,

This is a clip from a series of sermons Jerry Falwell gave in 1998 about Y2K. He reminisces about goats, too.

CAMPARI ADS WERE POPULARLY IDENTIFIED WITH HUSTLER'S COMPETITION; PLAYBOY
EACH MONTH THE AD 
HAD A DIFFERENT PERSON
TALKING ABOUT THEIR FIRST  
TIME DRINKING CAMPARI
FALWELL OF COURSE WAS 
AN ABSTAINER IN A STATE FAMOUS
FOR ITS BOURBON NOT VERMOUTH

A science reporter explains how Trump’s ‘devastatingly inept response’ to COVID-19 humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation 

August 11, 2020 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

As the world passes a grim milestone of 20 million coronavirus cases, we look at how the pandemic humbled and humiliated the world’s most powerful country. Over a quarter of the confirmed infections and deaths have been in the United States, which has less than 5% of the world’s population. Ed Yong, a science writer at The Atlantic who has been covering the pandemic extensively since March, says existing gaps in the U.S. social safety net and the Trump administration’s “devastatingly inept response” made for a deadly combination.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The world has passed a grim milestone: 20 million coronavirus cases. Over 5 million of the confirmed infections are here in the United States. Although the U.S. has just 5% of the world’s population, it has more than a quarter, more than 25%, of all the coronavirus infections and deaths, with a death toll of over 163,000, by far the world’s largest. The United States has recorded more than half a million new cases so far in August. That’s more cases than any European country has recorded since the pandemic began.

This comes as millions of parents are now deciding whether it’s safe to send their kids back to school. A new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics found nearly 100,000 children contracted COVID-19 in just the last two weeks of July alone. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control reports children of color are disproportionately being hospitalized. Latinx kids are eight times more likely to be hospitalized than white children. Black children are five times as likely. Latinx and Black children also make up nearly three-quarters of the cases of the rare but deadly multisystem inflammatory syndrome, which has been associated with COVID-19.

We’re joined now by Ed Yong, science reporter at The Atlantic, his new article, “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” It’s the cover story of the new issue of The Atlantic.

Ed Yong begins his piece, “How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.”

Ed Yong, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. OK, how did it happen? And how can it be fixed?

ED YONG: [inaudible] I wrote 8,000 words about it, but to try and summarize, I think there’s two main things we need to talk about. One is the devastatingly inept response to the pandemic over this year. The Trump administration has utterly failed the American people. It has failed to take the lead. It has failed to listen to experts. It has failed to roll out a workable plan to get testing in place, to steel the country, to ensure protective supplies are rolled out. It has failed in almost every conceivable way to deal with a pandemic that many other nations have brought to heel within a similar amount of time. And more importantly, I think it has failed to honor the sacrifices that Americans have made in spring, when everyone obeyed social restrictions, when they stayed at home, when they uprooted their lives at significant financial and emotional cost. That time was meant to be used to prepare the nation for what was to come, and it was squandered. So, that’s one aspect of it.

But I think the other that we really do need to grapple with is that the coronavirus exploited vulnerabilities that have been existing in American society for decades and centuries, well before the Trump administration. So, the underfunding of public health, the overpacked prisons, the understaffed nursing homes, the health inequalities that have been brewing for all of America’s history due to its legacy of colonialism and racism, all of those things contributed to how bad things are, the statistics that you read out at the start of this segment. And all of those vulnerabilities need to be addressed going forward, if we are going to be better able to deal with the pandemics of the future.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — the Trump administration is clearly betting a lot on being able to have a vaccine as soon as possible. The president has actually talked about the possibility of November for a vaccine. But the reality is that even the clinical trial now underway, the Moderna trial, has only registered 5,000 of 30,000 volunteers that it needs to enroll in this clinical trial. This emphasis on the vaccine as the key solution, I’m wondering your thoughts on that.

ED YONG: Yeah. Even if everything goes right in the vaccine development process — and there’s no guarantee that will happen — even if we do get a vaccine ahead of schedule, then there are all kinds of problems left. There are logistical problems. How do you deliver that vaccine into people’s arms? Could we trust a government that has utterly failed to provide things like protective equipment or to roll out a workable national plan to handle the logistics of getting millions of vaccine doses to an adult population who is typically not the group that is usually vaccinated? Are we confident that a program called Operation Warp Speed, which has trumpeted speed more than anything else, will do all the necessary steps required to make people comfortable about the efficacy and safety of a vaccine? That public trust, which is so diminished right now, is really important. And I think that’s going to be a problem that people who are banking on the vaccine are not really fully grappling with.

And finally, I think you’re hinting at something really important, that we always — and by “we,” I mean society, in general, and, I think, the Trump administration, in particular, is banking on a biomedical silver bullets, things that are just going to — you know, a shot in the arm that is going to fix everything. And I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. Even when a vaccine comes out, as I said, it’s going to take a long time for it to actually get to people. And there are things we can do now, right now, that will make a difference. Testing is still so important. Social interventions, like giving people paid sick leave or ensuring wider healthcare coverage, all of those things can make a difference to people’s health in the moment, without having to wait for the biomedical enterprise to save us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue of such a simple public health measure, like testing and tracking of those with positive results, why has there been such a colossal failure on the part of the U.S. government in dealing with the issue of testing?

ED YONG: It’s truly astonishing. I think, you know, at the start, some of the problems have been well documented. The CDC tried to roll out a test. It didn’t really work. Private labs tried to jump in and help out, but were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. And these problems rolled on and exacerbated, because the — because the U.S. fell behind in those early days, it then competed with basically the rest of the world for reagents and for swabs and all the equipment that you needed to test.

Why we are continuing to fail at testing is just utterly baffling. Many people have called for rapid diagnostic tests, that are a little less sensitive but can deliver results very, very quickly. That is incredibly important, because at the moment tests are taking weeks, you know, a week-plus, to return results, which is completely useless from the perspective of actually controlling the virus, working out where the pandemic is continuing to cause problems. We need a really coordinated testing plan. I think the real answer to your question, why this is still plaguing the country, is that there just has been no leadership. The logistical expertise to create a functioning testing plan across the country has not been marshaled. And that’s to the detriment of all of us.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Trump was questioned about his support for reopening in-person schools during the pandemic. This is what he said.

REPORTER: Ninety-seven thousand children tested positive for coronavirus in the last two weeks in July, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Does that give you any pause about —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No.

REPORTER: — schools reopening for in-person learning?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, because they may have, as you would call it, a case. It may be a case, but it’s also a case where there’s a tiny — it’s a tiny fraction of death. Tiny fraction. And they get better very quickly. Yeah, they have — they may have it for a short period of time, but, as you know, the — the seriousness of it, in terms of what it leads to, is — is extraordinarily small, very, very much less than 1%.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to ask you a multipart question on this, about misinformation and whether you think journalists should refuse to go to these daily coronavirus press briefings, unless President Trump has scientists at his side. Number two, this issue of the children, and particularly kids of color — Latinx kids eight times more likely to be hospitalized, Black children five times more likely, and 75% more chance of getting this multisystem disorder that can kill — how little these disparities are talked about, and do you think they weigh in to President Trump just disregarding them? By the way, his own kid won’t be going back in person to school, because their school is closed.

ED YONG: OK. So, to the first point, I don’t think that journalists should be airing these briefings live. I think they are among the most potent sources of misinformation and disinformation to the public right now. And, you know, maybe clips of them, along with the actual contextualizing information people need to make sense of it, but don’t ever, live. That just — yeah.

I think that in terms of your other question, the racial disparities, The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer wrote a piece that Trump took the virus seriously, until he worked out who was actually dying from it. We see from reports from Katherine Eban from Vanity Fair that testing plans were — plans to control the pandemic were shelved when it became clear that it was disproportionately targeting blue states and minorities. You know, I think one should always stick to Hanlon’s razor, assuming incompetence instead of malice, but there is increasing evidence that malice was part of this. And I think that is deeply worrying for what’s to come.

And you’ve read out statistics about the way the virus infects children, the lower relative risk of infection or death. That’s important, sure, but we need to remember that this is a pandemic which is still raging wildly throughout America. And the problem is that if you have an uncontrolled pandemic, not only do you have like massive community spread, which is a problem if you open schools in those communities, but rare events then become hugely problematic. If you have millions of people being infected, something that only happens to 1% of them is still going to affect huge swaths of the population. So the fact that something is relatively rare doesn’t make it safe in the context of a pandemic that is raging out of control, which is exactly what we are still seeing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ed Yong, I wanted to ask you — in your article for The Atlantic, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” you also look into the role of social media platforms in spreading disinformation or misinformation to the American public. And you write, quote, “The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.” Could you expound on that?

ED YONG: Yeah. We know that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube spread misinformation more quickly than they do information. And that’s because they are governed by algorithms that are designed to keep users engaged, to keep their attention on the site. And they do that by feeding them content that veers towards extreme, veers towards being very polarized and that stokes heavy emotion, regardless of whether that content is true and whether it is dangerous or not. And these problems have been well recognized.

This is the core theme of my Atlantic piece, that all of our problems in this pandemic were predictable and preventable. People were talking about social media platforms acting as radicalization engines. And that is exactly what we’re seeing now. They spread misinformation, and they contribute to this vortex of fear and uncertainty in which people are trapped. So, we are all worried. We are all concerned for our families, our friends. And we fill that, we sate that worry, by looking for more information. But we are looking for that information on channels that feed us falsehoods, that feed us polarizing information. And so that just worsens the feelings of fear and anxiety, which cause us to seek out even more information, which worsens the problem. And it just — it spirals. That is exactly what we are seeing now in this pandemic, and it’s contributing to the problems that we’re experiencing.

AMY GOODMAN: When you talk about a nontechnical fix — I mean, in terms of, for example, a vaccine, that we have to focus on now what many countries have gotten under control, the coronavirus pandemic, through masks, through testing, in both cases, something — it’s not just that the president has not invoked the Defense Production Act to the level of just ensuring everyone has it. In many places, it’s getting far worse. But I wanted to go to the issue of Medicare for All, Ed. We’re moving into the Democratic National Convention next week. And the executive committee, writing the platform — Joe Biden has made it very clear he’s against Medicare for All — amazingly, in the latest vote on the platform, against Medicare for All. How significant do you think — and do you think this pandemic and its disparate effects on the population of this country, especially communities of color — do you think that Medicare for All would make an enormous difference, and how it’s possible that the opposing party is saying “absolutely not” at this point, when many polls show it is the most popular answer to the health crisis we have in this country?

ED YONG: Yeah. America’s system of employer-tied insurance, which is unique in the world, is undoubtedly contributing to the disparities that we are seeing. It disadvantages poor communities. It disadvantages communities of color, Black and Latinx communities, that have been disproportionately hit by this virus. And we know that those disparities and this system of healthcare inequity is a legacy of the racism that America has always struggled with. Since the end of the Civil War, throughout the Jim Crow era, healthcare access was pushed away from Black communities and other communities of color. And that goes right up to the opposition to the expansion of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. And that has led to continuing gulfs in people being able to access healthcare, that is contributing to the disproportionate toll that this virus has taken upon communities of color.

Even before the pandemic started, America was rated by some global indices as being the most prepared nation in the world. That seems a bit ludicrous in hindsight. But even then, in terms of healthcare access, America was rated as 175th out of 195 different countries. This was always known to be a massive vulnerability that would cost the country dearly during a crisis of this kind. And, sure enough, it has, in a very preventable, very tragic way. And this has to be addressed. If this can’t — if we can’t use the lessons from this pandemic to realize that universal healthcare is a thing we have to fight for, I don’t know whether — I don’t know whether we’re going to do any better, not just for the future phases of this pandemic, but for future pandemics to come and all the other health problems that we still need to deal with.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ed Yong, I wanted to ask you about the Trump administration’s continued isolationism in terms of, for instance, the attempts to demonize China as the source of the pandemic, and constantly criticizing and attacking the World Health Organization. Yet China, even though the virus started there, has been able to contain it dramatically. What has the Chinese government done right, compared to what the U.S. government has done?

ED YONG: So, you know, China clearly made missteps earlier on. There were problems with transparency, of alerting the world to problems early on. These were issues that have been problems since the original SARS in 2003. But China did take steps to control the pandemic.

I think what we really need to remember now is that the pandemic shows how quickly diseases can spread around the world and that no country can stand alone. No country can wall itself off from the rest of the globe and expect to be fine. The world needs to work together to deal with threats like this. You know, the word “pandemic” comes from the Greek pan and demos, “all citizens,” “all people.” And that is what is required to deal with these problems.

The United States now, in seeking this isolationist stance, in pulling back from the WHO and other international alliances, is really shooting itself in the foot. You could argue that China made missteps early on and that we need new international norms to stop those lack of transparency from manifesting again, but it’s the international community that’s going to create the legal structures and the norms that will ensure that the entire world is better prepared for the next crisis. And if America withdraws, it is losing its seat at the table. It is losing positions of influence. And it is allowing those norms to be drawn without it. Now, maybe some people think that America doesn’t need the rest of the world. But they’re wrong. And by forfeiting that standing, that position of diplomatic power, it really is, I think, taking steps that will cost it in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we just have 10 seconds, but I wanted to ask you about the highest-level U.S. delegation, led by Alex Azar, the head of Health and Human Services, to Taiwan. Clearly, Trump wants to stick a finger in the eye of China. But what would be very important here is if the U.S. learned the lesson of Taiwan in how it dealt with the pandemic, immediately going to testing, national responses to testing and protective gear and masks — a true lesson for the United States to learn.

ED YONG: Yeah, I think humility would be an amazing lesson to learn. Other countries have dealt with this pandemic well. And if America can actually shed this sense of exceptionalism and look to what other nations have done well, maybe we can learn lessons that will protect people in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Ed Yong, we want to thank you so much for being with us, science writer at The Atlantic who’s been covering the pandemic extensively since March. His cover story, we will link to, is titled “How the Pandemic Defeated America.”