Trump just claimed Biden 'will cancel the Christmas season' in bizarre rally speech

Posted by Greg Evans in news

Donald Trump's spree of campaign rallies in the run-up to the US election continued on Sunday when he spoke to supporters in Carson City, Nevada.

The president spoke for nearly 90 minutes to the jam-packed crowd, where the was little to no evidence of social distancing.

Trump covered the usual topics that he likes to delve into at these types of events such as deriding Joe Biden and downplaying the seriousness of coronavirus.

However, he made a truly bizarre comment about Biden's plans for Christmas, claiming that the Democrat will end the season if he is elected.

Around 65 minutes in the president went on a rambling rant about Biden's plans for the state of Nevada and in a seemingly unrelated note added that Biden will completely end the Christmas season.

Under the Biden lockdown, the lights of Reno and Las Vegas we’re extinguished. Carson City will become a ghost town. If he comes in, Carson City will become a ghost town. And the Christmas season will be cancelled.

Trump didn't really explain how or why Biden would do this but almost immediately went on to another story, claiming that he had single-handedly got people saying 'Merry Christmas' again.

Look, remember I said we’re going to bring back Christmas? The name. Remember? We brought it back. Remember? I used to go around saying, 'We will bring…” Because I saw these big department stores. They thought it was politically correct. So they’d say, 'Have a great season.' I say, 'No, I don’t want to have a great season. I want to say Merry Christmas. Say Merry Christmas.' Now, they’re all saying Merry Christmas.

The president's bizarre and seemingly baseless accusation against Biden comes just a few weeks after audiotapes revealed that the first lady, Melania Trump, isn't a big fan of Christmas

It's not the first time he's taken credit for Christmas either, claiming in 2017 that people did not use the phrase "merry Christmas" before he was president, leading many people to point to the many occasions where Barack Obama had used the phrase.

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Replying to @atrupar

"The Christmas season will be canceled" -- Trump says Biden will cancel Christmas

6:25 PM · Oct 18, 2020

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Other comments from Trump that raised eyebrows during the rally included the president calling for major US states to open up despite coronavirus still posing a danger.

A classic gripe of the Trump presidency has been water pressure and sure enough, it came up again and went on to talk about people having to flush their toilet 15 times and his 'beautiful hair.'

He then mocks Biden for not having big crowds at his rallies, which is what should be happening during the pandemic, and then claims he's had the 'biggest crowds in the history of politics.'

So he goes out. Gets no people at any of the rallies. I go out, we get 35, 40,000, 25,000, 15,000. We go, boom! 15,000. We get the biggest crowds in the history of politics. Look, everything I say, they’ll correct. They’ll say… Who cares? I don’t even care what they say at this point. But we get these massive crowds. He gets nobody.

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Replying to @atrupar

Trump mocks Biden for pledging to listen to scientists. Watch this clip and ask yourself if Trump was trying to kill Americans by infecting them with coronavirus, how would it sound different?

5:36 PM · Oct 18, 2020

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Another potentially controversial moment was when Trump commended his son-in-law Jared Kushner for being 'skinny' and 'not having a weight problem.'

In terms of Trump rallies, this was hardly the most outrageous but he's been non-stop on the campaign trail and is set to speak twice in Arizona on Monday and then again in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

New Zealand's deputy PM had the perfect comeback when confronted by American conspiracy theorist

Posted by Iana Murray in news

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New Zealand's deputy prime minister Winston Peters has no time for Covid denial, or Flat Earthers for that matter.
At a re-election campaign meeting in Tarunga, the leader of the New Zealand First party was confronted by a conspiracy theorist with an accent that sounded very American.

The incident was captured on video, as the sceptic asked the deputy prime minister to provide evidence that “there is a virus that causes the disease.”

Before he could even finish the question, Peters cut him off and proceeded to show him the science:

We’ve got someone who obviously got an education in America. 220,000 people have died in the United States, there are 8 million cases to date. We’ve got 79,000 cases probably today in India, and here is someone who gets up and says, “the Earth is flat.” Sorry sunshine, wrong place.

Just a reminder: New Zealand currently has zero cases. So Peters and recently re-elected Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern are obviously doing something right.

People were a fan of the deputy PM’s brutal takedown.

Some Americans were also met with a wake-up call as to how the country is seen by the rest of the world.

Rex Chapman

@RexChapman

New Zealand: Winston Peters — deputy PM of New Zealand addresses an American COVID-19 denier at a press conference. “Sit down. Sorry sunshine, wrong place.”

3:24 PM · Oct 16, 2020

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Perhaps the lesson we can take from this is to be more like New Zealand, less like the US. Also, Winston Peters has some zingers.

Pro-Trump televangelist predicts that president will win the election and the world will end

Posted by Joshua Zitser in offbeat

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A famous televangelist has claimed God told him who will win the November presidential election and about the chaos that will ensue afterwards.

Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, told viewers of his show The 700 Club: “First of all, I want to say without question, Trump is going to win the election.”

Trump is currently down about nine points in the national polls but, according to election forecasters 538, still has about a 12 per cent chance of winning the election.

Robertson has defended the president in the past and has previously made dark predictions

Things got gloomier after this initial prediction thought.

Robertson said: “What I think very frankly is the only thing that will fulfil the word of Jesus … is some kind of asteroid strike on the globe.”

He continued: “It’s sudden destruction. It’s not going to be some nuclear war. We’re not going to be allowed to blow this earth up.”

Robertson predicted that more than five years will pass between the election and the destruction of the earth by an asteroid.

In the meantime, he argued, there will be civil disobedience, riots and two assassination attempts on Trump.

To top things off, he also prophesied that there will be a war on Israel which will only end when God intervenes.

Robertson has previously made prophecies which have proven to be totally wrong. He predicted the world would end in 1982 and also in 2007.

Evidently, it did not.

Why did conspiracy theorists believe that JFK Jr was going to become Trump's new running mate?
Posted 1 day ago by Greg Evans in news

Picture: STF/AFP via Getty Images/MANDEL NGAN/AFP

Over the weekend, followers of the baseless pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were bracing themselves for a major announcement from the president that could have changed the trajectory of the US election.

Images began circulating on Twitter from QAnon accounts that the president was going to sensationally announce at a rally in Dallas, Texas on Saturday that he was replacing Mike Pence as his running mate with John F. Kennedy Jr.

There are several problems here.

Firstly, Trump didn't hold a rally in Dallas on Saturday. He was actually at a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin instead.

Secondly, it would be against the law to announce a new running mate in the election as millions have already cast their votes.

Finally – and this is the biggest problem of them all – JFK Jr has been dead since 1999. The son of the former president died in a tragic plane crash on 16 July.

Kennedy was flying the light aircraft which crashed into the Atlantic ocean, a tragic accident which also claimed the lives of his wife Carolyn Bessette, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette.

Obviously, JFK Jr wasn't announced as Trump's new choice for vice president because that would have been impossible but QAnon followers seem determined to believe this otherwise ludicrous theory. There are even pieces of merchandise that have been created for the very unlikely Trump Kennedy partnership.

So where does this bizarre theory come from?

Well, according to Rolling Stone this conspiracy first started to do the rounds in June 2018.

Apparently, posts began appearing on the notorious 8Chan messageboard suggesting that JFK Jr had faked his death and had gone into hiding over fears that he was going to be targetted by the same deep-state conspiracy that QAnon believes has also been targetting Trump since he moved into politics.

The theory reportedly picked up momentum when the right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin told YouTuber Jenny Moonstone that she believed that the person behind Q was actually JFK Jr because of how lovingly they spoke of the former president. Rolling Stone quotes her as saying:

The way that Q talks about JFK Sr. in the posts, it is with such love and passion, it makes me think that it is someone that is close to him. If JFK Jr. faked his death and was alive, it would make sense that he was Q.

Daily Dot also reported in April 2019 that QAnon believers had tried to link JFK Jr's death to the start of Hillary Clinton's political career as she had run for the New York senate seat that he was allegedly running for, despite never announcing his intention to run for office during his lifetime.

Another claim trying to link JFK Jr to Trump is a quote from supposedly from the June 1999 edition of George magazine, a publication that Kennedy Jr was the editor-in-chief of. The quote, which is said to be from Kennedy Jr says:

If my dear friend Donald Trump ever decided to sacrifice his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become president he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate.

The fact-checking website Snopes has completely debunked this quote as not only did JFK Jr never say this, it was also never printed in the magazine.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Trump and JFK Jr were friends. There are photos of the two together which QAnon have used for their memes but they look to be from Trump's time as a New York socialite when he pretty much ran into anybody.

Another bizarre link to JFK Jr is a well known Trump supporter called Vicent Fusca who has been frequently spotted at Trump rallies. Despite having zero resemblance to Kennedy Jr, QAnon followers have been claiming that Fusca is Kennedy in disguise and has used plastic surgery to alter his appearance.

It can't be said how many members of the QAnon community believe in this conspiracy but they have twice suggested, prior to last weekend, that Kennedy was going to come out of hiding and side with Trump.

At Trump's 4 July celebration in 2019, they believed that JFK Jr was going to make it public that he was still alive. They had also looked very deeply into the 55th anniversary of the assassination of JFK and claimed that JFK Jr would reemerge on 22 November 2019 and 'usher in the storm' and help Donald Trump rid the world of the global Satanic paedophile rings that QAnon is so firmly against.

Not even a smidgen of this has ever happened and it appears to be another prime example of a conspiracy getting way out of hand and people wanting to believe something that clearly isn't true.

That being said, although it's unlikely that Trump believes in the JFK Jr theory, he has refused to disavow himself from the community. During a recent town hall event on NBC, Trump claimed to not know anything about the conspiracy before he started to praise them, saying:

I do know they are very much against paedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it … I just don’t know about QAnon.

Whether this theory continues to gather pace remains to be seen and with just a few weeks to go until the US election it will be interesting to see what the future of this wild conspiracy theory and its followers will be.

A scientist has a disturbing theory for why we haven't met aliens yet
Posted  by Louis Staples in discover
UPV



Right now, you'd understand if aliens didn't want to pay Earth a visit, what with the potentially deadly Covid-19 pandemic and all.

But earlier this year, after 16 years of secrecy, the Pentagon has released footage of UFOs which has made many ask, for the zillionth time: are we really alone in the universe? Or are aliens already among us?

For years, these questions have divided scientists, sci-fi fans and conspiracy theorists. Although many explanations have been put forward for why we haven’t met aliens yet, none have been completely convincing or universally accepted.

In short, in a world where we're obsessed with discovering every little thing, this is one big question we don't really know

But two years ago, when the world seemed like a very different place, Russian physicist Alexander Berezin, from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET), had a theory. He suggested that once a civilisation reaches the capabilities of spreading across the stars, it will inevitably wipe out all other civilisations.

Just what we need to hear.

The grim solution doesn’t hypothesise a necessarily evil alien race (phew!) it's more that they might not notice us and their exponential expansion across the galaxy might be more important to them than we are. Cheery indeed

He wrote in 2018:

They simply won't notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it.

So why haven't we met them yet and been obliterated?

Well, it's not all bad news, sort of. Berezin suggests that the reason humans are still here is that we are not likely to be the ants. In other words, we are the future destroyers of countless civilisations and we're just not ready yet.

Assuming the hypothesis above is correct, what does it mean for our future? The only explanation is the invocation of the anthropic principle. We are the first to arrive at the [interstellar] stage. And, most likely, will be the last to leave.

He cites colonialism and capitalism are two historical example of the forces that will eventually prompt humans to destroy other cultures.

Berezin hopes that he’s wrong and, to be honest, so do we.

So yeah, it seems like things could always be worse. If this theory is true, let's hope that aliens steer clear of us for a little (a lot) longer and that it's a very, very, very long time before we consider becomes the aliens who destroy other places.

HT: IFLScience

Iceland PM shook by an earthquake in a live interview responds in the best possible way
Posted  by Isobel van Hagen 

Getty

The prime minister of Iceland appeared shaken, literally, when she was interrupted by an earthquake during a live interview.

Katrin Jakobsdottir was discussing the impact of coronavirus on tourism with the Washington Post when the room she was in started to visibly shake. While she initially appeared startled, she managed to brush it aside and finish answering the question

"Oh my god, there's an earthquake," she said with her eyes widening. "Sorry, there was an earthquake right now. Wow."

But Jakobsdottir then started laughing, saying: "Well, this is Iceland!" before continuing her response to the question

"Yes I'm perfectly fine, the house is still strong, so no worries," she added.

She later posted on Twitter about the interview: “Spoke with @IgnatiusPost about Covid-19 and how we are dealing with the situation here in Iceland. We also spoke about the heart and soul of the Icelandic people. And then we had an earthquake. I hope everyone is feeling good and steady.”

Jakobsdottir, 44, has been Iceland's Prime Minister since 2017.

The 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck on Tuesday afternoon near Krysuvik, about 35km south of the capital, Reykjavik, according to The Icelandic Meteorological Office.

While earthquakes are quite common on the volcanic island country, the tremble led to reports of damage around the capital and also briefly interrupted a parliamentary session in the capital.

Bjarni Benediktsson

@Bjarni_Ben

Þetta var stærsti skjálfti sem ég hef upplifað (reyndar misst af allnokkrum).

7:46 AM · Oct 20, 2020

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“The was the biggest earthquake I have ever experienced,” Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson wrote on Twitter, next to a picture of a fallen ceiling tile.

People on social media seemed taken with Jakobsdottir calm control of the situation saying, “you handled it like a champ” and “seriously impressive”.

As one Twitter user put it, “Never a dull moment in Iceland!”

An earthquake in Iceland briefly disrupted an interview between Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius and Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir

5:10 PM · Oct 20, 2020

Trump has a Chinese bank account and pursued China projects, analysis of his tax record reveals

Trump did not include the Chinese bank account in his public financial disclosures

Stuti Mishra@StuteeMishra
  

File image: Analysis of Trump's tax records reveal attempts at getting business deals in China and a 'secret' bank account

Donald Trump maintains a previously undeclared Chinese bank account and has been unsuccessfully pursuing major business deals in China for more than a decade, according to a new US media report.

The president did not include the Chinese account in public financial disclosures, according to the New York Times, which has released a series of analyses of Mr Trump’s tax records since reporting that he has paid just $750 in income tax in some recent fiscal years.

According to the NYT report, the Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management and paid $188,561 in taxes in the country from 2013 to 2015.

Tax records do not apparently shed light on the exact amounts of money involved in the deals made through this account. But it is mandatory in the US to reveal any foreign income while filing for taxes, and Trump International Hotels Management has reported only a few thousand dollars from China in recent years.

The exposé comes in the final stages of a heated battle for the 3 November presidential election.

Recently, allegations from Senate Republicans against Democrat Joe Biden have included claims that his son “opened a bank account” with a Chinese businessman, hinting that he has vested interests in China. Mr Trump has repeatedly claimed that his opponent would be “soft” on the Asian superpower.

Trump Organisation lawyer Alan Garten told the Times that Mr Trump’s company does indeed maintain a bank account in China, but refused to name the bank in question. In a statement, he said Trump International Hotels "opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States to pay the local taxes".

Garten said the company had opened the account once an office was opened in China "to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia".

“No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialised and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive,” Garten said.

He added: “Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose.”