Gilead made $3 billion of Truvada last year alone.

R1, you go first.

"While polls generally show Trump retaining strong support overall among blue-collar whites, more detailed results in several recent surveys reveal a critical distinction: Trump faces much more resistance among working-class whites who are not evangelical Christians than among those who are. If Democrats can advance through that opening, it could prove crucial in 2020, because evangelicals compose a much smaller share of the white working-class population in the pivotal Rust Belt battleground states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, than they do in the South."

Very interesting. I'd love this to be tested rigorously under more controlled conditions. I'm not saying this isn't possible, and we know from animals like Koko the gorilla and Alex the African Grey Parrot, animals are certainly capable of doing this.

But we've been fooled before to like with those horses who apparently could do math (and give results by stomping their hooves) only to be revealed as picking up on their trainers non-verbal clues.

"Working from the premise that the country largely agrees with them on everything, or that agreeing with the majority of voters on issues is not necessary to win, the campaign has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again…

The debate has taken shape within a world formed by Twitter, in which the country is poised to leap into a new cultural and economic revolution, and even large chunks of the Democratic Party’s elected officials and voting base have fallen behind the times. As my colleague Ed Kilgore argues, the party’s left-wing intelligentsia have treated any appeals to voters in the center as a sign of being behind the times."

Coming to a fancy restaurant near you.

And so they are still turning up for work.

"An officer from the Los Angeles Police Department, who asked that his name not be used, said he had told at least 10 determined workers in the neighborhood to leave.

“For the most part it was evacuated. I’m driving around and I see people working,” he said. When he asked what they were doing, the laborers told him again and again: “I have to finish.”

And then there's this:

"The Lubbers, who are Republicans, feel the same. So when they voted in 2016, they wrote in Mitt Romney and John McCain. It was the first time since 1972 they had not voted for the Republican candidate for president.

“I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d voted for Trump,” Mrs. Lubbers said.

They were not alone. About 326,000 voters in Michigan in 2016 either wrote in a name, picked a third-party candidate or chose nobody at all. That is about 1 in 15 people who voted and about 30 times Mr. Trump’s margin of victory here."

And so, by voting 3rd party or not casting a vote at all, you enabled his win.

Good work there.

Climate Change too is likely a contributing factor - through warmer waters and perhaps (I speculate) higher levels of dissolved CO2.

As I've mentioned before. I wonder how long before people really absorb the fact that the "unusually" warm/cold weather we're having in month X or the "unusually" wet/dry period we're going through isn't at all going to be that unusual going forward.

Widespread occurrences of extreme weather are the new normal. And will likely become more frequent and more extreme for the rest of our lives, and your children and grandchildren.

Here's your next excuse when you stumble around the office plastered.

That is all.

"It’s possible that Putin wants to sow chaos in the United States. He certainly enjoyed Trump’s presidential campaign victory and its corrosive effect on American political life. But the Ukraine scandal and the impeachment investigation might be moving a bit too fast, even for the chaos mastermind. For Putin, it would have been better if the Ukraine scandal had never happened. Trump is better than a traditional American president, who would continue the traditional policy of treating Russia as a Cold war loser."

In a lot of countries "Blue Ivy" or "Moon Unit" just wouldn't cut it.

The Nikon Small World photo contest 2019.

"Schulz: Is Barack Obama Black?

Founders Attorney: Objection.

Schulz: To your knowledge?

Ryan: I’ve never met Barack Obama so I don’t …

Schulz: So you don’t know if Barack Obama is Black? What about Michael Jordan? Do you know if Michael Jordan is Black?

Founders Attorney: Objection

Ryan: I’ve never met him."

I'll believe it when I see it.

Not before.

I wonder how long before people stop saying things like "wow, July was unusually hot" or "the last few years have been abnormally dry" or "we've had our 3rd '100 year' flood in 10 years" and start absorbing the fact that THIS is the New Normal?

"In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive apocalypse, which is to say a revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. Our government and society have long made choices and embraced values that are difficult, if not impossible, to square with Christianity, so an end of any association between the two is welcome. Likewise, the proportion of Americans who actually practiced Christian faith in any meaningful, life-altering sense was always substantially lower than the proportion who would identify as Christian in a poll. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty which may be an opportunity for new faithfulness, repentance, or even revival."

Religion is just a front. White Evangelicals are at the core just another of the white supremacist, nativist groups that make up the GOP coalition.

"Evangelical denominations formed from these splits in the South were usually comprised of people who had made money from slavery or supported it. After the Civil War many were more likely to have supported the Ku Klux Klan and approved of (or participated in) lynching. The burning cross of the KKK, for instance, was a symbol of white Christian supremacy, designed both to put fear into the hearts of African Americans and to highlight the supposed Christian righteousness of the terrorist act."

Those planets full of hot men are just too far away.

Some things still can remain a mystery...apparently.

Pop quiz: guess the red states and the blue states.

The release of methane is one of the most predicted and feared of the positive feedback loops in Climate Change.

Stored in the permafrost and in deep sea ices called clathrates, it is 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 and the more the planet warms the more gas is released - thus the positive feedback loop.

Because nothing is going to happen meaningfully unless Trump starts to lose the GOP.

Small cracks so far maybe.

Allahpundit is one of the least crazy of the right wing writers.

Just relax and let it happen.

"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."

Your first floor will be flooded by the ocean and your neighborhood uninhabitable but you can be safe in the knowledge that your roof line will be aesthetically pleasing

"Member Gretchen Pfaehler asserted that “I am in favor of sustainability,” but “this detracts from the slope of the roof” in a way that was unacceptable to her. She did suggest she might be open to some other technology which blends in more with the roof. “I think there is a solution but this is not that solution,” she said." .

Has her tongue so far up Trump's ass she could taste his toothpaste.

And this is what she gets in return.

Let's state up front that the writer is a social conservative nutjob: he has, for example, proposed the banning of all pornography.

But I don't think he's totally off base here. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

"If you don't think Trump is capable of getting under her skin, remember that last year he single-handedly convinced her to take a freaking DNA test, the results of which she proudly reported, not-so-accidentally endorsing the "one-drop" theory. Native Americans were, rather understandably, appalled. Everyone else, with the possible exception of Trump himself, was confused. This is not how a sober-minded person responds to jibes from someone who has spent his entire life insulting people.

The Native American ancestry controversy is not going away, even if Warren does somehow manage to beat the current Super Tuesday math, which still favors Biden. How many Pocahontas jokes do you think she can stomach? Is she ready for Trump to tweet "Colors of the Wind" with her face superimposed on the Disney princess character by some teenaged alt-right sludgelord? Is she ready for the rally at which Trump tunelessly declaims — in that affectless monotone he adopts whenever he is trying to read something — the lyrics from Cher's "Half Breed"? Talking about postal banking in the middle of all this is going to require a very cool head."

I'd never really thought about it before, but it's true.

This is what the Internet is for.

And it doesn't look good for Trump.

Because we all now have the attention spans of goldfish.

"The Cape we love is at risk now. Cape Cod is perched on a stretch of ocean warming faster than nearly any in the world. And as much as we might wish it away, as hard as we try to ignore it, the effects of climate change here are already visible, tangible, measurable, disturbing."

Or, with this crowd, maybe a girdle.

Can't imagine why.

Oh, the humanity!

"When he told MPs that the "best way" to honour Jo Cox, who was murdered in the 2016 referendum, was to "get Brexit done", the chamber moved past boiling point and into complete meltdown. Some MPs walked out of the chamber in protest. Others left in tears.

But be in no doubt, this is a deliberate, calculated strategy to proactively whip up public anger. Mr Johnson's politics at the dispatch box on Wednesday were lifted straight from Trump's playbook. The more his rivals rage and rail against him, the better. His path to electoral success is predicated on stoking up division in order to turn out his vote.

Mr Johnson has no interest in uniting a nation. He has every interest in convincing Brexit supporters to back him in a general election. If he can win 35% of the popular vote from that pool of 17.4m Vote Leave supporters, he could stay as prime minister. Everything he does now is designed to prove to them he is the only one on their side."

“The camera zooms in for close-up shots of her crotch to confirm that the singing is definitely coming from between her legs…. This vile commercial is airing during prime time when children are likely watching television… Family viewing time is ruined. Can you imagine what goes through the mind of a child when he sees this ad?"

WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???

...when anybody will soon be able to generate convincing images from scratch?

Probably decimate it.

Bad, bad, pesky demons.

Reading the Interwebs you'd think she'd stolen their last viagra pill.

In contrast, one of the most consequential things that Canadian universities ever did to maintain their academic integrity was to ban athletic scholarships and admissions.

"Unsurprisingly, athletes and legacies had an enormous edge when applying to Harvard—for whites, their admissions rates were 87 percent and 34 percent, respectively, compared to 4.89 percent for normal applicants. Jocks were not particularly academically distinguished as a group. With legacies, dean’s list kids, and faculty children, however, the situation is a bit more nuanced. Their qualifications tended to be stronger than the average Harvard applicant, but weaker than the average student who was actually admitted."

I understand why she did it. And in a normal world it would be more than justified.

But the end result in the Senate is a foregone conclusion. As of now there is little public support for it - and with the polarization at all-time highs it will serve mainly to rally the troops around the sociopath we call president.

He will go into the next election claiming vindication and victory.

His chances for re-election just went up measurably.

But be comforted by your righteous indignation and your fealty to the rule of law.

"But, for all the apparent inevitability of Pelosi’s announcement, it still represents a gamble with the very highest stakes. Until now, she and her allies have argued that a number of conditions would need to be met for the launch of an impeachment inquiry. First, there would have to be an easy-to-understand set of facts indicating that Trump had carried out impeachable offenses. Second, there would need to be broad support in the country for impeachment. And, third, there would have to be some prospect of gaining at least some Republican support in the Senate, which would ultimately issue a verdict on the President.

At most, one of these conditions has been met—the first one."

I have a hard time remembering names in large groups of people.... now we're expected to remember customized pronouns too?

Go home microbiome. You're drunk.

Of course you do.

World Cup organizers will let fans bring their own food into stadiums after they cleared out some vendors’ entire supply.

I have long said this ruling was flawed to start off with. But at least they're not trying to impose it on the rest of the world.

But it's a $500 million a year business.

Not your grandfather's Deepfakes.

But some of the technologies coming along have the potential for a lot of evil.

Bad business decisions, the Internet and people taking fewer beach vacations.

A lot harder.

“I totally understand that there will be some people I will never convince, who will say you should never have had it,” Cameron says of the 2016 vote. He knows that millions of remain voters blame him viscerally for everything that has happened since then and probably always will. “But I think there are a lot of people who can also see that there was a growing inevitability about having a referendum and, yes, there was a problem in the Tory party, but the relationship with the EU was a far bigger one. Britain’s position was becoming more tenuous, and we had to fix it. I hope that I can convince people that it was an honest and thought through attempt to deal with the issue.”

You can't. Just shut the fuck up and crawl back under the rock you came out from.

God help us.

"But to many Trump allies, aides, and longtime observers, the president is showing the world the way he’s always operated. Only now it has become clearer because he is receiving less pushback from staff and advisers — and has very few effective checks on his administration from Congress, the national security community or fellow Republicans."

Perhaps. But in many cases, the physical manifestation of pain is only one aspect of the problem.

"Ramanuj pointed to plentiful research that shows how physical and emotional pain fire up the same regions of the brain. One pain can mask the other; it is far easier, after all, to confront a physical affliction than an emotional wound. Even if there were some kind of miracle cure, you would still need to contend with the vagaries of human behaviour. Patients regularly choose not to take drugs that might help them; sometimes, they seem not to want to get better. The lives of people in entrenched chronic pain have often unravelled: they might have lost jobs or relationships, years of productive existence. We all need a story to tell about our lives, to explain why we are where we are. For some, pain has become the explanation. “Pain occupies so much of your mind, you’re hardwired to attend to it; that’s what its purpose is,” said Ramanuj. “When you’re attending to physical pain there are other things you don’t need to attend to.”

And there is less and less overlap between the two.

"The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril."

But my issues with Warren aren't about substance, they're about style.

I still don't see her being able to effectively deal with the lies, bullying and the basic misogynistic, racist crudeness of Trump.

...on screen again.

Who knew?

Every time you think they have reached bottom, they find a way to dig deeper.

The GOP is now the party of straight, white, right wing Christian men.

If not, just fuck off.

"The Education Department wrote that the program places "a considerable emphasis" on the “understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.”

Yeah. Totally believable.

"The filings also reveal Musk hired a private investigator to look into Unsworth’s background, which might be troubling in itself, although Musk’s remarks do not make clear what definition of “private investigator” he’s operating under. Seemingly not the one that means “a person who uncovers factual information about another person or group in exchange for money,” because Musk states the investigator he retained—a Mr. Jared Birchall—had reported Unsworth moved to Thailand to wed a woman who was 12 years of age. At some later date, Musk appears to have learned Birchall’s findings were false."

The Paleocon view:

"Trump’s renunciation of the Iran nuclear deal is mostly about Israel and its perceived security requirements. Not only must Iran not have a single nuclear weapon, it must not have the theoretical capability to produce a weapon, were the Iranians to break from their pledges under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the JCPOA. This imposes a requirement on the Islamic Republic that no other medium-sized power has had to endure. That the Iranians are bearers of an ancient civilization makes the humiliation all the more painful. Those 12 demands were not designed to produce a settlement; they were designed to produce a crisis, as they now have done. Regime change lies back of them—that or simply the immiseration of another Muslim country. "

Literally.

I gotta say, some of these are pretty awesome and fun.

This is a very odd story that is getting way less press than one would expect. Maybe it's a sign of the times, but we have real, honest-to-God UFOs out there. That doesn't mean "aliens" but given the fact that the technology to allow this kind of behavior isn't anything we even have hints at, it leads to some interesting possibilities.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, is the truth.

"But it’s even more likely that any such talk will provide new fodder for the Trump/GOP message that today’s Democrats are dangerously radical and contemptuous of constitutional norms (not that court-packing is the least bit unconstitutional if it’s done by Congress). At a minimum, conservatives will spend a lot of time telling Christian-right audiences that Democrats are now fighting fire with fire and plan to thwart their own government-by-judiciary schemes aimed at a constitutional counterrevolution. And let’s face it: All the threats to democracy that Bouie and others are warning of will get a lot worse right away if Republicans hang on to the White House and the Senate in 2020. If discussion of judicial reform makes that even infinitesimally more likely, it’s probably a topic that should be placed on a back burner until after the election."

Hell even the phrase "Climate Change" is a Frank Luntz, GOP euphemism.

Because the police are trigger happy and the courts and lawmakers have basically made them unaccountable.

I suppose drinking yourself to death isn't fun enough.

This would be grounds for an immediate breakup.

You didn't hear it from me.

"Almost 400 years after the first folio of Shakespeare was published in 1623, scholars believe they have identified the early owner of one copy of the text, who made hundreds of insightful annotations throughout: John Milton."

"Half of a millennium ago, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew embarked on the first voyage to successfully sail around the world. On September 20, 1519, Magellan’s five-ship fleet set sail from Spain and traveled south, crossing the Atlantic to South America."

Ex-Florida man

Earth: interstellar dustdump.

This is what the "Conservative" Party has become - to defy a law explicitly passed by Parliament to prevent a no-deal Brexit Johnson will provoke a Constitutional Crisis for the nihilist fever dreams of the Brexiters.

"Under a new law passed by Parliament this month, against Johnson’s wishes, the prime minister must write to the EU to seek an extension if an agreement has not been agreed on by Oct. 19 and Parliament hasn’t given consent to leaving without a deal.

Johnson will refuse to write this letter, the senior government official said. If no agreement is reached with EU leaders at a summit in Brussels on Oct. 17-18, the government will pursue a no-deal Brexit, the official said."

Hey America apparently this is the price you must pay for "liberty" and "freedom" and resisting "tyranny".

A sick, twisted society whose priorities are always towards the most powerful and never towards the most vulnerable.

"Cheney-Rice is right that there is considerably more racism on the right than Republican Party elites wanted to believe pre-Trump and that the elite has conspicuously failed to confront its more overt and toxic forms — which is part of how we ended up with a birther as the president of the United States. In the longer view, he’s also right that white identity politics has been important to the conservative coalition since the 1960s, when the strategic and policy choices that the Nixon-era Republican Party made — in effect, rallying voters who opposed the Great Society’s vision of racial redress — ensured that a lot of racially conservative and racist white voters would migrate into the G.O.P."

The Puritans really fucked America over - with attitudes towards sex topping the list of profoundly dysfunctional societal attitudes and taboos.

For example: "Only 24 states mandate sex ed, and of these only 13 require that the information conveyed be medically accurate."

Now, you'll be able to find that trick on Grindr without knocking on the neighbor's door first.

Oh look, who would have thought that profits would triumph over safety?

Who said that bird wasn't asking for it?

I, for one, welcome our cold, dark overlords.

Don Jr may be around for a while.

...or they fall into somebody else's hands.

"We also shouldn’t read too much, pollsters and political handicappers say, into the variations in how different Democrats fare against Trump in these polls. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders might enjoy the biggest margins simply because they have the highest name ID among the 2020 Democratic field. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they would wallop Trump whereas Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg would struggle. It might just mean fewer Americans have heard of them.

But we can still learn something from these surveys. Their message is pretty simple: Trump looks weak. The president is lagging in the low 40s in head-to-head polls, consistent with his stubbornly low approval ratings. A lot of Americans seem to be fully committed to or are actively considering voting for somebody else. That’s not where the incumbent, after three years in office, should be if they want a second term."

"Yet few colleges’ individual freshman-name rankings this year align perfectly with the popular baby names of 2001. Considering the small sample size of any given freshman class—which at many schools is just a few hundred students—there’s bound to be a good amount of random variation. Still, statistics from individual schools can serve as a window into each institution’s idiosyncrasies."

"Technology ethicists worry that dog poop DNA testing, no matter how harmless sounding, could normalize the spread of surveillance systems in our own backyards and create a culture of acceptance around the creation of permanent biometric databases."

Yes, it will mess up your Molly, but really....

Of course the intake isn't even close to randomly selected so you would assume those who had the most "desirable traits" would do the best. But here's a bit of surprise (to me):

"Harvard is in a league of its own and its population is more than double Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania in second and third with around 5,580 super rich alumni each. Wealth-X's report mentions that the vast majority of the wealthy alumni from U.S. universities are actually self-made. For example, 79 percent of wealthy alumni from Harvard are self-made, 15 percent have mixed sources for their fortunes and only 6 percent inherited it."

"Major decisions are looming, including the mammoth seven-year E.U. budget that will determine the shape of E.U. priorities for the foreseeable future. It needs to be sorted out in the spring, and many policymakers in European capitals fear Britain could use a continued membership inside the E.U. to hold them hostage and make tough new demands."

This is key to understanding the Republican demographic.

Trump's main pillar of support is high-income whites, but those who don't have a college degree. These are the ones most motivated by the feeling of of racial resentment and cultural displacement.

"Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party."

"There is a group of voters the campaign calls “2018 disengagers.” These are voters who enthusiastically turned out for Trump in 2016 but sat home during the mid-term elections in 2018. Campaign data indicates those voters have “a high propensity” for going to the polls when Trump is on the ballot, Trump’s strategists say. This has led them to argue that even in states where Democrats made headway in 2018, Trump could still bring out a lot of voters in 2020."

"Some experts believe that serial killers are responsible for a significant number of these unsolved murders. Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit that compiles data on homicide, has examined how many unsolved murders are linked by DNA evidence. He believes that at least 2 percent of murders are committed by serial offenders—translating to about 2,100 unidentified serial killers. Michael Arntfield, a retired police detective and the author of 12 books on serial murder, agrees that the FBI’s projections are off (he blames patchy data, among other things) but thinks the number of active serial killers is more like 3,000 or 4,000."

Consumer DNA testing has basically seen to that.

"The concept of anonymity has been hammered into the model of sperm donation since its inception. The first recorded instance of artificial insemination with donor sperm occurred in 1884; the woman was never even told that another man’s semen was used. The fear, apparently, was psychological — it was believed this might cause “irreparable harm” to the marriage and to the child.

Infertility carried a stigma for many years, and still does today, particularly among men — even though they contribute to about half of the infertility cases in the world. As a result, sperm donation was shrouded in secrecy, even looked upon with shame, for nearly a century."

Progressives - a largely white, educated, wealthy demographic within the party - are pushing the Democratic party farther to the Left than the general public is comfortable with and helping Trump in areas that he should be very vulnerable in.

"Last fall, most Americans had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, according to the Pew Research Center. That makes sense, because Democrats ran a populist campaign in the 2018 midterms, focused on pocketbook issues that dominate many people’s lives, like wages and medical costs.

This year, the polling has flipped. Most Americans now have an unfavorable view of the party, no better than their view of the Republican Party. Likewise, slightly more voters say the “ideas being offered by the Democratic candidates” would hurt the country than say would help, according to the NPR poll."

"A Monticello tour guide was explaining earlier this summer how enslaved people built, planted and tended a terrace of vegetables at Thomas Jefferson’s estate when a woman interrupted to share her annoyance.

“Why are you talking about that?” she demanded, according to Gary Sandling, vice president of Monticello’s visitor programs and services. “You should be talking about the plants."

The Tory shitshow continues. I love the idea that the idiot Brexiters want the two most anti-democratic, right wing governments in the EU to come to their rescue.

What a group of ignorant, old disillusioned racists.

"Couldn’t the UK get Hungary or Poland to block an extension? This Brexiter idea is becoming almost as popular as the theory that German carmakers would demand a good deal for the UK. It is built on a similar misunderstanding of EU interests.

Neither Poland nor Hungary have anything to gain from frustrating the other 26 by vetoing an extension for Boris Johnson. Both are net recipients of EU funds and have their own fights with Brussels."

As always, some amazing shots.