Gap03

That would be the rational response. Of course, we have a Russian agent with a toddler's temperament in the WH though, so it certainly won't be that - more likely that it's either nothing or a full-out nuclear strike (if he feels like he needs a distraction that he can turn up to 11).

I was using the data here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ They have the log graph here as well. If you look close, there's a really modest bend downward over the last day or two (which amounts to about 75 fewer cases than my exponential trendline at 3/15). The quality of the data is a bit questionable so probably not worth reading too much into it.

Good point - the very modest slowdown (relative to the trendline) that I saw is probably a function of a subset of the population using a modicum of common sense rather than the more recent governmental efforts.

Just for kicks, I took the data from the following website: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ for the period from March 1 - March 14th and ran a trendline to see how close an exponential formula matched up with the recent data. The resulting formula was: Infections = 72.847 exp(0.2865 x n), where n = the number of days 3/1/20 with an rsq = 0.9989, so a pretty tight match. Plug in n=30 for the projected number of infections by March 31 - 393,707 cases. So, yeah, we better hope that our social distancing efforts (and any other factors that we may luck into) make a difference, or we're pretty much fucked pretty quickly. If you want to see the impact of efforts to curb the spread of the disease, the website offers a logarithmic graph option for the total cases - no impact = a straight line on the log graphs, effective efforts cause the log graph to bend downward. The US data trend is starting to bend down over the last day or two, so hopefully this demonstrates the impact of the recent shutdowns of large gatherings / businesses in the U.S. ** Obviously, this is an extremely simplistic analysis, and there are a lot of factors that come into play in modeling this stuff out, but it's eye-opening. I wish people understood even the basic math involved.

Even in this timeline, that's too stupid to be real. Russian bots?

MJ Hegar or someone with a lot of followers should tweet this in reply to Cornyn's beer tweet. Shouldn't he be fucking doing something, given this is in HIS state? Such a worthless piece of shit.

I agree with this. I have no problems whatsoever with them providing good faith estimates to open people's eyes. My objection was to them disclosing numbers without explaining to which model these results related, especially if there was a wide spread among the results of the models (which I kind of expected). For comparison: Stories were circulating earlier that Congress had been briefed that between 70-150m people in the US would likely be infected. Another epidemiologist (Michael Osterholm) projected around 96m infections in the US with ~480,000 deaths . I found Osterholm's interview with Joe Rogan pretty intriguing (estimates about 1:30-2:15) :

Yeah, I read that article this morning, and it seemed pretty irresponsible the way it was reported. It mentions that their were A, B, C and D models prepared, and "one of them" showed these results. I suspect that was the "we do absolutely nothing" model, but it was totally silent beyond it being one of several approaches. That's the type of thing that's going to warrant some accusations of them being click-baity in some of their stories. For those that are curious, the excerpt from the story is included below.

Dow finishes up almost a full Trump (2000 pts), spurred on by the market's love for the pending corporate welfare. Good plan making sure that the Q&A happened after the market closed. He better hope investors forget this part by Monday.

Definitely going to be some extra loud wheezing during this speech ...

I was chuckling as the guy was talking about 8-lb briskets at Walmart. Thanks for this feed.

The markets are just getting out ahead of his next press conference at 3pm. Thanks, Trump!

Come on, now - you gotta dream bigger. As I've said before, there are so many miserable old fucks in the R party, if there is a god, he's gonna have to knock off a handful of them (including AT LEAST Trump and McConnell) to prove himself to me.

Is it time yet?

Why yes, yes, they did: https://www.aao.org/headline/alert-important-coronavirus-context

Cool, I'll tune in promptly at 9:30pm ET, when he finally hauls his freshly-painted lard ass out in front of the cameras ....

I'm pretty sure that he knows Squi and Donky Dong Doug through Kavanaugh, so he'll likely get a consult from them as well.

Comforting story from The Atlantic for those of us here in Central Texas: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-testing-numbers/607714/ Top notch job of getting clear guidance out there across the board, it would seem.

For those that want to hear that part of the briefing: I'll hate to see this guy go, but it's just a matter of time now ...

Yeah, we're pretty much fucked. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is making sure that the annual worldwide threat assessment prepared by the intel agencies isn't released because it, once again, pointed out that we are totally unprepared for this pandemic: https://time.com/5799765/intelligence-report-pandemic-dangers/

Don't know much about Whitmer, but I caught her on MSNBC earlier today: She's definitely likeable. She seems to dismiss being added to the ticket, though - see 3:32-3:38. I'd be interested in hearing more of what she has to say if they start pushing her toward the VP slot.

You're just trying to set Brisket off again, right? I'm sure there are, but the vacancies on the FEC ensure that there isn't a quorum, so they can't make enforcement decisions. And we know that Barr and the DOJ aren't going to enforce any laws under its jurisdiction against Trump. Short version: Nothing matters, especially when it comes to our elections ...

This tweet is going to age well ... Of course, who am I kidding? We all know that he's going to suspend economic reporting until after the election, right?

Well, the first case in East Texas has popped up in Gregg County. We'll get to see how much faith they have in Trump here pretty shortly ...

Damn I miss Jon Stewart at times like this - he absolutely eviscerated Fox News for their bullshit. I have a dream that Bloomberg would work with Jon to produce ads to run on Fox News in the middle of their night time propaganda shows. I know that it would go right over the standard Trumpkin's head, but it would be so fucking cathartic to me.