Trump’s big coronavirus giveaway in Tulsa: Open thread

@Moggie:

If you had a test for mental fitness to be POTUS, you’d need to be very careful to design it to be resistant to abuse. Say, for example, you have the candidate examined by three independent specialists. They could all be bribed, or threatened. You could slip each of them $100M, and probably still turn a profit within four to eight years.

How about: a pool of hundreds of specialists, from which three will be randomly drawn and the examinations performed almost immediately afterward? Now, there’s no time for the bad guys to cut deals with the three between when they can know who the three are and when the examinations have already taken place, and the larger pool is too large to economically suborn (and large enough that the probability of a whistleblower among them approaches 1).

Of course, “between examination and report” remains a risk, but one could sequester them, like a jury during deliberations, or just have them give the upshot (a simple thumbs-up-or-down) immediately and write up a more detailed rationale later (if even needed).

As for the possibility of tampering with the random selection so as to know in advance who’ll get picked, they trust those ball bouncing machines that pick lotto numbers with controlling the fate of prizes up to the hundreds of millions of dollars, where there is a comparable huge financial incentive for someone to try to cheat. If they’re tamper-resistant enough to be trusted there then they can also be used to pick the examiners.

And finally, to avoid putting the examiners in the position of being able to decide the election, it would make sense to do this early in the primary campaigns, say a month or two before Iowa, giving the parties plenty of time to replace any disqualified candidates. Evidence of a candidate’s condition deteriorating as the general election approaches could prompt a re-examination. And a sitting first-term president would not be exempt, unless having already decided not to stand for reelection. Late joiners of the primary contest would need to be examined to qualify (think Bloomberg).

Forget dementia: I’d like to see political candidates everywhere face a written test of their knowledge relevant to the job, and Gary “what is Aleppo” Johnson would fail this as much as someone with dementia. It’s just that this would inevitably be gamed.

I’d suggest having members of the opposition party/ies and/or people from the media choose some of the questions, but then we’ll have simply reinvented the election debate, won’t we have?

Perhaps the debates should include a section specifically geared to testing the general knowledge of candidates, in addition to sections covering specific issues du jour such as climate change and gun control and generic sections on “what will you do?”

@Naglfar:

There are so many other things to call him out for about his character and actions rather than his ramp walking ability.

Yes, but most or all of those count in the “plus” column with his base. Failure to be a tough, strong, macho sort of guy, on the other hand, might not. So perhaps the hope is that kicking up a fuss about such things might peel away at least a few of his supporters who wouldn’t be persuaded by arguments about his moral character (what moral character? Exactly!) or his racism, etc.

Predictably, the RCMP are claiming that the killer definitely had nothing to do with them.

Which is pretty much a surefire indication that the RCMP did, in fact, have a lot to do with him.

@Alan Robertshaw
It seems fairly likely Trump’s physician is lying about his height (and likely other things), seeing as Trump’s listed height seems to have increased between the 1990s and now. This might be to alter his BMI, or maybe just to make him sound taller and more dominant.

@ naglfar

maybe just to make him sound taller and more dominant.

Well I suppose they might subscribe to that idea that the taller candidate always wins.

Although a quick google shows Mitt Romney was taller than Obama and G W Bush was shorter than his opponents both times.

@Alan : one of the french president, M. Mitterrand, lied about his health and the last part of his presidency had him under heavy medication to survive. He died almost immediatly after tha presidency, and good thing he was mostly a figurehead for the last two years of it.

I am not convinced it’s a good thing to have a president hide that he is dying just so that he can satisfy his pride and stay in power. It’s a difficult duty with responsability after all.

His successor (Chirac) also seemed quite weakened by the end of his second term, and clearly had dementia several year after. I don’t know it impacted him during his presidency ; since it was a very gradual process and since he too wasn’t much in control toward the end of his presidency, it’s hard to say.

Both are shining example of why electing 70+ year people isn’t wise. Even if they are in perfect condition when elected, they are at an age where they can degrade very fast, and it seem pretty hard to make an health check that cannot be abused. (even if it might be possible, as Surplus make a case for)

@ naglfar

I believe Lincoln was pretty tall; although that might just have been the hat.

In the Palaeolithic, the average height for men was 6’4″ and for women 6′ 2″. We’re shrinking!

There’s also that amazing analysis of the 20,000 year old footprints in Australia. One guy was running at 37 kph. That’s faster than Usain Bolt.

It’s quite straightforward. The principal predictor of adult height is protein consumption in childhood. Paleolithic societies had varied diets fairly egalitarian food distribution. Preindustrial agricultural societies tend to feed people mostly on grains, which haven’t any complete proteins in. These people trend short, often with exceptions for aristocrats who got lots of meat. These days, there’s loads of agricultural and pastoral products of all sorts available all over the place in the industrialized world, so in places that aren’t the US with its batshit agricultural policies the average height trends back up. Although it won’t anymore, 6 feet and change is pretty much the upper limit for human hearts to work right.

@ moggie

I’m not sure it counts if the extra circumference is bits of bone sticking out.

My wrists are different sizes. I’ll just have to hope women only approach from one direction.

Moggie & Masse Mysteria:

One of the “revelations” in Bolton’s book is that Trump was unsure whether Finland is a country

It was not great to hear that Trump maybe thought he was in Russia when he was in Helsinki.

To be fair, he reportedly made this “is it in Russia” check when his team was planning for the Helsinki meeting.

Incidentally, I heard back in early June 2018 that Trump admin had gotten around to nominating an ambassador to Finland. It’s some businessman donor named Robert “Bob” Pence – no mention if he’s related to the VP. (Trump admin has been generally notoriously slow to build up diplomatic networks after they slashed down all of Obama’s people.)

As it later turned out, this was about when Trump and Putin’s teams were considering Helsinki and Vienna as possible venues for their nothingburger summit. I presume our president Sauli Niinistö has been quite actively lobbying behind the scenes for just these kind of hosting opportunities. He’s a firm believer that almost any publicity is a good thing for small countries. He calls this summit business “advancing the dialogue”.

Niinistö already made a brief courtesy visit to the White House in 2017, though obviously you wouldn’t expect something like that to stick in Trump’s memory. (Same goes for when Trump personally visited Finland once or twice for his business errands long time ago. This was something that members of Finnish business elite remembered and brought up when Trump became president.)

Niinistö’s office has pictured Niinistö as building a close relationship with Trump, even successfully lecturing him about climate issues. I think what really happens is that he’s just maintaining the US state department’s general awareness that Finland is indeed a country. As a byproduct, Trump himself is occasionally/barely made aware of this.

6 feet and change is pretty much the upper limit for human hearts to work right.

Hah. I’m 6’6” and I’ve indeed sometimes had problems with low blood pressure in the brain.

Also, my shipment of Tall Guy Stacies appears to have been lost.

most likely you are to be injured if you trip on your own feet

*Raises hand, shows scar from orthopedic surgery*

O/T, but this is probably the most appropriate place to put this since it’s an open thread:
Graham Linehan momentarily lost his blue tick mark (though it reappeared moments later). That happened to Katie Hopkins shortly before she was banned, so maybe Graham is about to get banned. Expect a lot of really angry TERFs after their favorite man gets banned.

I’ll admit – I misread fungible and my mind went in some very odd directions. 🙂

Ugh, that’s horrible. Can’t say it’s surprising, given the government that’s currently in power in my province.

I’ll send my MPP an email about it.