What is the point of a Trump rally?
(Some observations from a rally in Macomb County, Detroit, Michigan)
THREAD 🧵
Oh, and for those who doubt I was really there - you can see me in the purple circle standing next to @InsidersABC host David Speers, who came along for the ride.
“Well we're not going to have this too much longer you know? We're winding down, we're winding down.”
These were Donald Trump’s opening remarks at a rally in the crucial swing state of Michigan on Friday.
I was one of the people he was speaking to that afternoon.

So, yesterday someone swiped a bag of our electronics from Sydney International Airport.
Not sure at what point it was swiped, but somewhere between the baggage carousel and the public pickup point in the car park, it disappeared. We frantically ran around the car park and airport entryway looking for it, asking lost property and Border Force if anyone had handed it in. Without luck.

Unpopular opinion but… imagine Charles is an actor on a stage instead of a guy sitting down at his office desk. What’s he supposed to do? Pick up the pens and carry them off backstage? Pop them on the floor? He’s asking for irritating props to be removed. Could he have handled it better? Yes. But I’m not sure what exactly he was meant to do with the props, and pretty much every actor I know would gesture to stage crew in the same way.

~Every nuclear power conversation in Australia~

Dude: I reckon we should do nuclear power

"But here's 18 reasons why we don't need to and could just do solar, wind and storage instead"

Dude: Yeah but we should still give it a crack I reckon. I mean, why not, right? (People watching 20-50yo coal fired power stations break down constantly and sometimes explode)
“What we need in this situation is more nuclear physics”

Hang on we're taking "anonymous engineer from Melbourne who nobody apparently knew anything about" as evidence that he WASN'T a spy? Sounds like kind of backstory a spy would have. Were we expecting "Sergey Sergeyovich who majored in Espionage at KGB University and was a 'diplomat' at the Adelaide consulate"?

OK, I'm working on a summary of things changing on Monday for family group chats so I might as well post it here too. Here goes. All of this is for fully vaccinated adults unless otherwise specified (Thread)

From Monday 11 October in NSW, you can... - Have 10 adults over to your home, and as many children (vax or unvax) as you want. Barbies and parties are on.
- Gather in groups of up to 30 outdoors.
- Travel between LGAs. Regional people can go where they like, but you can't travel from Sydney to the regions yet.

Me, a journalist whose job is mainly reporting on stuff happening in countries he’s not in, after reading the Atlantic’s article on Australia: “Journalists should be banned from reporting on stuff happening in countries they’re not in.” An American looking at premiers with sky high approval ratings after lockdowns, including some who were re-elected with increased and sometimes record-breaking majorities: “Democracy has collapsed in this country.”

I’ve been thinking a bit about how differently the pandemic would have played out in Australia if it had started in other decades. Really any time between the beginning of widely accessible air travel and the invention of broadband internet would have been so much worse. Lockdown would have meant almost all economic activity would end. Remote working would MAYBE have worked for SOME relying on faxes, but for most it just wouldn’t have worked at all.

If you're interested, here's a thread of links to studies and reports on outdoor transmission (excluding densely packed outdoor areas)
1. "Of 232,164 cases of Covid-19 recorded in Ireland 0.1 per cent of the total were as a result of outdoor transmission."
irishtimes.com/news/ireland/i… 2. Among 7,324 identified cases in China with sufficient descriptions, only one outdoor outbreak involving two cases occured in Henan, in an outdoor conversation between two people. This outbreak involved only 2 cases.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/in…

A lot of this could be copied and pasted into a NSW editorial. It's time for governments to stop lecturing people about compliance and start justifying restrictions with data. theage.com.au/national/victo… As the editorial says, governments (and their supporters) talk about restrictions as though they're one unit, when actually there are a lot of different ones. What the article is asking for is for each one to be given a cost/benefit analysis.

Gladys Berejiklian, like just about all politicians nowadays, cannot be coerced into answering a question she doesn't want to answer. Asking it over and over makes you feel better but it's not going to elicit new information and wastes time that could be spent on other questions. Politicians being so media trained that they've become brick walls graffiti'd with today's message is an appalling state of affairs, but it's where we are, and trying to break them isn't working. It's a crisis, so ask lots of different questions and disseminate the information.

This is LESS THAN IDEAL Who could possibly have foreseen while crossing some train tracks you may encounter a train.

I can’t get over how the MAGA revolutionaries stormed the parliament, took control of the seat of government, and then went “so um what do we do now? Hadn’t really thought this far ahead. Wander around taking selfies and meekly tip over the furniture I guess?” Like... they were in there. They had Molotov cocktails and IEDs. Every news network on earth was watching live. Obviously we can all be thankful the ending was relatively peaceful but coup leaders and revolutionaries around the world are probably absolutely losing it over this.

So... knowing Donald Trump's thought process and his current options fairly well, here's what I reckon is the best way to turn this situation to his advantage (I'm not saying this is ethically or morally right)

He needs to give a concession speech, from the Oval Office. "I am instructing my legal teams to withdraw their litigation. In my view, the unreliability of the mail-in ballot system has delivered an unfair result, but for the good of the nation, I will peacefully leave the White House upon the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20th...

I need to know what the order of events was

Was it (a)
Giuliani, without asking, announces an event at the Four Seasons hotel. Four Seasons refused. Giuliani finds another business named Four Seasons Or was it (b)
Giuliani called Four Seasons Total Landscaping, thinking it was the hotel. Nobody at the landscapers corrects him.

I’m enjoying Giuliani and the Trump crowd’s moving goalposts on when the election is over.

We’ve very quickly gone from “the election must be called on the night” to “the election is only over once every judge in the country has personally certified each ballot” How dare expert psephologists issue a highly-informed opinion like they have been doing for the last century? We must await the arrival of messengers on horseback from the western frontier to bring word to Washington from the returning officers like in the days of yore.

A little story we ended up being unable to squeeze into America, If You're Listening that is relevant today:

Six months before the 2016 election, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had been a rival of Trump in the transition, read a newspaper story. The story said that Trump aide Michael Glassner had been put in charge of planning the transition, should Trump win. Christie thought Glassner was unqualified for the incredibly important job.

(Tangent: Michael Glassner looks exactly like my wife's uncle)

https://twitter.com/MatthewBevan/status/1278216239278518273?s=20

Biden says his motivation for the last 5 years has been to fulfil a promise he made to his son Beau after he was diagnosed with cancer. Here he is with Colbert a few months after Beau’s death. The 2015 Biden/Colbert interview is probably the best one either man has done.

Colbert has an unusual empathy for Biden. In 1972 Biden’s wife and daughter died in a car crash. In 1974 Colbert’s father and two brothers died in a plane crash.

Here it is.

Ok here we go guys. The US news networks are all staring at each other right now. Who’s going to do this first?

https://twitter.com/decisiondeskhq/status/1324643210283593728

Ok the number one question people are asking me (and everyone who follows this) is when on Wednesday are things happening... so here you go - all times are Canberra/Melbourne/Sydney time.

10am - First states close. Indiana and Kentucky. Don’t even look up from your laptop. 11am - Most of Florida (everything but the bits of the panhandle in the central time zone) closes. Georgia closes.

Exit polls will be published. Ignore them, except if they indicate Biden is well ahead in Georgia. In that case, Trump is in DEEP trouble.

5 years ago I started doing a segment at 6:45am on the Australian current affairs radio show @RNBreakfast about global news.

The point was to cover stuff that was breaking during the night. It was sometimes serious but often light, weird news. In mid-2016 it started changing. Donald Trump started to dominate it, as he was doing a shocking thing each night.

To make sure I could cover him and what he was doing to America each day at short notice I started a research project that I thought would take a few weeks. It’s now been going for 4 years.