Manny is a handsome and opinionated, eight-year-old, 16-pound, male black and tan Min Pin/Corgi-mix looking for a loving guardian.
This boy is a love with some people but, has a tendency for aggression with others. For those he knows and loves, he rolls on his back for belly rubs. Sadly, he is also a fear-biter.

That’s why Manny has been waiting at the Famous Fido shelter for six and a half years. He has potential if only the right, dog-loving patient person willing and able to manage his behavior would come forward.

Manny is healthy, neutered, up-to-date on vaccines, heartworm-tested and microchipped.

His adoption fee of $250 benefits the Famous Fido Rescue.

To meet and possibly adopt Manny, please fill out the application for adoption at https://famousfidorescue.org/dog-adoption-application/.

You can follow up on your application by e-mailing Tina at [email protected] to set up an appointment to meet him.

He is currently at the Famous Fido Shelter at 3124 W. Irving Park in Chicago, Illinois.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes.” 

Those are the words that came out of the mouth of the current president of the United States. They were spoken during a call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In an hour-long call, Donald Trump tried to shake Raffensperger down to change the results of the presidential election in Georgia.

Trump even threatened him with legal consequences:

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

Trump was acting like Marlon Brando in “The Godfather”; making an offer that Brad Raffensperger couldn’t refuse….and yet the Secretary of State did. Little did Trump know that the call was being taped and would be released the next day. I’m pretty sure he didn’t care….he never does.

Maybe what Donald Trump did was illegal and maybe not. You can find plenty of legal opinions that support both cases. But, no question what he did was immoral. It’s something that no president has ever done….and probably never considered doing.

As stunning as the tape was, the reaction from his supporters is just as stunning. It starts with the Chairman of the Georgia Republican party David Shafer. Here’s his first Tweet:
President @realDonaldTrump has filed two lawsuits – federal and state – against @GaSecofState. The telephone conference call @GaSecofStatesecretly recorded was a “confidential settlement discussion” of that litigation, which is still pending.

Is anyone surprised that that is a lie!? There are no pending lawsuits….NONE! But then Shafer doubled down and added in another lie:
The audio published by @TheWashingtonPost is heavily edited and omits the stipulation that all discussions were for the purpose of settling litigation and confidential under federal and state law.

It just makes you want to shake your head. Nothing was edited, nothing was confidential. And yet, that’s not the worst take from a Georgia official.

David Perdue is in a run-off election today to try to retain his seat in the United States Senate. When asked for a reaction about the call from Fox News, here’s his reaction:
“I guess I was raised differently. To have a statewide elected official, regardless of party, tape without disclosing a conversation — private conversation — with the president of the United States, and then leaking it to the press is disgusting.”

Ummm….Dave…didn’t you hear what Trump said to your fellow Georgian? What about that? 
“I didn’t hear anything in that tape that the president hasn’t already said for weeks now since the November election.”

Okay…okay…we knew we were going to hear statements like this from his fellow Republican flunkies. For some reason, they’re still afraid of being attacked on Twitter by a lame-duck president. Or maybe they think Trump will find another flunky to primary them?  But, the ones that really scare me are the regular citizens. Somewhat normal folks like you and me, who really feel that this election has been stolen. They think something is unfairly being taken from them, and they aren’t shy in letting the world know whose side they are on. For example:

Raffyblabber is in big trouble.
What a jerk. He refuses to sit down with the President’s team and compare data.
The GSoS is a SCUMBAG!
Typical spineless RINO.
He’s a child and will grow up fast in prison.
Raffensperger should worry about facing federal charges for recording POTUS regarding the election, since a 2018 Exec. Order made elections matters of national security… on top of Espionage Act of 1917. No GA single-party consent beats that.
Hardcore Never Trumper Criminal.
I hope he is sued for all he has!

And all of that is in one Twitter thread. Notice how many of them are also experts in federal election law, too?

This is a scary time in our country. The repercussions of Trump’s behavior will last for years, if not generations. They say elections have consequences, and this is the consequence of electing Donald Trump four years ago. We always have wondered when Trump would hit rock bottom? This may it…although he still has fifteen days left in his term. Hmmm….how much lower can he get?

Related Post: The Trump administration legacy is one of death

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Another violent year in Chicago has concluded. There are really no words to describe 792 MURDERS, and over 4,170 people shot. If you factor in the armed carjackings, the Counties 1,600 opioid deaths from overdoses and the 8,200 deaths from COVID-19 the word slaughter crosses one’s mind. Cook County’s final total of over 970 murders, somehow didn’t even register as far any outrage from any county politicians. The old ostrich theory on display for all to see, HEADS BURIED DEEP IN THE SAND. Oh! sure, there was a demonstration against violence, organized by the usual assortment of priests and local reverends, and neighborhood activists, but as I looked on I did not see one county or city politician among the 150 or so participants. As usual, the demonstrators carried banners with the names of the dead and called for the end of the violence. Heavy press coverage showed the weeping mothers, loved ones, and friends of the dead and the usual competition by the march leaders to get before a camera and pontificate and express their outrage.

One might ask why these marches always take place in areas miles and miles from where the mayhem is devastating entire neighborhoods and not in the killing zones where the mayhem is taking place on a daily basis. One westside neighborhood finished the year with 100 murders, at least 15 miles from the Gold Coast neighborhood where the marchers inexplicably choose to invade. Newspaper stories and editorials gave the annual end of the year numbers of murders, and folks shot and as usual gave the same solutions all Chicagoans have been hearing ad nauseam for some 60 years. In order to stop the violence, we must address the ROOT CAUSES.

Through all of this and the so-called list of Root Causes, I never once heard the words GANG VIOLENCE. Astonishing as that may sound it’s true. Anybody that does not know that Gang Violence is the number one driving factor for the mayhem that has gripped the city since the early 60s has to either have an agenda of some sorts or is a complete imbecile. Groucho Marx back in the day had a Television Quiz Program called “You bet Your Life.”  It featured a 3 or 4-minute interview with Groucho, if at any time the contestant uttered what was called THE MAGIC WORD he or she would be awarded $100.  This word was selected before the show and was unbeknownst to the contestants. I’m guessing that all of Chicago and Cook County politicians would never have collected Groucho’s $100.

Newspaper editorials, and one story after another, and not one mentioned the Magic Word GANGS. One editorial always seems to seek out members of academia for the usual ROOT CAUSES spiel, the  University of Chicago Crime Lab, Loyola University to name a few, Professorial Local Gadflys who seem to draw the press like flies on stinky stuff whenever they need a quote. Their usual theme is of course those ROOT CAUSES. I’m guessing here but I’m thinking they never met a gang member (except maybe Congressman Bobby Rush who founded the Black Panther Party in Chicago back in the 60s and was its defense minister) and it’s estimated that there are close to 150,000 of them in the city alone. At least they have something to say on the matter, most politicians are adhering to the old Mafia Dictator, Tony (Big Tuna) Arccardo’s famous saying”A FISH WITH HIS MOUTH CLOSED NEVER GETS CAUGHT.” President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society Movement in 1964-65. Fifty-Five Years of addressing those “ROOT CAUSES” such as poverty, unemployment, missing parents, lack of education, unsympathetic cops, and scores more, simply haven’t come near stopping the slaughter for the past 6 decades. The gang lure has captured the hearts and minds of thousands of our youths and fighting them with words and speeches and billions of dollars have not worked.

Whether  State, City, and County politicians in what many people call the most corrupt in the country are suffering from nervous shakedowns or are just plain spineless is difficult to differentiate, and of course, we cannot overlook clueless. The fact is the gangs are having their way and at some juncture, there has to be a tipping point. What will it be? Chicago has a mayor along with many other pundits looking to deflect any type of blame by saying the Covid-19 Virus is mainly responsible for the horrid numbers of killings and shootings. Ask yourself this, what about the years from 2016 to the beginning of 2020 when there was no VIRUS?  2016 had the most murders and shootings for over 20 years. The following years were not much better. From 2016 thru 2019 the city averaged 651 murders a year, and 3,421 people shot, add to the record number of armed carjackings up 130% from the previous year, and it becomes extremely difficult to buy into the IT’S THE VIRUS BULLSHIT. All of that violence is 78% to 82 % GANG RELATED. The ROOT CAUSE is the refusal to recognize the gangs are at war and no one in power is challenging that power.

It’s time to step back and question the God-given wisdom about how contagious is COVID-19 and the mutant that’s making all the headlines.

At least one scientist questions the methodology of the models that determine the contagiousness of the virus, suggesting that the danger of the pandemic could be overstated.

The study, “The Coronavirus Response: Boxed in by the Models,” by Ray Pawson,* appears in the journal Evaluation in November. Its abstract is worth quoting in its entirety.

Science has a mixed record when it comes to predicting the future. Engineers build bridges based on foreknowledge of the forces that they are likely to encounter – and their constructions tend to withstand the test of time.

Predicting the future course of epidemics and building intervention to contain them are much more precarious. And yet simulation models produced in prestigious centres for mathematical biology have played a significant role informing coronavirus policy in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The predictive uncertainties include the inherent variability of the pathogen, considerable variation in host population immunity as well as the concern of this article, namely, the constantly adapting human judgements of those designing, implementing and experiencing the national response to an outbreak.

Assumptions about how interventions are implemented and how people will react are, of course, built into modelling scenarios – but these estimates depict behavioural change in fixed, stimulus-response terms. Real reactions to the complex restrictions introduced to combat the virus unfold in scores of different pathways – people comply, they resist, they learn, they grow weary, they change their minds, they seek exceptions and so on. Model building is intrinsically speculative, and it is important that crisis management is not boxed in by its latent simplifications. A more pluralistic evidence base needs to be drawn on, to understand how complex interventions operate within complex societies.

Or as Pawson states in his conclusion:

I have made the case that two influential models are potentially misleading, often arbitrary and clearly self-affirming. The mechanical assumptions and fixed statistical estimates built into the Imperial simulations completely fail to reflect the complexity of the societal response to the COVID-19 interventions.

Furthermore:

Research progresses by eschewing certainty and by encouraging debate and competition. All research methods are fallible, and the science of COVID-19 would benefit from greater humility. The profound philosophical and sociological accounts of the privileged status of scientific knowledge recognise that it owes that status through ‘organised scepticism’ (Merton, 1968) and close mutual monitoring from the ‘disputations community of truth seekers’ (Campbell, 1988).

I encourage skeptics to read the lengthy article for its reasoning, methodology and subtleties.  I came across this study some time ago, but it is particularly relevant now that the media are full of near-panicky reports of a new strain of the virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2 VOC 202012/01, or for short, SARS-CoV-2.

With full certainty, the reports that the new variant spread a lot more quickly, fueling (unproven) worries that it’ll be worse than COVID-19. Here we go again, scaring the bejabbers out of everyone by overstating “the science.”

One thing to keep in mind is that a sample of one of the variants grew in the lab, “propagating more quickly in human respirator epithelial cells….” So be it, but a more complete analysis of the contagiousness of the strain would include those factors that affect its spread in the real world. That analysis is missing.

For a more complete understanding of the new strain, consult the Center for Disease Control’s “Interim: Implications of the Emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variant VOC 202012/01.” Among the CDC’s cautions is this

At this time, there is no evidence that this variant causes more severe illness or increased risk of death….

The [new] virus would likely need to accumulate multiple mutations in the spike protein to evade immunity induced by vaccines or by natural infection.

Sadly, such caveats are missing in most of the reporting. Just as this study should not be taken as the final word, nor should any report that begins, “Science says….”

*Ray Pawson is Professor of Social Research Methodology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Pawson’s main interest lies in research methodology.