Ted Rall outdoes himself on coronavirus Update: And now, on police brutality

Just when I thought Ted Rall couldn't get more self-centered, in his oft-whiny way, he does, claiming he had COVID way back last November. You didn't, Ted, and stop your specious "reasoning."

That said, here's one "good" example of that.

If I were an animal, and had never heard of science, and had memory and self-awareness, I would know—know with the same certainty that I know I am typing this column—that I had COVID-19 and that I should probably worry about something else more than the possibility that I might get it again.

Erm, wrong!

If you were a non-human animal, you would not know of the existence of viruses, of a science field called biology and thus of the existence of coronaviruses.

If you were a non-human animal, you would not, because of the lack of writing, have an item called a calendar.

Ergo, you wouldn't know you had COVID in 2019 at all, because both concepts would not be known to you.

And newspapers still pay Rall for this New York Times op-ed page level of drivel? Well, the NYT pays its own columnists for similar drivel.

Oh, Ted? This piece you linked to, to argue against? It's spot on. Our human intuition is quite fallible. Behavioral psychology, among its other findings, will also tell you that.

And, the COVID facts on the ground? No confirmed cases in the US before February. The first case confirmed in CHINA wasn't until the second half of November of last year.

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Update, June 2: Ted re-outdid himself. He personalized the police brutality and protests against it by noting that the L.A. Times that fired him long ago alleged has the LAPD as its largest owner both way back in 2001 when he allegedly had the LAPD verschnizzle him, and now.

And actually, this is an outright lie, from all I know, as far as the "now."

L.A. Times parent Tribune went private in 2007 under Sam Zell, although eventually going public again. Current LA Times owner Patrick Shoon-Siong made the company private under his Nant Capital.

As for long ago? I highly doubt that, to be precise, the pension fund for the LAPD would be so much Times-Mirror stock as to be its primary investor. It clearly isn't now.

So, even if the LAPD pension fund DID at one time have "a share" in the Times, it wasn't "the owner." And, given it was taken private before it went public and now is private again, if there is a share, it's surely tiny.

Update, June 8: In a whiny follow-up column, Rall actually provides a URL, a link! Welcome to the 21st century, Ted. Of course, it's to an old column of his on Counterpunch. He's got a link from there, but it's dead.

Nonetheless, let me quote his CP column in the graf where the link is.

Nowadays the $18.4 billion LAPPL pension fund is managed by Oaktree Capital. Oaktree is the single largest stockholder of Tribune Publishing, parent company of the Los Angeles Times.

Yeah, and? Oaktree might have had 1/10 of 1 percent of LAPPL's investments. Ted, with a dead link to what appears to have been a personal URL, still has no information about what percent of Tribune the LAPPL owned, just that Oaktree was, corporately, the largest investor. And, yeah and No. 2? So what?

More importantly, Frederick Theodore Rall admitted his earlier column was lying about the “now” noted in conjunction with it:

The LAPD has since divested itself of its Tribune stock. The Times’ current owner, Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong, should pledge not to enter into financial partnerships with law enforcement agencies.

So, it’s not an owner of the LA Times now. Ted just admitted that. Now, in the version of his column currently online (would he have changed it? who knows?) he isn't explicit about that.

I will add a so what No. 3. It's legal for ANY pension fund, AFAIK, to own ANY newspaper. Look at CNHI, owned by the Alabama state retirement system. (That's why CNHI never declared bankruptcy in the Great Recession; pension obligations made that too difficult.)  And, for all of Theodore's talk about "the media," his ignorance of this shows that "the media" in his mind = "Frederick Theodore Rall III."

And, reiterating what I wrote on my first update, I have no more desire nor need to chase a sociopathic rabbit down its holes.