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Sunday, January 9, 2022

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2518 - Not Apathy, Purposeful Ignorance - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2201.09




A Sense of Doubt blog post #2518 - Not Apathy, Purposeful Ignorance - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2201.09


Greetings reader (or maybe there’s two of you, so readers), here’s the weekly hodge podge that is bi-weekly as two weeks is better to build up sufficient content that I see as I scour the things I scour on the Internet.

Let’s start with a local story, an egregious example of what one student involved called “purposeful ignorance.”

People being bed because they are lazy; they don’t want to deal with the sticky and difficult mess that is their responsibility to clean up.

And how can they be so heartless?

I will tell you.

People are inherently selfish as fuck.

We all are.

Even me.

The difference is those who try to do better and those who prefer to be “purposefully ignorant.”

There's something I never understood about criticism of liberals: calling them "bleeding hearts."

If my heart bleeds for someone, it shows I care.

It shows that I CARE A LOT.

Isn't that what Christ taught people? Caring for others? Loving others? Bleeding his blood for their blood??

I don't even believe in Jesus Christ as a messiah or a God, and yet I believe and model his teachings without identifying as a Christian.

And yet, I see so much HATRED and lack of compassion, no blood from the stony hearts of those who profess to BE CHRISTIAN, who go to church on Sundays, who want their religion to be front and center and the core of our publicly-funded schools, and yet they are unwilling to shed the blood in their hearts in CARING FOR OTHERS.

It's vile and grotesque.

It makes me sick.

Does it make you sick, too?

If you're going to claim to be Christian, then show some fucking compassion for other people and at least try to model the teachings of Christ, the being you profess to be your lord and savior.

I don't care if you fail. I expect you to fail. You are human. I am human. We can only do the best we can do. But so many people are not even trying to be better let alone doing their best. We can do better. We can all do better.

And so.... that story: EVERGREEN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

But before that story, another story that brought me to tears and should bring anyone to tears with even an once of empathy:

KLAY THOMPSON’S RETURN TO THE BASKETBALL COURT!

After a torn ACL and a torn Achilles, injuries that might have ended someone else’s career, injuries that kept him off the court since 2019, injuries that necessitated so many hours of therapy, re-conditioning, and recovery, and now, he is making his triumphant return!!

So some videos.

I am likely to do a whole post on this career milestone soon as it warms my heart, and I love Klay and the Dubs.

One of the messages of these Hodge Podge posts? The lesson that comes through over and over and over?

WE HAVE TO DO BETTER.

But other stuff.

The NYT Book Review readers picked the best books of the last 125, and I do not agree with the number one choice.

Of the top five, I can see Beloved being number one.

For me, House at Pooh Corner and Winnie the Pooh need to be in the top five or even number one.

Some Trump stuff because it is my goal to make you nauseated.

A TON OF TWITTER, which is a quick and graphical way to share links!

And my friend Paul’s “scissors” post is hilarious.

And the astounding revelation by super-model Paulina Porizkova that she is now “invisible” to men even when dressed up, obviously single, available, and FLIRTING.

I am stunned.

Keith Richards was trending again.... hilarious.

And a bunch of stuff. Links to things. Lots of Wonkette.

Plus some good fact checking.

MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS is not a thing.

Though Cult brainwashing sure is...

And Betty White died... :-( Like my maternal grandfather, just before turning 100. Such a sad thing not to reach that milestone.

After all, George Burns only loved two months after turning 100, but at least, he made it.

Some great Twitter from Dan Rather!

Omicron. Whoa.

NO FUCKING BEDS MEANS NO FUCKING BEDS.

Lots of science and space stuff.

Banning books, especially books like Gender Queer, makes me ragey!

Organic chicken may get processed with the factory meat and so not really be all that safer.

And universities may “de-prioritize” English over engineering? Like that hasn’t been happening for decades?

A great bit from Brian Eno on how NFTs are scams.

A great article on how Common Era dating has been trying to replace BC and AD.

Some sex stuff.

Hey!! Local news. My home state will enforce disclosure of ISP for home buyers.

My usual pandemic report, and then I end on a great bit about proof of one of Stephen Hawkings’ wilder ideas on primordial black holes.

I love learning.

You might, too.

See you in two weeks.







Jan 9, 2022


NBA
Tune in tonight as Klay makes his Warriors return vs Cavaliers on NBA TV.

#HouseofHighlights #NBA

Jan 9, 2022



House of Highlights

Cleveland Cavaliers vs Golden State Warriors - Full Game Highlights | January 9, 2022 | 2021-22 NBA Season






Students outside the Evergreen Public Schools administrative offices in east Vancouver wave signs condemning sexual abuse. Students said the school has recently failed to respond to reports of harassment and abuse.

Troy Brynelson / OPB



https://www.opb.org/article/2021/12/16/evergreen-school-district-students-walk-out-as-district-grapples-with-sexual-harassment-concerns/

EDUCATION

Evergreen Public Schools students walk out as district grapples with sexual harassment concerns

By Troy Brynelson (OPB)
Dec. 16, 2021 10:24 a.m.

The Southwest Washington school district has been battling public questions on whether school officials disregarded reports of unwanted sexual behaviors among students and teachers. One advocacy group has harshly criticized the district.

About two dozen Evergreen Public Schools students protested Wednesday against what they say are repeated failures to protect students from sexual harassment and abuse.

It’s at least the second time this month that students – and others who joined the protest – flocked to the district’s administrative offices in east Vancouver to raise concerns.

“If the issue isn’t apathy, it’s like purposeful ignorance,” said Sami Allen, a 20-year-old recent graduate who joined several others in waving signs at passing cars and chanting for students’ protection.

The recent rallies have formed amid rising concerns from students. Lilly Lewis, a sophomore who helped organize the protest, said numerous students are concerned that reports of unwanted sexual attention have gone unanswered.

“They could have done so much more, and I just feel like they didn’t,” Lewis said.

Among leading factors for the protests are recent controversies involving teachers within the district. On Nov. 22, a humanities teacher named William Marsh was convicted for child molestation of his adopted daughter, according to court records.

Lewis, once a student of Marsh, said she and multiple students had complained to the district about other alarming behaviors about the teacher. According to Lewis and other students at the protest, school administration didn’t appear to handle complaints properly.

After Marsh’s conviction, Lewis created an Instagram page through which she has been organizing the protests.

Evergreen spokeswoman Gail Spolar said the district takes allegations of sexual misconduct seriously and investigates each one. She noted that school employees are mandatory reporters, required by law to tell authorities when they learn of potential abuse.

However, outcomes of investigations aren’t always as well-known as allegations, Spolar said.

“We also understand that students and parents may think complaints are not handled when they do not know outcomes and actions taken on staff or student investigations due to privacy laws,” Spolar said.

Still, the district has been fully battling the perception – and not just from students or former students.

Some members of YWCA Clark County, a group advocating for women and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, joined the protest Wednesday. The organization said it has been receiving a deluge of complaints related to incidents within Evergreen Public Schools.

Deputy Director Vanessa Yarie said YWCA Clark County regularly hears from the community, but rarely does it field as many complaints as it has recently about Evergreen. Yarie said the complaints are varied, but tend to focus more on peer-to-peer incidents than anything involving teachers.

Yarie said a common theme has been students’ frustration with a feeling of being ignored and doubted.

“We are hearing that there’s no process of accountability. There’s no follow-up,” Yarie said.



Students outside the Evergreen Public Schools administrative offices in east Vancouver wave signs condemning sexual abuse. Students said the school has recently failed to respond to reports of harassment and abuse.

Troy Brynelson / OPB



The calls led YWCA Clark County to publish a statement last Friday, calling on Evergreen’s elected board members to rectify any failures in the reporting system. Executive Director Dunetchka Otero-Serrano wrote the district is “miserably failing to bring forth any accountability.”

“You have cultivated an environment where sexual violence is allowed. Your actions have placed fault on survivors and punished them instead of believing them,” Otero-Serrano wrote.

In response, Evergreen School Board President Victoria Bradford wrote a letter calling the YWCA’s statement “misleading” for “accusing the school district of not properly handling and/or ignoring student complaints regarding sexual assault and harassment.”

Bradford wrote the letter had “propagated misinformation, and potentially harmed, rather than helped, students gain needed assistance.”

While YWCA has not publicly responded to Evergreen’s retort, school board member Rachael Rogers issued her own statement that said Bradford’s letter “100% does NOT represent my views.”

“As a district it is our duty to make the safety of children our number one priority,” Rogers wrote to YWCA. “If our children feel that we are not taking allegations of sexual assault/abuse seriously, then at a minimum, we have a problem with perception/culture/optics and that needs to be fixed.”

Bradford spoke again publicly on Tuesday. In her statement, she said she agreed the district needed to re-examine how complaints are handled at the district.

“In the last week, it has also become clear, after listening to our students, that we need to examine our processes and make it even safer and easier to report any unwanted or threatening behavior,” Bradford said. “We need to make sure every student in our care has the opportunity to step forward.”

Despite the statement, Lewis, the sophomore, said at the protest Wednesday that she doesn’t feel like administrators are being genuine.

“I just have a really big lack of trust with anybody in their district,” Lewis said. “I think that’s something they have to earn back from students and I don’t think they realize that.”


Best book?? Not sure I agree...


Posted by BeauHD  from the nod-to-our-history dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a summary from Boing Boing, written by David Pescovitz:This year marked the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review. To celebrate, the editors asked readers to nominate "the best book published" in those 125 years. They culled 200,000 ballots down to the top 25 most-nominated titles and called for a vote. The winner? Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Here are the four runners-up:

2. The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
3. 1984 by George Orwell
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5 Beloved by Toni Morrison"Three writers -- John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner -- received nominations for seven of their books," reports the New York Times. "Other popular authors included James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf, who each had five books nominated. And readers nominated four of Joan Didion's books: 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' 'The White Album' and 'Play It as It Lays.'"

Would you agree with the number one pick? Is there a book worthy of this accolade that New York Times readers missed?
https://bookmarks.reviews/the-1960-time-magazine-review-of-to-kill-a-mockingbird/

#CNN #News
Jan 9, 2022



CNN

Diane Benscoter, former member of the Unification Church cult and founder of Antidote.ngo, joins Reliable Sources to explain the similarities between cult leaders former President Donald Trump.
#CNN #News

Dec 27, 2021



The speculation over the past week that Donald Trump could face criminal charges for attempting to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election has increased, but we all need to moderate our expectations right now. The evidence would certainly suggest that Trump and his team wanted to interfere, but that doesn't mean that criminal charges, or even referrals, are on the horizon any time soon - or possibly even at all. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.


#Trump #Politics #MSNBC
Dec 19, 2021


MSNBC

Select Committee vice-chair Rep. Liz Cheney signaled this week Trump could be on the hook for potential criminal liability for obstructing Congress' electoral college vote count as the investigation into the Capitol insurrection closes in on the former president's inner circle.» Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc

MSNBC delivers breaking news, in-depth analysis of politics headlines, as well as commentary and informed perspectives. Find video clips and segments from The Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, Meet the Press Daily, The Beat with Ari Melber, Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace, The ReidOut, All In, Last Word, 11th Hour, and more.


Dec 27, 2021


















































































































This is shared below but needs repeat viewings!








Phil Rucker, Harry Litman, and NBC’s Ali Vitali join Joe Fryer to discuss Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich’s lawsuit against the January 6th Committee’s request for access to his financial records. Budowich’s financial records could “paint a picture of the financing of the January rally, to the extent that he was involved in helping pay for them or at least helping frontload some of those expenses,” says Rucker. 



Omicron Update Again Already

Doktor Zoom
December 29, 2021 09:26 AM

Scanning electron microscope image by NIAID, Creative Commons lisense 2.0

Time for another update on the viral sensation that's infecting the nation, the Omicron variant, which is topping the charts. Like, if this chart were sales of your band's new record, you'd love to see it, but not if you're a public health official in Washington DC:



It should at least be of some comfort that while a chart of the hospitalization numbers for people who've been vaccinated and boosted also would show an increase, the curve on that one is more like the release of a new Loudon Wainwright III album than one by Taylor Swift.

The Numbers

The US set another new record for daily infections, with the seven-day average of new cases reaching 267,000 Tuesday, according to the New York Times. That's higher than the previous record set on January 11, 2021. Hospitalizations are lower than at the peak of last winter, but quite awful enough, with 71,000 a day. Deaths are climbing too, with an averaged of 1,243 daily, but that's also far below the January 26, 2021, record of 3,342. Let's work on not outdoing our previous achievements, please. [NYT]

Also, some improving numbers: The CDC estimates that more than 67 million Americans have gotten booster shots, with the highest proportion of boosters getting to the folks who are likely to be at greater risk:

  • 35.6% of fully vaccinated adults (18+) have received a booster.
  • 47.5% of fully vaccinated people age 50 and older have received a booster.
  • 57.6% of fully vaccinated seniors (65+) have received a booster.
  • 32.7% of the fully vaccinated population is boosted.

This is encouraging, or else pretty weak. [CNN]

Also too, the CDC yesterday revised downward its estimate from last week that the Omicron variant made up 73 percent of all new cases in the US, saying that the actual percentage of Omicron cases for the week ending December 18 was much, much lower, 22.5 percent. The Omicron percentage for last week, ending on Christmas, was 58 percent, so that means we still have plenty of Delta cases filling up the hospitals. [CNN]


Omicron Not More Dangerous In Kids; They're Just Not As Vaccinated As Adults

A hopeful note from the New York Times:

Even though the Omicron variant has produced a worrisome increase in hospitalizations among children in the United States, experts said that a combination of factors, including low vaccination rates, was the most likely explanation.

Doctors and researchers said they were not seeing evidence that Omicron was more threatening to children. Instead, much of the rise in pediatric admissions results from the sheer number of children who are becoming infected with both Delta and the more contagious Omicron variant, experts said, as well as low vaccination rates among children over 5.

“I think the important story to tell here is that severity is way down and the risk for significant severe disease seems to be lower,” said Dr. David Rubin, a researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

As with adults, the data so far seem to indicate that Omicron causes less severe illness than Delta does, for both children and adults. But since Omicron is even more infectious than the already highly infectious Delta variant, the rise in new cases is bad news for hospitals, which can still be overwhelmed by large case loads. [NYT]


Hospitals: It's Getting Bad Again

An unvaccinated Army veteran died in Phoenix on Christmas Eve because hospitals in the area weren't able to get him the emergency medical treatment he needed. Brian Yazzie was just 35 years old, but he was on a ventilator and had been approved to get treatment with a machine that would oxygenate his blood externally. None of the machines were available in any hospital nearby, and Yazzie was too sick to be flown to a city where the machines were available. [Idaho Statesman]

Here is yet another hospital worker reminding you that if hospitals are full of people who could have avoided serious infection by getting vaccinated and boosted, that means the hospitals are too full to care for other people who need hospitals, too:



Biden Lifts Travel Ban On Southern African Countries

President Joe Biden yesterday rescinded his previous order restricting travel by non-US citizens from eight countries in southern Africa — South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Malawi. Biden said in a proclamation ending the restrictions that the CDC had recommended they be ended. A new regulation requiring that all travelers flying to the US test negative for COVID within a day of arriving, instead of the previous three-day limit, will remain in place.

The travel restrictions were criticized by many public health experts, including those at the World Health Organization, who said they were of little value in slowing the spread of Omicron, while punishing African nations that had quickly identified and shared data on the new variant. [CBS News]


New York City Getting New Antiviral Drugs To Patients — For Free

Now that the FDA has granted emergency use authorization for the two new antiviral treatments for COVID-19, New York City health authorities are wasting no time in making the pills available at no cost to patients who need them (with a prescription, of course; this isn't a horse paste shoppe). The city health department announced that since the most widely used monoclonal antibody treatments aren't effective against Omicron, while the antiviral treatments are, the pills are now recommended instead to treat patients "with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk for progression to severe disease, regardless of vaccination status."

The city's notice to healthcare providers is careful to point out that Pfizer's drug Paxlovid is the preferred treatment, since it's both more effective and has fewer side effects, while Merck's Molnupiravir can be "considered for patients age 18 years and older for whom alternative FDA-authorized COVID-19 treatment options are not accessible or clinically appropriate." The notice also points out that since the drugs are both in short supply so far, they should be prioritized for treatment of patients at highest risk for severe COVID, which means they should go to "unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated individuals and vaccinated individuals who are not expected to mount an adequate immune response" (bold in original).

Once the drugs are prescribed, they'll be delivered to the patient's home by the pharmacy that the city is contracting with, at no charge. Right now, it's just one pharmacy delivery service, but as the drugs become more available, the number of pharmacies should increase. [NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene]


Court: Dipshit Oklahoma Gov. Can't Waive National Guard Vaccine Order

A federal court yesterday rejected a lawsuit filed by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, who had asked that the Pentagon's order for all service members to be vaccinated against the coronavirus be suspended for Oklahoma National Guard members, for freedom. Instead, Judge Stephen P. Friot said that yes, the military has the authority to make sure that all its members are healthy and ready to be called to national duty, even if they serve in red states where posturing against vaccine mandates is politically popular. Friot also didn't buy Stitt's claim that the Pentagon or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were acting unconstitutionally, because get the fuck out of here with that, all service members are already required to get nine vaccinations:

“Adding a tenth … vaccine to the list of nine that all service members are already required to take would hardly amount to ‘an enormous and transformative expansion [of the] regulatory authority’ the Secretary of Defense already possesses,” he wrote in his ruling.

The case will still go forward, but the ruling yesterday denied Stitt's attempt to have the vaccination order temporarily suspended while the case is decided. [WaPo (no paywall) / Ruling on Scribd ]


Happy New Year, Stay The Fuck Home! (Redux)

Elected officials and health experts continue to urge Americans to stay the hell home on New Year's Eve to avoid spreading the virus, because did you know it's still actually a pandemic no matter what the calendar says?

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker put it about as succinctly as you can get: "Omicron and delta are coming to your party. [...] So you need to think twice about how many people will be gathered together, keeping social distancing if you’re at a party. And if you can’t, leave.”

Pritzker didn't follow that with any new restrictions or cancellations of New Year's Eve events, like Chicago's big fireworks show. But you can damn well watch fireworks without being in a crowd, at least. In San Francisco, however, Mayor London Breed yesterday cancelled the city's fireworks display, because, again, pandemic, yeesh. [WaPo (no paywall)]

Dr. Anthony Fauci also recommended that people avoid New Year's Eve gatherings if they're not sure of others' vaccination status, telling CNN, "There will be other years to do that, but not this year," yes, even if you really are bored at home. Read a book, you.


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Posted by BeauHD  from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its "eye" and returned its first images from space -- a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team. Phys.Org reports:After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. Because components of the spacecraft's telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious. On Tuesday, Dec. 7, the spacecraft popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera and, to everyone's glee, streamed back the first image of its surrounding environment. Taken about 2 million miles (11 light seconds) from Earth -- very close, astronomically speaking -- the image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.

The DART navigation team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in another image on Dec. 10. Located in the constellation Auriga, the cluster of stars lies some 4,200 light years from Earth. Intentionally capturing images with many stars like M38 helps the team characterize optical imperfections in the images as well as calibrate how absolutely bright an object is -- all important details for accurate measurements when DRACO starts imaging the spacecraft's destination, the binary asteroid system Didymos.


Why Are All The Young People Leaving, Oklahoma Cries While Outlawing 'Books'

Doktor Zoom
December 29, 2021 04:25 PM

No Ancient homocanoodling, either! (probably)

The great moral panic over school libraries continues, with an Oklahoma state senator filing a bill that would require public school libraries to remove materials about sexuality within 30 days of a parent's complaint. If the materials aren't removed, the librarian would be fired and banned from working in Oklahoma for two years, and parents could also collect "at least $10,000 per day from school districts if the book is not removed as requested."

Appeals process? What appeals process? The Cultural Marxists have been poisoning kids' minds too long, and the bill's sponsor, state Sen. Rob Standridge, is tired of good decent people not being allowed to just get moral filth and degeneracy out of the schools. The McAlester News explains that Standridge believes current processes for parents to challenge school library materials can end with stuff parents and grandparents don't like still being available for checkout, and how is that even fair?

He said the books being promoted to school children are different than those in bookstores or even his local public library.

A few of the books he said he has concerns about include the “Trans Teen Survival Guide,” “Quick and Easy Guide to Queer and Trans Identities, “A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns,” and “The Art of Drag.”

“I just think that those are overly sexualized,” Standridge said. “I think parents and grandparents, guardians should have a say on whether their kids are exposed to those books. If they want them, they can take (their children) to their local library.”

We've got plenty of questions, but probably our most important is: Who does Standridge think is secretly fapping to A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns?

It certainly can't be the salacious illustrations, a sample of which we present here; please hide any small children or easily freaked out state senators who may be in the room with you.


We hope you survived that.

What distinguishes Standridge's Senate Bill 1142 from the rest of the crop of schoolbook freakouts is that it truly is a good old-fashioned Sex Panic festival, focused on eliminating LGBTQ materials without any of that trendy paranoia about "Critical Race Theory" you might find in other current censorship attempts. Standridge's summary of the bill says it would prohibit public school districts, public charter schools, and public school libraries from

having or promoting books that address the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, gender identity, or books that contain content of a sexual nature that a reasonable parent or legal guardian would want to know about or approve of before their child was exposed to it.

Standridge acknowledged to the McAlester News that the books he'd listed were all about LGBTQ matters, and added that he couldn't think of any "heterosexual books" that would run afoul of the law, although if a high school library had Fifty Shades of Grey on the shelves, his bill would help parents remove it, too.

Also too,

He also said he’s not worried that schools would have to also remove “The Bible,” for example, given that the Old Testament’s “Song of Songs” contains graphic sexual depictions, because he contends that schools don’t have Bibles on library shelves.

You know, we get the feeling that Mr. Standridge just isn't very familiar with either schools or libraries, really.

Besides, he cheerfully explained, before a school could be forced to remove any books, the aggrieved parent would need to sue and take the school to arbitration, and wouldn't that be neat, not that any good arbiter would ever agree with the school:

“Most likely these things will end up in court,” Standridge said. “My guess is the schools won’t comply and the parents will have to seek injunctive relief. That will be up to the trier of fact. They may well disagree with the parent and say reasonable parents would want their children to be exposed to transgender, queer and other sexually-related books. I would doubt that.”

It's not clear whether a lawsuit would also be necessary to get the librarians fired and banned, or for the parents to collect big money from the schools. Standridge's summary sure makes it seem like the firing would be automatic, albeit subject to "due process," while the monetary award would be subject to the outcome of the lawsuit.

Not surprisingly, a lot of your socialist "free speech" types say the proposal is unconstitutional on its face, not that red state legislatures ever worry about such petty concerns. Morgan Allen, director of LGBTQ advocacy group Oklahomans for Equality, emphasized that diverse library materials are important to young folks who may be questioning their sexuality, and that knowing they're not alone may help them feel less isolated. Just having a state senator condemning books that discuss their lives is harmful, she added:

“It’s sending negative messages to our young people, telling them that they can’t be who they are, that they should be ashamed of who they are,” Allen said.

She said 92% of LGBTQ+ teens reported that they hear negative messages in school, which increases suicidal ideation. Bills like this are a “death sentence” to youth, Allen said. She said nearly 1 in 4 Oklahoma LGBTQ+ youth surveyed reported that they had attempted suicide, compared with 7% nationally.

Thankfully, the News neglected to ask Standridge for comment on that point, not that we suspect he'd say something monstrous.

The Oklahoma Library Association said it was "disappointed" by the bill, since state law already allows parents to challenge school materials, but didn't those soon-to-be-fired librarians get the point that unless parents win such challenges, the process is worthless? Also, they probably want to keep their jobs, so selfish.

State Rep. Jacob Rosecrants (D) said the law was an invitation to abuse:

He said he’s concerned that the measure gives one single parent the sole power to decide whether a library can possess a book and fears it will be a “slippery slope” that invites chaos because it could impact any book that contains the word “sex.”

Well, yes, of course it would. That's the point. Why do you want underaged students reading sex books, Representative Pervert? Before you know it, you'll be saying that pronouns are useful parts of speech, won't you? Oh look, private parts, parts of speech, you liberals just can't go two minutes without waving your parts around. Disgusting. And to think this was once a free country.

Rosecrants added that in the past, "asinine bills" like SB 1142 wouldn't have had a chance of advancing, which makes us suspect he isn't altogether familiar with the body in which he serves. The Oklahoma lege has, in the recent past, tried to ban hoodies, sought to protect Christmas from whoever's trying to kill it, and attempted to authorize state militias to fight federal law, not to mention the approximately infinity plus a million times the body has attempted to ban abortion.

Oh, also too, in another bill, SB 1141, Standridge wants to ban Oklahoma universities and colleges from requiring any student to take classes about "any form of gender, sexual, or racial diversity, equality, or inclusion curriculum" unless they're actually majoring in a degree program that's "focused on gender, sexual, or racial studies," at least presumably until he figures out how to ban those degree programs too, the end, OPEN THREAD.

[McAlester News / KFOR.com / Oklahoma state Senate]

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A health-care worker conducts a test at a drive-through coronavirus testing site in Miami on Dec. 29. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)





By Michael T. Osterholm
 and 
Ezekiel J. Emanuel
 
Today at 9:00 a.m. EST
Michael T. Osterholm is Regents Professor and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Ezekiel J. Emanuel is vice provost for global initiatives at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute. Both were members of the Covid-19 Advisory Board for the Biden-Harris transition.


The current omicron surge represents one of the greatest public health challenges not only of the pandemic but also of our lifetime. To deal with the surge over the next six to eight weeks, policymakers need to plan for the impact of what could be 1 million cases a day of new infections in the United States.

Such planning involves being realistic about the effectiveness of vaccination at this point; taking immediate steps to improve public health messaging, data collection and the availability of drug therapies; and doing whatever is possible to ameliorate the potentially devastating consequences for our health-care system.

Vaccines remain the best tool we have available for reducing the risk of symptomatic disease, hospitalization and death, and convincing more people to be vaccinated and obtain booster shots is imperative. But the reality is that most doses administered over the next few weeks will have little impact on the overall trajectory of this immediate surge. It takes 10 to 14 days for even a third dose to increase immune protection. For those receiving their first or second doses, there may be some limited protection provided against severe illness or death, but the window of time to act is closing quickly.

Likewise, masks can be helpful, but only if they are high-quality and used routinely. This means non-fraudulent N95, KN95 or KF94 respirators, all of which have satisfactory filtration efficiency. Cotton or surgical masks are more for show than effective protection, especially against omicron. Public health messaging is essential, not only on the benefit of masking but also on what constitutes effective masking.

Testing represents another problem area. For one thing, we cannot rely on over-the-counter tests for omicron. Many people, including those fully vaccinated, are negative according to antigen tests days into their illness — but positive according to PCR tests. With the public using antigen tests every day and relying on their results before gathering with family, going to work or visiting public settings, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration must immediately research the performance of available rapid tests and advise people on their reliability and best practices for using them during this surge.

In addition, the inadequacy and unavailability of reliable testing means that data on omicron cases in the United States is incomplete and will be unreliable for several weeks. Most positive cases picked up by over-the-counter rapid tests are unlikely to be reported. And bottlenecks created by heightened demand for PCR testing means many cases will go untested and unreported. Pronounced increases in omicron cases will likely overwhelm reporting resources at state and local health departments, resulting in backlogs. As a result, instead of focusing on case counts to prognosticate about omicron, policymakers should follow more reliable metrics, particularly the number of hospitalized patients who are receiving oxygen.

Another area of urgent concern is that we have too few therapies to dent the surge. The two main monoclonal antibody cocktails appear ineffective against omicron. Meanwhile, a third monoclonal that retained effectiveness against omicron is in very short supply. Ditto for the much-heralded covid-19 oral drugs. There are less than 180,000 doses of the Pfizer drug, and it takes months to manufacture. These therapies must be rationed and allocated to those most likely to suffer severe cases: the elderly, younger patients with comorbidities and the immunocompromised. Expect shortages of these therapies in the next few weeks.

Finally, and perhaps most alarmingly, we must brace for the possible catastrophic impact of the omicron surge on the U.S. health system. The weakest link is not the number of hospital beds but the availability of highly trained workers. Approximately 9.8 million doctors, nurses and high-level medical technicians are employed throughout the country. It is possible that 10 or even 20 percent of health-care workers could be infected by omicron in the next eight weeks, as has been reported in South Africa.

Losing that many health-care workers from a system already severely strained by staff shortages would be an enormous challenge. Even with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allowing shorter isolation and quarantine periods to help mitigate risk, covid-related absences won’t be addressed by providing hospitals with a thousand more Defense Department health-care workers. Omicron has already caused wide-scale disruptions across the airline industry, in sports leagues and among essential workers. State and local officials must put in place crisis-management plans to account for a 20 percent reduction in the health-care workforces.

To ignore these issues puts our entire country in peril. The time to act is now.


Your Free-Range Organic Chicken May Have Been Processed at a Large Industrial Poultry Plant

To help us make sense of the opaque poultry supply chain, hundreds of ProPublica readers sent in details about their chickens and turkeys. Here’s what we learned.


WHAT THE ACTUAL????????????????????????




Posted by EditorDavid  from the major-issues dept.
Some American colleges and universities are cutting entire departments. But the Baffler magazine wonders if something else is going on:The ostensible reason provided for these cuts and terminations is "prioritization," a term used by university administrators to rank which programs deserve funding and attention. One such "prioritization" committee at St. Joseph's College in New York described it as a ranking of "centrality and essentiality," "demand and opportunity," and "productivity, revenue, and resources." If the terms sound like university administrator gobbledygook, that's because they are, cleverly disguising administrative judgments as some sort of due process. Around the country it is terms just like these that have been thrown at social science and liberal arts departments. Suddenly, faculty in these departments are expected to justify why they exist and why anyone would need a degree in English.

The two examples from Indiana, from Marian University and Purdue, also reveal how terms like "prioritization" are being used to disguise politically motivated excisions. Prioritization routinely argues that engineering departments need to be the ones getting more money and resources from the administration. Unlike English or political science, which are seen as useless and pointless majors, engineering and computer science carry an implicit promise of a job. Who needs to have read Shakespeare or know about how our political system works when you can rush off to be one among the armies of coders who make our digiverse possible?

That is the dream. In reality, "prioritization" debates, particularly in deep red states, are excellent cover for changing the political demographics of American colleges and universities. The Marian University case is instructive in this sense; the ostensible championing of STEM fields maps neatly onto the project of eliminating the most left-leaning professor, inevitably in departments that teach English or history or political science. If you have a right-leaning board of trustees in a red state like Indiana, professors like Johnny Goldfinger are unwanted, even threatening to those who would like student voters to know less rather than more about the processes of democracy. In a country where everything is riven and divided around political lines, this could well be a covert attack against the otherwise enduring liberal-ness of the college campus....

Despite what current debates about liberal arts would have you believe, not all employers are looking for software developers. A long-range perspective proscribes a rounded education, geared not just for the moment we are in. It is very likely that coding and other functions that administrators believe are the ones that deserve the most priority will be carried out via artificial intelligence processes that can do the painstaking work with far greater accuracy and speed than a human ever can. A liberal arts education is essential to surviving in our polarized world. In educating students in how to respect differences and create dialogue over disagreement, a liberal arts education provides skills essential to maintaining a healthy and functioning democracy.

Creating arbitrary epistemological rankings, where one kind of knowledge is given precedence over others, is failing to attend to the needs of the whole student capable of earning a wage but also of leading a good life....

It only makes sense if the actual purpose of slicing off departments and professors is part of a larger political project that has nothing at all to do with providing the best education.




in Art, Economics | December 30th, 2021 1 Comment


Image via Wikimedia Commons

It can feel, in our inequality-addled world, that we have little left in common — that there is no “we,” just us and them. But multiple crises driving us apart have the potential to unite the species. After all, a rapidly warming planet and global pandemic do threaten us all, even if they don’t threaten us equally. Do solutions exist in the creation of new forms of private property, new ways of moving capital around the world? Can the extinction-level byproducts of capitalist commodification and waste be mitigated by ingenious new forms of financialization? These seem to be the arguments made by purveyors of cryptocurrency and NFTs, an acronym meaning non fungible tokens and — if you haven’t noticed — the only thing anyone in the art world seems to talk about anymore. Why?

Brian Eno has put his opinion on the matter quite bluntly in a recent interview. “NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism,” he tells The Crypto Syllabus. “How sweet — now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.” He obviously disapproves of using art solely to generate profit, but then if we know anything about Eno’s theory of creativity and influence over the past several decades, it’s that he believes the guiding reason for art is to generate more art.


“If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to be an artist.” There’s utterly no use in trying to peg Eno as technophobic or out of touch; quite the contrary. But the fictional financial products that have invaded every other sphere of life have no place in the arts, he argues.

When asked why NFTs are touted as a salvation for artists and the art world by cryptocurrency visionaries, including many of his friends and collaborators, Eno replies:

I can understand why the people who’ve done well from it are pleased, and it’s natural enough in a libertarian world to believe that something that benefits you must automatically be ‘right’ for the whole world. That belief is a version of what I call ‘automaticism’: the idea that if you leave things alone and let something or other – the market, nature, human will – take its course unimpeded you will automatically get a better result than you would by tinkering with it. The people who hold beliefs of this kind don’t have any qualms about tinkering themselves but just want a situation where nobody else gets to tinker. Especially the state.

That the sale of NFTs have only benefitted very few — to the tune of $69 million in a single sale in a recent high-profile case — doesn’t seem particularly troublesome to those who insist on their benefits. Nor do the creators of NFTs seem bothered by the enormous energy overhead required by the technology, “an ecological nightmare pyramid scheme,” writes Synthtopia — of which Eno says: “in a warming world a new technology that uses vast amounts of energy as ‘proof of work’ — that’s to say, simply to establish a certain age of exclusivity — really is quite insane.”

Eno readily answers questions about why NFTs seem so glamorous — it’s no great mystery, just a new form of accumulation, commodification and waste, one in particular that adds nothing to the world while hastening a climate collapse. NFTs are the “readymade reversed,” David Joselit argues: Where “Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form; the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information.”

The discourse around NFTs also seems to liberate art from the category of art, and all that has meant to humankind for millennia as a communal practice, reducing creative productions to digital certificates of authenticity. “I am trying to keep an open mind about these questions,” Eno admits. “People I like and trust are convinced [NFTs] are the best thing since sliced bread, so I wish I could have a more positive view but right now I mainly see hustlers looking for suckers.”

Related Content: 

What are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)? And How Can a Work of Digital Art Sell for $69 Million

What Is Blockchain? Three Videos Explain the New Technology That Promises to Change Our World

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: An Introduction to Digital Currencies–A Free Online Courses from the University of Pennsylvania 

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness





Today, many people use the expressions “common era” and “before the common era,” or C.E. and B.C.E., instead of A.D. and B.C. But despite what we call it now, the roots of this system are not “common” but Christian. As the medieval studies scholar Kathleen Davis writes, using C.E. “does little to diminish the effect of a globalized Christian calendar.”

Initially, I too had applauded C.E. as a less Christian replacement for A.D. But today, I’d argue it is just the equivalent of a yellow sticky note placed over it. There’s nothing naturally “common” about the “common era,” and it’s worth applauding all kinds of diversity – even in time – on planet Earth. This year, what will you be toasting at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31?




THANK YOU!!!


Posted by msmash  from the welcome-to-2022 dept.
It's hard to imagine home life without the internet, particularly amid the coronavirus pandemic. Now a law going into effect in Washington state is acknowledging that. CNET News:Starting in the new year, home sellers in Washington will be required to share their internet provider on signed disclosure forms that include information about plumbing, insulation and structural defects. "Does the property currently have internet service?" the disclosure form will now ask, along with a space to say who the provider is. The law doesn't require sellers to detail access speeds, quality or alternative providers. The new disclosure is the latest in an array of efforts by lawmakers across the country to respond to our increasing reliance on home internet connectivity for work, education and entertainment. That internet connection has become even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has upended the lives of billions of people, forcing quarantines and lockdowns as people adjust to a new normal of daily life.

Posted by msmash  from the closer-look dept.
NPR reports:In late November, more than 110 people gathered at a crowded Christmas party at a restaurant in Oslo. Most of the guests were fully vaccinated. One had returned from South Africa just a few days earlier and was unknowingly carrying the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Ultimately, about 70% of the partygoers were infected. Scientists who traced this super spreader event concluded it was evidence that omicron was "highly transmissible" among fully-vaccinated adults. Just over a month later, omicron's speedy worldwide ascent now makes it abundantly clear that the party wasn't an isolated example. In country after country, the new variant has outcompeted its predecessor, the delta variant -- with one case of omicron sparking at least three other new infections on average. Cases have soared to record highs in parts of Europe and now the U.S., where about half a million new infections have been recorded in a single day. "This is a game-changing virus, especially in the vaccinated population where people have had a level of invincibility," says Sumit Chanda, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research.

Indeed, in a world where vaccinations and infections have built up immunity, other variants were having trouble gaining a foothold. Yet omicron is thriving. "This changes the calculus for everybody," says Chanda. And so scientists are trying to figure out: What accounts for omicron's lightning quick spread? While it's still early, they're starting to piece together why the new variant is so contagious -- and whether that means old assumptions about how to stay safe need to be revamped. [...] The variant's many mutations on the spike protein allow it to infect human cells more efficiently than previous variants could, leaving many more people again vulnerable. Because of that, "immune escape" alone could be the major reason why the variant looks so contagious compared to delta, which was already highly transmissible.

In fact, omicron has been spreading at a pace that's comparable to how fast the original strain of the coronavirus spread at the very beginning of the pandemic despite the world's newfound levels of immunity. "The playing field for the virus right now is quite different than it was in the early days," says Dr. Joshua Schiffer, an infectious disease researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "The majority of variants we've seen to date couldn't survive in this immune environment." Even delta was essentially at a "tie," he says, where it was persisting, but "not growing very rapidly or decreasing very rapidly." A new study from Denmark suggests that much of the variant's dominance comes down to its ability to evade the body's immune defenses. Researchers compared the spread of omicron and delta among members of the same household and concluded that omicron is about 2.7 to 3.7 times more infectious than the delta variant among vaccinated and boosted individuals.


Posted by msmash  from the closer-look dept.
A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus. From a report:In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty. "It's fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging," said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway. In November, when the first report on the Omicron variant came out of South Africa, scientists could only guess at how it might behave differently from earlier forms of the virus. All they knew was that it had a distinctive and alarming combination of more than 50 genetic mutations.

Previous research had shown that some of these mutations enabled coronaviruses to grab onto cells more tightly. Others allowed the virus to evade antibodies, which serve as an early line of defense against infection. But how the new variant might behave inside of the body was a mystery. "You can't predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations," said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge. Over the past month, more than a dozen research groups, including Dr. Gupta's, have been observing the new pathogen in the lab, infecting cells in Petri dishes with Omicron and spraying the virus into the noses of animals. As they worked, Omicron surged across the planet, readily infecting even people who were vaccinated or had recovered from infections. But as cases skyrocketed, hospitalizations increased only modestly. Early studies of patients suggested that Omicron was less likely to cause severe illness than other variants, especially in vaccinated people. Still, those findings came with a lot of caveats.


US COVID Cases More Than Triple in Two Weeks
The number of new COVID cases more than tripled over the past two weeks, shattering records all across the U.S. From a report: The Omicron variant appears to be significantly milder than its predecessors, and it's not leading to as much serious illness....

This Keyboard Lets People Type So Fast It's Banned From Typing Competitions
The CharaChorder is a new kind of typing peripheral that promises to let people type at superhuman speeds. From a report: It's so fast that the website Monkeytype, which lets users participate in typing challenges and maintains its own leaderboard, auto...

Garry Kasparov: Crypto Means Freedom
CoinDesk: Garry Kasparov knows math. He knows logic, strategy and decision-making. Widely regarded as the greatest chess player in the history of mankind, the Russian grandmaster -- ranked No. 1 from 1984 to 2005 -- sees the world with a certain clarity...

Honda Clocks Are Stuck 20 Years In The Past And There Isn't A Fix
Honda and Acura owners around the world are reporting that their clocks and calendars are getting stuck at a certain time in the year 2002. "The spread is impressive, impacting Honda and Acura models as old as 2004 and as new as 2012," reports Jalopnik. "T...

Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years
Gary Smith: In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award ("the Nobel Prize of Computing"), predicted that within "three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being." Fifty-two years later, we're...

Crypto Platform ARBIX Flagged As a Rugpull, Transfers $10 Million
Arbix Finance, an audited and supposedly trustworthy yield farming platform, has been flagged as a 'rugpull,' deleting its site, Twitter, and Telegram channel and transferring $10 million worth of deposited cryptocurrency. Bleeping Computer reports: Ru...

BMW's Color Changing Car Concept Works Just Like An E-Reader
At CES 2022, BMW unveiled color-changing paint for its vehicles that relies on the E-ink electronic paper technology found in e-readers like the Kindle. Engadget reports: [N]o, this futuristic feature is nowhere near production ready despite appearing ...

World's Largest Coal Port To Be 100% Powered By Renewable Energy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's largest coal port has announced it will now be powered entirely by renewable energy. The announcement from Port of Newcastle comes as coal power generation in Australia's national electr...

Sony Will Explore Building Electric Cars
At CES in Las Vegas this evening, Sony's Chairman, President and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida showed off a brand new prototype of its Vision S concept electric car, and announced that the Sony Group is starting a new division -- the Sony Mobility Inc -- which wil...


PANDEMIC

THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT

Photo of flu patients during the First World War



If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.

I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.



ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.

WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT - JOHNS HOPKINS

Anyway, as usual, here's the weekly links to the data about cases (lower than reality) and deaths (lower than reality, also) due to COVID-19.




Data can be found here, as always: 

This is also a good data site:
Worldometer - Coronavirus info

Last updated: January 10, 2022, 16:09 GMT

 United States

Coronavirus Cases:

61,263,030

Deaths:

859,356

Recovered:

42,257,508

About Worldometer
Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statistics for a wide audience of caring people around the world.
Over the past 15 years, our statistics have been requested by, and provided to Oxford University Press, Wiley, Pearson, CERN, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), The Atlantic, BBC, Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology, Science Museum of Virginia, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Kaspersky, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Amazon Alexa, Google Translate, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the U2 concert, and many others.
Worldometer is cited as a source in over 10,000 published books and in more than 6,000 professional journal articles and was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world.
THE CORONAVIRUS IS MUTATING NOW WHAT?

Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic - The Atlantic

A Red Cross worker in the United States, 1918


Good morning. The U.S. may soon offer booster shots to every adult. We’ll explain why.

Receiving a booster in Anchorage.Ash Adams for The New York Times

Boosters for all?

The federal government’s guidance on Covid booster shots has often been confusing, but it looks as if it’s about to become much simpler.

The F.D.A. appears to be on the verge of authorizing Moderna and Pfizer booster shots for all adults in the U.S. If it does, anyone over 18 can get a booster, as long as it’s been at least six months since their last shot. (The C.D.C. has said that adults who received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine should get a booster at least two months later.)

Dr. Anthony Fauci has become “a very, very relentless advocate” for boosters, The Times’s Sharon LaFraniere, who covers the federal government’s response to the pandemic, told us. “He keeps pointing out that the data is getting stronger.”

Today we’ll walk you through what’s compelling regulators to widen eligibility, who needs the shots most and how to get one.

Why now?

First, immunity is waning. While experts debate the pace at which the vaccines become less effective, there’s strong evidence that they do lose some of their ability to prevent Covid infections. (These charts show the decline.) While the vaccines’ protection against severe disease mostly holds, some studies suggest they become somewhat less effective at doing so, particularly for older people or others with underlying medical conditions.

Second, expanding booster access is simpler than asking Americans to consult a list of rules to determine whether they’re eligible. As our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli put it, “It’s easier to just tell people to get them.”

Third, broadening eligibility to all adults would bring the U.S. in line with the approach of other countries, including Israel and Canada. Several U.S. states have begun expanding booster access on their own, essentially declaring that they couldn’t wait for the federal government.

“Critics would say that the C.D.C. is starting to look more like a caboose than a locomotive,” Sharon says. If the agency recommends boosters for all adults, “they’re just authorizing what’s already happening.”

Who should get one?

The government has already recommended that older adults, people 50 and up with underlying medical conditions and those who are immunocompromised get an additional shot. And the C.D.C. has allowed boosters for many others.

“I’ve urged everyone I know who is higher risk to get a booster,” Zeynep Tufekci, the sociologist and Times Opinion columnist, writes.

Some experts believe that the urgency for younger, healthier Americans to get a booster is lower. But others have started to make the case for it. “All vaccinated adults would benefit from a booster,” Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University wrote yesterday in The Atlantic.

Why? Cases are rising again — as of Wednesday, the U.S. was averaging over 88,000 new cases a day, up 23 percent from two weeks ago — and another winter surge seems possible, particularly in parts of the country with lower vaccination rates. (Look up your county’s numbers.) That increases the urgency of getting more Americans as much protection as they can.

Chart shows 7-day daily average.Source: New York Times database

And although new infections are concentrated among the unvaccinated, Jha notes, breakthrough infections have become more common. For younger and healthier adults, getting a booster can lessen the chances of getting sick and of spreading the virus to someone more vulnerable.

And boosters appear to work. Evidence from Israel, which has offered extra shots to all adults, suggests that a third Pfizer dose increases protection against infection to a level similar to the vaccine’s initial efficacy.

How do I get one?

Once the government broadens eligibility, you’ll be able to go to your local pharmacy, a doctor’s office or anywhere else where vaccines are available.

Mixing and matching different types of vaccines seems to provide a stronger immune response, Apoorva says, especially if you get a Moderna one after two Pfizer shots or following the single-dose of J.&J.

Is it ethical?

Some public health experts have urged the U.S. and other countries not to make boosters widely available. They argue that doing so will limit the supply of shots for the rest of the world, especially for residents of less wealthy countries.

But as Sharon notes, the U.S. government has already stockpiled enough vaccine doses to give boosters to the adult population. And the Biden administration, under pressure to increase the supply to poor nations, is planning to expand manufacturing capacity with the goal of producing at least a billion more doses a year.

Millions of doses have already been distributed to pharmacies and clinics around the U.S. “They cannot be recaptured and sent abroad,” Jha writes. “Either we use those doses here or we throw them away.”

More on the virus:


No image available










Posted by BeauHD  from the far-out-man dept.
New submitter GFS666 shares a report from Live Science:We may soon be able to test one of Stephen Hawking's most controversial theories, new research suggests. In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most matter in the cosmos, may be made of black holes formed in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Now, three astronomers have developed a theory that explains not only the existence of dark matter, but also the appearance of the largest black holes in the universe. "What I find personally super exciting about this idea is how it elegantly unifies the two really challenging problems that I work on -- that of probing the nature of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes -- and resolves them in one fell swoop," study co-author Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University, said in a statement. What's more, several new instruments -- including the James Webb Space Telescope that just launched -- could produce data needed to finally assess Hawking's famous notion.

In the latest research, Natarajan, Nico Cappelluti at the University of Miami and Gunther Hasinger at the European Space Agency took a deep dive into the theory of primordial black holes, exploring how they might explain the dark matter and possibly resolve other cosmological challenges. To pass current observational tests, primordial black holes have to be within a certain mass range. In the new work, the researchers assumed that the primordial black holes had a mass of around 1.4 times the mass of the sun. They constructed a model of the universe that replaced all the dark matter with these fairly light black holes, and then they looked for observational clues that could validate (or rule out) the model.

The team found that primordial black holes could play a major role in the universe by seeding the first stars, the first galaxies and the first supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Observations indicate that stars, galaxies and SMBHs appear very quickly in cosmological history, perhaps too quickly to be accounted for by the processes of formation and growth that we observe in the present-day universe. "Primordial black holes, if they do exist, could well be the seeds from which all supermassive black holes form, including the one at the center of the Milky Way," Natarajan said. And the theory is simple and doesn't require a zoo of new particles to explain dark matter. "Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of supermassive black holes," Cappelluti said in the statement.The model could be tested relatively soon, the report says. "The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched Christmas Day after years of delays, is specifically designed to answer questions about the origins of stars and galaxies. And the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, especially the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), is poised to reveal much more about black holes, including primordial ones if they exist."
MORE..... FROM 

The team found that primordial black holes could play a major role in the universe by seeding the first stars, the first galaxies and the first supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Observations indicate that stars, galaxies and SMBHs appear very quickly in cosmological history, perhaps too quickly to be accounted for by the processes of formation and growth that we observe in the present-day universe.

"Primordial black holes, if they do exist, could well be the seeds from which all supermassive black holes form, including the one at the center of the Milky Way," Natarajan said.

And the theory is simple and doesn't require a zoo of new particles to explain dark matter.

"Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of supermassive black holes," Cappelluti said in the statement.

So far this idea is only a model, but it's one that could be tested relatively soon. The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched Christmas Day after years of delays, is specifically designed to answer questions about the origins of stars and galaxies. And the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, especially the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), is poised to reveal much more about black holes, including primordial ones if they exist. 


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2201.09 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2382 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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