Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Friday, July 3, 2020

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1963 - A symbol of hate? Weekly Hodge Podge for July Third

David Foster Wallace

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1963 - A symbol of hate? Weekly Hodge Podge for July Third

Welcome to the weekly HODGE PODGE, a stew, also known as a gallimaufry, of all the things that I found worth keeping and sharing in the last week.

Lately, a great deal of this Hodge Podge content is about Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus and the current resurgence of the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement of I Can't Breathe following the murder of George Floyd.

But I like to keep variety, too, because the week always feels immersed in a flood of varied information, events, and new, well-written articles.

So, right in the early going of BLACK LIVES MATTER and Covid-19 news, there's news of George RR Martin's writing progress on the Winds of Winter, the sixth book of the acclaimed series of books called The Songs of Fire and Ice, better known to the world at large as Games of Thrones.

There's also celebration of Mel Brooks' 94th birthday, followed immediately by the death of Carl Reiner.

There's a lot in this missive. As one of my favorite news casters on CNN, Chris Cuomo, says, "Let's get after it!!"

First, one of the most UPSETTING news item from this week.

BLACK LIVES MATTER - a symbol of hate??

That's what the individual who believes himself to be president said.

Or we could call him the "occupier," occupying the White House unlawfully and by continually showing his unfit to be president, hence my remarks "the individual who believes himself to be president."

Not my president. Not representing anything about what I believed my country to be.

News flash. The occupier, the "president," is a racist piece of shit.




No, not that shocking.

I am sure you are not surprised.

I do not usually resort to invective like "piece of shit," but this hateful rhetoric from the Occupier deserves to be called it for what it is, and it's HATEFUL.

Because he's a hateful, racist, and possibly mentally-ill piece of shit.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/trump-black-lives-matter-347051





President Donald Trump on Wednesday called New York City’s decision to paint ‘Black Lives Matter’ on Fifth Avenue a "symbol of hate," rebuking his home town's embrace of a rallying cry that has stirred nationwide protests against racism.
The president’s latest comments attacking the Black Lives Matter movement drew swift condemnation from New York City police reform groups.











Here's a take on that crap from the occupier and some other things by Author John Scalzi, one of my favorites.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/07/01/five-things-july-1-2020/
Five Things: July 1, 2020
 JOHN SCALZI37 COMMENTS

As I wrote on Twitter earlier today, well, the first two decades of 2020 are done. Let’s get to the next few decades! And to start off, these five things:
Trump, doubling down on being a racist piece of shit: This time by asserting that “Black Lives Matter” is a symbol of hate, which is not something he would say about, oh, the battle flag of a racist country that went to war specifically to own people. Because he’s a racist, you see. But we knew that about him. Also, you know, look: When the actual government of Mississippi is to the left of you on the whole “symbols of hate” thing, you may be too far out on that racist limb. The silver lining here is that there’s increasingly little wiggle room for the few remaining Trump supporters who want to believe that they are not racist to maneuver that particular rationale; Trump is seeing to that. Meanwhile:
The GOP defection is real: At least for old establishment Republicans who did time in Washington, in this case, a bunch of Bush-years folks. I don’t think individually these sort of public defections matter that much, but what it is doing by aggregation is giving a whole bunch of GOP voters sick of Trump’s bullshit cover to step into a voting booth and vote for a Democrat just this once. Of course, it doesn’t solve the problem of the fact that the GOP base is filled with racist ignorants who want conspiracy theorists as their elected representatives. But, I guess, one problem at a time.
Meanwhile, Putin, Ruler for Life: Russian voters (or, at least, we’re told Russian voters) approved changes in the Russian constitution that lets Putin run for president there at least twice more after his current term ends in 2024. You can bet our current president is super-jealous today about that. I don’t know enough about the Russian electoral system to know if the fix was actually in there, although I do know that Putin is more popular generally in Russia than our own president is here, so it’s entirely possible that the Russians would be happy to have Putin run things until he’s 83. Live your dreams, Russian electorate!
DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS??

ANOTHER GREAT podcast.



buy the book


https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/29/21304947/reddit-ban-subreddits-the-donald-chapo-trap-house-new-content-policy-rules

https://twitter.com/chapotraphouse?lang=en

http://www.chapotraphouse.com/


 WERE YOU TAUGHT THIS IN SCHOOL? I WASN'T.


An African American man, sitting for a posed portraitI have been thinking a lot lately about the gaps in my knowledge of history and especially the history of key African-Americans as these people and their works were not well taught to me. In fact, I never even heard of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 until earlier this year; I am very ashamed to admit that fact.

I need to increase my knowledge of great people like James Baldwin, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, and especially W.E.B. Du Bois.

I had a powerful revelation while watching the news last night. Angela Rye was responding to the hateful shit from the "president" that BLM is a symbol of hate, and she told of being corrected by her father when she used the term "slave." He said, "don't strip them of their humanity. Say "enslaved person."

See? Even for African-Americans the implicit bias is so deep in our culture, it's often INVISIBLE.

Here's the full segment:



Here's some other good segments:












George R.R. Martin Gives Quick Update on Winds of Winter Progress


Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:13p

Lockdowns around the US have begun to lift a bit, allowing people to escape from mandated shelter-in-place rules that prompted many to rediscover books, binge those TV shows that they’ve been meaning to get to, or work on projects that they’ve been meaning to get to for a while.
George R.R. Martin was one such person, and he’s provided a handful of updates over the last couple of months about what he’s been up to while in quarantine. In his latest blog post, he explains that work on his long-awaited Song of Ice and Fire novel  The Winds of Winter is still progressing, that he’s preparing for this year’s virtual WorldCon, and that he’s still juggling a bunch of TV projects.
While he’s been isolated in a literal cabin in the woods, Martin notes that he’s been “spending long hours everyday on The Winds of Winter, and making steady progress.”
I finished a new chapter yesterday, another one three days ago, another one the previous week. But no, this does not mean that the book will be finished tomorrow or published next week. It’s going to be a huge book, and I still have a long way to go.
Isolation has allowed him to build up a bit of momentum behind the book, and he says that while he’s sad that CoNZealand won’t be an in-person trip this year, the fact that he won’t have to pause his work for an international trip means that he’ll keep chugging along.
As far as what he’s been writing, he notes that, “Of late I have been visiting with Cersei, Asha, Tyrion, Ser Barristan, and Areo Hotah. I will be dropping back into Braavos next week.”
He also reveals that he has some other projects on his plate. Aside from pre-recording some video for the upcoming Hugo Awards ceremony, he’s been reading (Stephen King’s If It Bleeds and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel particularly impressed him), and working on number of TV projects.
Those include the forthcoming Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, which is tentatively due out in 2022, which he says is “still flying along wonderfully, thanks to Ryan Condal and his writers, and the tireless Ti Mikkel,” and that he’s been working on pushing Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death along. He also notes that he’s working to “relaunch the Wild Cards tv project,” which was originally announced in 2018 as a Hulu series (although given the changes between Hulu, Fox, and Disney since then, it’s possible that the series has since been quietly dropped.) He also notes that he’s been working on a TV series called The Lost Lands, “television shows in development based on works by Roger Zelazny and Tony Hillerman.” Finally, he notes that there are a couple of feature film projects based on his works in development: Sandkings, and The Ice Dragon. 
At the end of the day, it seem as though work is progressing, and while The Winds of Winter doesn’t appear that it’ll be in stores in the immediate future, it’s at least moving forward, little by little.

Data dive: Every Ghost Story is a Love Story —

MORE ABOUT THIS MAGAZINE (ABOVE) FARTHER ALONG...this image exists as foreshadowing.

MORE RACIST SHIT AND PARTICIPATION FROM THE OCCUPIER





Photo of flu patients during the First World War


WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT

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:

COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

This is also a good data site:

Worldometer - Coronavirus info

 United States

Coronavirus Cases:

2,892,476

Deaths:

132,129


COVID worse than flu_Large


Is covid-19 more contagious and more fatal than the flu?

 YES!

https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/how-covid-19-is-different-and-worse-than-the-flu


In addition, COVID-19 appears to be about 10 times as deadly as the flu. People who contract coronavirus face a far greater risk of death than those who get the flu, according to the World Health Organization. WHO also says that COVID-19 is 10 times deadlier than the H1N1 swine flu strain.

The death rate for flu—usually about 0.1%—is thought to be many times lower than for the coronavirus. The current best estimate for the coronavirus is 1%.

No image available

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
Cause
COVID-19: Caused by one virus, the novel 2019 coronavirus, now called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2.
Flu: Caused by any of several different types and strains of influenza viruses.

Transmission

While both the flu and COVID-19 may be transmitted in similar ways (see the Similarities section above), there is also a possible difference: COVID-19 might be spread through the airborne route, meaning that tiny droplets remaining in the air could cause disease in others even after the ill person is no longer near.
Deaths
COVID-19: There have been approximately 516,726 deaths reported worldwide. In the U.S, 128,062 people have died of COVID-19, as of July 2, 2020.*
Flu: The World Health Organization estimates that 290,000 to 650,000 people die of flu-related causes every year worldwide.
In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu. (The CDC does not know the exact number because the flu is not a reportable disease in most parts of the U.S.)
The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. Since this disease is caused by a new virus, people do not have immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. Doctors and scientists are working to estimate the mortality rate of COVID-19, but at present, it is thought to be substantially higher than that of most strains of the flu.
T-cell attacking Covid-19

https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/07/01/2154208/people-testing-negative-for-covid-19-antibodies-may-still-have-some-immunity-study-suggests


People Testing Negative For COVID-19 Antibodies May Still Have Some Immunity, Study Suggests (bbc.com)




Posted by BeauHD  from the latest-revelation dept.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC:For every person testing positive for antibodies, two were found to have specific T-cells which identify and destroy infected cells. This was seen even in people who had mild or symptomless cases of Covid-19. But it's not yet clear whether this just protects that individual, or if it might also stop them from passing on the infection to others.

Researchers at the Karolinksa Institute in Sweden tested 200 people for both antibodies and T-cells. Some were blood donors while others were tracked down from the group of people first infected in Sweden, mainly returning from earlier affected areas like northern Italy. This could mean a wider group have some level of immunity to Covid-19 than antibody testing figures, like those published as part of the UK Office for National Statistics Infection Survey, suggest. It's likely those people did mount an antibody response, but either it had faded or was not detectable by the current tests. And these people should be protected if they are exposed to the virus for a second time.
A Red Cross worker in the United States, 1918
https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/spanish-flu-the-virus-that-changed-the-world/
https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/why-was-spanish-flu-pandemic-known-called-that-where-did-name-come-from-spain-myth-coronavirus-covid-19-name/

Why is Spanish Flu called Spanish Flu? The H1N1 influenza virus is one of the deadliest disasters in history. It killed more people than the First World War – and in less time. But there are many misconceptions about the pandemic. Firstly, 50 million is a conservative estimate for the number of dead – the figure could be many times that number.
There is also no way of being certain where Spanish Flu originated, although the trenches of World War I, where poor sanitation and disease was rife, are an often-cited contender. The filthy, rat-infested conditions undoubtedly affected the soldiers’ immune systems, making them more vulnerable to illness.


It is thought the first cases were in military forts in the United States before spreading at an alarming rate to Europe. But yet the pandemic was called ‘Spanish Flu’ – again, a result of the war.
Spain was not hit especially badly compared to other countries but wartime censorship exaggerated the affects of the virus there. While Britain, France, Germany and the United States censored and restricted early reports, papers in Spain – as a neutral country – were free to convey all the horrid details of the pandemic.
This made it look much worse there, so the unfortunate name spread with the disease around the world.
WHAT IF WE HAD ANOTHER PANDEMIC TO GO WITH THIS COVID-19 PANDEMIC???

 WOULDN'T THAT BE FUN?

 LIKE EXTRA KOOL WHIP ON YOUR FUDGE BROWNIE





Nasal swabs from more than 30,000 pigs in China over 7 years found an increase in an avianlike influenza virus that has swapped genes from several strains. HONGLEI SUN





Swine flu strain with human pandemic potential increasingly found in pigs in China

By Jon Cohen


What the world doesn’t need now is a pandemic on top of a pandemic. So a new finding that pigs in China are more and more frequently becoming infected with a strain of influenza that has the potential to jump to humans has infectious disease researchers worldwide taking serious notice. Robert Webster, an influenza investigator who recently retired from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, says it’s a “guessing game” as to whether this strain will mutate to readily transmit between humans, which it has not done yet. “We just do not know a pandemic is going to occur until the damn thing occurs,” Webster says, noting that China has the largest pig population in the world. “Will this one do it? God knows.”

When multiple strains of influenza viruses infect the same pig, they can easily swap genes, a process known as “reassortment.” The new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on an influenza virus dubbed G4. The virus is a unique blend of three lineages: one similar to strains found in European and Asian birds, the H1N1 strain that caused the 2009 pandemic, and a North American H1N1 that has genes from avian, human, and pig influenza viruses.

The G4 variant is especially concerning because its core is an avian influenza virus—to which humans have no immunity—with bits of mammalian strains mixed in. “From the data presented, it appears that this is a swine influenza virus that is poised to emerge in humans,” says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who studies pathogens. “Clearly this situation needs to be monitored very closely.”

As part of a project to identify potential pandemic influenza strains, a team led by Liu Jinhua from the China Agricultural University (CAU) analyzed nearly 30,000 nasal swabs taken from pigs at slaughterhouses in 10 Chinese provinces, and another 1000 swabs from pigs with respiratory symptoms seen at their school’s veterinary teaching hospital. The swabs, collected between 2011 and 2018, yielded 179 swine influenza viruses, the vast majority of which were G4 or one of five other G strains from the Eurasian avianlike lineage. “G4 virus has shown a sharp increase since 2016, and is the predominant genotype in circulation in pigs detected across at least 10 provinces,” they write.

Sun Honglei, the paper’s first author, says G4’s inclusion of genes from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic “may promote the virus adaptation” that leads to human-to-human transmission. Therefore, “It’s necessary to strengthen the surveillance” of pigs in China for influenza viruses, says Sun, also at CAU.

Influenza viruses frequently jump from pigs to humans, but most do not then transmit between humans. Two cases of G4 infections of humans have been documented and both were dead-end infections that did not transmit to other people. “The likelihood that this particular variant is going to cause a pandemic is low,” says Martha Nelson, an evolutionary biologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center who studies pig influenza viruses in the United States and their spread to humans. But Nelson notes that no one knew about the pandemic H1N1 strain, which jumped from pigs to people, until the first human cases surfaced in 2009. “Influenza can surprise us,” Nelson says. “And there’s a risk that we neglect influenza and other threats at this time” of COVID-19.

The new study offers but a tiny glimpse into swine influenza strains in China, which has 500 million pigs. While Nelson thinks the predominance of G4 in their analysis is an interesting finding, she says it’s hard to know whether its spread is a growing problem, given the relatively small sample size. “You’re really not getting a good snapshot of what is dominant in pigs in China,” she adds, stressing the need for more sampling in the nation's pigs.
In the paper, Sun and colleagues—including George Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention—describe lab dish studies that show how G4s have become adept at infecting and copying themselves in human airway epithelial cells. The viruses also readily infected and transmitted between ferrets, a popular animal model used to study human influenza. The researchers found antibodies to the G4 strain in 4.4% of 230 people studied in a household survey—and the rate more than doubled in swine workers.
In addition to stepping up surveillance, Sun says it makes sense to develop a vaccine against G4 for both pigs and humans. Webster says at the very least, the seed stock to make a human vaccine—variants of a strain that grow rapidly in the eggs used to make a flu vaccine—should be produced now. “Making the seed stock is not a big deal, and we should have it ready,” Webster says.

China rarely uses influenza vaccines in swine. Nelson says U.S. farms commonly do, but the vaccine has little effect because it’s often outdated and doesn’t match circulating strains.
Ideally, Nelson says, we would produce a human G4 vaccine and have it in the stockpile, but that’s an involved process that requires substantial funding. “We need to be vigilant about other infectious disease threats even as COVID is going on because viruses have no interest in whether we’re already having another pandemic,” Nelson says.



https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/06/30/2151219/dr-anthony-fauci-says-new-virus-in-china-has-traits-of-2009-swine-flu-1918-pandemic-flu

Dr. Anthony Fauci Says New Virus In China Has Traits of 2009 Swine Flu, 1918 Pandemic Flu (cnbc.com)




Posted by BeauHD  from the watchful-eye dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC:White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that U.S. health officials are keeping an eye on a new strain of flu carried by pigs in China that has characteristics of the 2009 H1N1 virus and 1918 pandemic flu. The virus, which scientists are calling "G4 EA H1N1," has not yet been shown to infect humans but it is exhibiting "reassortment capabilities," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during a hearing.

"In other words, when you get a brand new virus that turns out to be a pandemic virus it's either due to mutations and/or the reassortment or exchanges of genes," he told lawmakers. "And they're seeing virus in swine, in pigs now, that have characteristics of the 2009 H1N1, of the original 1918, which many of our flu viruses have remnants of that in it, as well as segments from other hosts, like swine." Fauci said Tuesday there's always "the possibility that you might have another swine flu-type outbreak as we had in 2009." "It's something that still is in the stage of examination," he said. It's not "an immediate threat where you're seeing infections, but it's something we need to keep our eye on, just the way we did in 2009 with the emergence of the swine flu."

The Washington Post
The Post Most




“There are so many biases in the data set here that you can’t control for and you might not know exist,” Andersen said. In a time when as many as 90 percent of U.S. infections are still undetected and countries with limited public health infrastructure are struggling to keep up with surging cases, a shortage of data means “we can’t answer all the questions we want to answer.”
Pardis Sabeti, a computational biologist at Harvard University and the Broad Institute, noted that the vast majority of sequenced genomes come from Europe, where the G variant first emerged, and the United States, where infections thought to have been introduced by travelers from Europe spread undetected for weeks before the country shut down. This could at least partly explain why it appears so dominant.









(image) WIRED Coronavirus Update Logo

06.29.20
This is a special edition of our Coronavirus Update newsletter. To receive this email every weekday, sign up here.

Fake mask exemptions circulate, worldwide deaths pass 500,000, and Singapore rolls out a contact-tracing device for seniors. Here’s what you should know:

Headlines

Americans are using fake fliers to exempt them from wearing masks
As masks continue to be a flashpoint in America, the Americans with Disabilities Act website has exposed "fraudulent face mask fliers" that some citizens are using as proof that they don't have to wear masks. These fliers have the Department of Justice seal on them, but were not issued by the department nor endorsed in any way.
Coronavirus deaths pass 500,000 worldwide
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide and infected over 10 million. The stunning report comes as cases spike in the US, where more than a quarter of the world's deaths have occurred.
Singapore rolls out a coronavirus contract-tracing device for seniors
Singapore is distributing Bluetooth tokens to vulnerable seniors who don't have a smartphone that will tell them if they've been in contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus. The devices use Bluetooth to send signals to both other tokens and smartphones using a personalized QR code.

Daily Distraction

NASA's space suits are iconic in American culture, but soon they will be receiving the first major update in decades with help from AI algorithms.

Something to Read

The constant stream of news and social media may seem like it never ends. And while checking your phone for an extra two hours every night won’t stop the apocalypse, it might stop you from being psychologically prepared for it.

Sanity Check

Last week, Apple unveiled new privacy features for its internet browser, Safari. But if you're not a Mac user, fear not: Here's how you can get these features in Chrome and Firefox too.

One Question

What is contact tracing?
Contact tracing is a coordinated effort to pinpoint people who have potentially been exposed to Covid-19. This is accomplished by employing dedicated contact tracers to identify people who have potentially come into contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus. Several tech companies have created apps or frameworks to use people’s phones to automatically track contacts, but these efforts have been hampered by privacy concerns.

Covid-19 Care Package

❓ Have questions about anything Covid-19 related? We answered your questions and gathered all our coverage in one spot.
💻 Some of you are work-from-home pros, but if you're new to it, here's how to stay productive without losing your mind.
😔 It's hard not to be anxious about a global pandemic, but here's how you can protect yourself and your family without spiraling.
💉 Over 30 companies are working on a vaccine, but it's probably still at least a year away. Here's everything you should know.
📦 The Covid-19 virus can linger on objects for as little as a few hours or as long as a couple days, depending on the surface. Here's the research.
👫 Quarantined with a loved one? Here's how to not hate them before all this is over.
🧼 It's not just your hands that need washing—your gadgets, clothes, and home need it too. Here's how to properly disinfect your stuff.
🦠 Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.
(image) WIRED Logo



Wonkette Enemy of the People men's and women's tees!

WONKETTE IS MY NEW FAVORITE SITE!


https://www.wonkette.com/13-tons-of-alleged-concentration-camp-prisoner-hair-from-china-seized-at-border


Since 2017, as part of China's "war on terror," over a million Uyghurs and other ethnic Turkic minorities have been held in the horrific re-education camps in the Xinjiang autonomous region, where they are often sterilized, forced to do hard labor, otherwise tortured, raped, and starved until they sing songs praising Chinese leader Xi Jinping (whose policies are keeping them in these camps) and not let out until those running the camps feel that they have been sufficiently cleansed of their own culture and religion (the Uyghurs are mostly Muslim) and accepted the ways of the Han Chinese.
Apparently, this "re-education" now also means cutting their hair off and forcing them to make it into weaves for American consumers. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, but it is a thing that happens in real life.








 REMEMBER? According to John Bolton, Trump thinks the concentration camps were a great idea!


Just recently, it was revealed in former national security advisor John Bolton's book that when Donald Trump was told by President Xi Jinping of his plan to build these concentration camps, Trump "said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do." He also reportedly asked Xi to help him out with the 2020 election. Trump later responded to this by saying he purposely didn't want to put sanctions on China over the concentration camps because he was in trade talks and wanted those to go well.
Technically, since 2016, the United States has banned all products made with forced labor. Technically. There are many ways around that, so long as the supply chain is opaque enough. Many precious stones (including all those "healing crystals"), coffee beans, and cocoa beans are mined and harvested by actual slaves. Child slaves, usually. Actual child slaves, not the pretend QAnon mole children child slaves.








AND SO BETTER THINGS...




AND NOT SO MUCH BETTER...

















https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/06/29/0350216/mysterious-spike-in-radioactivity-over-northern-europe-accident-at-russian-nuclear-plant-suspected


Mysterious Spike In Radioactivity Over Northern Europe, Accident At Russian Nuclear Plant Suspected (ibtimes.com)





Posted by EditorDavid  from the little-bang-theory dept.

An anonymous reader quotes the International Business Times:Watchdog agencies last week detected an increase in radioactivity levels in the atmosphere over northern Europe, suggesting a potential damage at a nuclear plant. Authorities noted the possibility that the spike may be the result of accidental release of radioactive material from one of the nuclear plants in Russia, but a spokesman denied any problems with the Russian power plants.

Several Scandinavian watchdog agencies detected elevated levels of radionuclides cesium-134, cesium -137 and ruthenium-103 over parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic. Although the levels are not considered harmful to human health and the environment, radionuclides are artificial, unstable byproducts of nuclear fission, suggesting that the sudden increase in levels may have resulted from a damage in a nuclear power plant.

According to the Associated Press, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority noted Tuesday (June 24) that locating the origin of the radionuclides is "not possible" but by Friday, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands announced that calculations revealed that the radionuclides may actually have come from the direction of Western Russia...

In 1986, it was a similar detection in Sweden that contributed to the reveal that a disaster had occurred in Chernobyl.
National Security
President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.
AD
But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.








 WHAT BITCH MEDIA SAYS

 It's a new day, which means another opportunity to point out why Facebook sucks and why that matters.
If you’ve ever read a Bitch email before, you may already be familiar with this phenomenon. During the 2016 presidential elections, Facebook leaked user data to right-wing political advertisers in an unprecedented privacy breach that had ramifications for both the US election and Brexit. In the years since, other social media giants have come to recognize that freely allowing political ads on their site has created an irreversible culture of creating misinformation—and are doing some work to combat it. The days of claiming that social media sites have no obligation to fact-check in the name of free speech are over.
But not Facebook. Facebook cares more about selling your personal information than it does about its major contribution to the proliferation of misinformation and the spreading of right-wing terror. That is why instead of banning political ads, it’s instead generously allowing you to opt out of seeing Donald Trump’s racist, hateful ads with actual Nazi imagery. (And we know they’re making an exception for him. We’re not even allowed to run ads on Facebook if our page has the name “Bitch Media.”)
So where do news and media come into play with this? The effect that Facebook has had on the media industry is hard to overstate. With over $70 billion in targeted advertising revenue, Facebook has shaped the industry’s race to the bottom for clicks and shares. For us, an independent feminist media outlet, we have an obligation to you, our readers, to continue our work of providing rigorously researched analysis that asks critical questions of the powers that be and provides the tools you need to see through the jargon. No clickbait, no misleading headlines, no diluting our message to maximize reach and shares. Just the tools to help you read the news critically, uncover the biases that live in our world and in other reporting, and understand why that matters for underrepresented communities not often prioritized in mainstream media.


Senator Kamala Harris hugs Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden after introducing him at a campaign rally at Renaissance High School on March 9, 2020 in Detroit. (Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

A Black WomanVice President Can’t Save a Nation from Itself

by Yannise Jean
Published on July 2, 2020 at 10:11am
As the United States scrambles to find a new leader, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they’re ready to place the onus of healing the nation onto the shoulders of a Black woman, who already bears this burden. But before America can declare itself a nation of tolerance, it must hold itself accountable for the egregious actions taken against Black women. A vice president’s role is to assist the president and to guide them on sensitive matters. If Biden is serious in considering a Black woman for this role, there must be an understanding that “fixing” racism does not stop, or end, with appointing Black people to legislative positions. Deconstructing white supremacy will take work, and Black women cannot do it alone—and we shouldn’t have to. 



Andrew Cuomo


https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/28/andrew-cuomo-denial-coronavirus-trump-343002




CORONAVIRUS

Andrew Cuomo: Trump ‘in denial’ about coronavirus

“You can’t tweet at it,” New York’s governor said.

 “This is a continuation of the first wave, and it was a failed effort to stop the first wave in the country,” Cuomo said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “If you listen to what the president says, what they said at the White House briefing, they're saying what they said three months ago. They're basically in denial about the problem. They don't want to tell the American people the truth.”

 MORE WONKETTE!

https://www.wonkette.com/as-ppp-ends-marco-rubio-wonders-what-to-do-with-130-billion-left-over

https://www.wonkette.com/hey-jeff-sessions-henry-louis-gates-jr-isnt-some-criminal-you-racist-pos

https://www.wonkette.com/diamond-silk-and-an-fbi-sexxx-play-donald-trumps-big-day-of-not-learning-about-putins-murder-bounties

https://www.wonkette.com/michele-bachmann-knows-how-to-fix-covid-because-yeah-she-does

https://www.wonkette.com/kayleigh-mcenany-too-offended-to-confirm-if-president-beauregard-trump-glad-south-lost-civil-war

https://www.wonkette.com/the-lincoln-project-sets-fire-to-confederate-flag-in-new-anti-trump-ad

https://www.wonkette.com/trump-worried-about-being-remembered-as-loser-haha-too-late

https://www.wonkette.com/forced-birthers-so-upset-about-scotus-decision-they-cant-remember-why-they-were-there-in-the-first-place


 MORE FROM REASON MAGAZINE

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/n-y-state-bill-to-ban-hate-speech-from-social-media/

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/want-to-reform-the-criminal-justice-system-end-the-drug-war/

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/dont-let-the-pandemic-kill-religious-freedom/






Robyn Pennacchia

in Quartz

https://qz.com/1214718/what-america-is-getting-wrong-about-three-important-words-in-the-second-amendment/


“What is your definition of a ‘well-regulated militia,’ as stated in the Second Amendment?” Rogers asked Dana Loesch, a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association (NRA). “And using supporting detail, explain to me how an 18-year-old with a military rifle is well-regulated? And the world, our country, our nation, is going to grade your answer.”
Loesch responded: “George Mason was one of the founding fathers, and he said ‘The militia is the whole of the people.’ It’s every man, it’s every woman, that is who the militia is. In the context of the time, a well-regulated militia meant an American man, an American woman, a citizen of the United States of America, who could operate and service their firearm.”






MORE BY ROBYN PENNACCHIA

https://qz.com/quartzy/1687411/why-friends-is-still-so-popular/


https://qz.com/1257292/the-scientifically-proven-explanation-for-why-better-gun-control-really-will-stop-school-violence/


https://qz.com/1153516/americas-wholesome-square-dancing-tradition-is-a-tool-of-white-supremacy/

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/


Christian Extremist: I’d Rather “Be Beheaded” Than Wear Federally Mandated Masks



 JUNE 30, 2020 BY HEMANT MEHTA

OH NO! VENGEFUL REPUBLICANS ARE GONNA TEAR DOWN OUR PRECIOUS SATANIC STATUES THAT DON'T EXIST!

How will we ever go on?

 CULTURE WARS
MORE BY ROBYN PENNACCHIA

https://www.damemagazine.com/2020/01/02/the-privilege-of-white-victimhood/


https://www.damemagazine.com/2020/03/19/rugged-individualism-will-not-save-us-from-coronavirus/


HONG KONG’S TRUE HANDOVER






July 1 marks 23 years since Hong Kong’s handover from British rule to China. The city was supposed to retain a high degree of autonomy: the special territory would have an independent judiciary, for example, and far more robust protections of civil liberties than on the mainland. 
But China has chipped away at that autonomy over the years, and has used the pandemic as an opportunity to pounce on Hong Kong. This week, Beijing moved to directly exert control over Hong Kong by imposing a national security law that criminalizes a vast swath of activities and severely curtails freedoms. July 1, 2020 may well mark Hong Kong’s true handover. 
The new national security law’s ripples were felt even before its passage. For the first time in nearly two decades, police banned the annual July 1 pro-democracy march. Foreign businesses like HSBC have been pressured to support the law, and the US is taking steps to revoke Hong Kong’s special trade status, a move that threatens the city’s future as an international financial and data hub. 
But while these developments seem worrying, many protesters see them as signs that their laam caau strategy—daring Beijing to crack down further so governments will punish China and throw Hong Kong a lifeline—is finally paying off.

Psychopomp Magazine is a quarterly, online publication that exists to showcase stories and art that challenge genre and form conventions with particular attention to work that deals with conceptions of passages, rites of passage, transitions, juxtapositions, and the betwixt and between. We also run an annual fiction contest.
Psychopomp (Greek – psuchopompos – “Guide of Souls”): n. Creatures, angels, spirits, or deities who are responsible for escorting the dead to the afterlife. Their role is to provide safe passage. In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator btw. the conscious and unconscious realms.

bigcover7

ISSUE 7.1 | WINTER 2020

Contents

Emily Dezurick-Badran
_____
Benjamin Niespodziany
_____
Gabriel Coffman
_____
G.G. Silverman
_____
Petra Kuppers
_____
Lou Terlikowski

 An interesting human...

Author of the comedic YA zombie novel, VEGAN TEENAGE ZOMBIE HUNTRESS, & award-winning short stories


http://www.ggsilverman.com/blog/


Recent Posts


https://boingboing.net/2020/06/27/milton-glaser-legendary-graph.html



https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/the-trailer-to-asimovs-found.html




The trailer to Asimov's Foundation sure looks grand


 I wrote about that here:

https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-sense-of-doubt-blog-post-1960.html

Four years of Trumpist surrealism and horror in one Book: Into the Trumpverse, comics by Ruben Bolling





https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/four-years-of-trumpist-surreal.html


Surprised Kenan Thompson GIFGiphy






Sifter



Why I’m not a Christian summed up in one church sign





PRESIDENTS READING

Barack Obama's 2019 Reading List Includes Some Great Books to ...
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g28711238/barack-obama-summer-2019-reading-list-books/
Books President Obama reads - Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/6-books-president-obama-devoured-during-his-summer-vacation-2015-8
File:Bush at desk reading SotU draft.png - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bush_at_desk_reading_SotU_draft.png
Video: Bush Says His Blank 9/11 Reaction Was To "Project A Sense ...
https://gothamist.com/news/video-bush-says-his-blank-911-reaction-was-to-project-a-sense-of-calm
Books Bill Clinton thinks everybody should read this year ...
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-clintons-favorite-books-this-year-2019-8
New Deal Redux or Great Society II? - Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/new-deal-redux-or-great-society-ii-179995/
Statement on President George H.W. Bush - Arnold Schwarzenegger ...



Bush granddaughters share final touching moments with George H.W. ...
https://www.chron.com/life/article/Bush-granddaughters-share-final-touching-moments-13439367.php

Arthur Van Court Photograph Collection | Ronald Reagan ...
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/arthur-van-court-photograph-collection
President Reagan gets comfortable in an easy chair in Aspen Lodge ...
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-reagan-gets-comfortable-in-an-easy-chair-in-aspen-news-photo/515560266
The books Trump wants you to read - CNNPolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/02/politics/trump-books-list/index.html


Trump Couldn't Read Constitution on Camera: Book | Law & Crime
https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/trump-struggled-to-read-the-constitution-said-it-was-like-a-foreign-language-book/

Trump's lethal aversion to reading

Trump's lethal aversion to reading



How to not do presidential opsec: Crisis management over dinner in ...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/how-to-not-do-presidential-opsec-do-crisis-management-over-dinner-in-public/
BASEBALL


https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29402678/the-2020-mlb-season-series-tests-first-big-one-comes-today

No COVID case is a good case, but a lower prevalence than in another league is a step in the right direction. Baseball plans to proceed with teams traveling from city to city and do so without punitive measures for running afoul of suggested guidelines. The NFL is considering fining players for eating out. The NBA will establish an anonymous hotline in its bubble.
MLB is putting immense faith in its testing protocol, a months-in-the-making undertaking that involved overhauling a PED-testing lab in Utah and preparing it to handle more than 14,000 tests per week. Every other day, all of the players and staff members will submit saliva samples. Those will be shipped to the SMRTL lab in Utah, which, to process the volume of tests, will use a pooling method.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29388441/bobby-bonilla-day-why-mets-pay-119-million-today-every-july-1

It's Bobby Bonilla Day! Why Mets pay him $1.19 million today and every July 1


The calendar has turned to July 1, and that means one thing: It's time for Mets fans everywhere to wish each other a Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! Why? On Wednesday, 57-year-old Bobby Bonilla will collect a check for $1,193,248.20 from the New York Mets, as he has and will every July 1 from 2011 through 2035.
Because of baseball's salary structure, Bonilla's annual payday is often more than some of the game's current stars in a given year. Thanks to the shortened season and prorated salaries for players in 2020, that list has grown even longer.
Before and After: Windows 10 Start menu in dark theme.

WINDOWS UPGRADE


https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/07/01/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-20161/


SPACE STUFF





https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/07/02/2130218/core-of-a-gas-planet-seen-for-the-first-time

Core of a Gas Planet Seen For the First Time (bbc.com)



Posted by BeauHD  from the first-of-its-kind dept.

A team of astronomers has discovered what they think are the rocky innards of a giant planet that's missing its thick atmosphere. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature. The BBC reports:Its radius is about three-and-a-half times larger than Earth's but the planet is around 39 times more massive. In this size range, the planet would be expected to have a significant component that's gas. Yet it has a density similar to Earth, appearing to be mostly rocky. The object, called TOI 849 b, was found circling a star much like the Sun that's located 730 light-years away. The core orbits so close to its parent star that a year is a mere 18 hours and its surface temperature is around 1,527C. Researchers aren't sure whether the core lost its atmosphere in a collision or just never developed one.

If it was once similar to Jupiter, there are several ways it could have lost its gaseous envelope. These could include tidal disruption, where the planet is ripped apart from orbiting too close to its star, or even a collision with another planet late in its formation. If it's a "failed" gas giant, this could have occurred if there was a gap in the disc of gas and dust that it emerged from, or if it formed late, after the disc ran out of material.

 ANOTHER ASSHOLE THING TRUMP IS DOING

https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/07/02/2122200/inside-the-plot-to-kill-the-open-technology-fund

Inside the Plot To Kill the Open Technology Fund (vice.com)



Posted by BeauHD  from the tear-it-all-down dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News:[The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, which is part of the umbrella group called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which also controls Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.] OTF's goal is to help oppressed communities across the globe by building the digital tools they need and offering training and support to use those tools. Its work has saved countless lives, and every single day millions of people use OTF-assisted tools to communicate and speak out without fear of arrest, retribution, or even death. The fund has helped dissidents raise their voices beyond China's advanced censorship network, known as the Great Firewall; helped citizens in Cuba to access news from sources other than the state-sanctioned media; and supported independent journalists in Russia so they could work without fear of a backlash from the Kremlin. Closer to home, the tools that OTF has funded, including the encrypted messaging app Signal, have allowed Black Lives Matter protesters to organize demonstrations across the country more securely.

But now all of that is under threat, after Michael Pack, a Trump appointee and close ally of Steve Bannon, took control of USAGM in June. Pack has ousted the OTF's leadership, removed its bipartisan board, and replaced it with Trump loyalists, including Bethany Kozma, an anti-transgender activist. One reason the OTF managed to gain the trust of technologists and activists around the world is because, as its name suggests, it invested largely in open-source technology. By definition, open-source software's source code is publicly available, meaning it can be studied, vetted, and in many cases contributed to by anyone in the world. This transparency makes it possible for experts to study code to see if it has, for example, backdoors or vulnerabilities that would allow for governments to compromise the software's security, potentially putting users at risk of being surveilled or identified. Now, groups linked to Pack and Bannon have been pressing for the funding of closed-source technology, which is antithetical to the OTF's work over the last eight years.Pack is being pressed to fund Freegate and Ultrasurf, "two little-known apps that allow users to circumvent internet censorship in repressive regimes but currently have very small user bases inside China," reports Vice. "These apps are not widely trusted by internet freedom experts and activists, according to six experts who spoke to VICE News. That the OTF would pivot its funding from trusted, open-source tech to more obscure, closed-source tech has alarmed activists around the world and has resulted in open revolt among OTF's former leadership."

More than half a dozen experts who spoke to VICE News "said the apps' code is out of date, dangerously vulnerable to compromise, and lacks the user base to allow it to effectively scale even if they secured government funding."
TWITTER FEED











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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2007.03 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1827 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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