Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

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

Saturday, March 13, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2216 - The Greatest Evils are Ending - Weekly Hodge for 2103.13


 A Sense of Doubt blog post #2216 - The Greatest Evils are Ending - Weekly Hodge for 2103.13


Again, kind of a lazy Hodge Podge this week after taking a week off.

First, the stupid image. All administrations have had some deportation policy. And read on. The way the Trump administration gutted the immigration system to perpetrate great evil, in fact some of the greatest evil against immigrants in the history of our country, it is going to take the Biden administration time to untangle the mess.

Oh but some pundits are oh so eager for some payback for all the ire heaped on Trump, deservedly so.

And so, I have a random collection of things here with very little organization. There is the usual pandemic section.

I was going to do things with all the links. I do not have the energy. And I am working on a cool post for Sunday.

Still, I never leave you without value.

There's value here.

Like this,


Given Biden some time. Look at how his cabinet is shaping up so far at POLITICO.

It's Your Biden Immigration Roundup But Not Like 'Rounding Up' Immigrants. So Mostly Yay.

Jamie Lynn Crofts
March 12, 2021 02:30 PM

We are six weeks in to the Biden administration, so it's time for another check-in to see how it's doing on immigration.

Once again, it's a mixed bag. There are definitely some good things happening now that never would have happened under the previous regime. And, less than two months in to Joe Biden's presidency, there have already been some good changes at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security,

But it's important to never stop paying attention. We can't turn a blind eye to bad things happening just because a Democrat is president. And, while family separation is over and things are starting to improve, we still have babies in cages. That is never okay.

That said, there are some good things happening, too. And hopefully, we are starting on the way to a kinder, more humane immigration system.

So here goes!

That terrible COVID-rape camp in Mexico is finally closed!

Trump and his cronies did so many horrific things to immigrants and would-be immigrants. One particularly cruel policy was that he stopped letting asylum seekers into the country. Instead, he forced migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border to remain in Mexico, where they were forced to live in places like tent camps with horrific, inhumane conditions.

Now, the most prolific of these camps, in Matamoros, has finally closed. The final asylum seekers at Matamoros with open cases crossed the border last week.

Asylum seekers, like refugees (whom Trump also hates), are incredibly vulnerable. Asylees from Mexico and Central America come to the US border fleeing poverty, crime, persecution, and violence. Normally, those people would be allowed in to the US while their cases wind through the court system. But under Trump, the cruelty was the point.

Under Trump's "Migrant Protection Protocols," some 71,000 potential asylees were forced to remain in Mexico along the border in tent camps and shelters. Violence, kidnapping, rape, and disease were rampant. Thousands lived in tents with little or no access to facilities.

And that's not all. 27,898 asylum seekers who weren't allowed into the country had their asylum claims denied and received deportation orders ... because they didn't appear for their court hearings in the US.


Protecting Venezuelans with TPS designation

Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be giving Venezuelan nationals Temporary Protected Status, meaning most Venezuelans already in the US will be able to stay here for at least 18 months.

TPS is a temporary legal immigration status given to people from countries experiencing extreme hardship. It allows them to remain in the country and obtain work authorization as long as they meet certain conditions.
DHS noted when announcing the designation that "extraordinary and temporary conditions in Venezuela [...] prevent nationals from returning safely, including a complex humanitarian crisis marked by widespread hunger and malnutrition, a growing influence and presence of non-state armed groups, repression, and a crumbling infrastructure."

Venezuelans who have been US residents since at least March 8 have 180 days to register for TPS status. They can also apply for employment authorization documents and travel authorization.

The Trump administration ended TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants. It's nice to see TPS once again being used for good instead of evil.

Undoing the terrible Trump nonsense

Unfortunately, a lot of the terrible shit Donald Trump did is going to take a while to unwind. Trump's immigration awfulness took many forms — executive orders, official rulemaking, and both official and unofficial DHS policies. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Trump regime made nearly 1,000 changes to US immigration policy, basically all of them evil. ("Evil" might be our word and not theirs.)

At DHS, Acting Chad illegally ran the agency without ever being confirmed to the Senate until after both a federal court and Congress found it was fucking illegal. The Biden team is now apparently putting together a list of policies enacted by Chad to challenge in court because he was in his position illegally. If successful, this would be much easier than going through the long, tedious administrative process of changing federal government rules.

Getting rid of Trump and Stephen Miller's Nazi shit isn't going to be easy. After being sworn in, new DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Trump and company had "dismantled" the entire US immigration system, noting,

"We did not have the facilities available [nor are we] equipped to administer the humanitarian laws that our Congress passed years ago," he said at a briefing at the White House last week. "We did not have the personnel, policies, procedures or training to administer those laws. Quite frankly, the entire system was gutted."

Babies in cages

In a stark reminder that administrations of both parties treat immigrants like garbage, the Biden administration has more than 3,250 children behind bars along the Mexico-US border.

Since January, there has been an influx of migrants — and particularly unaccompanied children — arriving at the US border. More than 1,300 of the kids were held in baby jail longer than the legal max of 72 hours. At least 160 were under 13. Some are as young as six.

And look, it seems like this is happening because of an influx of children showing up at the border and a lack of available facilities, not pure evil. We're in the middle of a pandemic. We have to help kids who show up alone at the border. It's not intentional cruelty, like it was under Trump. (At least at the very top. DHS, ICE, and CBP remain actively evil institutions.)

DHS "shelters" are basically long-term detention facilities by a different name. Some of these "facilities" are just big tents — that inspectors have already found are unsafe for children and unhealthy. They aren't licensed or inspected by anyone. This is NOT OKAY.

Most children who show up alone at the border come with the address and phone number of relatives already in the US. As soon as government officials do their vetting to make sure it's an actual relative or family friend and not human traffickers, that is where those kids should be. Not in cages or tents or jails or "shelters" that operate like jails.

Today, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services made getting kids back to their families a little easier. Under Trump, DHS and HHS had signed a memorandum allowing information about sponsors to be shared with ICE. This made family members who were immigrants themselves afraid to come forward.

Now, the agencies are terminating the agreement "that undermined the interests of children and had a chilling effect on potential sponsors (usually a parent or close relative) from stepping up to sponsor an unaccompanied child placed in the care of HHS[.]"

Hopefully, this will help get kids out of baby jail and back in homes with families, where they belong. These are children. Children who are being traumatized every day they are treated like criminals instead of kids. One volunteer memo circulating showed how dire conditions remain in these facilities, saying, "DIAPERS ARE NEEDED EVERYWHERE."

So ... yeah

Some good, some bad, some ugly.

Because non-citizens can't vote, it's easy for politicians — yes, including Democrats — to ignore or attack them. Especially when the immigrants in question are poor and fleeing terrible things.

In a demonstration of this, an unnamed "former Obama official who is in touch with the Department of Homeland Security" actually whined to Politico this week about how hard things are for rich, white immigrants.

"The fact that European billionaire CEOs who have been vaccinated can't enter the U.S. but people can cross the southern border shows the lack of coherency of the policies of the administration," said a former Obama official who is in touch with the Department of Homeland Security.

WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE EUROPEAN BILLIONAIRES?!

But really ... can we just abolish ICE now?

[DHS-Montana Agreement / NYT / Politico / The Conversation]

Support striking Amazon workers this week instead of using our link to buy from them!





This Horrible Panda Express Story Is Why BS 'Self-Improvement Seminars' Need To Be Regulated

Robyn Pennacchia
March 11, 2021 02:39 PM

commons.wikimedia.org

A former Panda Express employee is suing the company over a 2019 incident of sexual abuse at a leadership seminar she was told she needed to attend in order to be eligible for a promotion.

In what was apparently meant to be a "self-improvement" exercise of some sort, the employee was required to strip down to her underwear and talk about her vulnerabilities in front of a classroom full of other employees. When a male employee was required to do the same thing, he broke down in tears and the female employee was required to hug him, while they were both still in their underwear, being stared at by other Panda Express employees.

It is entirely unclear how this would improve anyone's ability to manage a Panda Express.

The female employee, a cashier at the time, had been working at Panda Express in California for nearly three years and was only making $11.35 an hour. She had hoped to get a promotion but was told that the only way she would be considered was if she attended this four-day seminar conducted by a company called Alive Seminars and Coaching Academy. It was not cheap. She had to borrow hundreds of dollars from her relatives in order to attend, and lost four days of work (and thus four days of pay).

And in exchange for that, she got this.

Via Washington Post:

"The atmosphere resembled less a self-improvement seminar than a site for off-the-books interrogation of terrorist suspects," the lawsuit said, comparing the overall effect to "that of a particularly nasty drill sergeant."

On one day, seminar participants were told to pretend they were on a sinking ship and that only four of them would survive, the suit said. On the following day, leaders allegedly filmed them while instructing them to act as if a light from above was coming to suck away their "negative energy."

And then, in front of dozens of other employees, the woman was told to remove her clothing and share her inner struggles, the lawsuit said. Ramirez said that, combined with the forced hug, this particular portion of the seminar constituted both sexual battery and a hostile work environment.

Panda Express claims to have no official stake in Alive Seminars, but the only people attending that "self-improvement" seminar were employees of Panda Express and the Panda Express logo was on many of the class materials. They claim to have no knowledge of what went on in these seminars, either. It might have been a good idea to find that out before requiring their employees to attend and pay for these seminars in order to qualify for a promotion.

In a statement to the Washington Post, the fast food restaurant stated that they are taking the accusations "very seriously," stating:

"We do not condone the kind of behavior described in the lawsuit, and it is deeply concerning to us. We are committed to providing a safe environment for all associates and stand behind our core values to treat each person with respect."

Here's a good way to treat people with respect. If a company wants to make a promotion contingent on attending a "self-improvement" seminar, they should pay for that seminar themselves (and also find out what the seminar entails).

The fact is, most of these seminars are absolute scams. The best case scenario is that they end up just being a super expensive drama or improv class, and the worst, well ... I guess we know what the worst is now.

One does not have to be accredited in any way to start up a service like Alive Seminars, nor to be an independent life coach. If I wanted to, I could start up a business offering such seminars to corporations like Panda Express and I wouldn't be violating a single law. And that should terrify anyone.

The "about us" section on the Academy's website doesn't say anything about the background of those who started it or those who work there, or what their qualifications are. Nope, it's just this word salad:

Alive Seminars and Coaching Academy began with a vision and a statement powerful. That as the declaration is made, the action is taken Which was done with love and passion. With that love and passion creating basic and advanced programs and Leaderships To prepare leaders both in their community, in their jobs and their homes Alive continues to thrive on our dedication and passion given to each individual person and that is why great doors continue to open in our walk. Always remember the change in me will change the world.

Do you know what that says? Because I sure don't.

Whenever you have a situation like this, where people with no credentials in psychology or mental health are doing this kind of work, there is a fairly high likelihood that things are not going to end well. Hell, they could still end poorly even if people do have those backgrounds — there have certainly been some messed up mental health professionals as well. However — if an actual psychologist were to require a patient to get naked as part of their therapy, it would be a criminal offense in many states (including California) and they could go to prison.

Alas, if some random person calling themselves a life coach or whatever tells you to get naked and talk about your vulnerabilities, it's certainly messed up, and you could file a civil suit as this woman is doing, but they wouldn't be criminally liable like a licensed therapist would be.

If people are going to be messing with people's heads in this kind of way, it stands to reason that they should be held criminally liable for such an offense, just like an actual therapist would be. If not that, there are least has to be some kind of regulation, some kind of accreditation, or some kind of seminar they can take that might help them understand why it's really not okay to force people to stand in front of a group of people stripped down to their underwear in order to work at a Panda Express.

[Washington Post]



https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/students-lie-teachers-parents-school.html



https://www.wonkette.com/why-cant-rochester-new-york-police-stop-pepper-spraying-children




https://www.wonkette.com/wingnuts-prepare-to-draw-little-peens-vulvae-on-gender-neutral-plastic-potato-toys





https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-15-000-electricity-bills-in-texas-155822



https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/rochester-grand-jury-police-deadly-arrest-daniel-prude-mental-health.html


https://www.wonkette.com/really-we-have-to-rely-on-susan-collins-to-pass-the-lgbtq-equality-act


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/02/biden-cant-make-trumps-immigration-cruelty-vanish-overnight/


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/biden-lifts-trump-green-card-freeze-immigration.html?via=rss


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/02/republicans-are-taking-their-voter-suppression-efforts-to-new-extremes/


https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2021/02/biden-usps-nominees-dejoy/












https://www.danah.org/


I love finding cool people online through random means. I found this cool author and media savvy PhD when making my post about Ani DiFranco, as she has many DiFranco lyrics on her site.


https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/03/10/1018213/the-world-needs-syringes-he-jumped-in-to-make-5900-per-minute

The World Needs Syringes. He Jumped In To Make 5,900 Per Minute. (nytimes.com)


Posted by msmash  from the moving-forward dept.
In late November, an urgent email popped up in the inbox of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices, one of the world's largest syringe makers. It was from UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, and it was desperately seeking syringes. Not just any would do. These syringes must be smaller than usual. They had to break if used a second time, to prevent spreading disease through accidental recycling. Most important, UNICEF needed them in vast quantities. Now. From a report:"I thought, 'No issues,'" said Rajiv Nath, the company's managing director, who has sunk millions of dollars into preparing his syringe factories for the vaccination onslaught. "We could deliver it possibly faster than anybody else." As countries jostle to secure enough vaccine doses to put an end to the Covid-19 outbreak, a second scramble is unfolding for syringes. Vaccines aren't all that useful if health care professionals lack a way to inject them into people.

Officials in the United States and the European Union have said they don't have enough vaccine syringes. In January, Brazil restricted exports of syringes and needles when its vaccination effort fell short. Further complicating the rush, the syringes have to be the right type. Japan revealed last month that it might have to discard millions of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine if it couldn't secure enough special syringes that could draw out a sixth dose from its vials. In January, the Food and Drug Administration advised health care providers in the United States that they could extract more doses from the Pfizer vials after hospitals there discovered that some contained enough for a sixth -- or even a seventh -- person. "A lot of countries were caught flat-footed," said Ingrid Katz, the associate director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. "It seems like a fundamental irony that countries around the world have not been fully prepared to get these types of syringes." The world needs between eight billion and 10 billion syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations alone, experts say. In previous years, only 5 percent to 10 percent of the estimated 16 billion syringes used worldwide were meant for vaccination and immunization, said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, and an expert on health care supply chains.


Basically Everyone Leaving The GOP Now

Robyn Pennacchia
February 22, 2021 03:34 PM

Sometimes, in life, relationships end. People get to a point where they just have nothing in common anymore and the best thing for all involved is for them to split up and go their separate ways. And it just may be the best thing for America if devoted Trump supporters and anti-Trump Republicans both take their leave from the Republican party.

According to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Sunday, 46 percent of Republicans who voted for Donald Trump say they would leave the GOP if he started a new one; only 27 percent say they wouldn't and the rest aren't sure. At the same time, anti-Trump Republicans are reportedly abandoning the party in droves, unsure of where their new political home will even be.

Who would this leave in the actual Republican party? Hopefully no one!

Fifty percent of Trump voters who spoke to USA Today also said the party needs to be more loyal to Trump, who is supposedly going to be declaring himself the presumptive Republican nominee for 2024 at the upcoming CPAC convention. Only 19 percent disagreed.

On the other side, some of the anti-Trump Republicans have also been discussing forming their own party, or something to that effect.

Earlier this month, Evan McMullin, who ran against Trump as an independent in 2016, and more than 100 other Republicans and former Republican officials and strategists held a widely publicized meeting at which they discussed the prospect of a third party or organizing as a faction within the GOP.

Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff in Trump's Department of Homeland Security who started a group of administration officials and other Republicans working against Trump's reelection last year, said he and McMullin, with whom he is coordinating, are not "dead set on a third party."

Rather, he said, "What we are dead set on is that something dramatic needs to happen, and there needs to be a very, very clear break from what the GOP has been for the last four years."

Right now, there is record level support for abandoning the two party system — about two-thirds of the country thinks we need a third party — although I would think at least four would be ideal. With three parties you'd end up with a right-wing party, a left-wing party and a centrist party, and it seems like it would work out better for the two parties to each split into two, as to avoid ending up with only one giant dominant party.

There could also be another upside to this, other than just the Republicans breaking up with each other, in the form of more support for ranked choice voting, which is much better and more democratic, and would actually allow for third parties. It would also make it a lot easier to get money out of politics.

This split is a fairly interesting development given that some of the only actual differences between Trumpers and anti-Trump Republicans are in the area of demeanor and personality. Trump supporters love to complain complain about "Establishment Republicans," but the actual ideological differences between the two factions are minimal. There aren't many actual major divides or disagreements on policy, so much as whether or not to say the quiet parts out loud or not. So-called Establishment Republicans want to look respectable while they're cutting rich people's taxes, oppressing everyone else and murdering the planet, and the Trumpers, well, they just want to be told they're pretty and that their enemies are bad. That is what they think "fighting for them" means.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Weird how that is the complete opposite of what has gone on over the last several decades. Republicans have actually shut the entire government down a few times because they didn't get their way, so I don't really recall them capitulating on anything. Maybe a few votes from John McCain, Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romney here and there, but certainly not as a group.

Of course, I don't want to discourage them. These differences are, without question, absolutely irreconcilable and can never be mended. They must strike out on their own, follow their bliss and maybe even get out of politics altogether.

As for our own differences, at least when Dems disarray, we disarray over actual policy and not whether or not we are getting enough compliments.

[Politico / USAToday]




Shorter Trump: 'Elp! 'Elp! I'm Being Fascist Persecuted By Brett And Amy And Neil And Clarence And ...

Liz Dye
February 22, 2021 04:29 PM

cdn.pixabay.com

The Supreme Court is DONE with Donald Trump. So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye, Mr. No Longer President. Please take your embarrassing pleadings, and your wackass assertions of magical presidential immunity, and move it along. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here on this docket.

This morning, the Court denied Trump's application for a stay of discovery in the grand jury proceedings in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. At long last, that whiner's former accountants at Mazars are going to turn over eight years of Trump's tax returns and financial records. Sucks to be a private citizen, dude!

This stupid case has been going on for-freaking-ever. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance subpoenaed the company in August 2019. Trump and the DOJ appealed to the federal court, where the trial judge and Second Circuit ordered the accountants to COUGH IT UP, since presidential immunity from state investigations is not a thing. The Supreme Court agreed in July, tossing it back to the trial judge in case Trump wanted to assert a real shield to disclosure. Which he did, but was stymied by the fact that he couldn't come up with one. Neither the trial court nor the Second Circuit bought the argument that Vance's subpoena was overbroad and issued in bad faith.

So Trump asked SCOTUS to prettyplease let him string this out a little bit longer because "Even if the disclosure of his papers is limited to prosecutors and grand jurors, the status quo can never be restored once confidentiality is destroyed." It's worth noting here that courts are broadly deferential to prosecutors generally, and grand juries in particular. For Trump to argue somehow that it's NO FAIR and UNLEGAL for the grand jury to demand his tax records when Trump's own lawyer testified publicly that all his real estate valuations were hinky, is just amazing chutzpah. Besides which, as Vance's office noted in its response, Trump can hardly claim he'll be irreparably harmed by public disclosure of the returns when the New York Times already got them and wrote a whole series of stories about the fuckery therein. Simply put, Trump has already paid the reputational cost of public disclosure, and the only thing he can avoid by keeping them from the grand jury is criminal and/or civil penalties.

Naturally the former president responded with his usual grace and aplomb.

To summarize:

CRAZY NANCY! WITCH HUNT! RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA! DEMOCRAT CITIES! ANDREW CUOMO! IRS TEA PARTY! RIGGED ELECTION!

MOUNTAINS SIT IN A LINE, LEONARD BERNSTEIN!

PROSECUTING POLITICAL ENEMIES IS BAD EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO DOING LOCK HER UPS TO HILLARY CLINTON!

HOW COME AMY AND BRETT AND NEIL AREN'T PROTECTING ME?

THE PEOPLE OF OUR COUNTRY WILL NOT STAND FOR IT, AND SOON THEY WILL TURN NEW YORK RED AND PUT ME BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE! ANTIFA DEMOCRATS ARE THE REAL FASCISTS!

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, AND I FEEL WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!!!!!!

Cry harder, asshole. Actually, you know what? Don't! Because Mar-a-Lago man isn't president anymore, and he doesn't even have social media to hold a microphone up to his morning poop tweets any more. We literally do not have to listen to this shit! Hooray! And also, hand it over, asshole.

OPEN THREAD!

Follow Liz Dye on Twitter RIGHT HERE!




Mitch McConnell: Craven Sh*theel

Evan Hurst
February 26, 2021 09:00 AM

Let's play a game. It is a good game. It is the EASIEST game. It is called "How much of a cynical, hypocritical, power-hungry fucking troll is Mitch McConnell, on a scale of one to infinity?"

The way you play is you read this quote from Mitch McConnell not even two full weeks ago. It was just after he voted Donald Trump not guilty of inciting a domestic terrorist attack against the United States, on a technicality, explaining however that yeah, definitely, that guy incited a domestic terrorist attack against the United States, against the Capitol, against Congress, and he deserves to pay:

"January 6th was a disgrace.

"American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.

"Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.

"They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth – because he was angry he'd lost an election.

"Former President Trump's actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty."

Everybody still playing the game? OK, keep reading! Reminder, these are the words of Mitch McConnell.

There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

"The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.

"And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

"The issue is not only the president's intemperate language on January 6th.

"It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged 'trial by combat'.

"It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-president."

OK, you get it, that's enough. He said a lot more, but if you need to read all of it, click here.

Again, those words were said by Mitch McConnell, not even two full weeks ago.

The second part of the game is you read this quote and watch this video from Mitch McConnell yesterday.


"If [Donald Trump] was the party's nominee, would you support him?" [Bret] Baier asked.

"The nominee of the party? Absolutely," McConnell said.

It's fine, says Mitch McConnell, if Trump ends up being the nominee in 2024! He'll support him! Maybe if Trump got Russia to help him steal another one, Moscow Mitch's wife could be transportation secretary again! It's all good!

As we said, the game we just played is called "How much of a cynical, hypocritical, power-hungry fucking troll is Mitch McConnell, on a scale of one to infinity?"

If you answered anything besides "infinity" or "maaaaaaaan, fuck that guy," you lose.

The end.

[Business Insider]

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: March 13, 2021, 15:46 GMT

 United States

Coronavirus Cases:

29,993,629

Deaths:

545,545

Recovered:

22,031,223




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

No image available




Posted by EditorDavid  from the big-boom-theory dept.
Phys.org shares an announcement from the University of Texas at Austin:Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater.

Death by asteroid rather than by a series of volcanic eruptions or some other global calamity has been the leading hypothesis since the 1980s, when scientists found asteroid dust in the geologic layer that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs. This discovery painted an apocalyptic picture of dust from the vaporized asteroid and rocks from impact circling the planet, blocking out the sun and bringing about mass death through a dark, sustained global winter — all before drifting back to Earth to form the layer enriched in asteroid material that's visible today. In the 1990s, the connection was strengthened with the discovery of a 125-mile-wide Chicxulub impact crater beneath the Gulf of Mexico that is the same age as the rock layer.

The new study seals the deal, researchers said, by finding asteroid dust with a matching chemical fingerprint within that crater at the precise geological location that marks the time of the extinction... The telltale sign of asteroid dust is the element iridium — which is rare in the Earth's crust, but present at elevated levels in certain types of asteroids... In the crater, the sediment layer deposited in the days to years after the strike is so thick that scientists were able to precisely date the dust to a mere two decades after impact.

"We are now at the level of coincidence that geologically doesn't happen without causation," said co-author Sean Gulick, a research professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who co-led the 2016 expedition with Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London...

The dust is all that remains of the 7-mile-wide asteroid that slammed into the planet millions of years ago, triggering the extinction of 75% of life on Earth, including all nonavian dinosaurs.


Posted by BeauHD  from the statistically-significant-findings dept.
Thelasko shares a new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NPR reports on the key findings:As several states face criticism for lifting coronavirus-related public health restrictions, a study published Friday confirms that state-imposed mask mandates and on-premises dining restrictions help slow the spread of COVID-19. The study, published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, looked at the impact of state-issued mask mandates and on-premises dining on county-level COVID-19 cases and deaths between March 1 and Dec. 31.

It found that mask mandates were associated with "statistically significant" decreases in daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation. In contrast, allowing on-premises dining was associated with an increase in daily cases 41 to 100 days after reopening, and an increase in daily death growth rates after 61 to 100 days. "Policies that require universal mask use and restrict any on-premises restaurant dining are important components of a comprehensive strategy to reduce exposure to and transmission of SARS-CoV-2," the study authors wrote. "Such efforts are increasingly important given the emergence of highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants in the United States." The study says its analysis did not differentiate between indoor and outdoor dining.

Posted by BeauHD  from the ideas-with-super-cool-names dept.
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science:Astrophysicists have an idea that could help to solve two mysteries: the reason for the bizarre abundance of super-high-energy radiation shooting from the center of our galaxy and the identity of invisible stuff called dark matter that has perplexed the world since its discovery some 50 years ago. And the idea has a super-cool name: gravity portals. The idea goes, when two dark matter particles (whatever they are) get sucked into one of these portals, they obliterate each other and spit out shockingly strong gamma rays. This line of thinking can potentially explain why the galactic center -- where dense clusters of dark matter are thought to lurk -- is full of gamma rays; and it could shed light on how the dark matter behaves and might occasionally interact with the normal matter of our universe.The study has been published to arXiv, but has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Robyn Pennacchia
March 06, 2021 01:30 PM

It's over! Finally! Well, sort of, anyway! The Senate voted this morning to pass the COVID relief bill, bringing relief to the many Americans who are currently struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic, as well as to the businesses that rely on those Americans being able to spend money.

The final vote was 50-49, with all Republicans voting against, except for Dan Sullivan of Alaska, who was not present for the vote. Perhaps he had to wash his hair! The bill will include $1400 checks, funding for vaccine distribution, and money to help schools and colleges open up once our long national nightmare is over.

Via USA Today:

The chamber passed the bill following a session that began around 9 a.m. Friday and ended at approximately 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, after a "vote-a-rama" of proposed changes from both parties. The final vote was 50-49 with all Republicans voting against the measure and all members of the Senate Democratic caucus supporting it. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, was not present for the vote.

"This bill that we are completing now is the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country," Sen Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said before the Senate passed the bill. "The people are hurting and today, we respond."


Mitch McConnell, of course, was a regular Mitch McConnell about it.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., countered that "the Senate has never spent $2 trillion in a more haphazard way or through a less rigorous process."

Seems like it was actually pretty darn rigorous. And he should be happy, frankly, because it's still less than many economists think we need for our economy to recover from the pandemic.

We all pay taxes (well, some of us do) and the reason that we pay them is so we can survive things like this. It sure would be silly (and counterproductive!) to spend almost a trillion every year on a military supposedly meant to protect us from international bad guys only to let a virus just lay waste to our entire country.

Unfortunately, even though Republican votes were not even necessary to pass the bill, Democrats didn't get everything they wanted, thanks to eight conservative Democrats who voted against raising the minimum wage. Weekly unemployment benefits will also be cut from $400 to $300.

But what it does do is pretty great and will be very helpful to people.

- Provides most Americans earning up to $75,000 a $1,400 stimulus check.
- Extends a $300 weekly federal boost to unemployment benefits through August
- Sends $350 billion to state and local governments whose revenue has declined because of COVID-19's impact on the economy.
- Allocates $130 billion to help fully reopen schools and colleges.
- Allots $30 billion to help renters and landlords weather economic losses.
- Devotes $50 billion for small-business assistance.
- Dedicates $160 billion for vaccine development, distribution and related needs.
- Expands the child tax credit up to $3,600 per child.

So that's nice!

The bill will now go back to the House, which will likely vote to approve (or not approve, but we hope they will approve) the revised bill on Monday. The goal is to get it passed and signed by President Biden by mid-March, before the current unemployment boost expires. Fingers crossed!

[USA Today]






Posted by EditorDavid  from the irreproducible-results dept.
The Next Web tells the story of an AI researcher who discovered the results of a machine learning research paper couldn't be reproduced. But then they'd heard similar stories from Reddit's Machine Learning forum:"Easier to compile a list of reproducible ones...," one user responded.

"Probably 50%-75% of all papers are unreproducible. It's sad, but it's true," another user wrote. "Think about it, most papers are 'optimized' to get into a conference. More often than not the authors know that a paper they're trying to get into a conference isn't very good! So they don't have to worry about reproducibility because nobody will try to reproduce them." A few other users posted links to machine learning papers they had failed to implement and voiced their frustration with code implementation not being a requirement in ML conferences.

The next day, ContributionSecure14 created "Papers Without Code," a website that aims to create a centralized list of machine learning papers that are not implementable...

Papers Without Code includes a submission page, where researchers can submit unreproducible machine learning papers along with the details of their efforts, such as how much time they spent trying to reproduce the results... If the authors do not reply in a timely fashion, the paper will be added to the list of unreproducible machine learning papers.


Posted by EditorDavid  from the takes-money-to-make-money dept.
The Associated Press reports:After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday. The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free...

Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state's tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration launched in February 2019, selecting a group of 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city's median household income of $46,033. The program did not use tax dollars, but was financed by private donations, including a nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

A pair of independent researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed data from the first year of the study, which did not overlap with the pandemic. A second study looking at year two is scheduled to be released next year. When the program started in February 2019, 28% of the people slated to get the free money had full-time jobs. One year later, 40% of those people had full-time jobs. A control group of people who did not get the money saw a 5 percentage point increase in full-time employment over that same time period.

"These numbers were incredible. I hardly believed them myself," said Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who analyzed the data along with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Stockton mayor who'd started the program told reporters to "tell your friends, tell your cousins, that guaranteed income did not make people stop working."


Fox News COVID Messaging Weirdly Incoherent, But All Of It Says You Should Just Go Die

Stephen Robinson
March 09, 2021 04:00 PM

On the 1980s series "V," the evil alien visitors launched a disinformation propaganda campaign against scientists, who they feared might figure out they were actually people-eating lizards underneath cheap TV makeup. As a kid, this struck me as an obvious Nazi allegory with scientists replacing historically marginalized groups. Besides, who'd be dumb enough to join an anti-science, anti-expert bandwagon?

If you live long enough, everything stupid from your childhood becomes reality.

Professional terrible person Laura Ingraham whined Monday night on her white power hour that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "still doesn't want us to be free" because it advises that even vaccinated people avoid medium and large size gatherings and non-essential travel. The CDC is urging caution during a critical period, which Ingraham declared is “completely insane."


Ingraham thinks she's smarter than CDC director Rochelle P. Walensky. She's not. Ingraham claimed the reasonable COVID-19 guidance Walensky shared is proof that “experts" are obsessed with total control over Americans.

The vaccines were sold as a way to get our lives back, but obviously that's not true.

The vaccines are how we can avoid another 500,000 COVID-19 deaths. That's their primary “selling point," although I'll probably enjoy dining in a restaurant again as long as they don't mind that I'm wearing sweat pants. Ingraham bashed epidemiologist and former Biden coronavirus adviser Michael Osterholm because he said he wouldn't go inside a crowded restaurant now, even if vaccinated. That's not unreasonable. Vaccines aren't 100 percent effective like one of those miracle Star Trek cures, and only about 10 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated.

Russia is reportedly attempting to undermine public faith in the COVID-19 vaccines, and Fox News has joined the disinformation campaign. Tucker Carlson regularly invites former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson onto his show. Berenson is a coronavirus skeptic and an anti-masker — you know, a moron. He's promoted the fiction that vaccines aren't safe at all, and Carlson himself likes to complain that the “experts" won't permit you to even “question the vaccine."

Carlson could distrust vaccines, but he simultaneously argues that lockdowns and mask mandates are “totalitarian." Sean Hannity, who hosts the least racist hour of the Fox New primetime lineup, expressed doubts about getting vaccinated, as he'd heard scary things from stupid people. This might seem like whiplash programming: Carlson and Hannity are both “vaccines will kill you" but Ingraham is like, “hey, eight people are vaccinated! Let's burn those masks and party!" The message is diabolically consistent, though: You can't trust the so-called “experts."

Ingraham thinks we've spent so much time listening to experts we've “abandoned our common sense," which would obviously tell us to ignore medical experts and do whatever the hell we want. (We should probably tell our common sense to lay off the boilermakers before lunch.)

Last summer Dr. [Robert] Redfield said masks were as good as vaccines, and if we wore masks for about two months, it would basically be over. Instead, cases spiked.

Back in September, Dr. Redfield was begging fools to wear masks and he said that facial coverings were "more guaranteed to protect" wearers against COVID-19 than a vaccine that did not yet exist. The FDA had committed to produce a vaccine that was at least 50 percent effective. Maybe Ingraham would play Russian Roulette with those odds, but I'd keep wearing a mask.

Ingraham grossly linked the late summer spike in COVID-19 cases to Dr. Redfield's statements about masks. She's the one who spent the summer opposing mask mandates and questioning whether masks work at all.

She also played “gotcha" with Dr. Anthony Fauci because a year ago he claimed there was no reason that most people should wear a mask. Yes, he said this, but it was months before we knew the full extent of asymptomatic spread.

Back in January, Fox News host Steve Hilton suggested that maybe Dr. Fauci himself caused the coronavirus. Whenever you're watching, someone on the network is demonizing the very people Americans should trust regardless of politics. When science becomes partisan, people die. Russia is probably thrilled.

Ingraham declared that it's time for Americans “to break free of the cycle of failed experts and frankly unconstitutional orders."

If you are trapped in a blue state that won't open up, that denies the data and the science, that bows to the teachers unions, it's time to get — get up and either leave altogether, or get involved in politics, on the local level, on the state level, in any way you can. A year later, it's time to retire or just ignore the control freaks. It's time to declare victory and move on.

Sweet Christ. No one's “trapped" in a “blue state," and states that deny data and science have Republican governors. It's also downright eerie when Ingraham recommends that we “retire" the public health officials.

The rightwing's COVID-19 rhetoric is reckless but clear: Don't listen to the bad scientists who say the lizards are coming to eat you.

Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.

Yr Wonkette is 100 percent ad free and supported entirely by reader donations. Please click the clickie, if you are able!





Posted by EditorDavid  from the Challenger's-challenger dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader Nkwe shares an article from NPR:His job was to sign and submit an official form. Sign the form, he believed, and he'd risk the lives of the seven astronauts set to board the spacecraft the next morning. Refuse to sign, and he'd risk his job, his career, and the good life he'd built for his wife and four children.

"And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime," McDonald told me. "I refused to sign it. I just thought we were taking risks we shouldn't be taking...."

Now, 35 years after Challenger, McDonald's family reports that he died Saturday in Ogden, Utah, after suffering a fall and brain damage. He was 83 years old.

"There are two ways in which [McDonald's] actions were heroic," recalls Mark Maier, who directs a leadership program at Chapman University and produced a documentary about the Challenger launch decision. One was on the night before the launch, refusing to sign off on the launch authorization and continuing to argue against it," Maier says. "And then afterwards in the aftermath, exposing the cover-up that NASA was engaged in...."

He later co-authored one of the most definitive accounts of the Challenger disaster: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings — Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. In retirement, McDonald became a fierce advocate of ethical decision-making and spoke to hundreds of engineering students, engineers and managers.




Posted by BeauHD  from the relic-from-the-Big-Bang dept.
Astronomers have found the farthest known source of radio emissions in the universe: a quasar 13 billion light-years from Earth spewing jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Live Science reports:Quasars are some of the oldest, most distant, most massive and brightest objects in the universe. They make up the cores of galaxies where a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole gorges on all the matter that's unable to escape its gravitational grasp. While the black hole is devouring this matter, it's also blasting out an enormous amount of radiation that collectively can be more than a trillion times more luminous than the brightest stars, making quasars the brightest objects in the observable universe.

This quasar in particular, named P172+18, is a relic from around 780 million years after the Big Bang and reveals clues about one of the earliest ages of the universe -- the epoch of reionization. At the start of this period, the universe was darkly veiled by a mostly uniform cloud of hydrogen gas. Scientists refer to this time as the universe's dark ages, because most light emitted was quickly absorbed by the neutrally charged gas. Eventually, gravity collapsed the primordial gas into the first stars and quasars, which began to heat and ionize the surrounding gases, allowing light to pass through. [...] Further observations from telescopes [...] showed that P172+18 is nearly 300 million times more massive than the sun and is among the fastest-growing quasars ever discovered. The problem is, scientists don't know how a black hole became so massive this early on in the universe. The radio jets could be an explanation.The researchers' findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.



Posted by BeauHD  from the hide-and-seek dept.
SysEngineer shares a report from HuffPost:Some of the citizen sleuths behind the open-source effort to identify the hundreds of Donald Trump-loving rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol have launched an impressive new website that organizes the stunning amount of digital evidence collected about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The website, Jan6evidence.com, was built by a small team of volunteer software developers, using the work of open-source investigators looking into the deadly Capitol attack. The site features a color-coded timeline that reflects the time of day, and allows users to click around on a map of the Capitol and pull up any video evidence from a particular location and time frame. Users can even track an individual suspect's movements over the course of Jan. 6.



Posted by BeauHD  from the purely-theoretical dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org:Wormholes play a key role in many science fiction films -- often as a shortcut between two distant points in space. In physics, however, these tunnels in spacetime have remained purely hypothetical. An international team led by Dr. Jose Luis Blazquez-Salcedo of the University of Oldenburg has now presented a new theoretical model in the science journal Physical Review Letters that makes microscopic wormholes seem less far-fetched than in previous theories. [...] The researchers chose a comparatively simple "semiclassical" approach. They combined elements of relativity theory with elements of quantum theory and classic electrodynamics theory. In their model they consider certain elementary particles such as electrons and their electric charge as the matter that is to pass through the wormhole. As a mathematical description, they chose the Dirac equation, a formula that describes the probability density function of a particle according to quantum theory and relativity as a so-called Dirac field.

As the physicists report in their study, it is the inclusion of the Dirac field into their model that permits the existence of a wormhole traversable by matter, provided that the ratio between the electric charge and the mass of the wormhole exceeds a certain limit. In addition to matter, signals -- for example electromagnetic waves -- could also traverse the tiny tunnels in spacetime. The microscopic wormholes postulated by the team would probably not be suitable for interstellar travel. Moreover, the model would have to be further refined to find out whether such unusual structures could actually exist. "We think that wormholes can also exist in a complete model," says Blazquez-Salcedo.



Posted by BeauHD  from the what-to-expect dept.
sciencehabit writes:Just 5 years ago, physicists opened a new window on the universe when they first detected gravitational waves, ripples in space itself set off when massive black holes or neutron stars spiral together. Even as discoveries pour in, researchers are already planning bigger, more sensitive detectors. And a Ford versus Ferrari kind of rivalry has emerged, with scientists in the United States simply proposing detectors 10 times bigger than the ones they have now, and researchers in Europe pursuing a more radical design that would combine six detectors in a single underground observatory. Researchers say detectors 10 times more sensitive than the ones they have now could detect all black hole mergers within the observable universe and spot hundreds of mergers of neutron stars, laying bare the nature of the ultradense matter in neutron stars. But, it's early days for the U.S. project, which is called the Cosmic Explorer, and the European project, which is known as the Einstein Telescope.





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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.13 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2080 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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