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Saturday, July 24, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2349 - Unbeing dead - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2107.24



A Sense of Doubt blog post #2349 - Unbeing Dead - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2107.24

Greetings readers, Thanks for tuning in.

This is the WEEKLY HODGE PODGE. 

This is a big one and a random with no categories.

Today’s theme comes from a poem by ee cummings: “unbeing dead isn’t being alive.”

Are we “unbeing dead” as we shamble through our lives trying to grasp at meaning?

Lots of people will equate the “unbeing dead” phrase to life in the pandemic. But this is a selfish perspective for people focused on exterior things, pleasures outside the self, rather than the inwardly focused more introverted folks, like me.

I pretend to be an extrovert; I am really an introvert.

Sure I have missed things that I enjoyed pre-pandemic – like visiting my Dad and sister or seeing my step son – but the pandemic has been very good for me as an inward journey, a creative resurgence, a life of the mind, the heart, the soul.

Just look at what I have done with this blog?

I prefer to think of “unbeing dead” not as an analogy for the sensible restrictions of the pandemic but of the existence of so many who lack inward focus; who avoid self analysis; who trick themselves with rationalizations, justifications, and denials; who feel that their life is defined by “making liberals cry again,” hugging their guns like toys from infancy parents are attempting to take-away and jump start growing up, and hangers-on who party too long and act like teenagers when they are middle-aged or past middle age. Not that I am against partying. Nor am I caught up in the “act your age” bullshit. But as a sign of self development, the partier seems stuck in a lower stage of the process of individuation, doomed to return to try to achieve even a glimmer of enlightenment.

I never wanted to be that guy who should have cut off his pony tail years ago but is hanging on, hoping to still appear youthful when he really doesn’t. I present young without the long hair, and yet, I am clearly “an old.” I would never try to deny my state in this existence. I do not believe there’s any such thing as “act your age,” but I do feel that progress in the process of individuation through personal growth, analysis, and self-evolution is the necessary work of the human person.

Still, “Unbeing Dead” is totally the name of a short story I am going to write. It’s tight.

See what I did there? Men my age do not typically say “it’s tight.”

Fuck that kind of oppressive age restrictive nonsense.

The poem cummings wrote really targets a lot of what I am saying. I am not engaging in a full literary analysis here. I will save that for a future blog post. 

But just check out some of these lines, like 

“here are five simple facts no sub
human superstate ever knew...”

Or

“As it was in the begin
ning it is now and always will be or
the onehundredpercentoriginal sin
cerity equals perspicuity...”


You know.

“There’s more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

Do the work.

See reality for what it is but also see it for what you want it to be.

BE THE CHANGE.

We have a major problem in this country with people and their opinions. We’re not listening to each other, and we’re destroying the planet, ourselves, and our soceities.

If there was ever a better time for aliens from another world to attack and attempt to conquer us that time is now. If we were forced to work together to survive and preserve the human race, it would be a good thing.

But would we?

Or would we fight a hundred separate wars with the same enemy?

I would like to think we would band together, setting aside our differences, as we did in the 1940s to fight World War Two, but the world has changed.

We have people like a nearby neighbor with a flag still flying on his flag pole reading: “TRUMP 2020: Making liberals cry again.”

I want to tell him that TRUMP LOST, which he surely does not believe, but moreover, I want to ask him why his political slogan has to be so hateful, so much aimed at someone else’s pain and anguish?

Don’t we care about a lot of the same things?

Don’t we all want safety, prosperity, and health for ourselves, our families, and the people all around us?

Or do some of us just want prosperity and health for themselves, and everyone else can fuck off?

Is that the world we want to live in?

At least Trump’s “Make America Great Again” only implies insults to other people. It suggests that for at least the eight Obama years America has not been great. It suggests that America was great at one time, though no one ever specified when that time was when America was so great, and surely, it’s never been great for everyone. But at least it’s not a taunt of “I am enjoying your pain,” which is really, really hateful.

I am really worried that there will be another violent civil war with people who believe that violence is the only recourse to preserve their little fantasy of what America really is.

And so, we have the WEEKLY HODGE PODGE through which we shamble like the UNBEING DEAD.

A pot store opened up the street from me in our town, but selling cannabis is supposedly prohibited in Woodland.

Lame.

But from that first story, go on through all the crazy town stories: misinformation and lies and people fully residing all the time in crazy town.

Thank goodness for Chrome history as I keep accidentally closing the first of my five clusters of tabs, my new normal with the super-more-powerful desktop and all this RAM to stretch into.

There’s just a stream of things here in this post.

And like the Jung quote I also share, you do not have the complex; the complex has you.

I think you will enjoy it.

That’s all for today.

See you all next week or in three weeks, who knows.

The via regia to the unconscious . . . is not the dream, as [Freud] thought, but the complex, which is the architect of dreams and of symptoms. Nor is this via so very "royal," either, since the way pointed out by the complex is more like a rough and uncommonly devious footpath. - C. G Jung.







“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.”
- E.E. CUMMINGS



http://www.poemdujour.com/cummings.5truths.html


POEM(or
by ee cummings


POEM(or
"the divine right of majorities,
that illegitimate offspring of the
divine right of kings" Homer Lea)

here are five simple facts no sub

human superstate ever knew
(1 )we sans love equals mob
love being youamiare(2)
the holy miraculous difference between
firstrate & second implies nonth
inkable enormousness by con
trast with the tiny stumble from second to tenth
rate(3)as it was in the begin

ning it is now and always will be or
the onehundredpercentoriginal sin
cerity equals perspicuity(4)

Only The Game Fish Swims Upstream &(5)
unbeingdead isn't beingalive



https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/marijuana/marijuana-retailer-opens-in-washington-city-where-selling-cannabis-is-prohibited/

Marijuana retailer opens in Washington city where selling cannabis is prohibited

By 

Hayley Day

The Daily News

Despite a prohibition on the sale of marijuana in the city, a new retailer has opened shop to distribute cannabis in Woodland.

Woodland Community Development Director Travis Goddard said the city has received two complaints about the business, 20 After 4, defying city code by selling marijuana from its North Goerig Street shop since May 28.

Goddard said the store could be fined $50-$250 a day for violating city code.

He said the store has not been fined yet because the owner has not received an official letter from the city.

A representative from 20 After 4 declined to speak to The (Longview) Daily News. The store was open for business with cannabis on display and patrons in the shop Wednesday.

 


https://politics.slashdot.org/story/21/07/16/2312253/biden-says-platforms-like-facebook-are-killing-people-with-covid-19-misinformation

Biden Says Platforms Like Facebook Are 'Killing People' With COVID-19 Misinformation (theverge.com)


Posted by BeauHD  from the he's-not-wrong dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge:The White House escalated its fight against vaccine misinformation on Friday, with President Biden directly criticizing Facebook and other platforms for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread -- and consequently raising the ongoing death toll from the deadly pandemic. Asked for a message to platforms like Facebook, Biden replied, "They're killing people ... the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they're killing people." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of the president's comments. The full exchange is embedded [here]."We will not be distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts," said a Facebook spokesperson. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine."

"The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives," the spokesperson continued. "Period."



https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/07/13/0012207/gardened-zones-on-europa-could-be-the-key-to-finding-life-study-says

'Gardened Zones' on Europa Could Be the Key to Finding Life, Study Says (vice.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the garden-of-life dept.
Jupiter's moon Europa contains a voluminous ocean of liquid water under its icy crust that could potentially host extraterrestrial organisms. "But as evidence builds that Europa could be habitable under its crust, a problem remains: the intense radiation that Jupiter emits likely annihilates any signs of life, known as biosignatures, that upwell onto the moon's surface, presenting a challenge to future missions that aim to detect life with Europa landers," reports Motherboard. "Now, a team of researchers led by Emily Costello, a postdoctoral researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, have shed new light on this obstacle by examining the role of "impact gardening" in the search for life on Europa." From the report:Impact gardening occurs when rocks collide with a planetary body without an atmosphere, causing a mechanical churn that continually exposes new layers of the surface, known as the "gardened zone," to all the erosive effects of space, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. "Knowing the depth of the gardened zone is critical for the exploration of Europa as a potentially habitable world," the researchers added. "We will need to sample material below the gardened zone if we wish to discover biomolecules that have never been exposed to hazardous radiation at the surface."

Of course, that raises the question: just how deep is Europa's gardened zone? To provide an answer, the team produced the first comprehensive models of impact gardening on Europa, with the help of Moon rocks returned from the Apollo program that also show a distinct gardened zone. This approach yielded good news and bad news. The bad news is that the models suggest that impact gardening exposes the top 30 centimeters (12 inches) of Europa's global surface to radiation, on average. Contrary to previous studies that proposed the possible presence of juicy biosignatures only a few centimeters under the moon's surface, the new study finds that signs of life would be embedded much deeper in the ice.

That said, the good news is that pristine material from Europa's ocean could be sampled at shallower depths in rare circumstances, such as in the fallout of recent landslides or fresh meteorite impacts. These natural processes can excavate layers of ice from below the gardened zone and position them within centimeters of the surface. Looking for recent examples of such disturbances could reveal samples that have not experienced the damaging long-term effects of radiation yet. Fortunately, scientists will soon benefit from close-up observations of Europa from ESA's Jupiter Icy Worlds Explorer (JUICE) and NASA's Europa Clipper, both scheduled to launch in the 2020s. These spacecraft will conduct intimate flybys of Europa, and they may be able to spot regions with freshly excavated material on the surface that would be prime destinations for future lander missions.




Posted by BeauHD  from the what-to-expect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News:Every coast in the U.S. is facing rapidly increasing high tide floods. NASA says this is due to a "wobble" in the moon's orbit working in tandem with climate change-fueled rising sea levels. The new study from NASA and the University of Hawaii, published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that upcoming changes in the moon's orbit could lead to record flooding on Earth in the next decade. Through mapping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) sea-level rise scenarios, flooding thresholds and astronomical cycles, researchers found flooding in American coastal cities could be several multiples worse in the 2030s, when the next moon "wobble" is expected to begin. They expect the flooding to significantly damage infrastructure and displace communities.

While the study highlights the dire situation facing coastal cities, the lunar wobble is actually a natural occurrence, first reported in 1728. The moon's orbit is responsible for periods of both higher and lower tides about every 18.6 years, and they aren't dangerous in their own right. "In half of the Moon's 18.6-year cycle, Earth's regular daily tides are suppressed: High tides are lower than normal, and low tides are higher than normal," NASA explains. "In the other half of the cycle, tides are amplified: High tides get higher, and low tides get lower. Global sea-level rise pushes high tides in only one direction -- higher. So half of the 18.6-year lunar cycle counteracts the effect of sea-level rise on high tides, and the other half increases the effect." But this time around, scientists are more concerned. With sea-level rise due to climate change, the next high tide floods are expected to be more intense and more frequent than ever before, exacerbating already grim predictions.The study says these floods will exceed flooding thresholds around the country more often, and can also occur in clusters lasting more than a month. "During curtain alignments, floods could happen as frequently as every day or every other day," the report adds. "Almost all U.S. mainland coastlines, Hawaii and Guam are expected to face these effects."



What’s The Most Polite Way To Ask COVID-19 Anti-Vaxxers Not To Be F*cking A-Holes?

Stephen Robinson
July 19, 2021 09:05 AM
Giphy

Morons are delaying the nation's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic because they refuse to take a safe and effective vaccine. But we're not supposed to call them morons, even if they believe the vaccines are untested or experimental (they are neither) and might turn you into a living magnet (yeah, no).

Michael Brendan Dougherty at the National Review wrote that the vaccine rollout has hit a wall of “skepticism," but this is an insult to the good name of Dana Scully. Reasonable people are skeptical when drunks claim they saw a UFO. What we're experiencing isn't vaccine “skepticism," but a right-wing disinformation campaign that actively promotes baseless conspiracy theories about perfectly safe vaccines.

Twitter

Dougherty argues that liberals must "convince the skeptics" by making sure they don't "feel disrespected." Conservatives used to shout that “facts don't care about your feelings," but apparently that only applies when misgendering trans kids in public schools. Vaccine resisters are 21st century flat-earthers, and it's uncertain how liberals kissing their asses will somehow arouse their civic responsibility.

COVID-19, especially the more contagious Delta variant, is surging among the unvaccinated, so it's not like those of us with brains in our heads are asking these fools for a favor. It's in their best interests to protect themselves and their loved ones. Yes, we all benefit the sooner the nation reaches herd immunity, but how are we supposed to reach people who'd literally die to own the libs?

Louisiana's vaccination rate is an appalling 35 percent, but GOP Senator Bill Cassidy blames President Joe Biden, who he says made some “incredibly partisan statements" -- he obviously wasn't specific -- and that's why his constituents don't trust all the medical experts -- none of whom are Joe Biden -- who say the vaccine is safe. It's Cassidy's own Republican colleagues in the House and Senate who are making false statements about the vaccine. Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul (among others) are the problem, not President Biden.

John Kennedy, Lousiana's junior GOP senator, publicly announced he'd gotten vaccinated back in April, and even sang “Born Free" in a video he posted on Twitter encouraging others to do so. Good for him. Maybe if he promised not to sing again if people got vaccinated, the state's numbers would've improved.

Republicans have made “partisan statements" about unemployment rates, claiming people not rushing back to work (often in states with low vaccination rates) are lazy bums. The National Review wrote in June that states should "fight federal incentives that encourage joblessness." Republicans weren't interested in the reasons people might've had for not taking the first lousy job that came their way. No, they believed the only solution was forcing them back in the COVID-19 mines.

Contrast this to how Republicans have coddled vaccine resisters by blocking private businesses from requiring people are vaccinated before entering their establishments. Arkansas forbids private insurers from charging higher premiums to people who refuse vaccinations. Stupidity is not a pre-existing condition. Montana won't even let healthcare providers require their staffs to be vaccinated. Years ago, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan claimed the Affordable Care Act encouraged people not to work and that free school lunch kept poor kids from going out and finding rich parents, like Little Orphan Annie.

According to their own expressed ideology, Republicans are making it easier for people to remain unvaccinated. They've even applied their abstinence-only sex “education" approach to vaccinations: Republicans don't want health officials even talking about vaccinations. Just close your legs and don't catch coronavirus.

Meanwhile, some geniuses suggest that if Biden really wanted to save lives, he'd solicit help from former COVID-spreader in chief, Donald Trump.

Alleged “conservative Twitter satire star" David Burge tweeted Friday:

It would not kill Biden to invite Trump to jointly appear in a 5 minute pretaped, mutually approved film asking people to get a vaccine that they both want to take credit for. Doesn't have to be at the White House, it could be at a [Dairy Queen] or wherever.

We don't know how many coups the asshole has to plot before people catch on that Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone but Donald Trump. He left his own stooges, including his personal “Shemp" Mike Pence, at the mercy of his violent mob on January 6. Why would he work with Joe Biden, who he doesn't even acknowledge as president?

Biden isn't the diva here. All the surviving former American presidents and first ladies filmed a PSA promoting vaccination. Donald and Melania Trump were notably absent, because Trump was too busy having a tantrum around Inauguration Day. (Tucker Carlson denounced the PSAs, of course.)

Trump's sorry ass was vaccinated in secret, but he spends more time spreading his Big Lie than helping stop the spread of COVID-19. Burge also mistakenly assumes Trump is a leader instead of a vicious bully who cultivates his followers' worst instincts. MAGA is anti-vax, and Trump isn't interested in convincing them otherwise.

Sunday, Trump released a typically Trump-like statement where he took full credit for the vaccine, but claimed his supporters aren't taking the vaccine because they don't trust Biden or the election results. Does this monster want his supporters to die to spite Biden?

We're not monsters, so we regret any preventable deaths. If playing nice to overgrown children will demonstrably improve vaccination rates, we'd happily say: “Pretty please, with sugar on top, get the fucking vaccine."

Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.

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Majority Of COVID Misinformation Came From Just 12 People
Jul 24, 2021





The Ring of Fire

According to new reporting, the majority of COVID misinformation in the United States came from just 12 people. This misinformation has spread like wildfire on social media, prompting President Biden to come out this past week and say that these media outlets are now killing people with misinformation. There's a split about how to handle the misinformation on these platforms, but it is clear that something needs to be done about it. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this. 

FROM: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/17/covid-misinformation-conspiracy-theories-ccdh-report





We Must Discuss This Bonkers 7 Point Plan To Re-Install Trump Going Around CPAC
Robyn Pennacchia
July 11, 2021 02:20 PM

As has been widely publicized, there was a flyer going around CPAC this weekend, detailing a ridiculous seven-point-plan for reinstalling Donald Trump as president, which involved Nancy Pelosi melting like the Wicked Witch of the West and then a "trusted conservative" replacing her as Speaker of the House, then having said "trusted conservative" prove that the election was stolen, then install Trump as Speaker of the House, impeach Biden and Harris and BOOM! Trump is president again.

The flyer appears to have been written entirely by one Robert J. Antonellis, who describes himself as an "investigative researcher and engineer" and reads:

7-PT. PLAN TO RESTORE DONALD J. TRUMP IN DAYS, NOT YEARS:

1. Reveal ACHILLES' HEEL: Pull back the curtain on the horror show that is today's "Democrat Party". Watch Pelosi melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West. See the Black Caucus and other key groups flip, unexpectedly, and watch the tables turn.
2. Witness a trusted Conservative elected as Speaker of the House and, FINALLY, reveal suppressed results of existing investigations into election racketeering.
3. Correct the official record. Reveal that Trump legitimately won the 2020 Election.
4. The Speaker of the House drafts Articles of Impeachment for Biden-Harris.
5. Citizen Donald J. Trump is placed into the line of Presidential succession, behind the Vice President, by electing him Speaker of the House.
6. Speaker of the House Donald J. Trump then calls for a vote to impeach, charge, and remove impostors, Biden and Harris.
7. Duly impeach, charge and remove Biden and Harris, whereby rendering all acts of said impostors, while in office, null and void and of no effect! Then, duly elected Donald J. Trump resumes his rightful place as U.S. President.

It's no more or less ridiculous than any of the other plans to reinstall Trump as Dictator for Life ... until you go to the website listed on the bottom of the flyer, TrumpCard.PatriotsSoar.com and see what it is that they think is going to make Pelosi melt and the Black Caucus turn Republican. Because, oh boy, it is really something. And yes, it involves Satan and Satanic Ritual Sacrifices, because of course the fuck it does.

The plan hinges on Antonellis' theory that the "Democrat" party was built on the occult sacrifices of Martin Luther King, Jr, JFK Jr. (of fucking course) and ... Mary Jo Kopechne, whom the flyer claims represents the Virgin Mary. The plan, apparently, is to ask Nancy Pelosi about this theory and then ... I guess she's supposed to melt or something?

These are the questions. They are very normal questions.

- Nancy, will you please order investigations into these three related Occult sacrifices?
- No?! Nancy, are you Anti-Catholic? A racist? Anti-Kennedy? Or, all of the above?!
- Nancy, do you have any information about the numerous coincidences which connect Joe Biden, MaryJo Kopechne, Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pennsylvania?
- Nancy, is Joe Biden scripted as the anti-Christ?

THEN, he will ask her about her relationship with Jim Jones! And she'll be so freaked out because of how she definitely personally did Jonestown

- Nancy, what was your relationship with Jim Jones? And when did it begin?
- Nancy, have you ever apologized to African Americans for having had any association with Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre of over 600 African American women and their children?
- Nancy, did you create Jim Jones? Or did Jim Jones create you?!

Then, he's going to ask her if more stuff he made up is true! And also about her opinions on Charles Manson. I'm guessing we are to assume that Nancy Pelosi loves Charles Manson, here?

- Nancy, are you surprised to learn that BLM was the rebirth of the BLA? The Black Liberation Army, a support group of the Weather Underground?

- Nancy, do you think Charles Manson was a good American?

And if she can't answer them by the morning, she will be beheaded. Wait, no, that is the plot of Turandot.

ANYWAY, because I am a masochist, I watched one of the videos linked to in the PDF, and boy does it ever contain some batshit ideas. I made a list!

  • The Democratic Party arranged the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Ted Kennedy's car, because she was a "Catholic heterosexual virgin" named MARY.
  • Ted Kennedy maybe wasn't driving the car in Chapaquiddick that night — it could have been the CIA! And Kennedy was forced, for reasons (of Satan) to make it look like he did it.
  • Mary-Jo Kopechne's initials were MJK, Martin Luther King's initials were MLK ... and there was an L on Ted Kennedy's license plate, just like the one beginning Martin Luther King's middle name, and also the car was black. Like Martin Luther King. And these coincidence are just too strong to ignore.
  • The car was a Delmont, which is a slang term for "male sodomy" (does not appear to be a thing, but I could be wrong).
  • The license plate number was L78–207, and two 8s mean "Heil Hitler" ... and also that comes before 0 so H20, and that means water, which was related to Mary-Jo Kopechne being sacrificed in water, under the astrological sign of Cancer ... which makes Ted Kennedy the Zodiac Killer. Even though, according to this guy, it was a CIA guy what killed her.
  • Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4 ... and Mary-Ko Kopechne grew up in Wilkes-Barre, which is nicknamed Forty Fort (nope that's just another place in Pennsylvania) and it was named as such because it was 44 miles from the Sugarloaf massacre (again, no) ... which took place ... ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1780. Get it? Because September 11? Yeah. That's here too.

How is Joe Biden involved in this? SACRED GEOMETRY.

Right, okay, continuing with this list.

  • The freemasons made the top of Delaware a half circle, and Joe Biden lived in that circle ... area.
  • DELAWARE LOOKS LIKE A GIANT PENIS AND THAT IS EVIDENCE OF A THING.
  • Also maybe the top of Delaware is the Satanic arch of Baal? Or the Grim Reaper's hook?
  • Maybe Joe Biden is the actual Grim Reaper?
  • Are Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff Satanic-Americans?
  • Is Cancel Culture Satanists shaming good people for being good Americans?
  • Boston is shaped like a hammer and sickle! Therefore, communism. Or maybe it is also a dick, the guy is not sure. One of those two things.
  • You know who lives in Boston? Henry Louis Gates.
  • The British still control America. Through all the Satanists.

And now we're back to Chappaquiddick!

  • Chappaquiddick actually comes from British slang. Chap-pa-quid-dick. Man-father-dollar-penis. A place for men to buy sex from other men, possibly in some kind of incestuous manner. And that is why the Satanists chose to do their sacrifice there.
  • There is a Nazareth, Pennsylvania and a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania ... and that is why they chose Mary-Jo Kopechne to sacrifice. And both of those towns are in between Scranton, where Joe Biden was born, and Greenville, Delaware, where he later lived.
  • Probably someone from Joe Biden's freemason lodge found Mary-Jo and asked her to be a stand-in for the Virgin Mary and then somehow this led to Joe Biden being President now, but not any of the other times that he ran. I guess.

THE END.

And that's just the short 15 minute one. There are others, which I have not seen yet. I guess the longer one is the one where they get into Nancy Pelosi's time in the Manson Family. And yes, I'm going to watch that, if only because I would love to know which other areas of the country are shaped like a dick.

In fact, I'm going to go do it now, so you can all have your OPEN THREAD. Hooray!

[Patriots Soar]

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This Woman's Obituary Was So Harsh, Her Son Was Left Reeling! Tabs, Mon., July 12, 2021

Rebecca Schoenkopf
July 12, 2021 07:00 AM

Tabs gifs by your friend Martini Ambassador!

I am ... actually surprised. Hospitalized COVID patients say they regret not getting the shot. (NBC News) Vax-less assholes overwhelming the ERs and making Missouri nurses cry again, dying for no fucking reason. (KansasCity)

Oh ha ha.

Make Republicans pay a political price for valorizing the 1/6 insurrectionists and discouraging young people from getting the vaccine. Engage the goddamn culture war and WIN IT. Good newsletter from Brian Beutler.

You know how the mean ol' NSA is spying on Tucker Carlson? Eric Boehlert would like to make some excellent points. (PressRun)

Not only is South Dakota's Hit and Run AG attempting to access his late victim's medical records to see if he might have been "suicidal," but somehow he's also still South Dakota's AG! — MPR

Did a Denver hotel housekeeper stop a Vegas-style massacre? And if she did, why have three people been arrested in addition to the guy who said he'd "go out in a big way"? MYSTERY. (Denver Channel) Oh, that was the second hotel housekeeper this week; the first was in Chicago, in a hotel overlooking "Fourth of July festivities." What fun we have in the US of A! (ABC News)

A list of absolutely insane gun laws Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June, okay. (KSAT)

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Covering Trump. Really fun Julia Ioffe look at the reporters who made names reporting on the crazies and incompetents. — Tomorrow Will Be Worse

LOOK AT THE BEE GEES STATUE LOOOOOOK AT ITTTTTT. (BBC)

Oh you're a mean old daddy but I like you.

In 1969, Cary Raditz, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, quit his job in advertising and headed to Europe to bum around with his girlfriend. They ended up in Matala, on the island of Crete, where they found a bunch of hippies living in a network of caves. Raditz soon decamped for Afghanistan in a VW bus; when he returned, his girlfriend had bailed, but there was word that a new girl was headed to Matala. Raditz didn't know much about Joni Mitchell, but "there was buzz" among the hippies, and, soon enough, he found himself watching the sunset with one of the most extraordinary people alive. Raditz and Mitchell shared a cave for a couple of months, travelled around Greece together, and parted ways.

Go ahead and keep reading. — The New Yorker

"How about don't knock on my door!" No More Mister Nice Blog has had it with these Republicans in our uterus demanding nobody even OFFER them a vaccine.

The doomsday prepper grifter, his "Life Continuity" compound "The Haven," and an extremely pissed off former friend, mark, and investor, best-selling techno-thriller author Brad Thor. DANG, a longread! — Sam Biddle at The Intercept

Oh my god, Bessie Dreaming Bear. Oh my god.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced an investigation into the generational traumas of American Indian boarding schools. (NPR)

Cupcake troubleshooting. (Philosophy Forum) High altitude chocolate cupcakes. (Curly Girl Kitchen)

Not a cupcake.

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Dems Not About To Let Folks Forget Where That Extra Child Tax Credit Money Came From

Doktor Zoom
July 16, 2021 08:54 AM

Get in, loser. We're saving America.

With the monthly payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit starting to go out as of yesterday, the Democratic Party wants to remind Americans that Joe Biden is delivering a middle-class tax cut. The party's House and Senate campaign organizations have launched a digital ad campaign aimed at some of the key states in next year's midterm election, to tout the tax cut and to make clear that not a single Republican voted for it as part of Biden's American Rescue Plan.

The first of the ads presents a simple but effective message: Joe Biden promised to help Americans get through this economic mess caused by the pandemic, and help is here:


It's probably a smart strategy to brand it as a "family tax cut," since "child tax credit" may remind too many people of filling out their 1040 and who wants to be reminded of that? Also, did you notice the no-big-deal shot of the two dads? It's becoming such a nice familiar trope that it makes me feel a bit old to still be delighted by that.

We also liked the not terribly subtle switch from muted color to greyscale when the spot mentions that no Republicans voted for it, with Mitch McConnell's grim turtle face:


As Biden emphasized in his announcement of the payments yesterday, this really is a tax cut that goes to middle class families, with 90 percent of families with kids getting the benefit. That's a big change from 2017, when the Republicans also called their big fat tax cut for rich fuckwads a "middle class" tax cut, although most of the benefits went to the very rich and to corporations.

The ad buy will run in states with key Senate and House races next year, as Bloomberg News 'splains:

Democrats say they'll use the child tax credit as an argument for why voters should defeat GOP incumbents and re-elect Democratic senators, including Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Raphael Warnock (Ga.), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), and Maggie Hassan (N.H.). The issue will also be emphasized in open-seat Senate races in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The ads will also run in Florida, where Rep. Val Demings is the leading primary candidate in the race to take on Marco Rubio, and in Wisconsin, where Dumbest Republican Senator Ron Johnson may or may not run for a third term. And since they'll be running statewide in those eight states, the ads should help a lot of House candidates, too.

In a statement, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the ad campaign is just a little reminder of the difference between Democrats and the other guys:

We are making sure Americans know this contrast is clear. While Republicans continue to play games and block efforts to improve the lives of working people, Democrats are delivering for you."

Congressional Dems are also including an extension of the tax credit and its monthly payments in their big reconciliation bill, so that's likely to keep the issue front of mind for voters in 2022.

The ads emphasize that the benefits will go to about 90 percent of families with kids, with an average tax cut of $4,380. It's also fully refundable, meaning that it will go to folks who didn't earn enough to pay taxes in 2020; that's why the tax credit will help reduce the number of kids in poverty by nearly half.

Mind you, Republicans are seizing on that fact to portray the benefits as going to lazy people whose children apparently deserve to be in poverty to teach those slackers a lesson.

"Over the next six months, some American households with no working adults will receive over $6,000 in cash payments from the federal government," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement Wednesday, on the eve of the first payments. "The way President Biden tells it, the handout is part of his administration's 'pro-family' plan. In reality, he has transformed the pro-worker, pro-family Child Tax Credit into an anti-work welfare check."

Gee, we wonder if Val Demings will be able to make any ads about how Marco Rubio, the guy who sends out Bible verse tweets all the time, is in favor of kids being stuck in poverty. We bet she just might.

[Bloomberg Government / DNC]



This winter, two men who wrongly believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election allegedly concocted an elaborate plan to bomb the California Democratic Party’s headquarters in Sacramento—and even assembled the bombs with which they hoped to do it.

Federal prosecutors disclosed the alleged plot by 45-year-old Ian Benjamin Rogers and 37-year-old Jarrod Copeland in an indictment unsealed this week.

Rogers was taken into custody earlier this month after state officials and the FBI searched his home and found 49 firearms—including several that appeared to be automatic weapons—about 15,000 rounds of ammunition, five assembled pipe bombs, materials that can be used to make more explosives, and two device-building manuals. The FBI also found insignia of the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia group, and a gag credit card refashioned into a “white privilege card” with the inscription “white privilege trumps everything” and a number made up entirely of “0045,” likely in reference to Donald Trump, the 45th president.



There is now not a single state or county in the US where a minimum wage worker on a 40-hour week can afford a two-bedroom home at the fair market rent, according to a report published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week. In 93 percent of US counties, such full-time minimum wage workers can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment, either.

“The enduring problem of housing unaffordability requires bold investments in housing solutions that will ensure stability in the future,” said NLIHC President and CEO Diane Yentel in an emailed statement. “Without a significant federal intervention, housing will continue to be out of reach for millions of renters.”




Seems sensible enough, right? The biggest organized violent threat we face in the United States is domestic terrorism committed by homegrown radicalized white supremacists, as the FBI director appointed by Donald Trump has explained. It would make sense that the FBI would want to confront that threat by any means possible, and that family and friends are well-positioned to know if their Trump-supporting incel brother is spending too much time on the online forums, or if they find receipts where he gassed up his truck near DC on or around January 6.

Gaetz said:

"Back during the worst days of the Soviet Union, one out of every three of the folks in that country was providing some sort of information to a centralized governing authority," Gaetz continued. "Snitching really is a tool of the repressive security state, and we don't want that to happen in our country."

He said the agency is "getting more ambitious" after years of investigating the Russia hoax and pushing its own politics on the nation.

"This is an effort to identify people based on their politics, and I don't think we want an FBI that is resolving familial disputes through the lens of extremism," he said. "That seems to really take them away from an otherwise important mission."

Yeah, no matter how many times they say it, we are going to note each and every time that nobody is going after anybody for their "politics." If however people become radicalized by the fascist Big Lie pushed by Donald Trump, Gaetz, and others, and use that as a pretext for terrorism, then yes, it's a law enforcement issue.




You ready for the biggun'? Here is the biggun'.

Yes Collusion! Yes Collusion! Let's Close The Circle On HERE'S THE FUCKING COLLUSION!

We mentioned that part of this sanctions package hits individuals directly. And guess who's on the list? That's right, it is Paul Manafort's business partner/Russian spy buddy Konstantin Kilimnik! And if we are today less sure about what happened or did not happen with Russian bounties, we are more sure than ever about what Kilimnik did in 2016, and also in 2020.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Kilimnik was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice regarding unregistered lobbying work.

Oh, that is some bold language! The Biden Treasury Department just came right out and said the thing we've been suspecting all along!





"He wanted to not do the business of the department, which is to investigate cases, but instead go out and flap his gums about what he didn't like about the election overall," Barr went on, attesting that he'd provided every FBI resource requested to deal with actual problems, but refused to allow the US Attorney to make unsubstantiated allegations publicly. He did not add that he himself had abrogated longstanding DOJ policy by encouraging investigations of election fraud claims, although he himself suspected they were all "bullshit."

Democrats Have Crazy Idea: How About Ending Poverty For Disabled And Elderly Americans?

Doktor Zoom
July 10, 2021 03:30 PM
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York)

Yet another item rolling off the line from the Progressive Democratic Ideas Factory: Now that monthly payments for the expanded Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan are set to start reducing child poverty, how about we also fix other parts of the social safety net, too, like increasing benefits for Supplemental Security Income (SSI?? Go read this excellent explainer by Dylan Matthews at Vox, which calls attention to a piece of the safety net lots of people don't know much about, unless they need it. And millions of Americans — 7.8 million — do.

Honestly, while we knew what SSI is, we had no idea how the program came about:

It was passed into law in 1972 after Richard Nixon tried and failed to get Congress to adopt his "guaranteed annual income" plan, essentially a kind of unconditional basic income that would have given the poorest households in America a guaranteed cash benefit.

Yes, you did just read "Richard Nixon" and "unconditional basic income" in the same sentence. Congressional conservatives shot it down, but they agreed to two smaller programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and SSI, that have become key parts of the federal anti-poverty toolkit.

Most people have heard of the EITC, if only because it's a line on the 1040 they don't qualify for because they aren't in poverty. EITC helps out working poor families with a tax refund, and because many folks have such low incomes to start with, it can even reduce their income tax liability to zero.

Ranty digression: The EITC is the source of the bullshit rightwing claim that "people who pay no taxes get refunds," although those folks do indeed pay payroll, Social Security, and other taxes. Remember, whenever you hear anyone spouting that crap, remind them that Saint Ronald Goddamn Reagan called the EITC "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress."

Ahem. The other, lesser-known anti-poverty measure to come out of the failure of Nixon's basic income plan was SSI, which was aimed at helping folks the EITC couldn't, because they're not working due to being retired, disabled, or blind. (Matthews explains blindness is "a different category than 'disabled' for legal purposes." Laws are weird.)

Long story short: SSI was meant to help people in those categories avoid poverty, but it never quite has. So since we're in a New Deal mood these days, maybe we should fix that!

Here's the dealio:

In 2021, the maximum SSI benefit for an individual is $9,530.12 per year. The poverty line for a single person is $12,880 — meaning that SSI, at most, brings recipients up to less than three-quarters of the poverty line.

It gets worse, though. Let's say you're an SSI recipient married to another recipient, which makes you an "eligible couple." You could both be retirees in your 70s, or disabled/blind people earlier in life.

You don't get to add your benefit amounts together. Instead, you have to share a maximum benefit of $14,293.61, only 50 percent more than the individual benefit. The effect is a really dramatic marriage penalty: Two SSI recipients receive a large income boost if they get divorced, but those who marry take a big cut in benefits.

Well a lot of that just doesn't seem right or fair. Further, there are currently strict limits on the amount of assets someone can have in order to qualify for SSI: Just $2000 for an individual, or $3000 for a couple. Perversely, that works against people who have managed to save up a little bit for retirement, or disabled folks with more than just a little in savings. This is America: we don't want the poor to be too comfortable, because then they might have luxury items like a refrigerator or even a color TV.

Joe Biden included reforms to SSI as part of his disability policy plan, so this is not coming out of nowhere. Biden called for setting the maximum SSI benefit at 100 percent of the federal poverty line, which would increase it 35 percent over where it is now. Biden's plan would also get rid of that marriage penalty, so hooray family values or at least some damn fairness. It would also throw out "the complex 'in-kind assistance' provisions that result in reduced SSI checks for some people who, say, live for free in a family member's home."

On the assets side, says Matthews,

Biden would more than double the asset limit for individuals and nearly triple it for couples. I'd personally prefer getting rid of the asset test altogether, as it can encourage people to spend every bit of savings they have to qualify for the benefit; that said, raising it is an improvement.

No doubt Ted Cruz would find some way to make that a "scandal." But fuck him.

More good news: As Dems prepare the big reconciliation bill that's intended to contain most of the stuff in Biden's American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, congressional Democrats are pushing to include the revamp of SSI as part of it. That effort is being led by Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the newly-elected congressman from New York, and veteran Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Others who have signed on include Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who chairs the Budget Committee. Saaay, who's actually leading the preparation of the reconciliation bill? That'd be Bernie.

The reforms are supported by all the groups you'd expect, from the AARP to the unions to disability rights groups. And like the changes to the Child Tax Credit, SSI overhaul stands to take a significant bit out of poverty, which could be a hell of a good thing for Dems to run on in the next two elections.

The Urban Institute estimates that the combination of SSI changes and other Social Security reforms Biden has proposed would lift 1.4 million elderly or disabled people out of poverty in 2021. While increasing SSI alone would do less, it would still be a significant step forward for the people impacted.

And in a year when we're learning that the rich are legally avoiding taxes to a greater degree than anyone but their lawyers and accountants imagined, and the IRS doesn't have the resources to collect all the tax that's actually owed even without the loopholes, we're not betting there's likely to be a lot of public pushback to improving SSI. Republicans may invoke the national debt and Fox News may sputter. But disabled folks, who built increased political power in the Democratic coalition while fighting off 2017 the attempt to kill Obamacare, aren't likely to let this drop. It's far past time to follow through on the nearly 50-year-old commitment that nobody should live in poverty because they're elderly or disabled.

[Vox / Time]

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/activists-takes-aim-anti-lgbtq-hate-group-alliance-defending-freedom-n936391



All of that being said, Jeffries, it appears, is more than fine with displays of sexuality on Twitter (as long as they are heterosexual, we assume) and has been doling out "sex advice" on TikTok throughout the last week.

Via West Virginia Public Radio:

In the video, Jeffries appears to be responding to another user on the platform.

"They say sit on your face. Do you mean sit or hover?" a woman asks.

"So here's the thing, ladies. If he's not pushing you up, gasping for air, then you are probably doing it wrong. You should be rubbing that thing all over his face, like hard," Jeffries said. "His nose should be shoving your clit so far back up inside of you that it just drives you wild. Sit, not hover, sit. Push down. All your weight He'll take care of the rest."

I think I need a Silkwood shower after that. I mean, I am super sex-positive but that man just made cunnilingus sound about as appealing as cleaning out a vacuum cleaner. And also proved my earlier point.

Jeffries' colleagues, however, were not super happy with his apparent plans to become the right-wing Dr. Ruth and have since stripped him of his committee vice-chairman position. I'd say this wasn't surprising, but given Trump, you think they'd be okay with any kind of behavior on social media these days.







Fox News Still Doesn't Give A F*ck About Tucker's NSA Sob Story, And He Is MAD

Evan Hurst
July 13, 2021 09:00 AM

Mad face

EXTREMELY important Tucker Carlson news update, on the most important and consequential thing that's happening in his life.

We are of course talking about the very real and true non-lie story Tucker's been telling about how the NSA put wire tapps in his bottom, which you can believe because when has Tucker's integrity ever been called into question? (If the NSA has picked up Tucker's falsetto shrieks in surveillance, it COULD be because he's apparently been trying to get close enough to Vladimir Putin to get an interview for a while now.)

The sad news for Tucker, which is reportedly making him FURIOUS, is that Fox News brass still doesn't seem to either believe him OR give a shit.

One of the sources described Carlson as "furious" with network executives, especially the public relations team, "for not backing him up."

"Tensions are sky high," the person said.

Another source pointed out that Carlson has "always had tension with" management, but said right now he's "extra pissed."

Carlson has complained to colleagues and associates about what he perceives as a lack of support.

Poor Tucker is unsupported! That's not a thing Swanson frozen dinner heirs probably ever say about themselves!

Tucker of course denies, because of course Tucker denies. And again, has Tucker ever done anything to make the average person call the veracity of his denials into question? We report, you start making lists in your head while saying "WELL ACTUALLY ... "

"I'm not mad at anyone at Fox," he said. "If I was, I'd say so. I'm mad at you for lying relentlessly. What a loathsome person you are. Please print that."

Backing away slowly.

From the very beginning of this surely very interesting story, it's been reported that Fox News doesn't seem to give a crap about old Klanhood McYelpsALot whining about the NSA on his nightly white power talk therapy hour. Those who pay more attention than we ever will have also noted that the actual Fox News network hasn't said dick about it on-air. If this was a thing they thought was real or cared about, you can bet your ass the moron couch at "Fox & Friends" and all the rest of them would be snarfing it down like an open bag of Snausages.

But alas:

Fox pointedly has not covered his claims on its newscasts, even though such an intrusion would normally be a significant news story. Fox has not shown any outward signs of investigating Carlson's claims, either.

Noting some of Tucker's most recent complaints and lamentations, CNN Business further reports:

Carlson claimed that Biden's NSA has leaked the contents of his emails to other members of the media. One of the banners on his show said, "NSA LEAKED TUCKER'S EMAILS TO JOURNALISTS."

Ordinarily a TV network would be quick to denounce such a thing, if it actually happened. But Fox News executives have been noticeably silent during the back and forth.

You'd think. You know, if any of this was real, or mattered. The Fox News bigwigs haven't said anything. Tucker's fellow prime-timers aren't saying anything. Nobody cares.

CNN Business notes that there have been a couple of notable exceptions, but one of them is literally the dumbest, most batshit person on the air at Fox. (Rhymes with "Fartiromo") That fucking idiot was on TV this weekend helping spread Donald Trump's fever dreams about poor innocent Ashli Babbitt being executed by the state simply for visiting the Capitol gift shop. The other one was apparently Jesse Watters, but CNN Business notes that he didn't even cover it as a declarative story, instead framing it as a question: "Is Tucker Carlson being spied on by the Biden administration?"

If those are the only two people in your corner — especially Maria Bartiromo, shouting batshit into the abyss about God knows what and leaving everyone to wonder if somebody should call the emergency contact she listed on her HR form, just for her own safety — you might as well have no one in your corner at all.

[CNN Business]

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter.










OK Fine, Congress Will F*ck Up The Cyber Ninjas Now

Evan Hurst
July 16, 2021 09:20 AM

This came up when we searched "Cyber Ninjas" and it seems about right.

Giphy

Out there in the land of bugfuck, QAnon Arizona GOP state Senator Wendy Rogers — you know, the dumbass who wants to arrest Merrick Garland and gets stars in her eyes when she hears about bamboo ballots — has made a HEREBY DECLARATION, and it is that she's SEEN ENOUGH! Therefore it is time for Arizona to overturn the entire 2020 US American presidential election!

Yeah, God wasn't sending His best people when He made that one.

Meanwhile, equally dumbfuck Arizona Senate President Karen Fann has been out there conspiratorially saying that the official Arizona vote totals don't match the vote totals found in the Arizona Clown Fraudit — you know, the one led by the CYBER NINJAS who don't actually know anything about elections or ballots.

To which Maricopa County replied:

That is the funniest way we've heard somebody call an elected official a stupid idiot in quite a while.

There's probably more news from the land of bugfuck since we wrote this post yesterday afternoon, especially since Karen Fann threw a "hearing" about the "audit" on Thursday. (The live-tweet of it from that Maricopa County account up there is hilarious.)

But we're here to talk about something different, namely the great letter the House Oversight Committee sent the Cyber Ninjas this week. These people think they're holding hearings? They think they're doing an investigation? Let's have real hearings and real investigation, in the real Congress! Have fun with that, Cyber Ninjas and the whole fraudit team!

First thing you should know about the letter is that it was sent to the Cyber Ninjas' address, which is ... a mailbox at a UPS store. You know, because we're dealing with some real perfessionals here. It's addressed to the Cyber Ninjas' head Doug Logan, who is ... some guy!

It begins:

We are writing to request information about Cyber Ninjas' participation in an "audit" of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, in the 2020 election. We are concerned about your company's role in this highly unusual effort, given Cyber Ninjas' apparent lack of experience in conducting election-related audits; reports that the company engaged in sloppy and insecure audit practices that compromised the integrity of ballots and voting equipment and were questioned by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); and evidence that you and other individuals funding the audit have sought to advance the "big lie" of debunked voter fraud allegations in the November 2020 presidential election.

In other words, they are concerned in that the only thing they have ample evidence of is that Doug Logan is a know-nothing conspiracy theory-obsessed assclown.

The letter notes that an actual real grown-up big boy audit of Maricopa County's results found an exact match between paper ballots and voting machine counts. It notes that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which is 80 percent Republican, did not think this fraudit was necessary. And it notes that, instead of hiring actual experts, the Arizona state Senate decided to hire PRIVATE NINJAS! who seemingly have never done anything with an election in their lives.

And they have questions about who exactly is funding THE CYBER NINJAS. Is it just some carbuncle "reporter" from One America News and batshit Kraken lawyer Lin Wood and some other QAnon dark money clowns?

Reports indicate that substantial outside funding has come from partisan dark money groups. These include Voices and Votes, an organization run by Christina Bobb, a former Trump Administration appointee and anchor for One America News Network. Another reported funding source, Fight Back, is a nonprofit run by L. Lin Wood, an attorney who pursued failed litigation to overturn the 2020 election on behalf of former President Trump, promoted conspiracy theories linked to QAnon, and called for the execution of former Vice President Mike Pence. Another funder is America Project, run by Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com, who has also sought to overturn the 2020 election based on unfounded conspiracy theories.

Then House Oversight starts making fun of THE CYBER NINJAS' practices in this fraudit. For instance:

  • The part where THE CYBER NINJAS shot ballots with UV light to find secret watermarks, despite how that's not how watermarks work and also UV light can hurt ballots.
  • The part where security practices for the fraudit, including the constant unsupervised moving of ballots, were just absolute shit.
  • The part where Cyber Ninjas used blue pens during the audit, even though any moron who's read Arizona's election process manual knows only red pens are allowed, because blue pens can fuck up the ballots.
  • The part where BETTER SCAN THESE BALLOTS FOR BAMBOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
  • The part where Maricopa County literally has to buy all new election equipment now, because the fucking Cyber Ninjas compromised all of it that badly.
  • The part where this shit has been going on for ... how many months now? Five? And we were supposed to think it was crazy that cities and counties couldn't count all their votes by the end of election night, when these people who were clearly dropped on their heads as children can't finish in FIVE MONTHS, and are still going?

AND SO FORTH!

The letter notes the fuckbonkers conspiracy theories Cyber Ninjas chief Doug Logan believes. For example, it references a document on Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell's website, written by Logan, what argues for the HUGO CHAVEZ STOLED THE ELECTION FROM JOE BIDEN WITH DOMINION VOTING MACHINES FROM BEYOOOOOND THE GRAAAAAAAAAAVE theory of election fraud.

And then the committee starts making requests for documents, so many documents. They want to know everybody with any ownership connection to Cyber Ninjas. They want to know about allllll their money, including money they've received for this particular Arizona fraudit. They want to know about all Logan's communications, if any, with Donald Trump and anybody involved with his enterprises in any way, and also Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Michael Flynn, the nutbag MyPillow guy, and others. And so much more!

Basically hand it all over. You dumb morons are about to have your bamboo examined with UV lights by no less than Carolyn Maloney's House Oversight Committee.

Can't wait for the televised hearings.

[House Oversight Letter]

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter.









Texas Dems Taking Surprise Field Trip To DC To Show 'Em How Democracy Works

Liz Dye
July 12, 2021 04:20 PM

Texas Democrats play rough.

In a move to deny Republicans a quorum for the special session, at least 58 Democratic members of the Texas House are scheduled to leave the state today in an effort to kill a voter suppression bill being jammed through the legislature. The bill in question would ban drive-through and 24-hour voting, and drastically restrict access to absentee ballots, all while kicking voter ID and poll watching requirements into overdrive.

In May, the same Democratic legislators succeeded in blocking a similar bill by simply walking out on the last day of the session, leaving less than the required two-thirds of the body's members present to call a vote. But now this monstrosity is back, with new provisions kicking trans kids out of sports for good measure. Let no one say Texas Republicans aren't a sorry bunch of bigoted assholes.

But this time, just a few days into the 30-day special session, Democrats risk being rounded up by the Texas Rangers and returned to the chamber if they deny Republicans a quorum. As the Texas Tribune notes, House rules state that "All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested, wherever they may be found, by the sergeant-at-arms or an officer appointed by the sergeant-at-arms for that purpose, and their attendance shall be secured and retained. The house shall determine on what conditions they shall be discharged."

So if they want to kill this bill, they'll have to stay out of Texas for weeks on end. And what better destination than Washington, DC, in July, right? Hope those Texas Dems enjoy clouds of mosquitoes and absolutely filthy humidity. (They're Texas Democrats. DC humidity will feel downright breezy.) The New York Times reports that they're boarding a couple of charter planes and heading for the nation's capital with the goal of focusing attention on the need for congressional Democrats to get their shit together and pass some voting rights legislation.

"This is a moment that is going to wake America up," State Representative Trey Martinez Fisher, who organized the extended walkout, told the Times. "We have to decide if we are going to stand for democracy. We want the nation to join us and we want the U.S. Senate to hear us and act."

(Yes, we are aware of the irony of Texas Dems using the minority veto as a means to draw attention to the need to end the filibuster. Two things can be true at once.)

For their part, Texas Republicans call the move a stunt. Houston Republican Briscoe Cain, who chairs the House Elections Committee, predicted that the bill would pass eventually.

"It's just delaying the inevitable," he told the Times, calling the Democrats flight to DC "political theater."

That's pretty rich coming from a guy who slapped on a cowboy hat and hopped a plane to Philly on November 6, promising to put a stop to the vote count in Pennsylvania.

But this time, unfortunately, that dipshit is probably right. Governor Greg Abbott can continue to call special sessions forever, and last month he vetoed a budget bill after the Democrats walked out, ensuring that the legislature itself will be defunded if state politicians don't return to regular business. That probably won't have much of an effect on the politicians themselves, since the state's legislature is very, very part time, but it will screw the 2,000-plus career staffers who rely on the paycheck. He's a mean sumbitch, ain't he?

Texas Republicans also play rough. But unlike Democrats, they do it to hurt their own constituents and employees.

OPEN THREAD.

[Texas Tribune / NYT]








Posted by BeauHD  from the predicting-the-future dept.
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science:Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn't a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported. In that report -- published in the bestselling book "The Limits to Growth" (1972) -- a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization was bound to collapse if corporations and governments continued to pursue continuous economic growth, no matter the costs. The researchers forecasted 12 possible scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and personal welfare would plummet.

The report's most infamous scenario -- the Business as Usual (BAU) scenario -- predicted that the world's economic growth would peak around the 2040s, then take a sharp downturn, along with the global population, food availability and natural resources. This imminent "collapse" wouldn't be the end of the human race, but rather a societal turning point that would see standards of living drop around the world for decades, the team wrote.

So, what's the outlook for society now, nearly half a century after the MIT researchers shared their prognostications? Gaya Herrington, a sustainability and dynamic system analysis researcher at the consulting firm KPMG, decided to find out. [...] Herrington found that the current state of the world -- measured through 10 different variables, including population, fertility rates, pollution levels, food production and industrial output -- aligned extremely closely with two of the scenarios proposed in 1972, namely the BAU scenario and one called Comprehensive Technology (CT), in which technological advancements help reduce pollution and increase food supplies, even as natural resources run out. While the CT scenario results in less of a shock to the global population and personal welfare, the lack of natural resources still leads to a point where economic growth sharply declines -- in other words, a sudden collapse of industrial society."The good news is that it's not too late to avoid both of these scenarios and put society on track for an alternative -- the Stabilized World (SW) scenario," the report notes. "This path begins as the BAU and CT routes do, with population, pollution and economic growth rising in tandem while natural resources decline. The difference comes when humans decide to deliberately limit economic growth on their own, before a lack of resources forces them to."

"The SW scenario assumes that in addition to the technological solutions, global societal priorities change," Herrington wrote. "A change in values and policies translates into, amongst other things, low desired family size, perfect birth control availability, and a deliberate choice to limit industrial output and prioritize health and education services." After this shift of values occurs, industrial growth and global population begin to level out. "Food availability continues to rise to meet the needs of the global population; pollution declines and all but disappears; and the depletion of natural resources begins to level out, too," adds Live Science. "Societal collapse is avoided entirely."





Your Sunday Show Rundown Is Full Of Idiots, As Usual

Michael Mora
July 12, 2021 03:40 PM

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott

While billionaires were launching themselves into space to demonstrate wealth inequality and a nest of insurrectionist fuckbonnets gathered in Texas for CPAC this weekend, the Sunday shows kept chugging along.

On "Fox News Sunday," Texas GOP Governor Greg Abbott was questioned by Chris Wallace about his and the Texas legislature's priorities. Wallace pointed out their utter waste of taxpayer money on a special session to pass laws to suppress voters and scratch the right's weird culture war itches:


WALLACE: Governor, let me ask you about the special session in general because some Democrats say -- and this is the word they use -- that you are using it to pander to Trump supporters on the far right of the Republican Party.

I want to put up some of the key agenda items: voting reform [...]. Border security, social media censorship, transgender student athletes, critical race theory, abortion.

And your critics point out that what isn't on the agenda for the special session is the electrical grid in Texas, which broke down during the deep freeze last winter. A hundred -- more than 150 people were killed, more than four million Texans lost their power during that.

And the question is, why wouldn't you address an issue like that that affects people's everyday lives?

Abbott first tried to blame Texas Democrats for Texas Republicans' prioritizing of Fox News programming/GOP red meat over actual things of substance. But it was his newest excuse really takes the cake:

ABBOTT: I must point out, Chris, one very important thing that most people do not know, and that is, what was the main cause of the power grid failure in the wintertime, and it's nothing that anybody knows. The main cause of the power grid failure of the state of Texas actually was a failure by the power generators in Texas to file a simple document with ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

It was a clerical error! Well, I'm sure the families of those lost will be comforted to know their loved ones died because someone didn't put the cover sheet on the TPS report. As opposed to a completely deregulated, stand-alone power grid failing because capitalism incentivizes profits and Texas is run by idiots.

But not all the ridiculousness came from Texas Republicans on Sunday. Take CBS "Face The Nation" host John Dickerson.

While interviewing Dr. Anthony Fauci about vaccinations and the Delta variant, he blamed the hesitancy of some to take the vaccines not on misinformation or political opportunists or conspiracy quacks, but on us failing to understand how to get the correct information to morons.


DICKERSON: Let's start with the Delta variant, it seems to be making the case for vaccination more clear than ever with those who are being seriously affected coming from the population of those who are unvaccinated. That would seem to make a clear case, is it that the facts are not getting to people or is it the people delivering the message to those who are unvaccinated that that needs to change?

Fauci, like an exasperated scientist trying to explain climate change to Greg Abbott, responded with tired confusion at the dissonance.

FAUCI: So you're talking about something that's life-saving. So the idea of why some people, for whatever reasons and we know some of them are ideological, we know when you look geographically in the situations where you have under-vaccinated states where you have 30 percent or less of the people vaccinated, I mean, we've really got to get beyond that and we've got to put those kinds of differences aside and say this is a public health issue.

Dickerson again made excuses for idiots.

DICKERSON: You say the facts are hitting people between the eyes. Is it possible that people are a little scared, a little nervous, and the more facts they hear, they don't hear evidence? What they hear is you're a dummy for not getting this and that. Potentially people feel insulted when -- when the evidence is presented as if it should be clearly obvious to any normal person and that all that does is put them back in their corner.

This is the end result of glorifying anti-intellectualism and saying the opinions of your drunk uncle on Facebook are just as valid as actual professionals. If you get insulted by having TOO MANY facts, the problem is not the messengers.

On CNN's "State Of The Union," they showed Fauci video of CPAC idiots cheering unvaccinated people. It was clear he was fresh out of fucks to give to Jake Tapper.

FAUCI: It's horrifying. I mean, they are cheering about someone saying that it's a good thing for people not to try and save their lives. I mean, if you just unpack that for a second, Jake, it's almost frightening to say, hey, guess what, we don't want you to do something to save your life. Yay. Everybody starts screaming and clapping. I just don't get that. I mean, I -- and I don't think that anybody who is thinking clearly can get that. What is that all about? I don't understand that, Jake.

One of the two major political parties is a death cult.

Have a week.


https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/07/12/2341239/amazon-wants-to-monitor-you-in-your-sleep-for-your-benefit

Amazon Wants To Monitor You In Your Sleep, For Your Benefit (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the always-watching dept.
Amazon has won U.S. permission to use radar to monitor consumers' sleep habits. Bloomberg reports:The Federal Communications Commission on Friday granted Amazon approval to use a radar sensor to sense motion and "enable contactless sleep tracing functionalities." Amazon on June 22 asked the FCC, which regulates airwave uses, for permission to market a device that uses radar. The technology captures movement in three dimensions, enabling a user to control its features through simple gestures and movements, the company said in a filing. The capability, according to Amazon, could help people with "with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments," and it could monitor sleep with a high degree of precision.

"The use of Radar Sensors in sleep tracking could improve awareness and management of sleep hygiene, which in turn could produce significant health benefits for many Americans," Amazon said in its filing. "Radar Sensors will allow consumers to recognize potential sleep issues." Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The company didn't fully describe the device in its filing, but did say it would not be a mobile device. The FCC earlier granted similar permission to Google for radar to enable touchless control of Pixel smartphones, the agency said in its letter approving Amazon's request.



Posted by BeauHD  from the but-it's-only-functional-in-the-dark-and-without-oxygen dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas:By making alterations to the plastic manufacturing process, scientists hope to produce forms of the ubiquitous material that can break down far more safely and quickly in the environment than current versions do. Researchers in China have now demonstrated a new example of this that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives. The new material came about when study author Liang Luo from China's Huazhong University of Science and Technology was working on an advanced type of chemical sensor, as reported by PNAS. The materials scientist was developing a novel polymer film that changed color in response to pH levels. This process was driven by the material's unique molecular structure, with the chains of monomers giving the film its deep red color, and taking it away when these bonds were broken.

Through his team's experiments, Luo found that the deep red color of the film quickly faded away and the material broke apart after several days in the sunlight. Breaking apart these bonds is a common objective in research efforts to better recycle plastics, and in doing so Luo may have inadvertently conjured up a promising, environmentally friendly version of the material. The molecular makeup of the plastic means it wouldn't be suited for use in soda bottles or shopping bags, as it is only stable as a functional material in the dark and without oxygen. But exposed to sunlight and air, it disintegrates rapidly and completely decomposes within a week, leaving no environmentally damaging microplastic fragments behind. A byproduct of the process is naturally occurring succinic acid, however, which could potentially be upcycled for commercial use in pharmaceuticals or food.

Exploding Stars May Have Assaulted Ancient Earth (sciencemag.org)


Posted by BeauHD  from the land-before-time dept.
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine:Over the past 2 decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from an ancient supernova explosion marking the death of a nearby star. Erupting from hundreds of light-years away, the flash of x-rays and gamma rays probably did no harm on Earth. But the expanding fireball also accelerated cosmic rays -- mostly nuclei of hydrogen and helium -- to close to the speed of light. These projectiles arrived stealthily, decades later, ramping up into an invisible fusillade that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the atmosphere -- and life. In a flurry of studies and speculation, astronomers have sketched out their potential effects, including a depleted ozone layer, cancer-causing particles, wildfires, and a cooling of the climate that could have helped initiate the ice ages 2.5 million years ago. Most paleontologists are yet to be convinced, but astronomers argue that such supernovae could explain some extinction events that lack customary triggers like volcanic outbursts or asteroid impacts.




This illustration shows a coronavirus particle in blood plasma showing the Y-shaped immunoglobulin G antibodies (IgG, light blue) bound to the coronavirus' spike proteins (red). IgG antibodies are Y-shaped proteins produced by B-lymphocyte white blood cells as part of an immune response. Immunoglobulin M antibodies (IgM) are also shown in light blue. (Image credit: JUAN GAERTNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty)

https://www.livescience.com/how-early-was-coronavirus-covid-circulating.html


How early was the novel coronavirus circulating?

By  


In late December 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported cases of an unidentified viral pneumonia, which, along with other reports, alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) to a potential new health threat that was identified as a coronavirus in January 2020 and was later named SARS-CoV-2. 

But it has become clear that the virus emerged before late December 2019, possibly even months before. A joint WHO study by Chinese and international researchers identified 174 SARS-CoV-2 infections throughout December, with the earliest going back to Dec. 8. Though most researchers think the virus originated sometime during the fall or winter of 2019, an exact time is hard to pinpoint without more data. Finding out when SARS-CoV-2 began spreading among people could help prevent or address future epidemics and pandemics by providing insight into the kind of disease surveillance that would have been necessary to prevent this one, experts say.

By the time the virus was identified, it had already spread significantly and was harder to contain, said Sergei Pond, a professor of biology at Temple University in Philadelphia. "You don't want to wait eight weeks until you have a cluster of cases with unusual pneumonia," Pond said. "You kind of want to have a surveillance system where you pick it up very early."

Related: 7 facts about the origin of the novel coronavirus

The first case of COVID-19 that has been confirmed by a laboratory test was in a man who started to experience symptoms on Dec. 8, 2019, The Washington Post reported. Though there were earlier reports suggesting the first case could be traced back to Dec. 1 or Nov. 17, as Live Science previously reported, those reports were not confirmed by the WHO-China joint study, said Joel Wertheim, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Wertheim and his colleagues analyzed the virus's genetic information and conducted epidemiological computer simulations, which put the virus's origin date at between mid-October and mid-November 2019, they reported in April in the journal Science.

To draw this conclusion, the researchers analyzed genomes of SARS-CoV-2 from the first wave of the pandemic in China. Because viruses accumulate genetic changes over time, the researchers could identify a fixed rate of genetic mutation and then work backward until they found when the first person with a relatively unaltered form of the virus could have started to spread it among people. The researchers estimated that for SARS-CoV-2, that date was between Nov. 17 and Dec. 20, 2019.

But that's just when the virus likely started spreading among people. Because SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal and was passed to humans, the animal coronavirus that originally infected the first person could have genetic differences from the current virus. That version might have taken a while to become genetically recognizable as SARS-CoV-2, meaning the virus may have started spreading even earlier, the researchers said. 



Bats, particularly  horseshoe bats, are most likely the original reservoir for the precursor virus to SARS-CoV-2. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

To see how long it might have taken the virus to accumulate those kinds of changes, the researchers used a computer simulation of the virus's spread. They concluded that the process likely would have taken anywhere from zero to 41 days, although the most common result was eight days. This process, they said, might have pushed back the virus's initial spread to mid-October.

Wertheim emphasized that the goal of the study was to establish how far back the virus could have started to spread, not necessarily how early it did spread. "That's as far as you can make it go, and even then, that's a lot of assumptions to get that far back," he said.

Many researchers, including Pond, would agree with that based on current data, the timeframe that Wertheim and his colleagues proposed in the study is likely, said Pond, who co-authored  a separate study examining the early evolutionary history of  SARS-CoV-2, published in May in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. In that study, Pond and his colleagues used a kind of genetic analysis originally developed to reconstruct the evolution of human cancer cells. They determined that the version of SARS-CoV-2 that spread in December 2019 would take six to eight weeks to evolve from the initial human strain of the virus. Although the method they used was different, that time frame would also push the origin back to around the same time as the other study — October 2019.

But Pond said there are also ways of gaining new insight into when the virus emerged. For instance, many thought the virus emerged from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, but later analysis found cases that couldn't be linked to the market, Live Science previously reported. In contrast, Wertheim said the lack of confirmation from the China-WHO joint study for the Dec. 1 and Nov. 17 cases that his study used could affect the estimate. Frozen blood samples from early potential cases or genetic sequence records could also provide further insight, Pond said.

"You can easily imagine a scenario where you get five or 10 more sequences that are early, and they just change everything," he said. Regardless, Pond thinks it's unlikely that the virus emerged earlier than fall 2019 or, at the earliest, late summer 2019, because even events that could lead to the virus circulating undetected that early — such as it starting to spread, going extinct and then being reintroduced — are very unlikely and become increasingly so the further back you go.

Some research has suggested an origin date earlier than October, but the studies have not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journals. In one such study, researchers at Harvard University analyzed internet searches in Wuhan, China, from 2019 and found an increase in searches for "diarrhea" in August 2019 that correlated with an increase in traffic in a Wuhan hospital parking lot the same month. Diarrhea is more common with COVID-19 than with the flu, so the researchers suggested the increase could point to the virus spreading in August. 

In a commentary in response to that study, however, other researchers pointed out that the authors used an awkward Chinese translation for "diarrhea" and that the search term increased in use all over China, not just in Wuhan. Another study, which was published to the preprint server medRxiv and was not peer-reviewed, found traces of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2019. However, the findings made little sense without any evidence of patients experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 in Barcelona at the time.

There are inherent problems with trying to find a more precise origin date. Wertheim's analyses showed that early on, case counts were likely to be so low that the virus went undetected. In fact, in the computer simulations from the study that modeled the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from a single human case, the virus went extinct the majority of the time, and when it didn't, sometimes it relied on a single person to spread it more widely again. Of course, in a large, densely-populated city like Wuhan, that scenario doesn’t present a problem — it would be easy for a single person to transmit the virus to many people. But it does make it likely that early on, few people had the virus. Amid a severe flu season, and since SARS-CoV-2 had a relatively low mortality rate compared with viruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Wertheim said it's no surprise the virus wasn't detected when it first started to spread.

Wertheim hopes systems that allow for earlier detection could help prevent or mitigate the effects of future pandemics.

"In an ideal world, we would have a sort of systematic and interconnected way to report all unexpected illness in a way that can be seen across borders," he said. "Something like that would have given us a leg up on this pandemic and potentially have been able to stop it in its tracks."

Originally published on Live Science.


GOP Governors Will Do Anything To Encourage Vaccinations, But They Won't Do That

Robyn Pennacchia
July 23, 2021 01:29 PM

On Thursday afternoon, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican obviously, told reporters that she has had just about enough with people not getting vaccinated, given the 10,000 new cases in her state over the last two weeks. She is reasonably sure that the state's vaccination rate of only about 33 percent — the lowest in the nation — might have something to do with it.

But when asked what she planned to actually do about it, Ivey was simply at a loss.

Via Washington Post:

"I don't know. You tell me," the governor told a reporter in Birmingham on Thursday. "Folks [are] supposed to have common sense."

She did, however, have one message for her state: "It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It's the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down." [...]

"Almost 100 percent of the new hospitalizations are with unvaccinated folks. And the deaths are certainly occurring with the unvaccinated folks," she told reporters at an event for a tech company. "These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain."

Earlier this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, taking a break from hawking "Don't Fauci My Florida" shirts to encourage people to get the vaccine, said that 95 percent of people admitted to hospitals with COVID are unvaccinated and that the vaccines are saving lives.

Lots of people are saying "Oh look, they care now that it's killing their people!" but I'm not so sure that's it. It seems a whole lot more likely that they are concerned for their financial portfolios.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee would also like people to get vaccinated, but not if it inconveniences them or they really don't want to.

Now, I will say this. I actually do not think it is particularly helpful to shame people for not getting the vaccine — not because it isn't warranted, but because it just doesn't work. People don't usually feel motivated to do what you want if you tell them the reason they aren't doing it is because they aren't as smart as you are — and what ends up happening is that they go the other way and decide that you are the stupid one, because of how you are sheeple and they are thinking for themselves. Even if "thinking for themselves" means listening to people like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The fact is, the Republican Party, in collaboration with rightwing pundits, has been preparing these people to not take these vaccines for their entire lives. They've repeated that Ronald Reagan "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help" quote ad nauseam, they've trained their people to not trust anything "socialized," and particularly for the last five years they've told them that they can't trust the news because all of the news is "fake news," that academics and scientists are not to be trusted, which means there are basically no sources that these people consider trustworthy. They've made "owning the libs" a primary ethos, and what better way to own those smug liberals than to refuse to take their "Fauci ouchies."

Each of these governors, every Republican in office, has benefited from this messaging, and it is this messaging that is going to kill the people who fell for it.

That being said, we're at an impasse. These people have dug their heels in and they're not moving, and we need them to get vaccinated. They literally do not care how many people are out there tweeting "I got 99 problems but a vax ain't one" one day and then dying of COVID a month later. There is nothing that is going to convince them but inconvenience. It is time to bust out the vaccine passports for air travel and anything else within our control. Either it will convince them to get one or they will be less likely to spread COVID if they've got it.

So if these governors actually want to help the country get its act together, it's time for them to consider "actually doing something" as a possible tactic to keep people from dying.

Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.




THERE'S STILL A WHOLE LOTTA

 PANDEMIC GOING ON

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: July 25, 2021, 03:31 GMT

 United States

Coronavirus Cases:

35,184,671

Deaths:

626,713

Recovered:

29,507,123


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


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2107.24 -10:10

- Days ago = 2213 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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