Posted: December 25, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Afternoon!
I hope you are all having a nice holiday weekend! I’m home alone today, because I want to avoid any chance of getting the highly contagious Omicron variant of Covid-19. I’ve been hanging out here, mostly reading and and talking to friends and family on the phone.
Yesterday I read a very strange and interesting article on the origins of the Santa Claus folklore. Check it out if you have time today. Thom Hartmann at Raw Story: The hidden shamanic history of Santa Claus.
When Louise and I lived in Germany, Herr Mueller led us up a mountainside deep into the Franconian forest on this night where they had covered a pine tree with candles: we sang carols and he read aloud a bible verse. He later told me that in ancient times the shamans would set the tallest tree afire to re-ignite the sun and bring back longer days.
Arctic shamans, around this time of the year, would leave batches of dried amanita mushrooms out in the snow for the hungry reindeer, then follow them as they danced and played, gathering the fresh yellow snow to make into a holiday grog.For millennia across the European arctic circle around the North Pole, from Scandinavia through Siberia, indigenous shamans sought out red-and-white mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and dried them in socks hanging from their fireplaces.
The mushrooms contain a powerful psychedelic, Muscimol, but are also laced with compounds poisonous to humans. Reindeer, however, love to eat these mushrooms and, when they do, they behave oddly, as if their names were Dancer and Prancer.
Their reindeer livers metabolize and thus neutralize the compounds that poison humans, but leave the psychedelic Muscimol largely untouched. Thus, reindeer urine on fresh snow is powerfully psychedelic.
The shamans then collected the “yellow snow” and used it to get high.
This was also the time of the year that the father of gods in Norse religion, the long-white-bearded Odin, would ride his eight-legged horse Sleipnir (“sleigh-nir”), bringing good people small gifts made by “Odin’s men” in Asgard, his arctic retreat. The story seems to have morphed as it traveled out of Norway from men to elves, and from eight legs to eight reindeer.
Shamans and their communities would light their pine trees with candles, put the north star (the axis around which the world revolves) atop their trees, and consume their yellow-snow drinks on the darkest nights.Odin controlled the powers of Thunder and Lightning, “Donner” and “Blitzen” in ancient Norse and today’s Germanic and Scandinavian languages.
The reindeer’s favorite food, the amanita mushrooms, look like the shamans dressed, red with white trim and white spots. They’re rotund: you could call them “chubby.”
They grow under pine trees because their mycorrhizae or fungal filaments that extend underground transport minerals from the soil into the roots of the pine trees, who return the favor by transporting carbohydrates from year-round photosynthesis in their needles back down through their roots into the mycorrhizae to nourish the mushrooms.
Amanitas are only found under pine and spruce trees because of this symbiotic relationship that keeps them both healthy. And to this day pine and spruce are pretty much the only trees we use to decorate our homes this time of year.
This yule time history was completely new to me.
Omicron is spoiling holiday celebrations for many people.
CNN Business: More than 5,000 flights canceled on Christmas weekend.
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Posted: December 23, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Afternoon!!
The latest scientific speculation on the Omicron variant of Covid-19 is that the disease will eventually become endemic like the flu and common cold. We’re not going to get rid of it; we’ll just have to learn to live (or die) with it. We will have to get regular vaccines and new anti-viral treatments will likely be developed.
From today’s Wall Street Journal and not paywalled: Covid-19 Marches Toward Endemic Status in U.S. as Omicron Spreads.
The Omicron variant’s aggressive advance is the latest twist in the course of a disease that public-health experts say is on a path toward becoming endemic in the U.S.
In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic won’t have an end date. Rather, a crisis that engulfed the world within months of the coronavirus’s discovery in China will dissipate in fits and starts into something that feels more like normal over the course of years, infectious-disease experts say.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a day where the whole thing feels over,” said Joshua Schiffer, an associate professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
How quickly an endemic, steady-state arrives and how disruptive the virus remains will depend on what level of disease officials and individuals decide to tolerate, the precautions they are willing to adopt, and how the virus evolves.
What will that look like?
“We know we have all the tools to use so that we can continue operations that are important, like keeping kids in school,” said Charity Dean, former assistant director of the California Department of Public Health and co-founder of the Public Health Company Group Inc. “We just need to be proactive and put them in place right now.”
New antiviral treatments from Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc. are also expected to help lessen Covid-19’s burden on society. On the outlook for vaccines, early lab testing indicates a third or booster dose of the vaccines from Moderna Inc. and from Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE could protect against Omicron. Testing and public-health monitoring are also critical.
“Once we have those really well integrated, we are ready to move to where Covid is no longer disrupting our society,” said Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Even then, Covid-19 and its effects won’t be gone. Physical therapist Noah Greenspan opened a rehabilitation clinic in New York City on Monday for patients with lingering Covid-19 symptoms, or long Covid. He had provided online services and a smaller, temporary clinic since October 2020.
“We are planning as if Covid will never go away,” Dr. Greenspan said.
One problem is that immunity from Covid-19 doesn’t last as long as that from colds and flu, so we might have to have more frequent shots. I wonder if the anti-vax crazies would continue to muck it all up though.
Israel is rolling out more booster shots.
From the Washington Post article:
TEL AVIV — Israel’s decision this week to become the first country to recommend a fourth vaccine dose to combat the highly contagious omicron variant came after health officials concluded that an initial booster had turned the tide this fall against the delta variant.
While they acknowledged that their decision was not based on new scientific data about the omicron variant, officials said they thought it would be prudent to recommend an additional shot because they believe that the ability of the initial booster to prevent infection has been waning over time.
The decision, announced by Israeli officials Tuesday, will make a fourth dose — or second booster — of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine available to people over 60, those with compromised immune systems and employees in the health-care sector. All eligible recipients would need to have had their third dose more than four months prior.
The decision is still awaiting confirmation by Health Ministry Director Nachman Ash before becoming national policy. But facilities across the country are preparing to begin administering the vaccine, with many saying they are ready to start as early as Sunday.
Israel’s national coronavirus advisory committee made its recommendation for the fourth dose Tuesday while still gathering data on the omicron variant, saying it does not have the luxury of time. The omicron variant is believed to be three times more transmissible than previous variants, and while it may be milder — it has not caused massive increases in hospitalizations in the United Kingdom, and infections have plummeted after a surge in South Africa — many Israeli health officials warn that an increase in even moderate cases could overwhelm the country’s hospitals.
In the U.S., only a small percentage of people have gotten the booster. CNBC: U.S. heads into second Christmas with Covid as cases rise and Americans rush to get booster shots.
More than 62 million Americans have received a booster as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, representing roughly 19% of all Americans and 30% of those who are fully vaccinated. About 55% of fully vaccinated seniors have received an additional dose.
Since the heavily mutated and highly contagious Covid variant was first confirmed in the U.S. on Dec. 1, the nation has seen some of its biggest daily surges in vaccine shots in months. Much of the increase has been driven by boosters, which are being administered more than first and second doses, combined, at an average of more than 800,000 per day over the week ended Dec. 16, according to federal data.
“It’s got over 50 mutations, and because of those mutations just being vaccinated with two doses may not be enough,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” on Monday. “And so we really do need people to get boosted in order to increase their protection, especially against severe disease and death with omicron.”
I really hate to post this . . .
https://twitter.com/gregggonsalves/status/1473758973778173955?s=20
WaPo: “Gregg Gonsalves is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and associate professor (adjunct) at Yale Law School. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.” [He is also a long-time activist in the fight against AIDS.]
I’ve lived through two pandemics in my lifetime, first AIDS and now covid-19. From those experiences, I know no one roots for our leaders’ failures in such crises. Their successes can be measured in lives saved.
That’s why it pains me to admit it: President Biden is failing on covid-19.
After weeks of urging by public health and medical experts, Biden spoke to the public on Tuesday about his plan to address the omicron variant, which has swept the world in just a few weeks. Many of us have been asking for a policy “reset” to ramp up U.S. efforts as cases mount across the country. We hoped this would be the moment.
Sadly, what we saw this week was an administration floundering and a president not in command of facts or willing to shift course in any substantial way on the pandemic.
The president’s main call was for Americans to get vaccinated. That’s a fine refrain, except we still have millions without a single jab. The president was eager to point out that under his watch, 200 million people were fully vaccinated — except we know now that we require boosters to protect against omicron and only about 60 million Americans have had that additional jab.
Biden did indeed urge people to get boosted, saying they were free and available, but except for announcing a set of pop-up clinics around the United States, he didn’t articulate the plan to get this done. As for vaccine misinformation, he told its purveyors to “stop it,” which is far from the campaign we need to address the anti-vaccine propaganda circulating widely in the United States and the corporate reticence to take vaccination seriously.
We already know vaccines alone will not solve this problem. The president made a bet in March that vaccination could return the country to some semblance of normalcy, promising a “summer of freedom.” But as the delta variant emerged, the highly transmissible strain tore through the country, outpacing the speed of our vaccination efforts.
Public health experts called for more emphasis on a wider range of interventions, including rapid testing, masking and environmental controls, such as the upgrading of ventilation systems in buildings across the country. Yet such measures remain underutilized here in the United States. White House press secretary Jen Psaki even scorned those who suggested making rapid testing more widely available, dressing down an NPR reporter who made a suggestion of sending tests to every American household.
To its credit, the administration has since announced it would begin to send 500 million rapid tests to Americans in January, although it’s not clear whether the administration has put in an order for such tests. And at the scale promised, every American would receive a one-time delivery of no more than a single test at some point this winter. The president also claimed that schools need to be open and they are safer than ever, pointing out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now endorsed a “test and stay” strategy to make this possible. Except, the infrastructure and resources to carry out that strategy are simply not there for many school districts.
The shortage of tests comes as Americans want to know whether they are infected during the holiday season. Credit…Saul Martinez for The New York Times
In fact, the administration has not ordered the tests yet. The New York Times: Biden Promised 500 Million Tests, but Americans Will Have to Wait.
President Biden promised Americans he is making 500 million coronavirus tests available free of charge, but help is at least weeks away — if not longer — for anxious Americans facing a surge of new virus cases.
Mr. Biden’s administration has not yet signed a contract to buy the tests, and the website to order them will not be up until January. Officials have not said how many tests people will be able to order or how quickly they will be shipped once they begin to be available next month. Manufacturers say they are already producing tests as fast as they can.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden excoriated the lack of testing during the Trump administration, saying in March 2020 that “the administration’s failure on testing is colossal, and it’s a failure of planning, leadership and execution.” But the Omicron variant caught the White House off guard, as the president has acknowledged, and cases have far outstripped the government’s ability to make tests available.
The president’s pledge of a half-billion tests on Tuesday was the centerpiece of a newly aggressive testing effort, announced just days before Christmas, as Americans try to find the hard-to-find tests so they know whether they are infected during the holiday season.
“That’s not a plan — it’s a hope,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which tracks testing trends. “If those tests came in January and February, that could have an impact, but if they are spread out over 10 to 12 months, I’m not sure what kind of impact it is going to have.”
Contracts to purchase tests could be finalized as soon as next week, officials said.
Whether testing manufacturers can now ramp up to produce an extra 500 million at-home tests — and how soon — is unclear. John M. Koval, a spokesman for Abbott Laboratories, a major manufacturer of rapid at-home antigen tests, said in an email message that the company is seeing “unprecedented demand” for its tests, “and we’re sending them out as fast as we can make them.”
More News stories to check out:
Helaine Olen at The Washington Post: Stop shaming people for getting covid. Blame belongs elsewhere.
Vice News: People Got Sick at a Conspiracy Conference. They’re Sure It’s Anthrax. [It’s Covid.]
CNN: Biden says he supports filibuster carve-out for voting rights.
AP News: He wore a wire, risked his life to expose who was in the KKK. [He learned that many members of the KKK were in law enforcement.]
Lawrence H. Tribe, Donald Ayer, and Dennis Aftergut at The New York Times: Will Donald Trump Get Away With Inciting an Insurrection?
The Daily Beast: The Obscure Charge Jan. 6 Investigators Are Looking at for Trump.
Just Security: The Path to Real Accountability: The Timetable and Track Record of the Jan. 6 Select Committee.
The Washington Post: Amid fears Russia will invade Ukraine, Putin points finger at U.S. and NATO in marathon news conference.
What’s on your mind today? Any good news you’d like to share?
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Posted: December 21, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Winter Landscape on the Banks of the Seine, Henri Matisse
Happy Winter Solstice!!
When will there be good news? I feel as if I’m living in the apocalypse. In just a couple of weeks, the latest Covid-19 variant has become dominant in the U.S. Once again, new cases are rapidly rising even in fully vaccinated and boosted people. Hospitals are running out of beds and health care workers are overworked and exhausted. Democrats are in grave danger of losing the House and possibly the Senate to Republicans who have lost touch with reality. And, as we all know, Joe Manchin has dashed Democrats’ hope of passing a bill that would have made everything better for Americans who aren’t in the top 1 percent. Can you tell I’m discouraged? Here’s what’s happening:
Covid-19, Omicron Variant
AP News: Omicron sweeps across nation, now 73% of new US COVID cases.
Omicron has raced ahead of other variants and is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the U.S., accounting for 73% of new infections last week, federal health officials said Monday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in omicron’s share of infections in only one week.
In much of the country, it’s even higher. Omicron is responsible for an estimated 90% or more of new infections in the New York area, the Southeast, the industrial Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. The national rate suggests that more than 650,000 omicron infections occurred in the U.S. last week.
Since the end of June, the delta variant had been the main version causing U.S. infections. As recently as the end of November, more than 99.5% of coronaviruses were delta, according to CDC data.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the new numbers reflect the kind of growth seen in other countries….
Paul Gaugin Winter Landscape,
Much about the omicron variant remains unknown, including whether it causes more or less severe illness. Early studies suggest the vaccinated will need a booster shot for the best chance at preventing omicron infection but even without the extra dose, vaccination still should offer strong protection against severe illness and death.
“All of us have a date with omicron,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “If you’re going to interact with society, if you’re going to have any type of life, omicron will be something you encounter, and the best way you can encounter this is to be fully vaccinated.”
Craig Spencer at The Atlantic: Omicron Will Overwhelm America’s Emergency Rooms. Hospitals are already strained and many health-care workers have little left to give.
Like most of my colleagues, I haven’t arrived at this moment unscathed. I weathered the brutal first wave of the pandemic, often witnessing more COVID deaths during my shifts in New York City than I saw working in an Ebola-treatment center in West Africa in 2014.
When I was vaccinated against COVID a year ago, I was already exhausted. But better times seemed close at hand. Perhaps soon we wouldn’t have to endure wearing full personal protective equipment for hours on end. I was wrong.
After two years of dealing with this virus—working extra shifts, watching families sob on grainy FaceTime calls while their loved ones slipped away—many health-care workers are already in a dark place. With a new wave of COVID upon us, we face this grim truth: You can’t surge a circuit that’s been burned out. For frontline providers, there’s simply no new fuse that can fix the fact that we’re fried.
Edvard Munch, Snow Falling in the Lane
Many people are holding out hope for the possibility that the Omicron variant may cause less severe disease. But this is little comfort for those worried about our hospitals and the people who work there: A large surge of even a more mild variant will still produce more patients than our already maxed-out system can handle. Moreover, doctors and nurses will themselves get sick.
The looming tidal wave of Omicron cases comes at an already challenging time for emergency departments across the U.S. The Delta wave never fully subsided, and a lot of ERs are already attending to too many COVID patients. Also making things worse: Emergency-room visits are up for non-COVID illness as well, in part because people have postponed some routine medical care throughout the pandemic. As a result, we head into winter with emergency rooms across the country overwhelmed and over capacity.
Here in Massachusetts, Governor Baker has issued a new mask advisory and activated 500 National Guard members to aid hospitals. He has also asked hospitals to cancel all elective surgeries. He said he won’t issue a mask mandate and says schools must stay open.
ABC News: Biden to announce plan to mail 500 million free rapid tests to Americans next month.
President Joe Biden will announce a plan on Tuesday to distribute 500 million free at-home rapid tests to Americans beginning in January as part of an attempt to double down on the spread of a transmissible variant that has hit the U.S. distressingly close to the holidays.
Biden’s new efforts come as the omicron variant became the most dominant COVID strain in the country Monday, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all cases, and just as travel kicks off at nearly pre-pandemic levels for the holiday season.
Sleigh Ride, Winslow Homer
The free at-home rapid tests will be delivered by mail to Americans who request them, a senior administration official told reporters on Monday night in a preview of the speech, marking a slightly different approach from European countries that chose to send tests to all residents.
Americans will have to request the tests through a website that will launch in January, the official said, and its not yet clear how many tests Americans will be able to request per household.
Danger Ahead from the Trumpist Party
Doug Sosnik at The Washington Post: Opinion: As the GOP sheds its moderates, a whirlwind approaches.
We don’t need to wait for the results of next year’s midterm elections to know that a political shock wave is headed toward Washington. The early tremors are already detectable.
Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party will soon be complete, and what had previously been a fringe element within the GOP will emerge fully in control. The two big lies — that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was not serious enough to merit an investigation — are no longer considered radical inside the GOP.
Republicans can be expected to take over the House of Representatives after the midterm elections — most likely by a considerable margin. Trump already dominates the GOP at the state and local levels, and with the notable exceptions of Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), has a vice-like grip on Republican House members. Even if Trump does not run in 2024, his views and policies now represent mainstream Republican thinking.
And even if the Democrats maintain their narrow grip on the Senate, what is left of the reasonable wing of the Republican Senate is about to disappear. The Republican half of the Senate is on the brink of a new, and irresponsible, era. The 2022 election will cement the trend.
Richard von Drasche-Wartinberg, In Deep Winter
The Senate Republican Caucus has been the last remaining guardrail preventing Trump’s complete takeover of the Republican Party. That is about to change. There are five senators from what passes for the “governing wing” of the Republican Party who have announced their retirements: Richard C. Shelby (Alabama), Roy Blunt (Missouri), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Patrick J. Toomey (Pennsylvania). Because Trump carried all but one of these states (Pennsylvania) in 2020, it is a safe bet all these men will be replaced by more Trump acolytes. In each of these states, the Republican primary has been a referendum on which candidate is most similar to Trump.
It is only because of some of the soon-departing establishment Republicans — and a small handful of others — that President Biden got a hard infrastructure bill on his desk and an increase in the debt ceiling while at the same time allowing the government to remain open.
Because they control the redistricting process in most states, Republicans have been busy redrawing maps and packing swing districts to provide them with more conservative voters. Since winning a Republican congressional primary is tantamount to winning the general election, the GOP will have spent 2021 creating the conditions that will push the party even further to the right.
If you can bear it, three examples of what GOP crazies are up to:
Dana Millbank at The Washington Post: Sarah Palin’s anti-vax talk shows Republicans have become a death cult.
The Daily Beast: Anti-Vaxxer Crowds Are Now Attacking Cheesecake Factories, REIs, and Panera Bread.
The Daily Beast: Dallas QAnon ‘Cult’ Is Now Drinking Terrifying Chemical Cocktail, Family Says.
The Manchin Problem
Evan Osnos at The New Yorker: West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On?
The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive. To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.
Peter Doig’s Cobourg 3 + 1 More (1994)
If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.
Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak. After he persuaded the Biden Administration to drop from the bill the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the centerpiece of efforts to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, climate protesters surrounded Manchin’s silver Maserati.
Jim McKay, the director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that lobbied Manchin to support the bill, told me that the senator was “conspicuously absent” from “personal meetings with West Virginia families.” McKay said, “Unfortunately, while his staff did have some meetings—which we are thankful to have had—personal contacts with Senator Manchin were extremely limited.” Dodging uncomfortable meetings is not unique in politics, but the accusation carries a special sting for Manchin, whose status as a Democrat in a red state makes him especially keen to project an image of a man who refuses to “go Washington.” McKay said, “I look forward to when Senator Manchin reconnects with average people.”
Read more from West Virginians at CNN: Coal miners want Joe Manchin to reverse opposition to Build Back Better.
The Washington Post on Manchin’s final offer to Biden: Manchin’s private offer to Biden included pre-K, climate money, Obamacare — but excluded child benefit.
Sen. Joe Manchin III last week made the White House a concrete counteroffer for its spending bill, saying he would accept a $1.8 trillion package that included universal prekindergarten for 10 years, an expansion of Obamacare and hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change, three people familiar with the matter said.
But the West Virginia Democrat’s counteroffer excluded an extension of the expanded child tax credit the administration has seen as a cornerstone of President Biden’s economic legacy, the people said, an omission difficult for the White House to accept in the high-stakes negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door deliberations.
Manchin’s private proposal to the White House — the details of which have not been previously reported — was made just days before a spectacular public collapse in negotiations between the White House and the senator, marked by bitter and personal recriminations that left the status of the talks unclear.
The White House was weighing how to respond to Manchin’s proposal last week when on Sunday he told Fox News that he would be unable to support the current version of Democrats’ Build Back Better agenda.
Why does Manchin hate children? More details at the link.
The Washington Post: Liberal lawmakers don’t want to talk about scaling back their ambitions to revive some of what Joe Manchin killed.
Liberals are furious.
Their hopes of enacting an expansive domestic policy bill focused on health care, education and climate change have been dashed. They blame Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), arguing he failed to keep his word to negotiate in good faith with the White House before announcing his opposition to the package on “Fox News Sunday.”
And they are in no mood, at the moment, to think about scaling back their policy ambitions in hopes of getting some part of what they want into law following Manchin’s proclamation that he “can’t get there” on President Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal.
“Why do we have to acquiesce to what members of another party think we should be doing, what so called moderates think we should be doing, what so called independents think we should be doing? All of that represents a status quo,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). “Our status quo is rooted in racism, sexism and classism, and us not passing Build Back Better or scaling it back dramatically, even more so than has already been done, is going to disproportionately harm people of color, women, the poor, children and seniors.”
The intense frustration emanating from the most liberal members of Congress adds an extra layer of complication for the White House and Democratic leaders who are scrambling to find a path forward to save some of the roughly $2 trillion domestic policy bill Manchin torpedoed over the weekend.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m sorry I can’t be more upbeat about what’s happening. I can’t give up hope, but I’m exhausted by it all. I don’t know what I would do without all of you Sky Dancers!
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Posted: December 18, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: 2024 Elections, Ali Alexander, caturday, Civil War, coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19, January 6 insurrection, Omicron variant, Rick Perry, U.S. Military |
By Pat Matticchio
Good Afternoon!!
I’m beginning to accept that we are never going to return to “normal.” After 6 years of dealing with Trump and his domination of the Republican party, after 2 long years of Covid-19 and the loss of more than 800,000 lives, we now face the threat of losing our democracy as we deal with a new Covid variant that is already spreading rapidly and is likely to kill many more Americans. And I haven’t even touched on the dangers we face from climate change.
On the threats to U.S. democracy:
The Washington Post: Opinion: 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection, by Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba, and Steven M. Anderson
As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we — all of us former senior military officials — are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.
In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.
One of our military’s strengths is that it draws from our diverse population. It is a collection of individuals, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. But without constant maintenance, the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown is very real.
Le Chat Van Gogh by Toni Goffe
The signs of potential turmoil in our armed forces are there. On Jan. 6, a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military took part in the attack on the Capitol. More than 1 in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record. A group of 124 retired military officials, under the name “Flag Officers 4 America,” released a letter echoing Donald Trump’s false attacks on the legitimacy of our elections.
Recently, and perhaps more worrying, Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, the commanding general of the Oklahoma National Guard, refused an order from President Biden mandating that all National Guard members be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Mancino claimed that while the Oklahoma Guard is not federally mobilized, his commander in chief is the Republican governor of the state, not the president.
The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed.
Please go read the rest at the WaPo.
Molly Jong-Fast at The Atlantic: How Do You Get People to Care About Democracy? The preservation of Democracy shouldn’t be a partisan activity.
Every time the January 6 committee holds a hearing, it seems clearer and clearer that Donald Trump was trying to keep control over the government after losing reelection. The past week alone produced the “how to coup” PowerPoint, widely circulated in Trumpworld, and a slew of text messages, including this sorry we weren’t able to pull off a coup note from an unidentified lawmaker to Mark Meadows: “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.” It’s pretty clear what Trump was up to: trying to reinstall himself as president and end American democracy as we know it.
Trump’s crew surely knew how bad the events of January 6 were even as they were unfolding. “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home … he is destroying his legacy,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote to Mark Meadows in a text message read by Republican Representative Liz Cheney during the opening statements of the Jan 6 committee meeting on Monday night. A range of journalists sent similar messages. Actual reporter Jake Sherman—who had been stuck in the Capitol during the riot, and who released his texts with Meadows “out of transparency”—wrote, “Do something for us. We are under siege in the [Capitol].” Another “journalist” exchanging texts with Meadows at the time: Fox propagandist Sean Hannity, who wrote, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”
We are not alone, Greeting card by Alison Friend
It’s a long piece, but here’s the conclusion:
But how you safeguard democracy when only one party supports it is a riddle. How do Democrats permeate the Fox and Facebook anti-fact chamber, which paints Trump as the real victim of the insurrection he helped instigate?
I don’t know how you get Republicans to see past this election, to understand that losing democracy is about more than just a win for their guy. Some members of the mainstream media have been defensive, saying they aren’t covering the threat to democracy because lawmakers aren’t talking about it. But here’s the thing: It’s the media’s job to make people care, to highlight the stories that matter. We don’t look to elected officials to tell us what to write about. We journalists may be the bulwark that keeps America from resembling Hungary or Turkey in a few years. Keeping democracy shouldn’t be a partisan fight, but it is, and perhaps that’s the most damning thing of all.
Okay, then how do we get the most powerful newspaper–The New York Times–to care about democracy?
About that text to Meadows expressing sorrow that the coup failed? It appears to have come from Rick Perry’s phone. CNN: Exclusive: Jan 6 investigators believe Nov. 4 text pushing ‘strategy’ to undermine election came from Rick Perry.
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Posted: December 16, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because, morning reads | Tags: bell hooks, coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19, feminism, January 6 investigation, Omicron variant |
Good Morning!!
Yesterday we lost bell hooks (born Gloria Watkins), feminist theorist, poet, and activist.
I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read her work, but I was impressed by what I read about hooks this morning. Dakinikat was inspired by her, so perhaps she will share her thoughts today and/or tomorrow.
Lucy Knight at The Guardian: bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, has died aged 69.
Her niece Ebony Motley tweeted: “The family of @bellhooks is sad to announce the passing of our sister, aunt, great aunt and great great aunt.”
She also attached a statement, which said that “the family of Gloria Jean Watkins is deeply saddened at the passing of our beloved sister on December 15, 2021. The family honored her request to transition at home with family and friends by her side.”
The author, professor and activist was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, and published more than 30 books in her lifetime, covering topics including race, feminism, capitalism and intersectionality.
She adopted her maternal great-grandmother’s name as a pen name, since she so admired her, but used lowercase letters to distinguish herself from her family member. hooks’ first major work, Ain’t I a Woman?, was published in 1981, and became widely recognised as an important feminist text. It was named one of the 20 most influential women’s books in the last 20 years by Publishers Weekly in 1992.
She went on to write Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center in 1984, All About Love: New Visions in 2000 and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity in 2004, continuing to draw on themes of feminism, race, love and gender.
Since 2004, she taught at Berea College in Kentucky, a liberal arts college that offers free tuition.
In 2016 hooks wrote in the Guardian that Beyoncé’s album Lemonade was “capitalist money-making at its best”, but criticised the notion of “freedom” depicted in the lyrics. “To truly be free,” wrote hooks, “we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy.”
“I want my work to be about healing,” she said in 2018 when she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers’ Hall of Fame. “I am a fortunate writer because every day of my life practically I get a letter, a phone call from someone who tells me how my work has transformed their life.”
From The Literary Hub:
hooks’s first published work of theory, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, was published when she was 29 but written when she was an undergraduate, launching a four-decade-long career of writing and teaching, with a focus on classroom accessibility. hooks’s extensive body of scholarship and poetry—that remains and will continue to remain relevant—was consistent in its generosity, emphasizing the importance of loving communities to challenging systemic inequalities. Hooks believed a “militant commitment to feminism” was not at all at odds with joy and humor; in fact, that love “is the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact.” As she told The New York Times in 2015,
“We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humorless, they fail. Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community. For example, I love to be in conversation with Cornel West. We always go high and we go low, and we always bring the joyful humor in. The last talk he and I gave together, many people were upset because we were silly together. But I consider it a high holy calling that we can be humorous together. How many times do we see an African-American man and an African-American woman talking together, critiquing one another, and yet having delicious, humorous delight? It’s a miracle.”
hooks’s family said contributions and memorials can be made to the Christian County Literacy Council, which promotes reading for children, or the Museums of Historic Hopkinsville Christian County, where a biographical exhibit is on display.
From the New Yorker piece:
I came to her work in the mid-nineties, during a fertile era of Black cultural studies, when it felt like your typical alternative weekly or independent magazine was as rigorous as an academic monograph. For hooks, writing in the public sphere was just an application of her mind to a more immediate concern, whether her subject was Madonna, Spike Lee, or, in one memorably withering piece, Larry Clark’s “Kids.” She was writing at a time when the serious study of culture—mining for subtexts, sifting for clues—was still a scrappy undertaking. As an Asian American reader, I was enamored with how critics like hooks drew on their own backgrounds and friendships, not to flatten their lives into something relatably universal but to remind us how we all index a vast, often contradictory array of tastes and experiences. Her criticism suggested a pulsing, tireless brain trying to make sense of how a work of art made her feel. She modelled an intellect: following the distant echoes of white supremacy and Black resistance over time and pinpointing their legacies in the works of Quentin Tarantino or Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale.”
Yet her work—books such as “Reel to Real” or “Art on My Mind,” which have survived decades of rereadings and underlinings—also modelled how to simply live and breathe in the world. She was zealous in her praise—especially when it came to Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” a film referenced countless times in her work—and she never lost grasp of how it feels to be awestruck while standing before a stirring work of art. She couldn’t deny the excitement as the lights dim and we prepare to surrender to the performance. But she made demands on the world. She believed criticism came from a place of love, a desire for things worthy of losing ourselves to….
This has been a particularly trying time for critics who came of age in the eighties and nineties, as giants like hooks, Greg Tate, and Dave Hickey have passed. hooks was a brilliant, tough critic—no doubt her death will inspire many revisitations of works like “Ain’t I a Woman,” “Black Looks,” or “Outlaw Culture.” Yet she was also a dazzling memoirist and poet. In 1982, she published a poem titled “in the matter of the egyptians” in Hambone, a journal she worked on with her then partner, Nathaniel Mackey. It reads:
ancestral bodies
buried in sand
sun treasured flowers
press in a memory book
they pass through loss
and come to this still tenderness
swept clean by scarce winds
surfacing in the watery passage
beyond death
I enjoyed reading this piece from 2019 by Min Jin Lee in The New York Times: In Praise of bell hooks.
In 1987, I was a sophomore at Yale. I’d been in the United States for 11 years, and although I was a history major, I wanted to read novels again. I signed up for “Introduction to African-American Literature,” which was taught by Gloria Watkins, an assistant professor in the English department, and she was such a wonderful teacher that I signed up for her other class, “Black Women and Their Fiction.”
Gloria — as we were allowed to address her in the classroom — had a slight figure with elegant wrists that peeked out of her tunic sweater sleeves. She was soft-spoken with a faint Southern accent, which I attributed to her birthplace, Hopkinsville, Ky. She was in her mid-30s then but looked much younger. Large, horn-rimmed glasses framed the open gaze of her genuinely curious mind. You knew her classes were special. The temperature in the room seemed to change in her presence because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. It wasn’t just school then. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again….
I was 19 when I took hooks’s classes, and I was just becoming a young feminist myself. I had begun my study of feminism with Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among other white women, and perhaps, because I was foreign-born — rightly or wrongly — I had not expected that people like me would be included in their vision of feminist liberation. Women and men of Asian ethnicities are so often neglected, excluded and marginalized in the Western academy, so as a college student I’d no doubt internalized my alleged insignificance. bell hooks changed my limited perception.
Her book of theory taught me to ask for more from art, literature, media, politics and history — and for me, a Korean girl who had been born in a divided nation once led by kings, colonizers, then a succession of presidents who were more or less dictators, and for millenniums, that had enforced rigid class systems with slaves and serfs until the early 20th century, and where women of all classes were deeply oppressed and brutalized, I needed to see that the movement had a space for me.
What else is in the news? January 6 and the never ending pandemic.
January 6: Could it be that the investigation is really heating up?
David Rohde at The New Yorker: Is There a Smoking Gun in the January 6th Investigation?
William Saletan at Slate: The Chilling Lesson of Mark Meadows’ Text Messages.
The New York Times: Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/us/politics/trump-meadows-republicans-congress-jan-6.html
Kyle Cheney at Politico: The Jan. 6 puzzle piece that’s going largely ignored.
Kyle Cheney at Politico: Jan. 6 investigators mull whether Trump violated obstruction law.
CNN: Jim Jordan sent one of the texts revealed by January 6 committee.
The Washington Post: Role as Trump’s gatekeeper puts Meadows in legal jeopardy — and at odds with Trump.
Georgia Public Radio: Exclusive: More Georgia Secretary of State’s office officials interviewed by Jan. 6 committee.
The never ending pandemic
CNBC: Omicron symptoms could seem like a cold — but don’t underestimate this variant, experts warn.
AP via KTLA: U.S. faces a double coronavirus surge as omicron variant advances.
Ian Bogost at The Atlantic: I’m Starting to Give Up on Post-pandemic Life.
Yasmin Tayag at The Atlantic: Don’t Be Surprised When You Get Omicron.
Ed Yong at The Atlantic: America Is Not Ready for Omicron. The new variant poses a far graver threat at the collective level than the individual one—the kind of test that the U.S. has repeatedly failed.
Have courage and enjoy the present moment. There’s no telling what will happen next.
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Operational snags at airlines are coming as millions are still flying in spite of rising coronavirus cases. The TSA says it screened 2.19 million people at airports across the country on Thursday, the highest figure since the uptick in holiday travel started a week ago.
Now, health experts say the roughly 15 percent of the adult population that remains stubbornly unvaccinated is at the greatest risk of severe illness and death from the Omicron variant, and could overwhelm hospitals that are already brimming with Covid patients. In Cleveland, where Omicron cases are soaring, a hospital unit at the Cleveland Clinic that provides life support to the sickest patients is already completely full.
But people are not petri dishes or lab animals, and while molnupiravir works to some extent, it has not worked very well in covid-19 patients. Specifically, molnupiravir 
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