There was a pretty huge job fair in New Orleans this week alongside a first visit by President Biden to check out our dilapidated Sewage and Water infrastructure. Our covid-19 cases have dropped and it’s a rare day when I see a death among the new case numbers. It seems we should be recovering a bit more robustly.
We have eased some of our restrictions and there are inklings of brass bands returning to the streets to perform in distanced, open-air spaces. However, the last few weekends of music I heard was the thumping of the worst of the worst from an ongoing illegal rave party at an abandoned gas station at the abandoned Navy Base. Last night, it went on until sunrise. That kind of represents a type of Post Trump Dystopia Nightmare still lingering.
Bacchus dance, Andre Derain, 1906
Yes, Raves are so 1990s but for some reason, they’re back! I noticed that some Chinese Space debris is supposed to fall to earth today and I can’t help but wonder if I can psychically move the falling debris to take out that spot on the Mississippi so it can be reinhabited by something other than humans with opioid issues. That seems appropriately Post Trump Dystopian Nightmarish also.
The economy is actually doing gangbusters despite the somewhat dismal unemployment numbers released today. The Investment class should be quite happy with market performance. Something is still stuck somewhere. Frankly, I think that as a nation, we’re all just tired. I would like to add that American women are both tired and fed up so getting back to the old frantic normal seems less appealing all the time. Why does the American normal always wear a lot of us out?
No two ways about it: The April jobs report was extremely disappointing. And it’s likely to heat up the debate, now preoccupying the White House, over whether government policy might be subtly discouraging unemployed people from returning to work.
Economists and analysts had been expecting around a million jobs to be added on net in April, given the rising share of vaccinated Americans and relaxation of restrictions on business. Instead, employers created a measly 266,000 positions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Job growth for March was revised downward, too.
The size of the jobs deficit — the difference between how many jobs there are today vs. pre-pandemic — remains quite large, with employment in April still 8.2 million jobs, or 5.4 percent, below the peak from February 2020. If April’s hiring pace were to continue indefinitely, it would take 2½ more years before we regained all the jobs we had pre-covid (and we actually want more jobs than that, given population growth).
The disappointing numbers are almost certain to strengthen the narrative that there’s a labor shortage.
What do I mean by that? Unemployment is still elevated, at 6.1 percent in April compared with 3.5 percent in February 2020. So at first blush, that would suggest that there are still a lot of excess workers needing jobs. For about a month, though, a debate has been raging about whether there are too few workers willing to accept the jobs on offer. Restaurants and other small businesses have complained about their inability to hire, which is being disproportionately blamed on (depending on your politics) either Big Government’s too-generous unemployment benefits, or stingy employers’ reluctance to raise wages.
The industry that has been complaining the loudest about an inability to find workers, accommodation and food services (think hotels, restaurants, bars, etc.), accounted for nearly all of the hiring in April — 241,400 new jobs. This might suggest that their complaints are much ado about nothing.
Again, my friend Aine’s analysis of her experience here fits in with that narrative. Most of the employers at the fair were hotels, restaurants, and your usual array of dreary, hard, low paying service jobs. The Hilton Hotel is unionized but that’s not the norm around the outrageous right to work plantation mentality of the Republican Majority here who are now screaming that unemployment benefits, rent moratoriums, and Covid relief checks are keeping every one home.
Andre Derain The Promenade 1906
So, yes I’m an economist although I’m a financial economist and have minimal exposure to advanced labor economics. My narrative however is a bit more on the behavioral side.
We’re all than a bit more than worn out but the women who make up these types of jobs are more worn out and fed up than usual. We’ve born the brunt of both the Pandemic and the Trumpist regime. Exhaustion and a huge degree of being fed-up have depleted our enthusiasm to go out and be underpaid, underappreciated, and not supported for being mothers or caregivers of our elderly relatives. Yes. Joe has a plan for that. Do it now.
Her success with viewers is also a question of timing. The aftershocks of MeToo won’t wear off for many years, and still the stories keep coming. In the past month alone we heard of alleged abuses by Hollywood producer Scott Rudin, and the almost unbelievably novelistic horror of Blake Bailey, lauded biographer of Philip Roth, being the subject of multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, resulting in the book being hastily withdrawn.
We’ve had it. We’re done with it. Those years of Trump compulsively commenting on women’s looks, the intensity of demands made of women handling families and jobs throughout the pandemic, and the fact that women over 40 – particularly those in flannel and Timberlands – are still expected to remain largely invisible, have created a condition for this show to hit home. The absolute I’m-over-it energy of the heroine channels some broader snap in a willingness to go along with all this and a yearning for some reflection of how many are feeling.
It’s not even anger; much has been made of “female rage” in the past few years, but to my mind it’s more muted and long-suffering than that. It’s irritability, crossness, the oh-for-God’s-sake complete lack of surprise when the latest outrage comes along, with the occasional florid meltdown. In one scene, a middle-class character sensitively counsels Mare to open her heart to the daughter-in-law with whom she’s about to get locked in a custody battle. Instead, she storms over to her house, mocks her addiction, threatens to see her in court, then frames her for a crime she didn’t commit. I mean, it’s not ideal. But one appreciates a certain emotional truth.
There is, perhaps, one amusingly and I guess unavoidably false note in all this. Early on in the show, Mare meets a suave, middle-class character played by Guy Pierce, and reluctantly agrees to go out on a date with him. She throws on some makeup, finds a dress and a hairbrush, and – stepping out of her house – hey-ho, it’s Kate Winslet. Even that, I sense, we’ll give her. It goes badly; the guy’s a douche. She shrugs and goes home.
The Dancer,Andre Derain, c.1910
So, a lot of us have gone home for a while. Now, let me get back to a Brookings study last year on the impact of Women during the Covid-19 outbreak and shutdowns. It’s a grab bag of social sciences analyses by Nicole Bateman and Marth Ross: “Why has COVID-19 been especially harmful for working women?”
COVID-19 is hard on women because the U.S. economy is hard on women, and this virus excels at taking existing tensions and ratcheting them up. Millions of women were already supporting themselves and their families on meager wages before coronavirus-mitigation lockdowns sent unemployment rates skyrocketing and millions of jobs disappeared. And working mothers were already shouldering the majority of family caregiving responsibilities in the face of a childcare system that is wholly inadequate for a society in which most parents work outside the home. Of course, the disruptions to daycare centers, schools, and afterschool programs have been hard on working fathers, but evidence shows working mothers have taken on more of the resulting childcare responsibilities, and are more frequently reducing their hours or leaving their jobs entirely in response.
Problems facing women in the labor market have never been hidden, but they have been inconvenient to address because they are so entrenched in the basic operations of our economy and society. The low wages associated with “pink collar” occupations have long contributed to the feminization of poverty, and the chronic shortage of affordable, high-quality childcare reflects outdated notions of women’s societal roles, how the economy functions, and child development. COVID-19’s massive disruption to employment, childcare, and school routines has crippled the economy and pushed millions of women and families to the financial brink. This moment provides an important opening to rethink how policy supports women’s roles as financial providers and parents.
This is exactly the kind of plans that Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, and other women leaders have been pushing for years. These policy prescriptions have been adopted into the larger Biden-Harris policy efforts to promote better infrastructure. The Republicans, however, are dead set against all of it and are hellbent on institutionalizing Trumpism. We’re already seeing laws at state levels that courts already settled scuttling like bottom feeders towards a stacked Supreme Court. A huge number of these laws restrict the progress of women and minorities.
Don’t blame unemployment insurance for an inability to hire servers.
WTF is wrong w @henrymcmaster? There is NO evidence that the increased unemployment benefits have created a worker shortage. He is trying to force people to work by turning down federal $$$!
Instead of forcing people to take low paying jobs, increase the minimum wage to $15/HR! https://t.co/jONp34N9DW
At the time, millions of workers were losing their jobs every week, and nobody knew how bad things would get. But a few weeks after the initial lockdowns, businesses started recalling workers, millions returned to their jobs despite the extra benefits, and the jobless rate plunged. A spate of academic studies found the extra benefits weren’t stopping people from going back to work after all.
At $300 per week, the federal supplement is half what it was last year, but the criticism is twice as intense even though the previous doomsaying didn’t pan out.
“People get paid more not to work than to work,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told HuffPost, referring to the extra federal benefits. “Economists talk about that, but anecdotally, it’s clear.”
The unemployment complaint fits a broader Republican argument that Democrats under President Joe Biden are out to destroy the American work ethic with their proposals for new parent benefits and affordable child care.
“Think about what the Democrats have done,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House Republican leader, tweeted over the weekend. “They have demonized work so Americans would become dependent on big government.”
While some employers may be struggling to hire for one reason or another right now, economists say generous unemployment benefits are not the cause.
If demand for workers were exceeding supply, then the price of labor would be shooting up. But as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said last week, overall wage growth hasn’t increased. “We don’t see wages moving up yet, and presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market,” Powell said at a press conference. “And we may well start to see that.”
For now, unemployment remains elevated, at 6%, compared to 3.5% before the pandemic, and there were 4 million more unemployed people in March 2021 than in February 2020. That data reflects people who are trying to find jobs, not those who have removed themselves from the workforce for a number of reasons, like a lack of child care. Yet some business owners still say there are no willing workers out there.
Chef Andrew Gruel, owner of the Slapfish restaurant franchise, took to Twitter last week to declare “there are no employees available in California.” Gruel said his eateries were offering $21 per hour but couldn’t find any takers. The top reason? “They are making enough on unemployment and would rather not work.”
William Spriggs isn’t buying that. The chief economist at the AFL-CIO labor federation, Spriggs said it is “self-evident” that millions of people are trying to find work. Just because an employer hasn’t found them yet ― at the wages the employer is willing to pay ― doesn’t mean the workers aren’t out there.
Then, there’s this on the horizon. It’s also been the topic of the day among a lot of my friends that have not had the benefit of working at home like me. An economy–with lots of market-related rigidities–can be very slow on the rebound. Labor markets are notoriously rigid and sticky.
As landlords and tenants go broke across the U.S., the next crisis point of the pandemic approaches. https://t.co/7DHZB2Zcax
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 2, 2021
Estaque, Andre Derain, 1905
It’s not that I’m not excited about all the policies and traveling around that both Biden and Harris have done showing the need. I’m worried that if we don’t get it done now that the Republicans will come roaring back through voter suppression and more lies and we’ll be stuck, once again, in a place where everything and everyone has broken, while the money and the fun go to the very rich and powerful. Well, that and the homeless opioid rave unattended until something catches fire and the next one or dozen of them die from their addictions.
Meanwhile, the short-term Air Bnbs will bring tourists. The streets will still flood. I will still be working here with a half-ass internet connection for which I pay Cox a small fortune. I just don’t want to miss the opportunity we have at the moment and I’m all too familiar with the lessons of the first few Obama years. I don’t want a repeat.
So, sorry for being a bit of a Debbie Downer today but I just am beginning to see history repeat itself. The schadenfreude of broke and broken Guiliani is just not enough for the country. We’ve got to realize the Republicans are a lost cause still hanging on to the mentality of The Lost Cause. Move on without them!
Have a great weekend! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Gwen John (British painter, 1876-1939) Interior with Woman Sewing at Window and Cat
Good Afternoon!!
It’s the weekend, and we should be having fun even though we’re in the midst of a global pandemic with wars raging around the world and our democracy still in danger because one of our political parties has turned into a suicidal cult obsessed with conspiracy theories, led by a pathetic huckster who is rapidly sinking into dementia. So before I start on the news of the day, here’s a fun read at The New Yorker:
The article is long and involved, so there’s no way to summarize it with excerpts, but here’s just a taste:
The government may not have been in regular touch with exotic civilizations, but it had been keeping something from its citizens. By 2017, [Leslie] Kean was the author of a best-selling U.F.O. book and was known for what she has termed, borrowing from the political scientist Alexander Wendt, a “militantly agnostic” approach to the phenomenon. On December 16th of that year, in a front-page story in the Times, Kean, together with two Times journalists, revealed that the Pentagon had been running a surreptitious U.F.O. program for ten years. The article included two videos, recorded by the Navy, of what were being described in official channels as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or U.A.P. In blogs and on podcasts, ufologists began referring to “December, 2017” as shorthand for the moment the taboo began to lift. Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host, has often mentioned the article, praising Kean’s work as having precipitated a cultural shift. “It’s a dangerous subject for someone, because you’re open to ridicule,” he said, in an episode this spring. But now “you could say, ‘Listen, this is not something to be mocked anymore—there’s something to this.’ ”
Since then, high-level officials have publicly conceded their bewilderment about U.A.P. without shame or apology. Last July, Senator Marco Rubio, the former acting chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, spoke on CBS News about mysterious flying objects in restricted airspace. “We don’t know what it is,” he said, “and it isn’t ours.” In December, in a video interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, the former C.I.A. director John Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he didn’t quite know what to think: “Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
Mann mit Katze. Christoph Paudiss 1618 Private Collection
Last summer, David Norquist, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, announced the formal existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act, signed this past December, stipulated that the government had a hundred and eighty days to gather and analyze data from disparate agencies. Its report is expected in June….
Leslie Kean is a self-possessed woman with a sensible demeanor and a nimbus of curly graying hair. She lives alone in a light-filled corner apartment near the northern extreme of Manhattan, where, on the wall behind her desk, there is a framed black-and-white image that looks like a sonogram of a Frisbee. The photograph was given to her, along with chain-of-custody documentation, by contacts in the Costa Rican government; in her estimation, it is the finest image of a U.F.O. ever made public. The first time I visited, she wore a black blazer over a T-shirt advertising “The Phenomenon,” a documentary from 2020 with strikingly high production values in a genre known for grainy footage of dubious provenance. Kean is
stubborn but unassuming, and she tends to speak of the impact of “the Times story,” and the new cycle of U.F.O. attention it has inaugurated, as if she had not been its principal instigator. She told me, “When the New York Times story came out, there was this sense of ‘This is what the U.F.O. people have wanted forever.’ ”
Kean is always assiduously polite toward the “U.F.O. people,” although she stands apart from the ufological mainstream.
India posted a record daily rise of 401,993 new coronavirus cases on Saturday as the country opened up its massive vaccination drive to all adults, although several states warned of acute shortages.
It was the first time India’s daily case count had topped 400,000 after 10 consecutive days over 300,000. Deaths from Covid-19 jumped by 3,523 over the past 24 hours, taking the total toll in India to 211,853, according to official data.
The world’s biggest producer of Covid-19 vaccines has a limited number of shots available, worsening a grim second wave of infections that has overwhelmed hospitals and morgues while families scramble for scarce medicines and oxygen.
Hundreds of people were seen queuing to be vaccinated across Ahmedabad, the main commercial city in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, on Saturday.
Blaze at an Indian hospital Covid-19 ward kills 18
Eighteen people are dead after a fire broke out at a Covid-19 hospital ward in India’s Gujarat state in the early hours of Saturday.
Lillian Lancaster c. 1887-1973, The Boy and the Cat; Grundy Art Gallery
The fire broke out in the intensive care unit of the Welfare Hospital in the western state’s Bharuch district, according to Dr. MD Modiya, a senior district official.
According to Modiya, 16 of the dead were patients. Two were staff members.
Nearly 60 patients were in the hospital at the time of the fire, which broke out around 1 a.m. local time, he said. The remaining patients have been moved to nearby hospitals.
The cause of the fire is yet to be determined but initial investigations suggest a short circuit, according to Dr Modiya.
In a tweet on Saturday, Gujarat’s chief minister, Vijay Rupani, said two senior officers from the Indian Administrative Service have been dispatched to Bharuch to investigate the fire. The state government will open a judicial inquiry into the fire, he added.
In an earlier post, Rupani offered his condolences to the patients and staff at Welfare Hospital and offered $5,398 in compensation to the families of each of the victims.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also tweeted his condolences.
“Pained by the loss of lives due to a fire at a hospital in Bharuch,” he said. “Condolences to the bereaved families.”
Vaccine shortage halts rollout across two more Indian states
India’s southern states Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have become the latest to postpone Saturday’s planned national Covid-19 vaccination rollout, citing shortages of shots.
On Friday, Telangana’s Director of Public Health, Dr. G. Srinavasa Rao, tweeted that the state wouldn’t be vaccinating people over the weekend as it hadn’t received doses.
In neighboring Andhra Pradesh, officials have acknowledged that it was not “practically possible” to start vaccinating those over the age 18 due to limited stocks.
“If we need to fulfil the commitment to the former age group batch, it is definitely going to take all of May,” Anil Kumar Singhal, Andhra Pradesh’s Principal Health Secretary, told reporters on Friday.
At least seven states and territories are facing shortages that are impacting the planned vaccine rollout.
New Delhi — The first shipment of emergency medical aid supplies from the United States arrived in India on Friday as the country continued battling an explosion of coronavirus cases that has strained its health care system to breaking point. A U.S. military transport plane carrying more than 400 oxygen cylinders, nearly one million rapid coronavirus test kits and other supplies landed in Delhi on Friday morning.
But as mass vaccination centers were forced to close without any doses to stick in arms, and people continued to die without oxygen at jam-packed hospitals, the aid from the U.S. and other countries that’s started to pour in is like a Band-Aid for a severed leg….
“The United States stands with India as we fight the COVID-19 pandemic together,” said the U.S. Embassy in India in a tweet.
India’s External Affairs Ministry thanked the U.S. for the contributions, which were the first step toward fulfilling President Joe Biden’s pledge earlier this week to support India in its “time of need… Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic.”
Victims of India’s devastating COVID-19 surge are being cremated in parking lots, with one crematorium so overwhelmed that it has launched a ticketing system.
In the past two weeks, the number of new daily COVID-19 cases in India has repeatedly broken global records, with the country recording thousands of new deaths every day.
The staff at the Seemapuri crematorium in New Delhi recently erected several extra burning platforms in the parking lot to keep up with the staggering demand, CNN reported.
Cremation is the standard death rite in Hinduism, India’s dominant religion, and crematoriums are under intense pressure.
“Before the pandemic, we used to cremate eight to 10 people” a day, Jitender Singh Shunty, the head of the Seemapuri crematorium, told CNN. “Now, we are cremating 100 to 120 a day.”
Man with Cat, Candace Hunt
Madhukar Pai and Manu Prakash at The Washington Post: Opinion: India’s covid-19 crisis is a dire warning for all countries.
The covid-19 crisis in India is a massive setback for the entire world. The scale of the nation’s surge is a warning not only for its neighboring countries, which are also experiencing sharp increases in cases, but also for countries around the globe. If we do not heed this warning and work on vaccine equity, we risk a forever pandemic with long-term cycles of lockdowns, economic damage and constant fear.
India is reporting more than 380,000 cases and 3,500 deaths daily. Both are underestimates. The Indian health-care system is completely overwhelmed. It is impossible to find hospital beds. Supplies such as oxygen are incredibly scarce, and there is a huge backlog with diagnostic testing. Many people with sick family members and friends in India — including us — are checking in on them. This time around, younger people are sick and, as is always the case, the poor are hit the hardest.
India has 95,000 intensive care beds and 48,000 ventilators. By mid-May, it is projected that the country will need 340,000 beds and more than 700,000 ventilators. Rural India has few of these and is already hit hard. India needs the global community’s support to survive this crisis.
The devastating second wave in India is the result of a perfect storm: a failure to plan for a second wave; premature relaxation of public health measures; large gatherings; insufficient vaccination coverage; and newer variants such as B.1.1.7 and B.1.617 that are highly transmissible and potentially more severe.\India has 95,000 intensive care beds and 48,000 ventilators. By mid-May, it is projected that the country will need 340,000 beds and more than 700,000 ventilators. Rural India has few of these and is already hit hard. India needs the global community’s support to survive this crisis.\Even as India struggles to get the second wave under control, cases are surging among India’s neighbors, including Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. While the exact variant driving the new surges among India’s neighbors is unclear, the B.1.617 variant has already spread to more than 18 countries….
India has 95,000 intensive care beds and 48,000 ventilators. By mid-May, it is projected that the country will need 340,000 beds and more than 700,000 ventilators. Rural India has few of these and is already hit hard. India needs the global community’s support to survive this crisis.
Even as India struggles to get the second wave under control, cases are surging among India’s neighbors, including Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. While the exact variant driving the new surges among India’s neighbors is unclear, the B.1.617 variant has already spread to more than 18 countries.
Other countries in South Asia have far less resources and medical infrastructure compared with India. Nepal, for example, has 1,486 ICU beds and 634 ventilators , and Nepal’s health ministry is anticipating a need to treat 15,000 ICU patients by July. Bangladesh, home to 163 million people, has only 1,134 covid-19 ICU beds. Pakistan, the fifth-largest country in the world, has fewer than 4,000 ventilators. India’s neighbors can ill afford the kind of devastation India is experiencing.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
I’m running out of space, but I’ll end with some links to the latest on the huge–but fun for us–Rudy Giuliani story:
Andreas Jawlensky “Flower Still Life, Door Wing,” German Expressionism, Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) 1924
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I’ve been trying to find things to give us–well me–a bit of a pick me up because my last few trips to the doctor’s office keep reminding me that my body is not what it used to be at all. The headlines these days are bipolar. Even state and local news seems dependent on whether you live in the counterfactual reality of the Republicans or the pragmatic problem solving reality of independents and Democratic governments.
In the Matrix, taking the red pill means you’re willing to learn some unsettling truths. Taking the red path in the United States means you have to deny science, history, economics, and just about every intellectual endeavor known to mankind since we left the Dark Ages.
We had to take a lot of American History in my school district and at my university. This all occurred in Nebraska so I have no idea why entire swaths of people have forgotten a lot of its lessons. The frothy one–with the public voice of a nincompoop granted at CNN–has forgotten the entire American experience with indigenous peoples.
— Dr. Kat PhD. … not your kiddo, buddy🇺🇦🌻 (@Dakinikat) April 26, 2021
Moscow I (Red Square), 1916, Wassily Kandinsky
I was fortunate that my mother had a particular sensitivity to this and expected my sister and me to get a really good appreciation of the role genocide played in wiping out a lot of native culture. The missionaries and their schools played a huge role in that. The Trail of Tears played an even bigger role. Then there was the continuing westward movement that eventually started shrinking the number of safe, promised places granted to Indigenous nations. But, I would like to also offer this up. The Iroquois–one of the so-called ‘civilized’ tribes were quite influential on the actual “birth” of the nation. Even the use of the word “birth of a nation” is offensive. It’s not often you find such a prime example of racist slights to both indigenous and black Americans in one sentence.
I guess it’s just not any kind of thing worth recognizing unless a white guy does it. Plus, even if he doesn’t do it, he’ll take and get credit for it anyway.
On the surface, the Republican effort to roll back voting rights in Michigan looks similar to what’s happening in states around the country: after Donald Trump narrowly lost a key battleground state where there was record turnout, Republicans are moving swiftly to implement sweeping restrictions to curtail access to the ballot box.
But the effort is raising unique concerns. Even though the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is likely to veto a package of dozens of pending bills to curb voter access, Republicans are already hinting they will use a loophole to implement the measures anyway. They can take advantage of a quirk in Michigan’s law allowing voters to send a bill to the legislature if just over 340,000 voters sign a petition asking them to take it up. These kinds of bills cannot be vetoed by the governor.
“This effort is particularly anti-democratic, not just in substance, but in procedure,” said the Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who serves as the state’s top election official.
The proposals include measures that are breathtakingly restrictive, even when held up in comparison to other measures states are considering. One bill bans Michigan’s secretary of state not only from mailing out absentee ballot applications to all voters, but also blocks her from even providing a link on a state website to a mail-in ballot application. Another proposal does not allow voters to use absentee ballot drop boxes after 5pm the day before election day. A different measure would require voters to make a photocopy of their ID and mail it in to vote by mail.
The effort is being closely monitored in a state known for razor-thin elections and where Donald Trump and allies tried to overturn the result in 2020. Republicans are moving aggressively to put the new voting restrictions in place ahead of the 2022 elections, when there are races for governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Michigan also has several key swing congressional districts that will help determine who controls the US House of Representatives in Washington.
The radicalization manifests in myriad ways, most notably in Trump’s enduring popularity among Republicans. Trump’s loyalists have launched ferocious attacks against Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach him for his role in the insurrection, even as national Republicans eagerly position themselves as his heir. Right-wing media display growing fanaticism, while public-opinion polls show GOP voters embracing Trump’s lie that the election was stolen from him. The Republican Party’s illiberalism, its barely disguised nativism, and its white identity politics are resonating with extremist groups. Slate’s Will Saletan, in an article cataloging recent developments, summarized things this way: “The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.”
To better grasp what’s happening among 2020 Trump voters, I spoke with Sarah Longwell, a lifelong conservative and political strategist who is now the publisher of The Bulwark, a news and opinion website that is home to anti-Trump conservatives. She is also the founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, now the Republican Accountability Project.
Since 2018, Longwell has spent hundreds of hours speaking with and listening to Trump voters. From 2018 to 2020, she concentrated her attention on people who voted for Trump in 2016 but whose support was not locked in for 2020—many of them college-educated, suburban voters, mostly women who rated Trump’s performance as bad to very bad. Since Trump left office, she’s been using her focus groups to understand how his supporters’ views are changing.
Longwell has discovered that these voters, including many in Georgia who cast their ballots for Trump in November, have since grown more “Q curious”—she’s hearing more people talk positively about QAnon, a conspiracy theory that, among other things, posits the existence of a satanic pedophile cult run by top Democrats.
Prior to November 3, 2020, Longwell told me, “I almost never heard QAnon come up, except in a way that was derisive.” But postelection she’s had people “lean in and say, ‘I’m not saying I believe everything about Q. I’m not saying that the JFK-Jr.-is-alive stuff is real, but the deep-state pedophile ring is real.’” (The QAnon theory is that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his own death to become the group’s leader.) In Longwell’s words, “The deep-state/conspiracy/Hollywood pedophile ring, that is in there. I’m hearing that plenty.” She added, “It’s actually pretty Marjorie Taylor Greene–like.” (Greene, who represents Georgia’s Fourteenth District, has praised the conspiracy theory and subscribes to a number of its beliefs.)
As Longwell explained it to me, Trump supporters already believed that a “deep state”—an alleged secret network of nonelected government officials, a kind of hidden government within the legitimately elected government—has been working against Trump since before he was elected. “That’s already baked into the narrative,” she said. So it’s relatively easy for them to make the jump from believing that the deep state was behind the “Russia hoax” to thinking that in 2016 Hillary Clinton was involved in a child-sex-trafficking ring operating out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
In Oklahoma and Florida, Republicans have passed new laws making it legal for motorists to run over protesters, so long as they claim that they felt afraid of a “riot.” The laws are clearly meant to give cover to people who attack anti-racist protesters, a trend that started with Fields murdering Heyer but has spread rapidly on the right. Over the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, there were a whopping 104 incidents — including 8 by police — of motorists hitting protesters with cars. The 2017 video of Fields slamming his car into a crowd was a genuine shock, but similar images became sadly common in 2020. Now Republicans want to make it legal.
Such laws are part of a larger push to use violence and threats to silence anti-racism.
Meanwhile, on earth one, the focus is on the first 100 Days of the Biden/Harris administration and the upcoming speech before the nation and Congress. Most of the nation appears satisfied.
Biden's approval among Dems (90%) is 6 pts higher than Trump's among GOP (a smaller, shrunken party) 4 yrs ago. Biden's approval among indies, the largest group of voters, is 9 points higher than Trump 4 yrs ago.
Biden’s advantage is that he’s not just nice; he’s also tedious. He is relentlessly enacting an ambitious domestic agenda — signing legislation that could cut child poverty by more than half, expanding Obamacare, and injecting the economy with a stimulus more than twice the size of what Obama’s Congress passed in 2009 — while arousing hardly any controversy. There’s nothing in Biden’s vanilla-ice-cream bromides for his critics to hook on to. Republicans can’t stop Biden because he is boring them to death.
Biden’s strategy of boringness is a fascinating counterpoint to a career spent trying desperately to be interesting. Biden used to overshare, with frequently disastrous results that led him to accurately self-diagnose as a “gaffe machine.” Whether his advanced age has slowed him down or made him wiser, he has finally given up his attention-seeking impulse and embraced the opposite objective. Biden’s success is a product of the crucial yet little-appreciated insight that substantive advances don’t require massive public fights. The drama of inspiration and conflict is not only unnecessary to promote change but even, in certain circumstances, outright counterproductive.
This method runs contrary to the DNA of the political-activism industry and the news media, which look at politics as a war and judge each side by how well it mobilizes its troops for combat. It especially offends the sensibility of many progressives, who see popular mobilization as the highest form of political organization.
This moon gets its name from the pink early springtime blooms of the Phlox subulata plant, also called “moss pink.” It’s native to eastern North America.
Native American tribes across the United States have their own names for the moon, according to the Western Washington University Planetarium. Many of those names are also associated with springtime signs,including the melting of snow andthe return of geese after their journey south for winter. The Cherokee tribe of the East Coast calls it the “kawohni” or “flower moon,” and the Creek tribe of the Southeast refers to it as “tasahcee-rakko” or “big spring moon.”
You’ll get a good view of it tonight! Have a good week!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today??
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Things have been looking up for the U.S. now than we have a responsible, knowledgeable president with competent advisers. But we we’re still in danger as long as the worldwide pandemic rages in other countries. Right now India isin the spotlight. We also need to deal with the anti-vaxxers and the Trumpists who refuse to accept vaccines. We’re also still learning about the long-term effects of Covid-19 as well as how the disease is transmitted.
A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.
Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.
A New York Times analysis of U.S. death patterns for the past century shows how much 2020 deviated from the norm….
Since the 1918 pandemic, the country’s death rate has fallen steadily. But last year, the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted that trend, in spite of a century of improvements in medicine and public health.
Marcel Dyf Jeune Fille Avec Chaton The Kitten
In the first half of the 20th century, deaths were mainly dominated by infectious diseases. As medical advancements increased life expectancy, death rates also started to smooth out in the 1950s, and the mortality rate in recent decades — driven largely by chronic diseases — had continued to decline.
In 2020, however, the United States saw the largest single-year surge in the death rate since federal statistics became available. The rate increased 16 percent from 2019, even more than the 12 percent jump during the 1918 flu pandemic….
Combined with deaths in the first few months of this year, Covid-19 has now claimed more than half a million lives in the United States. The total number of Covid-19 deaths so far is on track to surpass the toll of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 nationwide.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 10 percent of the deaths last year can be directly attributed to Covid-19, which overtook other leading causes of death — like chronic lower respiratory diseases and unintentional injuries, such as car accidents and overdose deaths — to become the third biggest killer, after heart disease and cancer.
There have been fewer influenza cases in the United States this flu season than in any on record. About 2,000 cases have been recorded since late September, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In recent years, the average number of cases over the same period was about 206,000.
As measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus were implemented around the country in March 2020, influenza quickly disappeared, and it still has not returned. The latest flu season, which normally would have run until next month, essentially never happened.
After fears that a “twindemic” could batter the country, the absence of the flu was a much needed reprieve that eased the burden on an overwhelmed health care system. But the lack of exposure to the flu could also make the population more susceptible to the virus when it returns — and experts say its return is certain….
Experts are less certain about what will happen when the flu does return. In the coming months — as millions of people return to public transit, restaurants, schools and offices — influenza outbreaks could be more widespread than normal, they say, or could occur at unusual times of the year. But it’s also possible that the virus that returns is less dangerous, having not had the opportunity to evolve while it was on hiatus.
“We don’t really have a clue,” said Richard Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “We’re in uncharted territory. We haven’t had an influenza season this low, I think as long as we’ve been measuring it. So what the potential implications are is a bit unclear.”
The health effects of Covid-19 not only can stretch for months but appear to increase the risk of death and chronic medical conditions, even in people who were never sick enough to be hospitalized, a large new study finds.
In the study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, researchers looked at medical records of more than 73,000 people across the United States whose coronavirus infections did not require hospitalization. Between one and six months after becoming infected, those patients had a significantly greater risk of death — 60 percent higher — than people who had not been infected with the virus.
The research, based on records of patients in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system, also found that nonhospitalized Covid survivors had a 20 percent greater chance of needing outpatient medical care over those six months than people who had not contracted the coronavirus.
The Covid survivors experienced a vast array of long-term medical problems that they had never had before — not just lung issues from the respiratory effects of the virus, but symptoms that could affect virtually any organ system or part of the body, from neurological to cardiovascular to gastrointestinal. They were also at greater risk of mental health problems, including anxiety and sleep disorders.
Click the link to read more about the study results.
The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask, according to a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who challenge social distancing guidelines adopted across the world.
MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and John W.M. Bush, who teaches applied mathematics, developed a method of calculating exposure risk to Covid-19 in an indoor setting that factors in a variety of issues that could affect transmission, including the amount of time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunization, variant strains, mask use, and even respiratory activity such as breathing, eating, speaking or singing.
Bazant and Bush question long-held Covid-19 guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization in a peer-reviewed study published earlier this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.
“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the 6-foot rule, especially when people are wearing masks,” Bazant said in an interview. “It really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.”
Early Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, 1893-4, by Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938)
The important variable the CDC and the WHO have overlooked is the amount of time spent indoors, Bazant said. The longer someone is inside with an infected person, the greater the chance of transmission, he said.
Opening windows or installing new fans to keep the air moving could also be just as effective or more effective than spending large amounts of money on a new filtration system, he said.
Bazant also says that guidelines enforcing indoor occupancy caps are flawed. He said 20 people gathered inside for 1 minute is probably fine, but not over the course of several hours, he said.
“What our analysis continues to show is that many spaces that have been shut down in fact don’t need to be. Often times the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good,” Bazant said. “I think if you run the numbers, even right now for many types of spaces you’d find that there is not a need for occupancy restrictions.”
Clearly, we have a lot to learn about how the virus is spread.
India’s daily coronavirus death toll passed a new record Saturday as the government battled to get oxygen supplies to hospitals overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of new daily cases.
Queues of Covid-19 patients and their fearful relatives are building up outside hospitals in major cities across India, the new world pandemic hotspot, which has reported nearly a million new cases in three days.
Another 2,624 deaths, a new daily record, were reported in 24 hours, taking the official toll to nearly 190,000 since the pandemic started.
More than 340,000 new cases were also reported, taking India’s total to 16.5 million, second only to the United States.
But many experts are predicting the current wave will not peak for at least three weeks and that the real death and case numbers are much higher.
India reported 346,786 new cases of Covid-19 on Saturday — the third day in a row the country has set a world record for infections during the coronavirus pandemic, according to government and scientific tallies.
The related death toll for the previous 24 hours hit 2,624 — also a daily record for India — for 189,544 total fatalities.
The sky-rocketing Covid-19 infections are devastating India’s communities and hospitals. Everything is in short supply — intensive care unit beds, medicine, oxygen and ventilators. Bodies are piling up in morgues and crematoriums.
Indira Baldano, naive art Индира Балдано живопись
Twenty critically ill patients died at a Delhi hospital Friday night after its supply of oxygen was delayed by seven hours, according to Dr. DK Baluja, medical director at the Jaipur Golden Hospital.
“That happened last night. Everything we had was exhausted. The oxygen was not supplied on time. It was supposed to come in at 5 p.m. but it came around midnight. People who were critically ill needed oxygen,” said Baluja.
The hospital is currently scrambling to arrange more oxygen but has not received a fresh supply all Saturday morning. “We have only 15-20 minutes of oxygen left now. It may take hours to get another tanker,” Baluja told CNN.
Delhi hospitals have been facing a severe oxygen shortage as the number of Covid-19 cases have soared in the national capital in the past two weeks….
Delhi recorded 24,331 new cases Friday, including 348 deaths, according to the Covid-19 health bulletin issued by the Delhi government.
Countrywide, India has now recorded more than 16.6 million cases since the start of the pandemic, a CNN tally of figures from the Indian Ministry of Health reveals.
As the pandemic took hold last year, travel restrictions quickly proliferated — they were the second-most-common policy governments adopted to combat Covid-19. According to one review, never in recorded history has global travel been curbed in “such an extreme manner”: a reduction of approximately 65 percent in the first half of 2020. More than a year later, as countries experiment with vaccine passports, travel bubbles, and a new round of measures to keep virus variants at bay, a maze of confusing, ever-changing restrictions remains firmly in place.
But few countries have gone as far as Vietnam, a one-party communist state with a GDP per capita of $2,700. The Haiphong checkpoints timed for Tet were the equivalent of closing off Los Angeles to Americans ahead of Thanksgiving — within a country that was already nearly hermetically sealed. Last March, the government canceled all inbound commercial flights for months on end, making it almost impossible to fly in, even for Vietnamese residents.
Today, flights are limited to select groups, like businesspeople or experts, from a few low-risk countries. Everybody who enters needs special government permission and must complete up to 21 days of state-monitored quarantine with PCR tests. (Positive cases are immediately isolated in hospitals, regardless of disease severity.)
This strict approach to travel, global health experts say, is directly connected to Vietnam’s seeming defeat of Covid-19. Thirty-five people have reportedly died in total, and a little more than 2,700 have been infected with the virus during three small waves that have all been quickly quashed. Even on the worst days of the pandemic, the country of 97 million has never recorded more than 110 new cases — a tiny fraction of the 68,000 daily case high in the United Kingdom, which has a population one-third smaller than Vietnam, or the record 300,000-plus cases per day only the US and India managed to tally.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876 – 1907) Cat held by a child
Starting in mid-January, several social media channels and websites emerged as hubs for stories, generated by admins and users pulling together snippets from across the internet and crafting them into cohesive narratives and brief posts, linking reported deaths to COVID vaccinations. Several of these platforms have grown notably, and become more formalized, in recent weeks. Unsurprisingly, given the robust safety profile of the vaccines in use in the United States, they rarely detail how a vaccination supposedly caused a given death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not found a causal connection between COVID vaccines and virtually any post-vaccination deaths—although the agency recently announced it isinvestigating three deaths linked to a rare blood-clotting disorder a few individuals developed after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Medical authorities shelved that vaccine temporarily because sensitive monitoring systems picked up on this issue quickly. However, anti-vaxxers often take this less as a sign that safety systems are working and more as a sign that they were right all along and many more dangers must remain hidden.
But even if the narratives these hubs string together are weak and not supported by extant research on vaccine risks, some evidence suggests seeing these sorts of stories repeated ad nauseam may turn otherwise open people away from vaccines. This is a problem, as experts warn that skeptics, especially in far-right strongholds, are holding us back from herd immunity.
And death-hunting hubs are overflowing with dubious stories about vaccine death.
“People from all over the world send us the leads,” Brian A. Wilkins, a freelance writer who runs a site called The COVID Blog, which publishes pandemic misinformation and conspiracy theories, told The Daily Beast. (The blog has a “Vaccine Deaths” category, but Wilkins insists he only uses the term “for SEO purposes”; he, like many skeptics, falsely insists coronavirus vaccines are not real vaccines, and should properly be called experimental genetic therapies.) “I cannot even keep up,” he added. “I’m at least 70 stories behind.”
Some of these “leads” are local media reports that provocatively note someone got vaccinated and died days or weeks later—but never establish a firm causal link between the two. Others are social media posts describing people getting vaccinated, then dying suddenly or after an illness, either right after getting their shots or weeks later. Some are little more than loose digital chatter and speculation.
Read much more about these wackos at The Daily Beast.
So . . . What do you think? What else is on your mind? As always, this is an open thread.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
This is not the post I intended to write today. I figured I would have to take a look at the US re-entering the Climate Change Agreement or the Putin Pull out or some other kind of change we get since we got rid of the Previous Guy. Instead, I got treated to an entirely huge number of wipipo who really don’t need any sort of media attention at all.
In fact, they need to take their little whiny white asses back to whatever miserable enclave they sprang from to whack off to black and white TV from the 50s and leave the rest of us safely unaware of their existence. They do not have economic angst. They have a bad case of fascism, racism, and misogyny all wrapped up in a desire to replace democracy with white nationalism. It’s all so they can feel safe and good about themselves.
So, this bigoted idiot from Las Vegas was given print space by the Orlando Sentinel. He argues that Disneyland and Disneyworld should be there to give him his fantasy of white smeared with THAT sort’ve christian hegemony. He expects the entire organization should just exist only to humor his white supremacist fantasies just because he spends money there. The most distasteful thing in the article wasn’t the headline on how Disney Corp’s wokeness was ruining his good times. It was that he expected every one else to just go ahead and playact whatever offensive stereotype generations of their family try to escape from. Poor little white toad. “I love Disney World, but wokeness is ruining the experience | Commentary”. I just hope he stays away from New Orleans.
That spell is broken when the immersive experience is shattered by the real world. And boy, has Disney been breaking the immersion.
Recently, Disney announced that cast members are now permitted to display tattoos, wear inclusive uniforms and display inclusive haircuts. Disney did all of this in the name of allowing cast members to express themselves.
Man in Brown, Erich Heckel, 1912
His favorite thing to do first was the Pirates ride where he was regaled with kidnapped women in chains crying while guys yell “Marry a wench”. White Toad misses him some slavery. Then, there’s the entire longing for the Song of the South and the guide on the African river tour. I’ll leave it to your imagination about how he misses his black friends on those rides.
Go read it and go look at the face of the ugly American tourist that every one in the world–and around here where you have to deal with them–wants a cattle prod and the ability to stuff their asses on a plane and send them back to Stupidlandia. There’s some unwokeness for you! I’m tired of them thinking we’re all here to affirm there ignorant bigoted ass and superstitions. Take your damn money! Visit Hitler’s birthplace! Get it out of your system!
Which brings me to the next phase of the Covid 19 Crisis. This is where we spend tons of money telling those same ignorant asses to go get their ignorant asses to the nearest place they can GET a vaccination. Then, roll up a sleeve and take it like an American! Do it for your country! Do it so you do not kill other people! The shot is not going to turn you into some woke liberal! Believe me on that one! Education was already wasted on you!
And of course, twitter responds:
Disney World, Song of the South, Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise are all trending right now. Good grief. pic.twitter.com/uL646JoCIG
In an interview with conservative Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna, herself a vocal coronavirus vaccine skeptic, Johnson launched into a condemnation of “vaccine passports,” a credential that would allow businesses to verify vaccination status.
But Johnson also went a step further, declaring he sees “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people,” arguing their distribution should be “limited” to those most vulnerable to coronavirus, and asking, “if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”
Erich Heckel, Man on a Plain, 1917
Which brings me to FaceBook and their idea of wokeness. I’ve had a comment censored for “bullying” because I refer to these people as Plague Rats. Believe, me I have sympathy for that rats who had no idea they were spreading the Bubonic plague. However, these human beings should know better. My doctor daughter told me I had to realize these people don’t have access to good information and they are surrounded by the same kinds of people.
However, their so-called leaders like Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, John Neeley Kennedy, and the like are the Pied Pipers of spreading ignorance. They are either idiots themselves like Johnson. But worst, they play at idiocy because they can fleece idiots for power and money. Why does any one actively choose counterfactuality? Are facts that threatening to them? I frankly think they just like to be told they’re right and go do whatever the fuck they want no matter how hateful or destructive or life threatening it is.
And, just when we haven’t got enough if attention and money starve reality tv show personalities going doing the politics road we get this from Axios: “Scoop: Caitlyn Jenner makes it official for California governor’. Dear wisdom beings haven’t we suffered enough?
Jenner said in a statement that “Sacramento needs an honest leader with a clear vision” and that “for the past decade, we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people.”
The statement decries California’s taxes as “too high” and criticizes an “over-restrictive lockdown” response to the COVID pandemic including on in-person schooling.
“This is Gavin Newsom’s California, where he orders us to stay home but goes out to dinner with his lobbyist friends.”
“Self-Portrait With Raised Bare Shoulder,” by Egon Schiele,
During an appearance on the Today show, co-hosted by his daughter Jenna Bush Hager, the previous Texas governor turned president said: “I read that about Matthew, yeah… I tell you this, it`s a tough business” when asked about the 51-year-old actor’s chance of winning in the 2022 race
At least Texas Governors don’t do as much as the usual state governor does.
One year ago today, President Donald .Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid. It was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.
Some ex-Trump aides say they don’t even think about that day as the wildest they experienced — with the conceit that there were simply too many others. But for those there, it was instantly shocking, even by Trump standards. It quickly came to symbolize the chaotic essence of his presidency and his handling of the pandemic. Twelve months later, with the pandemic still lingering and a U.S. death toll nearing 570,000, it still does.
For weeks, Trump had been giving winding, stream-of-consciousness updates on the state of the Covid fight as it clearly worsened. So when he got up from the Oval Office to brief reporters gathered in the The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on April 23, there was no expectation that the day’s proceedings would be any different than usual.
Oskar Kokoschka (1908)
So, there are tons of folks with “vaccine hesitancy” and I’ve bumped into a few. I ask why and just sit back and listen. I eventually just say that I couldn’t live with myself if I was responsible for some one’s death and move on. But here’s a bit from VOX if you’re interested. It sums up some survey data.
The share of adults surveyed who are vaccinated or are willing to be vaccinated has grown from 72 percent to 77 percent from January through the end of February, a rise that reflects the increased availability of vaccines. However, the share of unvaccinated adults who are hesitant to get a vaccine has remained constant, at around 23 percent. It is this group that poses the greatest challenge to health care officials hoping to vaccinate the population to the point of herd immunity to stop the spread of coronavirus.
Some respondents hesitant about vaccination indicated general health concerns. Forty-five percent of those who said they definitely would not get the vaccine feared side effects, and 40 percent said they wanted to wait to see if vaccines were safe. (The vaccines have been shown to be safe and have generally mild side effects under clinical trials.) Others cited more conspiratorial reasons, with 29 percent of people not wanting the vaccine saying they didn’t trust vaccines and 27 percent saying they didn’t trust the government. Meanwhile, 20 percent said they didn’t think the vaccines work. People could select multiple reasons for not wanting a vaccine.
The vaccine rollout has been marred by misinformation, especially on social media. Some of the top narratives around the vaccine on social media include mentions of coronavirus conspiracy theories involving microchips and Bill Gates, according to new data from media insights company Zignal Labs. There’s also a conspiracy theory known as “the Great Reset,” the debunked idea that the coronavirus was created by the government to take control of the global economy.
Facebook, which has long been a bastion for the anti-vaccine movement, helped Carnegie Mellon survey its users for the report and is hoping to lead a large inoculation information campaign. After trying for years to crack down on vaccine misinformation, Facebook finally banned users from sharing anti-vaccine content in February. But vaccine misinformation can still be found on the site. A recent Washington Post report by Elizabeth Dwoskin examined internal documents at Facebook that suggest QAnon-supporting groups and a relatively small number of influential people are responsible for a significant share of vaccine skepticism on the site.
Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant | Egon Schiele 1912
It’s still pretty obvious by the way the Republicans keep acting, what they keep saying, and the fanatical way they are trying to stop POC from voting that they are still not beyond the previous guy. We will not get pass Covid-19 until they get pass the previous guy. We’re going to spend time in a lot of states stopping anti-democracy legislature . We will be watching a lot of bad court decisions come out of courts too.
From out of the recently Trumpified Supreme Court came yet another decision that murdered precedent. Delivering the death blow was Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This was a major flex for the carceral state and a major hit to criminal justice reform. It not only closed off future improvements in that regard, but also undercut what few accomplishments already exist.
The case was Jones v. Mississippi. Over the years, the courts began to look askance at the idea of handing juveniles sentences of life without parole, essentially warehousing individuals for decades in the horrors of the American penal system for crimes they committed as minors. Twice since 2012, the Supreme Court has decided that such sentences were in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. With a single decision, Kavanaugh, good Jesuit-educated lad that he is, and six of his colleagues decided that, instead, such sentences were both just and commonplace. It is yet another example of the current majority’s enthusiasm for gutting precedent while pretending that it’s not, and it is a monstrous legal offense against humanity.
By those two precedents, judges had to conduct separate proceedings before sentencing juveniles to life without parole and to provide a public explanation for those decisions. The 6-3 decision on Thursday for which Kavanaugh wrote the lead opinion effectively wipes out those two requirements which, in tandem, had reduced radically the number of juvenile convicts doing life without parole. And, in keeping with how that new conservative majority on the Court operates, Kavanaugh argues that he is keeping faith with those decisions he is obviously eviscerating. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas at least acknowledged that the Court was overturning precedents set in cases he considered wrongly decided.
I’m really beginning to understand why Buddhists want to deconstruct egos and Abstract expressionists deconstruct the human image. To borrow something old testament … All is vanity.
With this, I end with an appropriate song. Sing it Pete! (See he does more than provide background music for car ads)
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
India has 95,000 intensive care beds and 48,000 
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments