The Vax Of Life, Con't

We've reached the point where local health officials are openly being harassed and attacked at COVID vaccine clinic events by the GOP Death Cult.

Dr. John Cowan cut a lonely figure at a recent Republican rally in northwest Georgia.

Not only because a few months earlier he had lost a GOP primary to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman serving as the event’s headliner, but because he was offering conservative activists coronavirus vaccines. And there were no takers in the crowd of hundreds.

As Cowan roamed the open-air pavilion trying to drum up interest, Greene and other Republicans on stage railed against mask mandates and vaccine requirements. The Floyd Medical Center staffers working the mobile clinic outside the rally, he said, were targeted with “snide” remarks from attendees. Not a single shot was administered.

The hostility toward the vaccination effort was no isolated incident. Dr. Kathleen Toomey, the state’s top health official, said for the first time this week that Georgians aligned with the anti-vaccination movement disrupted several recent inoculation drives — and forced one to shut down entirely.

“It’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong,” Toomey said. “These people are giving their lives to help others, to help us in the state. We in Georgia could do better. We should be thanking these individuals who are trying to get lifesaving vaccines to our state.”

The harassment represents a new front in the state’s fight against a lethal fourth wave of COVID-19 that’s pushing infections and hospitalizations to levels not seen in Georgia since January peaks.

Even as officials struggle with inoculation rates among the nation’s lowest, these reports of concerted efforts to derail vaccination drives sparked worry among public health experts and spurred outrage among politicians.

“Public health officials are getting booed in places, they’re getting harassed, when this should be a time to come together,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, an Emory University infectious disease specialist.

Toomey said she only recently became aware of the disruptions. Her office said public health staff have been “harassed, yelled at, threatened and demeaned by some of the very members of the public they were trying to help.”

In one South Georgia county, residents protesting the vaccinations tracked down public health employees and bombarded them with hostile messages and misinformation about the vaccine.

And a mobile vaccination event in an unspecified North Georgia county was canceled after an “organized” group of people showed up to harass and name-call public health workers, said Nancy Nydam, a spokeswoman for Toomey.

“Aside from feeling threatened themselves, staff realized no one would want to come to that location for a vaccination under those circumstances, so they packed up and left,” she said.

 

Just like the anti-choice assholes, they will eventually start hurting and even killing health care workers who provide the vaccine in dangerous GOP-controlled Death Cult zones. This is escalating fast and the violence is completely designed to stop all vaccine efforts in rural areas, where people will die, and them blame Biden for it.

More importantly though the GOP is doing this on purpose to raise the chance that health care workers quit. They want them out. They want people to suffer as a result and to say "See, this is all Joe Biden's fault, you'd better vote for us."

Health care workers "sided" with the Democrats on vaccines.

They have to be punished, just like any other industry group that "sides" with the Democrats.

 

 

 

The Road To Gilead, Texas

With Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito choosing to pass on blocking Texas's insane anti-choice law that literally allows civil bounties for suing Texas women who receive reproductive health care in any state after just six weeks of pregnancy, the odious law takes affect today, and the era of Roe v Wade is all but over. 

A Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect Wednesday, as a midnight deadline for the Supreme Court to stop it came and went without action.

The court could still grant a request from abortion providers to halt the law, one of the nation’s most restrictive. But for now, abortion providers in Texas, including Planned Parenthood and Whole Woman’s Health, said they will no longer terminate pregnancies more than six weeks from a woman’s last period.

Providers said the law effectively eliminates the guarantee in Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that women have a right to end their pregnancies before viability, and that states may not impose undue burdens on that decision.

As longtime opponents of abortion claimed Wednesday as “a historic and hopeful day,” abortion-rights advocates and providers decried the impact of the new law on the women they serve.

“It’s just really unclear what the future will hold for women in Texas,” said Kathy Kleinfeld, the director at Houston Women’s Reproductive Services. “I really don’t know. I don’t feel pessimistic. I don’t feel optimistic. I’m just right in the middle, cautiously waiting.”

Human Coalition Action Texas Legislative Director Chelsey Youman, who backed the bill, praised Texas as “the first state to successfully protect the most vulnerable among us, preborn children … Human beings are worthy of protection at all phases of development.”

Federal judges across the country have cited Roe and other precedents to block six-week bans in other states before they took effect.

The lawsuits that stopped those laws targeted government officials who would enforce the bans, which proponents dub “heartbeat bills” because they say that is when a doctor can first detect a fetal heartbeat. Doctors opposed to the bills dispute that description, saying the fluttering that is detected cannot exist outside the womb.

The Texas law was designed to make it more difficult for abortion rights advocates to win such pre-enforcement injunctions. The statute empowers individuals, instead of state government officials, to bring legal action against those who help women seeking a prohibited abortion.

Lawyers for abortion providers told the Supreme Court that the statute, known by its bill number, S.B. 8, would “immediately and catastrophically reduce abortion access” in Texas and probably force more clinics to close. The law is unconstitutional, they say, because it conflicts with the court precedents that prevent states from banning abortion before a fetus would be viable outside the womb, usually around 22 to 24 weeks.

About 85 to 90 percent of people who obtain abortions in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy, meaning this law would prohibit nearly all abortions in the state.

“Patients will have to travel out of state — in the middle of a pandemic — to receive constitutionally guaranteed health care. And many will not have the means to do so,” Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), said in a statement. “It’s cruel, unconscionable, and unlawful.”

 

But for the first time in my lifetime, the Supreme Court isn't lifting a finger to stop a state law that clearly ends abortion access in the state because it drafts residents of any state as bounty hunters to sue women, clinics, and health care providers into oblivion in civil court.

 

The legal argument is insidious.

 

In response Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction to act against the law at this point, and that any legal challenges would have to wait until someone actually brought a civil action against an abortion provider or someone who aids the woman.

“This Court cannot expunge the law itself. Rather, it can enjoin only enforcement of the law,” he wrote in his brief to the court, which did not mention Roe. But in the Texas case, he noted, government officials “explicitly do not enforce the law.”

The abortion providers, Paxton wrote, “have not shown that they will be personally harmed by a bill that may never be enforced against them by anyone.” 

 

Abortion is now illegal in Texas in 95% of instances.  And even if the law was blocked and found unconstitutional, Texas clinics will all close, so that number will be effectively 100%. By the time this grinds through the courts, there will be zero legal abortion health care providers in a state with 14 million women.

Expect a score of other states to institute Texas's law by spring, before the Roberts Court strikes down Roe in June.

A full third of American women will have no access to abortion whatsoever in 12 months.

Gilead is here.

StupidiNews!

•  Two senior FDA vaccine officials are retiring, the Biden administration says it will fill the roles "quickly" in order for the FDA to continue its work.
• The Caldor wildfire continues to scorch thousands of acres in California, with evacuations of tens of thousands from the Lake Tahoe area on Tuesday.
• New Zealanders are emerging back outdoors as the nation's COVID-19 lockdowns have been lifted, but schools and offices remain closed across the country.
• President Joe Biden defended America's exit from Afghanistan, saying it saved US lives and billions of dollars.
• Disgraced biotech wunderkind and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison on fraud charges as jury selection begins this week for Holmes's trial.

Last Call For The Good Package, Con't

Corporate lobbyists in DC are doing everything they can to burn down the $3.5 billion Good Package, because of the corporate tax hikes and regulatory improvements. They don't want a piece of the pie, they want to bury the whole deal.

 

“We’re doing it in every way you can imagine,” said Aric Newhouse, the senior vice president for policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, when asked about the group’s lobbying. He added that the tax increases Democrats have pursued would mean “manufacturing families will suffer, jobs will be lost.”

Disney, Pfizer and Exxon declined to comment. Jessica Boulanger, a spokeswoman for the Business Roundtable, said in a statement it is engaged in “a significant, multifaceted campaign” to stop tax hikes and would “continue to ramp up our efforts in the coming weeks.”

Brian Newell, a spokesman for PhRMA, stressed that the group supports general pricing reforms — just not the ideas Democrats are pursuing. “The industry is willing to come to the table and do its fair share to help deliver real relief to patients at the pharmacy, not empty promises that will do more harm than good,” he said in a statement.

The raft of lobbying arrives as lawmakers begin to translate Biden’s broader economic vision into legislation. Democratic leaders have said their reconciliation measure can expand Medicare coverage, offer universal prekindergarten, provide new help to low-income families, and invest substantial sums toward fighting climate change.

Hoping to give Biden a win, Democrats have aimed to send the package to his desk as soon as September. Their race to enact legislation has set off a mad dash on Capitol Hill, a process that is sure to test the president’s political influence — and the durability of Democrats’ narrow, potent and fractious majorities in both chambers of Congress.

In a sign of the obstacles Democrats face, the Chamber of Commerce last week took a firm stand against the package, promising to do “everything we can” to prevent Congress from adopting it in full. The group’s president and chief executive, Suzanne Clark, issued the statement hours after the House adopted the $3.5 trillion budget that enabled Democrats to begin crafting tax and spending provisions — an approach, she said, that would “halt America’s fragile economic recovery.”

The Chamber’s opposition marked a major shift in tone from earlier this summer, when the business lobby locked arms with Democrats to help advance another centerpiece of Biden’s economic agenda. The group threw its full weight behind a bipartisan Senate package to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections, arguing that the roughly $1 trillion in fixes were long overdue.

Once the Senate adopted the package, however, the Chamber turned up the pressure on the House. Last week, for example, it unleashed widely viewed ads on Facebook praising the nine moderate Democrats who had threatened to block the party’s budget unless they could first secure a House vote on infrastructure spending. Democrats ultimately resolved their internal stalemate, paving the way for both packages to proceed this month, but not before the Chamber sought to highlight the party’s internal divisions in ads that together received millions of views.

The Chamber declined to comment about its plans, including the behind-the-scenes work to assemble a coalition. Neil Bradley, the group’s executive vice president, blasted Democrats for pursuing a bill “that proposes to fundamentally rewrite the rules of the road across virtually every major industrial sector.”

 

The big issue of course is that one of the main revenue components of the Good Package is reversing the Trump corporate tax cuts. These corporate types will burn the package to the ground and the Dems along with it in order to stop it.

 

We'll see who wins.

McCarthy In The Messy Morass Middle

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy isn't going to be able to put off the question of impeaching President Joe Biden over absolutely nothing until January 2023, as the bloody ghouls in his own party are demanding impeachment hearings of Biden officials over Afghanistan now.

As hard as Kevin McCarthy has hammered the White House over the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he’s under rising pressure from his right to go further.

The House minority leader has repeatedly pushed back on rank-and-file Republicans who want to make a high-stakes call for impeaching Biden over his handling of Afghanistan — a vow that would come due should the GOP take back the chamber next November. But multiple House Republican sources said that even before Tuesday’s fraught end to the U.S. military mission, their offices were being bombarded with calls from base voters for a future Biden impeachment or another more forceful response against the administration.

“It’s a grassroots pressure — we're feeling it,” said freshman Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. “I think even some of the Democrats are feeling it.”

While Republicans would have no path to impeaching Biden while still in the House minority, and any GOP-instigated impeachment trial would go nowhere unless the Senate also changed hands in the midterms, the constituent pressure could persuade more reluctant members of McCarthy’s conference to back an escalation in the party’s messaging against Biden. McCarthy, who endorsed former President Donald Trump’s call to pull troops from Afghanistan, already has promised “a day of reckoning” that includes investigations and hearings on Biden’s handling of the U.S. pullout if Republicans win the majority.

Should the House flip next year, however, McCarthy will then need near-unified support from conservatives in order to secure the speaker’s gavel. And notably, while the California Republican tries to keep his focus on getting Americans out of Afghanistan safely, most of the pro-impeachment energy is coming from his right flank.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus discussed whether to endorse calling for Biden to be impeached during a meeting last week, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the confab. While some were not ready to commit to impeaching Biden, almost all members agreed that “doing nothing is not an option at this point,” according to a Freedom Caucus member at the meeting who talked about it candidly on condition of anonymity.

Freedom Caucus members were “preparing for calling for resignations and or impeachment” last week, this GOP lawmaker said, but were also realistic about the Democratic line of succession. Some Republicans say privately that they have raised the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris to constituents as a reason why they are not behind impeachment.

The group is planning a Tuesday press conference to urge Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call Congress back into session early so lawmakers can vote on a GOP resolution backing impeachment of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as GOP resolutions calling for the resignations of Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

McCarthy already made his own call for Pelosi to bring the House back into session ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, telling GOP members in a Sunday letter that Republicans would try to force floor action by filing a discharge petition on a bill that he says would “empower our military with the support they need to get Americans home.” The House GOP also plans to use the upcoming debate over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to spotlight problems with the U.S. pullout.

U.S. officials said Monday night following the military's withdrawal, scores of Americans remained in Afghanistan who had wanted to leave amid an unstable situation as the Taliban took full control of the country.

Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said Monday that the party already has 50 NDAA amendments on Afghanistan, aimed at U.S. equipment that may have been left behind and the closure of Bagram airbase ahead of the withdrawal, among other issues.

 

Going after Biden is one thing, but going after Blinken, Austin, and Milley is going to be a tall order without it looking like the GOP is going after the troops and the generals, especially since getting out of Afghanistan is very popular.

Once again, McCarthy's in a trap. He either has to overplay his hand, or be removed from power.

Couldn't happen to a nicer jackass.

Disinformation Nation, Con't

Trust in major news organizations has plummeted among Americans in the last two years, and nearly all of that drop is thanks to Republicans, who are too stupid to believe anything unless it's shat out of Trump's ass.

In just five years, the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations has been cut in half – dropping from 70% in 2016 to 35% this year. This decline is fueling the continued widening of the partisan gap in trust of the media.

Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78%) say they have “a lot” or “some” trust in the information that comes from national news organizations – 43 percentage points higher than Republicans and Republican leaners (35%) – according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted June 14-27, 2021. This partisan gap is the largest of any time that this question has been asked since 2016. And it grows even wider – to 53 points – between liberal Democrats (83%) and conservative Republicans (30%).

The 35% of Republicans who have at least some trust in national news organizations in 2021 is half that of in 2016 (70%) – and has dropped 14 points since late 2019 (49%). By comparison, Democrats have remained far more consistent in the past five years, ranging somewhere between 78% and 86%.

Overall, about six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from national news organizations. While still a majority, this is the smallest share over the past five years this question was asked. When it was last asked in late 2019, 65% expressed at least some trust. And far fewer (12%) express that they have “a lot” of trust in the information that comes from national news organizations.

Americans tend to have greater trust in local news organizations – though there is somewhat of a decline here as well. A large majority of Americans (75%) still say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from local news organizations, modestly lower than the shares who said the same in 2016 (82%) and in late 2019 (79%). And again, far fewer express the highest level of trust (18%).

A similar partisan divide emerges when it comes to local news, though to a lesser extent. As of June 2021, Democrats are 18 percentage points more likely than Republicans to have at least some trust in the information that comes from local news organizations (84% vs. 66%, respectively) – a gap that is again larger than at any time in recent years. Five years ago, 85% of Democrats had at least some trust in local news organizations, while 79% of Republicans did.

Social media continues to engender a much lower level of trust. About a quarter of Americans (27%) say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from social networking sites, with just 4% expressing that they have a lot of trust in it. This is about on par with late 2019 when 26% said they had at least some trust, but somewhat lower than the 34% who said the same in 2016. (In 2016, this question was asked of internet-using U.S. adults.)

Social media is trusted by a minority of both parties, though a partisan gap still exists. About a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (34%) and 19% of Republicans and Republican leaners say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from social media – a 15-point gap. This gap is larger than gaps from any other time in recent years and has nearly doubled since late 2019.

 

At least there remains a healthy skepticism of everything social media, and that's good, but I think Republicans are lying about this because they're supposed to "hate" Twitter and Facebook for banning Trump. They have no problem getting their disinformation from the Right-Wing Noise Machine on a daily basis.

Trump did more to destroy American institutions than America's enemies could ever dream of, and right now we're ripe for an autocratic takeover by the right.

Here's hoping that enough of us with common sense can resist before the bullets start flying.

 

StupidiNews!

• The last of the world's leaded gasoline was sold in Algeria last month as the UN officially announced that 99 years of the fuel have come to an end.
• A new report finds that some 14,000 hours of January 6th insurrection footage from the US Capitol has still yet to be viewed by US officials.
• Panama's Congress has approved medical marijuana in a unanimous vote, President Laurentino Cortizo is expected to sign the bill into law.
• UN nuclear observers say that North Korea may have restarted its reactor at Yongbyon and may have been operating the once-shuttered facility since last month.
• Scientists and researchers have built a robot to mimic the strike of the mantis shrimp, a sea creature whose attack boils the water around it and hits with .22 caliber force.
  

Last Call For The China Game

China apparently feels the need to crack down on kids playing video games, restricting those under 18 to just 3 hours a week, on weekend evenings, as parents are apparently furious that mobile games especially are not being controlled.

Regulators in China are taking their disapproval of youth gaming to the next level with sweeping new restrictions that limit minors to a handful of state-approved online gaming hours a week.

According to Bloomberg, authorities have ordered gaming platforms such as industry giant Tencent and Netease to restrict gaming for minor users to between 8:00 p.m. on Fridays, weekends, and holidays, a dramatic decrease from prior restrictions that limited accounts belonging to minors (those under 18) to 1.5 hours a day. News of the restrictions comes via Chinese state-owned media organ Xinhua, which cited the government’s National Press and Publication Administration.

The new rules will require all gaming platforms to be linked to a state-operated “anti-addiction” system and require that all users be verified with a real-life identity. Regulators also said they will step up compliance checks to ensure companies enforce the new rules.

As Ars Technica reported, it’s widely understood that the restrictions will apply to all games and all devices. However, the measures appear to predominantly target online ones and it’s not clear how regulators could restrict offline gaming even if they intend to. Reuters wrote that many users on Chinese social networking site Weibo were skeptical that young gamers couldn’t easily evade the new rules by such means as the use of parental accounts not subject to the same restrictions.

Previously, Chinese state media announced that restrictions on video game playing by minors would be enforced via requirements that platforms implement face recognition systems. Theoretically, such a system could be required for all game platforms in the future, providing a way to enforce age requirements in offline games.

Tencent quickly moved to roll out a “Midnight Patrol” system Daniel Ahmad, an analyst at occasional Tencent partner Niko Partners, told the Verge. The system worked by identifying gamers who remained active after midnight and prompted those who remained online for long amounts of time or spent lots of money to submit a picture of their face to verify they were actually 18 or older.

The NPPA statement in Xinhua characterized the new restrictions as “protecting the physical and mental health of minors... and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation.”

“This ruling is the strictest one to date and will essentially wipe out most spending from minors, which we note was already extremely low,” Ahmad told Bloomberg. Netease stock slid by over 9% in pre-market trading in New York, Bloomberg wrote, while UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Ltd executive director Steven Leung told the news agency that three hours is “too tight” and will “have a negative impact on Tencent too.”

“I thought regulatory measures would take a break gradually, but it’s not stopping at all,” Leung added. “It will hurt the nascent tech rebound for sure.”

 

Seems that China doesn't want to get that dirty, awful, US kid entertainment all over its authoritarian utopia. Bread and circuses, just the ones the CCP approves of, and not even China can stop people from playing games.

 

The more you tighten your grip, the more these star systems slip through your fingers, as a very wise woman once said.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The big COVID story here in Cincy right now is that a judge in suburban Butler County (a.k.a Boehner Country) ordered West Chester Hospital to treat a COVID patient with Ivermectin, a horse dewormer with no known real benefits to treating COVID patients, but the judge ordered it anyway because...freedom or something.

A Butler County judge ruled in favor of a woman last week who sought to force a hospital to administer Ivermectin — an animal dewormer that federal regulators have warned against using in COVID-19 patients — to her husband after several weeks in the ICU with the disease.

Butler County Common Pleas Judge Gregory Howard ordered West Chester Hospital, part of the University of Cincinnati network, to treat Jeffrey Smith, 51, with Ivermectin. The order, filed Aug. 23, compels the hospital to provide Smith with 30mg of Ivermectin daily for three weeks.

The drug was originally developed to deworm livestock animals before doctors began using it against parasitic diseases among humans. Several researchers won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for establishing its efficacy in humans. It’s used to treat head lice, onchocerciasis (river blindness) and others.

Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned Americans against the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19, a viral disease. It’s unproven as a treatment, they say, and large doses of it can be dangerous and cause serious harm. A review of available literature conducted earlier this month by the journal Nature found there’s no certainty in the available data on potential benefits of Ivermectin.

The drug has grown in popularity among conservatives, fueled by endorsements from allies of former President Donald Trump like U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc. or Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. The CDC warned reports of poisoning related to use of Ivermectin have increased threefold this year, spiking in July.

Julie Smith filed the lawsuit on behalf of her husband of 24 years. He tested positive for COVID-19 July 9, was hospitalized and admitted to the ICU July 15, and was sedated and intubated and placed on a ventilator Aug. 1. He later developed a secondary infection he’s still wrestling with as of Aug. 23, court records say.

The lawsuit doesn’t mention whether Jeffrey Smith is vaccinated against COVID-19. However, overwhelming majorities of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated — data from the Ohio Department of Health shows of roughly 21,000 Ohioans hospitalized with COVID-19 since Jan. 1, only about 500 were vaccinated.

Julie Smith found Ivermectin on her own and connected with Dr. Fred Wagshul, an Ohio physician who her lawsuit identifies as “one of the foremost experts on using Ivermectin in treating COVID-19.” He prescribed the drug, and the hospital refused to administer it.

A hospital spokeswoman said she can’t comment on litigation and federal patient privacy laws prevent her from commenting on any specifics of patient care.

Smith is represented by New York attorney Ralph Lorigo, the chairman of New York’s Erie County Conservative Party, who has successfully filed one similar case against a Chicago area hospital and two more in Buffalo. He did not respond to an email or phone call.

The Ohio lawsuit makes reference to the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, a nonprofit of which Wagshul is listed as a founding physician. The organization touts Ivermectin as both a preventative and treatment for COVID-19. Its “How To Get Ivermectin” section includes prices and locations of pharmacies that will supply it, from Afghanistan to Fort Lauderdale to Pennsylvania to Sao Paulo, Brazil.

 

Rather than take the vaccine, now approved by the FDA, these pathetic losers are turning to a livestock dewormer to treat a virus because hey it's "like" a parasite and it should work, right, only people are ending up in the ER with poisoning issues, ER's filled with COVID patients by the way.

On top of that there's now an international network of ambulance chasers getting judges to force doctors to treat COVID patients with quackery.

This should be of national concern, but apparently there's literally so much garbage out there going on that we don't have time to address this nationally, and frankly doing so would set off multiple armed bloody insurrections across the United States because millions are willing to literally die in order to avoid the vaccine.

You can't reason with anyone willing to give their own life for a cause as ludicrous as this. It's well past the time we cut these assholes free and let brutal Darwinian consequences scour the playing field.

But here across the river in Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul is gleefully blaming Democrats for COVID victims, saying that "Trump hatred" is preventing the FDA from taking Ivermectin "seriously" as a treatment.

Hatred of former President Donald Trump has kept researchers from looking into the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and other drugs to treat COVID-19, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told constituents on Friday.

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control have warned people using ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic worm infections in humans and livestock, is dangerous. The FDA went as far as tweeting out a reminder on August 21, "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it."

But Paul encouraged more research.

"The hatred for Trump deranged these people so much, that they're unwilling to objectively study it," Paul said to the 60 people squeezed into the Cold Spring City Council chambers in this Northern Kentucky suburb just south of Cincinnati. "So someone like me that's in the middle on it, I can't tell you because they will not study ivermectin. They will not study hydroxychloroquine without the taint of their hatred for Donald Trump."

It's also why they don't research hydroxychloroquine, he said, an anti-malarial drug touted by Trump as a treatment.

The World Health Organization in April found based on six clinical trials that hydroxychloroquine "had little or no effect on preventing illness, hospitalization or death from COVID-19."

A woman in the audience had asked Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, why ivermectin wasn't more available. The woman said she had some ivermectin stashed away "just in case."

Paul told her he didn't know if it works because there isn't enough research. When asked by The Enquirer after the meetings about the FDA and CDC warnings on ivermectin, Paul reiterated what he said in the town hall

"I don't know if it works, but I keep an open mind," Paul said.

 

There isn't enough research on whether or not wearing a necklace of geodes prevents COVID-19 infections either, and it's because it's ludicrous to waste time doing it. Even if there was a million pages of research, Rand Paul and his ilk would dismiss it anyway and just boot the goalposts into space.

The entire point here is for more people to die from COVID under Biden's term than under Trump's, so that the GOP "wins" the "competence argument", so Republicans are going to just continue to disinform the public until enough die from it.

So they can "win", thanks to a corrupt judicial that orders what doctors have to prescribe now, based on disinformation. That's frightening.

 

That's what matters to them. Winning, and you're the one who loses.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

As Hurricane Ida moves north this morning into Mississippi, it's important to note that the Supreme Court's decision to kill the CDC eviction moratorium means people are being evicted into the twin storms of a Gulf hurricane and COVID delta, and some of them will simply not survive the next few weeks.

T. Young’s reprieve from homelessness was three days.

The mother of four rushed home Friday when she heard the news. When she arrived, officers were still traveling door to door at Catherine Street Apartments in Starkville, flanking a representative from her new rental company. They were informing the residents that the mass-eviction process that started only weeks before was resolving, and resolving quickly.

What happened next is disputed. Were residents given three hours, or three days? Young is adamant that she heard three hours. “They said, ‘you have three hours to get out,’” she told the Mississippi Free Press in an Aug. 28 interview. “I was on the phone with my boyfriend, and I heard her say it. She was close enough for me to hear her. (Then) she said to get all our stuff packed up and leave.”

Others at the apartment complex heard the same message. Before long, activists arrived, representatives from Starkville Strong, from the Oktibbeha County NAACP. Twenty minutes after Young made it home, Starkville Mayor Lynn Spruill arrived. The eviction moratorium had not even been dead a full day. It may not have helped, though; the Starkville evictions have nothing to do with rent money.

Spruill conferred with Judge Marty Haug, who confirmed that he had not yet signed a removal order. But the order is coming, as sure as the hurricane brewing in the south. Monday morning, his signature will adorn it. On Tuesday, Young, her boyfriend and their four children—11, 9, 7, and a month old—will lose their home. Accompanying them will be many of the dozens and dozens of families living across 61 units at Catherine Street Apartments.

No back rent can save them. The apartments’ new owners plan to rehabilitate the buildings. For this, they want all of the residents gone. Without an active lease, nothing in Mississippi State Code prevents the evictions.

“At this point, we don’t know where we’re going next,” Young said. Her family had experienced homelessness already, finding a place at Catherine Street Apartments in December 2020 with the assistance of Starkville Strong, a local civic support group. That same organization is working to help Young and her partner now. Exhaustion fills her voice, and sorrow quiets it.

A hotel stay, they hope, will get them through the first weeks of September. Then, God willing, another affordable housing unit, one that might provide shelter for more than a year before unceremoniously throwing them out.

Imagine that this is the best case scenario for you, surviving long enough to get evicted again in a few years. Most likely, some of these folks will simply disappear into the hell of near-permanent homelessness. And some will die from COVID or other diseases. That's if they survive Ida flooding the state. 

This hell awaits tens of millions of us if we don't put in real safety guardrails. Sadly, we don't have the political will to do even that. Climate change, COVID, and a runaway Supreme Court? All preventable.

But we didn't prevent it.

So now we will pay for decades to come.

Some of us will pay with our lives, sooner rather than later.

This is America now.

StupidiNews!

• Southern California is facing yet another deadly wildfire, the Chapparal fire near San Diego has already covered 1,200 acres and is only 10% contained.
• Legendary actor Ed Asner has passed away at age 91, Asner's stage and screen career spanned six decades and he earned seven Emmy awards, more than any other male actor in Hollywood.
• The Afghan Taliban has issued a statement agreeing to let certain Afghans leave the country as the US evacuation of American and Afghan citizens continues.
• The one-two punch of COVID delta and Hurricane Ida has left hospitals across the Southern US with critically low oxygen supplies as the Biden administration prepares FEMA help.
• New research indicated a major solar storm could knock out undersea internet cables, leaving internet outages across the globe for days or weeks, or longer.
  

Last Call For Crossfire Hurricane

Hurricane Ida has made landfall in Louisiana, just short of Category 5 with winds of 150 MPH, and all of NOLA is without power.

All of Orleans Parish — which is the city of New Orleans — is without power, according to NOLA Ready, New Orleans' emergency preparedness campaign.

If anyone in the parish has power, it's coming from a generator, NOLA Ready says.

Across Louisiana, more than 700,000 customers are without power as Hurricane Ida continues to pound the coastal state.

Power outages are expected to continue increasing as the storm moves inland.

 

Ida is a slow moving storm and is expected to spend days over Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, bringing drenching rains, flooding, and more power outages before heading into the mid-Atlantic and New England by the end of the week.

Be careful out there, folks.

The Big Lie, Actual Truth Edition

So turns out we've actually found election fraud committed by corrupt state election officials, and of course they're Republicans failing to count votes in order to help GOP candidates.

 

Seated onstage at the most-hyped election conspiracy event of the year, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, Tina Peters, described herself as a crusader for election security.

“I’ve looked at it objectively,” Peters said of supposed issues in election data during her speech at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” this month. “There’s some discrepancies there that I cannot deny, and I tell people, ‘I cannot unsee some of these things.’ If I’m going to be honest with the people of Mesa County and Colorado and all of you, I cannot unsee some of these things.”

But at home in Mesa County, some current and former officials have a different recollection of Peters’ tenure overseeing elections.

During Peters’ first year as clerk, in 2019, her office was blamed for leaving more than 570 uncounted ballots in a box, long past an election. Less than a year later, one of her office’s drop boxes leaked ballots, sending some floating in the summer breeze. Now Peters has gone underground, reportedly hiding in a safe house provided by Lindell, after she allegedly participated in a breach of Mesa County voting machine data this year. That data soon wound up on conspiracy websites, making Peters a folk hero among the MAGA set and the subject of an FBI investigation.

Peters (who did not return requests for comment) took office in 2019, after her predecessor, Sheila Reiner, reached her term limit. What followed was an unusually bombastic tenure in a typically low-drama role.

While overseeing the November 2019 general election, Peters’ office forgot to count 574 ballots, instead leaving them unattended in a drop box outside her office for months. That slip-up coincided with a rush of departures from Peters’ office. In December 2019, nearly 20 of Peters’ 32-person staff had departed, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported at the time. More staff quit days after the missing ballots were discovered, in late February 2020, bringing the departure count over two dozen.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office told Peters to get her act together.

“The Secretary of State’s Office appointed someone to be in the [clerk’s] office to help with the election,” Amanda Polson, who served as elections director under Reiner, told The Daily Beast.

Patti Inscho, a Democrat and an experienced former Mesa County Clerk employee, was hired to help Peters with elections. But just two months into Inscho’s role, Peters fired her, accusing her of not doing assigned work—an allegation Inscho firmly denied. The rift turned ugly, with a Peters staffer filing a criminal complaint against Inscho for allegedly not working during a pandemic, the Colorado Sun previously reported. Police dismissed the report.

“Tina didn’t want to fight facts,” Inscho told The Daily Beast. “She wanted to damage people. She did and said a lot of things about me that are untrue. It hurt my reputation, and it’s hard to fight back against.”

Polson, who had been hopeful about Inscho’s hiring, saw her termination as a bad omen.

“Essentially, that person [Inscho] got shut out,” Polson said. “Nothing had improved in the office. She was still, we thought, not handling the ballot issue correctly. There are some lines you can’t cross in an election administration. That is one of them: not counting ballots that should be counted.”

In May 2020, Polson formally began an effort to recall Peters. The campaign took issue with Peters’ handling of the lost ballots, as well as her staff turnover, a series of controversial business expenses (including more than $3,000 in food), and her decision not to oversee a pair of town-level elections. (The towns were forced to oversee their own elections, costing them two to three times the typical cost of a county-run vote.)

Soon the recall campaign had another data point: a ballot drop-off box, installed by Peters’ office for the 2020 primary election, appeared defective, sending completed ballots blowing across a parking lot. Peters claimed the leak was staged and blamed a local couple who’d reported the issue. The couple denied the allegation in an interview with the Daily Sentinel, where a reporter also noted ongoing issues with ballots becoming lodged in the drop box.

Polson was joined in her signature-gathering campaign by Inscho and even, on occasion, Peters’ predecessor Sheila Reiner. “I agreed with the group that things weren’t being done properly,” Reiner told The Daily Beast. “I didn’t believe that Tina was doing a good job.”

She said she collected some signatures for the recall, but was not one of its organizers. Still, her involvement cost her. Reiner said she was antagonized by Peters loyalists who objected to the recall.

“I'm a Republican,” she said. “There are some other Republicans that felt like that I wasn't being loyal to the brand, let’s put it that way.”

 

Remember, this is someone who is a GOP hero because she actually committed election fraud, with the justification that it was "correcting" election fraud by the Democrats that didn't actually exist. 

I expect a lot more of this in 2022 and especially 2024, especially since it's clear that Democrats aren't going to kill the filibuster to pass federal voting rights legislation, and no Republican will ever vote for it.

They've been screaming about election fraud for over a year now -- before even the 2020 election - so they have cover to steal the next several ones.

Sunday Long Read: Prime Time Slime

Maybe I should stop referring to Republicans and corporate criminals (often the same overlapping categories in the big venn diagram) as "slimeballs" because it turns out slimes are actually fascinating, and they even love oatmeal as Orion Magazine's Lacy M. Johnson tells us in this week's Sunday Long Read. No, seriously, they love oatmeal.

IT IS SPRING IN HOUSTON, which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. The bricks of my house sweat. In my yard the damp air condenses on the leaves of the crepe myrtle tree; a shower falls from the branches with the slightest breeze. The dampness has darkened the flower bed, and from the black mulch has emerged what looks like a pile of snotty scrambled eggs in a shade of shocking, bilious yellow. As if someone sneezed on their way to the front door, but what came out was mustard and marshmallow.

I recognize this curious specimen as the aethalial state of Fuligo septica, more commonly known as “dog vomit slime mold.” Despite its name, it’s not actually a mold—not any type of fungus at all—but rather a myxomycete (pronounced MIX-oh-my-seat), a small, understudied class of creatures that occasionally appear in yards and gardens as strange, Technicolor blobs. Like fungi, myxomycetes begin their lives as spores, but when a myxomycete spore germinates and cracks open, a microscopic amoeba slithers out. The amoeba bends and extends one edge of its cell to pull itself along, occasionally consuming bacteria and yeast and algae, occasionally dividing to clone and multiply itself. If saturated with water, the amoeba can grow a kind of tail that whips around to propel itself; on dry land the tail retracts and disappears. When the amoeba encounters another amoeba with whom it is genetically compatible, the two fuse, joining chromosomes and nuclei, and the newly fused nucleus begins dividing and redividing as the creature oozes along the forest floor, or on the underside of decaying logs, or between damp leaves, hunting its microscopic prey, drawing each morsel inside its gooey plasmodium, growing ever larger, until at the end of its life, it transforms into an aethalia, a “fruiting body” that might be spongelike in some species, or like a hardened calcium deposit in others, or, as with Stemonitis axifera, grows into hundreds of delicate rust-colored stalks. As it transitions into this irreversible state, the normally unicellular myxomycete divides itself into countless spores, which it releases to be carried elsewhere by the wind, and if conditions are favorable, some of them will germinate and the cycle will begin again.

From a taxonomical perspective, the Fuligo septica currently “fruiting” in my front yard belongs to the Physaraceae family, among the order of Physarales, in class Myxogastria, a taxonomic group that contains fewer than a thousand individual species. These creatures exist on every continent and almost everywhere people have looked for them: from Antarctica, where Calomyxa metallica forms iridescent beads, to the Sonoran Desert, where Didymium eremophilum clings to the skeletons of decaying saguaro cacti; from high in the Spanish Pyrenees, where Collaria chionophila fruit in the receding edge of melting snowbanks, to the forests of Singapore, where the aethalia of Arcyria denudata gather on the bark of decaying wood, like tufts of fresh cotton candy.

Although many species are intensely colored—orange, coral pink, or red—others are white or clear. Some take on the color of what they eat: ingesting algae will cause a few slime molds to turn a nauseous green. Physarum polycephalum, which recently made its debut at the Paris Zoo, is a bright, egg yolk yellow, has 720 sexual configurations and a vaguely fruity smell, and appears to be motivated by, among other things, a passionate love of oatmeal.

Throughout their lives, myxomycetes only ever exist as a single cell, inside which the cytoplasm always flows—out to its extremities, back to the center. When it encounters something it likes, such as oatmeal, the cytoplasm pulsates more quickly. If it finds something it dislikes, like salt, quinine, bright light, cold, or caffeine, it pulsates more slowly and moves its cytoplasm away (though it can choose to overcome these preferences if it means survival). In one remarkable study published in Science, Japanese researchers created a model of the Tokyo metropolitan area using oat flakes to represent population centers, and found that Physarum polycephalum configured itself into a near replica of the famously intuitive Tokyo rail system. In another experiment, scientists blasted a specimen with cold air at regular intervals, and found that it learned to expect the blast, and would retract in anticipation. It can solve mazes in pursuit of a single oat flake, and later, can recall the path it took to reach it. More remarkable still, a slime mold can grow indefinitely in its plasmodial stage. As long as it has an adequate food supply and is comfortable in its environment, it doesn’t age and it doesn’t die.

Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat, has no brain, no sense of sight or smell, but can solve mazes, learn patterns, keep time, and pass down the wisdom of generations.

It turns out that slimes are pretty cool. I really should stop using it as an insult. After all, they're more useful than Republicans.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Yes, COVID-19 delta is killing kids, kids who are unvaccinated and in schools with other kids, with governors who are preventing schools from enforcing mask regulations because making a child wear a mask is "child abuse", as opposed to filling their lungs with their own liquefied lung tissue and watching them drown as they spend their final moments on Earth in the ICU of children's hospitals.

Tens of millions of American adults who were supposed to protect them are too selfish to do the right thing, mask up, and get the vaccine, and America's kids are paying the ultimate price for that hubris.

 

As children’s hospitals in many parts of the United States admit more Covid-19 patients, a result of the highly contagious Delta variant, federal and state health officials are grappling with a sharp new concern: children not yet eligible for vaccination in places with substantial viral spread, now at higher risk of being infected than at any other time in the pandemic. Nowhere is that worry greater than in Louisiana, which has among the highest new daily case rates in the country and only 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, putting children at particular risk as they return to school.

Most children with Covid-19 have only mild symptoms, and there is not enough evidence to conclude that Delta makes some of them sicker than other variants do, scientists say. Doctors and nurses at Children’s Hospital agreed with that assessment.

Theresa Sokol, Louisiana’s top epidemiologist, said that people younger than 18 had among the highest test positivity rates in the state and were responsible for a significant share of transmission, with many cases most likely undetected.

“So many days are filled with this puzzle of: We don’t have enough beds for this patient who wants to come, so how are we going to shuffle our children around to accommodate one more?” said Devon H. Relle, a pediatric nurse practitioner at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, where she worked the front desk of the 17-bed I.C.U. The hospital was also seeing an early, worrisome wave of respiratory syncytial virus, known as R.S.V., which can cause some of the same symptoms and was contributing to the overflow conditions.

The crush of Covid-19 at Children’s Hospital grew so intense this month that the state called in a federal “surge team” of emergency responders from the Department of Health and Human Services’s National Disaster Medical System. The group of about 14 included a physician, a nurse practitioner, nurses, paramedics, a respiratory therapist and a pharmacist.

The team was the first assigned to a children’s hospital during the pandemic.

“Covid-19 right now down here is so endemic that you don’t have to have a specific exposure, because it’s just out there,” said Anne Barylick, a nurse practitioner on the surge team who handled patient intake in the emergency department and Covid-19 units. “Statistically, you’re going to run into it.”

Dr. Mark W. Kline, the hospital’s physician in chief, said that its overcrowded units threatened care for children across the region. It is one of the few advanced children’s hospitals in Louisiana and bordering states, he said, and there are few other options for specialized pediatric care.

Ms. Barylick, who works at a community health center in Rhode Island, was also deployed to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But this deployment was fundamentally different, she said. Instead of helping with a field hospital or pop-up clinic under a tent after a natural disaster, she and her colleagues were woven into the hospital’s normal operations. They rotated with members of the regular nursing staff to triage young patients and greeted them in the emergency room to assess whether they might have Covid-19.

The need here was clear.

“I have never seen our faculty look so tired or sad,” said Dr. Adele K. Evans, who leads the hospital’s tracheostomy team. About 60 members of the medical staff were in quarantine last week. She called it the most difficult moment in the hospital’s history.

 

Let me explain this to people in no uncertain terms so that there is no misunderstanding.

 

The reason why you get vaccinated, and why you wear masks, is not only to protect yourself, but to protect those who cannot be vaccinated. 

To protect kids.

Why is this so difficult?

Why is empathy so hard for these assholes? Why is the concept of a greater good so foreign to selfish, narcissistic jackasses?

I guess I answered my own question. The next question is, how long are we going to tolerate this. And sadly, given the number of kids America lets die in a year in the name of "freedom", the answer is "forever".