It's A Gas, Gas, Gas

I have to admit that Americans are very good at self-fulfilling prophecies of stupidity, I've been writing about that for going on 13 years now.

 

A growing number of gas stations along the East Coast are without fuel as nervous drivers aggressively fill up their tanks following a ransomware attack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline, a critical artery for gasoline. The panic-buying threatens to exacerbate the supply shock. 

As of 4 pm ET Tuesday, 8.5% of gas stations in North Carolina and 7.7% in Virginia didn't have gasoline, according to outage figures reported by GasBuddy, an app that tracks fuel prices and demand. The Virginia figure was flat from 11 am ET, while North Carolina was up from 5.8% previously. 

Rising outages are also being reported at gas stations in Georgia (5.8%), Florida (2.8%) and South Carolina (3.5%), according to GasBuddy, which collects user reports and shares the information with the government during emergencies. 

"Panicked buying" is "running stations in the region dry," Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told CNN Business. 

He warned that the "irrational behavior" could prolong supply issues "for weeks." 

Tiffany Wright of AAA Carolinas criticized what she described as "irresponsible behavior at the pump." 

"People are taking their entire family fleet of vehicles to the gas station and filing up when they don't need to," Wright told CNN's Dianne Gallagher. "We are our own worst enemy in this situation because we are over-consuming at the pump." 

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pleaded with Americans not to hoard gas as the pipeline attempts to resume operations. 

"Let me emphasize that much as there was no cause for say, hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic, there should be no cause for hoarding gasoline," Granholm said during Tuesday's White House press briefing, "especially in light of the fact that the pipeline should be substantially operational by the end of this week and over the weekend." 

Demand for information on gasoline availability is so intense that GasBuddy itself experienced outages. De Haan told CNN the platform is experiencing "slowdowns" because of "extreme traffic," so users may experience "periodic timeouts" on its website and app.

US gasoline demand jumped 20% on Monday compared with the prior week, according to GasBuddy. 

In just five states served by Colonial Pipeline — Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia -- demand was up by a collective 40.1%, GasBuddy said. 

"I got scared that I could not go to work or take my daughters to school," Florida resident Linderly Bedoya told CNN on Tuesday. "All the gas stations in my area were without gas and when I finally found one I had to stay an hour in line and I had to fill up with the premium unleaded."

 

So if you're a Republican governor, and you want to hurt this administration, what do you do?  You declare a state of emergency, which immediately makes demand and shortages even worse.

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared a state of emergency due to the Colonial Pipeline shutdown on Saturday, May 7.

According to the executive order, on May 7, Colonial Pipeline, a major US fuel pipeline operator, was the target of a cyberattack that disabled certain computer systems responsible for sustaining pipeline operations.

As a result of the incident, Colonial Pipeline was forced to temporarily halt pipeline operations in order to contain the attack.

Colonial Pipeline is responsible for transporting a "substantial percentage" of fuel on the East Coast of the United States, including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products, the executive order stated.

The closure of the pipeline poses a severe threat to the State of Florida and Gov. DeSantis said this requires immediate resources be taken to protect the continued delivery of fuel products to the state, the executive order read.

The executive order is to expire in 30 days from Tuesday, May 11, unless Gov. DeSantis extends it.

 

So now Florida is free from all commercial driving regulations for as long as DeSantis wants it, and shortages will sure make energy companies and GOP donors a shitload of money, while he sits back and blames Biden.

Bonus: He gets political cover for doing this from Virginia's Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who also declared a state of emergency making everything worse.

You can bet that DeSantis will be playing news footage of long gas lines whenever he needs to do so, and I have to admit, he's crafty as well as evil.

Remember when I said the real threat was Trump, only without the baggage?

Yeah.

StupidiNews!

• Colombian activist Lucas Villa was declared brain dead Monday night, almost a week after he was shot eight times at a peaceful protest by unknown gunmen.
• Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey has signed into law the state's voter suppression bill, purging 140,000 voters from the rolls and making voter registration more difficult.
• Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis says she will seek the death penalty for the Atlanta suspect accused of shooting eight people at various spas, charging the suspect with anti-Asian hate crimes.
• President Biden is expected to nominate former Chicago Mayor and Obama WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as America's Ambassador to Japan.
• The country's largest planned wind turbine power farm has finally cleared regulatory hurdles and has received final approval to be built off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
  

Last Call For Israeli A Problem, Con't

As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's legal prospects grow dimmer by the day in his corruption trial, he's walked away from the day-to-day management of Israel is order to save his own skin, and the neglect and dereliction means the worst possible instincts are being used to try to control the latest situation in Gaza with brutal force that threatens to create a much bigger problem for the entire Middle East.

 

Airstrikes left neighborhoods in Gaza trembling, killing at least two dozen people, and rockets rained on cities in Israel, including Tel Aviv, as some of the worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in years showed no signs of abating on Tuesday.

The immediate trigger was a police raid on an Islamic holy site in Jerusalem the day before, but by Tuesday the conflict had grown far broader, with civilians on both sides of the border paying a heavy cost.

In Gaza, at least 26 Palestinians, including nine children, were killed in at least 130 Israeli strikes on Monday and Tuesday, and 122 others were wounded, according to health officials.

In Israel, two people were killed in strikes on the seaside city of Ashkelon on Tuesday, and at least 56 Israelis have received hospital treatment, according to medical officials. As multiple salvos of rockets streaked out of Gaza in rapid succession, one hit a school in the city, just 13 miles up the coast from Gaza. And a giant fire raged on the outskirts of Ashkelon where an oil facility was hit.

The school was empty at the time because the Israeli authorities had ordered all schools within a 25-mile radius of Gaza closed in anticipation of rockets.

Several more slammed into the port city of Ashdod, a little farther up the coast, where at least one hit a house. The emergency services reported several people wounded slightly.

Shortly after 9 p.m., militants fired another barrage toward Tel Aviv, Israel’s second-largest city, with one rocket hitting an empty bus south of the city, wounding at least three people, including a 5-year-old girl. One person was killed by the barrage, the authorities said, and 11 people were injured, according to early media reports.

Palestinian militants said the barrage was revenge for an airstrike that toppled a tower that houses the offices of several Hamas officials.

In a late-night address to Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Hamas and Islamic Jihad have paid, and will pay, a very heavy price for their aggression.” But he warned, that “this campaign will take time.”

The Israeli military, prepared for the latest eruption of cross-border fighting with militant groups in Gaza, designated a code name for its operation just hours after the deadly violence began: Guardians of the Walls, a reference to the ancient ramparts of the Old City of Jerusalem. The militant groups had their own code name for their campaign: Sword of Jerusalem.

By early Tuesday morning, barely 12 hours after Hamas, the Islamist militant group that holds sway in Gaza, had launched a surprise volley of rockets toward Jerusalem, Israel had carried out at least 130 retaliatory airstrikes in the Palestinian coastal territory, according to an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. Militant groups had fired nearly 500 rockets into Israel by the afternoon, according to military officials.

Things are rapidly spiraling out of control in Gaza, and while I don't think Netanyahu wants a third Intifada, he's going to take advantage of it if it comes to stay in power with a breathtakingly horrid crackdown where thousands may die. 

Like Trump, Netanyahu has set the stage for being rid of these troublesome Palestinians, and it looks like Israel's hardliners in the military are going to push this as far as they can.

I'm hoping President Biden can step in and calm things down, but I'm not holding out hope.

The Big Lie, Con't

Conspiracy theorists in Arizona, seeing the recount nonsense crumbling to dust before their eyes, are now petitioning the state's Supreme Court to throw out all 2020 election results and to remove the entirely of the state's elected officials immediately, where they would be replaced by a list of "ordinary Arizona citizens" that just happens to consist of the plaintiffs.

A group of Arizona citizens, including one Republican Congressional candidate, is asking the state’s Supreme Court to invalidate all election results since 2018 and remove all elected officials from their offices immediately.

And who should replace the ousted election officials? Well, the citizens who filed the lawsuit, of course.

The legal petition claims all officials elected in Arizona since 2018 are “inadvertent usurpers” because the elections they won were conducted by vote-counting equipment that was not properly certified.

The plaintiffs claim the evidence to back up this staggering claim will be provided in the lawsuit’s appendix, which unfortunately they had not submitted at the time of writing.

The plaintiffs claim that the court has the authority to void the terms of the named officials—which include Gov. Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—and install themselves as appropriate replacements.

“When in the past citizens have been appointed by the Governor to finish out a Senate term due to unusual circumstances, the Governor has typically chosen pedigreed, well-known politicians, but this is not necessary. Any Arizona resident meeting the minimum qualifications is entitled to and has the right be appointed to a seat in unusual situations,” the lawsuit claims.

The legal filing is the latest harebrained effort by pro-Trump and QAnon supporters in Arizona to get the results of November’s election overturned. There is currently an audit of 2.1 million votes being conducted in Maricopa County. The GOP-sanctioned recount is being conducted by a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, which has no experience conducting audits.

So far the group has used UV lights to look for watermarks that conspiracy theorists claim were placed on certain ballots by former President Donald Trump to prove election fraud. And last week they began examining the ballots for bamboo fibers, based on a false claim that 40,000 ballots were flown in from Asia to tip the election in President Joe Biden’s favor.

The new lawsuit was filed with the Arizona Supreme Court on Friday, and the plaintiffs in the case sought to have their names redacted. “Petitioners have chosen to redact their names and personal information and utilize initials due a reasonable concern for their safety,” the plaintiffs write in the lawsuit.

But the group does give some indication of who they are by calling themselves “We the People,” a widely used phrase in the QAnon community.

One of the people involved in the “We the People” group is Daniel Wood, a former Marine who was a Republican candidate for Congress in last November’s elections.

Wood, who was beaten by Democratic rival Rep. Raul Grijalva, is mentioned at the bottom of a press release about the lawsuit which was published by the right-wing website the Gateway Pundit.

Also listed on the press release is Josh Barnett, a businessman who says he is a Republican candidate for Congress in 2022.

“As average citizens of Arizona, from all walks of life, we have discovered that our past elections in 2018 thru 2020 are out of compliance per the U.S. Election Assistance Commission,” Wood and Barnett claim in the press release.

Wood and Barnett did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News.

 

This is absolute poppycock and the people behind this idiocy should be tossed into the clink for a few months, but it's going to be The Next Proof Thing™ of a massive conspiracy to not elect tinfoil crazies to run the state. They are literally asking a judge to hand the entire state over to some random assholes.

 

And eventually, these fools will turn to more violence. It's inevitable.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Joe Biden's latest Associated Press poll shows him in pretty good shape at 63% favorability, with seven out of ten Americans approving of his pandemic response.

President Joe Biden is plunging into the next phase of his administration with the steady approval of a majority of Americans, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The survey shows Biden is buoyed in particular by the public’s broad backing for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the fourth month of his presidency, Biden’s overall approval rating sits at 63%. When it comes to the new Democratic president’s handling of the pandemic, 71% of Americans approve, including 47% of Republicans.

The AP-NORC poll also shows an uptick in Americans’ overall optimism about the state of the country. Fifty-four percent say the country is on the right track, higher than at any point in AP-NORC polls conducted since 2017; 44% think the nation is on the wrong track.

Those positive marks have fueled the Biden White House’s confidence coming out of the president’s first 100 days in office, a stretch in which he secured passage of a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package and surged COVID-19 vaccines across the country. The U.S., which has suffered the most virus deaths of any nation, is now viewed enviably by much of the rest of the world for its speedy vaccination program and robust supplies of the shots.

“We are turning a corner,” said Jeff Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator.

The improvements have also impacted Americans’ concerns about the virus. The AP-NORC poll shows the public’s worries about the pandemic are at their lowest level since February 2020, when the virus was first reaching the U.S. About half of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried that they or a relative could be infected with the virus, down from about 7 in 10 just a month earlier.

As has been the case throughout the pandemic, there is a wide partisan gap in Americans’ views of pandemic risks. Among Democrats, 69% say they remain at least somewhat worried about being infected with the virus, compared with just 33% of Republicans.

Despite the overall positive assessments of Americans, Biden’s advisers are well aware that the next phase of his presidency is potentially trickier. Vaccination rates have slowed, and the administration is grappling with how to persuade those who are reluctant to get the shots about their safety and efficacy.

Biden’s legislative agenda for the rest of this year also faces obstacles on Capitol Hill. Republicans are resisting his calls for passing a sweeping infrastructure package, and there’s insufficient support among Democrats for overhauling Senate rules in a way that would allow the party to tackle changes to immigration policy, gun laws and voting rights on its own.

 

The first 100 days of the Biden administration was the easy part. Putting out Trump's forest fires took months, but there were clear goals and people broadly supported them.

 

It gets much, much harder from here for Biden, and for us as a nation.

StupidiNews!

• NYPD investigators believe the suspected gunman who injured three in Times Square last weekend may have been targeting his brother.
• India's COVID-19 cases continue to top 400,000 daily as deaths on Monday passed the 4,000 mark for the second consecutive day.
• Palestinian rockets in Gaza have left nine dead after Jerusalem Day celebrations ended in 300 Palestinians injured by rubber bullets and stun grenades.
• The Treasury Department is now accepting applications for local and state governments for up to $350 billion in COVID-19 relief funds.
• Amazon says it destroyed more than 2 million counterfeit products last year as the online sales giant grapples with foreign supply chains and sales scams.
  

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The recount of Maricopa County's votes by Arizona Republicans has now fully devolved into a circus, and Republicans are openly beginning to express regret that the lunatics running the show may not have been the best, most competent people to hire for the job. 

Directly outside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum near downtown Phoenix, the Crazy Times Carnival wraps up an 11-day run on Sunday, a spectacle of thrill rides, games and food stands that headlines the Arizona State Fair this year.

Inside the coliseum, a Republican-ordered exhumation and review of 2.1 million votes in the state’s November election is heading into its third week, an exercise that has risen to become the lodestar of rigged-vote theorists — and shows no sign of ending soon.

Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs noted the carnival’s presence outside the coliseum when she challenged the competence and objectivity of the review last week, expressing concern about the security of the ballots inside in an apparent dig at what has become a spectacle of a very different sort.

There is no evidence that former President Donald J. Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona’s presidential election in the fall was fraudulent. Nonetheless, 16 Republicans in the State Senate voted to subpoena ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and two-thirds of the state’s vote in November, for an audit to show Trump die-hards that their fraud concerns were taken seriously.

As recently as a week ago, officials said the review would be completed by May 14. But with that deadline a week away, only about 250,000 of the county’s 2.1 million ballots have been processed in the hand recount that is a central part of the review, Ken Bennett, a liaison between those conducting the review and the senators, said on Saturday.

At that rate, the hand recount would not be finished until August.

The delay is but the latest snag in an exercise that many critics claim is wrecking voters’ confidence in elections, not restoring it. Since the State Senate first ordered it in December, the review has been dogged by controversy. Republicans dominate the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which supervised the election in the county. They said it was fair and accurate and opposed the review.

After a week marked by mounting accusations of partisan skulduggery, mismanagement and even potential illegality, at least one Republican supporter of the new count said it could not end soon enough.

“It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, said on Friday. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

Civil-rights advocates say political fallout is the least of the concerns. They say the Arizona review is emblematic of a broader effort by pro-Trump Republicans to undermine faith in American democracy and shift control of elections to partisans who share their agenda.

 

As I've said before, I fully expect red states where Democrats win in 2024 to be annulled, especially in the presidential contest. I expect Republicans will simply ignore voters and send a slate of GOP electors instead, regardless of the outcome. It's going to happen in a state like Wisconsin or Arizona or (if things go badly) Virginia.

That's when we find out if we remain a democracy. The Big Lie is all about trashing elections to the point where they don't matter any more.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

So the cyberattack that brought down the Colonial Pipeline on Friday may be part of the Russian mob's revenge on US sanctions, in what should not surprise anyone.

A Russian criminal group may be responsible for a ransomware attack that shut down a major U.S. fuel pipeline, two sources familiar with the matter said Sunday.

The group, known as DarkSide, is relatively new, but it has a sophisticated approach to the business of extortion, the sources said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Sunday that the White House was working to help Colonial Pipeline, the Georgia-based company that operates the pipeline, to restart its 5,500-mile network.

The system, which runs from Texas to New Jersey, transports 45 percent of the East Coast's fuel supply. In a statement Sunday, the company said that some smaller lateral lines were operational but that the main lines remained down.

"We are in the process of restoring service to other laterals and will bring our full system back online only when we believe it is safe to do so, and in full compliance with the approval of all federal regulations," the company said.

Raimondo said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that the effort to restart the network was "an all-hands-on-deck effort right now."

"We are working closely with the company, state and local officials to make sure that they get back up to normal operations as quickly as possible and there aren't disruptions in supply," she said, adding: "Unfortunately, these sorts of attacks are becoming more frequent. They're here to stay."

A White House official said Sunday that the Energy Department is leading the government's response. Agencies are planning for a number of scenarios in which the region's fuel supply takes a hit, the official said.

 

The Biden White House is at least taking this seriously as an attack on the country's infrastructure and economy, and "criminal groups acting with state blessing" is the hallmark of Putin's oligarch mafia. Trump of course would have refused to act for weeks until he could have found a way to blame China, and Americans would have suffered in the meantime.

The bigger short-term problem is gasoline futures are rising sharply, and gas prices on the East Coast are soon to follow.

Futures for fuel prices rose Monday, as much of one of the largest pipelines in the U.S. remains closed following a cybersecurity attack.

Gasoline futures rose 0.6% to $2.14 per gallon, pulling back from their highest levels of the overnight session. At one point, gasoline futures jumped as high as $2.216, levels not seen since May 2018.

Heating oil futures rose 0.6% to $2.02, also off the highest levels of the session.

West Texas Intermediate crude futures, the U.S. oil benchmark, turned lower, giving up earlier gains. It was last down 0.2% to $64.78 per barrel. International benchmark Brent crude traded at $68.69 per barrel, for a gain of 40 cents. Natural gas futures declined 0.5% to $2.91 per million British thermal units.

Colonial Pipeline said Sunday evening that some of its smaller lateral lines between terminals and delivery points are once again online but that its main lines are still shut down.

In an attempt to maintain fuel supplies along the Eastern Seaboard, the U.S. declared a state of emergency in 17 states and the District of Columbia on Sunday evening.

It is not yet clear whether the shutdown will raise prices consumers pay at the pump, but analysts say a prolonged shutdown beyond five days could translate to higher prices.

The markets are expecting this to be over with shortly. If it's not, it's going to get bad, and fast.

Black Lives Still Matter

Remember, it's the people screaming about cancel culture and free speech who are doing everything they can to criminalize even saying that Black lives matter.

Two brothers, 8 and 5, were removed from their Oklahoma elementary school classrooms this past week and made to wait out the school day in a front office for wearing T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter,” according to the boys’ mother.

The superintendent of the Ardmore, Okla., school district where the brothers, Bentlee and Rodney Herbert, attend different schools had previously told their mother, Jordan Herbert, that politics would “not be allowed at school,” Ms. Herbert recalled on Friday.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma has called the incident a violation of the students’ First Amendment rights.

On April 30, Bentlee, who is in the third grade, went to class at Charles Evans Elementary in a Black Lives Matter shirt, which Ms. Herbert said he had picked out himself to wear.

That evening, Ms. Herbert learned that the school’s principal, Denise Brunk, had told Bentlee that he was not allowed to wear the T-shirt. At Ms. Brunk’s direction, he turned the shirt inside out and finished out the school day.

On Monday, Ms. Herbert went to the school to ask the principal what dress-code policy her son had violated, Ms. Herbert said. Ms. Brunk referred her to the Ardmore City Schools superintendent, Kim Holland.

“He told me when the George Floyd case blew up that politics will not be allowed at school,” Ms. Herbert said on Friday, referring to Mr. Holland. “I told him, once again, a ‘Black Lives Matter’ T-shirt is not politics.”

Neither Ms. Brunk nor Mr. Holland responded to emails or phone calls seeking comment on Friday.

On Tuesday, Ms. Herbert’s three sons — Bentlee; Rodney, who is in kindergarten; and Jaelon, a sixth grader, all of whom are Black — went to their schools in matching T-shirts with the words “Black Lives Matter” and an image of a clenched fist on the front.

Later that morning, Ms. Herbert received a call from Rodney’s school, Will Rogers Elementary, telling her that she needed to either bring Rodney a different shirt or let the school provide one for him, or Rodney would be forced to sit in the front office for the rest of the school day. Rodney did not change shirts, and he sat in the office until school was over.

Ms. Herbert learned later that day that Bentlee had also been made to sit in his school’s front office, where he missed recess, and did not eat lunch in the cafeteria with his classmates.

Jaelon, 12, encountered no issues at Ardmore Middle School because of his T-shirt, his mother said.

In an interview with The Daily Ardmoreite, Mr. Holland suggested that the T-shirts were disruptive.

“It’s our interpretation of not creating a disturbance in school,” Mr. Holland told the newspaper. “I don’t want my kids wearing MAGA hats or Trump shirts to school either because it just creates, in this emotionally charged environment, anxiety and issues that I don’t want our kids to deal with.”

 

So ask yourself why a kindergartener is being told by the school that Black lives mattering is "creating a disruption". Meanwhile, how many active shooter drills have kids in these schools gone through?

Pretty sad when you decide to take out revenge, and this is what it is, revenge, mind you, on a five-year-old. What's the district's policy on Confederate flag t-shirts, something that is actually disruptive and hurtful? If those are banned, why are Black lives matter t-shirts treated the same way?

 

Of course, we know the answer to that rhetorical question, and that's why Republicans are doing everything they can to banish everything but the most anodyne interpretation of American history in the name of making white folk feel better about slavery, colonization, and genocide. We have to rewrite history and gaslight our kids to keep them from learning the truth about this country's history for the last 400 years.

I got a crash course on this nearly 30 years ago in high school during the Rodney King riots. I thank my lucky stars that the student and faculty where I went to school actually confronted that and brought the entire school body together to discuss what went on, and yeah, there were people who said nothing bad happened.

But the vast majority of us were pissed off, and we all learned about out own experiences involving race from one another, white, Black, Asian, Indigenous, all of us that April and May. That shaped my life to this day.

And three decades later, a generation later, we're still having this discussion.

Black Lives Still Matter.

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Andres has formed in the Pacific, the earliest in a year a named storm has formed in the Pacific since the era of satellites.
• At least 68 were killed in Afghanistan as a school was attacked by suicide bombers, family members are in mourning as dozens of students died.
• Ford is recalling more than 600,000 Explorer SUVs over safety concerns for roof rail retention pins, with the possibility that the pins could fail and roof rails could fly off the vehicle.
• UK Labour Party leader Kier Starmer is retooling his team after getting soundly beaten by Tories in weekend local elections.
• New analytics find that 96% of Apple iPhone users installing iOS update 14.5 are choosing to opt out of app tracking for privacy purposes.
  

Last Call For Jab And A Brewski

 Buffalo has found one possible answer to overcoming vaccine hesitancy: free beer.

The idea of getting vaccinated had been rolling around in the back of Tyler Morsch's mind for weeks. As a 28-year-old, he didn't feel in any particular danger, but he finally decided he should start looking for a Covid-19 vaccination clinic this week. Then he heard the magic words. 

"Free beer," he said.

Saturday was the first day that Erie County worked with a local microbrewery to host its Shot and a Chaser program, offering individuals who got their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine at Resurgence Brewing Company a free pint glass and coupon for the vaccinated person's drink of choice.

Under normal circumstances, it would be beyond strange for a brewery to host a vaccination clinic in the shadow of 1,000-gallon fermentation tanks, with a brick wall separating a bustling bar service from health care professionals handling syringes filled with the Moderna vaccine. But these are not normal times.

"Given the world we live in right now, it's not so weird," said Ben Kestner, Resurgence Brewing's director of taproom operations.

County Executive Mark Poloncarz, who was nursing his own drink in one hand while directing vaccine recipients to open table with the other, was happy to see the county's first Shot and a Chaser effort going so well. Before the vaccinations started at 11 a.m., there was a line out the door.

Programs like the Shot and a Chaser program are among the more creative outreach efforts to try and attract individuals who would otherwise not consider vaccination a priority, especially younger adults. New Jersey and Suffolk County have picked up on the idea, offering free drink vouchers at participating breweries for those who agree to get vaccinated.

Poloncarz said he's happy to see others pick up the idea.

"We're going to do more people today at our first-dose clinics than most of our first-dose clinics in the last week combined," Poloncarz said. "It's been a success. We figured it would be pretty good, but now we're seeing the results."

That's not a very high bar, given that many of the county's first-dose clinics have had less than two dozen people show up. At one site, only one person showed up, Poloncarz said. Comparatively, more than 100 people had been vaccinated at Resurgence by mid-afternoon, including some walk-ups and restaurant patrons who decided to get the vaccine at the spur of the moment.

 

We've heard a lot about the stick end of the approach to incentivizing vaccinations and making it mandatory to return to the office or to in-person classes, for example. But there's a lot to the carrot approach too. 

Besides, you can always use another pint glass.

Generation COVID, Con't

Schools are reopening for kids across the nation for in-person learning, but not everyone wants to go back. High schoolers in large cities picked up jobs to help out their families, and day care arrangements are in place now for families. Whether we turn this into a new normal or fight it like vaccine hesitancy, a major debate is raging right now about whether or not kids should return to in-person learning later this fall, and it will affect an entire generation of kids for decades to come.

Pauline Rojas’s high school in San Antonio is open. But like many of her classmates, she has not returned, and has little interest in doing so.

During the coronavirus pandemic, she started working 20 to 40 hours per week at Raising Cane’s, a fast-food restaurant, and has used the money to help pay her family’s internet bill, buy clothes and save for a car.

Ms. Rojas, 18, has no doubt that a year of online school, squeezed between work shifts that end at midnight, has affected her learning. Still, she has embraced her new role as a breadwinner, sharing responsibilities with her mother who works at a hardware store.

“I wanted to take the stress off my mom,” she said. “I’m no longer a kid. I’m capable of having a job, holding a job and making my own money.”

Only a small slice of American schools remain fully closed: 12 percent of elementary and middle schools, according to a federal survey, as well as a minority of high schools. But the percentage of students learning fully remotely is much greater: more than a third of fourth and eighth graders, and an even larger group of high school students. A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American students remain out of school.

These disparities have put district leaders and policymakers in a tough position as they end this school year and plan for the next one. Even though the pandemic appears to be coming under control in the United States as vaccinations continue, many superintendents say fear of the coronavirus itself is no longer the primary reason their students are opting out. Nor are many families expressing a strong preference for remote learning.

Rather, for every child and parent who has leaped at the opportunity to return to the classroom, others changed their lives over the past year in ways that make going back to school difficult. The consequences are likely to reverberate through the education system for years, especially if states and districts continue to give students the choice to attend school remotely.

Teenagers from low-income families have taken on heavy loads of paid work, especially because so many parents lost jobs. Parents made new child care arrangements to get through the long months of school closures and part-time hours, and are now loath to disrupt established routines. Some families do not know that local public schools have reopened, because of language barriers or lack of effective communication from districts.

Experts have coined the term “school hesitancy” to describe the remarkably durable resistance to a return to traditional learning. Some wonder whether the pandemic has simply upended people’s choices about how to live, with the location of schooling — like the location of office work — now up for grabs. But others see the phenomenon as a social and educational crisis for children that must be combated — a challenge akin to vaccine hesitancy.

“There are so many stories, and they are all stories that break your heart,” said Pedro Martinez, the San Antonio schools superintendent, who said it was most challenging to draw teenagers back to classrooms in his overwhelmingly Hispanic, low-income district. Half of high school students are eligible to return to school five days a week, but only 30 percent have opted in. Concerned about flagging grades and the risk of students dropping out, he plans to greatly restrict access to remote learning next school year. 

 

The conventional wisdom for the last 14 months has been "We have to get kids back into school ASAP."  But as usual with conventional wisdom, the actual reality on the ground is a lot more complex, and it always has been, especially for low-income Black and brown families. Money is a lot bigger issue than people think.

Not everyone is going to go back, folks.  Maybe we should find ways to provide education for them, rather than punishing them.

Just an idea.

Sunday Long Read: The Maine Problem With Sharks

There's still a hell of a lot we don't know about great whites and sharks in general, but in the era of climate change and ocean acidification, it's important to remeber that sharks have survived for millions of years by staying on the move, as this week's Sunday Long read from Down East reminds us, even to places like Maine's coast.

Monday, July 27, 2020, dawned sultry and bright on Bailey Island, a village of about 400 full-time residents in the midcoast town of Harpswell. Early that morning, lobsterboats sputtered out of picturesque Mackerel Cove. A lone harbor seal appeared, then ducked back underwater. A handful of summer visitors watched from their docks, sipping coffee. On the cove’s east side, at a small and shallow inlet off the bridged island’s main road, Charlie Wemyss-Dunn and his wife, Katy, walked from the water’s edge back to the small cottage they and Charlie’s parents had rented for the month. There, they began a day of remote work at their computers.

By early afternoon, the temperature had topped 90 degrees. Katy was settled onto an outdoor sofa on the house’s back deck. Charlie sat with his laptop at the kitchen table, near a picture window. They both remember looking up as Julie Dimperio Holowach and her daughter, Alex, wandered down to the water from their house, a few doors down. Julie and her husband, Al, had purchased the summer property some 20 years earlier, the culmination of a long-standing love affair with Maine’s islands. After both retiring from careers in the New York fashion world, the couple had begun spending more and more of each year there. During that time, Julie had become known for her community work: she served on boards, mentored young women, and volunteered for several nonprofits. Alex, a physical-education teacher at a private school in New York City, visited for holidays and long summer vacations. Over the years, the entire Holowach clan had become much-loved community members on Bailey Island, where residents — summer and year-round — tend to treat one another like family.

Julie and Alex descended a neighbor’s sloping yard, walked out onto a dock, and slid off it with the ease of swimmers who spend a good deal of time in the water. Although the ocean was temperate by Maine standards, Julie wore her usual wetsuit. A high tide filled the inlet. As the pair bobbed around, their chatter and laughter floated up and into the nearby rental houses. The Wemyss-Dunns took a momentary break from their work, both thinking how nice it was to hear a mother and daughter enjoying their time together. They listened as the two women took turns diving below the surface and marveled at how clear the water seemed.

For an hour, the Holowaches swam easy circles, gradually making their way some 50 feet from shore. Then, at about 3:20 p.m., Julie Holowach let out a terrified scream. Katy Wemyss-Dunn looked up just in time to see the swimmer thrown into the air, then dragged below the surface. Both she and Charlie heard Alex cry for help. Still in the kitchen, Charlie assumed someone had experienced a medical crisis — a heart attack, maybe. He ran outside, where Katy was already struggling to launch a tandem kayak. By then, Alex had clamored onto the inlet’s one exposed rock. Nearby, Julie floated on her back, unmoving. The water around her had turned red.

As Charlie and Katy tumbled into the kayak and started paddling, Charlie suggested that Julie had been struck by a boat propeller. Katy, in a state of shock, shook her head. She was having trouble speaking, but she knew what she had just witnessed was no boating accident. It was a deadly shark attack.

By the time the Wemyss-Dunns got out beyond their long dock, Alex had swum back to shore, near where she and Julie had entered the water. She was still shouting for someone to help her mom. A man renting the house next door dialed 911 to report the attack.

When Charlie saw Katy struggling to catch her breath, he paddled her back to shore, where neighbors had begun comforting Alex. Charlie’s mother took Katy’s spot in the kayak, and the duo paddled back out to the rock, where Julie Holowach still floated on her back, not moving. Charlie’s mother grabbed the swimmer’s hand and supported Julie’s head with her kayak paddle as Charlie slowly ferried them back to shore. By the time they arrived, police and ambulance crews were pulling into the house’s circular drive, along with several other members of the Holowach family who also live on Bailey Island. They dragged Julie out of the water and laid her on the lawn. Emergency medical technicians pronounced the 63-year-old dead at the scene.

Maine didn't even bother tagging or tracking sharks, because sharks aren't on Maine's coast.

Sharks are on Maine's coast.

More things will change as climate does.

Laboring Under A Misconception, Con't

 Like Montana, South Carolina is also cutting off federal COVID-19 benefits in order to make people suffer, because there's nothing more American than making the least among us miserable.

Gov. Henry McMaster is ordering the state’s Department of Employment and Workforce to withdraw from the federal government’s federal pandemic unemployment programs.

Starting on June 30, the state will no longer participate in the expanded unemployment benefits put in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“South Carolina’s businesses have borne the brunt of the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those businesses that have survived — both large and small, and including those in the hospitality, tourism, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors — now face an unprecedented labor shortage,” McMaster wrote in a letter to DEW Executive Director Dan Ellzey.

South Carolina’s unemployment rate reached 12.8% in April of last year. In March, the unemployment rate was down to 5.1%, below the national rate of 6%.

McMaster said South Carolina has more than 81,000 available job openings as the economy has reopened and as restrictions have been lifted and the COVID-19 vaccine is being distributed.

Nothing says GOP policy quite like "Get back to flipping burgers for $8 an hour during a pandemic that we're prolonging on purpose, peons."

Only one problem. The "labor shortage" is complete bullshit.

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.

Whether you think there's a labor shortage or not, the reality is more red states are going to "solve" the problem by hurting the unemployed rather than treating the root cause: getting enough of us vaccinated so that we can open schools, offices, and public buildings and do it safely. 

It's Infrastructure, Weak

Criminal and possibly terrorist cyberattacks are landing more and more often on America's critical infrastructure systems, and after the last guy made sure those doors were left wide open, it's a wonder then that the country hasn't been forced offline by more assaults like these.

The attack hit Colonial Pipeline, which carries gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Texas to New York and moves about 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast.

In a statement late Friday, Colonial Pipeline said it was "the victim of a cybersecurity attack" though the company didn't say who launched the attack or what the motives were.

"In response, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems," the company said.

Colonial Pipeline said it contacted federal agencies and law enforcement, as well as enlisting a third-party cybersecurity firm to help with an investigation "into the nature and scope of this incident."

The Georgia-based company transports more than 100 million gallons, or 2.5 million barrels of fuel daily, including gasoline, diesel fuel, home heating oil, jet fuel and fuels for the U.S. military through its pipeline system, according to the company's website.

The pipeline shutdown comes amid growing concerns over vulnerabilities in the country's infrastructure after several recent cyberattacks, including last year's attack at the software company SolarWinds that hit several U.S. government agencies, including the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, as reported by NPR.

The Biden administration responded to the SolarWinds attack by issuing an executive order to help the country better protect itself against cybersecurity attacks.

"The fact that this attack compromised systems that control pipeline infrastructure indicates that either the attack was extremely sophisticated or the systems were not well secured," said Mike Chapple, a computer science professor at Notre Dame.

"This pipeline shutdown sends the message that core elements of our national infrastructure continue to be vulnerable to cyberattack," he said.

Chapple notes that securing infrastructure involves different federal agencies and requires centralized leadership. "Last year, Congress authorized the creation of a national cybersecurity director within the White House, but this position remains unfilled by the Biden administration," he said. 

 

Part of Biden's infrastructure plan needs to be funding for and implementation of new security measures for the systems that control pipelines, sanitation systems, water works, and power plants. If those go offline for an extended period of time, we're done.

And everyone knows it.