Oil and gas companies are hurtling toward bankruptcy, raising fears that wells will be left leaking planet-warming pollutants, with cleanup cost left to taxpayers.
National Parks May Become Latest Battleground in Reopening
What Black Lives Matter Has Revealed About Small-Town America
…perhaps the most pressing concerns have to do with the steps being taken by the WHite House with regards to such data as is currently being made available regarding what the facts on the ground might be during an ongoing public health crisis the like of which has not been encountered in a generation
…but if you go down to the woods these days…you know what wouldn’t surprise me in the fucking slightest?
The recent assessment that Russia paid bounties to the insurgents to attack U.S. troops stunned many, but officials said the Kremlin’s outreach began almost a decade ago.
The National Security Agency said a hacking group associated with Russian intelligence was targeting health care organizations to gain intelligence about vaccines.
…or cozy bears…or any other kind of bears we can haul into this analogy before flogging the poor thing over the cliffs of reason to dash itself upon the rocky shores who “who even fucking cares?”
…you did not…partly because quite frankly I lost track of that rather profuse collection…& partly because the links tend to be things I’ve looked at & I think the stuff about that that I ran across I listened to?
…possibly I misunderstood something but it seemed to me that it was of a pattern that had been seen before whereby they found a pretext to put it on some secluded server somewhere…when it comes to information that consider might embarrass the the tangerine-asaurus their argument is that it constitutes a threat against national security & nobody ought to be able to access it?
…but if anyone happened to have a link to hand it’d be welcome…Loveshaq seemed to have found one or two with some concerns along those lines
…but to be honest I’m not sure that makes me all that reassured…their bar for what information they should be entitled to withhold remains shockingly low & the stuff on the sorts of servers I alluded to above includes at least some of the stuff Mueller bemoaned being denied to his investigations so I very much wouldn’t put it past them as/when the data is flowing entirely via them?
About the June deficit. The WaPo article explains it pretty well in very broad terms. The extra $600/week for unemployment recipients (of which I am one, and to my horror just learned is taxable income…) and the PPP loans, which previously weren’t counted as spending. Typically loans are considered an asset: if I loan you $100 I still have that $100; I just don’t have it on me. In June they took into account that most loans will be forgiven. Also, the tax filing deadline was pushed back from 4/15 to 7/15, and any sane person who owed for the 2019 tax year waited until 7/15 to cough up. Then of course the tax “reform” (cuts for the wealthy) so that’s been having an effect on tax receipts. Our exports are probably severely hobbled at this point but I don’t know if a trade deficit gets rolled into a monthly deficit number.
Just a huge, unsustainable mess. The only reason we haven’t turned into Greece or Iceland (during their worst economic crises) is that foreigners love dollars and they need them to buy all kinds of assets to get their ill-gotten gains out of their kleptocratic countries.
Just an aside, but why not. Pre-pandemic I took an evening stroll down Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row, West 57th Street. Of the hundreds and hundreds of visible windows there were lights on in maybe three of them. Interpol should set up a satellite office or at least a West 57th Street dedicated bureau.
…the deficit thing is (as things involving numbers that size are wont to be) pretty freaking complicated…which is why I tried to avoid the temptation to frame it as an attempt to pump & dump the entire economy in service to a fully delusional campaign strategy
…but that those loans would be an amalgam of necessarily forgiven in the case of those to whom they were likely never enough to characterize as assistance & taxed down the line wherever possible…sadly I find neither of those outcomes to be surprising?
…so if I were going anywhere with that it would have been that a jump of two orders of magnitude in the year on year federal deficit numbers was the very definition of no small thing
…for which there appears to have been a small amount of direct financial assistance (some of which is to be clawed back if at all possible) a “stockpile” described as being on the bare side despite the states being expected to shift for themselves & not rely on it much in the first instance
…& a concerted effort to discredit the foremost authority on the pandemic in order to better obfuscate the medical facts of the thing so that it doesn’t fuck with important things like the incumbent’s favorability with ill-informed low-information voters still misanthropic enough to consider voting for another round of this…well, a bonfire doesn’t seem to do justice to the scale of the thing…arsonists’ playground of the vanities?
Speaking of Greece, they had a vastly more effective response to COVID-19 than the US. Greece has the same population as Georgia. Greece has had a total of 4,000 cases and 193 deaths. Brian Kemp and Donald Trump are responsible for 121,000 cases and 3,100 deaths, assuming they are even telling the truth. Greece has the virus largely contained, while Georgia…. (stares blankly out the window).
Did I miss the part where you went over the situation with the information the administration stole form the CDC has already disappeared?
…you did not…partly because quite frankly I lost track of that rather profuse collection…& partly because the links tend to be things I’ve looked at & I think the stuff about that that I ran across I listened to?
…possibly I misunderstood something but it seemed to me that it was of a pattern that had been seen before whereby they found a pretext to put it on some secluded server somewhere…when it comes to information that consider might embarrass the the tangerine-asaurus their argument is that it constitutes a threat against national security & nobody ought to be able to access it?
…but if anyone happened to have a link to hand it’d be welcome…Loveshaq seemed to have found one or two with some concerns along those lines
…this seems to suggest the effect was merely temporary
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/16/who-took-down-the-cdcs-coronavirus-data-the-agency-itself-367018
…but to be honest I’m not sure that makes me all that reassured…their bar for what information they should be entitled to withhold remains shockingly low & the stuff on the sorts of servers I alluded to above includes at least some of the stuff Mueller bemoaned being denied to his investigations so I very much wouldn’t put it past them as/when the data is flowing entirely via them?
About the June deficit. The WaPo article explains it pretty well in very broad terms. The extra $600/week for unemployment recipients (of which I am one, and to my horror just learned is taxable income…) and the PPP loans, which previously weren’t counted as spending. Typically loans are considered an asset: if I loan you $100 I still have that $100; I just don’t have it on me. In June they took into account that most loans will be forgiven. Also, the tax filing deadline was pushed back from 4/15 to 7/15, and any sane person who owed for the 2019 tax year waited until 7/15 to cough up. Then of course the tax “reform” (cuts for the wealthy) so that’s been having an effect on tax receipts. Our exports are probably severely hobbled at this point but I don’t know if a trade deficit gets rolled into a monthly deficit number.
Just a huge, unsustainable mess. The only reason we haven’t turned into Greece or Iceland (during their worst economic crises) is that foreigners love dollars and they need them to buy all kinds of assets to get their ill-gotten gains out of their kleptocratic countries.
Just an aside, but why not. Pre-pandemic I took an evening stroll down Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row, West 57th Street. Of the hundreds and hundreds of visible windows there were lights on in maybe three of them. Interpol should set up a satellite office or at least a West 57th Street dedicated bureau.
…the deficit thing is (as things involving numbers that size are wont to be) pretty freaking complicated…which is why I tried to avoid the temptation to frame it as an attempt to pump & dump the entire economy in service to a fully delusional campaign strategy
…but that those loans would be an amalgam of necessarily forgiven in the case of those to whom they were likely never enough to characterize as assistance & taxed down the line wherever possible…sadly I find neither of those outcomes to be surprising?
…so if I were going anywhere with that it would have been that a jump of two orders of magnitude in the year on year federal deficit numbers was the very definition of no small thing
…for which there appears to have been a small amount of direct financial assistance (some of which is to be clawed back if at all possible) a “stockpile” described as being on the bare side despite the states being expected to shift for themselves & not rely on it much in the first instance
…& a concerted effort to discredit the foremost authority on the pandemic in order to better obfuscate the medical facts of the thing so that it doesn’t fuck with important things like the incumbent’s favorability with ill-informed low-information voters still misanthropic enough to consider voting for another round of this…well, a bonfire doesn’t seem to do justice to the scale of the thing…arsonists’ playground of the vanities?
Speaking of Greece, they had a vastly more effective response to COVID-19 than the US. Greece has the same population as Georgia. Greece has had a total of 4,000 cases and 193 deaths. Brian Kemp and Donald Trump are responsible for 121,000 cases and 3,100 deaths, assuming they are even telling the truth. Greece has the virus largely contained, while Georgia…. (stares blankly out the window).
‘The science should not stand in the way of’
schools fully reopening(your issue here) …The entire GOP platform, laid bare.
Here to help you bear your burdens- Fur Face Friday!
https://groupthink.kinja.com/fur-face-friday-1844396379
…salvation is at hand…thanks for that
Do any of you guys watch Vice News? They have been doing some amazing stuff, like the 8:46 Project:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/846-news