…they say variety is the spice of life…but when it all gets to feeling like variations on a theme
Coronavirus cases worldwide surpassed 200 million on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally, as the more-infectious delta variant threatens areas with low vaccination rates and strains healthcare systems.
The global surge in cases is highlighting the widening gap in inoculation rates between wealthy and poor nations. Cases are rising in about one-third of the world’s countries, many of which have not even given half their population a first dose.
The World Health Organization(WHO) on Wednesday called for a moratorium on Covid-19 vaccine boosters until at least 10% of the population in every country was vaccinated.
[…]
At least 2.6% of the world’s population has been infected since the pandemic started, with the true figure likely higher due to limited testing in many places. If the number of infected people were a country, it would be eighth most populous in the world, behind Nigeria, according to a Reuters analysis.It took over a year for Covid-19 cases to hit 100 million mark, while the next 100 million were reported in just over six months, according to the analysis. The pandemic has left close to 4.4 million people dead.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/covid-cases-surpass-200-million-around-globe-delta-variant-spreads
…it can seem like endlessly playing the same tune…or – to quote a routine old enough that both halves of the double act are dead now
Congress could begin taking testimony as soon as this week from top Justice Department officials who bore witness to then-President Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to overturn his 2020 reelection loss based upon lies and misinformation.
And in the increasingly apparent real-time Justice Department efforts to combat that attempt, one man who has agreed to testify is emerging as something of a potential star witness in the effort: Richard P. Donoghue.
Repeatedly, the former acting deputy attorney general’s name has surfaced in notes and emails repudiating the effort to call the election results into question in no uncertain terms.
[…]
Donoghue’s name has surfaced in two separate instances in recent days.First, over the weekend, came notes he had written during a December meeting with Trump in which, according to Donoghue’s notes, Trump urged the Justice Department to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen.”
[…]
The other big revelation this week involves a highly unorthodox draft letter from Clark. In it, Clark sought to urge the Georgia state legislature to call a special session to look at potentially overturning the election results in their state. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, the proposed letter appears to be the latest in a series of thinly veiled attempts among Trump allies to lay a predicate for getting Congress not to accept the election results Jan. 6.
[…]
As Bump rightly notes, Donoghue’s response carries all the indicators of a guy who know this correspondence might one day be made public — and perhaps wanted to make sure he was on the right side of history.But it’s hardly the first example of that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/04/key-witness-emerges-probe-trump-doj-election-scheme/
…but while for some the consequences are about what you’d expect
A federal judge rejected claims that detained defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach are “political prisoners” or that riot participants acted out of patriotism before sentencing a Michigan man to six months in prison Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington said Karl Dresch, 41, of Calumet, Mich, was held because of his actions, not his political views, and that others who joined the attack on Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 presidential election could face prison time.
“He was not a political prisoner,” Jackson said. “We are not here today because he supported former president Trump . . . He was arrested because he was an enthusiastic participant in an effort to subvert and undo the electoral process.”
[…]
In Dresch’s case, Jackson said he has the right to vote for whomever he wants, “but so does everyone else. Your vote doesn’t count any more than anyone else’s. You don’t get to cancel them out and call for a war because you don’t like the results of the election.”The judge continued, “You called yourself and the others patriots, but that’s not patriotism. Patriotism is loyalty to country, loyalty to the Constitution, not loyalty to a single head of state. That’s the tyranny we rejected on July 4th of 1776.”
Not patriots, not political prisoners — U.S. judges slam Capitol riot defendants at sentencing [WaPo]
A federal judge in Colorado has disciplined two lawyers who filed a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election late last year, finding that the case was “frivolous,” “not warranted by existing law” and filed “in bad faith.”
In a scathing 68-page opinion, Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter found that the lawyers made little effort to corroborate information they had included in the suit, which argued there had been a vast national conspiracy to steal the election from President Donald Trump.
‘The stuff of which violent insurrections are made:’ Federal judge punishes Colorado lawyers for 2020 election lawsuit [WaPo]
[…]
Calling the suit “one enormous conspiracy theory,” Neureiter ordered that the duo must pay the legal fees of all the individuals and companies they had sued — 18 separate entities in all — as a way to deter future similar cases.
[…]
“In short, this was no slip-and-fall at the local grocery store,” wrote Neureiter, who was appointed as a magistrate judge by other judges. “Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the Complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”
…that “what you’d expect” part isn’t always what you’d call a good thing
As with the entire effort to overturn the results of the election, Trump’s behavior was as clumsy as it was in earnest. He truly wanted the Justice Department to give him a pretext for some kind of (presumably drastic) action, but the most he could do in pursuit of this goal was to complain to top officials on the phone. “The conversations often included complaints about unfounded voter fraud conspiracy theories,” [Katie] Benner notes
But a haphazard attempt is still an attempt. That Trump is an absurd figure does not mean we should treat his drives and desires as nonthreatening. This was true when he was in office, and it is true now, while he is still trying to “stop the steal.”, “and admonishments that department leaders had failed to fight hard enough for Mr. Trump, the officials said.”
Yes, Trump Is Ridiculous. He’s Also Dangerous. [NYT]
…I’ve heard it said that these days GOP might as well stand for Gaslight/Obstruct/Project
The Senate continued to vote Tuesday on amendments to the sweeping infrastructure legislation, working through some hiccups and tension about how quickly to move to a final vote.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warned Democrats not to “speed the process” by calling a vote Wednesday to end debate, saying he’d encourage Republicans to filibuster the bill if so.
“There’s an excellent change that it will be a bipartisan success story for the country. And to try to truncate an amendment process on something of this magnitude, I think, is a mistake,” McConnell said. “So my best advice to the majority leader would be that slow but steady wins the race.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-plods-along-infrastructure-bill-mcconnell-warns-democrats-move-slowly
…& the fact that it works better than it has any right to isn’t new either
The battle over the once-a-decade realignment of legislative and congressional districts is underway across the country even before new maps have been drawn, with lawsuits filed in nearly a dozen states, signaling how intense the fight for partisan power in the states and Congress will be in the coming year.
Many of the early moves have been made by Democrats, who are scrambling to make up a historic deficit when it comes to the bare-knuckle redistricting process that Republicans used in 2011 to cement their dominance at state and national levels.
At stake is how voters will be divided into individual districts for the next decade, and which party will emerge with the greater advantage. Fierce fighting over the maps could delay that process in many states — potentially upending 2022 campaigns midstream.
[…]
“There is heightened attention and awareness of the damaging effects of gerrymandering, and you’re seeing an increase of litigation as a result of the voter suppression and other election laws passed by Republicans as they attempt to hold on to power,” said Kelly Ward Burton, the [National Democratic Redistricting Committee] president. “We are fighting for fair maps that reflect the will of the voters, and if Republicans attempt to ignore this and gerrymander their way to power, we will be ready to sue.”
[…]
“Redistricting has become entrenched warfare where lawmakers exert enormous effort and expense to gain an inch,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute that is part of New York University Law School. “Lawmakers have always attempted to game redistricting, but we’re seeing a lot of new tactics this decade because so much is on the line.”
[…]
Democrats were caught off-guard a decade ago when Republicans, who had shored up their majorities in state legislatures during the 2010 tea party wave, used their power to shape GOP-friendly districts in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio. The new congressional districts gave Republicans the power to stymie much of President Barack Obama’s policy agenda.Republicans say they plan to make the most of their current dominance.
Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, has said his group is preparing for “a decade of even more litigation,” and to challenge maps it views as unfairly tilted to the left.
“There will definitely be more redistricting litigation this decade,” he said. “Republicans will be playing more defense than offense because we have significantly more redistricting control than Democrats.”
Of the 37 states where elected officials will ultimately decide the shape of congressional maps this year, 20 are fully in Republican control, eight are held by Democrats and nine are split.
[…]
“The gerrymandering that we saw last cycle was unprecedented in their sophistication and how long they endured and defined the last decade of our politics. The Republicans were able to dominate the process without Democrats fully able to understand what happened until it was done,” said David Daley, an author who has written two books on redistricting.But, Daley said, “that won’t be the case this time. Every twist and turn in every state is going to be contentious and chaotic and contested.”
…so even if here & there it might seem like some things are worth pushing for
A torrent of Congressional Democrats is calling on the White House to extend a soon-expiring pause on federal student loan payments, emboldened by their success in pressuring the Biden administration to approve a new eviction moratorium.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/08/04/democrats-eviction-student-loans/
[…]
In recent weeks, the Biden administration has signaled it is at least considering another freeze on federal student loan payments. Without a final decision, however, lawmakers have ramped up their advocacy — hoping to ward off the same financial cliff that had threatened millions of renters until Tuesday.
…things going about how you’d expect isn’t necessarily a comfort
A Democratic candidate backed by the party establishment and a Republican endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump won two primary races for open House seats in Ohio on Tuesday, an assertion of dominance for the leadership of both political parties as they face questions over unity in their ranks.
Democratic Insider and a Republican Backed by Trump Win Ohio House Races [NYT]
…particularly when the conclusions that some are inclined to draw might not sound like a lot to celebrate
Brown prevailed by embracing President Biden — and celebrating his brand of incrementalism. “This is about making progress, and sometimes that takes compromise,” she said during her victory speech in a Cleveland suburb. “Because when you demand all or nothing, usually you end up with nothing.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/04/nina-turners-loss-ohio-means-biden-doesnt-need-keep-caving-left/
[…]
Biden has to be attentive to the left, given Democrats’ slim House majority. But Tuesday’s results suggest he doesn’t need to contort himself to placate the party’s progressive wing — as he’s doing with the extension of the eviction moratorium — as much as they demand or he has often deemed necessary.
…& it doesn’t really help to know it could be worse
Vitaly Shishov, the 26-year-old who led the Belarusian House in Ukraine that helps people fleeing from Belarus to settle abroad, was reported missing by his partner on Aug. 2 after he did not return from his morning run.
Kyiv police said Tuesday he was found hanged. They have launched an investigation into whether it was suicide or “murder disguised as suicide,” they said.
Prominent Belarusian activist, who helped others flee Lukashenko regime, found dead in Ukraine [WaPo]
[…]
In the past year, facing the greatest opposition challenge to his 27-year reign, Lukashenko has brutally cracked down on any dissent in Belarus, arresting thousands. The repression has sparked an exodus, with many Belarusians leaving the country for its Baltic neighbors Poland and Lithuania. Ukraine is considered another sanctuary — Belarusians are the second-largest minority there after Russians.
…although you have to admire it when there’s an attempt to beard a lion in its den, I guess
The Mexican government has launched legal action against US gunmakers in an unprecedented attempt to halt the flow of guns across the border, where US-made weapons are routinely used in cartel gun-battles, terror attacks on civilians – and increasingly to challenge the state itself.
The Mexican government is suing six gunmakers in a Massachusetts court, alleging negligence in their failure to control their distributors and that the illegal market in Mexico “has been their economic lifeblood”.
Announcing the suit on Wednesday, the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, alleged that units of Smith & Wesson, Barrett Firearms, Colt’s Manufacturing Company, Glock and Ruger have catered to the tastes and needs of Mexican drug cartels and depend on illegal Mexican sales to boost their bottom lines.
The lawsuit alleges that gun companies openly pandered to Mexican criminals, citing Colt’s special edition .38 pistol, engraved with an image of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. One such weapon was used in the 2017 murder of the Chihuahua journalist Miroslava Breach, who investigated links between politicians and organized crime and was shot dead while taking her son to school.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/04/mexico-guns-us-manufacturers-lawsuit
…however that’s likely to pan out
Legal experts questioned the lawsuit’s ultimate chances, given that U.S. federal law guarantees gun manufacturers a strong shield against being sued by victims of gun violence and their relatives. But some said the lawsuit could lend political support to the strengthening of gun regulations in the United States, which are among the loosest in the hemisphere.
“It’s a bit of a long shot,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “It may just be a way to get the attention of the federal government and Biden and the White House so they can sit down and make a deal.”
[…]
In Washington, the White House noted that President Biden has urged Congress to repeal the federal statute that shields gunmakers from lawsuits. “President Biden remains committed to Congressional repeal,” said Michael Gwin, a White House spokesman. “While that law remains on the books, gun manufacturers and distributors should be held accountable — to the extent legally possible — when they violate the law.”American gun laws have clear links to the ebb and flow of violence in Mexico, experts say. When the U.S. assault weapons ban ended in 2004, the government noted in the suit, gun makers “exploited the opening to vastly increase production, particularly of the military-style assault weapons favored by the drug cartels.”
Soon after, killings in Mexico began to rise, reaching record levels in 2018, when more than 36,000 people were murdered across the country.
Mexico Sues Gun Companies in U.S., Accusing Them of Fueling Violence [NYT]
[…]
Since Mr. López Obrador’s landslide victory three years ago, killings have declined by less than 1 percent. So far this year, more than 16,000 people have been murdered in Mexico, according to government figures.
…but at least trying beats the alternative
Global failures of cooperation are, of course, nothing new; we did have those two world wars. But now we’re facing something perhaps even more worrying than nationalist enmity and territorial ambition. What if humanity’s capacity to cooperate has been undone by the very technology we thought would bring us all together?
The internet didn’t start the fire, but it’s undeniable that it has fostered a sour and fragmented global polity — an atmosphere of pervasive mistrust, corroding institutions and a collective retreat into the comforting bosom of confirmation bias. All of this has undermined our greatest trick: doing good things together.
What if Humans Just Can’t Get Along Anymore? [NYT]
[…]
Sometimes, though, our fates are so obviously intertwined, you want to scream. Vaccines work best when most of us get them. Either we all patch up this sinking ship or we all go down together. But what if lots of passengers insist the ship’s not sinking and the repairs are a scam? Or the richest passengers stockpile the rations? And the captain doesn’t trust the navigator and the navigator keeps changing her mind and the passengers keep assaulting the crew?
How can Trump be made so toxic that his sycophants, employees, and, most importantly, money backers find it more advantageous to desert him? Because at high level it is all about the money, right?
If Rudy, the pillow, guy, the Trump kids, his Trump-world high level employees, etc. are left to bankruptcy as opposed to profiting from the current grift, might that serve as a deterrent to participation in the ongoing scam of cult of Trump?
You may have used this link at some point this week (apologizes if I missed it), but it discusses a scam artist who created two fake PACs which supported Trump, channeled the funds raised to his personal accounts, and now show a loss to avoid prosecution. The article is a primer on Grift 101 and a slick take on using PAC laws for protection against individual repercussions.
Speaking of “America’s Mayor”:
https://www.businessinsider.com/rudy-giuliani-attacks-treatment-of-andrew-cuomo-2021-8
This is strange for two reasons. One, his son is running for Governor of New York, to replace Andrew Cuomo. Two, if you google this topic you get almost no results, so I think we’re finally close to hitting the point where no one cares what Rudy says or does.
His son is running a big, beautiful campaign. Many people are saying it.
He showed up a few weeks ago in my neck of the woods to press the flesh for a few minutes at a local, beloved, family-owned business. Only problem: He hadn’t talked to said business about appearing there as a campaign stop. The owner was furious and had called the press to disavow/complain before he’d even left: https://dailygazette.com/2021/06/02/andrew-guiliani-stumps-for-votes-in-restaurant-bakery/
I’m sure lots of people went up to him and called him “Sir” though.
Maybe he’d have more luck if he could find an establishment in New York called The Four Seasons Gardening Center.
Honestly, I’m at a loss as to how that could happen. He’s already blown through every single benchmark for political toxicity that we have in this country and is more popular than ever. As you say, it’s all about the money, so theoretically if there was something that would actually make supporting Trump a personal financial disaster then that might work–but at this point I can’t even imagine what it could be.
Besides, even if we were somehow able to get the rich pricks and corporations to disown him, he’s already tapped into the Ignoramus Market of small dollar donors. He can suck off that teet indefinitely because there’s no way to convince the knuckle draggers that he’s the piece of shit he really is. Even terminally stupid Jr. is digging deep into it, which means even after Sr. dies (a hopefully very painful death) he’ll be able to keep snookering those suckers for decades. Strap in because it’s just going to get worse.
One key point is stop trying to force this behavior into being all about money.
Think about a million crooks who spend endless hours on schemes to net, say, $100,000.
In a narrow sense it looks like pure economic behavior. BUT! As anyone could tell you, they’d make more money at less risk doing something legit. In any rational larger perspective, it’s not economics.
Which is not to say economic penalties have no bearing. In the smaller sense of stopping a particular crime, making that particular crime not pay will stop it from playing out.
But in the larger perspective, they’ll still be criminals looking for a new con. The cause has to be pulled from the roots and it has to be made clear that fascism and authoritarianism in and of themselves are unacceptable. By all means make crimes pay — intermediate steps certainly help. But that’s a subset of what has to happen.
Ok but what does that look like?
It means treating the GOP like a criminal gang, basically. Money is a piece of it, to be sure — shutting down grifter pipelines matters.
But also, GOP institutions need to be broken. Part of it is purely social. Anthony Bourdain once said, not even joking, that if he had his way Henry Kissinger wouldn’t be able to dine anywhere in Manhattan, and there needs to be a social stigma attached to Republicans. They still want to be invited to parties and sit on panels hosted by liberals, but liberals need to be clear that literally stupid anti-democracy beliefs are disqualifying.
It means that law schools need to start declining admission to College Republicans who back Trump and his efforts to overthrow the rule of law, and refuse to hire professors who do the same. It needs to be clear that the social cachet that comes from a Yale law degree is denied when you fight to overturn the rule of law. Likewise for a thousand other institutions. Hospital boards should not include GOP fundraisers backing antivax politicians, for example.
The press needs to be challenged when they run fluff pieces on Glenn Beck, or they give interviews to right wing apologists — they need to stop conflating reporting on the right with giving them platforms.
It also means shifting to a perspective that social and institutional rewards need to start putting a bigger emphasis on good citizenship and deciding to no longer overlook someone’s backing for racist policies when choosing gardener of the month. There needs to be an end to the belief that someone who is incredibly divisive deserves the benefits of inclusiveness.
It’s absolutely true that money is a significant piece of it. But a singleminded focus on money by liberals is a tradeoff that they will accept. And at this point, the stakes are high enough, and the rottenness of the GOP is bad enough, that more than just money needs to be at stake for the GOP.
So, all that makes sense and I’m definitely in favor…but I don’t see how we get there, especially with trying to force higher education to actually make those kinds of substantive changes. Hell, I don’t even know where to start.
You see this take a lot in the wild, and I can’t stand it. It’s not “the internet” — it’s specific people pushing a specific agenda backed by huge amounts of money who are interested in destabilizing society for political motive or profit margin. Nobody in their right mind would get mad at Philo Farnsworth for being responsible for Fox News or Skip Bayless; same rules ought to apply here.
There’s also some weird revisionist history that presumes there weren’t crazy-ass people who believed insane shit in the olden days just because it wasn’t broadcast as widely. There were! The John Burch Society was Q before Q, and it was around when my grandparents were in their prime. There were people who broke WWII rationing rules, and business owners who tried to profiteer off the war effort. The “War of the Worlds” broadcast of terror has been a little overstated historically, but it IS true that as science fiction took off in the early to mid 1900s, suddenly lots of people started believing that their neighbors were aliens. New York rioted during the Civil War because poor white folks felt like they were dying for Blacks (even despite Lincoln making the case over and over that he was fighting for the Union, not for the slaves.)
Or even shorter me: The bank panic in “It’s a Wonderful Life” was only partially about the Depression; it was about Potter trying to pull the strings on ole George Bailey. AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN.
A slight quibble with the NY draft riots thing: yes, the rioting was started by people who thought it was about dying for slaves–and that those newly freed slaves would then come and take their jobs. But, the riot came after protests had started over the fact that if you had…I forget, I think it was $300 which was an astronomical sum back then, you could buy your way out of being drafted. So, what initially was a non-rioting protest over the inherent unfairness of rich people being able to do whatever they want (it was always thus), then turned into what I’m pretty sure is still the largest race riot in US history–even bigger than Tulsa or Detroit.
It’s true, it was both, but it went from being a protest of the rich into a race riot because … well, that’s just what we do.
I’ve said much the same thing. The amount of craziness is the same, it’s just that the Internet allows the crazies to find each other and reinforce their insanity without any checks on it.
It’s really true of anything — if you have an unconventional but harmless hobby you can find others that share the same interests on the Internet. Collecting cranberry glass or owning VW Bugs. It happens all the time. It’s just that some groups are utterly toxic while others are benign if perhaps eccentric.
I feel that facebook and twitter bear a lot of responsibility for this current mess
Oh, there is no doubt of that:
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/02/1023819435/antisemitic-posts-are-rarely-removed-by-social-media-companies-a-study-finds
That study focused on antisemitism but it makes the point that social media companies don’t actually police much of anything as far as hate speech or misinformation goes. Even when there are complaints they rarely bother to take action.
Here’s the thing unsaid in the NPR story: Social media companies don’t police posts not because they’re not interested but because it’s prohibitively unprofitable to do so!
To respond to every reported FB post would take thousands of new hires working through a very delicate process across the entire globe 24/7. They’re never going to do that! And yes, they don’t want to piss off every country’s reich-wing, but I really think it’s way less ideological than is generally believed.
They’ll staff just enough low-paid contractors to make sure that ISIS beheading videos aren’t popping up everywhere, but otherwise, they’re going to let things go because that’s far more profitable.
Human intervention isn’t going to be feasible, but automated intervention is right now. If Google bots are crawling all over every website cataloging copy (and they are) then social media companies could invest in the same thing. Or license it from Google, honestly. They just don’t want to.
And I don’t care if any filters or keywords are overzealous, either. If Fred’s review of the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld gets caught in the same filter as the latest Proud Boys screed, I’m perfectly okay with that.
And yes, humans are creative monkeys, and people would find workarounds, but anything that decreased the amount of garbage would be an improvement.
Splinter said it well here too, but I’ll also note that Google, which tries to do a good job on its site, also owns YouTube … which will algorithmically lead you to Q/anti-vax/freeDUMB constantly.
My son usually uses YT for Kids but there are some videos he wants that aren’t on there so I’ll let him use YT for small bursts, and I’ll keep an eye on what he’s watching while he’s doing it and check his history afterward. Despite him always watching very innocuous items, he’s gotten sidebar suggestions for drunk driving defense, Ben Shapiro videos, a “the REAL story of Islam,” and at least one totally insane PragerU video. And as you can’t start by blocking channels, you basically have to hope that the overwhelming history (in his case, Peppa Pig, Minecraft and logo videos) eventually overwhelms the other shit that’s teed up.
Anyway, long story longer: I don’t trust algorithms.
…I think you’re right about that in a lot of ways…but…there’s some other stuff that I think it’s hard not lay at their door which has more to do with how some of the algorithmic side of things work…facebook in particular has run copious quantities of stuff like A/B tests to see what “works” & at least some of what they’ve concluded is that inflammatory stuff (be it never so full of shit or ultimately harmful to its audience) scores better for the metrics they care about that an approach that acknowledges why that might be (to put it mildly) wildly fucking irresponsible on their part
…& it’s not that they don’t know that…you only have to see the way that zuckerberg (or @jack for that matter) squirm their way around any line of questioning that might so much as lead to there being one about the responsibility that might be supposed to attach to the incredible de facto influence those platforms have…& even if you remove any implication of that having anything to do with their respective political leanings…I don’t know that anything at this point can convince me that it doesn’t stem from a basically solipsistic denial that they owe their users (much less the rest of the world) anything because those users are little more than the least efficient part of a system intended to produce an improvement on their bottom line
…& although it would very possibly be less profitable to take a different approach there’s a pretty massive margin between their current levels of profitability & their business(es) falling so far below their current bottom line as to actually make it into unprofitable territory
…so it might be a fools errand to look to them to diligently ensure that there’s nothing objectionable to be found in their ecosystem…but there absolutely is stuff they could do differently that would constitute an improvement…& they are not unaware of that, either…so I tend to think that makes them meaningfully responsible for things being worse than they could be?
The monsters are due on Maple Street.
My favorite wanna-be death cult leader is back at it again:
DeSantis rails at Biden, blames immigrants for record COVID surge
Unfortunately for his case:
The persistent Republican allegation that immigrants and asylum-seekers are the cause of the recent surge in Delta variant COVID cases, which led to a record 12,408 hospitalizations in Florida Wednesday, comes as most people trying to cross at the Mexican border are being turned away, according to PolitiFact.
https://gph.is/2MwMxMw
Ugh. Screwed up the giphy link. MORE COFFEE!
Facts? What are you, a commie?
The sad thing is you’re right. DeSantis’ followers won’t bother to fact-check, since their Lord and Savior Captain Combover convinced all of them that there are caravans of immigrants pouring across the border and fanning out throughout the country. It’s all fiction but they can’t be arsed to do a google to find that out.
Hell even if they did a search you know they’d only click on fair and balanced links, not those commie sites like NPR or BBC. See Black Rod’s comment above.
Who are you gonna believe, ME OR YOUR LYING EYES?
Sorry supposed to be threaded under Butcher’s comment.
The global surge in cases is highlighting the widening gap in inoculation rates between wealthy and poor nations.
welp…as im in very much a not poor nation.. we’re now sitting at 80% of over 18s having had at least their first jab…around 50% for both
there is however a notable outlier… the bible belt….sitting pretty just shy of 20% having had a jab
god will look out for us…..is gonna keep this shit dragging on forever….
come to think of it….im quite baffled by the religious’s hatred of vaccines
i mean…they are all about doing the lords work….its a good thing
but apparently creating a vaccine so you dont die is not the lords work
i guess they want a lord approved force field or some shit
anyways…im agnostic for a reason…. there might be a god….but theres too much fucking stupid on his/her side for me to side there before im dead
I think they’re more opposed to science in general, farscy, rather than vaccines in particular. Science is evidence-based, and religion is all about faith. It’s hard to get people to embrace faith when you’ve got all of reality demonstrating that faith is completely ineffective in addressing the known universe.
There are people who reconcile the two, but religion (or at least the majority of its adherents) has a massive inferiority complex when it comes to reality. And so they deny and get defensive. Unfortunately for them, reality doesn’t care. And neither do viruses.