If you ask Donald Trump, his upcoming arena tour with disgraced ex–Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly is already an outrageous success. “I will be focusing on greatness for our Country, something seldom discussed in political dialogue,” the former president said, promising that the tour—which is scheduled to launch in Sunrise, Florida, in December and stops in Orlando, Dallas, and Houston, among other places—will be “fun, fun, fun for everyone who attends!”
If you ask box office employees, the story is very different. Tickets to hear the pair of accused sex pests in conversation have been on sale for more than a month, but thousands of seats remain available for purchase on Ticketmaster and AXS, according to Politico. “We have concerts that are doing a lot better than this,” one Orlando Amway Center employee told the outlet. For instance, a Bad Bunny concert at the Amway Center reportedly recently sold out within 48 hours, despite the fact that it won’t take place until next March. (In a text message to Politico, the marketing director for the Amway Center protested: “The box office person you talked with did not provide an accurate assessment nor do they speak for us.”)
A stadium employee at the American Airlines Center in Dallas told Politico that a “large number” of seats are still open for the event. And an employee with access to ticket-sales information said that at Houston’s Toyota Center, “60 to 65% of seats remain unsold.” (A Toyota Center spokesperson declined to comment to Politico, and an American Airlines Center spokesperson said they could not comment on ticket sales.)
The lackluster sales may represent flagging momentum for the right-wing stars—or the prices could be to blame. Those willing to settle for standard tickets—or even seats in the nosebleeds—can expect to pay between $100–$300, per Politico. For those who want to be closer to the action, prices are in the $1,000 neighborhood. And the “VIP Meet & Greet Package” runs up to $8,500, according to Insider, and includes a pregame reception, floor seats, and personal fan pictures with the hosts.
There's no Ark being built for us. No one is going to whisk us all away from the mess we've made here, and magically transport us to the next green spot where life is fun and we can frolic like a buncha fuckin Eloi. Nobody - not Branson, not Musk, not Bezos - nobody.
And there are no more Green Spots. This is it. When you foul your nest, you live in your shit.
As the Bootleg Fire burns, locals are faced with the realities of climate change — and remain skeptical
In a row of small conservative towns, the flames are unlike anything they’ve seen before. Instead of concerns over global warming, though, there is blame directed at environmentalists, marijuana farmers and potential looters.
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The West has been beset by historic drought and heat waves this year exacerbated by climate change, but among the small towns that have been threatened by the Bootleg Fire — Sprague River, Beatty, Bly — there is little talk of global warming. Instead, residents vent about the federal government’s water policies and forest management. They blame liberal environmentalists for hobbling the logging industry and Mexican marijuana farmers for sucking up the area’s water.
“Now the top end of the Forest Service are a bunch of flower children,” said Jim Rahi, 71, who was filling up his 3,600-gallon water tanker to deliver to firefighters in the town of Lakeview, east of the spreading fire. “That’s what the real problem is. It’s not that much hotter. It’s environmentally caused mismanagement.”
Germany comes to grips with massive flood damage as some regions brace for more rains
The death toll in the devastating floods that hit Europe climbed to 183 on Sunday as rescue workers searched for bodies amid the receding waters while new storms hit alpine areas further south.
Heavy rain drenched parts of the German states of Bavaria and Saxony overnight as flooding also spread to Austria and Switzerland.
At least 156 people have died in Germany alone since once-in-a-century summer rainfall caused rivers and dams to burst. So far 27 people have died in Belgium.
On Saturday night, areas of Bavaria were declared a disaster zone as the southern state on the border with Austria was also hit by flash floods. At least one person died in the Berchtesgadener district.
The receding waters in parts of Germany have allowed the first assessments of the scale of the damage. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he would submit a plan for at least 300 million euros in emergency aid to the cabinet this week.
As new areas prepared for flooding, others were still reeling from the earlier inundations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the village of Schuld in the state of Rhineland Palatinate on Sunday, where entire homes were swept away last week by the swollen Ahr river, a tributary of the Rhine.
She described herself as “shocked” by the devastation and said the situation was “terrifying” in the affected areas. She pledged rapid, immediate help.
“Thankfully in Germany, we are living in a prosperous country, Germany is a strong country and we will counteract this natural disaster,” she said, adding that in the long term the government would “focus policymaking more on climate protection than we have in recent years.”
Human-caused climate change is believed to have had an affect on the intensity of the rains.
Canada’s farmers brace for new heat wave as scorching summer leaves cherries roasting on trees
As devastating heat waves sweep swaths of the globe, farmers in Canada are facing a crippling phenomenon: Crops are baking in fields.
Cherries have roasted on trees. Fields of canola and wheat have withered brown. And as feed and safe water for animals grow scarce, ranchers may have no choice but to sell off their livestock.
“It will totally upend Canadian food production if this becomes a regular thing,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.
A heat dome roasted Canada in late June, leading to hundreds of “sudden and unexpected” deaths, according to officials, and sparkedfear among Canadian farmers and climate experts. A village in British Columbia claimed the nation’s highest recorded temperature, clocking in just shy of 115 degrees. This weekend, another scorching wave is expected to return to the nation.
Newman said farmers are resilient and have been planning for slow, constant climate change. But no model predicted this summer’s spike, which she characterized as a “thousand-year” event that cannot become the norm.
“We can’t farm like this, where there’s a giant disruption every year,” she said. “Or we’re going to have to really rethink how we produce food.”
The climate stress is especially unwelcome at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on supply chains and food production. Floods, early freezes, droughts, pests and other emergencies have also strained Canada’s farming industry over the past several years. Multiple municipalities have declared states of agricultural disaster because of the heat and drought.
On the shores, shellfish have popped open, broiling by the millions. “You could smell the destruction,” Newman said.
New Cases: 484,283 (⬆︎ .25%) New Deaths: 7,191 (⬆︎ .18%)
USA
New Cases: 24,081 (⬆︎ .07%) New Deaths: 113 (⬆︎ .02%)
Yesterday, July 17, 2021
7,191 people were killed by COVID-19
99.5 % of them were not vaccinated
USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 185.5 million (56.0%)
Fully Vaxxed: 161.1 million (48.5%)
If you care about the little dopamine squirt you get when one of your lower quartile intellectual peers confirms your deliberate ignorance more than you care about your own health - which, like it or not, is at least partly dependent of everybody else's health - then I can only promise to try not to smirk if your dumb un-vaccinated ass gets sick and fuckin' dies.
Delta variant takes hold in U.S. as coronavirus cases rise nearly 70 percent
‘This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ CDC director says
Federal health officials sounded an alarm Friday about a surge in U.S. coronavirus infections fueled by the twin threats posed by the highly transmissible delta variant and a stagnation in efforts to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.
During a White House briefing, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the seven-day average of coronavirus infections soared nearly 70 percent in just one week, to about 26,300 cases a day. The seven-day average for hospitalizations has increased, too, climbing about 36 percent from the previous seven-day period, she said.
“There is a clear message that is coming through: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Walensky said. “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk, and communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.”
Data and maps illustrated the hastening pace of cases — and the disproportionate burden borne by some states. Florida emerged as a national hot spot, accounting for 1 in 5 cases in the past week. Four states were responsible for more than 40 percent of cases in the past week, health officials said. And 10 percent of counties have moved into “high transmission risk.”
The response in some corners of the nation was swift. In Los Angeles County, an indoor mask mandate — applying to everyone, vaccinated or not — was reimposed. In Abilene, Kan., the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum was shuttered because of an increase in covid-19 cases.
Health officials repeatedly stressed the outsize toll covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, is taking on unvaccinated people and communities.
More than 97 percent of hospitalizations are among those who are unvaccinated, Walensky said, and almost all covid-19 deaths — which climbed 26 percent in the past week — are among people who have not received a shot.
“Unvaccinated Americans account for virtually all recent covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths,” said Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator. “Each covid-19 death is tragic, and those happening now are even more tragic because they are preventable.”
On Friday, the Association of American Medical Colleges recommended all of its member institutions require vaccinations for employees.
“We are aware of the sensitive nature of this recommendation and understand that it must be made on an institution-by-institution basis, subject to legally required exceptions and consistent with state law,” David J. Skorton, the association’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “However, for the safety of our patients, communities, health care personnel, faculty, and students, we encourage our members to require vaccinations for employees while working with local public health officials as appropriate.”
The delta variant has become the dominant strain worldwide and is responsible for the majority of U.S. cases, said Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In some parts of the United States, Fauci said, the delta variant is responsible for more than 70 percent of cases.
Fauci said young people — who have been particularly hesitant about getting vaccinated — are being hospitalized to a greater extent than they were earlier in the pandemic, in large part because most older Americans are inoculated.
Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy discussed Friday how misinformation about vaccines and the coronavirus more broadly has hampered the nation’s efforts to get vaccine-hesitant Americans inoculated. He called on social media platforms, news organizations and individual Americans to “call this activity out” and help properly inform the public.
“During this pandemic, health misinformation has led people to resist wearing masks and high-risk settings to turn down proven treatments, in some cases to turn to unproven treatments and to choose not to get vaccinated,” Murthy said. “All of this has led to avoidable illnesses and deaths. Simply put, health misinformation has cost us lives.”
In another indication of the ever-evolving pandemic, Zients said the administration would be prepared to administer booster shots to some Americans if the science demonstrates they are beneficial, but health officials stressed that Americans at this time do not need a booster. A CDC advisory panel is scheduled next week to discuss whether patients with fragile immunity should receive an additional vaccine dose. People who are immunocompromised do not mount the same immune response as healthy individuals in response to the vaccine.
Florida, where only about 47 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, ranks 26th among the states in vaccinations, according to the CDC’s vaccine tracker. The slow vaccine rollout, combined with a reduction in people wearing masks, made the large and populous state “a ripe ground for the emergence of the delta variant,” said John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“The concern for the South is the summer months bring people indoors because of the heat,” Brownstein said.
Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious-disease expert at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work at Florida International University, has been tracking the rise in case numbers from week to week and also seeing an increase in the percentage of people testing positive. The current surge, she said, feels uncomfortably familiar.
“It’s almost the same timeline as last year,” Trepka said. She’s hoping it won’t prove as steep.
Figures from Florida’s health department show that in the past month, the number of cases is four times higher, reaching more than 45,000 in the most recent week.
A week ago, the rate of cases in Miami-Dade County was 150 per 100,000 people, or five times the rate of the United States. What’s most worrisome, Trepka said, is the stalling vaccination rate.
The surge in infections is being reflected in an increase in hospitalizations, according to Hany Atallah, chief medical officer at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. The immediate challenge at the sprawling hospital is to figure out bed space and the availability of negative pressure rooms.
In the last 24 hours, there have been about 20 to 25 new covid admissions, Atallah said, with the greatest increase in patients between the ages of 30 and 50. Atallah said most of the patients being admitted have not been vaccinated. But in a few instances, people who were vaccinated but are immunocompromised became sick enough to warrant hospital care.
Atallah urged people to maintain mask-wearing and social distancing, and to surmount lingering hesitancy about getting a shot.
“It’s not too late to get the vaccine,” Atallah said.
Vaccination rates are particularly low in some rural counties in northern and southern parts of Florida and in the Panhandle, according to Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist at the College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida. Prins also noted that people are acting as if they are done with the pandemic. “There is a feeling of being open,” Prins said, particularly following the Fourth of July.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Prins said of the new surge. “If people would get vaccinated, we wouldn’t be seeing these numbers.”
The big players get overly aggressive and win - they pocket the proceeds.
The big players get overly aggressive and lose - they get bailed out. Again.
The big burst of over-exuberance is usually the bellwether of a crash. Which forces the questions:
What does that burst look like?
Will we recognize it?
Are we seeing it now?
And of course, when the slump hits - and it will - are we going to allow the big players to panic us into another "solution" that will almost certainly be almost literally nothing more than Trickle Down rebranded?
We have to get back to where we have a national economic overview.
Not a blueprint - and not a central plan - but something like general common-sense good-government guidelines not based in a plutocratic agenda - something that looks to re-establish a better (ie: fairer) balance between capital and labor.
If the point is to kill off everybody else in an attempt to be King Of The Hill, then there is no fucking point to any of this at all.
New Cases: 562,803 (⬆︎ .30%) New Deaths: 8,653 (⬆︎ .21%)
USA
New Cases: 40,529 (⬆︎ .12%) New Deaths: 293 (⬆︎ .05%)
Yesterday, July 16, 2021
8,653 people were killed by COVID-19
99.5 % of them were not vaccinated
USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 185.4 million (~ 56%) Fully Vaxxed: 160.6 million (~ 48%)
Everybody hates "Big Tech". Kinda like how everybody hates "Big" everything in one way or another - Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Ag and Big Media and and and - or they say they do.
But we can't seem to get the politicians to move on anything that reins in the power of these monstrous conglomerates that eat the world and shit people.
Anyway - Biden at least is taking a bit of a swipe at Facebook. Maybe this could be the start of something good?
President Biden on Friday unleashed a forceful new attack against social media companies for allowing the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines, explicitly blaming them for the deaths of many Americans of covid-19.
“They’re killing people,” Biden said on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One on his way to Camp David for the weekend. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”
Biden’s comments marked a far more combative tone than he had taken previously on the pandemic and came a day after Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a broader warning against health misinformation, saying that tech companies were partially responsible for the falsehoods spreading online and causing large numbers of Americans to avoid getting vaccinated.
The salvo immediately placed Biden in a public argument with Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, on an issue that has consumed his presidency and is showing new signs of resurgence.
“We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts,” Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever said in a statement, pointing to the website’s tools for helping users to get authoritative information and find vaccination sites.
“The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” Lever said. “Period.”
The remarkable multi-front attack over the course of about 24 hours — from the president, his surgeon general and his press secretary — is a notable change in strategy for Biden. For six months, he has taken a gentler tone, praising Americans for getting vaccinated, imploring the hesitant to get the shots and avoiding attacks on figures who are falsely questioning the vaccines.
Biden’s comments also come as senior administration officials are increasingly concerned about a notable increase in coronavirus infections, with new outbreaks particularly in areas with low vaccination rates.
Less than two weeks after holding a 1,000-person gathering at the White House — where Biden declared on the Fourth of July, “The virus is on the run, and America’s coming back” — there is concern in the administration that parts of the country may need to reinstitute restrictive measures as the more contagious delta variant rips through parts of the country and threatens the progress Biden has spent months touting.
Vaccination rates have meanwhile stalled, even as the administration has tried new ways to encourage Americans to get their shots. Pop star Olivia Rodrigo appeared with Biden on Wednesday, and the White House has been promoting other ways to encourage vaccinations, including at NASCAR races and highway truck stops.
One reason vaccination rates are not higher, administration officials believe, is the misinformation about them that has spread for months online. In some ways, the back-and-forth resembles the earlier furor over social media platforms allowing election-related disinformation, a controversy that resulted in some of the tech companies instituting more safeguards.
Twitter on Friday declined to comment on Biden’s remarks, pointing to a tweet on Thursday in which the company said, “We’ll continue to do our part to elevate authoritative health information.” YouTube also did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Biden’s remarks.
But top White House officials have been unsatisfied with the response from social media companies and over the past two days grew far more outspoken about their concerns. They have called on the platforms to make it harder for users to spread false information and have proposed greater investments in content moderation, especially in languages other than English. They also want more action on detecting “super spreaders” and repeat violators of the company’s policies.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday that the White House is in regular communication with social media platforms, urging them to remove false narratives such as the notion that coronavirus vaccinations can cause infertility.
The White House has also pressed Facebook to remove the 12 people that one study found are producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.
In her comments Friday, Psaki appeared to address concerns about the First Amendment or any heavy-handed government intervention into private business.
“We don’t take anything down. We don’t block anything. Facebook and any private-sector company makes decisions about what information should be on their platform,” she said. “Our point is that there is information that is leading to people not taking the vaccine, and people are dying as a result. And we have a responsibility, as a public health matter, to raise that issue.”
Although the administration has released recommendations that it wants social media companies to follow, it has not outlined any penalties or potential regulatory changes.
Facebook executives have said that they have removed more than 18 million pieces of coronavirus misinformation and shut down accounts that repeatedly break the platform’s rules. But when asked if those efforts were sufficient, Psaki said, “Clearly not.”
Biden himself did not weigh in until Friday afternoon. He stopped briefly to take a question from reporters as he was walking to board Marine One for a flight to spend the weekend at Camp David, the nearby presidential retreat.
Asked about his message to platforms like Facebook regarding misinformation, he said three sentences — two of them punctuated by “They’re killing people.”
That condemnation is likely to exacerbate the longtime tensions between him and social media companies, a lingering distrust that for many Democrats is rooted in Russian disinformation on Donald Trump’s behalf that took hold during the 2016 presidential campaign.
During Biden’s own 2020 run, he and his advisers took a combative posture throughout, expressing early and open criticism of Facebook and Twitter.
Last summer, Biden’s campaign sent an open letter to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg urging his company to do more to combat political disinformation. “It continues to allow Donald Trump to say anything — and to pay to ensure that his wild claims reach millions of voters,” the letter read.
The Biden campaign also took out ads to combat false claims that he supported the movement to defund police departments and that he was a socialist.
Days after the election, top Biden staffer Bill Russo used a number of tweets to ridicule Facebook, saying the company was “shredding the fabric of our democracy.”
He also said that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech companies from liability for messages posted by their users, “immediately should be revoked.”
“It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company,” he told the Times, adding that Zuckerberg and his company should be subject to civil liability. “It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.”
Social media companies respond that they are doing all they can to combat reckless and irresponsible speech, including policing and taking down messages and ousting repeat offenders from their platforms.
But the dissatisfaction spans the political spectrum, and the companies’ role in monitoring the falsehoods that roll across their platforms has been a sticking point between the two parties.
Many Democrats have criticized social media sites for allowing misinformation to spread rampantly and have called for greater measures to stop it, while some Republicans have accused the companies of “censoring” conservative viewpoints and have pushed them to take a more hands-off approach to speech.
Some conservative politicians and pundits have invoked the First Amendment in appealing to social media to allow more free speech. But the First Amendment generally constrains government actions, not those of private companies.
Some have also raised privacy concerns about pursuing individuals for what they post, but the White House played down those questions, saying it is talking only about publicly available information.
Psaki said the White House had not made any direct contact with the 12 individuals who are said to be responsible for spreading the majority of the misinformation about vaccines. The figures cited by the White House came from an analysis released in March by the Center for Countering Digital Hate called “The Disinformation Dozen: Why platforms must act on twelve leading online anti-vaxxers.”
As top officials at the White House and elsewhere pore over data, they are reckoning with the fact that millions of people are vehemently opposed to getting vaccinated even as the delta variant spreads rapidly. Public health experts fear that cases will skyrocket as people head back to offices and spend more time indoors in the cooler weather of fall.
Further complicating the White House’s effort is the likely need eventually for booster shots for the elderly and other vulnerable people. Pfizer executives met with top U.S. health officials this week to make their case for administering a third dose to some people six to 12 months after they received the company’s two-shot regimen.
The White House has continued to focus its vaccination efforts on the local level, seeking to elevate trusted community leaders to reach individuals who have concerns about the vaccines. But significant populations continue to refuse to get the shots, including younger Americans, communities of color and staunch conservatives.
One outside health expert who has advised the Biden administration criticized the framing of the White House’s July 4 goal that 70 percent of Americans get at least one shot of the vaccine.
“It sent the message that one shot is enough,” the person said, noting that one dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine provides significantly less protection than the recommended two doses.
The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly about the White House effort, also said the administration was premature in celebrating “independence from covid” on the Fourth of July. One senior administration official acknowledged that the White House identified the Fourth of July as a significant marker before the administration truly understood the delta variant.
“By the time July 4 was coming around, they tempered the language considerably,” the official said. “It was not the summer of fun anymore.”
