We Ain't Goin' Nowhere

Jeff Bezos & Richard Branson have thrown 10 or 12 billion dollars (less than 2% of their wealth) at their hobby of "space travel".

That's like most folks spending a hundred bucks for 2 or 3 rounds of golf every month.

I guess dumping money into Horse Hockey and The Americas Cup just ain't what it used to be.

I'm not going to shit on the accomplishment - honest. I just think they could do a few things with that money that would be of much greater benefit.

1. Provide Medicaid for 3 million people

The number of uninsured Americans has plummeted since the Affordable Care Act, with 25 million more non-elderly Americans insured than before(elderly Americans are eligible for Medicare). But, 22 million Americans remained uninsured at the end of 2016.

At the program’s current costs, $10 billion could provide Medicaid – cost-effective, quality insurance – for 3 million Americans. That’s like giving free, quality health insurance to the entire state of Iowa.

2. More than quadruple federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy

Climate change is real, and it’s here. It’s depressing that the United States budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy is a paltry $2 billion.

3. Give the Environmental Protection Agency a 120% Raise

Continuing on the environmental theme, this federal defender for clean water, clean air, protection of endangered species, safe disposal of toxic waste, land conservation and even food quality and safety has been under assault by the current administration. A $10 billion raise would be enough to increase its budget by 120%, from $8.2 billion to $18.2 billion.

4. Increase federal aid to public K-12 schools by 60%

An additional $10 billion would be a 60% increase to this aid, and could make a big difference to our schools. U.S. schools are old, and many are desperately in need of updates, like expansion to accommodate growing enrollment, and energy retrofits to control spiking energy costs. The $10 billion spike wouldn’t be enough to solve the problems, but in a world where citizens launch GoFundMe campaigns to raise $75,000 for school heaters, it would be a good start.

5. Fund the National Endowment for the Arts for another 60 years

Since its founding in 1965, the NEA has spent just $5 billion in all, supporting more than 145,000 grants to artists, writers, and performers. NEA support helped create the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, DC; the Sundance Film Festival; and is currently partnering with the Department of Defense to implement creative arts healing programs for veterans with traumatic brain injury.

Want people to have a better overall attitude about things? Want more civility in our civil society? Try teaching folks about The Humanities - it's right there in the name, dummy.

6. Double heating assistance for low-income households

$10 billion for The Low Income Home Energy Assistance is a near-tripling  for a program that provides support to low-income households to help them afford heating and cooling costs.

With a $10 billion increase, LIHEAP could help 15 million families afford heat, and 3 million families afford cooling.

7. Resettle 11 times more refugees than we did in 2018

The U.S. helps to resettle anywhere from about 22,000 to about 85,000 refugees in our cities and towns. The cost of resettlement for those refugees averages under $3 billion.

Increasing the budget for refugee resettlement by $10 billion could allow the U.S. to accept 15-20 times more refugees - more than ½ a million desperate people, and half of those are kids.

8. Double (or triple) funding for substance use and mental health

With the United States facing a disturbing decline in life expectancy, experts have blamed both an opioid epidemic and a historically high suicide rate. Substance abuse and mental health should be near the top of the list for increased funding.

And yet the current budget for the main federal agency that handles both substance abuse and mental health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), receives less than $5 billion in federal funds.

And BTW, there's no place else to go. Yeah, OK, there's another planet or two out there somewhere that could be less than totally hostile to human life, and we're never going to know for sure if we don't go look for them.

But we're finding those planets without ever having to leave this one. And like grandma said - "You gotta show me you can take care of the one you've got before you ask for another'n."

And the kicker? If we could figure out how to go 100 times faster than people have ever traveled before (which is 10 times faster than is believed to be survivable for humans), it'll take us about 6 million years to get to the nearest "possibly habitable" planet.

6. million. YEARS.

I guess we better get that whole Space Warp thing goin'.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   420,411 (⬆︎ .22%)
New Deaths:      6,859 (⬆︎ .17%)

USA

New Cases:   24,256 (⬆︎ .07%)
New Deaths:       121 (⬆︎ .02%)

Yesterday, July 19, 2021

6,859 people were killed by COVID-19

99.7 % of them were not vaccinated

USA Vaccination Scorecard

At Least One Dose: 186.3 million (56.1%)
Fully Vaxxed:           161.5 million (48.6%)

Sean Hannity wants you to take the pandemic seriously now that he's spent 15 months reinforcing Trump's bullshit that it's a hoax.

Alternate headline:

Arsonist seeks credit for fighting a fire that he spent a year denying was a fire.

Fox News host Sean Hannity took some time out of his broadcast Monday night to deliver a direct message to Fox News viewers, telling them to take the coronavirus pandemic “seriously” and declaring that he believes in the “science of vaccines.”

Amid a frightening surge of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations due to the rapid spread of the Delta variant and stagnating vaccination rates, Fox News has come under intense fire in recent days over its hosts and pundits relentlessly peddling vaccine hesitancy and skepticism. With the unvaccinated making up over 99 percent of recent COVID deaths, critics have wondered aloud whether Fox’s anti-vaccine rhetoric is “killing people.”

While many Fox News anchors and hosts seemed to make a concerted effort on Monday to push viewers to get vaccinated, others like Brian Kilmeade and Tucker Carlson continued to defend vaccine-resistant Americans and fearmonger over the safety and efficacy of the shots.

Hannity, who hasn’t been nearly as hostile to vaccination efforts as his primetime Fox colleagues, seemed to want it both ways on Monday night. While he delivered an instantly viral soundbite in which he appeared to praise the vaccines, he bookended his remarks by blasting universities for mandating vaccinations and interviewing a college student who refuses to get the shot because she was injured by a different vaccine years ago.

“Across the country, with the approval of Joe Biden, some colleges and universities are mandating that students take the vaccine, regardless of whether they had natural immunity,” the pro-Trump Fox star huffed.

“The courts, so far, seem to be on the side of mandates,” he continued. “For example, a federal judge on Monday upheld Indiana University’s vaccination requirement for students despite arguments from plaintiffs that such rules violate their right to body integrity and medical privacy.”

From there, Hannity suddenly shifted gears.

“Just like we’ve been saying, please take COVID seriously,” he exclaimed. “I can’t say it enough. Enough people have died. We don’t need any more death.”

After telling viewers to “research like crazy” and talk to their doctors in order to “make a very important decision” based on safety and medical history, Hannity then seemed to endorse the coronavirus vaccines.

“Take it seriously. You also have a right to medical privacy, and doctor-patient confidentiality is also important,” he stated. “And it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science, I believe in the science of vaccination.”

Then, Hannity immediately pivoted to a story about a young woman who was temporarily paralyzed in 2019 after she took a different vaccine. Noting that she has since declined to get a COVID-19 shot due to her past experience with vaccines, Hannity pointed out that BYU Hawaii—which by state law is requiring students to be vaccinated—has refused to give her a medical exemption.

“Unfairness,” Hannity grumbled as he read a statement from the school that said she could attend another BYU campus in a different state.

Who's Listening?

Everybody.

Paranoia's a real thing, and sometimes for real reasons. Cuz hey - I may be paranoid, but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

WaPo: (pay wall)

The Take-Aways:

Military-grade spyware leased by the Israeli firm NSO Group to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and the two women closest to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners led by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories.

Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to a list of more than 50,000 numbers and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. Amnesty’s Security Lab did forensic examination of the phones.

1. Phones identified from a sprawling list: Thirty-seven targeted smartphones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found. The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 phones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance attempts, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.
2. Politicians, journalists, activists found on list: The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials — including cabinet ministers, diplomats and military and security officers, as well as several heads of state and prime ministers. The purpose of the list could not be conclusively determined.
3. Company says it polices its clients for abuses: The targeting of the 37 smartphones would appear to conflict with the stated purpose of NSO’s licensing of the Pegasus spyware, which the company says is intended only for use in surveilling terrorists and major criminals. The evidence extracted from these smartphones, revealed here for the first time, calls into question pledges by the Israeli company to police its clients for human rights abuses. NSO Chief Executive Shalev Hulio said Sunday that he was “very concerned” by The Post’s reports. “We are checking every allegation, and if some of the allegations are true, we will take stern action, and we will terminate contracts like we did in the past.” He added, “If anybody did any kind of surveillance on journalists, even if it’s not by Pegasus, it’s disturbing.”
4. Apple iPhone shown to be vulnerable: The discovery on a list of phone numbers of 37 smartphones that had been either penetrated or attacked with Pegasus spyware fuels the debate over whether Apple has done enough to ensure the security of its devices, popular the world over for their reputation for resisting hacking attempts. Thirty-four of the 37 were iPhones.
5. New details of hacking carry worldwide implications: Among the 37 phones confirmed to have been targeted, 10 were in India and another five in Hungary, most linked to journalists, activists or businesspeople. The finding will add to concerns about extralegal government surveillance conducted with private spyware in both countries. Hundreds more numbers from India and Hungary appear on the broader global list. Each country says it acts legally in carrying out any surveillance activity.

Rachel - starting at about 37:10

Editorial Choices

I would've given most anything to be in the meeting when they decided to use the word "flatline" in a piece about a guy who wants to lead a political party currently dominated by people who tried to lynch him.

That had to be one for the books.

I wonder if there were any suggestions they thought went just a little too far.

Politico:

Pence flatlines as 2024 field takes shape

“There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the Antichrist,” said one Iowa GOP official.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Mike Pence was met by a respectful, even warm, crowd in his first trip back to Iowa since the election. Republicans at a picnic in the northwestern corner of the state stood and clapped for him on Friday. In Des Moines later that afternoon, a ballroom full of Christian conservatives did the same.

He was “honorable,” a “man of faith,” attendees at the annual Family Leadership Summit said. Evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats called him “a very consistent conservative voice in Congress and then as governor, and then as vice president.”

What few people said they saw in Pence, however, was the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Many Iowa Republicans had seen the results of the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, released just days earlier, in which Pence flatlined, drawing no more than 1 percent support. Before that, they’d watched the video of Pence getting heckled and called a “traitor” at a major gathering of conservatives in Florida last month.

“I don’t imagine he’d have a whole lot of support,” said Raymond Harre, vice chair of the GOP in eastern Iowa’s Scott County. “There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the Antichrist.”

Harre said Pence “did a good job as vice president,” and he called the vitriol directed at him “kind of nutty.” Still, he said, “I don’t see him overcoming the negatives.”

Six months after he left the vice presidency, that is the prevailing view at the grassroots and among the GOP political class. By most accounts, both here and nationally, Pence is dead in the early waters of 2024.

“Who?” Doug Gross, a Republican operative who was a chief of staff to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, replied flatly when asked about Pence. “It’s just, where would you place him? … With Trumpsters, he didn’t perform when they really wanted him to perform, so he’s DQ’d there. Then you go to the evangelicals, they have plenty of other choices.”

And then the piece goes off into the weeds, trying to overlay a little sanity on a GOP that can't stop getting crazier.

"Squirrel turds are as nutty as anything ever gets?

Hold my beer, Cletus"

Today's Reddit

What the fuck, science?

Today's GIF(s)

If Van Gogh had a computer

Pay Up Or Get Out

One of the big fantasies we've been suckered with is the one about "the noble job creators" - the companies we have to bow down to for practically everything.

eg: WalMart employees get fucked over (right along with the rest of us) because the Waltons have figured out how to stay within legal parameters (which their lobbyists helped establish) while paying their people so little that an alarmingly big chunk of their hourly staff qualify for Medicaid.

So taxpayers get to pick up the tab for WalMart's healthcare insurance - as well as their water and sewer in a lot of cases, and of course their fire and police protection, as well as a fair amount of their federal taxes.

"State and local governments spend nearly twice as much

on corporate welfare as they do on fire protection"

WaPo: (pay wall)

President Biden and Democrats in Congress have kicked off a national debate about raising corporate taxes. Yet an arguably more important conversation is happening outside Washington, D.C.: how to slash the nearly $95 billion in tax incentives that states and cities give to businesses every year. And unlike the discussion about the corporate tax rate, the movement to cut corporate welfare has attracted notable support on both sides of the political aisle.

Legislators in 15 states have introduced bills that would block their governments from doling out tax incentives and subsidies through so-called economic development programs. Every state has used these programs, trying to convince corporations from Hollywood producers to sports teams to brand-name manufacturers to set up shop or stay within their borders.

State and local governments spend nearly twice as much on corporate welfare as they do on fire protection. It’s done through a combination of both direct payments and company-specific tax breaks: In Michigan, where I live, most incentives are cash payments. The same is true for the biggest giveaway programs in most states, such as Florida, where companies can get $3,000 “refunds” for each job they create. At least 35 states have handed out more than a billion dollars each, though many fail to report the true total.

Subsidies for Hollywood productions are among the most popular, with Michigan alone spending half a billion dollars between 2008 and 2015. National Football League teams worth billions of dollars each routinely get hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to build stadiums. Each state tends to reward its biggest corporate citizens: In Michigan, Ford, GM and Stellantis get the most; in Massachusetts, General Electric; in Louisiana, oil companies; and in Washington state, Boeing received the biggest tax break in history, worth $8.7 billion.

And, of course, states pull out all the stops to lure big-name businesses. Wisconsin courted the chipmaker Foxconn with $2.9 billion in state tax credits in 2017, while New York and Virginia dangled a combined $3.75 billion in incentives to win Amazon’s second headquarters.

Such deals have deservedly spurred a massive public outcry. The Foxconn debacle played a major role in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, and the subsidy was subsequently cut by more than two-thirds. Widespread opposition even led Amazon to cancel its New York plans. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

State lawmakers, representing various political bases, increasingly oppose these blatant handouts. No one has done more to draw attention to the issue than Dan Johnson, a progressive lobbyist in Illinois. In Michigan, the Senate Democratic leader and a key House Republican are leading the legislative charge. In Alabama and Utah, Republicans are in the vanguard. In Rhode Island, the Senate sponsor of the anti-subsidy bill is a Democrat, while the House sponsor is a Republican.

Despite their disagreements on other issues, these lawmakers share the view that states should compete on business climate and quality-of-life issues, not corporate welfare. They also have the facts on their side, as studies show that such subsidies can harm, not help, economic growth and almost always fail to drive the promised job creation.

Yet no state is willing to end its incentive program unless others do the same, fearing that unilateral disarmament would damage their economy. That’s unlikely: One study found that up to 98 percent of companies would make the same investment and expansion decisions without any tax breaks. Even so, state leaders aren’t willing to take the risk. Fortunately, the legislation under consideration in those 15 states is designed to overcome this hurdle.

Whether it’s Hawaii, Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania or elsewhere, no bill currently under consideration would take effect on its own. If enacted, it would go live only after at least one other state passed the same measure. The goal is for many more states to enact the legislation simultaneously. It would then be illegal for all those states to reduce taxes or provide subsidies to entice specific companies to stay or relocate within their borders. Existing corporate welfare handouts would wind down until they disappear entirely. In short, the legislation creates an interstate compact to ban corporate welfare.

This concept is new, arising only in 2019. Yet the mounting interest from lawmakers across the country shows that momentum is building. Although no state has enacted anything yet, Utah is closest, with the interstate compact bill passing the House of Representatives in 2020. With each state legislative cycle, more lawmakers in more states introduce this policy. No wonder: Ending taxpayer giveaways to corporations has broad and bipartisan appeal.

This issue deserves at least as much attention as corporate tax rates. It’s a matter of respecting taxpayers and companies who pay their fair share. That’s a conversation America needs to have, and states are not only doing so, they’re moving toward the right decision.

It wasn't a buncha poor people who lobbied state and federal legislatures to put 100,000 pages of shelters, loopholes, and exemptions in the tax codes

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   445,269 (⬆︎ .27%)
New Deaths:      6,817 (⬆︎ .17%)

USA

New Cases:   9,513 (⬆︎ .03%)
New Deaths:       31 (⬆︎ .005%)

Yesterday, July 18, 2021

6,817 people were killed by COVID-19

99.5 % of them were not vaccinated

USA Vaccination Scorecard

At Least One Dose: 186.0 million (48.6%)
Fully Vaccinated:     161.2 million (56.0%)

Continuing the theme - the monster is still here and it's still hungry, and we still have a double-digit percentage of knuckleheads who're still not willing to take the simplest of precautions.

In spite of a good down-tick over the weekend, the medicos are very worried about the rise in cases and deaths in the disturbingly large Pockets of Stoopid out there in The Land of MAGA. 

Axios:

"A pandemic of the unvaccinated"

Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are back on the rise in the U.S. as the highly transmissible Delta variant spreads across the country.

The big picture:

This is happening almost exclusively to people who aren’t vaccinated, and it’s worse in places where overall vaccination rates are low.
“This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday.

By the numbers:

• The U.S. is now averaging about 26,000 new cases per day — up 70% from the previous week, Walensky said. Hospitalizations are up 36%, and deaths are up 26%, to an average of 211 per day.
• Roughly 66% of eligible Americans have gotten at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and about 57% are fully vaccinated.

That is enough vaccinations to avoid another wave as bad as the worst of the pandemic, when the U.S. was averaging more than 3,000 deaths per day. But it is still low enough that another wave of illness death, largely confined to the unvaccinated, is still very much a possibility.
Over 97% of the people currently hospitalized for severe COVID-19 infections were unvaccinated, according to the CDC.

Driving the news:

• Vaccinations in the U.S. have plateaued just as the Delta variant has become the dominant strain of the virus here and around the world.
• A small handful of states with especially low vaccination rates — Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Nevada — are driving a plurality of new cases. One in five new infections comes from Florida alone, Walensky said.
• "If you don't choose the vaccine, you're choosing death," one Louisiana doctor said at a press conference last week. The state has also undertaken a lottery with cash prizes to boost its vaccination rates.
• In Eastern Kentucky, demand is so low that health workers don’t think twice about breaking the seal on a new vial of vaccines, even if most of it will spoil, just to deliver a single dose.

The good news:

• The vaccines work, even against the Delta variant.
• Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — as well as the AstraZeneca shot, which is not authorized in the U.S. — are still highly effective at preventing symptomatic infections and hospitalizations, according to a Financial Times review of real-world data from several countries where the Delta variant is dominant.
• Some vaccinated people can still get sick, but the risk of severe illness is far lower. Roughly 3,700 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized for COVID-19 infections nationwide, according to the CDC — not zero, but still dramatically lower than the risk faced by unvaccinated people.

The bottom line:

This is, in large part, what experts anticipated in low-vaccination parts of the world. In the U.S, however, unlike much of the rest of the world, vaccines are free and readily available. All of these cases and deaths are preventable.

WEAR A MASK

&

GET THE VAX

why you gotta make this hard?

Today's Tweet

And ol' Marj stands there smilin' like a witless fool. No clue what's going on.

Matt Gaetz will only take photos with supporters who acknowledge he is a pedophile. pic.twitter.com/mNL3OIq0yz

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) July 18, 2021

A Short Daydream

I'm not inclined to travel the world, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings if some kind-hearted woman suggested we go take a look at Tuscany.