This is not a guy who races around looking for the panic button.
Aug 2, 2021
Today's GIF
Adam Kinzinger (R-IL16) to ABC on the Jan6 Select Committee: "I would expect to see a significant number of subpoenas for a lot of people."
Dear Mr Minority Leader,Heads up, motherfucker.
COVID-19 Uupdate
Yesterday, August 1st, 2021
7,348 people were killed by COVID-19
99.7 % of them were not vaccinated
New Cases: 466,210 (⬆︎ .23%)
New Deaths: 7,348 (⬆︎ .17%)
USA
New Cases: 21,768 (⬆︎ .06%)
New Deaths: 64 (⬆︎ .01%)
USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 191.5 million (57.7%)
Fully Vaxxed: 164.8 million (49.6%)
One of the great tragedies of the great tragedies (war, famine, disease, etc) is the the fact that an awful lot of stories will be largely lost and forgotten.
Every single one of the 600,000+ dead Americans has a story, which includes the stories of loss and heartbreak for more than a million families.
‘I should have gotten the damn vaccine,’ woman says fiance texted before he died of covid-19
Micheal Freedy was not opposed to vaccination, his fiancee said. Like many Americans who have yet to get their coronavirus shots, the 39-year-old father just wanted to wait and learn more about how people reacted to the vaccines.
“All we were doing is waiting one year,” Jessica DuPreez, 37, told The Washington Post on Sunday.
Then everything changed. This weekend — DuPreez’s grief days old and her voice breaking — the Las Vegas mother of five gave interview after interview to spread the same message: Get the vaccine. She said Freedy came to the same conclusion early on in the fight with covid-19 that put him in an intensive care unit in July.
“I should have gotten the damn vaccine,” he texted DuPreez, according to a picture she shared with The Post.
Freedy, who is listed in her phone as “My Heart,” died on Thursday, leaving behind young children, including a 17-month-old.
“My kids don’t have a dad anymore because we hesitated,” she said on CNN as one child cried in the background. “ … I would take a bad reaction to the vaccine over having to bury my husband. I would take that any day.”
The highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus has brought new urgency to the nation’s vaccination efforts, with some hospitals filling up again and federal health officials warning that “the war has changed.” Multimillion-dollar lotteries, door-to-door outreach and pleas from doctors have failed to persuade millions of Americans, pushing governments and employers to increasingly turn to mandates for their workers. A little less than half the country is fully vaccinated, and 45 percent of the population is inoculated in Freedy and DuPreez’s home state of Nevada.
Despite new evidence that the immunized can still spread the virus, officials say the vaccines remain highly effective, especially at preventing death and severe illness. The vast majority of those with covid-19 who die or are hospitalized are unvaccinated.
Some holdouts are outright resistant: A Washington Post-ABC News poll found earlier this summer that 29 percent of Americans said they were unlikely to get vaccinated, up several percentage points from a few months earlier. But many are like Freedy — hesitant, worried about side effects, waiting even longer. With coronavirus cases rising again, officials are scrambling to persuade them.
Adding their voices to the message are people like DuPreez, converted by wrenching loss. She said she and her oldest son got vaccinated after Freedy became sick.
DuPreez said that she and her fiance — the father of her two youngest children — were never disparaging of science, just cautious. They wore face masks, she said, and sanitized their hands and shifted to pickup orders for their shopping. And when they went to San Diego with the kids in mid-July, the threat of the pandemic seemed to be quickly receding. Thousands had recently flocked to the Las Vegas area for a Garth Brooks concert and an Ultimate Fighting Championship event.
Then Freedy ended up in an emergency room with a horrible sunburn from their beach trip, his fiancee said. He was unable to eat or sleep and had the chills, but the doctor sent him home.
He returned to another emergency room when the symptoms persisted, where he learned that more than sun poisoning was at play: He tested positive for the coronavirus. Freedy went home again with instructions to drink water and isolate, she said.
Then, one day at about 3 a.m., Freedy woke DuPreez “panicking,” she recounted. He was struggling to breathe. When he tried to stand, he fell over. He knew something was deeply wrong. The couple rushed to yet another ER, DuPreez said, where staff members found that he had low blood oxygen and were surprised that he was even able to talk.
Freedy went on oxygen, then a machine to force his lungs open, DuPreez said. She tried to stay positive.
“Keep it in your head that you can come home in a few days, work as hard as you can and do all they tell you to,” she texted Freedy after he sent her worried messages about “the long-term effects of [what’s] happening to my body.”
Then, last Monday, there came a flurry of more dire texts: “911 911 911.”
Freedy was going to the ICU, immediately. “Alright well I tried,” he messaged his fiancee.
DuPreez began to cry as she recounted their last phone call.
“I told him to please fight so he can come home to us,” she said Sunday. “He said he was, that he promised, that he was trying, that it was just hard.”
The end was brutal. It was just like you see on TV, she said, with shouts of “He’s coding!” and people running in with paddles and calls for scalpels, pulse checks, desperate chest compressions. “And when you’re a spectator in it, there’s no trying to slide out the door. You just have to stay in the back of the room and out of the way.”
Freedy’s face turned purple, she said. And then he was gone.
The Clark County coroner’s office did not immediately respond Sunday to questions about Freedy’s death.
For DuPreez, taking her grief public has brought support but also vitriol that underscores the bitterness of the country’s divide over the pandemic and how to fight it.
She has largely stopped answering the phone and messages sent through her GoFundMe page, which seeks help for a family that lived “paycheck to paycheck” off casino jobs. She set her Facebook page to private and did the same for Freedy’s Twitter account as fat-shaming comments pinged in on the dead man’s phone.
For every nice note, she said, there are three or four nasty ones.
“If your fiance was stupid enough not to get the vaccine whilst working in a casino, that’s his fault,” read one message she shared with The Post. “You put yourself in this situation,” another read.
Others accuse her of playing into “fear propaganda” around the coronavirus and abetting the “mainstream media,” she said.
“There’s people who’ve told me that it’s a lie … that Mike’s still alive, that we’re just a made-up family, my child who cried on the news is an actor,” DuPreez said Sunday.
As DuPreez pushes on with the tasks of life between interviews, she marvels at the resiliency of her children, ages 17, 10, 7, 6 and 17 months.
“They′ll stop and they’ll cry and be upset and say how they miss him, and then they’ll be back to playing their games,” she said. “Just lost in their games. I’ve never been so thankful for an iPad in my life. Because if I could just get lost in a game like that, it would probably be way easier.”
They were just going to wait a year - to see if was all going OK - so they felt more sure that the vaccine is safe - like a coupla standard-issue American boneheads know better than the battalions of doctors and scientists.
We are The Stoopid Country.
Get the vax
Wear your mask
Keep your distance
Wash your hands
I still don't get why you think this is so fucking hard
Aug 1, 2021
Today's Tweet
A random and blatant act of kindness
Amazing, one of the best videos I've ever seen 🥲🙂 ♥️♥️ pic.twitter.com/pmg1vq8ALZ
— 🍀🇮🇪☘️Wat_the_duece☘️🇮🇪🍀 (@Wat_the_deuce) July 31, 2021
Don't Look Away
There's a common thread that runs through the conservative fuckery we've been subjected to over these last forever years.
Four law enforcement heroes made abundantly clear at Tuesday’s inaugural hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol why this inquiry is essential and why so many Republicans wanted to keep it from happening.
Their dramatic, heartfelt testimony also made an airtight case that right-wing extremism is a clear and present danger to the United States.
“What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened,” D.C. police officer Michael Fanone said.
“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room,” he went on, “but too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist, or that hell actually wasn’t that bad.”
His next point was devastating as a commentary on what large sections of the Republican Party are committed to doing — and in its accuracy.
“The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he said, “nothing, truly nothing, has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny events of that day. And in doing so betray their oath of office.”
Yes, they do.
At Tuesday’s hearing, D.C. police officers Fanone and Daniel Hodges, Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell made clear why so many Republicans want us to forget what happened on Jan. 6.
Republicans don’t want us to focus on “the hit man,” in Dunn’s resonant phrase.
They want to let Donald Trump off the hook.
And they resolutely do not want to do what Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) rightly said the committee must do: try to account for “what happened every minute of that day in the White House — every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack.”
A thorough investigation of what happened will necessarily be an inquiry into the right-wing extremism that is bleeding into the mainstream of the Republican Party. The best among the Republicans know how dangerous this is for their party and the country. Unfortunately, they do not currently have the upper hand in the GOP, which is why Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) were named to the committee by a Democratic House speaker, not by their own leadership.
That both acquitted themselves with honor, dignity and intelligence served as a rebuke to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his decision to wage political war against them while embracing his party’s far right.
The extremism exposed on Tuesday was inextricably linked to racial backlash and outright racism. Gonell brought this home by noting the politicized inconsistency in the right wing’s attitudes toward the police: thoroughly positive when officers were responding to racial justice protests but not when they were defending democracy and the nation’s lawmakers from attack.
In 2020, Gonell said, the Capitol Police were given “all the support we needed and more” during Black Lives Matter protests. He did not sense the same support before Jan. 6.
“Why the different response?” he asked.
With four words, he opened up a moral inquiry the nation must undertake.
“There are some who expressed outrage when someone simply kneeled for social justice during the national anthem,” Gonell said. “Where are those same people expressing outrage to condemn the violent attack on law enforcement officers, the U.S. Capitol and our American democracy?”
Where indeed?
The double standard was underscored by Hodges, who spoke of the flags carried by the rioters, including a Christian flag, and another: “I saw the thin blue line flag, a symbol of support for law enforcement, more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us.”
And there was nothing subtle about the racism confronted by Dunn, who testified that the rioters repeatedly addressed him with an unprintable racial epithet. “Other Black officers shared with me their own stories of racial abuse on January 6,” he said.
Trump has described the crowd that gathered to hear him speak before the attack as “loving.” Asked about this by Cheney, Gonell replied: “I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day.” The officer added that the former president’s comments were “a pathetic excuse for his behavior, for something that he helped to create, this monstrosity.”
What happened on Jan. 6 was monstrous, the product of a dangerous, anti-democratic sickness haunting parts of the American right. This is the sort of event that a free nation must come to terms with, not ignore; investigate, not sweep under the rug; and understand, not dismiss as a one-off display of violence. That’s why this committee’s work is so important.
And I think it has to do with something from Judith Herman's work on trauma and recovery:
“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”
--Judith Herman, MD - Trauma and Recovery
Empathy is what Dr Herman is getting at, and it's a thing that's started to come back into vogue fairly recently.
When I overlay this Empathy Deficit on practically everything we've been bombarded with - "the Nanny State" and "Just Do It" and "get in touch with your inner warrior" and "no mercy - take no prisoners" and "real men don't eat quiche" and "a free market is driven by animal instinct" and all the hyper-macho bullshit that I used to suck up like mother's milk - when I see it in the context of a deliberate attempt to strip away everything that makes us human (ie: humane), then it gets a little easier for me to grok.
And even though I'm still tallying up what it cost me to walk away, I'm coming to realize I've been making the right decisions.
We can hope the investigation into the Jan6 Attempted Coup may act as a clarifying agent - a way to focus on the simple fact that we need to stop a minute and think about the implications of these Qult45 assholes mounting an outright assault on our democracy, and how the Republicans are in the process of getting us to ignore the fact that we're the ones being victimized (democratic self-government, dontcha know). We can't just look away and move on.
EJ Dionne, WaPo: (pay wall)
Four law enforcement heroes made abundantly clear at Tuesday’s inaugural hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol why this inquiry is essential and why so many Republicans wanted to keep it from happening.
Their dramatic, heartfelt testimony also made an airtight case that right-wing extremism is a clear and present danger to the United States.
“What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened,” D.C. police officer Michael Fanone said.
“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room,” he went on, “but too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist, or that hell actually wasn’t that bad.”
His next point was devastating as a commentary on what large sections of the Republican Party are committed to doing — and in its accuracy.
“The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he said, “nothing, truly nothing, has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny events of that day. And in doing so betray their oath of office.”
Yes, they do.
At Tuesday’s hearing, D.C. police officers Fanone and Daniel Hodges, Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell made clear why so many Republicans want us to forget what happened on Jan. 6.
Republicans don’t want us to focus on “the hit man,” in Dunn’s resonant phrase.
They want to let Donald Trump off the hook.
And they resolutely do not want to do what Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) rightly said the committee must do: try to account for “what happened every minute of that day in the White House — every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack.”
A thorough investigation of what happened will necessarily be an inquiry into the right-wing extremism that is bleeding into the mainstream of the Republican Party. The best among the Republicans know how dangerous this is for their party and the country. Unfortunately, they do not currently have the upper hand in the GOP, which is why Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) were named to the committee by a Democratic House speaker, not by their own leadership.
That both acquitted themselves with honor, dignity and intelligence served as a rebuke to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his decision to wage political war against them while embracing his party’s far right.
The extremism exposed on Tuesday was inextricably linked to racial backlash and outright racism. Gonell brought this home by noting the politicized inconsistency in the right wing’s attitudes toward the police: thoroughly positive when officers were responding to racial justice protests but not when they were defending democracy and the nation’s lawmakers from attack.
In 2020, Gonell said, the Capitol Police were given “all the support we needed and more” during Black Lives Matter protests. He did not sense the same support before Jan. 6.
“Why the different response?” he asked.
With four words, he opened up a moral inquiry the nation must undertake.
“There are some who expressed outrage when someone simply kneeled for social justice during the national anthem,” Gonell said. “Where are those same people expressing outrage to condemn the violent attack on law enforcement officers, the U.S. Capitol and our American democracy?”
Where indeed?
The double standard was underscored by Hodges, who spoke of the flags carried by the rioters, including a Christian flag, and another: “I saw the thin blue line flag, a symbol of support for law enforcement, more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us.”
And there was nothing subtle about the racism confronted by Dunn, who testified that the rioters repeatedly addressed him with an unprintable racial epithet. “Other Black officers shared with me their own stories of racial abuse on January 6,” he said.
Trump has described the crowd that gathered to hear him speak before the attack as “loving.” Asked about this by Cheney, Gonell replied: “I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day.” The officer added that the former president’s comments were “a pathetic excuse for his behavior, for something that he helped to create, this monstrosity.”
What happened on Jan. 6 was monstrous, the product of a dangerous, anti-democratic sickness haunting parts of the American right. This is the sort of event that a free nation must come to terms with, not ignore; investigate, not sweep under the rug; and understand, not dismiss as a one-off display of violence. That’s why this committee’s work is so important.
We've excised the main body of the tumor,
but the prognosis is only slightly improved.
The need for continued aggressive treatment is imperative.
Today's Deep Thought
Condoms aren’t completely safe - a friend of mine had a
whole pocketful of ‘em when he got hit by a cement truck.
COVID-19 Update
Yesterday, August 1st, 2021
8,901 people were killed by COVID-19
99.8 % of them were not vaccinated
World
New Cases: 534,902 (⬆︎ .27%)
New Deaths: 8,901 (⬆︎ .21%)
USA
New Cases: 51,898 (⬆︎ .15%)
New Deaths: 241 (⬆︎ .04%)
USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 191.0 million (57.5%)
Fully Vaxxed: 164.4 million (49.5%)
Florida Leading The Charge
Florida records most new daily COVID cases in state since pandemic began
Florida reported 21,683 new COVID-19 cases — the most in the state in a single day since the pandemic began, per data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday.
The big picture: Florida is now the U.S. coronavirus epicenter, with the Delta variant driving a surge, Axios Tampa Bay's Ben Montgomery notes.
Hospitalizations and deaths from the virus among the unvaccinated are increasing.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has taken a stand against local authority restrictions, announcing in May that he would pardon "any Floridian" who faces "outstanding infractions" for violating COVID-19 guidance like mask mandates and social distancing.
On Friday, he issued an executive order that bars local school districts from requiring students to wear masks when they return to the classroom next month.
Of note: The new cases record released by the CDC occurred on Friday. The surge comes one day after the state recorded 17,093 new cases the previous day, according to the CDC.
"The previous peak in Florida had been 19,334 cases reported on Jan. 7, before the availability of vaccinations became widespread," AP notes.
What A Day It Must've Been
Usually we'd fuck people over and take their shit. But later, sometimes we'd buy their shit and then fuck 'em over. Is that progress?
Jul 31, 2021
Fuck Around And Find Out
Two travellers who arrived in Toronto from the United States have been fined for providing fake COVID-19 proof of vaccination documents and lying about pre-departure tests.
The Public Health Agency of Canada says the travellers also didn’t comply with requirements to stay at a government-authorized hotel or to get tested upon arrival.
The agency says in a news release Friday that the travellers arrived last week and have been handed four fines totalling $19,720 each.
Canada eased quarantine requirements on July 5 for fully vaccinated Canadians and foreign nationals with an exemption to enter the country, but they must upload their proof of vaccination documents to the ArriveCAN app before entry.
Those who are not fully vaccinated are still required to stay for three days at a government-approved hotel, quarantine for 14 days and undergo tests pre-departure, post-arrival and eight days later.
The public health agency is warning that all travellers are obligated to answer questions truthfully and that providing false information or documents to government officials upon entry to Canada is a serious offence.
The agency says violating quarantine or isolation instructions when entering Canada could lead to a $5,000 fine for each day of non-compliance or each offence, or more serious penalties including six months in prison or $750,000 in fines.
We Go On
From the first human handprint on a cave wall
Or a picture on someone's phone
We're part of something continuous
Something that will proceed without us
But there will always be something of us left behind
For the next ones to find
We don't just die and decay
We don't just dissolve back into the clay
We go on
Or a picture on someone's phone
We're part of something continuous
Something that will proceed without us
But there will always be something of us left behind
For the next ones to find
We don't just die and decay
We don't just dissolve back into the clay
We go on
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)