The Case Of The Missing Hootch

This one's just too ripe.

NYT:

The State Department is investigating the whereabouts of a $5,800 bottle of whiskey the Japanese government gave to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019, according to two people briefed on the inquiry and a document made public on Wednesday.

It was unclear whether Mr. Pompeo ever received the gift, as he was traveling in Saudi Arabia on June 24, 2019, the day that Japanese officials gave it to the State Department, according to a department filing on Wednesday in the Federal Register documenting gifts that senior American officials received in 2019. Such officials are often insulated by staff members who receive gifts and messages for them.

American officials can keep gifts that are less than $390. But if the officials want to keep gifts that are over that price, they must purchase them. According to the filing, the State Department said the bottle was appraised at $5,800.

The department also took the unusual step of noting that the whereabouts of the whiskey is unknown. Similar filings over the past two decades make no mention of any similar investigations.

First - a bottle of booze that costs $5,800? WTF are we doing? Seems like maybe there's a whole class of hucksters huckstering the hucksters - the parasitic rich are infested with parasites looking to get rich off the rich. That's one fuckin' ugly process.

Second - of course somebody pinched it. The Trump "administration" was a criminal enterprise and we can't reasonably expect that somebody wouldn't take advantage of an opportunity to steal something. It was not for nothing that Pompeo got the State Dept Inspector General fired.

Third - I get the appreciation for fine sprits. Some whiskeys are pretty amazing. But I think keeping a real-world perspective is kind of important. In the end, it's poison. The high end stuff can be a very pleasant way to toxify your brain, but it's still poison.

And in the morning, is there a big difference in the quality of your hangover?

COVID-19 Update

Yesterday, August 4th, 2021

10,118 people were killed by COVID-19

99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated

World

New Cases:   638,585 (⬆︎ .34%)
New Deaths:    10,118 (⬆︎ .24%)

USA

New Cases:   112,279 (⬆︎ .31%)
New Deaths:         656 (⬆︎ .10%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations: 192.6 million (58.0%)
Fully Vaccinated:    165.3 million (49.8%)

As The Red Plague continues its thoroughly preventable rampage, we see the effect of idiots clustering together to provide a breeding ground for SARS-CoV-2, allowing it to do what living organisms do - mutate and evolve in order to survive and propagate.

WaPo:

Here’s what we know about the delta-plus variant

South Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency said Tuesday that it had recorded at least two cases of the new coronavirus delta-plus variant, which some experts believe to be more transmissible than the original delta variant that was first detected in India and has since thwarted plans for returning to life before the pandemic.

But what do we know about “delta plus,” yet another new variant causing alarm among governments and health officials? First identified in Europe in March, the variant is also known as B. 1.617.2.1 or AY.1.

It has been detected in several countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States and India.

Last month, experts in India labeled the variant one of concern and warned that it appeared to be more transmissible than most. Citing studies, the country’s health ministry said that the variant has the ability to bind more easily to lung cells and could be resistant to therapies used to treat the infection.
Union science and technology minister Jitendra Singh announced Friday that up to 70 cases of the delta-plus variant were detected in genome sequencing as of July 23, Hindustan Times reported.

How India has weathered the devastation of the delta variant and how it has named the delta-plus variant as one of concern should place public health leaders on notice, said James E.K. Hildreth, president and chief executive of Meharry Medical College.

“We’ve got to be more willing to consider observations made in other countries dealing with [the coronavirus],” he said, noting that the relative of the highly contagious delta variant is concerning. “Again, we saw what happen with delta in India and how quickly it spread … Why would we think the delta-plus variant would be different?”

The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium has since said that the delta-plus variant is unlikely to be more transmissible than the delta variant and trends have yet to emerge, according to Hindustan Times.

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Today's Reddit

I dearly love me some postal service, but it's time for this to become standard equipment.

Today's Pix

click

COVID-19 Update

More than 99.99% of people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 have not had a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization or death. More than 6,500 breakthrough cases as of July 26 may sound like a lot, but that means less than 0.004% of fully vaccinated people had a breakthrough case that led to hospitalization and less than 0.001% of fully vaccinated people died from a breakthrough Covid-19 case. (full piece below)

Yesterday, August 3rd, 2021

10,057 people were killed by COVID-19

99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated

World

New Cases:   615,073 (⬆︎ .31%)
New Deaths:    10,057 (⬆︎ .24%)

USA

New Cases:   104,758 (⬆︎ .29%) Welcome to The Delta Wave - Woohoo!
New Deaths:         516 (⬆︎ .08%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard

At Least One Dose: 191.8 million (57.8%)
Fully Vaxxed:           167.9 million (49.7%)

WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: (paywall)

Opinion: Despite all the disinformation, Americans are finally waking up to the covid-19 crisis

Some rays of sunshine have permeated the Republican fog of coronavirus disinformation. It turns out that despite rather shoddy coverage putting the number of “breakthrough” infections in absolute terms (rather than as a percentage of cases) and ongoing lies from opportunistic politicians, more Americans are waking up to the danger posed by the delta variant.

CNN reports: “The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Sunday that 816,203 additional doses were administered, the fifth straight day the agency recorded more than 700,000 shots in arms. That brings the total number of doses administered to 346,456,669, according to the CDC numbers released Sunday. The seven-day average of administered doses is now 662,529 per day, the highest average since July 7.” On Monday, the United States finally reached a milestone: 70 percent of adults have received at least one shot.

Many mainstream media outlets have not covered themselves in glory of late. Too many stories have relied on sensationalistic headlines, erroneous assumptions and bad math in reporting on the rise of the delta variant of the coronavirus. At the White House’s covid-19 task force briefing on Monday, one reporter asked why Americans think health-care professionals are downplaying the number of breakthrough cases. Hmmm, maybe because so much reporting has confused Americans by putting out breakthrough numbers without context?

Thankfully, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained at the briefing that Americans are eight times as likely to contract the coronavirus if they are unvaccinated and 25 times more likely to be hospitalized or die. “An important point to bring up is that the greater percentage of people that are vaccinated, even with a high degree of protection, the absolute number of breakthrough infections might appear high,” he explained. “That’s not the critical number. The critical number is what is the proportion of the vaccinated people who, in fact, are getting breakthrough infections. And that’s the critical one.”

Put differently, as CNN recently did: “More than 99.99% of people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 have not had a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization or death.” More than 6,500 breakthrough cases as of July 26 may sound like a lot, but that means “less than 0.004% of fully vaccinated people had a breakthrough case that led to hospitalization and less than 0.001% of fully vaccinated people died from a breakthrough Covid-19 case.” And of those cases, three-quarters are among the elderly.

The good news is that — even though Republican disinformation on vaccines has not let up — the uptick in cases and hospitalizations (virtually all among unvaccinated people) in red-state areas has permeated the right-wing media echo chamber. In Texas, for example, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has been among the worst public figures, actively blocking vaccine and mask mandates. Despite his reckless conduct, the Houston Chronicle reports, “More than 65 percent of Texans said they would support vaccine mandates issued by federal, state or local governments; the national average was 64 percent. More than 70 percent of Texans would support vaccine requirements to board an airplane; more than 62 percent would support vaccine mandates for children returning to schools; and 67 percent would support them for students returning to universities.” Now, they just have to let their elected leaders know.

While it is true that Democrats far outpace Republicans in support for mandates (84 percent among Democrats, compared with 45 percent among Republicans), the Chronicle makes clear that “support among both groups has ticked upward since a previous survey this spring.” Other differences persist: Urbanites are much more likely than rural Americans to support vaccine mandates, and “women are nearly 10 percentage points less likely to support mandates than men, though both groups are highly supportive overall, at 60 percent and 69 percent.”

It is not hard to figure out the reason for this surge in vaccinations. When local papers blast out news of hospital overcrowding and deaths of local figures, the pandemic finally becomes “real” — even for covid-19 deniers. Add in new mandates for employees of the federal government, some cities and many big corporations, and powerful incentives emerge for the unvaccinated to get their shots.

It is a tragedy that it took the delta surge to rouse some Americans to the crisis. We can only pray that more wake up before the hospitalization and death toll rises any further, forcing us once again to close down and retreat to our homes.

Today's Jan6 Coup Attempt Stuff

Some of it anyway. I'm trying to do a kind of roundup. We'll see how it goes.

Brian Tyler Cohen:

WaPo: (pay wall)

Jan. 6 committee faces unprecedented choice of whether to call Republican lawmakers to testify
Several congressional Republicans have admitted to having some contact with President Donald Trump during the insurrection or in the days leading up to it, making their testimony potentially key to the panel’s stated goal of being ‘guided solely by the facts’

Politico:

CIA feud complicates Jan. 6 probe
A years-old scandal within the spy agency is resurfacing as the House investigation gets underway.

Channel 9 Cincinnati:

New evidence revealed in Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigation of Warren County couple
Unsealed search warrant shows 20 firearms seized

Today's Tweet

Rules is rules, but I'm hoping they go easy on the crew, cuz that prickish little Daren got what he had comin'.

Frontier passenger allegedly touched 2 flight attendants breasts, then screamed his parents are worth $2 million, before punching a flight attendant. Frontier suspended the crew for duct taping the passenger to his seat as they landed in Miami. 22 yr old Max Berry is in custody. pic.twitter.com/4xS9Rwvafx

— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) August 3, 2021

Krugman Speaks

"Freedom"

This is a pretty good explainer.

NYT, Paul Krugman: (pay wall)

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, isn’t stupid. He is, however, ambitious and supremely cynical. So when he says things that sound stupid it’s worth asking why. And his recent statements on Covid-19 help us understand why so many Americans are still dying or getting severely ill from the disease.

The background here is Florida’s unfolding public health catastrophe.

We now have highly effective vaccines freely available to every American who is at least 12 years old. There has been a lot of hype about “breakthrough” infections associated with the Delta variant, but they remain rare, and serious illness among the vaccinated is rarer still. There is no good reason we should still be suffering severely from this pandemic.

But Florida is in the grip of a Covid surge worse than it experienced before the vaccines. More than 10,000 Floridians are hospitalized, around 10 times the number in New York, which has about as many residents; an average of 58 Florida residents are dying each day, compared with six in New York. And the Florida hospital system is under extreme stress.

There’s no mystery about why this has happened. At every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus, for example by issuing orders blocking businesses from requiring that their patrons show proof of vaccination and schools from requiring masks. More generally, he has helped create a state of mind in which vaccine skepticism flourishes and refusal to take precautions is normalized.

One technical note: Florida’s vaccination rate is well below the rates in the Northeast, but closely matches the national average. But seniors are much more likely to be vaccinated than younger Americans, in Florida as elsewhere; and Florida, of course, has an unusually high number of seniors. Among younger groups the state lags behind the nation as a whole, and even further behind blue states.

So, given these grim developments, one might have expected or at least hoped that DeSantis would reconsider his position. In fact, he has been making excuses — it’s all about the air-conditioning! He has been claiming that any new restrictions would have unacceptable costs for the economy — although Florida’s recent performance looks terrible if you place any value on human life.

Above all, he has been playing the liberal-conspiracy-theory card, with fund-raising letters declaring that the “radical left” is “coming for your freedom.”

So let’s talk about what the right means when it talks about “freedom.” Since the pandemic began, many conservatives have insisted that actions to limit the death toll — social distancing, wearing a mask and now getting vaccinated — should be matters of personal choice. Does that position make any sense?

Well, driving drunk is also a personal choice. But almost everyone understands that it’s a personal choice that endangers others; 97 percent of the public considers driving while impaired by alcohol a serious problem. Why don’t we have the same kind of unanimity on refusing to get vaccinated, a choice that helps perpetuate the pandemic and puts others at risk?

True, many people doubt the science; the link between vaccine refusal and Covid deaths is every bit as real as the link between D.U.I. and traffic deaths, but is less obvious to the naked eye. But why are people on the right so receptive to misinformation on this subject, and so angry about efforts to set the record straight?

My answer is that when people on the right talk about “freedom” what they actually mean is closer to “defense of privilege” — specifically the right of certain people (generally white male Christians) to do whatever they want.

Not incidentally, if you go back to the roots of modern conservatism, you find people like Barry Goldwater defending the right of businesses to discriminate against Black Americans. In the name of freedom, of course. A lot, though not all, of the recent panic about “cancel culture” is about protecting the right of powerful men to mistreat women. And so on.

Once you understand that the rhetoric of freedom is actually about privilege, things that look on the surface like gross inconsistency and hypocrisy start to make sense.

Why, for example, are conservatives so insistent on the right of businesses to make their own decisions, free from regulation — but quick to stop them from denying service to customers who refuse to wear masks or show proof of vaccination? Why is the autonomy of local school districts a fundamental principle — unless they want to require masks or teach America’s racial history? It’s all about whose privilege is being protected.

The reality of what the right means by freedom also, I think, explains the special rage induced by rules that impose some slight inconvenience in the name of the public interest — like the detergent wars of a few years back. After all, only poor people and minority groups are supposed to be asked to make sacrifices.

Anyway, as you watch DeSantis invoke “freedom” to escape responsibility for his Covid catastrophe, remember, when he says it, that word does not mean what you think it means.

COVID-19 Update

Ed Note: 6 states didn't report their numbers yesterday (most notably, Florida - ahem), so I've included their 7-day floating averages here.

Yesterday, August 2nd, 2021

8,141 people were killed by COVID-19

99.8 % of them were not vaccinated

World

New Cases:   493,349 (⬆︎ .24%)
New Deaths:      8,141 (⬆︎ .19%)

USA

New Cases:   71,732 (⬆︎ .20%)
New Deaths:       275 (⬆︎ .04%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard

At Least One Dose: 191.8 million (57.8%)
Fully Vaxxed:           164.9 million (49.7%)

There's been discussion the last few days on how to get the idiots vaccine-hesitant (bless their hearts) to step up and get the jab.

I speculated a little about this before, and voilà - here it is. The Free Market speaks...

NYT:

Don’t Want a Vaccine? Be Prepared to Pay More for Insurance.

America’s Covid-19 vaccination rate is at around 60 percent, for ages twelve and up. That’s not enough to reach so-called herd immunity, and in states like Missouri — where a number of counties have vaccination rates under 25 percent — hospitals are overwhelmed by serious outbreaks of the more contagious Delta variant.

The vaccine resisters offer all kinds of reasons for refusing the free shots and for ignoring efforts to nudge them to get vaccinated. Campaigns urging Americans to get vaccinated for their health, for their grandparents, for their neighbors, to get free doughnuts or a free joint haven’t done the trick. States have even held lotteries with a chance to win millions or a college scholarship.

And yet there are still huge numbers of unvaccinated people. Federal, state and municipal governments, as well as private businesses continue to largely avoid mandates for their employees out of fears they will provoke a backlash.

So, how about an economic argument? Get a Covid-19 shot to protect your wallet.

Getting hospitalized with Covid-19 in the United States typically generates huge bills. Those submitted by Covid patients to the NPR-Kaiser Health News “Bill of the Month” project include a $17,000 bill for a brief hospital stay in Marietta, GA (reduced to about $4,000 for an uninsured patient under a “charity care” policy); a $104,000 bill for a fourteen-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured man; possibly hundreds of thousands for a two-week hospital stay — some of it on a ventilator — for a foreign tourist in Hawaii whose travel health insurance contained a “pandemic exclusion.”

Even though insurance companies negotiate lower prices and cover much of the cost of care, an over $1,000 out-of-pocket bill for a deductible — plus more for copays and possibly some out-of-network care — should be a pretty scary incentive.

In 2020, before there were Covid-19 vaccines, most major private insurers waived patient payments — from coinsurance to deductibles — for Covid treatment. But many if not most have allowed that policy to lapse. Aetna, for example, ended that policy on Feb. 28; UnitedHealthcare began rolling back its waivers late last year and ended them by the end of March.

More than 97 percent of hospitalized patients last month were unvaccinated. Though the vaccines will not necessarily prevent you from catching the coronavirus, they are highly effective at assuring you will have a milder case and are kept out of the hospital.

For this reason, there’s logic behind insurers’ waiver rollback: Why should patients be kept financially unharmed from what is now a preventable hospitalization, thanks to a vaccine that the government paid for and made available for free? It is now in many drugstores, popping up at highway rest stops and bus stops and can be delivered and administered at home in parts of the country.

A harsher society might impose tough penalties on people who refuse vaccinations and contract the virus. Recently, the National Football League decreed that teams will forfeit a game canceled because of a Covid-19 outbreak among unvaccinated players — and neither team’s players will be paid.

But insurers could try to do more, like penalizing the unvaccinated. And there is precedent. Already, some policies won’t cover treatment that results from what insurance companies deem risky behavior, such as scuba diving and rock climbing.

The Affordable Care Act allows insurers to charge smokers up to 50 percent more than what nonsmokers pay for some types of health plans. Four-fifths of states in the U.S. follow that protocol, though most employer-based plans do not do so. In 49 states, people who are caught driving without auto insurance face fines, confiscation of their car, loss of their license and even jail. And reckless drivers pay more for insurance.

The logic behind the policies is that the offenders’ behavior can hurt others and costs society a lot of money. If a person decides not to get vaccinated and contracts a bad case of Covid, they are not only exposing others in their workplace or neighborhoods; the tens or hundreds of thousands spent on their care could mean higher premiums for others as well in their insurance plans next year. What’s more, outbreaks in low-vaccination regions could help breed more vaccine-resistant variants that affect everyone.

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And quit bitchin' about how the guidance keeps changing. Here's your default:

Today's Birthday

Happy birthday, Marge Roberts (aka: Mom)

Aug 3, 1928 - March 23, 1986

buy the book

Making friends in Guatemala

Miller St @ W 58th Pl - Arvada CO