click a pic
Aug 20, 2021
Oops
KIRO Seattle:
Child sex-trafficking sting at 2021 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally nets 9 arrests
STURGIS, S.D. — A weeklong sex-trafficking sting executed at the 81st annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally netted nine arrests, each with some connection to children.
Eight of the nine men arrested, who range in age from 22 to 54, are South Dakota residents charged with attempted enticement of a minor using the internet, a charge which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison upon conviction, the Argus Leader reported.
The ninth man, a New York resident, is charged with attempted commercial sex trafficking of a minor, which carries a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison upon conviction, the newspaper reported.
The South Dakota U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed the arrests in a Tuesday news release.
According to the Rapid City Journal, the joint sex operation involved the South Dakota Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, Pennington County Sheriff’s Office and the Rapid City Police Department.
Specifically, law enforcement placed multiple advertisements on online websites and mobile applications to communicate with online predators. Skout, MeetMe and Whisper, as well as the website fetlife.com, were among the platforms targeted, the Journal reported.
The men arrested include:
- Alec Walker Daniel, 22, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- Alexander Wayne Basaldu, 35, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- Jesse James Young, 36, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- Joshua Robert Lehmann, 34, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- Christopher Thomas Dahl, 28, Wolcott, New York: Attempted commercial sex trafficking of a minor.
- Stephen Gregory Fontenot, 39, Black Hawk, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- Anthony James Kemp, 54, Spearfish, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- James Dean Hanapel, 20, Ellsworth AFB: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
- Clayton John Paulson, 36, Spearfish, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
And the hardest part for me is resisting the urge to profile these fuckin' slugs as the usual "conservative" MAGA Incel suspects who talk shit while doing almost exactly what they accuse other people of doing.
About Governor Bloodstain
Several school districts are doing the right thing despite the governor’s threats, writes columnist Mac Stipanovich.
Ron DeSantis is a governor uninterested in actually governing, a lawyer with little respect for the law, an anti-elitist with an Ivy League education and a hypocrite unbothered by inconsistency. Populist politics, not public policy, is his long suit.
So it is not surprising that he has made a monumental mess of masking in public schools. When it became apparent that many of Florida’s 67 local school boards intended to require students, teachers and staff to wear masks based on the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, plus the clear consensus of health care professionals generally, DeSantis did not see a serious public health issue. He saw an irresistible opportunity to pander to the MAGA peanut gallery on a grand scale.
Through a combination of executive orders and emergency rule making by a docile Department of Health and a spineless state Board of Education, DeSantis forbade mandatory masking in public schools and made private school vouchers available to the parents of every child in any school district with a mask mandate. This cowed almost all of the recalcitrant district school board members and superintendents, who tried to save face and have it both ways by requiring masks but allowing parental opt-outs.
Almost all. The Broward and Alachua school boards spit the bit, defying DeSantis and digging in to fight for the safety of those for whose safety they are responsible. They adopted mask mandates without parental opt-outs.
And things have gone downhill for DeSantis from there. He and whoever gives him what passes for advice in such matters realized the voucher threat was not going to get the job done. Not enough parents in Broward and Alachua were going to take advantage of the vouchers to make a difference, as evidenced by the low percentages of parents who have opted out of the quasi-mask mandates in the compliant school districts.
The next threat was to cut state education funding to Broward and Alachua, which would be disastrous. But because it would be disastrous, the threat was not credible, and it was quickly abandoned.
Then there were going to be “surgical” cuts in state funding, specifically, the salaries of the defiant school board members and superintendents. Nope. The state doesn’t pay those salaries, a fact known to my barber, if not to DeSantis and his brain trust.
The most recent fallback position in DeSantis’ pell-mell retreat from the high water mark of his arrogance is reducing state funding to the rebellious districts by an amount equal to the salaries of the school board members and superintendents. This would not, of course, actually cost the individuals in question a dime, and the relatively small reductions — three-tenths of one percent of the school district budget in Broward and six-tenths of one percent in Alachua — could easily be backfilled with funds from budget reserves.
And even that might be unnecessary, because the Biden administration, sensing a high-profile opportunity to promote masking and ding DeSantis in the bargain, weighed in and said it is prepared to make up any reduction in state funding to the districts with federal dollars. Whether that proves possible is not as important as the statement it makes.
It is too early to know how this goat rope will end. The Board of Education in a second emergency meeting grilled the representatives of the Broward and Alachua schools districts for three hours like the Inquisition going after Galileo, and in the end, after all of the huffing and puffing, did nothing more than resolve to do an unspecified something in the future, after further investigation of the obvious: Broward and Alachua ain’t budging. And now the school districts in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties have joined the rebellion, so things are going to get worse before they get better.
It is not too early, however, to make two observations. First, DeSantis has proven yet again that, his posh degrees notwithstanding, he’s not always particularly smart. Almost 70 percent of Americans favor mandatory masking in schools, and his masking antics cannot have gained him more than five votes he didn’t already have while incensing and invigorating his opponents.
Second, win, lose or draw, the stands made by these stout-hearted school board members and superintendents are bracing reminders of the potent power of principles and true grit in a confrontation with an authoritarian bully. Good on them.
Go Deeper
People who tell you not to talk to them until they've had their morning coffee are basically saying they're unpleasant to be around if they're not under the influence of drugs.
But maybe they're saying they find you unpleasant
if they're not under the influence.
reddit - r/showerthoughts
COVID-19 Update
Numbers are up across the board - New Cases, New Deaths, and New Vaccinations - while Gov Bloodstain in Florida continues trying to gaslight everybody by posting numbers that simply can't be accurate.
‘I’m begging you. ... Take that shot.’
As covid-19 surges in unvaccinated Alabama, the intimate conversations between doctors and patients have taken on a new urgency
CENTREVILLE, Ala. — Cases were spiking again. Hospitals were filling up again. The latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic was raging across Alabama, and inside a rural clinic in one of the state’s least-vaccinated counties, a doctor scanned a chart for her first case of the day: 84 years old. A routine exam. Unvaccinated.
“Mr. Potts,” Lacy Smith said, greeting a man in dark slacks and a maroon T-shirt leaning on a cane. “How’ve you been feeling?”
Even at the most urgent of moments, it was the most ordinary of questions because of what the doctor understood: that if Alabama had any chance of turning things around at this point, it was no longer a matter of what Dr. Fauci said on CNN, or what some celebrity posted on Twitter but rather what was about to happen now, a delicate conversation between a doctor and a patient, the vaccines in a cooler down the hall just in case. Between Smith and two colleagues, there were 10 unvaccinated people on the schedule this day, and the first was Potts.
“Oh, pretty good, considering my age and the heat,” he replied as the doctor reminded herself to be patient, because the question wasn’t whether to bring up the vaccine, only how.
She asked about his garden. They discussed his vitals.
“So,” she finally said. “What are your current thoughts about the covid vaccine?”
“People getting pretty sick, aren’t they?” he said.
“Super sick, especially with this delta,” she said, referring to the variant.
“That shot I get for the shingles, that’s a vaccine too, ain’t it?” he said.
All similar, the doctor said, as she had in their three prior conversations.
“The benefits outweigh the other side, don’t it?” Potts said.
“Very much so, yes sir,” she said, letting a promising silence hang in the air.
He tapped his cane on the floor. “I believe I’ll think on it,” he said, and so the morning began with a no as the situation in Alabama continued to degenerate. An average of nearly 3,000 new covid-19 cases a day.
And then this, via WJXT - Jacksonville:
Cha-ching, motherfucker
Meanwhile, we can go on pleading with people to get vaxxed up.
‘I’m begging you. ... Take that shot.’
As covid-19 surges in unvaccinated Alabama, the intimate conversations between doctors and patients have taken on a new urgency
CENTREVILLE, Ala. — Cases were spiking again. Hospitals were filling up again. The latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic was raging across Alabama, and inside a rural clinic in one of the state’s least-vaccinated counties, a doctor scanned a chart for her first case of the day: 84 years old. A routine exam. Unvaccinated.
“Mr. Potts,” Lacy Smith said, greeting a man in dark slacks and a maroon T-shirt leaning on a cane. “How’ve you been feeling?”
Even at the most urgent of moments, it was the most ordinary of questions because of what the doctor understood: that if Alabama had any chance of turning things around at this point, it was no longer a matter of what Dr. Fauci said on CNN, or what some celebrity posted on Twitter but rather what was about to happen now, a delicate conversation between a doctor and a patient, the vaccines in a cooler down the hall just in case. Between Smith and two colleagues, there were 10 unvaccinated people on the schedule this day, and the first was Potts.
“Oh, pretty good, considering my age and the heat,” he replied as the doctor reminded herself to be patient, because the question wasn’t whether to bring up the vaccine, only how.
She asked about his garden. They discussed his vitals.
“So,” she finally said. “What are your current thoughts about the covid vaccine?”
“People getting pretty sick, aren’t they?” he said.
“Super sick, especially with this delta,” she said, referring to the variant.
“That shot I get for the shingles, that’s a vaccine too, ain’t it?” he said.
All similar, the doctor said, as she had in their three prior conversations.
“The benefits outweigh the other side, don’t it?” Potts said.
“Very much so, yes sir,” she said, letting a promising silence hang in the air.
He tapped his cane on the floor. “I believe I’ll think on it,” he said, and so the morning began with a no as the situation in Alabama continued to degenerate. An average of nearly 3,000 new covid-19 cases a day.
Roughly 65 percent of the population is still not fully vaccinated. And now, as Smith’s colleague John Waits headed into Exam Room 4, the message was spreading that nearly every hospital in the state was turning away emergencies because they were too busy with covid, as had first happened a few days before, when a doctor had to do CPR on a man in the back of a pickup truck as she waited for an emergency room to open up, which it never did, and the man died.
- more -
- more -
Aug 19, 2021
COVID-19 Update
The reporting bullshit continues in Florida. I guess Gov Bloodstain's just gonna ride it as long as he can.
World:
World:
USA:
USA:
Covid Live Updates: Alabama Has Run Out of I.C.U. Beds, Officials Say
The situation in the state may be a sign of what’s to come for other places with low vaccination rates. Cuba’s vaunted health system, long a symbol of national pride, is struggling to cope with a virus wave.
Here’s what you need to know:
USA:
Covid Live Updates: Alabama Has Run Out of I.C.U. Beds, Officials Say
The situation in the state may be a sign of what’s to come for other places with low vaccination rates. Cuba’s vaunted health system, long a symbol of national pride, is struggling to cope with a virus wave.
Today's Tweet
Her strongest game is when she's on her knees?
Damn - how I wish it was still OK to do a little slut-shaming.
"I'm a Christian. So they may try to drive me to my knees, but that's where I'm the strongest." - Lauren Boebert pic.twitter.com/8eOgOe8BYs
— Hear Me Roar (@Stop_Trump20) August 17, 2021
Aug 18, 2021
COVID-19 Update
Reporting remains a little spotty. MI, IA, and KS reported no new cases, while Florida continues to lead the pack in new cases, and lag behind in vaccinations, but somehow manages to come in very low on new deaths. Hmm.
I have to be a bit suspicious when FL Gov Ron DeSantis hits the airwaves pitching Regeneron as a therapeutic, while insisting that masks aren't really a thing, and that vaccination is kinda, "Well yeah - maybe it's OK - whatever".
Covid Live Updates: Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas Tests Positive
The governor, who is fully inoculated, has ardently opposed masks and vaccine mandates. Early data suggests that breakthrough infections are making up a growing percentage of hospitalizations in the U.S.
And then we find out that millions have been "donated" to a certain PAC that just happens to be all in on DeSantis as a prospect for the 2024 GOP nomination for POTUS, and that one of that PAC's top donors is the maker of - you guessed it - Regeneron.
Anyway, here are yesterday's numbers, such as they are.
And here's a nasty little snapshot:
"Remember, dear - karma's only a bitch when you are" --Glinda, Witch of the North
The governor, who is fully inoculated, has ardently opposed masks and vaccine mandates. Early data suggests that breakthrough infections are making up a growing percentage of hospitalizations in the U.S.
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