COVID-19 Update

This was not the usual weekend slump - this looks like a big fuckin' fail.

30 states reported no numbers at all for yesterday.

Newsweek:

Former President Donald Trump was booed by his own supporters during a rally in Cullman, Alabama Saturday night after he encouraged the crowd to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

"I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you gotta do what you gotta do, but I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good," he said, drawing boos from the crowd of supporters.

"That's okay, that's alright," Trump continued, brushing off the disapproval. "But I happen to take the vaccine. If it doesn't work, you'll be the first to know. But it is working. You do have your freedoms, you have to maintain that."

A growing number of Republican leaders have urged voters to get the coronavirus vaccine as the highly contagious Delta variant sweeps through most parts of the U.S., driving up cases, deaths and hospitalizations in a new phase of the pandemic.

Here's a clip. Notice the equivocation: "Take the vaccine - but don't take the vaccine, because freedom."

Also, the lies:

We developed a vaccine in 3 months. And then more equivocation - but it's OK cuz it's all good even though you should be extremely skeptical because it was rushed and it's experimental and it's not been fully approved, and one contradiction after another.

Daddy State Awareness

The Daddy State lies to us as a means of demonstrating their power.

The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.

Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

THEIR GOAL IS TO DICTATE REALITY TO US.

Today's Tweet

I will blow my own horn, thank you very much

Sovereign citizens are extreme libertarians - radical individualists demanding fealty to their twisted ideas of being freed from self-governing principles - which disguises their true desire simply to escape being held accountable by invoking a magic spell of civic invisibility. https://t.co/U1fg1bxKtk

— e'Ville Mike (@eVilleMike) August 21, 2021

This Month

It started in USAmerica Inc more than 400 years ago.

ACLU of Virginia:

In August of 1619, a group of captive Kimbundu-speaking people from the kingdom of Ndongo landed in Virginia at Fort Monroe, brought against their will by white settlers. They were the first documented Africans brought to Virginia.

It is crucial that we remember all history, not just the history that makes us comfortable.

Hereditary life-long enslavement - some of the effects of which persist to this day.

We have lots of work to do, which makes for plenty of good trouble we can get into.

"Conservative" "Thinking"

Hugh Hewitt never disappoints - we can always count on him to pimp some of our favorite "conservative" lies.

Like this:

For 20 years, the sacrifices made in Afghanistan were part of keeping the homeland safe.

Allow me to suggest an edit:

"For 20 years we've heard the lie that tries to link safety at home with funneling trillions of tax dollars to defense contractors for overseas military adventures - which fosters the various layers of corruption (foreign and domestic) wherever large piles of cash are made readily available, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to accomplish the stated objective."

Yes, we should stay appropriately engaged in the world, but engaging in "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan - "fighting them over there" - has led us to neglect the rising threat of terrorism posed by our very own brand of homegrown terrorism right here in USAmerica Inc.

The GOP has been in the process of attempting a coup not unlike what the Taliban has been attempting in Afghanistan. This little screed wouldn't have anything to do with stuffing Jan6 down the memory hole would it, Hugh?

That, and a little projection, intended to shift the criticism from Trump - who set all this shit in motion - to Biden, who's now trying to keep America's promises and make it work.

Hugh Hewitt, WaPo: (pay Wall)

America has lost a war, and the consequences will be terrible. Yes, this happened in 1975 with the fall of Saigon, but it is not easy to find a precedent in our history for a calamity such as that unfolding in Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans — the exact number is uncertain — are suddenly stranded far from home with no simple avenue for escape.

Events have left many Americans in a state of collective shock. The video of an infant being passed from family members over concertina wire to U.S. troops at Kabul’s airport illustrated the profound desperation that is sweeping Afghanistan, and elicited an awareness that we have betrayed much and many in the past week.

We can be proud of our warriors and still be deeply ashamed of our country.

The Pentagon suggested Thursday that if Americans in Afghanistan — mostly contractors and nongovernmental aid workers now — could get to the airport in Kabul, their safe passage home was likely. The Pentagon did not explain how Americans were to get safely to the airport. The president tried again Friday to give similar reassurance and guidance to the trapped — and failed again. He told the world they would get home. He gave no guidance on how they could get to the airport.

This is unacceptable. Is there really no alternative to simply hoping for the best? “Trust me and the Taliban?” Really?

Then there are sensitive questions about President Biden’s capacity to deal with fast-moving events. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) commented early in the week that the president appeared “shellshocked.” On Friday, Biden played his favorite loop in the East Room, promising to bring Americans and our loyal Afghan allies home — but not really explaining how. He is stubbornly attached to his inner narrative and won’t budge from it.

Questions about Donald Trump’s temperament and capacity dogged his entire presidency. To age, as candid older men and women will freely confess, is to slow down from previous capacity, to grow fixed in opinions and habits. Biden is our president, and we only get one at a time, but we can ask that everyone around him make doubly sure he is getting everything older Americans routinely need as they age — particularly unpleasant advice when they don’t want to hear it.

Maybe especially when they don’t want to hear it.

The broad unease about the president’s ability to adjust to quick changes in facts on the ground is genuine, and the fact that he finally allowed four reporters to ask questions on Friday about his decision-making did not allay that unease.

The families of every American abandoned to the tender mercies of the Taliban deserve a president who is accessible and commanding, not one who seems uncertain or half-withdrawn. CNN’s Clarissa Ward, reporting with incredible courage from Kabul, should not be Americans’ best source of information on conditions at the Kabul airport. It should be the president, but his answers on Friday did not help him much or set many minds at ease.

This is very much a disaster of choice, not inevitability. The questions are many: What did the president not know about the political landscape in Afghanistan — and for how long has he not known it? What options did he solicit? Which did he decline? What advice did he reject?

It is also necessary to ask: What signal does this send to an increasingly aggressive China and Russia, and will they act on that signal? What does this mean for the perilous situations in Taiwan and Ukraine? And how did the United States get blindsided again?

For 20 years, the sacrifices made in Afghanistan were part of keeping the homeland safe. That shield has dropped. The president again insisted on Friday that we have over-the-horizon abilities. But, as one reporter asked Biden, if we didn’t see the collapse coming, how can we be confident that we will see the next attack on the homeland coming?

Finally, given the president’s argumentative and defensive speech Monday, refusal to take questions after a threadbare deflection speech Wednesday, the confused and confusing sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and his halting do-over performance Friday, the Biden-friendly legacy media must press to learn what is happening behind the scenes. ABC News’s refusal to release the entire unedited tape of Stephanopoulos’s midweek interview with the president is unacceptable. The same degree of scrutiny that fell on every Trump move must follow this president.

At moments of national calamity, we all need to be respectful of our common citizenship, but difficult discussions must be had in public, and the president especially must be available and accountable to the people he has so long wanted to lead. This is not, as the president and his team may imagine, another sort of campaign crisis to be endured and overcome in a few news cycles. The oldest president ever must keep his circle expanding and information flowing in, with truth-speakers close at hand. And he must meet with the press again and again as the crisis unfolds.

BTW #1: The idea's been floated that Biden tried to convince Obama to get us out of Afghanistan pretty much the whole 8 years he spent as VP. That story will emerge at some point as people start to dig into the history of the first two decades of "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire".

BTW #2: In case you've missed it, "conservatives" have also been pimping the bullshit that Tom Cotton is their best bet for the 2024 GOP nomination. Look for more of this as we go, and especially be on the lookout for the Press Poodles to say things like "Well, that Tom Cotton guy has some common sense stuff goin' on yada yada yada".

Ya heard it here first, kids.

COVID-19 Update

Another day, another opportunity for dog-ass Republican governors to lie about the pandemic, as Florida and Iowa post no numbers for yesterday.

And today's wrinkle illustrates for us the simple fact that everything is interconnected.

WaPo:

Orlando urges residents to conserve water because of surge in covid hospitalizations

Liquid oxygen, used in hospitals and water treatment, is in short supply as more critically ill patients need respiratory therapy.

Orlando officials called on residents Friday to stop watering their lawns and washing their cars for the next two weeks so that supplies of liquid oxygen used in water treatment can be preserved for hospitals grappling with a surge of coronavirus patients.

The region has faced shortages of liquid oxygen as people critically ill with covid-19 stream into hospitals in need of respiratory therapy. The demand has become so high that the city’s water regulator warned that water quality could falter if consumers do not cut back.

“If we are unable to reduce water demand, hospital needs continue and the supply remains limited … water quality may be impacted,” Linda Ferrone, chief customer and marketing officer at the Orlando Utilities Commission, said in a statement. “But, we believe that will not happen if everyone does their part to conserve water.”

The city’s announcement highlights the far-reaching consequences of the spike in hospitalizations being driven by the fast-moving delta variant, which is sickening tens of thousands of people daily in Florida alone. It presents a stark warning to other communities around the country where infections have strained health-care systems and caused shortages of medical supplies not seen since the worst waves of the pandemic.

Florida’s hospitals are treating more than 17,000 patients with covid-19 — with more than 3,550 of those in intensive care, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data. Supplies of liquid oxygen have run low in some places as hospitalizations have risen. Doctors and nurses give oxygen to patients who need help to breathe and to help stave off the damage covid-19 can cause in the lungs.

In Orlando, the city’s water regulator uses liquid oxygen as part of its process for removing foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide from water pumped in from the Lower Floridan Aquifer.

In August, Florida hospitals were struggling to get their hands on oxygen supplies in part because there were few truck drivers available who were qualified to transport it, Bloomberg News reported.

“It’s critical that we continue to work together and each one of us do our part, as we have done throughout this pandemic, to mitigate the impacts the virus continues to have on our community,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said in a statement Friday. “While this is another new challenge, I know that as a community, working together, we can overcome it with the help of our residents and businesses.”

Nicole Ray, a spokeswoman for Orlando Health, a major health-care provider in the region, said Friday that the company’s network of hospitals had an adequate supply of oxygen and didn’t expect the increased demand to have “any impact on patient care.” To help the city, Orlando Health is planning to conserve water across its system, she said.

“These measures will have a minimal impact to the operations of our health system and will be continuously evaluated and adjusted as needed to ensure the best use of our resources according to the needs of our patients,” Ray said in an email. “Our team members and medical staff continue to handle this surge, not unlike a year ago at this same time, in a professional and exemplary way and remain ready to serve the residents of our community.”

Orlando officials said residents and business owners should immediately halt all nonessential work involving water, including watering lawns, washing vehicles and pressure washing until supplies of liquid oxygen have been replenished. They are not asking people to reduce their use of water for cooking, bathing or drinking.

Customers should prepare for the conservation measures to last “at least two weeks,” the utilities commission said in an FAQ, while cautioning that the timeline could change. “This is difficult to determine with certainty because it is tied to the number of covid-19 patients being treated in hospitals with oxygen.”

Today's Pix

click a pic

Oops

So we thought the main story would be the eventuality of a spike in Delta infections, and while that's still probably the case, here's a shitty little bonus for us.

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.

The 2021 rally attracted more than 525,000 attendees, substantially fewer than the record-setting 2015 crowd of more than 747,000, but nearly 14% more than the roughly 462,000 who rode in for the 2020 event, KOTA-TV reported.

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

Tampa Bay Times

Ron DeSantis has ‘made a monumental mess of masking in public schools’

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.

And then this, via WJXT - Jacksonville:

Cha-ching, motherfucker

Meanwhile, we can go on pleading with people to get vaxxed up.

WaPo:

‘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.

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