Fun Fact:
Jeff Bezos has more money than he has brain cells
Aug 24, 2021
On Our Differences
Just once, I'd like to see an article like,
"Extroverted? Here are some tips on how you can shut the fuck up and leave people alone."
hat tip = @tomandlorenzo
COVID-19 Update
Fauci says he thinks we can get there by Spring 2022.
But of course, the problem is that the 80% will be a national average, which means there will be some remaining hotspots where people insist on behaving stupidly, which means the monster will continue to have opportunities to mutate and evolve, which could lengthen the timeframe, if not put us all the way back to square one, because the longer it takes to get to herd immunity, the more likely it is that the virus to come up with a variant that doesn't care about your little vaccination thingie.
So let's not make the mistake (again) of pretending to be on the verge of winning something.
We'll know more as we go, but stay humble, cuz we dunno jack shit right now.
Opinion: Pfizer’s vaccine is fully authorized. It’s time for excuses to end and mandates to start.
Bring on the vaccination mandates! If reason, patriotism and clear self-interest won’t convince reluctant Americans to protect themselves and their communities against covid-19, maybe the threat of not being able to work, go to school or lead anything like a normal life will do the trick.
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has given full approval to the Pfizer vaccine for use by those 16 and older, the last remotely plausible rationalization for refusing to get vaccinated is gone. The fact that the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson jabs have until now been administered under emergency use authorization was always a fairly flimsy reason to refuse them. Now, at least for the Pfizer vaccine, that fig leaf has been shredded. The people who were hiding behind it need to roll up their sleeves today.
I realize that not everyone will respond to Monday’s FDA decision in a reasonable way, unfortunately.
There are reportedly some adults in Mississippi — where only 37 percent of the population is fully vaccinated — who reject the vaccines because “they were developed so fast” or because “we don’t know what’s in them.” Neither of these rationalizations are true: The ingredients are clear, and the development processes that contributed to them are long-standing. And even worse, some of these refuseniks are following loony-bin advice and trying to ward off covid-19 with ivermectin, a veterinary drug used to rid livestock of worms and other parasites. I don’t know how federal or state officials can reach those who have gone so far down the anti-vaccine rabbit hole.
But their employers might bring them back to reality, or at least grudging compliance, with a simple message: Now that the Pfizer vaccination has full approval, with other options on the way, we have being vaccinated against covid-19 as a condition of employment. Get vaccinated by a certain date, and be able to prove it, or you can’t work here anymore.
Some companies — including The Post — have already made coronavirus vaccination mandatory as a condition of continued employment, with few case-by-case exemptions for those with legitimate medical or religious objections. It is understandable that some cautious employers might have felt they were on shaky ground requiring vaccines that were less than fully, finally approved for safety and effectiveness. But now, at least for the two-shot Pfizer vaccine, that reason to hesitate is gone.
Government leaders at all levels, from President Biden down to local school boards across the country, should require employees to be vaccinated — not “vaccinated or regularly tested,” as has become a popular way to impose a non-mandatory mandate, but “vaccinated, period.” All universities should join the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and many others in requiring all students coming to campus this term to be vaccinated or face the prospect of being disenrolled.
The Biden administration should use all appropriate power at its disposal to keep ambitious Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas from burnishing their faux-populist credentials by trying to thwart needed mandates. For example, if governors withhold state funding from school districts that impose vaccine or mask mandates, why couldn’t the Education Department use federal funds to make those districts whole?
And all of this needs to happen immediately.
To say we are heading in the wrong direction on the coronavirus is a gross understatement. The delta variant looked like bad news when it arrived weeks ago, but now it looks calamitous. After a glorious early-summer lull when it looked as if the worst of covid-19 might be behind us, the nation is back to averaging around 140,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths each day, according to Johns Hopkins University.
We now know that vaccinated individuals can be infected and can pass the virus on to others. But that is not a reason to conclude that the vaccines don’t work, because we also know that they give tremendous protection against hospitalization and death. The victims who are filling intensive care units in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and other states with relatively low vaccination rates are largely unvaccinated. Those who are dying are almost all unvaccinated.
With more than 90 million eligible Americans still unvaccinated, there will surely be much more suffering and death — a tragedy that we have more than enough vaccine doses to prevent.
I, for one, am eager to line up for the booster shot that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends. If we end up having to get occasional boosters against covid-19 the way we do against tetanus, say, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t see why anyone should.
We already require children to be vaccinated against a host of diseases before they can enroll in public schools. Let’s use that precedent to require coronavirus vaccination. Want to work and earn a paycheck? Get the shot.
The Grift Everlasting
First, there's the Big Lie, and when that begins to lose its fresh and starchy appeal, you shift to the Big Stall.
Arizona Audit Delayed Because Cyber Ninjas Have COVID
Arizona Republicans’ election “audit” report will be delayed even longer, because the leaders of the team running it are “quite sick” with COVID-19.
The long-awaited farce of an Arizona election audit is ending in tragedy.
The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate was finally supposed to receive the report on its sham of an election fraud audit on Monday. But state Republicans announced that the report hadn’t been submitted—because the majority of the leaders of the conspiracy-minded Cyber Ninjas team that ran the so-called “audit” have caught COVID-19.
And right on cue, we get the stall:
“The team expected to have the full draft ready for the Senate today, but unfortunately Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and two other members of the five-person audit team have tested positive for COVID-19 and are quite sick,” Arizona’s Republican senate president, Karen Fann, said in a statement Monday afternoon.
Here's the full statement as per a tweet from the aforementioned (and aptly named) Karen:
Fann said the senate had received “a portion of the draft report,” and will meet Wednesday to begin reviewing what they had received.
The report won’t be made public until Senate Republicans decide to release it after reviewing and finalizing its findings, a process that will now slip even further into the future.
Cyber Ninjas, a firm that had never conducted an electoral audit before, was given carte blanche to investigate whether widespread fraud stole the election from President Trump. Since then, it’s been chaos.
The company, whose owner had publicly floated false conspiracy theories that the election had been rigged against Trump even before it was hired, failed to follow basic auditing procedures, and spent nearly $6 million in outside funding from conservative backers on the monthslong slog of a process. The audit even banned its own monitor from observing the process, kicking former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett out of the building for leaking data.
The audit’s official account was banned from Twitter for spreading lies and misinformation about the 2020 election. Logan recently appeared in a conspiracy theory-driven “documentary” about how the election was stolen from Trump. Cyber Ninjas refused to comply with a U.S. House probe of its investigation. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the audit has violated federal law.
But the audit has become a focal point for Trump and conspiracy theorists to argue the election was indeed stolen from him—and has inspired similar efforts in other states.
Now, the audit’s results will be delayed even longer.
With a little payback's-a-motherfucker thrown in through the side window.
Arizona Audit Delayed Because Cyber Ninjas Have COVID
Arizona Republicans’ election “audit” report will be delayed even longer, because the leaders of the team running it are “quite sick” with COVID-19.
The long-awaited farce of an Arizona election audit is ending in tragedy.
The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate was finally supposed to receive the report on its sham of an election fraud audit on Monday. But state Republicans announced that the report hadn’t been submitted—because the majority of the leaders of the conspiracy-minded Cyber Ninjas team that ran the so-called “audit” have caught COVID-19.
And right on cue, we get the stall:
“The team expected to have the full draft ready for the Senate today, but unfortunately Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and two other members of the five-person audit team have tested positive for COVID-19 and are quite sick,” Arizona’s Republican senate president, Karen Fann, said in a statement Monday afternoon.
Here's the full statement as per a tweet from the aforementioned (and aptly named) Karen:
Fann said the senate had received “a portion of the draft report,” and will meet Wednesday to begin reviewing what they had received.
The report won’t be made public until Senate Republicans decide to release it after reviewing and finalizing its findings, a process that will now slip even further into the future.
Cyber Ninjas, a firm that had never conducted an electoral audit before, was given carte blanche to investigate whether widespread fraud stole the election from President Trump. Since then, it’s been chaos.
The company, whose owner had publicly floated false conspiracy theories that the election had been rigged against Trump even before it was hired, failed to follow basic auditing procedures, and spent nearly $6 million in outside funding from conservative backers on the monthslong slog of a process. The audit even banned its own monitor from observing the process, kicking former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett out of the building for leaking data.
The audit’s official account was banned from Twitter for spreading lies and misinformation about the 2020 election. Logan recently appeared in a conspiracy theory-driven “documentary” about how the election was stolen from Trump. Cyber Ninjas refused to comply with a U.S. House probe of its investigation. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the audit has violated federal law.
But the audit has become a focal point for Trump and conspiracy theorists to argue the election was indeed stolen from him—and has inspired similar efforts in other states.
Now, the audit’s results will be delayed even longer.
Let's Review
I think the basic take-away is that really, not much has changed. Even when they acknowledge their bias, and especially when they actually articulate the contradictions internal to their "beliefs", they stay in the bubble.
Jordan Klepper - The Daily Show
"...a personal, irrational fear of ever admitting error combined with the fear of being ostracized by the tribe..."
We should prob'ly check in with some folks about that old bugbear "cognitive dissonance".
The Lincoln Project - Reed Galen and Dr Gale Tarvis
Aug 23, 2021
COVID-19 Update
35 States - no reported numbers for yesterday.
We Are The Stoopid Country, part ∞
The plea from Mississippi’s top doctor to a state grappling with the nation’s second-lowest vaccination rate seemed simple: Do not take ivermectin — a drug intended for treating worms in livestock — to prevent or treat the coronavirus.
Despite no scientific evidence that ivermectin is effective at preventing or treating covid-19, State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs was left baffled this week after one person was hospitalized for ingesting the horse dewormer medication to treat the virus — a “kind of crazy” act he likened to getting chemotherapy at a feed store.
“Please don’t do that,” he said.
Cases of people consuming ivermectin to treat the coronavirus in Mississippi are drawing alarm, with the state’s health department issuing an alert Friday warning people not to take the drug, saying the state’s poison control center has “received an increasing number of calls from individuals with potential ivermectin exposure taken to treat or prevent covid-19 infection.” Mississippi State Epidemiologist Paul Byers wrote in a letter to the MS Health Alert Network that “at least 70 percent of the recent calls” have been related to the ingestion of ivermectin “purchased at livestock supply centers.”
“Do NOT take drugs made for animals in any form,” the health department wrote on Facebook.
The spike in ivermectin use in Mississippi comes at a time when the state is suffering through what Dobbs described as “the worst part of the pandemic.” Mississippi reported more than 5,000 new covid cases Friday, bringing its seven-day average for new infections to 3,586, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. More than 1,600 people are hospitalized for the virus and about 450 beds in intensive care units are filled as of Saturday.
Dobbs, who has repeatedly stressed that vaccination remains “our best way out of this pandemic,” issued an order Friday threatening infected Mississippi residents with fines or possible jail time if they do not isolate at home.
The increase in cases has also affected children in the state, as more than 20,000 students, accounting for 4.5 percent of the public school population, have been quarantined for exposure to the coronavirus. Byers emphasized that Mississippi minors ages 5 to 17 are seeing the fastest growing number of coronavirus cases, with the highly transmissible delta variant hospitalizing young people at a high rate.
“We’re in as bad of a situation as we can be,” Byers said during a live-streamed meeting with the Mississippi State Medical Association.
Commonly used to treat parasites in animals, ivermectin has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat several forms of parasitic worms found in people. But the FDA and health officials have warned for months against using the drug to treat the coronavirus, saying its use can “cause serious harm.”
“There are approved uses for ivermectin in both people and animals,” Byers wrote in the letter. “Patients should be advised to not take any medications intended to treat animals and should be instructed to only take ivermectin as prescribed by their physician.”
The total number of cases related to ivermectin was not specified in the Friday letter. Byers noted that 85 percent of those who called the Mississippi Poison Control Center said they experienced mild symptoms. Some of the symptoms for ivermectin use among people include rash, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, neurological disorders, and potentially severe hepatitis requiring hospitalization.
“Animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans,” Byers said.
Dobbs and Byers did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday.
Just over 36 percent of Mississippi’s eligible-population is fully vaccinated, above only Alabama for the lowest vaccination rate in the nation. Dobbs acknowledged this week that the severity of the state’s health crisis was due to a “tsunami” in cases among the unvaccinated population that’s overwhelmed hospitals. Nearly 90 percent of covid-19 hospitalizations and 86 percent of deaths in the state have been among unvaccinated people, Dobbs said.
The discussion surrounding ivermectin has largely stemmed from anecdotal testimonies online of those who largely oppose vaccination and masking. On social media, some have falsely claimed ivermectin to be a cure and that they were “mostly symptom-free” after taking the drug. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, previously told The Washington Post that ivermectin was “the new hydroxychloroquine,” referring to the malaria drug pushed by former president Donald Trump that proved ineffective against covid.
Ivermectin, which had been used in some countries in Latin America as a covid treatment, took off in popularity at the start of the year; the FDA said at least three people were hospitalized in February after taking the veterinary formulation. In places like Nevada, customers flocked to feed stores in search of the deworming drug to help fight against covid. Makenna LaFond, who works at Sierra Feed and Saddlery in Reno, recalled to The Post earlier this year what she’d have to tell people seeking ivermectin to treat or prevent covid, “No, that’s not for you. That’s for a 1,100-pound horse.”
“Then, they would buy, like, six tubes of it,” she said.
My wife and I got covid-19. Our doctor prescribed a medication used to treat parasites in livestock. (part of the horror story in Brazil)
The FDA, National Institutes of Health and World Health Organization have warned people against using the drug for covid-19 treatment and a March study published in the medical journal JAMA found that ivermectin does not speed recovery in people with mild cases of the disease. Pharmaceutical giant Merck, an ivermectin manufacturer, has also said it did not support the drug’s safety and efficacy for covid treatment.
On Saturday, the FDA re-upped its warning, tweeting: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
The drug has found a national audience in conservative circles. Between March and this month, Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham promoted the use of ivermectin as an alternative covid treatment to millions of viewers on their prime-time shows. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was suspended from YouTube in June for posting a video touting ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for covid-19.
Recently, reports of ivermectin use among unvaccinated people have sprung up in states besides Mississippi. The family of Phil Valentine, a conservative radio host in Tennessee who was unvaccinated and using ivermectin, was “elated” to hear his listeners are getting vaccinated after he was infected with the virus; Valentine died Saturday, according to the Associated Press. In Chalmette, La., 62-year-old Darleen Asevedo died of complications from covid-19 on Aug. 14. Her daughter, Kortney, told WAFB that her mother was unvaccinated and taking ivermectin.
“Every single person has given me different information of what she should have done, what she should have took,” Kortney Asevedo said through tears. “Everybody’s wrong.”
Doctors in Southern states are still urging patients to get vaccinated and not take any unproven forms of covid treatment. Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake medical center in Baton Rouge, told the WAFB that while she has used ivermectin to help treat parasitic worms in people, the science shows Americans looking for a coronavirus treatment that’s not the vaccine need to come to terms with the ineffectiveness of the deworming drug.
“We have to let it go,” O’Neal said. “We’ve tried lots of things during this pandemic, some have worked, some have not. Ivermectin doesn’t work.”
Aug 22, 2021
Booed In Alabama
Mo Brooks gave a fiery speech on January 6, exhorting the crowd to kick ass and take names, because of course the election was stolen and they needed to storm the Capitol in order to "stop the steal".
Now, Mr Brooks is running for the seat of retiring Senator Richard Shelby, and he knows the bullshit they've been peddling is wearing thin and that it's possible he could be headed for prison about this time next year (I said possible - not likely), and he'd better start getting some things straightened around.
Anyway, another thing this change in direction is meant to accomplish is to get the rubes to stop reminding everybody of the failed coup attempt that he helped instigate.
(Notice how quiet Mike Lindell has been since that cluster fuck in South Dakota almost 2 weeks ago.)
Lie lie lie, then deny deny deny, then lie lie lie again.
- "What you heard is not what you heard."
- "What you saw is not what you saw."
- "Listen only to me because only I can steer you to the promised land."
Mo Brooks had a featured spot at Trump's rally in Alabama last night, and when he floated the proposition that the rubes need to unhitch themselves from the previous pack of lies in order to support him in the brand new set of lies that he'll be pimping in his run for the Senate, they booed him.
I guess Brooks and his fellow Daddy State travelers are finding out that the Ship Of 50 Million Fools is a lumbering hulk that doesn't exactly turn on a dime and hand you 9 cents change.
Republicans keep creating these monsters. And every time, they seem unable to understand that once the latest version of the monster is loose, it's even harder for them to control it.
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