Today's Tweet

"Christianity" in USAmerica Inc.

The Q-Anon crowd is at televangelist John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.

They are chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon” from the church pews. pic.twitter.com/pGqUmUXezn

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) November 14, 2021

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

This is some pretty good analysis, which stands up in good shape - as long as we don't dismiss or discount the (IMO) very strong probability that Bannon will make deliberate attempts to drag it out so that it does threaten to torpedo Republicans in congress during their runs for re-election next year.

In a piece in Daily Beast almost 5 years ago, Bannon self-identified as a Leninist.

"Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment ... to bring down the entire establishment including the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress”

The hole in the logic is that if Bannon presses his case against the Repubs, and succeeds in pulling them down next year - leaving Dems with majorities in both houses - who's left for him to have on his side?

So, are we talking about a very delicate thread-the-needle thing? Maybe Bannon's just another self-loathing bomb-thrower who isn't really in favor of anything - he's not trying to build anything after all the destruction he's bringing - he just wants to watch it all burn(?)

What else is Bannon counting on that I'm not seeing?

Curious as fuck. Scary too.

COVID-19 Update

Two things here, kids: 

First, stop playing these stoopid little political games with a disease that's killed more than ¾ of a million Americans.

And second, stop playing with fire - this ongoing slow-smoldering insurrection is fucking dangerous. Assholes.

WaPo:

Oklahoma National Guard rejects Pentagon’s coronavirus vaccine mandate

The Oklahoma National Guard has rejected the Defense Department’s requirement for all service members to receive the coronavirus vaccine and will allow personnel to sidestep the policy with no repercussions, a potential blueprint for Republican governors who have challenged Biden administration mandates.

Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, appointed this week by Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) as adjutant of the state’s 10,000 National Guard soldiers and airmen, on Thursday notified those under his command that they are not required to receive the vaccine and won’t be punished if they decline it.

It’s an extraordinary refusal of Pentagon policy and follows Stitt’s written request to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin seeking suspension of the requirement for Guard personnel in the state.

“We will respond appropriately,” John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesperson, said of Stitt’s letter. “That said, Secretary Austin believes that a vaccinated force is a more ready force. That is why he has ordered mandatory vaccines for the total force, and that includes our National Guard, who contribute significantly to national missions at home and abroad.”

Air Force is first to face troops’ rejection of vaccine mandate as thousands avoid shots

The governor installed Mancino after having removed the state’s prior adjutant, Maj. Gen. Michael C. Thompson, who has advocated for his troops to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and last month publicized having received a booster shot. Carly Atchison, a spokesperson for Stitt, told the Associated Press that Thompson’s departure was unrelated to his stance on vaccine policy, that “the governor had been exploring making a change for a number of months” and Thompson had intended to resign in January.

Atchison would not address whether the governor instructed Mancino to order the new guidelines.

Stitt contracted the virus in July 2020 and was vaccinated in March. Along with other Republican governors and lawmakers, he has described Biden’s vaccine mandates as “unconstitutional,” declaring it a personal choice.

Overall Republican resistance to vaccine mandates has intensified in recent weeks, with multiple GOP governors filing suit to stop the requirement for federal contractors and a Friday court ruling temporarily halting the administration’s directive that private businesses employing more than 100 workers require inoculation or impose onerous testing guidelines. Oklahoma’s objection to the Pentagon’s directive would appear to open another pathway for states to challenge the president’s orders.

Mancino’s new policy walks a line between a state’s military orders, in which the governor acts as commander in chief for operations such as disaster relief, and federal military orders, in which Guard members carry out missions under the president’s command. For now, it appears that Oklahoma Guard members can refuse the vaccine, but that they would be subject to the requirement if they are put on active duty for a federally mandated assignment, such as an overseas deployment.

A senior official in the Oklahoma National Guard, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly, said that a recent survey of Guard members in the state showed that approximately 13 percent indicated they would not take the vaccine.

The official declined to address whether leadership of the Oklahoma National Guard was in step with Austin’s belief that vaccination is imperative for military units to be ready for an emergency. The National Guard, like all of the military’s active-duty components, requires personnel to be vaccinated against numerous other potential illnesses.

In most cases, deployments entail months of preparation, leaving ample time for those who aren’t vaccinated now to be in compliance should they be called upon for assignments outside the state’s borders, the official said. But the issue already has complicated deployments: The vaccination status of several rescue airmen posed challenges during the military’s evacuation from Afghanistan in August, the Air Force has said.

A spokesperson for the Oklahoma National Guard did not address how many of its members are vaccinated. Combined, the entire Army National Guard, which faces a June deadline to comply with the Pentagon’s mandate, is about 46 percent fully vaccinated. The Air National Guard is about 80 percent vaccinated ahead of its Dec. 12 deadline.

The National Guard has absorbed a disproportionate share of the 75 deaths among military personnel infected with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. National Guard members account for 28 percent of all covid-related deaths in the military, but they constitute only about 19 percent of the entire armed forces. The Army National Guard has the highest death toll across the services, according to Pentagon data.

- more -

Maybe we should stop saying

the US military represents

the best America has to offer

(they've stopped reporting 1 dose vs fully vaxxed)

Today's Tweet

The Vaccine Makers Project

"...does not enter the cell's nucleus or interact with DNA."

I am blown away by this COVID vaccine video, one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time pic.twitter.com/yREIETqtWh

— Sam (@SamIAm2021MD) November 12, 2021

COVID-19 Update

WaPo:

For many ICU survivors and their families, life is never the same

Physical, mental and cognitive problems can last years after covid-19 or other severe illness is conquered

CONNELLSVILLE, Pa. — When she finally made it home after 54 days in the UPMC Mercy intensive care unit, Brenda Markle was literally helpless. She could not sit, stand or speak. She could not feed herself or use the bathroom.

The occasional transfer from her bed to her motorized wheelchair required the arduous use of a Hoyer Lift; when settled into the chair, she could operate the joy stick with one hand or push a button with her head.

Once a robust 54-year old nurse’s aide, Markle was still plagued by erratic blood pressure, anxiety, depression and the metallic taste that many covid-19 patients complain of when they eat. She had an ever-growing bed sore that contributed to her eventual death from septic shock, after another 68 days of intensive care.

“A lot of people think after the ICU, if you make it, you come home and your life’s normal again,” said her daughter, Brittany Butler. “Because that’s what I thought. I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to have her back home with us. We’re going to have the same life that we once had.’”

For perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, the coronavirus pandemic has proved it often does not work out that way. Intensive care has saved countless lives since January 2020, but the invasive process can also yield a poorly-recognized cluster of serious consequences that together constitute “post-intensive care syndrome.” They are symptoms not of the disease, but of the cure.

The worst effects include debilitating weakness and fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, difficulty thinking and hard-to-define challenges functioning in daily life. Family members, suddenly thrust into the role of caregivers for a seriously ill loved one, endure emotional and practical difficulties of their own.

Only in recent years have doctors and researchers begun to focus on the long-term impact of their efforts in the ICU to stave off death. Much remains unknown, but growing evidence points to prolonged inactivity, deep sedation, delirium and powerful medications as some of the main causes of serious side-effects that can last for years.

Some physicians are considering how they can alter their practices in the ICU to improve results for the people who survive. Earlier physical therapy, lighter sedation and screening for psychological problems are being tested or considered.

“Why is it we high-five when people leave the ICU and then never think about them again?,” asked Brad Butcher, head of UPMC’s medical ICU, who treated Markle and has opened one the nation’s few clinics for post-ICU syndrome.

There appears to be no national tally of the number of people with covid who have spent time in ICUs since the pandemic began. Collectively, patients spend about 21 million nights in intensive care annually, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Since the agency started releasing consistent data in July 2020, about a quarter of the ICU beds were occupied by covid patients.

The HHS data does not break out the number of individual patients who spent time in an ICU , or the average length of stay. It instead counts the number of days that ICU beds were occupied. It is unclear whether covid patients increased the overall use of ICUs or occupied the beds of other seriously ill people who would have been there in a normal year.

A 2018 study revealed that 64 percent of critically ill patients had at least one physical, cognitive or mental health problem three months after release from the ICU. At 12 months, 56 percent were still affected.

A 2013 study showed that 12 months after they left an ICU, about 25 percent of patients had cognitive difficulty similar to that seen in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease, and about a third had impairment akin to people with moderate traumatic brain injury. The longer their delirium in the ICU, the worse their thinking and executive function was later, the researchers found.

A 2016 review of the medical literature found that about 30 percent of ICU survivors suffered depression in the year following their admission.

“It makes me want to cry,” said Connie Bovier, a 61-year-old Pittsburgh woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who has been in the ICU twice since 2018. Thoughts flit through her mind quickly and randomly, she said, like a riffled deck of cards. She cannot focus. She has short-term memory problems. She is repeatedly distracted.

“I just want to get it together,” Bovier said. “It’s been a long time, and I just want to get it back. I feel like I need a life coach. Something. I feel like I can’t get it together.”‘It was a roller coaster’

Neil Butler and Brenda Markle met in this small town southeast of Pittsburgh. “I met her down at the Moose Lodge in Connellsville, about 35 years ago. She was bartending,” he remembered. They lost a newborn after 31 days in neonatal intensive care. They raised three children — Brittany, now 28, Neil Jr., 24, and Breanna, 20 — in the small home Markle liked to decorate elaborately for every holiday.

Butler brought a small Christmas tree and other decorations to her tiny room in the ICU while she fought covid over the 2020 holidays. Most days, he would awake at 3 a.m., work his shift as a supervisor at AmeriGas Propane in Ruffs Dale and drive 50 miles to the hospital to sit by her side, though she was often unconscious from sedation.

The coronavirus had found its way into their home after a relative’s visit. On Dec. 2, 2020, Neil and his son woke early to go hunting, but found Markle on the couch soaked in her own urine. She could not stand on her own. The virus had raised her blood sugar to seven times its normal level.

Doctors at a nearby hospital diagnosed her with a urinary tract infection and covid and sent her home. But her condition continued to worsen and two days later, paramedics raced her to UPMC Mercy.

Over the next 54 days, 26 of them on a ventilator, Markle fought assault after assault from the disease and its toll on her body. She developed seizures, a blood clot in her lungs, bacterial pneumonia and diabetes. She could not clear secretions from her lungs. Her blood pressure rose and fell.

'It was a roller coaster.'

It was an up and down. I was scared,” Neil Butler said. “Her blood pressure would go up and down. Her heart rate, her pulse — everything was like out of whack.”

A bed sore developed on her tailbone. By the time Markle died in July it was so large that Butcher could put his fist in it and so deep he could see the bones of her pelvis.

The family refused to consider any outcome other than Markle returning home. “They were convinced, without a doubt in their mind, that she was going to be reunited with them at home,” Butcher said. “And that spilled over to the care team as well. We all wanted that to happen.”

Somehow it did. After nearly eight weeks, Markle was moved to a regular hospital floor. Nine days later she began six weeks of rehabilitation in the hospital. On March 26, she went home. The family celebrated. They put her hospital bed in the living room, and Neil Butler slept on the couch next to her.

“I didn’t know which way it was going to go. I knew it was a 50-50,” Brittany Butler said. “But I had expected when she got to rehab that she was going to make a full recovery. She never did.”

Markle could not move her right side, her family said. She remained catheterized. She had to relearn how to move her arms and legs. Her vocal cords were partly paralyzed. She ate little beside canned peaches and broth, her family said.

Speech, physical and occupational therapists visited her home to develop strategies for Markle and the family. They wrapped her utensils in towels so she could hold them. Her family brushed her teeth. They tended to her skin ulcer. They held the phone near her hand. She could press it once and unlock it.

Eventually she became able to bench press a broom stick and fashion cones out of clay. But her physical disabilities were overwhelming.

“It is very difficult to get people the care they need,” said Carla Sevin, director of the ICU Recovery Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “And sometimes the care they need is someone saying to you what you’re experiencing is not unexpected.

“We know that most people could benefit from more support than they’re getting, which right now is kind of zero.”

‘You’ve lost control of your life’

ICU acquired weakness is much more debilitating than simply getting out of shape from lack of activity. Even the muscles in the ribs and neck that help the lungs clear secretions become too weak to do their jobs.

When The Washington Post observed Markle in the ICU in January, she was off the ventilator but effectively motionless. She could muster only a slight nod of her head in response to questions.

“It is a real thing. It is profound,” Butcher said. “That seems impossible, that someone can be that weak. But it’s true. It’s absolutely true.”

Patients also report terrifying nightmares or delusions while under sedation that can foreshadow post-traumatic stress disorder after they recover. Covid patients often are put under deeper sedation, for longer periods of time, than other ICU patients because they are often intubated longer than patients with other diseases.

“One of the risk factors for development of PTSD is having those frightening or delusional experiences,” said Ann Parker, an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine and co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Post-Acute Covid-19 team.

They have “very vivid memories of a frightening experience — ’I thought I was being stabbed in my chest,’" she said. "In talking it through with them, you realize, well, they did have a chest tube placed.”

At Mercy’s PICS clinic, Bovier was visited by a parade of caregivers. The former phone company cable splicer is tethered to an oxygen tank and dependent on a variety of medications. Still, her lung function is declining. Once a heavy smoker, she still puffs on one or two cigarettes a day. Somehow, she is doing better than the medical tests indicate she should.

A pharmacist went over her medications. A respiratory therapist checked her pulmonary results. An occupational therapist made sure she can still take care of herself, that she can drive, cook and tend to her home. A physical therapist tested her stamina.

But it is her brain fog and inability to move forward that plague her most. “You’ve lost control of your life,” she said. “Not that you ever had it. But we all think we do have it. And this reminds you every day that you don’t have it.”

She used to enjoy working through her to-do list. “Now a good day is being able to make a to-do list,” she said. “It piles up. What does that do? It overwhelms you. And what does that do? It depresses you.”

Butcher came into the examining room last. He arranged for her to visit a handful of specialists, including one to help her cope with her cognitive and functional deficits.

He had one more topic to gently address. “You know that your lungs are really bad,” he told her. “So you know that if you were to get a breathing tube again, it would be really hard to take the tube out.”

Did Bovier want to write an advance directive that would instruct doctors about intubation, CPR and other lifesaving measures, to save her children from deciding those issues in an emergency? How long should doctors try to keep her alive in a crisis?

“That’s hard Brad, because you know my faith,” Bovier said. “And you already know that I shouldn’t be here. But I’m here for some reason. And my faith says to trust. So you know what I’m trying to say? It’s hard for me to say cut the cord, pull the plug. It’s hard for me to say don’t give up until the end.”

Bovier and Butcher agreed that she and one of her sons will discuss the issue.

‘They don’t see it with their brains, or with their hearts’

A month after she arrived home, Markle’s blood pressure plunged again, and she was taken to a nearby hospital. After three weeks, when the doctors broached scaling back efforts to save her and switching to comfort measures, the Butlers, outraged, moved her to UPMC Mercy’s ICU again.

There she survived for 68 more days, her medical condition even worse than it was during the first stay. She went on 24-hour dialysis when her kidneys failed. She had frequent seizures that required four different medications. The sac around her heart twice filled with blood, causing cardiac arrests as doctors raced to drain it.

Markle was “capable of being kept alive by technology and medication,” Butcher said, “but without any of that technology or medication would not be able to survive.”

The family urged him to continue fighting. “It’s really hard to divorce them from this idea that if we just manage all these details everything will be OK,” he said. “They see it with their eyes, but they don’t see it with their brains, or with their hearts.”

Markle was improving slightly just before she died. She was off the ventilator for parts of some days, and she asked to sit upright in her chair.

On July 30, she unexpectedly went into cardiac arrest again. Butcher began CPR, then a nurse brought Butler in. After a few minutes, he asked Butcher to stop.

The two men wrapped their arms around each other and wept.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

The New Jon Stewart

He's recycling a lot of his schtick from The Daily Show, and it doesn't come off as well.

He might be having a hard time figuring out how to get back into it - to provide some good comic relief without seeming to make light of some very heavy shit.

The Problem, With Jon Stewart

393 million guns

332 million Americans

There's something wrong here, America.

It seems like a very good idea to make it a lot harder for certain people to get guns.

• Sex offenders
• People with a history of violence, particularly Domestic Violence
• People on the Terrorist Watch List

And Stewart hits pretty close to what I've advocated.

 There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Savage Inequality

Back when I was a complete Libertarian Asshole - not a Progressive Just-Partly-An-Asshole like I am now - I hated unions.

I was absolutely sure they'd outlived their usefulness, and that they were doing far more harm than good. And I was more right than wrong at the time.

That was then and this is now.

Here's Ari Melber being brilliant.

Today's Tweet

“Emotional” should be in quotes. It looked like acting to me, with a glance to make sure the jury was watching. https://t.co/9JFikzKECd pic.twitter.com/20NxmXZWhV

— 🇺🇸Meta Vote Blue in 2022🇺🇸 (@jwhoopes2) November 11, 2021

How Great I Art

Years ago, Google kicked me out of their Ad Sense deal because apparently someone was over-clicking, and they don't like that, and they won't listen to anything you have to say on the subject, and there's no appeal process - you're just outa there and fuck you.

A few months ago, I went back and flipped the Ad Sense switch just to see what's up, and holy crap, they let me back in. Which is why you may have noticed the ads between my posts these days.

So anyway, they sent me this little pat-on-the-head email:

I'm not in it for the money - obviously - but hey - 2 bucks is 2 bucks. And this 2 bucks is 2 bucks more than I made on this shit last month.

So thanks, loyal readers. I think I'll head on down to the Quik-Mart and get myself a very small coffee with my new-found wealth.