Friday - Magawa the Rat is Retiring & Lots of Crazy

US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 298 Million Shots

HALF THE US ADULT POPULATION IS FULLY VACCINATED!
One-half of the US population will has received at least one dose.




CALIFORNIA 


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Where is the COVID Risk the Greatest?

Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming are among the states with the lowest vaccination rates.
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The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday urged parents to vaccinate their teenagers against Covid-19, citing a rise in the number of adolescents hospitalized with the disease in March and April.

"I am deeply concerned by the number of hospitalized adolescents and saddened to see the number of adolescents who required treatment in intensive care units or mechanical ventilation," CDC director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement that accompanied a new study on teen hospitalizations.
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If You Think the US Real Estate Market is Nuts

A parking space has reportedly sold for a record-breaking $1.3m (HK$10.2m; £930,000) in Hong Kong.

It was one of several spots sold at an ultra-luxury development in the city's affluent The Peak residential area, local media reported.

The Mount Nicholson development overlooking the city's Victoria Harbour has some of Asia's most valuable homes.

Hong Kong is so crowded that space, whether it is for living in or parking a car, can attract a huge premium.

The global financial hub often tops lists of the world's most expensive places to live.

The previous record price for a parking space was also set in Hong Kong, when a spot fetched $980,000 in 2019, according to Bloomberg.

What Kind of Car Do You Park in Your $1.3 Million Parking Space?
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A Heroic Rat Who Is Not in An Animated Film

Magawa the rat, who was awarded a gold medal for his heroism, is retiring from his job detecting landmines.

In a five-year career, the rodent sniffed out 71 landmines and dozens more unexploded items in Cambodia.

But his handler Malen says the seven-year-old African giant pouched rat is "slowing down" as he reaches old age, and she wants to "respect his needs".

There are thought to be up to six million landmines in the South East Asian country.

Magawa was trained by the Belgium-registered charity Apopo, which is based in Tanzania and has been raising the animals - known as HeroRATs - to detect landmines since the 1990s. The animals are certified after a year of training.

Last week, Apopo said a new batch of young rats had been assessed by the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC) and passed "with flying colours".


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New Flash:  UFOs are Unidentified

A US government report on sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) found no evidence of alien activity but does not rule it out, officials have told US media.

The review of 120 incidents is expected to conclude that US technology was not involved in most cases.

But beyond that, the report makes no definitive assessments about what the objects might be, officials said.
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The QOP Won't Care

In late February 2020, Microsoft carried out the first official test of its ElectionGuard voting security software in an election in Fulton, Wisconsin, for the local school board and a state supreme court seat. Developed as part of the tech giant's "Defending Democracy" project, the software is designed to help make elections more secure and trustworthy.

"I don't think there's been a more important time in history for vendors to try building this technology into their systems because of its ability to build trust in the electoral process," Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice president of customer security and trust, told CNN Business.

Microsoft (MSFT) on Thursday announced the first such implementation of ElectionGuard with a major US voting technology vendor, Hart InterCivic. Hart — one of the three leading election vendors in the United States — provides its voting system to election officials in more than 500 jurisdictions across 17 states.

The companies said the agreement will make Hart the first major election tech vendor to offer voters end-to-end verification that their ballots were counted correctly.
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Compromise. That Means Do It My Way!

However, polls also show that many Americans are willing to scrap bipartisanship if it means passing legislation that their party prefers. For instance, a 2019 poll from the Pew Research Center found that despite majorities of Democrats (69 percent) and Republicans (61 percent) saying it was very important that elected officials be willing to compromise, members of both parties thought it was more important for officials from the other party to compromise than it was for officials from their own party to do so.

Seventy-nine percent of Democrats thought it was very important for Republican lawmakers to compromise compared with just 41 percent of Republicans. Likewise, 78 percent of Republicans thought it was very important for Democratic lawmakers to compromise compared with 48 percent of Democrats.
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The Definition of Insanity



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Pillow Guy is Suing Dominion Based on This

From his filing:

"In 2018, Dominion was acquired by a private equity firm, Staple Street Capital, whose largest shareholder, David Mark Rubenstein, is a co-founder of The Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group is a global investment firm with longstanding and enormous investments in China. In 2020, mere months before the election, Staple Street Capital (owner of Dominion) received a $400 million investment from UBS Securities, LLC. UBS Securities LLC owns 24.99% of UBS Securities Co. LTD, a Chinese investment bank. The remaining 75% of UBS Securities Co. LTD is owned by the Chinese government or various arms of it."

Can Any Figure Out What He is Alleging? Maybe Rudy Can



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Arizona Election Data is in Montana?

A contractor hired by the Arizona Senate is reviewing Maricopa County's 2020 election data from an undisclosed location in Montana, with no oversight from state or county officials.

Ben Cotton, founder of tech firm CyFIR, a Senate subcontractor, made copies of the county’s election server and other election data and then drove the copies to a “secure lab” in Montana, according to Senate liaison Ken Bennett.
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It's Not Enough to Make Me Get a Facebook Account

Facebook announced Friday its suspension of Donald Trump's account from the platform will hold for two years from the initial suspension on Jan. 7.

"Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump's suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols," Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs for Facebook, said in a statement published Friday.
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Biden Boom Blasts On

U.S. employers added a solid 559,000 jobs in May, a sign the economy continues to expand as consumers and businesses resume their normal activity amid a nationwide decline in COVID-19 infections.

The nation's unemployment rate fell to 5.8% as more jobless workers were hired and others left the labor force, meaning they've stopped looking for work altogether and were not counted as unemployed. It is the lowest jobless rate since March of 2020, when unemployment was 4.4%.

It's Still Going to Take a Year to Get All the Jobs Back At This Rate
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Here's Something I Have Never Written Before. Nice Move, JP Morgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase & Co will resume making political donations to U.S. lawmakers but will not give to Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn President Joe Biden's election victory, according to an internal memo on Friday seen by Reuters.

The bank was among many corporations that paused political giving following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riots when supporters of former president Donald Trump tried to stop Congress from certifying the electio

Just hours later, 147 Republicans, the vast majority of them in the House of Representatives, voted to overturn the Electoral College results which Trump falsely claimed were tainted by fraud.

Following a review, the country's largest lender will this month resume giving through its Political Action Committee (PAC) but will continue its freeze on donations to a "handful" of the 147 lawmakers whom it had previously supported, the bank said.
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Do You Think This Will Pressure Workers to Get Vaccinated?

Workers in California will have to keep their masks on unless every employee in the room is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

That's the mandate under revised rules approved Thursday night by a sharply divided California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board. The guidelines are expected to go into effect by June 15 — the same day that the state more broadly loosens masking and other requirements in social settings in keeping with recent federal health recommendations.
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I Wish They All Could Be California Girls.  But Maybe Older.  I'm Not Matt Gaetz

Utah police said they got "quite a surprise" when they found a nine-year-old girl driving a car with her four-year-old sister in the passenger seat early on Wednesday morning.

The sisters told officers they were heading to California because they wanted to "swim in the ocean".

They drove on two major roads, hit another car and then crashed head-on into a lorry, police said on Twitter.

The sisters were both wearing their seatbelts and were not hurt.
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Just In Case You Haven't Had Enough Right-Wing Crazy Today

QAnon promotor, Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, has a plan to overturn the 2020 election and needs your money to do it. Her legal strategy is simple. She claims vote-counting equipment used in states across the country was ‘not properly certified’. In her analysis, this allows aggrieved voters to file “quo warranto” lawsuits. This arcane legal action requires an officeholder to show “by what warrant an office or franchise is held, claimed, or exercised”. If they can’t, they can be replaced with a QAnon representative until a new election is held.

It makes as much sense as Trump’s claim he will be reinstated in August. But it does provide Maras-Lindeman with a steady income. She has worked hard to develop her presence on the gamer streaming site Twitch, which is a useful tool to monetize paranoia. So far in 2021, she has raked in tens of thousands of dollars (and a new Tesla)

Ohio is Ground Zero for her legal fantasy. On January 29th she announced on her Twitch channel, ‘@toresays’:  “Ohio’s gonna be lit, next week we’re gonna be setting some serious fires.”

Then, she issued a warning to lawmakers:  “You want a great reset? Here it is. We’re gonna do it our way, and that’s by eliminating you.”

Genevieve Oh, a live-streaming analyst, who has been closely tracking Maras-Lindeman’s activity on Twitch for months, reports that her efforts are paying off. “Looking at her followers’ messages and reactions, she seems to have legitimately convinced her viewers they’re going to take Ohio Senate and House of Representatives seats through this movement,”

So far, over 60 people in Ohio have signed up to take part in this mass lawsuit filing (aka “Operation 1776”) But much as chief conspiracy theorist Trump promises and doesn’t deliver, nothing has yet come of the plan — except for the handing over cash part.

And in another Trumpian move, Maras-Lindeman has taken credit for a similar effort in Arizona, where “We The People” filed a quo warranto lawsuit, with 19 people demanding that 19 elected officials —or “inadvertent usurpers,” as they were called in the filing—vacate their seats. She had nothing to do with it, but still crowed on her Telegram channel

“So proud of my team in AZ. We worked hard to get this out there and all because @toresays taught us how to fight.”
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