Post by mhbruin on Dec 1, 2021 9:34:17 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 462 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
CDC doesn't do a good job of reporting around hoidays.
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Around 134 Million Americans Are Not Fully Vaccinated. Around 92 Million Have Had No Vaccine At All.
Around 87 million old enough to qualify have had no vaccine.
Who Would Side With a Virus Over People's Lives?
Some states want to ensure that Americans who quit their jobs or who are fired over COVID-19 vaccine requirements in the workplace can collect unemployment.
In general, workers who quit their job or who are dismissed after defying a company's vaccine rule, willfully flouting its terms and conditions of employment, are ineligible for unemployment benefits.
Now, four Republican-led states have changed their unemployment insurance rules to protect workers who oppose vaccination requirements by ensuring that they can collect jobless aid. As of this month, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have each amended their laws around unemployment insurance.
Who Takes the Side of People Over Viruses?
"I would strongly suggest you get boosted now, and not wait for the next iteration of it, which we might not even need," Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House,
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What Could Happen to Roe?
There are three possible outcomes next summer:
1) overturn Roe v Wade
2) rule that the Mississippi law does not place "an undue burden" on women seeking an abortion - this would leave Roe standing in principle, while undermining it in practice
-3) strike down the Mississippi law, allowing Roe to stand - though this is considered unlikely
My money is on #2
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Could Overturning Roe Be Bad for the QOP?
Here's the best-kept secret about the so-called abortion "debate" in the United States: It's actually not that much of a debate at all. A majority of Americans believe that the decision to end or continue a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her doctor, not the state. Most Americans oppose laws that make it more difficult for reproductive health clinics to operate. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month challenging Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, but fewer than a third of Americans want Roe to be overturned.
Those are the results of a new ABC News / Washington Post poll, and the findings are consistent with previous polling on the issue. Despite political treatment of abortion as a contentious partisan issue, the truth is that America is a pro-choice nation. And if the anti-abortion movement gets their way and the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the Republican Party and the Supreme Court itself will have a lot of angry Americans to contend with.
Too often, American politicians and media outlets talk about abortion as a political issue or a front in the culture war, and not a matter of basic health care that women the world over have been availing themselves of for many centuries. The self-defined pro-life movement and their representatives in the Republican Party very much benefit from redefining abortion from common (though stigmatized) medical treatment into a partisan wedge issue: In doing so, they radically change the framing, and may even convince significant swaths of the public that their position enjoys far more support than it actually does. That keeps the narrative around abortion as one about "both sides" of a political drama rather than a fundamental question of health care access that enables women's physical safety and personal freedom.
According to this latest poll, even a slim majority of Republicans and conservatives, and 75% percent of Americans generally, believe that abortion should be a private decision between a woman and her doctor. Just one in five Americans, a small minority, want to see the decision of whether or not to have an abortion regulated by law. Majorities support abortion rights across racial, gender, regional, and educational lines; almost half of white Evangelicals, the most conservative voting bloc in the country, say abortion should be between a woman and her doctor instead of regulated by law and 62% of Catholics favor upholding Roe v Wade. Only about a quarter of Americans strongly support state laws that make it more difficult for clinics to run.
The Americans who are most directly impacted by laws regulating abortion -- women under 40, who remain the most likely group to become pregnant -- remain some of the strongest supporters of abortion rights: a whopping 86% say the decision should be between a woman and her doctor.
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Looking For a Cheap City to Live In? Try Damascus
Tel Aviv has been named as the most expensive city in the world to live in, as soaring inflation and supply-chain problems push up prices globally.
The Israeli city came top for the first time in a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), climbing from fifth place last year and pushing Paris down to joint second with Singapore.
Damascus, in war-torn Syria, retained its place as the cheapest in the world.
The survey compares costs in US dollars for goods and services in 173 cities.
Where In the World is Almaty? Is Carmen San Diego There? How About Waldo?
The five most expensive cities
1 Tel Aviv
2 Paris and Singapore in joint place
3 Zurich
4 Hong Kong
The five cheapest cities
1 Damascus
2 Tripoli
3 Tashkent
4 Tunis
5 Almaty
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What Is Everyone Listening To?
Pop stars Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny were among the most-streamed artists of 2021, according to figures from Apple Music and Spotify.
But it was newcomer Olivia Rodrigo who took the top spot in the UK - with her punk-pop anthem Good 4U emerging as the most-played song on both services.
Globally, her debut hit Drivers License was the biggest song for Spotify users.
Apple's audience preferred the slick pop of BTS, whose single Dynamite was the most-played song of the year.
Originally released in 2020, Dynamite song failed to make Spotify's top five - presumably because the streaming service only launched in the band's native South Korea this year (without the option of its popular, ad-funded free service).
British artists were well-represented in the year-end charts, with Dua Lipa's disco-pop odyssey Future Nostalgia becoming Spotify's second most-played album, after Olivia Rodrigo's Sour.
Ed Sheeran's earworm Bad Habits - specifically released to soundtrack a summer of lockdown easing - was Spotify's third biggest song of 2021.
It only came 53rd in Apple's chart, however, reflecting the service's more US-centric audience.
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Inflation, It's Not Just For Tires Anymore.
No one likes paying more for stuff. That's why inflation, especially the sharp price increases we've seen in recent months, feels like a dirty word.
But on the whole, inflation can actually be a good thing for many working-class Americans, especially those with fixed-rate debt like a 30-year mortgage. That's because wages are going up, which not only empowers workers but also gives them more money to pay down debt. Plus, in the case of a mortgage, your monthly payment will be the same but your house will increase in value.
And many of the people taking a bath when prices rise are higher-net worth people who hold the vast majority of government bonds.
The trouble is, you're not going to feel the upside immediately.
"There is light at the end of the tunnel, it's just that it could be a couple of years," said Kent Smetters, professor of business economics at the Wharton School of Business.
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290 Gigawatts Marty!
The world is set to add nearly 290 gigawatts of renewable power capacity this year, according to the International Energy Agency, with the Paris-based organization expecting 2021 to “set a fresh all-time record for new installations.”
Published on Wednesday, the IEA’s Renewables Market Report forecasts that the planet’s renewable electricity capacity will jump to more than 4,800 GW by the year 2026, an increase of over 60 percent compared with 2020 levels.
Capacity refers to the maximum amount of energy that installations can produce, not what they’re necessarily generating.
China is set to be the main driver of renewable capacity growth in the coming years, according to the IEA, with Europe, the U.S. and India following on behind.
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Wow! A Bomb from WWII.
A World War II bomb exploded at a construction site next to a busy railway line in Munich on Wednesday, injuring four people, one of them seriously, German authorities said.
A column of smoke was seen rising from the site near the Donnersbergerbruecke station. The construction site for a new commuter train line is located on the approach to Munich’s central station, which is about a half-mile to the east.
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Fox News Uncovers The Shocking Story of the Year!!!
Where's Santa? Did He Move to Almaty or Damascus Because of Inflation?
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The Previous Guy Tried to Infect the Current Guy
A new memoir from former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows admits what many suspected all along: Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19 before his first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. Then Trump lied about that result, got on a stage with Biden, and continued to downplay the pandemic even as he was exposing everyone in the room to the virus he was carrying.
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But Don Lemon Loves Him
It's Here! It's There! It's Every F-ingwhere! Omicron!
Brazil and Japan joined the rapidly widening circle of countries to report cases of the omicron variant Tuesday, while new findings indicate the mutant coronavirus was already in Europe close to a week before South Africa sounded the alarm.
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How Misleading Is This?
He Will Answer Some Questions and Not Others. That Isn't Cooperation. That's Pretending to Cooperate to Delay the Process.
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What's Good For the Goose May Be Good For the Gander, But What's Good for the Sheep, Is Not For the Lamb
Marcus Lamb is (excuse me, was) a prominent televangelist, and CEO of Daystar Television Network the second largest “Christian” television network in the whole freaking world. He was part of the contingent of televangelist hypocrites who advised Trump.
Lamb had your usual “Christian” televangelist controversies. An affair that he admitted to and apologized for. A misuse of Covid Paycheck Protection Program money to buy private jets, that sort of thing. Apparently God, and the Department of Justice, forgave him.
“Reverend” Lamb regularly preached anti-vaccine lies that included calling vaccine mandates a “sin” and stuff claiming that vaccines were pushed by hidden Satanic forces to kill our children. You know, that kind of absolutely normal stuff.
With that, the Good Lord drew the line and sent a message. Today Marcus Lamb died, (at age 64) from Covid.
However, it’s not as if Lamb trusted just in Jesus to protect him from Covid. He trusted alternative therapies, to include Ivermectin whose official motto is: “failing to save lives, one Covid death at a time.”
So yes, Lamb took sheep dewormer, and died.
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This Professor Wants to Party Like It's 1899.
A political-science professor at one of Idaho’s top universities has sparked outrage after openly calling for women to be kept out of engineering, medical school, and law so that they can instead focus on “feminine goals” such as “homemaking and having children.”
Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, who previously served on far-right Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s task force investigating right-wing claims of “indoctrination” in schools, made the bizarre declaration during the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando in late October, the Idaho Statesman reports.
After his comments went viral on social media this week, female students and female lawmakers alike in Idaho said they are utterly freaked out.
“He has power. He has power to issue a grade. It’s disgusting. He needs to come into the current century, but it doesn’t sound like he will,” Boise State MBA student Emily Walton told the Statesman.
Yenor’s comments at the Oct. 31 event went well beyond sexist stereotypes, with the professor suggesting a nation could only be “great” if men and women were kept apart in their respective spheres.
“Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children,” he told the crowd. “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade,” he said.
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He Pays People to Do This?
Then Again, He Probably Won't Pay Him
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Condemned By the Auschwitz Museum
Lara Logan, a host on Fox News’ streaming platform, has been denounced by several prominent Jewish organizations and the Auschwitz Museum after she compared White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci to Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on Jewish extermination camp prisoners during the Holocaust.
“Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful,” Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial said Tuesday in a Twitter statement. “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”
The American Jewish Committee said the comments were “utterly shameful” and noted that Mengele earned his “Angel of Death” moniker by performing deadly experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, including many children.
Agree or not with Fauci, comparing him to “history’s most sadistic medical experimenter is beyond vile,” said David Harris, the CEO of the committee.
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They Should Just Shut Up Until They Know Something
CEOs at two pharmaceutical giants whose double-shot COVID-19 vaccines are dominating the U.S. market are pitching different perspectives on the impact of the omicron variant.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said current vaccines for COVID-19 will likely be less effective against the new omicron variant. Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday that he has spoken to scientists who told him that omicron is "not going to be good." He said it could be months before enough vaccines can be produced to crush omicron.
BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, however, told the Wall Street Journal the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is effective against severe illness from COVID-19 and would likely continue to be effective against the omicron variant.
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Why Was It Only Narrowly Approved?
Apanel of the Food and Drug Administration's outside drug advisers voted narrowly Tuesday to endorse allowing antiviral pills developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to be prescribed for COVID-19, following an hours-long meeting mulling the benefits and risks of molnupiravir to treat the disease in high-risk adults.
Early results announced by Merck from its trial had touted a steep 50% drop in the risk of hospitalization or death, treating adults at risk of worse COVID-19 symptoms within days after they were diagnosed. But later data announced by Merck suggested the benefits of the drug were more modest in the company's trials, reducing the risk by just 30% compared to a placebo.
The advisers also grappled with the rare risk that the drug's mechanism of triggering new mutations of the virus might lead to a new variant of concern from SARS-CoV-2, especially in immunocompromised patients who might harbor and spread error-riddled copies of the virus for weeks after the treatment ends or people who do not hew closely to prescriptions to take all five days of pills.
"Even if the probability is very low, one in 10,000 to one in 100,000, that this drug would induce an escape mutant for which the vaccines we have do not cover, that would be catastrophic for the whole world actually," said Dr. James Hildreth, one of the panel's advisers
Merck's scientists acknowledged they did not have the data to accurately estimate the risk that might occur, but pointed out that none of the people who took the pills appeared infectious after they were treated with molnupiravir.
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Fake News and Drug Dealers. What is the Benefit of Social Media?
The drug trade is booming on social media, according to Kathleen Miles, who works for the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime. "I think social media can be great, but it also has a really dark side of it," Miles said.
With fentanyl in high circulation, the risks are often deadly. The U.S. recorded more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths in a 12-month period for the first time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's the highest number of drug overdose deaths ever recorded in a year.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has warned of the alarming increase in the availability and lethality of fake prescription pills containing fentanyl and methamphetamine.
In her experience, Miles said teenagers on social media are two degrees of separation away from a drug dealer.
CBS News asked Miles to create two fake profiles across Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, claiming they were 18, but publicly identifying as high school students.
One was actively searching for drugs and found an apparent dealer within 48 hours.
The second account used different hashtags like #depression, #sad and #anxiety. While all three social media platforms provided some mental health resources, posts about marijuana and cigarettes also appeared on Instagram.
"By the third day, on Instagram," Miles said, "we were fully immersed into drug culture." For her, this culminated in a picture of someone appearing to snort cocaine. Miles added that the tech companies bear responsibility. "Since they aren't liable, they're not creating the guardrails needed to keep our kids safe."
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CDC doesn't do a good job of reporting around hoidays.
Doses Administered 7-Day Average | Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses | Number of People Fully Vaccinated | New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Dec 1 | 1,116,587 | 233,590,555 | 197,363,116 | ||
| Nov 30 | 1,152,647 | 233,207,582 | 197,058,988 | 82,846 | 816 |
| Nov 29 | 937,113 | 232,792,508 | 196,806,194 | 80,178 | 804 |
| Nov 28 | No Data | 72,008 | 719 | ||
| Nov 27 | No Data | 72,139 | 721 | ||
| Nov 26 | No Data | 73,962 | 742 | ||
| Nov 25 | No Data | 82,440 | 887 | ||
| Nov 24 | 898,833 | 231,367,686 | 196,168,756 | 93,931 | 989 |
| Nov 23 | 1,126,545 | 230,669,289 | 195,973,992 | 94,266 | 982 |
| Nov 22 | 1,521,815 | 230,732,565 | 196,398,948 | 93,668 | 1,009 |
| Nov 21 | 1,774,196 | 230,298,744 | 196,284,442 | 91,021 | 985 |
| Nov 20 | 2,136,513 | 229,837,421 | 196,128,496 | 90,823 | 996 |
| Nov 19 | 1,952,717 | 229,291,004 | 195,920,566 | 92,852 | 1,047 |
| Nov 18 | 1,870,564 | 228,570,531 | 195,713,107 | 94,260 | 1,069 |
| Nov 17 | 1,811,047 | 228,175,638 | 195,612,365 | 88,482 | 1,032 |
| Nov 16 | 1,608,906 | 227,691,941 | 195,435,688 | 85,944 | 1,028 |
| Nov 15 | 1,582,519 | 227,133,617 | 195,275,904 | 83,671 | 1,029 |
| Nov 14 | 1,375,998 | 226,607,653 | 195,120,470 | 80,823 | 1,043 |
| Nov 13 | 1,370,279 | 226,157,226 | 194,951,106 | 80,590 | 1,049 |
| Nov 12 | 1,335,066 | 225,606,197 | 194,747,839 | 78,552 | 1,038 |
| Nov 11 | No Data | 73,218 | 999 | ||
| Nov 10 | 1,316,294 | 224,660,453 | 194,382,921 | 76,458 | 1,051 |
| Nov 9 | 1,316,228 | 224,257,467 | 194,168,611 | 74,584 | 1,078 |
| Nov 8 | 1,300,925 | 223,944,369 | 194,001,108 | 73,312 | 1,078 |
| Nov 7 | 1,265,361 | 223,629,671 | 193,832,584 | 71,867 | 1,068 |
| Nov 6 | 1,254,975 | 223,245,121 | 193,627,929 | 71,327 | 1,079 |
| Nov 5 | 1,283,684 | 222,902,939 | 193,425,862 | 71,517 | 1,071 |
| Nov 4 | 1,188,564 | 222,591,394 | 193,227,813 | 71,241 | 1,102 |
| Nov 3 | 1,068,184 | 222,268,786 | 192,931,486 | 70,431 | 1,109 |
| Nov 2 | 1,112,624 | 221,961,370 | 192,726,406 | 71,029 | 1,130 |
| Nov 1 | 1,243,313 | 221,760,691 | 192,586,927 | 74,798 | 1,190 |
| Oct 31 | 1,203,517 | 221,520,153 | 192,453,500 | 71,207 | 1,151 |
| Oct 30 | 1,114,502 | 221,221,467 | 192,244,927 | 71,690 | 1,156 |
| Feb 16 | 1,716,311 | 39,670,551 | 15,015,434 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | |
| % of Total Population | 70.4% | 59.4% |
| % of Population 12+ | 80.8% | 69.4% |
| % of Population 18+ | 82.8% | 71.2% |
| % of Population 65+ | 99.9% | 86.3% |
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Around 134 Million Americans Are Not Fully Vaccinated. Around 92 Million Have Had No Vaccine At All.
Around 87 million old enough to qualify have had no vaccine.
Who Would Side With a Virus Over People's Lives?
Some states want to ensure that Americans who quit their jobs or who are fired over COVID-19 vaccine requirements in the workplace can collect unemployment.
In general, workers who quit their job or who are dismissed after defying a company's vaccine rule, willfully flouting its terms and conditions of employment, are ineligible for unemployment benefits.
Now, four Republican-led states have changed their unemployment insurance rules to protect workers who oppose vaccination requirements by ensuring that they can collect jobless aid. As of this month, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have each amended their laws around unemployment insurance.
Who Takes the Side of People Over Viruses?
"I would strongly suggest you get boosted now, and not wait for the next iteration of it, which we might not even need," Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House,
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What Could Happen to Roe?
There are three possible outcomes next summer:
1) overturn Roe v Wade
2) rule that the Mississippi law does not place "an undue burden" on women seeking an abortion - this would leave Roe standing in principle, while undermining it in practice
-3) strike down the Mississippi law, allowing Roe to stand - though this is considered unlikely
My money is on #2
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Could Overturning Roe Be Bad for the QOP?
Here's the best-kept secret about the so-called abortion "debate" in the United States: It's actually not that much of a debate at all. A majority of Americans believe that the decision to end or continue a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her doctor, not the state. Most Americans oppose laws that make it more difficult for reproductive health clinics to operate. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month challenging Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, but fewer than a third of Americans want Roe to be overturned.
Those are the results of a new ABC News / Washington Post poll, and the findings are consistent with previous polling on the issue. Despite political treatment of abortion as a contentious partisan issue, the truth is that America is a pro-choice nation. And if the anti-abortion movement gets their way and the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the Republican Party and the Supreme Court itself will have a lot of angry Americans to contend with.
Too often, American politicians and media outlets talk about abortion as a political issue or a front in the culture war, and not a matter of basic health care that women the world over have been availing themselves of for many centuries. The self-defined pro-life movement and their representatives in the Republican Party very much benefit from redefining abortion from common (though stigmatized) medical treatment into a partisan wedge issue: In doing so, they radically change the framing, and may even convince significant swaths of the public that their position enjoys far more support than it actually does. That keeps the narrative around abortion as one about "both sides" of a political drama rather than a fundamental question of health care access that enables women's physical safety and personal freedom.
According to this latest poll, even a slim majority of Republicans and conservatives, and 75% percent of Americans generally, believe that abortion should be a private decision between a woman and her doctor. Just one in five Americans, a small minority, want to see the decision of whether or not to have an abortion regulated by law. Majorities support abortion rights across racial, gender, regional, and educational lines; almost half of white Evangelicals, the most conservative voting bloc in the country, say abortion should be between a woman and her doctor instead of regulated by law and 62% of Catholics favor upholding Roe v Wade. Only about a quarter of Americans strongly support state laws that make it more difficult for clinics to run.
The Americans who are most directly impacted by laws regulating abortion -- women under 40, who remain the most likely group to become pregnant -- remain some of the strongest supporters of abortion rights: a whopping 86% say the decision should be between a woman and her doctor.
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Looking For a Cheap City to Live In? Try Damascus
Tel Aviv has been named as the most expensive city in the world to live in, as soaring inflation and supply-chain problems push up prices globally.
The Israeli city came top for the first time in a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), climbing from fifth place last year and pushing Paris down to joint second with Singapore.
Damascus, in war-torn Syria, retained its place as the cheapest in the world.
The survey compares costs in US dollars for goods and services in 173 cities.
Where In the World is Almaty? Is Carmen San Diego There? How About Waldo?
The five most expensive cities
1 Tel Aviv
2 Paris and Singapore in joint place
3 Zurich
4 Hong Kong
The five cheapest cities
1 Damascus
2 Tripoli
3 Tashkent
4 Tunis
5 Almaty
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What Is Everyone Listening To?
Pop stars Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny were among the most-streamed artists of 2021, according to figures from Apple Music and Spotify.
But it was newcomer Olivia Rodrigo who took the top spot in the UK - with her punk-pop anthem Good 4U emerging as the most-played song on both services.
Globally, her debut hit Drivers License was the biggest song for Spotify users.
Apple's audience preferred the slick pop of BTS, whose single Dynamite was the most-played song of the year.
Originally released in 2020, Dynamite song failed to make Spotify's top five - presumably because the streaming service only launched in the band's native South Korea this year (without the option of its popular, ad-funded free service).
British artists were well-represented in the year-end charts, with Dua Lipa's disco-pop odyssey Future Nostalgia becoming Spotify's second most-played album, after Olivia Rodrigo's Sour.
Ed Sheeran's earworm Bad Habits - specifically released to soundtrack a summer of lockdown easing - was Spotify's third biggest song of 2021.
It only came 53rd in Apple's chart, however, reflecting the service's more US-centric audience.
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Inflation, It's Not Just For Tires Anymore.
No one likes paying more for stuff. That's why inflation, especially the sharp price increases we've seen in recent months, feels like a dirty word.
But on the whole, inflation can actually be a good thing for many working-class Americans, especially those with fixed-rate debt like a 30-year mortgage. That's because wages are going up, which not only empowers workers but also gives them more money to pay down debt. Plus, in the case of a mortgage, your monthly payment will be the same but your house will increase in value.
And many of the people taking a bath when prices rise are higher-net worth people who hold the vast majority of government bonds.
The trouble is, you're not going to feel the upside immediately.
"There is light at the end of the tunnel, it's just that it could be a couple of years," said Kent Smetters, professor of business economics at the Wharton School of Business.
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290 Gigawatts Marty!
The world is set to add nearly 290 gigawatts of renewable power capacity this year, according to the International Energy Agency, with the Paris-based organization expecting 2021 to “set a fresh all-time record for new installations.”
Published on Wednesday, the IEA’s Renewables Market Report forecasts that the planet’s renewable electricity capacity will jump to more than 4,800 GW by the year 2026, an increase of over 60 percent compared with 2020 levels.
Capacity refers to the maximum amount of energy that installations can produce, not what they’re necessarily generating.
China is set to be the main driver of renewable capacity growth in the coming years, according to the IEA, with Europe, the U.S. and India following on behind.
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Wow! A Bomb from WWII.
A World War II bomb exploded at a construction site next to a busy railway line in Munich on Wednesday, injuring four people, one of them seriously, German authorities said.
A column of smoke was seen rising from the site near the Donnersbergerbruecke station. The construction site for a new commuter train line is located on the approach to Munich’s central station, which is about a half-mile to the east.
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Fox News Uncovers The Shocking Story of the Year!!!
Where's Santa? Did He Move to Almaty or Damascus Because of Inflation?
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The Previous Guy Tried to Infect the Current Guy
A new memoir from former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows admits what many suspected all along: Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19 before his first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. Then Trump lied about that result, got on a stage with Biden, and continued to downplay the pandemic even as he was exposing everyone in the room to the virus he was carrying.
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But Don Lemon Loves Him
It's Here! It's There! It's Every F-ingwhere! Omicron!
Brazil and Japan joined the rapidly widening circle of countries to report cases of the omicron variant Tuesday, while new findings indicate the mutant coronavirus was already in Europe close to a week before South Africa sounded the alarm.
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How Misleading Is This?
He Will Answer Some Questions and Not Others. That Isn't Cooperation. That's Pretending to Cooperate to Delay the Process.
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What's Good For the Goose May Be Good For the Gander, But What's Good for the Sheep, Is Not For the Lamb
Marcus Lamb is (excuse me, was) a prominent televangelist, and CEO of Daystar Television Network the second largest “Christian” television network in the whole freaking world. He was part of the contingent of televangelist hypocrites who advised Trump.
Lamb had your usual “Christian” televangelist controversies. An affair that he admitted to and apologized for. A misuse of Covid Paycheck Protection Program money to buy private jets, that sort of thing. Apparently God, and the Department of Justice, forgave him.
“Reverend” Lamb regularly preached anti-vaccine lies that included calling vaccine mandates a “sin” and stuff claiming that vaccines were pushed by hidden Satanic forces to kill our children. You know, that kind of absolutely normal stuff.
With that, the Good Lord drew the line and sent a message. Today Marcus Lamb died, (at age 64) from Covid.
However, it’s not as if Lamb trusted just in Jesus to protect him from Covid. He trusted alternative therapies, to include Ivermectin whose official motto is: “failing to save lives, one Covid death at a time.”
So yes, Lamb took sheep dewormer, and died.
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This Professor Wants to Party Like It's 1899.
A political-science professor at one of Idaho’s top universities has sparked outrage after openly calling for women to be kept out of engineering, medical school, and law so that they can instead focus on “feminine goals” such as “homemaking and having children.”
Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, who previously served on far-right Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s task force investigating right-wing claims of “indoctrination” in schools, made the bizarre declaration during the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando in late October, the Idaho Statesman reports.
After his comments went viral on social media this week, female students and female lawmakers alike in Idaho said they are utterly freaked out.
“He has power. He has power to issue a grade. It’s disgusting. He needs to come into the current century, but it doesn’t sound like he will,” Boise State MBA student Emily Walton told the Statesman.
Yenor’s comments at the Oct. 31 event went well beyond sexist stereotypes, with the professor suggesting a nation could only be “great” if men and women were kept apart in their respective spheres.
“Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children,” he told the crowd. “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade,” he said.
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He Pays People to Do This?
Then Again, He Probably Won't Pay Him
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Condemned By the Auschwitz Museum
Lara Logan, a host on Fox News’ streaming platform, has been denounced by several prominent Jewish organizations and the Auschwitz Museum after she compared White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci to Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on Jewish extermination camp prisoners during the Holocaust.
“Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful,” Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial said Tuesday in a Twitter statement. “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”
The American Jewish Committee said the comments were “utterly shameful” and noted that Mengele earned his “Angel of Death” moniker by performing deadly experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, including many children.
Agree or not with Fauci, comparing him to “history’s most sadistic medical experimenter is beyond vile,” said David Harris, the CEO of the committee.
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They Should Just Shut Up Until They Know Something
CEOs at two pharmaceutical giants whose double-shot COVID-19 vaccines are dominating the U.S. market are pitching different perspectives on the impact of the omicron variant.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said current vaccines for COVID-19 will likely be less effective against the new omicron variant. Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday that he has spoken to scientists who told him that omicron is "not going to be good." He said it could be months before enough vaccines can be produced to crush omicron.
BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, however, told the Wall Street Journal the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is effective against severe illness from COVID-19 and would likely continue to be effective against the omicron variant.
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Why Was It Only Narrowly Approved?
Apanel of the Food and Drug Administration's outside drug advisers voted narrowly Tuesday to endorse allowing antiviral pills developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to be prescribed for COVID-19, following an hours-long meeting mulling the benefits and risks of molnupiravir to treat the disease in high-risk adults.
Early results announced by Merck from its trial had touted a steep 50% drop in the risk of hospitalization or death, treating adults at risk of worse COVID-19 symptoms within days after they were diagnosed. But later data announced by Merck suggested the benefits of the drug were more modest in the company's trials, reducing the risk by just 30% compared to a placebo.
The advisers also grappled with the rare risk that the drug's mechanism of triggering new mutations of the virus might lead to a new variant of concern from SARS-CoV-2, especially in immunocompromised patients who might harbor and spread error-riddled copies of the virus for weeks after the treatment ends or people who do not hew closely to prescriptions to take all five days of pills.
"Even if the probability is very low, one in 10,000 to one in 100,000, that this drug would induce an escape mutant for which the vaccines we have do not cover, that would be catastrophic for the whole world actually," said Dr. James Hildreth, one of the panel's advisers
Merck's scientists acknowledged they did not have the data to accurately estimate the risk that might occur, but pointed out that none of the people who took the pills appeared infectious after they were treated with molnupiravir.
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Fake News and Drug Dealers. What is the Benefit of Social Media?
The drug trade is booming on social media, according to Kathleen Miles, who works for the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime. "I think social media can be great, but it also has a really dark side of it," Miles said.
With fentanyl in high circulation, the risks are often deadly. The U.S. recorded more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths in a 12-month period for the first time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's the highest number of drug overdose deaths ever recorded in a year.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has warned of the alarming increase in the availability and lethality of fake prescription pills containing fentanyl and methamphetamine.
In her experience, Miles said teenagers on social media are two degrees of separation away from a drug dealer.
CBS News asked Miles to create two fake profiles across Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, claiming they were 18, but publicly identifying as high school students.
One was actively searching for drugs and found an apparent dealer within 48 hours.
The second account used different hashtags like #depression, #sad and #anxiety. While all three social media platforms provided some mental health resources, posts about marijuana and cigarettes also appeared on Instagram.
"By the third day, on Instagram," Miles said, "we were fully immersed into drug culture." For her, this culminated in a picture of someone appearing to snort cocaine. Miles added that the tech companies bear responsibility. "Since they aren't liable, they're not creating the guardrails needed to keep our kids safe."
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