Thurs - Mouthwash? Hogwash!

CDC doesn't do a good job of reporting around holidays.

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This Is Still Delta

The governors of Maine and New York deployed the National Guard in response to dangerously low capacity at statewide medical facilities due to the pandemic.
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Calling Them "Teens" While Literally True, Is Misleading

Three teens arrested on arson charges for Montana fire that burned 13 homes

The teens were shooting fireworks on Dec. 1. when the blaze erupted and razed through over 84 acres in Gibson Flats area, authorities said.

Three teenagers have been arrested for allegedly starting the Gibson Flats Fire in Montana that razed through over 84 acres and burned 13 homes, authorities said.

Brandon Bennett Jr., 18, Jevin McLean, 19, and Galvinn Munson, 19, were arrested and booked on arson charges, Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter announced in a press conference Wednesday.
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Find The One True Statement

Ali Alexander, a far right conspiracy theorist and organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, is scheduled to lie to the House Select Committee on Thursday morning.

That he will lie not a presumption. Alexander has already provided his opening statement, in which he claims to have “nothing to do with any violence or lawbreaking that happened on Jan. 6.” He also denies that he had anything to do with the planning or preparation for the insurgency. Instead, says Alexander, he was on the side of the angels. In videos of the events that day, Alexander claims that his group can be seen, “working with police to try to end the violence and lawbreaking” as well as “yelling and screaming at people to stop trying to enter the Capitol.”

Alexander will claim that while there is plenty of evidence of his innocence, the Select Committee is “looking for a boogeyman” and that “as a Black and Arab man, it is common for people who look like me to be blamed for things we didn’t do.” 
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When is a Tie, Not a Tie?

A new poll from the Republican firm Insider Advantage for Fox 5 Atlanta gives Gov. Brian Kemp a 41-22 lead over his newly-announced foe in next year's GOP primary, former Sen. David Perdue, with former state Rep. Vernon Jones in third with 11%. That finding doesn't square at all, though, with Fox 5’s own headline, which reads, “Dead Heat between Kemp, Perdue due to Trump endorsement.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution likewise trumpeted, “Brian Kemp and David Perdue neck-and-neck in early poll.” Many on Twitter, of course, followed suit. So what gives?

It turns out that the local Fox station was touting a question it shouldn't have touted. As in any normal poll, Insider Advantage asked respondents how they'd vote in the primary, yielding that 19-point Kemp lead. It then followed up by asking, “As you may have heard, President Trump is planning to endorse David Perdue in the Republican Primary for Governor. Knowing this information, how would you vote?”

When presented with this news, Kemp sinks into a 34-34 tie with Perdue, while Jones ticks down slightly to 10%. And sure enough, Trump went ahead and endorsed Perdue's nascent campaign on Tuesday over Kemp, whose rejection of the Big Lie single-handedly turned the governor from Trump favorite to outcast.
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Is a Death in 2021 Less Tragic Than a Death in 2020?

If 100,000 dead from COVID was “incalculable,” how then to describe another 700,000 Americans gone, an impossible number that is probably even higher? After a brief lull, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are rising again. The Delta variant continues to rage, especially in conservative states. Omicron, the latest variant, is spreading across the country.

So has indifference.

Forget COVID fatigue — that’s so 2020. Many seem to have grown cold to the mayhem this virus is still unleashing on families and communities. The infected are now younger and sicker, and at least 120,000 children have lost parents or caregivers. Some COVID survivors struggle to fully recover since the virus can cause organ damage and make once-simple tasks into daily challenges. Yet a preoccupation with getting back to “normal” has convinced some to act like they’re done with the virus when the virus clearly isn’t done with us.

Despite three highly effective vaccines, 2021 saw more COVID deaths than in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Inflamed by the pandemic’s rancid politicization originally fueled by Donald Trump, resistance to masking protocols led to resistance to vaccines. Anti-vaxxers were already a noisy minority before this pandemic; COVID metastasized their dangerous movement.

It Is If It Results From the Deceased Making the Choice to Take An Unnecessary Risk
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Who's Quitting?




Companies Struggle To Fill Low-Wage Positions In Tight Job Market

Who's Working?  Just About Anyone Who Wants To

Jobless claims fall to 52-year low as layoffs decline

The number of Americans applying for jobless aid plunged last week to the lowest level in 52 years — more evidence that the job market is recovering from last year's coronavirus recession.

First-time unemployment claims dropped to 184,000 last week, a drop of 43,000 from the previous week and the lowest since September of 1969, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week moving average, which smooths out weekly volatility, fell to below 219,000, the lowest since the pandemic slammed the U.S. in March 2020.

Weekly claims, a proxy for layoffs, have fallen steadily this year since topping 900,000 one week in early January and are now below the 220,000 a week level typical before the health crisis. Overall, just under 2 million Americans were collecting traditional unemployment benefits the last week of November.

That's FIFTY-TWO YEARS!
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What About Doctor Dre?

As conservatives cheered celebrity doctor and maybe-New-Jerseyan Mehmet Oz entering the race to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate, publications were inconsistent on whether they referred to him as Dr. Oz, as he’s known on his TV show, or just Oz. 

The day after Oz announced his candidacy, The Inquirer’s front-page headline, photo caption and first sentence all referred to Dr. Oz. That goes against the paper’s style guide, which reads: “Do not use Dr. on first reference for anyone with the title, whether they are a medical doctor or have a doctorate in a nonmedical field, to avoid complaints of unequal treatment from individuals who worked hard to achieve doctorates in nonmedical fields.” It specifies just two exceptions: obituaries, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. J is gonna be pissed.

How About Calling Him "Oz, Not So Great, But Terrible"?
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Blame It All On Tom Osborne.

I consider all this the upshot of what appears to be a shift in the very nature of fandom, a moral drift. Fandom has traditionally been mostly regional. In recent years, however, it has begun to take on the worst of the corrupted tribalism that has dominated so much of life outside the arena, the ballpark, and the stadium ever since Donald Trump became America’s coach. Before that, sports was generally considered a crucible for character, a place to define righteous principles, or at least to pay lip service to the high road, whether anyone was on it or not.

Of course, as Trump himself was more a symptom of ongoing developments in this country than the originator of them, this moral drift in sports started years ago when TV and shoe company money further corrupted the arms-race competition among colleges for box-office athletes. Think of Trump as the blowhard who fanned the already growing flames, or perhaps more accurately — by provoking the fanatics — flamed the fans. This shifting sense of sports, fandom, and life in America started gathering velocity in the late 1990s as performance-enhancing drugs proliferated and the National Football League’s (NFL’s) ongoing cover-up of the brain traumas the sport caused so many of its players began to be revealed.

Soon enough, though, cover-ups of just about any sort became unnecessary as the world of Trumpism affirmed that the strategic use of lies and bad behavior was at least as acceptable as were well-thought-out personal fouls in soccer and basketball. And all of that was before the complications of the Covid-19 pandemic led professional athletes to realize that it was about time they assumed active responsibility for their own physical and mental health — if they wanted to survive.

Go back a tiny bit further than “the late 1990s” and cite former Nebraska football coach (and former U.S. congressman) Tom Osborne’s coddling of Lawrence Phillips as the beginning of the shift that Lipsyte correctly identifies. The Phillips situation was, after all, all out in the open and Osborne allowed him to play, anyway.

Prior to that, of course there were sports ”bad boys” like Paul Hornung, Denny McClain, and Barry Switzer and the Oklahoma Sooners. And of course, we know a lot more about the shady and even criminal pasts of a number of college and professional sports programs (including The University of Michigan and that Team to the South).
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Remember When COVID Killed Useless Old People (If You Believed the QOP)

The latest COVID deaths are of people in their 30's
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So Much Crazy!

PETERS: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this so-called cold, the virus flu that I have right now, was a targeted attack on me. Do you speculate that some of that might be going on as well?”

LORRAINE: “A targeted attack?”

PETERS: “Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Like the bioweapon being released on you. This sociopath Tony Fauci, when he chimerically engineered this taxpayer-funded, lab-originated, intentionally released Wuhan, China, virus. I mean, that could probably be used against people automatically. I mean, people—Republicans, conservatives, talk show hosts—people being targeted with this virus. Don’t you think, so they can paint this picture of, ‘Oh, Stew Peters got the coronavirus. He did it to himself because he’s not vaccinated.”

LORRAINE: “Exactly. No, 100%. We talked about last week with the World Economic Forum launching this bubble gun, that you can just point a gun basically and someone gets a vaccine. I’m sure that they have the power to target somebody to get COVID. All the very prominent Republicans and people who have been outspoken against vaccines—pastors, etc.—suddenly they come down with a bad case of COVID and it makes the news: ‘Anti-vaxxer, anti-masker pastor comes down with COVID.’ It’s all too suspicious, and I absolutely think people are being targeted.”

PETERS: “Well, they’re going to have to try harder than this, because this thing, whatever I have, is weak as hell. … I got a little bit of a stuffy nose now and a little bit of a scratchy throat. Whoop-dee-doo.”



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QANON Ron Rides Again!

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson told supporters Wednesday that mouthwash is proven to be effective against COVID-19, continuing his trend of spreading dangerous misinformation about the disease and its treatments.

“By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?” he said during a telephone town hall with Wisconsin constituents. “It just boggles my mind that the NIH continues to tell people, ‘Do nothing, you know, maybe take Tylenol.’”

Mouthwash?  Hogwash!

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) baselessly claimed this week that unvaccinated individuals are “basically” being put in “internment camps” abroad, downplaying the risk of an unvaccinated population in the face of the new, seemingly highly transmissible, omicron coronavirus variant.

Johnson, who frequents talk radio shows in his home state of Wisconsin to fear-monger about COVID-19 vaccines, said it’s not “irrational” to forgo a coronavirus vaccine, basing his arguments on outdated, incomplete and often misleading data on death rates and vaccine side effects.

“We are demonizing [unvaccinated] people,” Johnson said in an interview with Janesville-based radio station WCLO Tuesday. “Around the world, they’re putting them basically into internment camps.”

Johnson went on to say that government officials and the media are suppressing and censoring the “truth” about the COVID-19 vaccines.

According to his staff, Johnson was referring to Australia — namely, the country’s strict travel quarantine rules — when comparing the treatment of the unvaccinated to the U.S. incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

So They Infect Them With Bubble Guns and Then Send Them to Manzanar?  Or Is It Myanmar?  Zanzibar?
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Then There Is This Misleading Headline From The Guardian

"US Covid cases surge as vaccine progress slows and Omicron variant sparks fears"

If you check the data I post every day, around a million more people get vaccinated every two days.  It's not slowing.
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These Stars Are on the B-List, But ...

Scientists have discovered a giant planet orbiting a massive pair of extremely hot stars, an environment previously thought too inhospitable for a planet to form in.

A research article published Wednesday in the science journal Nature said the discovery of the planet, named “b Centauri (AB)b” or “b Centauri b,” disproves a widely held belief among astronomers.

“Until now, no planets had been spotted around a star more than three times as massive as the Sun,” wrote the European Southern Observatory, which photographed the planet from its Very Large Telescope in the Chilean desert.

The study’s leader, Markus Janson, a professor of astronomy at Stockholm University, said “it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts.”

The “B-type” dual star, which sits at the center of a solar system in the Centaurus constellation, is extremely massive and hot. It emits large amounts of high-energy ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which has “a strong impact on the surrounding gas that should work against planet formation,” the European Southern Observatory said.

“B-type stars are generally considered as quite destructive and dangerous environments, so it was believed that it should be exceedingly difficult to form large planets around them,” Janson said in a news release.
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Good Luck With This

New York's attorney general is seeking to question former U.S. President Donald Trump under oath as part of the state's civil fraud investigation of his namesake business, the Washington Post said on Thursday.

The attorney general, Letitia James, wants Trump to sit for a Jan. 7 deposition as she probes whether the Trump Organization manipulated the valuations of its real estate properties, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
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Whose Fault is the Default?

Chinese real estate giant Evergrande defaults on $1.2B in bonds

Two major Chinese property firms have defaulted on $1.6 billion worth of bonds to overseas creditors, Fitch Ratings agency said Thursday, as contagion spreads within the country's debt-ridden real estate sector. China's government sparked a crisis within the property industry when it launched a drive last year to curb excessive debt among real estate firms as well as rampant consumer speculation.

Companies that had accrued huge debt to expand suddenly found the taps turned off and began struggling to complete projects, pay contractors and meet both domestic and foreign repayments.

Real estate behemoth Evergrande has been the highest profile firm embroiled in the crisis, struggling for months to raise capital to pay off $300 billion in debt.

Why Should We Care?

An economic slowdown in China would have global consequences, says Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Her comments come amid concerns that Evergrande's woes could spark a financial crisis.
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They Don't Have a Ghost of a Chance of Tracing These Guns

Authorities investigating a man suspected of trafficking “ghost guns” in September tailed a white GMC truck to a Home Depot parking lot in New Jersey, closing in as he left the store.

Inside his truck, investigators found more than a dozen “ghost gun” kits, which authorities say can be built into functioning, untraceable firearms within hours — or even minutes.

The man, William R. Pillus, 23, whose attorney declined to comment, is accused of planning to build the kits into 9 mm handguns and sell at least some of them, according to a state indictment in New Jersey. In his basement apartment in Lincoln Park, authorities found an AR-style “ghost” rifle and handwritten instructions for how to build handguns.

The source of Pillus’ gun-building knowledge, authorities allege: YouTube.

The internet has made the proliferation of homemade weapons a vexing problem for law enforcement officials across the country, who have linked them to mass shootings, attacks on police and drug and gang killings in recent years.

More than three years after YouTube tightened its gun content restrictions, an NBC News review found dozens of videos, with more than 4.6 million combined views, showing how to assemble “ghost guns,” which remain largely unregulated in most states and are nearly impossible to trace because they lack serial numbers.
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I'll Believe It When I See It

A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older.

Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up. The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.
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The One True Statement

“as a Black and Arab man, it is common for people who look like me to be blamed for things we didn’t do.”