Weds - Hedge Fund Slum Lords

US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 487 Million Shots  (Population 333 Million)




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Why Passing BBB This Month Matters

If it is not passed by the 28th, 10 million children could go back into poverty as the expanded Child Tax Credit expires.

Meanwhile

Democrats are still feuding over how to structure a tax break that will go to richer people.

Some Senate Democrats are growing impatient that it's holding up Biden's agenda.

I Live in California, and My Tax Rate Went UP Under the Previous Guy's "Tax Cuts"
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It's Here!  It's There!  It's Every-F***ing-Where!

The new coronavirus variant Omicron is spreading across the globe at an unprecedented rate, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

Cases of the heavily mutated variant have been confirmed in 77 countries.  But at a press conference, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was probably in many others that had yet to detect it.

Dr Tedros said he was concerned that not enough was being done to tackle the variant.

"Surely, we have learned by now that we underestimate this virus at our peril. Even if Omicron does cause less severe disease, the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems," he said.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet Surveillance System

The omicron variant of the coronavirus is moving faster than surveillance systems can track it and has so unnerved some medical experts that they're starting to put the brakes on preparations for their holiday gatherings.
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It's Still Fatal

More than 800,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, the highest recorded national death toll from the global pandemic.

It comes as the US reached 50 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 on Monday.

Most deaths have been recorded among the unvaccinated and the elderly, and more Americans died in 2021 than in 2020.

The US is again seeing deaths rising at an alarming rate.

The last 100,000 deaths came in just the past 11 weeks, a quicker pace than any at other point aside from last winter's surge.

If You Want to Know About Hospitalizations

The UK Is Usually a Preview of What Will Happen in the US

The UK has recorded the highest number of daily Covid-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, with 78,610 new cases on Wednesday.

The previous record was 68,053 on 8 January - when the UK was in lockdown.
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It's Amazing What Workers Will Do If You Give Them a Choice

While the Great Resignation implies people are leaving the workforce, a large swath of workers are simply reconfiguring what their careers look like.

The Great Resignation of the past year appears to still be in full swing: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 3% of the US workforce resigned in October, following a record-high in September. As often discussed, some resignations are people taking sabbaticals, early retirement or dropping out of the workforce for caring responsibilities. But that only tells part of the story.

Workers – globally, in many instances – aren’t just leaving the workforce; millions of people are reconfiguring their careers. Some are leveraging the current hiring crisis to get into better positions. Others have decided to work for themselves – with the number of self-employed workers in the US rising by 500,000 since the pandemic.

Many more, however, are simply shifting into new industries and careers that offer higher wages or align more with their values. “For talented individuals, in high-demand industries like tech, we’re seeing a lot of movement,” says Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, US, and the originator of the term ‘Great Resignation’. “People are finding jobs that give them the right pay, benefits and work arrangements in the longer term.”

Rather than merely being a ‘Great Resignation’ in which people simply quit and walk away, the current disruption is seeing a large swath of employees move around the job market. Workers have agency: they’re fine-tuning a better work-life balance and making deliberate choices as to where their careers are heading next. “There’s now a greater ability for people to fit work into their lives, instead of having lives that squeeze into their work,” says Klotz.
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Obama Had a Bigger Inauguration Crowd and Now This

President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced his latest wave of nine judicial nominees, capping a year where the selections -- and an effort to establish an imprint on the federal courts -- served as a focal point for his administration.

Biden announced his intent to nominate nine district court nominees, bringing the administration's total for the year to 73 -- one more than former President Donald Trump nominated in his first year in office.

Previous Guy Says "It's Fake News"
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I Feel Like I'm the Kid in "The Emperor's New Clothes".

Nike said on Monday it had bought virtual sneaker company RTFKT for an undisclosed sum, as the sportswear giant looks to quickly expand its footprint in the fast-growing "metaverse."

This All Seems Nuts to Me
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But, But His E-Mails!!


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It Won't Be Coat Hangers.  It Will Be Pills.

When SCOTUS guts Roe: The covert plan to provide abortion pills on demand – and avoid prosecution

Abortion pills offer real hope — and real dangers — for those fighting for reproductive rights in a post-Roe world

The full story.
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Boost, Baby, Boost


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They Were Shaken, But Not Stirred to Reject the Big Lie

As a mob of former President Donald Trump's supporters violently breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, three hosts from Fox News and the president's eldest son privately implored then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to push the president to call for an end to the mayhem, according to text messages revealed by the House select committee probing the Capitol assault.



Why Aren't They Investigating Benghazi?

After more than 24 hours of silence, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham finally addressed on their programs last night the panicked texts they’d sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 begging for Trump to do something about the Capitol attack.

A totally unbothered Ingraham wants to know “what’s really going on” with committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and “the diminutive media elves.”

Hannity wants Cheney’s texts. “Let us look at your text messages,” he said.

Ingraham, on the other hand, actually doesn’t “care to read any” of the committee members’ texts because “they’re all so aggressively boring.” In fact, “they’re the most boring people” and “so predictable,” the Fox host snickered.

Later on her program, Ingraham denied ever downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection … then went on to insist that the attack “was not an insurrection” and “to say anything different is beyond dishonest and ignores the fact of that day.”

Hannity attacked the “sham” committee on his program and insisted that what he told Meadows on Jan. 6 was “the exact same thing” he said publicly on air that day. What Hannity ignored, though, was the fact that his texts fully contradicted his efforts to shift the blame from Trump to “agitators.” In fact, Hannity doubled down yesterday on the baseless claim that there were “people that had staged certain things” on Jan. 6.
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Are We Living in the Real "Dark Ages"?

There’s a reason for this misunderstanding. The medieval era we historians know—a time when Europe thrived, despite not yet being aggressively imperial or expansionist, and where the Catholic Church drove extensive scientific and philosophical invention—simply doesn’t fit with the narratives that American and European society wants. We need the Middle Ages to have been awful, to justify the reintroduction of empires built on slavery in the centuries afterwards. Religion has to have been the enemy of science, or we can’t explain the tension between the two in our own society. Medieval Europe must have been completely isolated from the rest of the world, or our fantasies of white ethnonationalism aren’t grounded in history. Myths about the medieval period as the “Dark Ages”—a thousand-year period devoid of growth, delight, art, and pleasure—persist largely to make us feel better about ourselves.
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Sadly, It's Not Hard to Believe This Really Happened

David Lopez Zuniga is a very ordinary air conditioning repairman in Houston. He has the typical white panel van filled with the tools and parts for his trade as he travels about the city engaged in the non-exotic craft of repairing air conditioners. This story begins with a rather extraordinary day for this ordinary man had.

As Zuniga was driving his van he is suddenly rammed from behind. As Zuniga gets out of his vehicle a crazed man he has never seen before pulls a gun on him and orders him to the ground. The crazed man kneels on his back, gun to his head, until the police arrive.

The crazed man is former Houston Police Department Captain Mark Aguirre. Aguirre was working for a group called “Liberty Center” financed by conservative activist Steven Hotze, who remains convinced massive election fraud, and Hotze paid Aguirre hundreds of thousands of dollars to investigate and find election fraud, most of which was deposited in Aguirre’s account the day after this incident.

Aguirre somehow became convinced that Zuniga was the mastermind of a massive voting fraud plot and had 750,000 fraudulent ballots hidden in that van. Thus, on October 19th of last year Aguirre rammed Zuniga’s van and held him at gunpoint. When the police arrived Aguirre insisted they search the van. The police did and found only a van filled with tools and air conditioner parts. That must have been an interesting moment.

However, the story now concludes with a happy ending. Yesterday Aguirre was indicted on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Not THAT Mark Aguirre
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Quietly, Biden Is Doing Some Good Stuff

The Biden administration has orderd an immediate halt to new federal support for coal plants and other carbon-intensive projects overseas, a major policy shift designed to fight climate change and accelerate renewable energy worldwide.

The wide-ranging directive for the first time bars U.S. government backing for future ventures, potentially affecting billions of dollars in annual funding as well as diplomatic and technical assistance. The move was detailed in a cable sent late last week to U.S. embassies and obtained by Bloomberg News.

The policy contains significant exemptions, including for compelling national security concerns, foreign policy considerations or the need to expand energy access in vulnerable areas. It also does not apply to existing projects, including some the U.S. has supported under multiple administrations.

Too Quietly
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The Price of No Jab Is Going Up

Kroger, the country’s biggest traditional grocery chain, is ending some benefits for unvaccinated workers as big employers attempt to compel more of their workforce to become vaccinated with cases of COVID-19 again rising.

Unvaccinated workers will no longer be eligible to receive up to two weeks paid emergency leave if they become infected, a company spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. That policy was put into place last year when vaccines were unavailable.  The change is effective Jan. 1.

The company said it will also begin charging a $50 monthly fee to unvaccinated salaried workers and managers who are enrolled in a company health care plan. Unionized workers and non-union hourly workers won’t be charged that fee.
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MTG Speaks and MTF Speaks


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More Powerful Than a Locomotive...And Scarier


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The Growth of the Hedge-Fund Slum Lord

The homes on Tammy Sue Lane aren’t fancy. Modest in size and clad in vinyl siding, the houses were priced below $200,000 when most were built about 15 years ago, and for many families in suburban Nashville, they represented a first chance at homeownership.

A corrections officer bought one, and so did a housekeeper and an electrician.

Then some of the world’s wealthiest people bought in.

Over the past six years, 19 of the 32 homes on Tammy Sue Lane have been purchased by a billion-dollar investment venture, part of an unprecedented flow of global finance into the American suburbs. Less than 10 years old, the company has amassed one of the nation’s largest portfolios of single-family houses, becoming the landlord for tens of thousands of families.

The venture, Progress Residential, acquires as many as 2,000 houses a month through the use of a computerized property-search algorithm and swift all-cash offers. Progress executives boast that the company’s efficient management practices have been a boon to their tenants who cannot afford to buy one of the “entry level” homes.

But according to previously undisclosed documents and dozens of interviews with renters and former employees, Progress Residential has been ringing up substantial profits for wealthy investors around the world while outbidding middle-class home buyers and subjecting tenants to what they allege are unfair rent hikes, shoddy maintenance and excessive fees.

The Disgusting Practices of Jared Kushner Go Global
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Should Amazon Be Deciding Which Non-Profits Go on Their List of Eligible Charities?

Amazon’s charitable program is paying tens of thousands of dollars to anti-vaccine groups in a move experts say is “shocking” as millions of Americans remain unvaccinated in the face of another Covid-19 wave.

AmazonSmile reportedly donated more than $40,000 to leading sources of vaccine misinformation in 2020, according to separate analyses by Popular Information and the Washington Post.

“That’s really shocking,” said Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “That’s incredible that Amazon is supporting those groups.”

The charity program of the e-commerce giant donates 0.5% from purchases to designated nonprofits – including at least a dozen organizations working against widespread vaccination in the US.

Last year, Amazon donated more than $60m to nonprofits. The portion of anti-vaccine funding is small compared to the full amount, but it may be significant to the fundraising efforts of groups with relatively small budgets.

The National Vaccine Information Center has received $41,533.71 over the course of several years, according to an anonymous volunteer. Last year, Amazon gave them $12,675, the Post reports – one of a dozen groups to receive such funding.

Children’s Health Defense, headed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, received $10,969; Physicians for Informed Consent received $3,626; and Informed Consent Action Network received $2,970.41.

More than 1m nonprofits are registered in the program, and organizations supported by AmazonSmile must not “engage in, support, encourage, or promote … illegal, deceptive, or misleading activities,” according to the participation agreement. Nonprofits may participate if they are registered 501(c)(3) organizations.

Hate groups and terrorism groups are banned from the program. But in the past, AmazonSmile also reportedly funded anti-LGBTQ groups.

Should the Government Do a Better Job of Deciding Who Deserves Non-Profit Status?
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