Monday - The Solution to COVID?

US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 520 Million Shots  (Population 333 Million)




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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesdays)


Reservoirs are still low, but they take time to refill and it may take the spring snow melt.
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Ikea Says If You Don't Get Vaccinated, You Can Tjuk Your Bjursta In Your Mulig

Ikea has cut sick pay for unvaccinated staff who need to self-isolate because of Covid exposure, joining a growing list of firms changing their rules.

The retail giant acknowledged it was an "emotive topic" but said its policy had to evolve with changing circumstances.

From this week, sick pay cuts will be implemented at Wessex Water and in the US several major companies have starting penalising unjabbed workers.

It comes as firms struggle with mass staff absences and rising costs.

At Ikea unvaccinated workers who are required to isolate could now receive as little as £96.35 a week - the Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) minimum. Average pay at Ikea is between about £400 and £450, depending on location. The move was first reported by the Mail on Sunday.

Ikea, which employs about 10,000 people in the UK, said in a statement: "Fully vaccinated co-workers or those with mitigating circumstances will receive full pay for self-isolations. 
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Ikea Has No Opinion On What to Do With Your Ichthyosaur

Ichthyosaur: Huge fossilised ‘sea dragon’ found in Rutland reservoir

"I rang up the county council and I said I think I've found a dinosaur," explained Joe Davis, who works at Rutland Water Nature Reserve.

During landscaping work at the reserve's reservoir in February 2021, he had spotted something odd poking out of the mud.

It wasn't a dinosaur. But it was the fossilised remains of a 10m-long sea predator called an ichthyosaur.

And it was the largest of its type ever discovered in the UK.

"I looked down at what seemed like stones or ridges in the mud and I said this looks a bit organic, a bit different," Mr Davis told BBC News. "Then we saw something that looked almost like a jawbone."

The council said to Mr Davis: "We don't have a dinosaur department at Rutland County Council so we're going to have to get someone to call you back." A team of palaeontologists were brought in for a closer look.

They concluded it was an ichthyosaur - a type of warm-blooded, air-breathing sea predator not unlike dolphins. They could grow up to 25 metres long and lived between 250 million and 90 million years ago.

Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist from Manchester University, was brought in to lead the excavation effort. He called the discovery "truly unprecedented" and - due to its size and completeness - "one of the greatest finds in British palaeontological history".

"Usually we think of ichthyosaurs and other marine reptiles being discovered along the Jurassic coast in Dorset or the Yorkshire coast, where many of them are exposed by the erosion of the cliffs. Here at an inland location is very unusual."

Rutland is more than thirty miles from the coast, but 200 million years ago higher sea levels meant it was covered by a shallow ocean.

When water levels at the Rutland reservoir were lowered again in the late summer of 2021, a team of palaeontologists came in to excavate the remains. Special attention was paid to the removal of the huge skull.


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The Seven-Year Glitch

The last seven years have been the seven warmest on record for the planet, new data shows, as Earth's temperature continues its precarious climb due to heat-trapping fossil fuel emissions.

A new analysis by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, which tracks global temperature and other climate indicators, found 2021 was the fifth-warmest year on record.

Though the long-term trend is up, yearly fluctuations in global temperature are expected, mainly because of large-scale weather and ocean patterns like El Niño and La Niña, the latter of which was present in 2021 and tends to lead to cooler global temperature.
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American Taliban:  Issac, Ariel, Norma and Adrian

Ancient rock art at a Texas national park was "irreparably damaged" last month, prompting officials to urge the public to come forward with information about the vandals.

"On December 26th, a panel of ancient petroglyphs in the Indian Head area of Big Bend National Park was irreparably damaged when vandals chose to boldly scratch their names and the date across the prehistoric art," the National Park Service said in a statement.

The carvings that were destroyed are between 3,000 and 8,500 years old, Tom VandenBerg, chief of interpretation and visitor services with Big Bend National Park, told NBC News.

"The particular style of rock art that was damaged in this instance is classified by archeologists as the 'Pecked Abstract Tradition," VandenBerg said. "It is characterized by abstract, complex, geometric shapes and lines."

Damaging park resources violates the Code of Federal Regulations. Additionally, rock art and ancient cultural sites are protected under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act.

The petroglyphs, or rock carvings, in Big Bend appeared to be carved over with the names Issac, Ariel, Norma and Adrian; the year 2021; and the date 12-26-21, according to a photo from the park service.
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Bad Bunny!  Bad, Bad Bunny!

In early December, after a two-year hiatus from the stage, Bad Bunny went home to Puerto Rico to give his most dedicated fanbase the concert of their lives. The reggaeton star may have delivered with his “P FKN R” show — a two-day, $10 million spectacle and tribute to Boricua culture at a massive 60,000-person stadium in San Juan. But it also turned out to be a superspreader event.

All concert-goers were required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination and to wear masks or else risk a $100 fine and removal from the concert. Though their vaccination status was verified at the door, there wasn’t much enforcement of the mask mandate, and many attendees took them off once they got to their seats. As a result, an estimated 2,000 attendees tested positive for the virus afterward, contributing to a 4,600 percent jump in cases on the island last month. December 2021 accounted for a third of the total cases recorded in Puerto Rico, and now the island’s positivity rate is 36 percent.

The concert was emblematic of what has gone wrong in Puerto Rico — and in other parts of the US amid the spread of the omicron variant. Many Puerto Ricans feel more protected than they actually are due to the island’s high levels of vaccination, but two shots of vaccine have proved not to be a sufficient defense in the face of omicron, which is more transmissible than past variants. And more people getting infected has meant more people are ending up in the hospital, straining medical infrastructure.

Just a month ago, Puerto Rico appeared to be in a better position than other parts of the US. It has among the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the US, and for months led the country in vaccination rates. A unified messaging campaign from the scientific community and government leaders has allowed the island to largely avoid politicization of the virus and the vaccine. And Gov. Pedro Pierluisi has implemented some of the strictest vaccine mandates in the country. Without all of that, the latest wave could have been much more deadly.

But even Puerto Rico wasn’t immune to the highly contagious omicron variant, which has contributed to a spike in caseloads and hospitalizations across the US. Gatherings during the holiday season, which in Puerto Rico spans from Thanksgiving to mid-January with Three Kings Day celebrations, have exacerbated the problem. And given that many Puerto Ricans are vaccinated — nearly 78 percent as of January 6 — infections on the island have been generally mild, giving people a false sense of security during the latest wave.
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Last Week Our Power Was Out For 9 Hours.  Could This Have Helped?

EV owners could conceivably get power at home during blackouts by plugging their car into a charger in their home — and this would eliminate the need for the sometimes deadly, carbon monoxide-spewing diesel generators many people currently rely on.
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Show This to Your Unvaccinated Friends.


They'll Ignore It, But At Least You Tried






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Finally!  The Solution To COVID



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There Were Elections Stolen in 2020.  Guess Which Party Did It.

Ironically, it turned out that Florida’s election hadn’t been entirely without fraud or subversion. In the 2020 election, three Democratic state lawmakers lost tight re-election races to Republicans in large part due to the presence of three “ghost” candidates that did little campaigning but were backed with massive outlays by a mysterious political action committee called Grow United.



Voters were bombarded with ads and flyers touting the supposed strong progressive credentials of the spoiler candidates, at least one of whom had been bribed into playing the patsy by a former Republican lawmaker named Frank Artiles. That candidate, an auto parts salesman named Alex Rodriguez, siphoned off 6,000 votes in a race that the Democratic incumbent, state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, lost by just 32 votes.



Alex Rodriguez pled guilty to fraud charges in August, admitting to accepting over $44,000 for his part in the scheme. Artiles also recruited at least one of the other ghost candidates, as well.



Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez was known for his environmental activism — he wore rain boots to the Capitol in 2018 in an effort to draw attention to rising sea levels and flooding in his South Florida district — and was a vocal proponent of clean energy. So it made sense that he was one of the three Democrats targeted by Grow United, which has deep financial and political ties to Florida Power & Light.



According to an investigation just released by the Orlando Sentinel, FPL helped finance the founding of Grow United and sent millions of dollars to the consultants that run the organization. Grow United’s consultants also communicated with FPL lobbyists about the three elections in which it was supporting the ghost spoiler candidates; in one text message, FPL’s Vice President of State Government Affairs wrote “We are going to charge full speed ahead in all those seats,” which is one of the most unambiguous admissions of guilt that I have ever seen.
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Were There Really Fine Nazis?

The Anti-Defamation League slammed a right-wing Indiana state senator who recently told a history teacher that he must remain impartial when talking about Nazism to his students.



Last Wednesday, Sen. Scott Baldwin told history teacher Matt Bockenfeld that he doesn’t discredit Marxism, Nazism, fascism or “any of those isms out there.”



“I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms,” he said. “I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position on those isms. We need to be impartial.”



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This Sounds Like Something Out of a Movie

Los Angeles police at the scene of a plane crash Sunday pulled a bloodied pilot to safety seconds before a train smashed into the wreckage.



The crash of the single-engine Cessna 172 on tracks near county-run Whiteman Airport, a one-runway facility in L.A.'s northeastern San Fernando Valley, put its injured pilot in a precarious position as a double-decker commuter train barreled in its direction shortly after 2 p.m., authorities said.



Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said in a statement that the plane went down at a busy intersection after taking off from Whiteman. "The pilot was the only person on board," he said.



Multiple officers from the Los Angeles Police Department's Foothill Division, based about a half-block away, blocked the roadway with their SUVs as one officer stood at the tracks in the direction of the oncoming train in an apparent attempt to warn the conductor, according to body camera footage released by the LAPD.
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Money For Nothing

More than a year after the 2020 presidential election, the GOP is still covering numerous legal bills for the benefit of former President Donald Trump -- and the price tag is ruffling the feathers of some longtime GOP donors who are now critical of Trump.


In October and November alone, the Republican National Committee spent nearly $720,000 of its donor money on paying law firms representing Trump in various legal challenges, including criminal investigations into his businesses in New York, according to campaign finance records.



Trump's legal bills have sent the Republican Party's total legal expenditures soaring in recent months, resulting in $3 million spent just between September and November. In contrast, the Democratic National Committee has been gradually winding down its legal expenses over the last few months.



Traditionally, national political parties have at times covered presidents and their advisers' legal fees in matters related to their presidential campaigns. And throughout his presidency, the Republican Party has footed legal bills for Trump, his family members and his political allies, going back to the days of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 election, through the impeachment proceedings following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.


But experts say the GOP's recent payments of Trump's attorney fees after he left the White House, for investigations that are not relevant to the next presidential campaign, is a very unusual move that's indicative of the ongoing influence that the former president has over the party.
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Stop The Presses!   Nevermind.  It's Just Jim Jordan

The Ohio Republican Jim Jordan is the second sitting congressman to refuse a request for cooperation from the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.
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“Didn’t catch any fish, ran out of propane early and got stranded on the ice.”  -- Not My Idea of Fun

A piece of ice near Point Comfort — along the east shore of Green Bay, which leads out to Lake Michigan — had begun to split from the main shoreline, leaving more than two dozen people stranded, the Brown County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. Their fishing gear drifted off with it.



It took authorities aboard ice rescue boats nearly an hour and a half and several trips to rescue at least 27 fishermen who were stuck. The ice block drifted farther from the shore with each trip, Lt. John Bain, with the Brown County Sheriff’s Office, said at a news conference.
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I Guess Tennis Fans Are Idiots, Just Like Fans of Other Sports

Acrowd of Novak Djokovic supporters were pepper-sprayed by police in Melbourne, Australia on Monday night as they gathered around a car they believed was transporting the tennis star.



The world no. 1 emerged victorious earlier in the day, after it was ruled that the Serbian sportsman would not be deported by the Australian government over not being vaccinated against COVID-19.



Djokovic's case has sparked a strong reaction in the city—where Djokovic had traveled to compete in the Australian Open—with one side decrying the star's exemption from the country's strict COVID rules, while others have supported him.



Video footage shared on Twitter by The Guardian journalist Tumaini Carayol showed Djokovic's supporters chanting "Free Nole"—a nickname used by fans—as they marched in the central business district, where his lawyer's office is reportedly located.

Not a Mask On These Fans


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