Post by mhbruin on Feb 17, 2022 10:19:52 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 549 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday Feb 15)
January had NO rain or snow. February looks the same.
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
These People Were Left in the Dark
Hundreds of people who had retinal implants to improve their sight face an uncertain future as the technology they rely on is now obsolete.
Second Sight stopped making its Argus II bionic eyes several years ago to focus on a brain implant instead.
According to IEEE Spectrum, which broke the story, it is now hoping to merge with a biopharmaceutical firm which does not make implants.
The system consists of the implant, special glasses with a built-in camera and a video processing unit (VPU) that is attached around the wearer's waist.
The camera on the glasses sends video to the VPU, which converts the images to patterns of black and white pixels and sends them back to a responder in the glasses, which in turn beams them wirelessly to an antenna on the outside of the eye.
An implanted electrode array behind the retina receives the stimulation patterns from the user's glasses and stimulates the eye by creating flashes of light that correspond to the video feed and which are sent by the implant to the optic nerve to create a kind of artificial vision.
It's clever and innovative tech, which has taken decades to create and was not cheap - estimated at around $150,000 (£110,000) excluding surgery and post-surgery training.
But patients contacted by IEEE Spectrum voiced concern.
One, Ross Doerr, said Second Sight failed to contact any of its patients after its financial difficulties in 2020.
"Those of us with this implant are figuratively and literally in the dark," he said.
Another user, Jeroen Perk, had problems when his VPU system broke in November 2020. "I had no vision, no Argus, and no support from Second Sight," he told the publication.
He considered having the device surgically removed but decided to ask other patients and doctors familiar with the system for help, and luckily found spare parts.
A Previous Guy (PG) Has An App. It Probably Lies to You and Takes All Your Money. They Call it "Truth" So It Must be Lies.
Conservative figures are increasingly promoting Truth Social, the alternative social media app backed by former President Donald Trump, as the platform undergoes pre-launch testing.
And as more images of the app have surfaced, the more Truth Social appears to be a direct clone of Twitter (TWTR), the social network of choice for Trump before he was kicked off the platform.
Kimmel Looks at PG's App
Jimmy Kimmel spotted one of the most glaring issues with former President Donald Trump’s new social media service, which was unveiled in a screenshot this week when Donald Trump Jr. posted it on Twitter.
“You may notice this new site looks almost exactly like Twitter,” Kimmel observed. “It took him who knows how many millions of dollars and a year to change a blue checkmark to a red checkmark.”
The checkmark color appears to be one of the only differences between Trump’s upcoming Truth Social and Twitter itself, where Trump is banned.
But that gave Kimmel an idea.
“Basically they made Donald Trump a pretend Twitter to post on,” Kimmel said. “See? That’s what we should be doing. Build him a fake Oval Office, tell him he’s president again and everybody wins.”
Maybe They Only Had One Set of Handcuffs
A video showing police officers breaking up a fight between a Black teenager and a White teenager at a New Jersey mall has prompted outrage over the police response.
The Black teenager begins to get up and is pinned to the ground by one officer and rolled on to his stomach, with his hands behind his back. The other officer pushes the White teenager onto a nearby couch and then assists in handcuffing the Black teenager. Eventually, officers stand the handcuffed Black teenager up.
"I felt like they were treating him like he was superior to me," Kye, said of the officers leaving the White teen on the couch while he was handcuffed.
Sometimes the Enemy of Your Enemy is Another Enemy
Republican statewide candidates are duking it out in primary races across the country. Just take a look:
“J.D. Vance called Donald Trump an idiot and smeared his America-first policies as immoral and absurd. Jane Timken defended a RINO congressman after he impeached Trump,” one TV ad from Ohio Senate GOP candidate Mike Gibbons says. “J.D. Vance and Jane Timken would be Washington wimps. But Mike Gibbons is Trump tough.”
“Pull back the curtain on Dr Oz. What do you find? Hollywood liberal,” says an anti-Mehmet Oz ad in Pennsylvania.
“McCormick got rich off us. McCormick led a hedge fund with a billion-dollar Chinese investment program. He called China our ally,” responds an anti-David McCormick ad in the Keystone State.
Cruz and Hawley Think Jailing Innocent People Prevents Crime
Republicans are trying to make a judicial nominee the face of violent crime after she has spent her career getting false convictions overturned. President Joe Biden nominated Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project, to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Of New York. At her confirmation hearing, she faced astonishing hostility—even by the standards of Republican hostility to Biden nominees—from the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
Morrison’s work with the Innocence Project has involved freeing dozens of people who should never have been convicted in the first place, because they are (check the name of the organization) innocent. In many cases Morrison’s clients have been exonerated by DNA evidence. Never mind that, though. Republicans are furious.
“I will oppose you and anyone else the administration sends to us who do not understand the necessity of the rule of law,” said Hawley to a judicial nominee whose chief focus is upholding the rule of law by overturning false convictions.
”The whole of your record is deeply disturbing,” Cruz railed at Morrison. It cannot be said enough times that Morrison’s record is freeing innocent people.
“Across this country, Americans are horrified at skyrocketing crime rates, at skyrocketing homicide rates, at skyrocketing burglary rates, at skyrocketing carjacking rates,” Cruz said. “All of those are the direct result of the policies you’ve spent your entire lifetime advancing.”
Homicides rose in 2020 and 2021 after decades of decline, but remain well below where they were in the early 1990s.
Cruz and His Buddies Want People to Be Able to Beat on Flight Attendants, Pilots, and Passengers.
quick review of some of the behavior seen on airlines over the last two years. There was …
The passenger who bit off one passenger’s ear off after beating another passenger.
The passenger who peed in his seat as a protest against being asked to wear a mask.
The passenger who knocked out a flight attendant’s teeth, then got on the next flight.
The passenger who threatened to kill a flight attendant and track down her family.
The passenger who followed a flight attendant to the galley and beat her brutally.
The passenger who refused to sit and started throwing luggage at other passengers.
The passenger who refused to wear a mask because he was busy snorting cocaine.
The passenger who tried to break into the cockpit, then tried to open one of the emergency doors until he was taken down by other passengers and a coffee-pot wielding attendant.
The most terrible thing may be that these are just a few of the 5,981 reports logged by the Federal Aviation Administration in the last year. Out of these, a horrific 4,290 incidents were passengers who turned to violence or other disruptive behavior that delayed, diverted, or turned around a flight for one reason: refusing to wear a mask.
There’s something else that all these ear-biting, incontinent, violent assholes have in common: The support of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and at least seven other Republican senators. Those senators are opposing placing those who have violently disrupted airline flights on a no-fly list, because they claim such a list would draw an equivalence between terrorists and those who react with violence to being asked to wear a mask for the safety of others. And on that point, the Republicans are exactly right; that equivalence isn’t just there, it’s well deserved.
As The Washington Post reports, the eight Republicans dispatched a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. In that letter, Republicans claim they “strongly condemn” violence toward airline workers, but they don’t want the good names of people who are biting, punching, and peeing their way through American skies to be damaged. Or their ability to do it again to be threatened.
Bogus Billionaire Bannon Backer is Bankrupt. Boo Hoo.
Guo Wengui, aka Miles Keon, is the billionaire backer behind Steve Bannon and also the right-wing social media site Gettr. However, like some others who claim to be billionaires, he isn’t. This week he declared bankruptcy after a judge ordered him to pay $134 million to a creditor for a yacht, the Lady May, which he had moved into international waters in an attempt to welsh on a debt.
Jailed For Listening to Pillow Man
Last September, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly had revoked Douglas Jensen‘s bond in September after he admitted to watching a “Cyber Symposium regarding the recount of the presidential election” led by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. A pretrial services officer had discovered Jensen in August in his garage watching the symposium on a far-right video-sharing website.
The violation came less than one month after Jensen was released from custody. He had been in custody since his arrest days after the Capitol siege. Kelly, a Trump appointee, agreed to grant Jensen’s bond request in July. One of the conditions of Jensen’s pretrial release to home detention was that he avoid the use of any electronic device that can access the internet.
Scammers Scam. Google Profits.
1111 LLC, a little-known affiliate marketing company run by a former pro MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The firm, which also operates a network of pro-Trump news sites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one of Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers.
1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced videos via Google ads in recent months that promote entirely fabricated government handouts: $38,070 in tuition funding for individuals without college degrees through the “Government Education Program”; $2,888 for seniors in “certain zip codes” through the “ACA Plus Program”; $97,246 for homeowners through the “Homeowner Relief” program; $710 for drivers without DUIs through the “SODA Program”; among others.
Many of these ads are designed to look like news segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk appearing to sign documents related to the bogus payouts. Some ads even display falsified CNBC articles with headlines restating the ads’ hoaxes. They have collectively been viewed well over 100 million times in a matter of months, according to public Google data, sparking false hope in an untold number of households nationwide as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar year.
1111 LLC’s ads are part of a sprawling scheme to drive web traffic and harvest people’s personal details, including their phone numbers and emails, which may be sent directly to the marketing firm’s clients to do with as they please (like financially prey on the elderly), or may be rented out and sold as information lists for big money.
Shady companies fleecing people online is a story as old as the internet, but what’s noteworthy in this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed more than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run ads that cruelly con its own users while flagrantly violating its own policies — and, experts say, federal law.
Is a Cotton Mouth Poisonous?
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Wednesday accused Democrats of being insufficiently supportive of law enforcement, citing in part their backing of a prison reform bill President Donald Trump championed and signed into law in 2018.
Congress approved the measure, known as the First Step Act, by huge bipartisan margins. The vote was 87-12 in the Senate, with most of Cotton’s Republican colleagues on board. But Cotton and a few other conservatives insisted the law threatened public safety.
Democrats quickly pointed out that Trump and other Republican senators enthusiastically backed the law, pitching it as a major criminal justice reform initiative in their appeals to win over Black voters.
The law reduced prison sentences for some federal inmates whom federal prison officials deemed unlikely to commit future crimes. It also allowed inmates currently serving time for crack cocaine offenses to petition courts for an earlier release, correcting for the disparity in sentences for crack and powder cocaine.
The floor fight boiled over after Cotton placed a hold on eight of President Joe Biden’s U.S. attorney nominees, who would serve as top law enforcement officials around the country.
The Senate typically confirms U.S. attorney nominees via voice vote. It last required cloture on a U.S. attorney nominee in 1993 and last held a roll call vote on such a nominee in 1975.
PG's Lawyers Use the Sargent Schultz Defense "He Knows Nothing. Nothing." PG Says He Knows Everything.
Former President Donald Trump said in a court filing Monday that he "denies knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth" about his company's finances.
A day later, he issued a blistering 1,100-word statement in response to his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA dropping the Trump Organization as a client and claiming it could no longer stand by a decade's worth of tax documents. Trump waxed lyrical about his company's "fantastic assets" and said prosecutors should give consider giving Hillary Clinton the death penalty instead of investigating the Trump Organization's finances.
"My company has among the best real estate and other assets anywhere in the world, has significant amounts of cash, and has relatively very little debt, which is totally current," Trump said in the statement Tuesday.
The discrepancy was pointed out in a court filing Wednesday from the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James. Her office is set to face off against Trump in court Thursday and ask a judge to enforce a subpoena that would force him to sit for a deposition.
"It is not unusual for parties to a legal proceeding to disagree about the facts," wrote Austin Thompson, a lawyer for James's office. "But it is truly rare for a party to publicly disagree with statements submitted by his own attorneys in a signed pleading — let alone one day after the pleading was filed. That is what Mr. Trump has done here."
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COVID Deaths are FINALLY Trending Down. SLOOOOOWLY
Everything is trending down. Cases, hospitalizations, vaccinations, and news coverage.
It will be a while before cases get down to pre-Omicron levels of around 80,000 to 90,000. We are still over 200,00.
I would sure like to see the 38 million people who only got one shot get their second shot.
Then There Are These Headlines
"73% of Americans may be immune to omicron" -- USA Today
"Estimated 73% of US now immune to omicron: Is that enough?" -- AP
For the umpteenth time: There is no immunity. There is only increased resistance.
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Driving that Train. High on Cocaine. Zahra, You'd Better Watch Your Speed
A rail company recruiting 30 female train drivers in Saudi Arabia says it has received 28,000 applications.
The successful candidates will drive high-speed trains between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina after a year of training.
It is the first time such roles have been advertised for women in the conservative Muslim kingdom.
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Today's Safety Tip: Don't Hold Your Wedding on Top of a Well
At least 13 people have died after falling into a well during a wedding ceremony in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Police said the victims - all women and children - were sitting on a metal slab covering the well when it collapsed under their weight.
Two more people have been injured in the accident, which took place in Kushinagar district.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the deaths "heart-wrenching".
The tragedy took place on Wednesday evening during the traditional "haldi" ceremony, in which relatives apply turmeric paste to the faces of the bride and groom as a marker of prosperity.
When the slab broke, other guests ran to rescue the victims and took them to a nearby hospital. While 11 people were declared dead immediately, two others died later during treatment, police said.
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Short-Term Funding Can Mean Long-Term Problems
This week, the Senate plans to pass another short-term spending bill that would fund the government through March 11, narrowly avoiding a shutdown.
The vote on a short-term bill, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), comes as existing government funding is set to run out on February 18. In the roughly two months since the last CR passed, lawmakers have been unable to agree on what full-year appropriations should be, and hope to give themselves three more weeks to figure it out.
The agreement to prevent a shutdown is important. But relying on another CR is a deeply flawed approach to governance, one that fails to respond to the everyday needs of various agencies and programs. Because these CRs keep funding at levels approved by Congress in 2020, they effectively freeze spending at the amounts passed during the Trump administration. That means new programs aren’t being fully funded and older programs that need more money aren’t getting it, either.
Many government entities, including the military and the Department of Transportation, have said that the funding they’ve been given can't meet current needs. The use of a continuing resolution is also stalling the implementation of legislation that’s already been passed. Funding for various projects in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, for example, has been delayed since new spending bills haven’t been approved.
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Our Tax Dollars At Work
Still, there are broad trends in how states are spending the American Rescue Plan money: Almost every state that has allocated money so far has spent some on broadband, water and sewer infrastructure, which was one of the big spending categories determined by Congress.
So far, 22 states have allocated over $7 billion toward broadband, or about 9 percent of their total disbursements from the federal government. Within states, this has meant a mix of new programs, funding for existing programs and expansion of broadband services to more rural areas where the lack of access to reliable, fast internet made it harder for some children to attend virtual school during lockdowns.
Infrastructure has also been a big priority for states like Florida, which is spending money on highways and other transportation projects that had been long-planned but unfinished. Lazere said some of the need for infrastructure goes all the way back to the Great Recession, which began in 2007, and the long, slow recovery that followed. “These were areas of need that had not been addressed, [for which] there hadn’t been a dedicated state or federal funding source, so the rescue plan gave them the opportunity to tackle these problems that had been around for a long time,” he said.
Sounds Pretty Good to Me
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The Loan Sharks of the World Are on the Prowl
Some people are wondering if Trump’s latest troubles might actually endanger national security.
“This explodes the national security risk by a factor of 10, because now he's going to be desperate for new loans,” Joseph Cirincione, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the Daily Beast. “Legitimate banks are not going to touch him. So it expands the universe of shady characters who could offer him loans in return for favors that might include disclosing U.S. national security secrets.”
Cirincione continued: “Whether it is the Saudis, Russians, narcoterrorists—anybody with access to hundreds of millions would be in the running for Donald Trump’s new loan officer. That is why you don’t give security clearance to people who are financially compromised.”
So, yeah, it’s pretty important to keep him from winning again and having access to more government secrets. He might actually pay attention this time.
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One Night in Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Makes a Hard Man Humble. Terrible!
No, English speakers and others using the Roman alphabet aren’t going to have to start calling the Thai capital by its local name, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, and drop the more familiar “Bangkok.”
It started when the Cabinet on Tuesday approved a Royal Society proposal changing the way the capital would be referred to internationally from “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon; Bangkok” to “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (Bangkok).”
As people sought to divine the meaning behind changing the semicolon to parentheses, many put great weight to the accompanying explanation that it would “revise” the name of the capital city and keep the “former” name in brackets.
The capital is already officially known in the Thai language as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, which literally means “great city of angels,” and most Thais shorten it to just Krung Thep in conversation.
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Munich? They Had to Pick Munich?
Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to the Munich Security Conference later this week, as the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine still looms, and U.S. officials say the Russian military presence at the border of Ukraine has increased by as many as 7,000 troops. Russia has claimed that it is pulling back troops because its military exercises have concluded.
On Saturday, Harris will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and also separately with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, according to senior administration officials. This will be the first engagement between Harris and Zelensky. The vice president is also going to be meeting with the Baltic state leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
The Site of Neville Chamberlain's Meeting With Hitler and the Munich Olympics
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I Can't Believe They Signed on to Face the Most Terrifying Enemy on Earth. School Children!
On past deployments Army National Guard Spc. Michael Stockwell surveilled a desolate section of the U.S.-Mexico border during a migrant surge, and guarded a ring of checkpoints and fences around New Mexico’s state Capitol after the January 2021 insurrection in Washington.
On his current mission, Stockwell helps students with assignments as a substitute science teacher at Alamogordo High School.
“You can't act Army with these kids. You can't speak the same way you would with another soldier with these kids. You can't treat them the same way. You have to be careful with corrective actions,” he said with a laugh.
Dozens of National Guard Army and Air Force troops in New Mexico have been stepping in for an emergency unlike others they have responded to before: the shortage of teachers and school staff members that has tested the ability of schools nationwide to continue operating during the coronavirus pandemic.
While many other states and school districts issued pleas for substitute teachers amid omicron-driven surges in infections, New Mexico has been alone in calling out its National Guard members. In 36 of the state’s 89 school districts, guard members have traded in mission briefs for lesson plans to work for school systems.
Haven't They Watched Kindergarten Cop?
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Rising Seawater Doesn't Have to Cover the Land to Be a Problem
Surfside collapse exposes an overlooked threat: Saltwater rising from underground
Not long after a condo tower collapsed in Surfside, Florida, last June, Randall Parkinson had what he calls an epiphany.
Parkinson, a coastal geologist who studies the impact of climate change at Florida International University in Miami, wondered whether rising sea levels had driven saltwater into the ground beneath the tower, corroding its concrete foundation. Others were asking similar questions, but he couldn’t find anyone who’d researched the effect of saltwater intrusion on residential buildings.
“So I decided to dig a little deeper,” Parkinson said.
More than seven months after the June 24 collapse, which left 98 people dead, there are no definitive answers about what caused the 40-year-old condo, Champlain Towers South, to fall. Parkinson is one of several scientists who believe that the tower may have been damaged by saltwater seeping into its underground foundation.
He and others had previously found that rising sea levels press underground saltwater closer to the foundations of coastal buildings. They also note that photos showed corroded columns and flooding in Champlain Towers South’s underground garage and that staff members reported pumping water out of the garage.
In a December report, a Miami-Dade County grand jury investigating the collapse also theorized that saltwater intrusion had probably damaged the building’s foundation.
Surfside is 3 Feet Above Sea Level
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CDC doesn't do a good job of reporting around holidays.
Doses Administered 7-Day Average | Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses | Number of People 2 or More Doses | New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Feb 17 | 493,892 | 252,539,755 | 214,474,721 | ||
| Feb 16 | 516,988 | 252,400,057 | 214,218,580 | 121,664 | 2,020 |
| Feb 15 | 544,184 | 252,277,758 | 214,104,148 | 134,468 | 2,100 |
| Feb 14 | 546,667 | 252,144,326 | 213,962,983 | 146,921 | 2,208 |
| Feb 13 | 555,669 | 252,054,215 | 213,869,678 | 161,197 | 2,196 |
| Feb 12 | 486,374 | 251,926,344 | 213,734,419 | 168,881 | 2,197 |
| Feb 11 | 568,820 | 251,755,851 | 213,563,173 | 175,395 | 2,241 |
| Feb 10 | 580,896 | 251,655,172 | 213,430,434 | 190,401 | 2,305 |
| Feb 9 | 591,786 | 251,467,303 | 213,246,140 | 215,418 | 2,313 |
| Feb 8 | 602,606 | 251,312,470 | 213,061,117 | 230,602 | 2,303 |
| Feb 7 | 611,742 | 251,176,199 | 212,920,278 | 247,319 | 2,404 |
| Feb 6 | 627,161 | 251,070,439 | 212,806,521 | 291,471 | 2,294 |
| Feb 5 | 655,591 | 250,915,858 | 212,657,682 | 298,890 | 2,331 |
| Feb 4 | 680,135 | 250,731,754 | 212,481,465 | 313,117 | 2,404 |
| Feb 3 | 719,986 | 250,593,665 | 212,336,183 | 343,563 | 2,371 |
| Feb 2 | 494,092 | 250,378,993 | 212,130,684 | 378,015 | 2,403 |
| Feb 1 | 510,477 | 250,184,240 | 211,954,555 | 415,552 | 2,369 |
| Jan 31 | 575,732 | 250,029,773 | 211,818,885 | 446,355 | 2,287 |
| Jan 30 | 603,030 | 249,892,470 | 211,695,131 | 497,296 | 2,234 |
| Jan 29 | 595,871 | 249,695,301 | 211,533,229 | 522,626 | 2,261 |
| Jan 28 | 626,946 | 249,473,925 | 211,343,818 | 543,016 | 2,265 |
| Jan 27 | 643,725 | 249,267,851 (I don't know why) | 211,162,083 | 577,748 | 2,300 |
| Jan 26 | 962,958 | 251,518,114 | 210,850,212 | 596,859 | 2,288 |
| Jan 25 | 1,011,603 | 251,289,667 | 210,682,471 | 627,294 | 2,246 |
| Jan 24 | 1,201,186 | 250,964,433 | 210,459,963 | 692,359 | 2,166 |
| Jan 23 | 1,101,405 | 250,763,600 | 210,358,008 | 663,908 | 1,936 |
| Jan 22 | 1,002,322 | 250,568,431 | 210,229,586 | 686,715 | 1,939 |
| Jan 21 | 1,035,111 | 250,262,153 | 210,021,766 | 716,829 | 1,974 |
| Jan 20 | 1,094,988 | 250,028,635 | 209,842,610 | 726,870 | 1,843 |
| Jan 19 | 1,135,453 | 249,702,939 | 209,509,297 | 744,615 | 1,749 |
| Jan 18 | 1,158,537 | 249,393,487 | 209,312,770 | 755,095 | 1,669 |
| Feb 16, 2021 | 1,716,311 | 39,670,551 | 15,015,434 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | % of Vaccinated W/ Boosters | |
| % of Total Population | 76.1% | 64.6% | 43.1% |
| % of Population 5+ | 80.9% | 68.7% | |
| % of Population 12+ | 85.8% | 73.2% | 44.5% |
| % of Population 18+ | 87.6% | 74.7% | 46.4% |
| % of Population 65+ | 95.0% | 88.6% | 65.7% |
California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday Feb 15)
January had NO rain or snow. February looks the same.
| Percent of Average for this Date | Last Week | 2 Weeks ago | 3 Weeks ago | 7 Weeks ago | |
| Northern Sierra Precipitation | 99% (59%) | 105% (59% of average for full season) | 113% | 124% | 170% |
| San Joaquin Precipitation | 86% (51%) | 92% (51%) | 99% | 110% | 170% |
| Tulare Basin Precipitation | 79% (46%) | 84% (46%) | 91% | 101% | 151% |
| Snow Water Content - North | 68% (53%) | 80% (58%) | 89% | 134% | |
| Snow Water Content - Central | 75% (57%) | 80% (57%) | 89% | 148% | |
| Snow Water Content - South | 74% (54%) | 81% (57%) | 92% | 158% |
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
These People Were Left in the Dark
Hundreds of people who had retinal implants to improve their sight face an uncertain future as the technology they rely on is now obsolete.
Second Sight stopped making its Argus II bionic eyes several years ago to focus on a brain implant instead.
According to IEEE Spectrum, which broke the story, it is now hoping to merge with a biopharmaceutical firm which does not make implants.
The system consists of the implant, special glasses with a built-in camera and a video processing unit (VPU) that is attached around the wearer's waist.
The camera on the glasses sends video to the VPU, which converts the images to patterns of black and white pixels and sends them back to a responder in the glasses, which in turn beams them wirelessly to an antenna on the outside of the eye.
An implanted electrode array behind the retina receives the stimulation patterns from the user's glasses and stimulates the eye by creating flashes of light that correspond to the video feed and which are sent by the implant to the optic nerve to create a kind of artificial vision.
It's clever and innovative tech, which has taken decades to create and was not cheap - estimated at around $150,000 (£110,000) excluding surgery and post-surgery training.
But patients contacted by IEEE Spectrum voiced concern.
One, Ross Doerr, said Second Sight failed to contact any of its patients after its financial difficulties in 2020.
"Those of us with this implant are figuratively and literally in the dark," he said.
Another user, Jeroen Perk, had problems when his VPU system broke in November 2020. "I had no vision, no Argus, and no support from Second Sight," he told the publication.
He considered having the device surgically removed but decided to ask other patients and doctors familiar with the system for help, and luckily found spare parts.
A Previous Guy (PG) Has An App. It Probably Lies to You and Takes All Your Money. They Call it "Truth" So It Must be Lies.
Conservative figures are increasingly promoting Truth Social, the alternative social media app backed by former President Donald Trump, as the platform undergoes pre-launch testing.
And as more images of the app have surfaced, the more Truth Social appears to be a direct clone of Twitter (TWTR), the social network of choice for Trump before he was kicked off the platform.
Kimmel Looks at PG's App
Jimmy Kimmel spotted one of the most glaring issues with former President Donald Trump’s new social media service, which was unveiled in a screenshot this week when Donald Trump Jr. posted it on Twitter.
“You may notice this new site looks almost exactly like Twitter,” Kimmel observed. “It took him who knows how many millions of dollars and a year to change a blue checkmark to a red checkmark.”
The checkmark color appears to be one of the only differences between Trump’s upcoming Truth Social and Twitter itself, where Trump is banned.
But that gave Kimmel an idea.
“Basically they made Donald Trump a pretend Twitter to post on,” Kimmel said. “See? That’s what we should be doing. Build him a fake Oval Office, tell him he’s president again and everybody wins.”
Maybe They Only Had One Set of Handcuffs
A video showing police officers breaking up a fight between a Black teenager and a White teenager at a New Jersey mall has prompted outrage over the police response.
The Black teenager begins to get up and is pinned to the ground by one officer and rolled on to his stomach, with his hands behind his back. The other officer pushes the White teenager onto a nearby couch and then assists in handcuffing the Black teenager. Eventually, officers stand the handcuffed Black teenager up.
"I felt like they were treating him like he was superior to me," Kye, said of the officers leaving the White teen on the couch while he was handcuffed.
Sometimes the Enemy of Your Enemy is Another Enemy
Republican statewide candidates are duking it out in primary races across the country. Just take a look:
“J.D. Vance called Donald Trump an idiot and smeared his America-first policies as immoral and absurd. Jane Timken defended a RINO congressman after he impeached Trump,” one TV ad from Ohio Senate GOP candidate Mike Gibbons says. “J.D. Vance and Jane Timken would be Washington wimps. But Mike Gibbons is Trump tough.”
“Pull back the curtain on Dr Oz. What do you find? Hollywood liberal,” says an anti-Mehmet Oz ad in Pennsylvania.
“McCormick got rich off us. McCormick led a hedge fund with a billion-dollar Chinese investment program. He called China our ally,” responds an anti-David McCormick ad in the Keystone State.
Cruz and Hawley Think Jailing Innocent People Prevents Crime
Republicans are trying to make a judicial nominee the face of violent crime after she has spent her career getting false convictions overturned. President Joe Biden nominated Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project, to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Of New York. At her confirmation hearing, she faced astonishing hostility—even by the standards of Republican hostility to Biden nominees—from the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
Morrison’s work with the Innocence Project has involved freeing dozens of people who should never have been convicted in the first place, because they are (check the name of the organization) innocent. In many cases Morrison’s clients have been exonerated by DNA evidence. Never mind that, though. Republicans are furious.
“I will oppose you and anyone else the administration sends to us who do not understand the necessity of the rule of law,” said Hawley to a judicial nominee whose chief focus is upholding the rule of law by overturning false convictions.
”The whole of your record is deeply disturbing,” Cruz railed at Morrison. It cannot be said enough times that Morrison’s record is freeing innocent people.
“Across this country, Americans are horrified at skyrocketing crime rates, at skyrocketing homicide rates, at skyrocketing burglary rates, at skyrocketing carjacking rates,” Cruz said. “All of those are the direct result of the policies you’ve spent your entire lifetime advancing.”
Homicides rose in 2020 and 2021 after decades of decline, but remain well below where they were in the early 1990s.
Cruz and His Buddies Want People to Be Able to Beat on Flight Attendants, Pilots, and Passengers.
quick review of some of the behavior seen on airlines over the last two years. There was …
The passenger who bit off one passenger’s ear off after beating another passenger.
The passenger who peed in his seat as a protest against being asked to wear a mask.
The passenger who knocked out a flight attendant’s teeth, then got on the next flight.
The passenger who threatened to kill a flight attendant and track down her family.
The passenger who followed a flight attendant to the galley and beat her brutally.
The passenger who refused to sit and started throwing luggage at other passengers.
The passenger who refused to wear a mask because he was busy snorting cocaine.
The passenger who tried to break into the cockpit, then tried to open one of the emergency doors until he was taken down by other passengers and a coffee-pot wielding attendant.
The most terrible thing may be that these are just a few of the 5,981 reports logged by the Federal Aviation Administration in the last year. Out of these, a horrific 4,290 incidents were passengers who turned to violence or other disruptive behavior that delayed, diverted, or turned around a flight for one reason: refusing to wear a mask.
There’s something else that all these ear-biting, incontinent, violent assholes have in common: The support of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and at least seven other Republican senators. Those senators are opposing placing those who have violently disrupted airline flights on a no-fly list, because they claim such a list would draw an equivalence between terrorists and those who react with violence to being asked to wear a mask for the safety of others. And on that point, the Republicans are exactly right; that equivalence isn’t just there, it’s well deserved.
As The Washington Post reports, the eight Republicans dispatched a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. In that letter, Republicans claim they “strongly condemn” violence toward airline workers, but they don’t want the good names of people who are biting, punching, and peeing their way through American skies to be damaged. Or their ability to do it again to be threatened.
Bogus Billionaire Bannon Backer is Bankrupt. Boo Hoo.
Guo Wengui, aka Miles Keon, is the billionaire backer behind Steve Bannon and also the right-wing social media site Gettr. However, like some others who claim to be billionaires, he isn’t. This week he declared bankruptcy after a judge ordered him to pay $134 million to a creditor for a yacht, the Lady May, which he had moved into international waters in an attempt to welsh on a debt.
Jailed For Listening to Pillow Man
Last September, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly had revoked Douglas Jensen‘s bond in September after he admitted to watching a “Cyber Symposium regarding the recount of the presidential election” led by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. A pretrial services officer had discovered Jensen in August in his garage watching the symposium on a far-right video-sharing website.
The violation came less than one month after Jensen was released from custody. He had been in custody since his arrest days after the Capitol siege. Kelly, a Trump appointee, agreed to grant Jensen’s bond request in July. One of the conditions of Jensen’s pretrial release to home detention was that he avoid the use of any electronic device that can access the internet.
Scammers Scam. Google Profits.
1111 LLC, a little-known affiliate marketing company run by a former pro MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The firm, which also operates a network of pro-Trump news sites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one of Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers.
1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced videos via Google ads in recent months that promote entirely fabricated government handouts: $38,070 in tuition funding for individuals without college degrees through the “Government Education Program”; $2,888 for seniors in “certain zip codes” through the “ACA Plus Program”; $97,246 for homeowners through the “Homeowner Relief” program; $710 for drivers without DUIs through the “SODA Program”; among others.
Many of these ads are designed to look like news segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk appearing to sign documents related to the bogus payouts. Some ads even display falsified CNBC articles with headlines restating the ads’ hoaxes. They have collectively been viewed well over 100 million times in a matter of months, according to public Google data, sparking false hope in an untold number of households nationwide as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar year.
1111 LLC’s ads are part of a sprawling scheme to drive web traffic and harvest people’s personal details, including their phone numbers and emails, which may be sent directly to the marketing firm’s clients to do with as they please (like financially prey on the elderly), or may be rented out and sold as information lists for big money.
Shady companies fleecing people online is a story as old as the internet, but what’s noteworthy in this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed more than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run ads that cruelly con its own users while flagrantly violating its own policies — and, experts say, federal law.
Is a Cotton Mouth Poisonous?
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Wednesday accused Democrats of being insufficiently supportive of law enforcement, citing in part their backing of a prison reform bill President Donald Trump championed and signed into law in 2018.
Congress approved the measure, known as the First Step Act, by huge bipartisan margins. The vote was 87-12 in the Senate, with most of Cotton’s Republican colleagues on board. But Cotton and a few other conservatives insisted the law threatened public safety.
Democrats quickly pointed out that Trump and other Republican senators enthusiastically backed the law, pitching it as a major criminal justice reform initiative in their appeals to win over Black voters.
The law reduced prison sentences for some federal inmates whom federal prison officials deemed unlikely to commit future crimes. It also allowed inmates currently serving time for crack cocaine offenses to petition courts for an earlier release, correcting for the disparity in sentences for crack and powder cocaine.
The floor fight boiled over after Cotton placed a hold on eight of President Joe Biden’s U.S. attorney nominees, who would serve as top law enforcement officials around the country.
The Senate typically confirms U.S. attorney nominees via voice vote. It last required cloture on a U.S. attorney nominee in 1993 and last held a roll call vote on such a nominee in 1975.
PG's Lawyers Use the Sargent Schultz Defense "He Knows Nothing. Nothing." PG Says He Knows Everything.
Former President Donald Trump said in a court filing Monday that he "denies knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth" about his company's finances.
A day later, he issued a blistering 1,100-word statement in response to his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA dropping the Trump Organization as a client and claiming it could no longer stand by a decade's worth of tax documents. Trump waxed lyrical about his company's "fantastic assets" and said prosecutors should give consider giving Hillary Clinton the death penalty instead of investigating the Trump Organization's finances.
"My company has among the best real estate and other assets anywhere in the world, has significant amounts of cash, and has relatively very little debt, which is totally current," Trump said in the statement Tuesday.
The discrepancy was pointed out in a court filing Wednesday from the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James. Her office is set to face off against Trump in court Thursday and ask a judge to enforce a subpoena that would force him to sit for a deposition.
"It is not unusual for parties to a legal proceeding to disagree about the facts," wrote Austin Thompson, a lawyer for James's office. "But it is truly rare for a party to publicly disagree with statements submitted by his own attorneys in a signed pleading — let alone one day after the pleading was filed. That is what Mr. Trump has done here."
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COVID Deaths are FINALLY Trending Down. SLOOOOOWLY
Everything is trending down. Cases, hospitalizations, vaccinations, and news coverage.
It will be a while before cases get down to pre-Omicron levels of around 80,000 to 90,000. We are still over 200,00.
I would sure like to see the 38 million people who only got one shot get their second shot.
Then There Are These Headlines
"73% of Americans may be immune to omicron" -- USA Today
"Estimated 73% of US now immune to omicron: Is that enough?" -- AP
For the umpteenth time: There is no immunity. There is only increased resistance.
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Driving that Train. High on Cocaine. Zahra, You'd Better Watch Your Speed
A rail company recruiting 30 female train drivers in Saudi Arabia says it has received 28,000 applications.
The successful candidates will drive high-speed trains between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina after a year of training.
It is the first time such roles have been advertised for women in the conservative Muslim kingdom.
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Today's Safety Tip: Don't Hold Your Wedding on Top of a Well
At least 13 people have died after falling into a well during a wedding ceremony in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Police said the victims - all women and children - were sitting on a metal slab covering the well when it collapsed under their weight.
Two more people have been injured in the accident, which took place in Kushinagar district.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the deaths "heart-wrenching".
The tragedy took place on Wednesday evening during the traditional "haldi" ceremony, in which relatives apply turmeric paste to the faces of the bride and groom as a marker of prosperity.
When the slab broke, other guests ran to rescue the victims and took them to a nearby hospital. While 11 people were declared dead immediately, two others died later during treatment, police said.
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Short-Term Funding Can Mean Long-Term Problems
This week, the Senate plans to pass another short-term spending bill that would fund the government through March 11, narrowly avoiding a shutdown.
The vote on a short-term bill, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), comes as existing government funding is set to run out on February 18. In the roughly two months since the last CR passed, lawmakers have been unable to agree on what full-year appropriations should be, and hope to give themselves three more weeks to figure it out.
The agreement to prevent a shutdown is important. But relying on another CR is a deeply flawed approach to governance, one that fails to respond to the everyday needs of various agencies and programs. Because these CRs keep funding at levels approved by Congress in 2020, they effectively freeze spending at the amounts passed during the Trump administration. That means new programs aren’t being fully funded and older programs that need more money aren’t getting it, either.
Many government entities, including the military and the Department of Transportation, have said that the funding they’ve been given can't meet current needs. The use of a continuing resolution is also stalling the implementation of legislation that’s already been passed. Funding for various projects in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, for example, has been delayed since new spending bills haven’t been approved.
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Our Tax Dollars At Work
Still, there are broad trends in how states are spending the American Rescue Plan money: Almost every state that has allocated money so far has spent some on broadband, water and sewer infrastructure, which was one of the big spending categories determined by Congress.
So far, 22 states have allocated over $7 billion toward broadband, or about 9 percent of their total disbursements from the federal government. Within states, this has meant a mix of new programs, funding for existing programs and expansion of broadband services to more rural areas where the lack of access to reliable, fast internet made it harder for some children to attend virtual school during lockdowns.
Infrastructure has also been a big priority for states like Florida, which is spending money on highways and other transportation projects that had been long-planned but unfinished. Lazere said some of the need for infrastructure goes all the way back to the Great Recession, which began in 2007, and the long, slow recovery that followed. “These were areas of need that had not been addressed, [for which] there hadn’t been a dedicated state or federal funding source, so the rescue plan gave them the opportunity to tackle these problems that had been around for a long time,” he said.
Sounds Pretty Good to Me
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The Loan Sharks of the World Are on the Prowl
Some people are wondering if Trump’s latest troubles might actually endanger national security.
“This explodes the national security risk by a factor of 10, because now he's going to be desperate for new loans,” Joseph Cirincione, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the Daily Beast. “Legitimate banks are not going to touch him. So it expands the universe of shady characters who could offer him loans in return for favors that might include disclosing U.S. national security secrets.”
Cirincione continued: “Whether it is the Saudis, Russians, narcoterrorists—anybody with access to hundreds of millions would be in the running for Donald Trump’s new loan officer. That is why you don’t give security clearance to people who are financially compromised.”
So, yeah, it’s pretty important to keep him from winning again and having access to more government secrets. He might actually pay attention this time.
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One Night in Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Makes a Hard Man Humble. Terrible!
No, English speakers and others using the Roman alphabet aren’t going to have to start calling the Thai capital by its local name, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, and drop the more familiar “Bangkok.”
It started when the Cabinet on Tuesday approved a Royal Society proposal changing the way the capital would be referred to internationally from “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon; Bangkok” to “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (Bangkok).”
As people sought to divine the meaning behind changing the semicolon to parentheses, many put great weight to the accompanying explanation that it would “revise” the name of the capital city and keep the “former” name in brackets.
The capital is already officially known in the Thai language as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, which literally means “great city of angels,” and most Thais shorten it to just Krung Thep in conversation.
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Munich? They Had to Pick Munich?
Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to the Munich Security Conference later this week, as the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine still looms, and U.S. officials say the Russian military presence at the border of Ukraine has increased by as many as 7,000 troops. Russia has claimed that it is pulling back troops because its military exercises have concluded.
On Saturday, Harris will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and also separately with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, according to senior administration officials. This will be the first engagement between Harris and Zelensky. The vice president is also going to be meeting with the Baltic state leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
The Site of Neville Chamberlain's Meeting With Hitler and the Munich Olympics
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I Can't Believe They Signed on to Face the Most Terrifying Enemy on Earth. School Children!
On past deployments Army National Guard Spc. Michael Stockwell surveilled a desolate section of the U.S.-Mexico border during a migrant surge, and guarded a ring of checkpoints and fences around New Mexico’s state Capitol after the January 2021 insurrection in Washington.
On his current mission, Stockwell helps students with assignments as a substitute science teacher at Alamogordo High School.
“You can't act Army with these kids. You can't speak the same way you would with another soldier with these kids. You can't treat them the same way. You have to be careful with corrective actions,” he said with a laugh.
Dozens of National Guard Army and Air Force troops in New Mexico have been stepping in for an emergency unlike others they have responded to before: the shortage of teachers and school staff members that has tested the ability of schools nationwide to continue operating during the coronavirus pandemic.
While many other states and school districts issued pleas for substitute teachers amid omicron-driven surges in infections, New Mexico has been alone in calling out its National Guard members. In 36 of the state’s 89 school districts, guard members have traded in mission briefs for lesson plans to work for school systems.
Haven't They Watched Kindergarten Cop?
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Rising Seawater Doesn't Have to Cover the Land to Be a Problem
Surfside collapse exposes an overlooked threat: Saltwater rising from underground
Not long after a condo tower collapsed in Surfside, Florida, last June, Randall Parkinson had what he calls an epiphany.
Parkinson, a coastal geologist who studies the impact of climate change at Florida International University in Miami, wondered whether rising sea levels had driven saltwater into the ground beneath the tower, corroding its concrete foundation. Others were asking similar questions, but he couldn’t find anyone who’d researched the effect of saltwater intrusion on residential buildings.
“So I decided to dig a little deeper,” Parkinson said.
More than seven months after the June 24 collapse, which left 98 people dead, there are no definitive answers about what caused the 40-year-old condo, Champlain Towers South, to fall. Parkinson is one of several scientists who believe that the tower may have been damaged by saltwater seeping into its underground foundation.
He and others had previously found that rising sea levels press underground saltwater closer to the foundations of coastal buildings. They also note that photos showed corroded columns and flooding in Champlain Towers South’s underground garage and that staff members reported pumping water out of the garage.
In a December report, a Miami-Dade County grand jury investigating the collapse also theorized that saltwater intrusion had probably damaged the building’s foundation.
Surfside is 3 Feet Above Sea Level
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