Post by mhbruin on May 2, 2022 9:52:19 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 576 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday April 27)
We had some rain up north this week.
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I Call My Horse Mayo, and Sometimes Mayo Neighs
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
Blaming the Victims. I Guess They Don't Want Israel to Remain Neutral.
Israel has reacted with fury after Russia's foreign minister claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler "had Jewish blood".
Sergei Lavrov made the comments to try to justify Russia's portrayal of Ukraine as "Nazi" despite the fact that its president is Jewish.
Israel's foreign ministry summoned Russia's ambassador for "clarification" and demanded an apology.
Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust in World War Two.
Mr Lavrov made the remarks in an interview on Italian TV programme Zona Bianca on Sunday, days after Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the most solemn occasions in the Israeli calendar.
When asked how Russia can claim that it is fighting to "de-Nazify" Ukraine when President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish, Mr Lavrov said: "I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews."
The minister's statement was met with outrage across Israel's political spectrum.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said: "Such lies are meant to blame the Jews themselves for the most terrible crimes in history and thus free the oppressors of the Jews from their responsibility.
"No war today is the Holocaust or is like the Holocaust."
Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid reacted angrily, calling Mr Lavrov's words "unforgivable".
Are Your Kids Involved in Youth Sports. Check the Database.
In 2018, Congress and the U.S. Olympic Committee created the U.S. Center for SafeSport to investigate youth and adult abuse in Olympic-affiliated sports. SafeSport can ban coaches from participating in Olympic events or activities — including elite youth programs in sports like soccer, tennis, swimming and volleyball — but it has no jurisdiction over the vast majority of youth sports programs.
SafeSport has permanently banned hundreds of coaches. Today, one of them owns his own taekwondo facility in suburban Missouri and works with boys and girls under 12.
An NBC News analysis of people disciplined by SafeSport found at least 10 who appear to still be coaching or working with minors despite having been banned by SafeSport after they were criminally charged with offenses involving sexual misconduct. Another 10 people are still coaching or working with minors after they were banned as a result of a SafeSport investigation or investigation by an Olympic governing body, such as USA Swimming. Five more were found to have coached or trained kids after they were banned but no longer appear to be doing so.
The coaches amount to only a fraction of the roughly 1,400 who have been banned by SafeSport, but experts say they illustrate the vulnerability of the estimated 45 million children who participate in youth sports in the U.S.
Check out Your Kid's Coach Here
Are Nicaraguans & Mexicans Shelling Maternity Hospitals?
Republicans eager to concoct reasons to attack the Biden administration have spent the past month beating their well-worn drum about a nonexistent “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border by Latino immigrants. But this time around, the effect has been jarring.
That’s because, since late February, the world has been seeing in real time what an actual invasion looks like, thanks to the attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army. We’ve witnessed cities bombed into rubble, tanks rumbling through the countryside, suburbs turned into death camps, women and children murdered while waiting at railway stations.
So when Texas Congressman Michael McCaul goes on Fox News Sunday, as he did this week, and makes the comparison explicit—“Putin invaded Ukraine,” he told host Sandra Smith. “We have an invasion in my home state right on the border, every day”—the contrast between the two situations becomes stark. And the tawdry, wildly inappropriate nature of the analogy couldn’t be clearer.
Mexico Won't Pay For the Wall, But They Will Pay for the Railroad To Avoid Texas.
Looks like Mexico has finally had enough of being demonized by the GOP and looking to take their business, and billions, with them. Mexico has basically said FU to Abbott about his stunt last month to “secure the border” by ordering searches of trucks crossing the border.
Because of the wanna-be biggest MAGA governor stunt the Mexican government says it now intends to shift long-range plans to build a trade railway connection, worth billions of dollars, from Texas to blue friendly New Mexico, and seriously damaged it’s relationship with Texas’ number 1 trading partner.
As per the Dallas Morning News, “
“Mexican Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier said a planned rail and ports expansion — known as the T-MEC Corridor — to connect the Pacific port of Mazatlán to the Canadian city of Winnipeg would not use Texas, but instead the rail line would be routed along the far edge of West Texas up through Santa Teresa, N.M., about 20 miles west of downtown El Paso.“We’re now not going to use Texas,” Clouthier said at a conference April 28 in Mexico City. “We can’t leave all the eggs in one basket and be hostages to someone who wants to use trade as a political tool.””
The planned rail and ports expansion, known as the T-MEC Corridor, will connect the Pacific port of Mazatlán to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. It will now be routed along the far edge of West Texas up through Santa Teresa, N.M., about 20 miles west of downtown El Paso.
Clouthier’s message was clear: Mexico is angry about the chaos at the border caused by Abbott’s surprise order a few weeks back to force commercial trucks coming from Mexico to undergo additional inspections. While Texas officials didn’t uncover any contraband or undocumented migrants, they created hours long delays that left fresh produce to rot and caused havoc with supply chains.
You Don't Get Credit For Doing Something That Should Have Been Done Long Ago.
For years, pediatricians have followed flawed guidelines linking race to risks for urinary infections and newborn jaundice. In a new policy announced Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics said it is putting all its guidance under the microscope to eliminate “race-based” medicine and resulting health disparities.
A re-examination of AAP treatment recommendations that began before George Floyd’s 2020 death and intensified after it has doctors concerned that Black youngsters have been undertreated and overlooked, said Dr. Joseph Wright, lead author of the new policy and chief health equity officer at the University of Maryland’s medical system.
The influential academy has begun purging outdated advice. It is committing to scrutinizing its “entire catalog,” including guidelines, educational materials, textbooks and newsletter articles, Wright said.
In recent years, other major doctor groups including the American Medical Association have made similar pledges. They are spurred in part by civil rights and social justice movements, but also by science showing the strong roles that social conditions, genetics and other biological factors play in determining health.
Last year, the academy retired a guideline calculation based on the unproven idea that Black children faced lower risks than white kids for urinary infections. A review had shown that the strongest risk factors were prior urinary infections and fevers lasting more than 48 hours, not race, Wright said.
A revision to its newborn jaundice guidance — which currently suggests certain races have higher and lower risks — is planned for this summer, Wright said.
We'd Like To Forget Previous Guy's Name, Too. Why Can't He Just Go Away?
Former President Donald Trump couldn’t remember the name of the controversial Ohio Republican candidate he endorsed for Senate.
“We’ve endorsed ... J.P.? Right?” he asked at a Nebraska political rally Sunday, appearing to look to someone offstage from the podium for help while he was addressing the crowd.
“J.D. Mandel,” he finally chose. “And he’s doing great.”
The name he was searching for was J.D. Vance, venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has no experience in politics. (And it’s Josh Mandel; he’s running against Vance in the GOP primary on May 3.)
KABC Gets Award for Worst Headlines in the World
"Bidenomics: Gas prices on the rise again in LA, OC"
"Bidenomics II: Poll Shows 94 Percent Of Americans Are Worried About Inflation"
KABC is the flagship station of the USC Trojans football and men's basketball radio networks.
As of October 2021, KABC ranks 31st in among Los Angeles area radio stations in the Nielsen Radio Ratings.
She Was Kept on Ice for 19 Years. Now ICE Wants to Punish An Innocent Woman.
Sandra Castaneda spent 19 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.
But when the California courts overturned her conviction in July 2021, the 40-year-old Los Angeles woman did not walk free. Instead, she was picked up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and taken to a federal detention center where she is now facing deportation to Mexico, a country she left at age nine.
Castaneda has been in Ice detention for nine months, trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare in which lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Ice, argue she should be deported due to the original murder charge even though the California courts and an immigration judge have said that her conviction was invalid.
“I’m stuck here. There’s nothing to do all day and I get overwhelmed,” Castaneda said in a recent call from inside a detention center in the state of Georgia. “It’s like nothing applies to [Ice]. They can do whatever they want. It makes me angry … I’m just wasting time here.”
Immigrants’ rights advocates say her case is extraordinarily unjust – but far from unique.
The US has long deported immigrants based on their criminal records, routinely detaining people convicted of a wide range of offenses, leading people like Castaneda, who have legal status, to be threatened with removal.
But as the US justice system reckons with its past and various states have passed reform laws meant to right the wrongs of mass incarceration and unjust convictions, the immigration system has not caught up.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees
The US Military Gets a Win. They Are Not Getting the Credit They Deserve.
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Invasions Have Consequences
You Have to Be At Least a Little Crazy to Be a War Correspondent.
I tell him I want to go to Mykolaiv to see the front. The fussy man leans across the table. “Don’t do that,” he says. “I know you want a Pulitzer, but there is no guarantee you’ll come back.” He continues. “Look, this is not an army that respects the Geneva Convention. The Russians see the red cross of an ambulance as a target.”
We've Learned The Russian Army Wasn't All It Was Cracked Up to Be, And ...
The Russian Navy Ain't So Hot, Either
Kyiv said Monday that its drones sank two Russian patrol boats near the Black Sea's Snake Island where Ukrainian soldiers rebuffed Moscow's demands to surrender at the start of its invasion.
"Two Russian Raptor boats were destroyed at dawn today near Snake Island," Ukraine's defense ministry said in a statement distributed on social media.
The defense ministry also released grainy black-and-white aerial footage showing an explosion on a small military vessel.
"The Bayraktars are working," Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, was cited as saying in the statement, referring to Turkish-made military drones.
Raptor patrol boats can carry up to three crew and 20 personnel. They are usually equipped with machine guns and used in reconnaissance or landing operations.
Cancel Your May 9th Party Plans.
Note to TucKGBer
Germany Is Trying to Kick the Habit.
Germany says it’s making progress on weaning itself off Russian fossil fuels and expects to be fully independent of Russian crude oil imports by late summer.
Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday that Europe’s largest economy has reduced the share of Russian energy imports to 12% for oil, 8% for coal and 35% for natural gas. Germany has been under strong pressure from Ukraine and other nations in Europe to cut energy imports from Russia that are worth billions of euros, which help fill Russian President Vladimir Putin's war chest.
“All these steps that we are taking require an enormous joint effort from all actors and they also mean costs that are felt by both the economy and consumers,” Habeck said in a statement. “But they are necessary if we no longer want to be blackmailed by Russia.”
The announcement comes as the whole European Union considers an embargo on Russian oil following a decision to ban Russian coal imports starting in August. The bloc pays Russia $850 million a day for oil and natural gas and Germany is one of its top importers of Russian energy.
Germany has managed to shift to oil and coal imports from other countries in a relatively short time, meaning that “the end of dependence on Russian crude oil imports by late summer is realistic,” Habeck's ministry said.
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Every Time I Hear Someone Say They Tested Positive, But They Have Mild Symptoms, ...
Emerging research suggests that a small portion of people who now live with long Covid may have showed no Covid-19 symptoms at all when they were initially infected -- or their symptoms were mild or unusual,
Post COVID-19 Syndrome in Patients with Asymptomatic/Mild Form
We All Would Love This To Be Over, But ...
Let’s talk about how the COVID cycle seems to work.
1. New variant spotted — and it seems that South Africa is where most of the newest ones are found because the nation still sequences their cases while the US and UK shut their programs down. BA.2.12.1, being found in New York, is an exception to this trend.
2. Local surge where the new variant becomes dominant. This happened in both South Africa and New York this year with Omicron Original Recipe (remember that?) and BA.2.12.1, respectively.
3. The variant starts spreading beyond South Africa, usually to Europe. South Africa is hit with a wave of hospitalizations.
4. Europe notices the next wave has started and cases shoot up. South Africa starts to see the deaths.
5. The rest of the world starts seeing cases of the next variant, and Europe starts seeing hospitalizations rise. South Africa starts seeing the metrics fall.
6. The world sees a spike of cases and hospitalizations, Europe starts to spike in deaths, and South Africa returns to “COVID baseline”.
7. The world sees a spike in deaths, while European measures start their decline. South Africa detects a new subvariant/variant, and we are back at step #1.
The data from South Africa
I highly doubt we will see the bad days from the beginning of the pandemic again. We know so much more about how to treat COVID than we did then. But all it takes is waning immunity combined with jackassery (which I increasingly see around people ignoring simple protection measures) to allow the virus to return to its glory days.
Here's One Way to Deal With It. Or We Could Just Keep Wearing Masks.
The COVID-19 outbreak that has shut down most of Shanghai appears to be waning, with the number of new cases falling below 10,000 a day over the weekend.
Authorities have begun a limited easing of a citywide lockdown that has disrupted the lives of millions of residents and dealt at least a temporary blow to China's economy. Many have been confined to their apartments for three weeks or more. They reported difficulty ordering food deliveries in the early days of the lockdown and higher prices for what they could get.
China’s largest city recorded about 7,000 cases a day on Saturday and Sunday, down from a peak of 27,605 nearly three weeks ago on April 13. Shanghai reported 32 deaths, raising the death toll to 454. Most of the victims have been elderly and many were unvaccinated.
Even as many other countries relax pandemic restrictions, the Chinese government has stuck to a “zero-COVID” approach that restricts travel, mass tests entire cities and sets up sprawling temporary facilities to try to isolate every infected person. Lockdowns start with buildings and neighborhoods but become citywide if the virus is spreading widely.
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To Commute or Not To Commute, That is the Question.
A London law firm has offered staff the option to work from home permanently, but the convenience comes at a price.
The firm, Stephenson Harwood, said it would allow staff to work remotely but pay them 20% less than their current salary.
Since the start of the pandemic a debate has raged over who gains and who loses when staff work from home.
Employees save time and money, but employers can save too, on office space and costs.
Some argue workers are less productive when unsupervised at home. Others say without the commute they work longer hours, often spilling over into evenings and weekends and face fewer distractions.
Most recently cabinet office minister Jacob Rees-Mogg sparked controversy when he said all civil servants must stop working from home. and left notes on empty desks saying "I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon."
Academic studies suggest remote working can boost productivity. And many private sector firms have found that hybrid working, allowing a combination of home and office work, frees up space and improves staff satisfaction.
Stephenson Harwood told the BBC that it had recruited some remote workers from outside London during the pandemic, on a lower pay package, reflecting the lower cost of not commuting into the capital.
But if they do need to go to the office remote workers could claim travel expenses, he said.
The firm is now extending the remote working option to existing staff, but also applying the salary difference between the two packages, the firm said.
The choice of full-time remote working is available to all employees but not to partners in the firm.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the terrible driving of idiots and assholes, or to take a pay cut and end the drive?
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Russian Genocide in Ukraine. It's Deja Vu All Over Again.
In many parts of Russia, this “collectivization” of agriculture went relatively smoothly because the peasants were already accustomed to collectivized forms of land ownership. In a harsh climate and having poor soil, like in central and northern parts of Russia, villagers had merged their land plots into large pool of land (“община,” “мир”) since the days of old. In Ukraine, however, with its milder climate and exquisitely rich soils, that was unheard of. Not only wealthy, but middle-income level Ukrainian peasants became extremely hostile to the idea of communal land and agricultural produce ownership. In 1929-1930, hundreds of peasant uprisings were documented in Ukraine and brutally suppressed by the Red Army and special police force units. At one point, the government backed up and announced that the collective farming should be voluntary. Immediately, the number of Ukrainian peasants who had joined the collective farms plummeted, so the government had to resume repressions and harassment of individual landowners. By the end of 1930, a campaign of mass deportation of wealthy individual landowners (“kulaks” in Russian or “kurkuli” in Ukraine) resulted in forceful re-settlement of hundreds of thousands of rural families from Ukraine to remote areas of Siberia and Middle Asia. Over there, those who managed to survive the most brutal conditions of transportation were organized into “special settlements” not actually differing from concentration camps.
The events began to unroll leading to one of the worst genocides in the entire history of the humankind. As Professor Roman Serbyn writes in his brilliant series of works on this subject, Stalin and the narrow inner circle of his henchmen embarked on a task to completely remove Ukraine out of their way, to eliminate it as a nation, a culture, and a political subject. The task consisted of four parts: (1) to destroy the intellectual core of Ukraine, its “brain” – the writers, artists, scientists, engineers, managers, doctors, teachers; (2) to rip off Ukraine’s “heart” – the clergy, the spiritual, religious leaders who remained outside of the control from Moscow; (3) to wipe out the Ukrainian peasantry with its traditions of individual ownership and responsibility, with its resilience against the dictatorship of the state; and (4) to kill off all the islets of the Ukrainian language and culture outside the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, i.e. in Russia, including the Kuban, the North Caucasus, certain areas in the Far East etc. Stalin wanted to see Ukraine merely as a territory with rich farmland that could be exploited for his main pragmatic plan: to strengthen the army that, eventually, the sooner the better, will subjugate the whole world, molding it into his personal empire. Any other kind of Ukraine did not suit him.
Between 1930 and 1934, the GPU (secret police) of the Ukrainian SSR, under the leadership of S. Redens and then V. Balitsky, forged the stories of several fictional “counter-revolutionary organizations” that, allegedly, existed in Ukraine and worked to bring Ukraine under the control of Capitalist countries, particularly Poland. One of them, the so-called SVU (from Ukrainian Спілка визволення України, “The Ukrainian Liberation Union”), allegedly included the former leaders of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, including such luminaries as Serhiy Efremov, V. Chekhivsky (see Parts 6 and 7 of this series), L. Starytska-Chernyakhivska, Y. Hermaize and others. Almost 500 people were indicted and 45 were tried in Kharkiv in March-April 1930. Many of the tried did not even confirm the existence of any SVU; others did testify that the organization had existed, but their testimony was extremely conflicting and obviously given under duress. All of the tried were found guilty and 15 of them were sentenced to death by firing squad; others were sent to concentration camps. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. All over Ukraine, local Stalinist henchmen arrested, tortured, executed, or deported thousands and thousands of intellectuals. Many of the victims, like the writer Hryhoriy Kosynka, were kidnapped from their homes or on the street and executed within weeks without any trial.
In January 1930, the so-called Ukrainian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church allegedly issued a statement calling for the Extraordinary Convention of the Ukrainian Orthodox clergy. In fact, this document was a sham composed by the secret police. The “Convention,” which was subsequently staged, declared that the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was a schismatic group founded by agents of Petlyura to harm the Russian Orthodoxy in Ukraine. Following this pseudo- “convention,” all Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox parishes were forcefully closed and the head of the UOAC, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky, was arrested (he was shot in 1937 and later canonized as a martyr). The remaining Orthodox parishes in Ukraine were strictly forbidden to use the Ukrainian language in their services. By the late 1930s, almost all clergy that had any connection with the UOAC were physically eliminated – executed or worked to death in GULAG camps.
But the most horrific genocide was committed in rural areas. In June 1932, Ulas Chubar, then the head of the government of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote to Stalin that after the forced collectivization and the numerous requisitions of grain, Ukraine urgently needs help or, otherwise, there will be mass starvation. In response, the quotas of grain that the Ukraine farmers “owed” to the government were only increased. By June 30, 1932, the entire stock of seed grain was taken away from Ukraine. On August 7, 1932, Stalin’s government issued a decree that made it a crime for a farmer to take home even a tiny amount of grain from the collective farm fields. Those who were caught gleaning grain were ordered to be executed on the spot. Only if the weight of the “stolen” grain was equal to, or less than, the weight of approximately 5 kernels of wheat, the execution could be replaced by at least 10 years of hard labor with confiscation of all belongings. Children were not exempt from this barbaric law. In that same month of August, employees of all railroads in Ukraine were ordered not to let peasants board the trains going from the rural areas to big cities, unless they had a special permit from their collective farm and local Communist Party authorities. All highways and country roads were patroled by armed special police units. So, millions of impoverished, exhausted, hungry, sick, barely moving people were herded to the collective farm fields for back-breaking labor every day, without being even minimally compensated and without any chance to escape. To make things even deadlier, a number of regions in Ukraine (especially areas in the east and southeast where the soil was the richest) were demanded to pay absolutely fantastic fines for not reaching the grain quotas; for example, an area could receive orders to pay its “debt” in grain, and then, as punishment, also 15 times this weight paid with meat of the livestock (which was not there because it had been slaughtered due to hunger and the lack of fodder). In the many areas that were announced to be “malicious debtors,” all food stores were closed down and farmers’ markets were outlawed. Meanwhile, special armed bands of the military and civilian “activists” continued to raid villages, taking away all food. Beginning from fall 1932, they received orders not to leave anything edible to the peasants; if they could not carry more food after loading their trucks or carriages, they had to physically destroy any food they would find in the villagers’ dwellings. So, they poured soup or stew on the ground, stomped potatoes to mesh with their boots etc. They also took away clothes and pottery. Their activities became openly genocidal.
History of Ukraine: The genocide of Ukrainians by Stalin
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November is Still Six Months Away
Today, 46 percent of registered voters say they would vote for the Democrat in their congressional district, compared with 45 percent who say they would vote for the Republican. Based on historical patterns, Democrats would likely need a bigger advantage to avoid losing their majority.
Yet last fall, Republicans held a 10-point edge and in February led by seven points on this question, known as the generic ballot. Nearly all of the change since February is the result of a shift toward the Democrats among self-identified independents, a group that can be volatile in public opinion polls.
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Overall, as mentioned, Biden’s general job approval rating is up 5 points, to 42%, from his low as president in February. That includes his best rating among Hispanic people (62% approve) since just after he took office and +9 points since February among urban residents.
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Faster Than a Speeding Greyhound
Vera Rasnake laughed as she led a trio of barking, jostling dogs into the Iowa Greyhound Park, but her smile faded when she acknowledged that after 41 years of being around the sleek animals, her sport was teetering on extinction.
After the end of a truncated season in Dubuque in May, the track here will close. By the end of the year there will only be two tracks left in the country.
It’s been a long slide for greyhound racing, which reached its peak in the 1980s when there were more than 50 tracks across 19 states. Since then, increased concerns about how the dogs are treated along with an explosion of gambling options have nearly killed a sport that gained widespread appeal about a century ago.
A racing association found that betting on greyhounds plunged from $3.5 billion in 1991 to about $500 million in 2014. Since then, many more tracks have closed.
In some states like the dog-racing mecca of Florida in 2021, it was voter initiatives that ended the sport at the state’s dozen tracks. In others like Iowa, state officials allowed casinos to end subsidies that had kept greyhound racing alive as interest declined.
“Do I think the industry is dying? Yes,” said Gwyneth Anne Thayer, who has written a history of greyhound racing. But “it’s happening way faster than I thought it would.”
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New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | New Hospitalizations 7-Day Average | |
| May 1 | 57,020 | 307 | |
| Apr 30 | 56,581 | 310 | 1,882 |
| Apr 29 | 56,166 | 308 | 1,946 |
| Apr 28 | 54,696 | 311 | 1,955 |
| Apr 27 | 53,133 | 334 | 1,941 |
| Apr 26 | 48,692 | 299 | 1,889 |
| Apr 25 | 47,407 | 330 | 1,840 |
| Apr 24 | 44,416 | 314 | 1,779 |
| Apr 23 | 45,413 | 315 | 1,629 |
| Apr 22 | 44,308 | 311 | 1,642 |
| Apr 21 | 40,744 | 346 | 1,647 |
| Apr 20 | 42,604 | 375 | 1,609 |
| Apr 19 | 40,985 | 385 | 1,582 |
| Apr 18 | 37,132 | 380 | 1,564 |
| Apr 17 | 35,212 | 373 | 1,542 |
| Apr 16 | 34,972 | 379 | 1,532 |
| Apr 15 | 34,778 | 399 | 1,510 |
| Apr 14 | 35,475 | 446 | 1,490 |
| Apr 13 | 31,391 | 409 | 1,477 |
| Apr 12 | 29,401 | 452 | 1,463 |
| Apr 11 | 30,208 | 483 | 1.447 |
| Apr 10 | 28,927 | 500 | 1,443 |
| Apr 9 | 28,339 | 509 | |
| Apr 8 | 28,169 | 516 | |
| Apr 7 | 26,286 | 471 | |
| Apr 6 | 26,595 | 496 | |
| Apr 5 | 26,845 | 533 | |
| Apr 4 | 25,537 | 537 | |
| Apr 3 | 25,074 | 572 | |
| Apr 2 | 25,787 | 576 | |
| Apr 1 | 26,106 | 584 | |
| Mar 31 | 25,980 | 605 | |
| Mar 30 | 25,732 | 626 | |
| Mar 29 | 25,218 | 644 | |
| Mar 28 | 26,190 | 700 | |
| Mar 27 | 26,487 | 690 | |
| Mar 26 | 26,593 | 697 | |
| Mar 25 | 26,874 | 705 | |
| Feb 16, 2021 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | % of Vaccinated W/ Boosters | |
| % of Total Population | 77.5% | 66.0% | 45.6% |
| % of Population 5+ | 82.3% | 70.2% | |
| % of Population 12+ | 87.1% | 74.5% | 47.4% |
| % of Population 18+ | 88.9% | 76.0% | 49.1% |
| % of Population 65+ | 95.0% | 90.0% | 68.3% |
California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday April 27)
We had some rain up north this week.
| Percent of Average for this Date | Last Week | 2 Weeks Ago | |
| Northern Sierra Precipitation | 81% (74%) | 79% (70%) | 73% (63% of full season average) |
| San Joaquin Precipitation | 67% (61%) | 65% (58%) | 65% (57%) |
| Tulare Basin Precipitation | 62% (57%) | 60% (54%) | 61% (53%) |
| Snow Water Content - North | 29% | 15% | |
| Snow Water Content - Central | 33% | 27% | |
| Snow Water Content - South | 23% | 24% |
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I Call My Horse Mayo, and Sometimes Mayo Neighs
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
Blaming the Victims. I Guess They Don't Want Israel to Remain Neutral.
Israel has reacted with fury after Russia's foreign minister claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler "had Jewish blood".
Sergei Lavrov made the comments to try to justify Russia's portrayal of Ukraine as "Nazi" despite the fact that its president is Jewish.
Israel's foreign ministry summoned Russia's ambassador for "clarification" and demanded an apology.
Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust in World War Two.
Mr Lavrov made the remarks in an interview on Italian TV programme Zona Bianca on Sunday, days after Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the most solemn occasions in the Israeli calendar.
When asked how Russia can claim that it is fighting to "de-Nazify" Ukraine when President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish, Mr Lavrov said: "I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews."
The minister's statement was met with outrage across Israel's political spectrum.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said: "Such lies are meant to blame the Jews themselves for the most terrible crimes in history and thus free the oppressors of the Jews from their responsibility.
"No war today is the Holocaust or is like the Holocaust."
Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid reacted angrily, calling Mr Lavrov's words "unforgivable".
Are Your Kids Involved in Youth Sports. Check the Database.
In 2018, Congress and the U.S. Olympic Committee created the U.S. Center for SafeSport to investigate youth and adult abuse in Olympic-affiliated sports. SafeSport can ban coaches from participating in Olympic events or activities — including elite youth programs in sports like soccer, tennis, swimming and volleyball — but it has no jurisdiction over the vast majority of youth sports programs.
SafeSport has permanently banned hundreds of coaches. Today, one of them owns his own taekwondo facility in suburban Missouri and works with boys and girls under 12.
An NBC News analysis of people disciplined by SafeSport found at least 10 who appear to still be coaching or working with minors despite having been banned by SafeSport after they were criminally charged with offenses involving sexual misconduct. Another 10 people are still coaching or working with minors after they were banned as a result of a SafeSport investigation or investigation by an Olympic governing body, such as USA Swimming. Five more were found to have coached or trained kids after they were banned but no longer appear to be doing so.
The coaches amount to only a fraction of the roughly 1,400 who have been banned by SafeSport, but experts say they illustrate the vulnerability of the estimated 45 million children who participate in youth sports in the U.S.
Check out Your Kid's Coach Here
Are Nicaraguans & Mexicans Shelling Maternity Hospitals?
Republicans eager to concoct reasons to attack the Biden administration have spent the past month beating their well-worn drum about a nonexistent “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border by Latino immigrants. But this time around, the effect has been jarring.
That’s because, since late February, the world has been seeing in real time what an actual invasion looks like, thanks to the attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army. We’ve witnessed cities bombed into rubble, tanks rumbling through the countryside, suburbs turned into death camps, women and children murdered while waiting at railway stations.
So when Texas Congressman Michael McCaul goes on Fox News Sunday, as he did this week, and makes the comparison explicit—“Putin invaded Ukraine,” he told host Sandra Smith. “We have an invasion in my home state right on the border, every day”—the contrast between the two situations becomes stark. And the tawdry, wildly inappropriate nature of the analogy couldn’t be clearer.
Mexico Won't Pay For the Wall, But They Will Pay for the Railroad To Avoid Texas.
Looks like Mexico has finally had enough of being demonized by the GOP and looking to take their business, and billions, with them. Mexico has basically said FU to Abbott about his stunt last month to “secure the border” by ordering searches of trucks crossing the border.
Because of the wanna-be biggest MAGA governor stunt the Mexican government says it now intends to shift long-range plans to build a trade railway connection, worth billions of dollars, from Texas to blue friendly New Mexico, and seriously damaged it’s relationship with Texas’ number 1 trading partner.
As per the Dallas Morning News, “
“Mexican Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier said a planned rail and ports expansion — known as the T-MEC Corridor — to connect the Pacific port of Mazatlán to the Canadian city of Winnipeg would not use Texas, but instead the rail line would be routed along the far edge of West Texas up through Santa Teresa, N.M., about 20 miles west of downtown El Paso.“We’re now not going to use Texas,” Clouthier said at a conference April 28 in Mexico City. “We can’t leave all the eggs in one basket and be hostages to someone who wants to use trade as a political tool.””
The planned rail and ports expansion, known as the T-MEC Corridor, will connect the Pacific port of Mazatlán to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. It will now be routed along the far edge of West Texas up through Santa Teresa, N.M., about 20 miles west of downtown El Paso.
Clouthier’s message was clear: Mexico is angry about the chaos at the border caused by Abbott’s surprise order a few weeks back to force commercial trucks coming from Mexico to undergo additional inspections. While Texas officials didn’t uncover any contraband or undocumented migrants, they created hours long delays that left fresh produce to rot and caused havoc with supply chains.
You Don't Get Credit For Doing Something That Should Have Been Done Long Ago.
For years, pediatricians have followed flawed guidelines linking race to risks for urinary infections and newborn jaundice. In a new policy announced Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics said it is putting all its guidance under the microscope to eliminate “race-based” medicine and resulting health disparities.
A re-examination of AAP treatment recommendations that began before George Floyd’s 2020 death and intensified after it has doctors concerned that Black youngsters have been undertreated and overlooked, said Dr. Joseph Wright, lead author of the new policy and chief health equity officer at the University of Maryland’s medical system.
The influential academy has begun purging outdated advice. It is committing to scrutinizing its “entire catalog,” including guidelines, educational materials, textbooks and newsletter articles, Wright said.
In recent years, other major doctor groups including the American Medical Association have made similar pledges. They are spurred in part by civil rights and social justice movements, but also by science showing the strong roles that social conditions, genetics and other biological factors play in determining health.
Last year, the academy retired a guideline calculation based on the unproven idea that Black children faced lower risks than white kids for urinary infections. A review had shown that the strongest risk factors were prior urinary infections and fevers lasting more than 48 hours, not race, Wright said.
A revision to its newborn jaundice guidance — which currently suggests certain races have higher and lower risks — is planned for this summer, Wright said.
We'd Like To Forget Previous Guy's Name, Too. Why Can't He Just Go Away?
Former President Donald Trump couldn’t remember the name of the controversial Ohio Republican candidate he endorsed for Senate.
“We’ve endorsed ... J.P.? Right?” he asked at a Nebraska political rally Sunday, appearing to look to someone offstage from the podium for help while he was addressing the crowd.
“J.D. Mandel,” he finally chose. “And he’s doing great.”
The name he was searching for was J.D. Vance, venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has no experience in politics. (And it’s Josh Mandel; he’s running against Vance in the GOP primary on May 3.)
KABC Gets Award for Worst Headlines in the World
"Bidenomics: Gas prices on the rise again in LA, OC"
"Bidenomics II: Poll Shows 94 Percent Of Americans Are Worried About Inflation"
KABC is the flagship station of the USC Trojans football and men's basketball radio networks.
As of October 2021, KABC ranks 31st in among Los Angeles area radio stations in the Nielsen Radio Ratings.
She Was Kept on Ice for 19 Years. Now ICE Wants to Punish An Innocent Woman.
Sandra Castaneda spent 19 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.
But when the California courts overturned her conviction in July 2021, the 40-year-old Los Angeles woman did not walk free. Instead, she was picked up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and taken to a federal detention center where she is now facing deportation to Mexico, a country she left at age nine.
Castaneda has been in Ice detention for nine months, trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare in which lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Ice, argue she should be deported due to the original murder charge even though the California courts and an immigration judge have said that her conviction was invalid.
“I’m stuck here. There’s nothing to do all day and I get overwhelmed,” Castaneda said in a recent call from inside a detention center in the state of Georgia. “It’s like nothing applies to [Ice]. They can do whatever they want. It makes me angry … I’m just wasting time here.”
Immigrants’ rights advocates say her case is extraordinarily unjust – but far from unique.
The US has long deported immigrants based on their criminal records, routinely detaining people convicted of a wide range of offenses, leading people like Castaneda, who have legal status, to be threatened with removal.
But as the US justice system reckons with its past and various states have passed reform laws meant to right the wrongs of mass incarceration and unjust convictions, the immigration system has not caught up.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees
The US Military Gets a Win. They Are Not Getting the Credit They Deserve.
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Invasions Have Consequences
You Have to Be At Least a Little Crazy to Be a War Correspondent.
I tell him I want to go to Mykolaiv to see the front. The fussy man leans across the table. “Don’t do that,” he says. “I know you want a Pulitzer, but there is no guarantee you’ll come back.” He continues. “Look, this is not an army that respects the Geneva Convention. The Russians see the red cross of an ambulance as a target.”
We've Learned The Russian Army Wasn't All It Was Cracked Up to Be, And ...
The Russian Navy Ain't So Hot, Either
Kyiv said Monday that its drones sank two Russian patrol boats near the Black Sea's Snake Island where Ukrainian soldiers rebuffed Moscow's demands to surrender at the start of its invasion.
"Two Russian Raptor boats were destroyed at dawn today near Snake Island," Ukraine's defense ministry said in a statement distributed on social media.
The defense ministry also released grainy black-and-white aerial footage showing an explosion on a small military vessel.
"The Bayraktars are working," Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, was cited as saying in the statement, referring to Turkish-made military drones.
Raptor patrol boats can carry up to three crew and 20 personnel. They are usually equipped with machine guns and used in reconnaissance or landing operations.
Cancel Your May 9th Party Plans.
Note to TucKGBer
Germany Is Trying to Kick the Habit.
Germany says it’s making progress on weaning itself off Russian fossil fuels and expects to be fully independent of Russian crude oil imports by late summer.
Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday that Europe’s largest economy has reduced the share of Russian energy imports to 12% for oil, 8% for coal and 35% for natural gas. Germany has been under strong pressure from Ukraine and other nations in Europe to cut energy imports from Russia that are worth billions of euros, which help fill Russian President Vladimir Putin's war chest.
“All these steps that we are taking require an enormous joint effort from all actors and they also mean costs that are felt by both the economy and consumers,” Habeck said in a statement. “But they are necessary if we no longer want to be blackmailed by Russia.”
The announcement comes as the whole European Union considers an embargo on Russian oil following a decision to ban Russian coal imports starting in August. The bloc pays Russia $850 million a day for oil and natural gas and Germany is one of its top importers of Russian energy.
Germany has managed to shift to oil and coal imports from other countries in a relatively short time, meaning that “the end of dependence on Russian crude oil imports by late summer is realistic,” Habeck's ministry said.
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Every Time I Hear Someone Say They Tested Positive, But They Have Mild Symptoms, ...
Emerging research suggests that a small portion of people who now live with long Covid may have showed no Covid-19 symptoms at all when they were initially infected -- or their symptoms were mild or unusual,
Post COVID-19 Syndrome in Patients with Asymptomatic/Mild Form
We All Would Love This To Be Over, But ...
Let’s talk about how the COVID cycle seems to work.
1. New variant spotted — and it seems that South Africa is where most of the newest ones are found because the nation still sequences their cases while the US and UK shut their programs down. BA.2.12.1, being found in New York, is an exception to this trend.
2. Local surge where the new variant becomes dominant. This happened in both South Africa and New York this year with Omicron Original Recipe (remember that?) and BA.2.12.1, respectively.
3. The variant starts spreading beyond South Africa, usually to Europe. South Africa is hit with a wave of hospitalizations.
4. Europe notices the next wave has started and cases shoot up. South Africa starts to see the deaths.
5. The rest of the world starts seeing cases of the next variant, and Europe starts seeing hospitalizations rise. South Africa starts seeing the metrics fall.
6. The world sees a spike of cases and hospitalizations, Europe starts to spike in deaths, and South Africa returns to “COVID baseline”.
7. The world sees a spike in deaths, while European measures start their decline. South Africa detects a new subvariant/variant, and we are back at step #1.
The data from South Africa
I highly doubt we will see the bad days from the beginning of the pandemic again. We know so much more about how to treat COVID than we did then. But all it takes is waning immunity combined with jackassery (which I increasingly see around people ignoring simple protection measures) to allow the virus to return to its glory days.
Here's One Way to Deal With It. Or We Could Just Keep Wearing Masks.
The COVID-19 outbreak that has shut down most of Shanghai appears to be waning, with the number of new cases falling below 10,000 a day over the weekend.
Authorities have begun a limited easing of a citywide lockdown that has disrupted the lives of millions of residents and dealt at least a temporary blow to China's economy. Many have been confined to their apartments for three weeks or more. They reported difficulty ordering food deliveries in the early days of the lockdown and higher prices for what they could get.
China’s largest city recorded about 7,000 cases a day on Saturday and Sunday, down from a peak of 27,605 nearly three weeks ago on April 13. Shanghai reported 32 deaths, raising the death toll to 454. Most of the victims have been elderly and many were unvaccinated.
Even as many other countries relax pandemic restrictions, the Chinese government has stuck to a “zero-COVID” approach that restricts travel, mass tests entire cities and sets up sprawling temporary facilities to try to isolate every infected person. Lockdowns start with buildings and neighborhoods but become citywide if the virus is spreading widely.
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To Commute or Not To Commute, That is the Question.
A London law firm has offered staff the option to work from home permanently, but the convenience comes at a price.
The firm, Stephenson Harwood, said it would allow staff to work remotely but pay them 20% less than their current salary.
Since the start of the pandemic a debate has raged over who gains and who loses when staff work from home.
Employees save time and money, but employers can save too, on office space and costs.
Some argue workers are less productive when unsupervised at home. Others say without the commute they work longer hours, often spilling over into evenings and weekends and face fewer distractions.
Most recently cabinet office minister Jacob Rees-Mogg sparked controversy when he said all civil servants must stop working from home. and left notes on empty desks saying "I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon."
Academic studies suggest remote working can boost productivity. And many private sector firms have found that hybrid working, allowing a combination of home and office work, frees up space and improves staff satisfaction.
Stephenson Harwood told the BBC that it had recruited some remote workers from outside London during the pandemic, on a lower pay package, reflecting the lower cost of not commuting into the capital.
But if they do need to go to the office remote workers could claim travel expenses, he said.
The firm is now extending the remote working option to existing staff, but also applying the salary difference between the two packages, the firm said.
The choice of full-time remote working is available to all employees but not to partners in the firm.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the terrible driving of idiots and assholes, or to take a pay cut and end the drive?
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Russian Genocide in Ukraine. It's Deja Vu All Over Again.
In many parts of Russia, this “collectivization” of agriculture went relatively smoothly because the peasants were already accustomed to collectivized forms of land ownership. In a harsh climate and having poor soil, like in central and northern parts of Russia, villagers had merged their land plots into large pool of land (“община,” “мир”) since the days of old. In Ukraine, however, with its milder climate and exquisitely rich soils, that was unheard of. Not only wealthy, but middle-income level Ukrainian peasants became extremely hostile to the idea of communal land and agricultural produce ownership. In 1929-1930, hundreds of peasant uprisings were documented in Ukraine and brutally suppressed by the Red Army and special police force units. At one point, the government backed up and announced that the collective farming should be voluntary. Immediately, the number of Ukrainian peasants who had joined the collective farms plummeted, so the government had to resume repressions and harassment of individual landowners. By the end of 1930, a campaign of mass deportation of wealthy individual landowners (“kulaks” in Russian or “kurkuli” in Ukraine) resulted in forceful re-settlement of hundreds of thousands of rural families from Ukraine to remote areas of Siberia and Middle Asia. Over there, those who managed to survive the most brutal conditions of transportation were organized into “special settlements” not actually differing from concentration camps.
The events began to unroll leading to one of the worst genocides in the entire history of the humankind. As Professor Roman Serbyn writes in his brilliant series of works on this subject, Stalin and the narrow inner circle of his henchmen embarked on a task to completely remove Ukraine out of their way, to eliminate it as a nation, a culture, and a political subject. The task consisted of four parts: (1) to destroy the intellectual core of Ukraine, its “brain” – the writers, artists, scientists, engineers, managers, doctors, teachers; (2) to rip off Ukraine’s “heart” – the clergy, the spiritual, religious leaders who remained outside of the control from Moscow; (3) to wipe out the Ukrainian peasantry with its traditions of individual ownership and responsibility, with its resilience against the dictatorship of the state; and (4) to kill off all the islets of the Ukrainian language and culture outside the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, i.e. in Russia, including the Kuban, the North Caucasus, certain areas in the Far East etc. Stalin wanted to see Ukraine merely as a territory with rich farmland that could be exploited for his main pragmatic plan: to strengthen the army that, eventually, the sooner the better, will subjugate the whole world, molding it into his personal empire. Any other kind of Ukraine did not suit him.
Between 1930 and 1934, the GPU (secret police) of the Ukrainian SSR, under the leadership of S. Redens and then V. Balitsky, forged the stories of several fictional “counter-revolutionary organizations” that, allegedly, existed in Ukraine and worked to bring Ukraine under the control of Capitalist countries, particularly Poland. One of them, the so-called SVU (from Ukrainian Спілка визволення України, “The Ukrainian Liberation Union”), allegedly included the former leaders of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, including such luminaries as Serhiy Efremov, V. Chekhivsky (see Parts 6 and 7 of this series), L. Starytska-Chernyakhivska, Y. Hermaize and others. Almost 500 people were indicted and 45 were tried in Kharkiv in March-April 1930. Many of the tried did not even confirm the existence of any SVU; others did testify that the organization had existed, but their testimony was extremely conflicting and obviously given under duress. All of the tried were found guilty and 15 of them were sentenced to death by firing squad; others were sent to concentration camps. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. All over Ukraine, local Stalinist henchmen arrested, tortured, executed, or deported thousands and thousands of intellectuals. Many of the victims, like the writer Hryhoriy Kosynka, were kidnapped from their homes or on the street and executed within weeks without any trial.
In January 1930, the so-called Ukrainian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church allegedly issued a statement calling for the Extraordinary Convention of the Ukrainian Orthodox clergy. In fact, this document was a sham composed by the secret police. The “Convention,” which was subsequently staged, declared that the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was a schismatic group founded by agents of Petlyura to harm the Russian Orthodoxy in Ukraine. Following this pseudo- “convention,” all Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox parishes were forcefully closed and the head of the UOAC, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky, was arrested (he was shot in 1937 and later canonized as a martyr). The remaining Orthodox parishes in Ukraine were strictly forbidden to use the Ukrainian language in their services. By the late 1930s, almost all clergy that had any connection with the UOAC were physically eliminated – executed or worked to death in GULAG camps.
But the most horrific genocide was committed in rural areas. In June 1932, Ulas Chubar, then the head of the government of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote to Stalin that after the forced collectivization and the numerous requisitions of grain, Ukraine urgently needs help or, otherwise, there will be mass starvation. In response, the quotas of grain that the Ukraine farmers “owed” to the government were only increased. By June 30, 1932, the entire stock of seed grain was taken away from Ukraine. On August 7, 1932, Stalin’s government issued a decree that made it a crime for a farmer to take home even a tiny amount of grain from the collective farm fields. Those who were caught gleaning grain were ordered to be executed on the spot. Only if the weight of the “stolen” grain was equal to, or less than, the weight of approximately 5 kernels of wheat, the execution could be replaced by at least 10 years of hard labor with confiscation of all belongings. Children were not exempt from this barbaric law. In that same month of August, employees of all railroads in Ukraine were ordered not to let peasants board the trains going from the rural areas to big cities, unless they had a special permit from their collective farm and local Communist Party authorities. All highways and country roads were patroled by armed special police units. So, millions of impoverished, exhausted, hungry, sick, barely moving people were herded to the collective farm fields for back-breaking labor every day, without being even minimally compensated and without any chance to escape. To make things even deadlier, a number of regions in Ukraine (especially areas in the east and southeast where the soil was the richest) were demanded to pay absolutely fantastic fines for not reaching the grain quotas; for example, an area could receive orders to pay its “debt” in grain, and then, as punishment, also 15 times this weight paid with meat of the livestock (which was not there because it had been slaughtered due to hunger and the lack of fodder). In the many areas that were announced to be “malicious debtors,” all food stores were closed down and farmers’ markets were outlawed. Meanwhile, special armed bands of the military and civilian “activists” continued to raid villages, taking away all food. Beginning from fall 1932, they received orders not to leave anything edible to the peasants; if they could not carry more food after loading their trucks or carriages, they had to physically destroy any food they would find in the villagers’ dwellings. So, they poured soup or stew on the ground, stomped potatoes to mesh with their boots etc. They also took away clothes and pottery. Their activities became openly genocidal.
History of Ukraine: The genocide of Ukrainians by Stalin
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November is Still Six Months Away
Today, 46 percent of registered voters say they would vote for the Democrat in their congressional district, compared with 45 percent who say they would vote for the Republican. Based on historical patterns, Democrats would likely need a bigger advantage to avoid losing their majority.
Yet last fall, Republicans held a 10-point edge and in February led by seven points on this question, known as the generic ballot. Nearly all of the change since February is the result of a shift toward the Democrats among self-identified independents, a group that can be volatile in public opinion polls.
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Overall, as mentioned, Biden’s general job approval rating is up 5 points, to 42%, from his low as president in February. That includes his best rating among Hispanic people (62% approve) since just after he took office and +9 points since February among urban residents.
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Faster Than a Speeding Greyhound
Vera Rasnake laughed as she led a trio of barking, jostling dogs into the Iowa Greyhound Park, but her smile faded when she acknowledged that after 41 years of being around the sleek animals, her sport was teetering on extinction.
After the end of a truncated season in Dubuque in May, the track here will close. By the end of the year there will only be two tracks left in the country.
It’s been a long slide for greyhound racing, which reached its peak in the 1980s when there were more than 50 tracks across 19 states. Since then, increased concerns about how the dogs are treated along with an explosion of gambling options have nearly killed a sport that gained widespread appeal about a century ago.
A racing association found that betting on greyhounds plunged from $3.5 billion in 1991 to about $500 million in 2014. Since then, many more tracks have closed.
In some states like the dog-racing mecca of Florida in 2021, it was voter initiatives that ended the sport at the state’s dozen tracks. In others like Iowa, state officials allowed casinos to end subsidies that had kept greyhound racing alive as interest declined.
“Do I think the industry is dying? Yes,” said Gwyneth Anne Thayer, who has written a history of greyhound racing. But “it’s happening way faster than I thought it would.”
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