Mon - Which Will Russia Run Out of First, Guns or Ammo?

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Today's Worst Joke in the World

Lego store opens after lockdown.  People lined up for blocks.
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“We Have to Get Out of This Phase”: Ashish Jha on the Future of the Pandemic

Many experts believe that this, more or less, is our new normal: new variants, intermittent surges, breakthrough infections, occasional boosters, offices emptying out when cases rise—covid not as an emergency, but not something we can forget about, either. Is that the way that you see things? Are we condemned to repeat the recent past for the foreseeable future?

No, no, no. Might we have to deal with this for another six months or a year? Sure. But are we living like this three or five years from now? Absolutely not. We have hundreds of thousands of Americans getting infected every day. We still have a few hundred people dying of covid every day. I don’t think any of this is an acceptable normal for the long run. First, it is very disruptive. Second, we don’t fully understand long covid, but the idea of people getting infected over and over and over again—it’s just not great. Third is that this just continues to fuel more variants.

So, what’s going to change it?

What’s currently driving new variants is their ability to escape immunity. As we get more complex immunity—meaning that some people have immunity from the original vaccines, other people from newer vaccines, other people have immunity from infections with Delta and Omicron—you’re building a population immunity that gets harder and harder for the virus to break through. I do think there is a limit to how much the virus can keep evading.

If It's the Last Thing We Ever Do.  We Gotta Get Out of This Phase.  Girl, There's a Better Life For Me and You.



What Is This Phase?

For two years, the coronavirus killed Americans on a brutal, predictable schedule: A few weeks after infections climbed so did deaths, cutting an unforgiving path across the country.

But that pattern appears to have changed. Nearly three months since an ultra-contagious set of new Omicron variants launched a springtime resurgence of cases, people are nonetheless dying from Covid at a rate close to the lowest of the pandemic.

The spread of the virus and the number of deaths in its wake, two measures that were once yoked together, have diverged more than ever before, epidemiologists said. Deaths have ticked up slowly in the northeastern United States, where the latest wave began, and are likely to do the same nationally as the surge pushes across the South and West. But the country remains better fortified against Covid deaths than earlier in the pandemic, scientists said.
  
Because so many Americans have now been vaccinated or infected or both, they said, the number of people whose immune systems are entirely unprepared for the virus has significantly dwindled.

“In previous waves, there were still substantial pockets of people who had not been vaccinated or exposed to the virus, and so were at the same risk of dying as people at the beginning of the pandemic,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Those pockets don’t exist anymore.”

Personal Note

Even if it doesn't kill you, my fully-vaccinated daughter is feeling HORRIBLE.  This is still not "just like the flu".

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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees

If they Added a Lump of Coal to Each Meal, Manchin Would Have Supported This

Last summer, Shenae Rowe was able to provide 36,000 meals a week to hungry kids throughout Warrick County in rural southwest Indiana. Parents could pick up a week’s worth of food in one trip to take home.

This summer, the Warrick school district’s director of food and nutrition is hoping to serve 600 meals a week. Breakfast and lunch will only be available in two schools in the spread-out district instead of nine schools, and only for four weeks instead of the whole summer. Plus, kids will have to eat on site rather than be able to bring the food home.

“It makes my heart break,” Rowe said. “We got to help so many families.”

Summer meals programs around the country are drastically shrinking this year because Congress did not extend Covid-19 pandemic waivers that provided school districts with much more freedom to distribute food to kids during the break.

The waivers, which were put in place in March 2020 to give needy families access to free meals when schools were closed early in the pandemic and to help schools cope with supply chain disruptions, expire on June 30. Advocates had pressed lawmakers to extend them as part of the federal government’s spending bill in March, but the measure did not make it into the final legislation.

These Ads Of QOP Holding Guns Are Turning Into a Cliche


News From the Land of Oz


Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania's crucial U.S. Senate race, has repeatedly criticized pharmaceutical companies blamed for the rising cost of insulin — but his recent financial disclosure shows that he has invested up to $715,000 in exactly those companies.

Prior to announcing his Senate bid, Oz repeatedly railed about the rising cost of diabetes treatment, lamenting in a Newsmax op-ed that the cost of insulin had more than tripled over the past decade.

"Globally, three companies dominate the insulin market, and all of them have raised their prices dramatically. In 1996, the original price of Humalog was $21 a vial; it is now $275," he wrote in a joint op-ed with Dr. Mike Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute.

The rising cost is "forcing many people to reduce their life-saving use of insulin," the authors warned, citing a study that found that a quarter of diabetic patients had to ration doses because of the cost. "Interestingly, very few of the patients surveyed were uninsured, but their out-of-pocket costs were still prohibitively high, and so were their blood sugar levels," they wrote.

The Credit Card Industry Wants to Hide Gun Sales.  Don't They Know Dead Mass Shooters Won't Pay Their Bills?

The credit card industry has blocked a novel effort to track suspect firearm and ammunition purchases, depriving law enforcement of a potential tool to identify and stop gun crime.

Documents obtained by CBS News show employees from domestic and international credit card companies, including Visa, Mastercard and American Express, pushed back on an application to create a merchant category code for firearm and ammunition sellers.

The application was first submitted in July 2021 by the New York-based Amalgamated Bank, and was twice denied by the International Standards Organization (ISO), which sets standards across the financial services industry. The documents show that the credit card industry employees were part of an internal committee within ISO that recommended the application's rejection. The ISO told CBS News the credit card companies only advised the committee and did so in a "personal capacity."

"So much illegal gun activity depends on your ability to use the financial system to buy the guns," Priscilla Sims Brown, the CEO of Amalgamated Bank told CBS News chief investigative correspondent Jim Axelrod in an exclusive interview.

Amalgamated Bank began considering applying for a unique firearms seller code after it said it noticed some of the deadliest mass shootings were being financed with credit cards.

The shooter who terrorized a Colorado movie theater in 2012 charged more than $9,000 worth of guns, ammunition and tactical gear in the two months leading up to his attack that killed 12 and injured 70.

The man who shot up the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people, put more than $26,000 on credit cards.

And the shooter who killed 59 at a music festival in Las Vegas charged almost $95,000.

"We have an obligation to address crime that is being facilitated through our system," Sims Brown said.

"Her Allegations Are False, But We Are Giving Her $15 Million Anyway.

Fox News reportedly agreed to pay former anchor Melissa Francis approximately $15 million to settle a dispute over her claims of a gender pay gap at the network, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

Francis had filed a separate complaint with the New York State Labor Department last year, arguing the conservative outlet retaliated against her after she brought up evidence of male hosts being paid more than their female counterparts, according to the Daily Beast.

Fox News continues to deny her allegations.

“We parted ways with Melissa Francis over a year and a half ago and her allegations were entirely without merit,” a Fox News spokesperson told HuffPost. “We have also fully cooperated with the New York State Department of Labor’s investigation and look forward to the completion of this matter.”

This Sounds Like Crypto-Babel to Me

Babel Finance, the distressed crypto lender which froze withdrawals on Friday, said it won a reprieve on debt repayments as it battles to survive a tumultuous slump in cryptocurrency markets.

Hong Kong-based Babel has “reached preliminary agreements on the repayment period of some debts, which has eased the company’s short-term liquidity pressure,” it said in a statement sent to Bloomberg on Monday and later posted to its website. Co-founder Flex Yang told Bloomberg the company “will disclose to the public” once they’ve made progress.

Babel is in talks with large institutions about potential solutions that include setting up a new entity to take over some of the debt, a person with knowledge of the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.

Babel’s difficulties highlight the turmoil sweeping the crypto industry, where at least one more major lender has frozen withdrawals and a prominent hedge fund is trying to stave off collapse. Babel cited “unusual liquidity pressures” for its decision to halt withdrawals.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees

You Should Have Seen the One Which Got Away

A fisherman in northern Cambodia hooked what researchers say is the world’s largest freshwater fish — a giant stingray that scientists know relatively little about.

The fisherman, 42, caught the 661-pound fish — which measured about 13 feet in length — near a remote island on the Mekong River in the Stung Treng area. A team of scientists from the Wonders of Mekong research project helped tag, measure and weigh the ray before it was released back into the river. The research group believes it was healthy when released and expects it to survive.

The tag — which emits an acoustic signal — will allow researchers to track the fish’s movements and, they hope, learn more about its species’ behavior in the Mekong.

The catch “highlights how little we know about a lot of these giant freshwater fish,” said Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada. “You have a fish that’s now the record holder for the world’s largest freshwater fish, and we know little about it.”

The fisherman, Moul Thun, caught the giant stingray with a hook and line on the evening of June 13, and then contacted researchers the next morning.



This is a Fair Grade


60% Get It Right Again.  Personally, I Think He Should Be Charged With MANY Crimes




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Invasions Have Consequences

Day 117

Fighting

Russia advances as its forces seize a village near Ukraine’s industrial city of Severodonetsk, a prime target in Moscow’s campaign to control Ukraine’s east, Russian state news agency TASS said. Luhansk’s Governor Serhiy Haidai told Ukrainian television Russian claims are a lie and “they control the main part of the town, not the whole town”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he expects Russia to intensify attacks on Ukraine as Kyiv waits for the European Union’s decision to grant it candidacy status.

Russia’s air forces are underperforming in Ukraine, forcing Moscow to rely more than planned on exhausted ground troops and advanced cruise missiles that are running out, the UK’s defence ministry said.

Ukraine’s deputy prosecutor general says Kyiv launched 19 criminal proceedings against Russian soldiers for sexual violence against at least 14 women in the temporarily occupied territories.

Diplomacy

European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen expressed confidence that Ukraine will be granted official candidate status ahead of a key EU summit in Brussels later this month.

Ukraine is not a suitable candidate for EU membership, the speaker of Russia’s parliament Viacheslav Volodin said, citing “total corruption, rampant crime, oligarchic power and a ruined economy”.

The UK must have a military capable of fighting in Europe and defeating Russia, the new head of the British army said.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the war in Ukraine “could take years” and the West must continue its support, Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported.

Economy

Russia’s blockade of the export of millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain is a war crime, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday in Luxembourg.

EU foreign ministers will discuss ways to free the grain stuck in Ukraine at a meeting in Luxembourg.

Russia promised to continue gas shipments to Hungary, Budapest’s foreign minister said.

Germany’s economy minister said the country will limit the use of natural gas for electricity production amid concerns about possible shortages caused by a cut in supplies from Russia.

Who's Got the Guns?

NASA FIRMS data suggests that more artillery is landing on Russian-held territory than Ukrainian. And sure, NASA FIRMS satellite imagery isn’t perfect, but one would expect to see far greater fire disparity if, indeed, Russia had a 10-1 advantage in artillery. Look at the last three days of fires near Severodonetsk:



The vast majority of those fires are on Russian-held territory. The ones on Ukrainian land can be counted with one hand. Ukraine is slamming the f’ out of Russian artillery and logistical targets, and it looks similar all around the Donbas front. Popasna, for example, is getting smacked hard. Meanwhile, Russian accounts themselves have lamented their own perceived inability to keep up with Ukrainian artillery.

[Note:  NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) distributes near real-time (NRT) active fire data within three hours of a satellite observation.]

Russia Has the Ammo

One of the primary aspirations of professional militaries is to field a force capable of delivering victory while circumventing attritional warfare. Attritional warfare develops when neither side is able to achieve a decisive advantage. Unless new capabilities or terrain shift the logic of a fight, attritional warfare ends when one side exhausts its supply of people, materiel or morale. This is the grim state of the current fighting in Ukraine.

For Russia, the low morale and poor cohesion of its infantry prevents its army from undertaking large offensive manoeuvres without taking unsustainable levels of losses in both personnel and equipment. So far, it has lost about a quarter of its armoured forces in Ukraine.

Russia has therefore resorted to the saturation of Ukrainian positions with artillery, destroying defended villages and tree lines until Ukrainian troops are forced to withdraw, and then advancing to occupy what has been abandoned. This is slow and resource-intensive, but Russia has enough ammunition to keep up its current rate of fire for several years.

But Can Ukraine Take Out the Guns?

“Russia currently has about 110 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in Ukraine, according to the United States. Each group could have six to eight artillery pieces such as howitzers or rocket launchers, Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine colonel and a senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told RFE/RL, an estimate that would put the total as high as 900, with the majority concentrated in the Donbas.” 
SO maybe 900 pieces.  (I have heard numbers as high as 1,600.)

But Ukraine says they have knocked out 745 artillery pieces so far in the war 

And as I pointed out before — they fire 50,000 rounds a day and the tubes lives burn at 2,000 full charge rounds. ie — they have already used up the useful lives of about 2,800 tubes. And they will continue to wear out those lives 25 a day (750 a month). Without changing them out they get more and more and more off and the range gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And eventually they just blow up at the throat or otherwise completely break. 

Modern War


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Who Killed Shireen?

A New York Times investigation has concluded that an Israeli soldier “mostly likely” fatally shot Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, adding to a growing body of independent probes that have found that the Palestinian-American correspondent was killed by Israeli forces.

The New York Times report, published on Monday, said no Palestinian armed men were near Abu Akleh at the time she was killed in the occupied West Bank, dismissing early Israeli theories blaming Palestinians for the incident.
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The Attack of the Killer Scooters

Rome, the eternal city, has been invaded, conquered and pillaged countless times since its founding nearly 2,800 years ago.  The current invasion of the Italian capital comes from e-scooters -- more than 14,000 of them -- modern chariots that block sidewalks, unnerve drivers and kill.

Since rental scooters were introduced three years ago as an alternative to public transportation during the Covid pandemic, four people have been killed while riding them, according to Rome City Hall mobility councilman Eugenio Patane. The city's emergency rooms treat at least one scooter-related major injury every three days, health authorities say.

And yet only 2% (around 270) of the foot scooters for rent are used on a daily basis.

Rome City Hall has given licenses to seven companies responsible for changing batteries, carrying out repairs, moving scooters to high-traffic areas and fishing them out of the city's Tiber River.

It's the scooters that aren't in use that are presenting the greatest challenge, especially to the disabled.

As Giuliano Frittelli, head of the Italian Union for the Blind and Visually Impaired, navigates with his walking stick around a half a dozen scooters littering the sidewalk near his office in the city center, he tells CNN that for people who don't see, they are a death trap.

"The first problem is the wild parking," Frittelli says as he taps his walking stick on the base of a scooter, explaining that their unusual shape also makes it easy for someone with impaired eyesight to trip over them.

He also says that because they are electric, they are silent, which is also a threat to those who cannot see.

"You don't hear them so you cannot navigate around them," Frittelli says, recalling an incident when a scooter passed a blind person so closely their startled seeing-eye dog jumped off the sidewalk, causing what he called "a series of frights" that luckily did not end in physical injury.
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Tweet of the Day


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In Today's Barents Sea News, ...

New data has found that temperatures in the northern Barents Sea are so high that they will negatively affect the extreme weather events in North America, Europe, and Asia. What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

The new figures show annual average temperatures in the area are rising across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in the months of autumn of up to 4C a decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest warming place known on Earth.

Recent years have seen temperatures far above average recorded in the Arctic, with seasoned observers describing the situation as “crazy”, “weird”, and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown.

It was already known that the climate crisis was driving heating across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but the new research shows the situation is even more extreme in places.

We know that without sea ice, the reflectivity of the sun's rays back to space is lost and as a result, the ocean absorbs heat from the sun in a reinforcing feedback loop.

“We expected to see strong warming, but not on the scale we found,” said Ketil Isaksen, senior researched at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and who led the work. “We were all surprised. From what we know from all other observation points on the globe, these are the highest warming rates we have observed so far.”

“The broader message is that the feedback of melting sea ice is even higher than previously shown,” he said. “This is an early warning for what’s happening in the rest of the Arctic if this melting continues, and what is most likely to happen in the next decades.” The world’s scientists said in April that immediate and deep cuts to carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases are needed to tackle the climate emergency.

“This study shows that even the best possible models have been underestimating the rate of warming in the Barents Sea,” said Dr Ruth Mottram, climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, and not part of the team. “We seem to be seeing it shifting to a new regime, as it becomes less like the Arctic and more like the North Atlantic. It’s really on the edge right now and it seems unlikely that sea ice will persist in this region for much longer.”

You Don't Know Where the Barents Sea Is?   We Need More Maps.



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Happy Juneteenth!
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