Month: April 2021

James Fallows passed along this list of useful unsolicited advice from @kevin2kelly. I’m not quite at his age, but I can certainly endorse a good part of it — and now that I think about it, much of the rest. (I’m still learning, obviously.)

Fallows added his own maxim” “Never miss a chance to give a *deserved* compliment.” Absolutely.

Kelly wrote:

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.

• Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

• Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

• Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

• Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.

• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

• Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

• Treating a person to a meal never fails, and is so easy to do. It’s powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.

• Don’t trust all-purpose glue.

• Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and kickstart their imaginations.

• Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don’t be in debt to losers.

• Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

• Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.

• Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

• Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.

• Don’t be the best. Be the only.

• Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

• Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works. [Don’t be a pest though or you will turn yourself into a stalker. Learn how to take no for an answer, too. — digby]

• The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.

• Promptness is a sign of respect.

• When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.

• Trust me: There is no “them”.

• The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.

• Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.

• To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

• The Golden Rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all other virtues.

• If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

• Saving money and investing money are both good habits. Small amounts of money invested regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.

• To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.

• Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

• You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.

• Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.

• Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

• If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.

• Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

• Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

• This is true: It’s hard to cheat an honest man.

• When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm’s reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you’ll find it.

• You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

• If you lose or forget to bring a cable, adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels now have a drawer full of cables, adapters and chargers others have left behind, and probably have the one you are missing. You can often claim it after borrowing it.

• Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.

• There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

• Be prepared: When you are 90% done any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

• When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

• Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

• For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.

•Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.

• On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You’ll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.

• When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.

• Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.

• If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.

• Art is in what you leave out.

• Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

• Rule of 7 in research. You can find out anything if you are willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn’t know, ask them who you should ask next, and so on down the line. If you are willing to go to the 7th source, you’ll almost always get your answer.

• How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

• Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.

• When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.

• Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

• You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

• Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.

• A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

• Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

• Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.

• Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

• I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

• Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

• The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there well worth pondering.

As far as I can tell in my neighborhood, the pandemic is officially over. Sure some of us oldsters are still following the guidelines but the number of younger people just going completely back to normal is huge. Big change from even a couple of weeks ago.

Sadly, some of them are going to get this thing. And a few oldies who haven’t been fully vaccinated will too. And that’s not good for anyone.

Here’s the latest:

What used to be a mysterious new variant first detected in the UK is now the most dominant coronavirus strain in the US.And unlike the original strain of the novel coronavirus, the more contagious B.1.1.7 strain is hitting young people particularly hard.”(Covid-19) cases and emergency room visits are up,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

We are seeing these increases in younger adults, most of whom have not yet been vaccinated.”Now doctors say many young people are suffering Covid-19 complications they didn’t expect.

And it’s time to ditch the belief that only older adults or people with pre-existing conditions are at risk of severe Covid-19.

Viruses mutate all the time, and most mutations aren’t very important. But if the mutations are significant, they can lead to dangerous new variants of a virus.”

The B.1.1.7 variant has mutations that allow it to bind more” to cells, said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University.”

Think of this mutation as making the virus stickier.”

Coronavirus latches onto cells with its spike proteins — the spikes surrounding the surface of the virus.”There is a little difference in the way the (B.1.1.7) spike protein holds that makes it stick to your cells a little more easily,” said emergency physician Dr. Megan Ranney, director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health.

With the original strain of the novel coronavirus, “you need a certain inoculum — a certain amount of virus — in order for the infection to basically stick,” Reiner said.”Is one viral particle enough to make you sick? No, probably not. On the other hand … sometimes a massive inoculum can kill an otherwise healthy person. And we’ve seen that in health care workers,” he said.”

So these new variants, particularly the UK variant, seem to be stickier. So the notion is that it’s more contagious, so to speak, because potentially you don’t need as much of an inoculum to get sick.”

What this means in real life: “You can be in a place and maybe have a briefer exposure or have a smaller exposure — more casual exposure — and then get infected,” Reiner said.And because B.1.1.7 is stickier, “you may indeed have a higher viral load.”

“If you have a higher number of viral particles in your respiratory tract, then it’s going to be easier to spread it to other people,” Ranney said.

That’s another reason why it’s so important for young adults to get vaccinated.B.1.1.7 cases have now been reported in all 50 states, the CDC said.

“What we’re seeing in a bunch of places now is sick, young people — hospitalized young people. Whereas earlier on in the pandemic, it was primarily older people,” Reiner said.

“The reason for this might be as simple as the older population in this country has either been exposed to this virus, killed by the virus, or now vaccinated against the virus.”

As of Saturday, more than 78% of people age 65 and over have received at least one dose of vaccine, and 60% have been fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

“The unvaccinated — those are the people who are getting infected — we’re seeing a large number of young people, and they’re the ones we’re seeing in hospitals now.”

In March, New Jersey saw a 31% jump in Covid-19 hospitalizations among young adults ages 20 to 29, the state health commissioner said. And the 40-49 age group saw a 48% increase in Covid-19 hospitalizations.Ranney said she’s also noticed a stark change in who’s getting hospitalized.

“This has been kind of a gradual increase in the proportion of folks who are younger over the last couple of months,” she said, citing data from COVID-NET — which tracks cases from more than 250 hospitals in 14 states.

“Looking at the week of December 26 or January 2, age 65-plus would be, say, 3,000 (hospitalizations). And then everything else together is 3,000. More than 50% were age 65-plus.”But by March 27, “it was about one-third (ages) 18 to 49 … about one-third ages 50 to 64, and then about one-third 65-plus,” Ranney said.

As an emergency room doctor, Ranney said she regularly sees young, previously healthy patients struggling with coronavirus.”I see at least a few people on every ER shift that I work who are there because they are having persistent trouble breathing or other side effects as a result of Covid-19,” she said.

Ranney said she generally defines “young people” as those under 50. But “no matter which age cutoff you use, right now, we’re seeing more B.1.1.7 than the older variants.”

“We’re certainly seeing it more in 20s and 30s as well,” she said. “And people in their 20s and 30s are less likely to be vaccinated and more likely to be out and about.”

The vast majority of positive coronavirus tests don’t go through genomic sequencing to figure out whether it’s B.1.1.7 or another strain. But as genomic sequencing increases nationwide, health experts say there’s no doubt B.1.1.7 is fueling more hospitalizations among young people.Dr. Justin Skrzynski is a Covid hospitalist — or specialist in the care of Covid-19 patients — at Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak in Michigan. He said the facility sends a portion of its coronavirus samples to the state for DNA analysis.

“Right now, the regular Covid test we do — that’s still just showing Covid (or) no Covid,” Skrzynski said.

“But we do send a lot of those out to the state, and we are seeing something like 40% of our patients now (with) B.1.1.7.”Reiner said he thinks both human behavior and the “stickiness” of B.1.1.7 are leading to more Covid-19 hospitalizations among young people.”It may be simply because of just (more young people) getting infected … and perhaps the inoculum (viral load) is higher,” he said.

Sometimes, young people can be victims of their own strong immune systems.Throughout the pandemic, doctors have noticed some young, previously healthy patients suffer from Covid-19 cytokine storms. That’s basically when someone’s immune system overreacts — potentially causing severe inflammation or other serious symptoms.

As B.1.1.7 keeps spreading, it’s possible the number of young people with cytokine storms will increase, Reiner said.”We’ve certainly seen people come into our hospital, very young people (in their early 20s) … need to be put on ECMO, which is basically a heart-lung machine for days or even weeks because they come in with cardiomyopathy — which is a response to a cytokine storm,” he said.

As more young people get infected, doctors are worried they’ll see more of a disturbing trend they’ve noticed for months — long-term complications.

“I cannot tell you how many people I’ve taken care of in the ER who are in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who are never sick enough to end up in the ER with Covid, but who now have long-lasting respiratory difficulties,” Ranney said

.”Or they have persistent loss of taste and smell, and they’re losing weight because there’s no joy from eating. Or they have that kind of brain fog that we hear about with long Covid. And it’s not universal. It’s not every person who gets Covid who’s going to get that. But there is the reality that this disease is not benign — regardless of whether they get hospitalized or in the ICU,” she said.

“So I think there’s this false sense of both ‘I’m immune to it just because I’m young,’ and ‘Even if I catch it, I’ll be fine.’ You may be lucky. And that may be true, that if you catch it, you’ll be fine. But there’s also a chance that you won’t.”

Reiner said some long-haul symptoms in young people have lasted roughly a year now — “debilitating symptoms that have come in the aftermath of their coronavirus infection,” he said.”So what I would say to young people is that Covid-19 doesn’t have to kill you to wreck your life.

“Health experts say it’s critical to keep practicing Covid-19 safety precautions until many more people get vaccinated. Yet some states have ditched mask mandates or reopened bars to full capacity just as B.1.1.7 was spreading rapidly.

And that’s likely fueling the spread of B.1.1.7 among young people, Reiner said.

“They’re the people going out to the bars. They’re the people meeting for brunch. The older people in this country have been hunkered down for a year because they’ve been worried about dying from this virus. Young people in this country haven’t worried so much about dying from this virus.

And there’s a lot of pandemic fatigue.

“Reiner said he understands many businesses have been devastated and need to fully reopen once it’s safe to.

“But easing the mask mandate makes zero sense,” he said. “There is no economic hardship, and there’s no personal hardship to require a person to wear a mask when they’re out in public.”

Ranney said young people may misinterpret the lifting of safety mandates.”When you hear that … as a regular person who’s not following the day-to-day (data), you think, ‘Well, my governor wouldn’t open it if it’s not safe,'” she said. “So I think there is that mixed message.”

It’s not just young adults who are getting infected with this variant. More cases of B.1.1.7 are showing up among children, too.

“Absolutely, we are seeing a higher number of kids test positive for B.1.1.7 than we have seen for the other virus types,” Ranney said.”It’s not necessarily that kids are more susceptible to B.1.1.7. But it’s just that they’re more likely to be exposed to it both because they’re out and about, and because this version is more transmissible.

“While classroom learning is relatively safe when the right safety precautions are taken, health officials say after-school activities — such as youth sports and other extracurriculars — are causing more children to get Covid-19.

And while Covid-19 deaths among children are extremely rare, they have happened.

Some children who contracted coronavirus have experienced MIS-C, or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, which is rare but can sometimes cause severe illness or death.

The good news about B.1.1.7: We don’t need a new playbook to fight it. But we do have to follow the existing playbook closely to snuff out this highly contagious variant.

“Even though it is more transmissible, every piece of data that we have supports that we can still stop it using the same techniques that we have used for other variants,” Ranney said.

“So it’s still about masks and physical distancing and ventilation and vaccines. And our current vaccines — and this is really critical — the current vaccines work really well against B.1.1.7.”

But here’s the catch: The longer a virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to develop new mutations. And if the mutations are significant, they can lead to more problematic variants — including some that might evade vaccine protection.

“To me, this is a warning sign. This is a shot across the bow of what could happen,” Ranney said.B.1.1.7 “does spread more easily. It is increasing the number of cases. We’re seeing some increases in hospitalizations, probably due to the B.1.1.7 spread. But the vaccines work against it,” she said.”There may be future variants for which we are not so lucky.”

California plans to completely re-open on June 15th. And if everyone can keep their wits about them until then there should be no problem in doing that. But if a bunch of young people and right wingers don’t get vaccinated and this variant does to us what it’s doing to Michigan I don’t think it will happen.

The good news here is that there seems to be a willingness to get vaccinated here and the program is working pretty well. If they can get to the hard to reach populations, especially with the one-shot J&J, we might just beat the odds. But I do wish people would be a little bit more careful. Big, maskless, indoor parties are still a bad idea.

Remember that “Health and Freedom Conference” starring Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and other right wing crazies? Here’s a taste of Trump lawyer Lin Wood:

The crowd is going totally crazy over it! pic.twitter.com/hsRUKX473Z

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) April 18, 2021

Lin Wood is a Georgia man, and the Trumpers down there are still hopping mad:

The grassroots anger at Gov. Brian Kemp and other top state officials who refused to overturn former President Donald Trump’s election defeat bubbled up on Saturday at several county GOP meetings across the state as activists gathered to censure or rebuke the GOP leaders for their stances.

Republican delegates in more than a half-dozen counties passed resolutions over the past week assailing Kemp for not doing more to help Trump’s false claims of voting fraud. And several more also punished Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who have also drawn Trump’s wrath.

The governor’s forceful defense of a new election rewrite that includes new restrictions to voting pushed by pro-Trump forces has put him on more solid footing with his party’s base, but the fallout of the weekend showed he’s still not in the clear.

Though he has so far escaped a top-tier Republican primary opponent, former Democrat Vernon Jones launched a challenge against him on Friday, vowing to win over anti-Kemp conservatives despite only switching to the GOP earlier this year.

And while most local GOP groups refused to rebuke Kemp, the mostly rural counties that did offered evidence that the governor must still shore up his base in an expected rematch against Democrat Stacey Abrams, the nationally known voting rights advocate and former House leader who narrowly lost to him in 2018.

Even a fraction of Republicans who remain skeptical of Kemp could pose problems to Kemp in November 2022, much like a sharp turnout drop in conservative rural areas hampered U.S. Senate incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the January runoff defeats to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

“Many of the Trump supporters that did not return and vote in the January runoff will not return to vote for Kemp in 2022,” said Brian Pritchard, a North Georgia GOP activist and commentator. “The only way to get a Trump supporter to vote for Kemp is to get Trump to endorse Kemp. And we don’t see that happening.”

You never know. Trump likes to hold grudges but he also likes to make his enemies grovel for his favor. We’ll have to see.

“That’s what happens when people listen to us.” — One America News producer Marty Golingan upon seeing Capitol insurrectionist holding a flag emblazoned with his network’s logo.

One America News Network continues to promote conspiracy that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” At least a few staffers are uneasy about that. Sixteen of 18 staffers the New York Times interviewed “said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue.”

“The real question is to what extent.”

New York Times:

To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Donald J. Trump as “President Trump” and to President Biden as just “Joe Biden” or “Biden.” That practice is not followed by other news organizations, including the OAN competitor Newsmax, a conservative cable channel and news site.

OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators. Toward the end of a March 4 news segment that described the attack as the work of “antifa” and “anti-Trump extremists” — and referred to the president as “Beijing Biden” — Mr. Sharp said, “History will show it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who called for this violence.” Investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the Capitol riot.

Charles Herring, the president of Herring Networks, the company that owns OAN, defended the reports casting doubt on the election. “Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly took place in the November 2020 election,” he said. “The real question is to what extent.”

Spoken as if the answer to that question is none of his concern.

Charles Herring defended OAN’s coverage. “A review process with multiple checks is in place to ensure that news reporting meets the company’s journalist standards,” he said. “And, yes, we’ve had our fair share of mistakes, but we do our best to keep them to a minimum and learn from our missteps.”

Mr. Golingan added that, since Inauguration Day, OAN’s news director, Lindsay Oakley, had reprimanded him for referring to Mr. Biden as “President Biden” in news copy. Ms. Oakley did not reply to requests for comment.

More than a dozen employees have resigned since the Capitol riot.

“And the thing is, when people speak up about anything, you will get in trouble,” said Allysia Britton, a former OAN news producer.

Dominion Voting Systems has sued Fox News, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell over alleged defamatory claims about its voting machines in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, something OAN has done as well. One of its most popular YouTube videos is hosted by OAN White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, features a man claiming to have heard “company executives say they would ‘make sure’ Mr. Trump lost.”

Mr. Golingan, the producer, said some OAN employees had hoped Dominion would sue the channel. “A lot of people said, ‘This is insane, and maybe if they sue us, we’ll stop putting stories like this out,’” he said.

Not as long as there are Trump cultists ready to believe.

“Policing in America is on trial here,” Joseph Giacalone told the Washington Post last week. “Derek Chauvin has done more damage to policing in America than any issue since I’ve been alive.” The retired NYPD detective sergeant teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Chauvin is on trial in Minneapolis, Minn. for the murder of George Floyd last May.

One would think repeated negative press, rumors of cracks in the “blue wall of silence,” and nationwide calls for sweeping police reform might have given more officers pause. Particularly around Minneapolis. And one would be wrong (USA Today):

Journalists covering a protest in a Minneapolis suburb Friday night were forced on their stomachs by law enforcement, rounded up and were only released after having their face and press credentials photographed.

The incident occurred hours after a judge issued a temporary order barring the Minnesota State Patrol from using physical force or chemical agents against journalists, according to court documents. It also barred police from seizing photographic, audio or video recording equipment, or press passes.

The journalists were covering a protest in the Brooklyn Center suburb of Minneapolis where last week a white officer shot and killed a 20-year-old Black man, Daunte Wright, during a traffic stop last Sunday. The officer who fired the fatal shot captured on body-cam video has been arrested.

Police declared the protest an unlawful assembly after about 30 minutes and an an incident propmpted police to deploy pepper balls and chemical irritants. They ordered the crowd of about 500 to disperse. Journalists lingered to report on events, thinking they did not need to disperse, said Jasper Colt, a photojournalist with the USA TODAY Network.

Police forced the journalists to the ground onto their faces and began photographing them.

The Minnesota State Patrol issued guidance to its troopers and other law enforcement agencies, MSP said in its statement. The guidance highlights the orders in the temporary restraining order prohibiting MSP from enforcing general dispersal orders against the press.

MSP is also prohibited from “arresting, threatening to arrest, or threatening/using physical force” against members of the press.

So much for that.

The Minnesota State Patrol issued a statement on the temporary restraining order issued as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The guidance was issued in response to that order:

“MSP will not photograph journalists or their credentials,” the agency said in a statement. “However, troopers will continue to check credentials so media will not be detained any longer than is necessary. In addition, MSP will no longer include messaging at the scene advising media where they can go to safely cover events.”

Use of force they know. And PR? not so much.

“The emergency order requires law enforcement to take certain steps to protect journalists… the order requires law enforcement to leave them alone,” said Adam Hansen, an attorney with Apollo Law LLC, who is working on the civil case with ACLU-Minnesota. “We absolutely see what happened last night as a violation of the court’s order and we’re doing everything we can to make sure that it doesn’t continue tonight and on into the future.”

There will be an “into the future.”

Trump is desperate to get credit for the vaccines, so much so that he claimed the other day on a pathetic Newsmax interview that he believes they should be called “Trumpcines” (yet another example of his highly overrated branding expertise…) But he couldn’t bring himself to be photographed getting the shot and neither has he done any kind of PSA or outreach to his own voters to get vaccinated.

Why? Because he’s a chickenshit who can’t ever bear to get on the wrong side of his voters over anything (unless he just blurts out something he doesn’t understand like saying “we should take the guns first and then have due process.”)

He knows his people aren’t getting vaccinated largely because he promoted the idea that the virus was “just going to go away” and that it’s been overblown in order to hurt him politically. They believed him and now they are giving their lives for the cause and taking a lot of people with them:

About 31 percent of adults in the United States have now been fully vaccinated. Scientists have estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the total population must acquire resistance to the virus to reach herd immunity. But in hundreds of counties around the country, vaccination rates are low, with some even languishing in the teens.

The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. The New York Times examined survey and vaccine administration data for nearly every U.S. county and found that both willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The phenomenon has left some places with a shortage of supply and others with a glut.

For months, health officials across the United States have been racing to inoculate people as variants of the coronavirus have continued to gain a foothold, carrying mutations that can make infections more contagious and, in some cases, deadlier. Vaccinations have sped up and, in many places, people are still unable to book appointments because of high demand. In Michigan, where cases have spiraled out of control, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, recently urged President Biden to send additional doses.

But in more rural — and more Republican — areas, health officials said that supply is far exceeding demand.

In a county in Wyoming, a local health official asked the state to stop sending first doses of the vaccine because the freezer was already stuffed to capacity with unwanted vials.

In an Iowa county, a clinic called people who had volunteered to give shots to tell them not to come in because so few residents had signed up for appointments.

In a county in Pennsylvania, a hospital set up a drive-through in the park, stocked with roughly 1,000 vaccine doses. Only about 300 people showed up.

And in interviews with more than two dozen state and county health officials — including some who said they were feeling weary after a year of hearing lifelong friends, family and neighbors tell them that the virus was a hoax or not particularly serious — most attributed low vaccination rates at least partly to hesitant conservative populations.

“I just never in a million years ever expected my field of work to become less medical and more political,” said Hailey Bloom, a registered Republican and the public information officer for the health department that covers Natrona County, Wyo., which Mr. Trump won by a wide margin last year.

If the shoe were on the other foot, the Republicans would be demanding that Democrats either be forced to get vaccinations or should be denied medical care if they caught the virus after refusing.

You know they would. Personal responsibility and all that:

If you wonder just how cruel the Republicans are willing to be to make a political point, you don’t have to look any further than the spate of anti-trans legislation making its way through state houses across the country. For people who used to say they wanted the government out of their lives, they are proving once again that it only applied to taxes and guns because they are taking their ongoing crusade to dictate bodily authority to even more grotesque levels:

A Texas mom said she was taking a major risk by standing up for her son during a state Senate hearing this week on a new proposal that would bar gender-affirming medical care for children who are transgender.

“I’m terrified to be here today,” said Amber Briggle, from Denton, whose Tuesday testimony widely circulated this week.

Briggle’s son, Max, came out to her as transgender when he was 4 years old, she told lawmakers during a passionate plea for the state to not pass proposals that she said would block needed health care for transgender kids.

The state is currently considering passing two bills — S.B. 1646 and S.B. 1311 — which would make it illegal for parents to seek medical treatment for children who are transitioning.

The first bill would classify any parent seeking out gender-affirming medical care under “child abuse,” according to The Austin Chronicle, while the second bill would ban physicians from providing such treatments.

A tearful Briggle told lawmakers that she was there to defend her son’s medical needs — even though, she said, speaking out could lead to the state taking her son away under the new bills if they become law and criminalize her actions.

“I’m afraid that by speaking here today that my words will be used against me should S.B. 1646 or S.B. 1311 pass, and my sweet son whom I love more than life itself will be taken from me,” Briggle said.

She run an LGBTQ advocacy group named in honor of her son, called Love to the Max, and was previously invited to the White House by President Barack Obama‘s administration for her work on transgender rights.

“Max is a bright, goofy, helpful, athletic, popular child, who loves cats, cartoons, and camping. He’s also transgender,” she writes on her website. “He doesn’t have a political agenda by being transgender — he’s just a kid, being true to himself.”

Her son Max is “the most popular boy in 7th grade” and is loved by the family, their friends and their community, she said.

“This is possible because he has parents who affirm him and provide him with the support he needs,” Briggle said in her testimony.

Briggle explained that when her son was younger, she “didn’t understand then that [Max] was trans” and that she “only knew that he wasn’t like most girls his age and that something inside him was hurting.” 

Providing Max with support — and gender-affirming medical care — has improved his life, she said.

“Taking that support away from him — or worse, taking him away from his family because we broke the law to provide that support — will have devastating and heartbreaking consequences,” Briggle continued, choking up as she spoke.

Treatments that would be banned under the new law include puberty-suppression prescription drugs, medical procedures and cross-sex hormone therapy.

Hormone blockers, Briggle said, are “reversible, are not new, and are clinically proven to save the lives of the transgender children taking them.”

Proponents of the bill, like the Republican Party’s state executive committeewoman, Jill Glover, argue children are “unable to give informed consent” about these treatments, according to local TV station KVUE.

Other supporters of such bans maintain that the medical care is too extreme for kids to undertake. “When parents interject things that rob them of that innocence, and really robs them of a future, we have a problem,” one Republican lawmaker backing the proposals said this week.

However, the bills’ critics, such as Briggle and local LGBTQ advocates like Alicia Roth Weigel, have called them “ludicrous” proposals that could have a dangerous impact on transgender youth, according to the Chronicle.

During her testimony this week, Briggle said that she didn’t want to let lawmakers pass the bill without hearing how it would impact kids across the state.

“If this bill becomes law,” the mother told the group of senators, “I promise I will call every single one of you every time a transgender child dies from suicide to remind you that their lives could have been saved — but you chose not to.”

They lost the fight against gay marriage so they’ve decided to take it out on trans kids, perhaps the most fragile people anyone can imagine. I can’t think of anything meaner than to make these children afraid that this decision could mean their removal from their parents. It is horrifying.

Right wingers believe the family is sacrosanct — except when it comes to women/LGBT rights, in which case they want politicians and distant tribunals in black robes to make the most intimate decisions any family can have, for them.

A tiny bit of good news is that this sympathetic article appeared in the very mainstream People Magazine which means that this take on the issue is being transmitted to low information types who only read anything like this when they’re getting their hair done or waiting for the dentist. A little ray of hope.

If Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t exist, the super-wingnut Freedom Caucus would have to invent them, just so they could appear to be mainstream by comparison:

Members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus are among a wide array of House Republicans rejecting a nascent group being organized by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) whose platform reportedly aims to preserve “anglo-saxon political traditions.”

The publication Friday by congressional newsletter Punchbowl News of a seven-page document appearing to be the America First Caucus’ platform was met with “fury” by top members of the Freedom Caucus, a source with knowledge of the group’s internal discussions told Forbes.

One member, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), took objections shared between some members of the caucus public, slamming the “hatefulness” of the platform in a Friday night tweet, with his spokesperson Lindsey Curnutte telling Forbes he has no plans to join the group.

Freedom Caucus members that Punchbowl reported to have “agreed to join” the America First Caucus, Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Barry Moore (R-Ala.), told Forbesthey have not yet decided whether to do so.

That’s on top of criticism from other House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Conference Chair Liz Cheney, with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) calling for the GOP to expel any conference member who joins and strip their committee assignments.

Greene’s spokesperson Nick Dyer, asked about criticism of the platform from top Republicans, sought to backtrack from Greene’s public defense of its language, telling Forbes the documentwas “never approved or agreed to by Congresswoman Greene.”

Greene, in a follow-up statement, distanced herself even further from the platform after considerable backlash, calling it a “staff level draft proposal from an outside group that I hadn’t read,” adding that she “plans to drive President Trump’s America First agenda with my Congressional colleagues.”

Forbes has reached out to members of the Freedom Caucus for comment.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), Greene’s fellow pro-Trump freshman and one of just two Black Republicans in the House, “does not plan to join” the America First Caucus, spokesperson Emma Hall told Forbes. Owens received $5,000 from the Freedom Caucus’ PAC but is not a member of the caucus itself, Hall said.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) – who, despite being vocally pro-Trump, is also not a member of the Freedom Caucus – said he is “proud to join” the America First Caucus despite the incendiary language in the platform. Gaetz is engulfed in a cloud of scandal surrounding a federal investigation into allegations he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old.

Greene and Gosar are both members of the Freedom Caucus, which has aimed to throw a wrench into congressional proceedings to protest what they say is inadequate governance. But the group has reportedly fractured in recent weeks over just how far to take that rebellion – and over the group’s controversial acceptance of Greene into its ranks.

The America First Caucus has been widely panned by Democrats, with several dubbing it the “white supremacy caucus” and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) tweeting that members who join it should not ask him to co-sponsor legislation. “Take your nativist crap and shove it,” tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). The document got bicameral criticism, with Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) tweeting, “This is blatantly racist.”

Any schism Greene’s new group causes in the Freedom Caucus seems unlikely to go her way, as the release of the document appears to have caught members off guard and put them in a defensive position. Gohmert, in an interview with Forbes, struggled to articulate clearly how the two groups would exist in parallel, stating, “the Freedom Caucus looks at a lot of other issues besides those that will sustain us in the future.”

Uhm, Gohmert struggles to articulate anything.

They can run but they can’t hide. These people represent a major faction within their party. They let it happen, they encouraged it, they embraced that orange monster who empowered it. I don’t think they can shut it down now. I hope I’m wrong.

White House Rose Garden on this day in 2015, five years before its evisceration: #Getty.

Originally tweeted by Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) on April 16, 2021.

This is what he means by evisceration, which is what Melania did to it.

Everything they touch turns to, well … fertilizer.