More than three decades ago, a collection of scientists sanctioned by the United Nations first warned that humans were fueling a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if the world didn’t act collectively and deliberately to slow Earth’s warming, there could be “profound consequences” for people and nature alike.
The scientists were right.
On Monday, that same body — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — issued its latest and most dire assessment about the state of the planet, detailing how humans have altered the environment at an “unprecedented” pace and cautioning that the world risks increasingly catastrophic impacts in the absence of rapid greenhouse gas reductions.
The landmark report, compiled by 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies from around the globe, bluntly lays out for policymakers and the public the most up-to-date understanding of the physical science on climate change. Released amid a summer of deadly fires, floods and heat waves, it arrives less than three months before a critical summit this November in Scotland, where world leaders face mounting pressure to move more urgently to slow the Earth’s warming.
Monday’s sprawling assessment states that there is no remaining scientific doubt that humans are fueling climate change. That much is “unequivocal.” The only real uncertainty that remains, its authors say, is whether the world can muster the will to stave off a darker future than the one it already has carved in stone.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called the findings “a code red for humanity” and said societies must find ways to embrace the transformational changes necessary to limit warming as much as possible. “We owe this to the entire human family,” he said in a statement. “There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”
But so far, the collective effort to slow climate change has proved gravely insufficient. Instead of the sort of emission cuts that scientists say must happen, global greenhouse gas pollution is still growing. Countries have failed to meet the targets they set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, and even the bolder pledges some nations recently have embraced still leave the world on a perilous path.
“What the world requires now is real action,” John F. Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate, said in a statement about Monday’s findings. “We can get to the low carbon economy we urgently need, but time is not on our side.”
It certainly is not, according to Monday’s report.
We cannot afford anymore of this bullshit from the right, here or elsewhere. This problem, like the pandemic (another global problem), requires collective action across the planet. And they are doing everything in their power to stop us from doing that.
Rand Paul today: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us .. No one should follow the CDC.” He then says he will introduce amendments to defund any govt agency that seeks to enforce CDC guidelines, including schools. pic.twitter.com/PYOQtKDYBN
What is the difference between this US Senator and Alex Jones? Or some Q-Anon nut? sWell, he’s just as crazy but he’s getting many, many people killed.
Update: More from the Death Cult:
Earlier this week, President Joe Bidencalled on elected officials to help defeat the COVID-19 pandemic or “get out of the way.” Rather than heed his advice, the nation’s most irresponsible leaders have continued to do their thing, with states like Texas and Florida—which account for about a third of infections in the United States—seemingly competing to see who can come up with the most deranged approaches to the deadly virus.
Thanks to Ron DeSantis, the profoundly cynical and incorrigibly smug Florida governor, the Sunshine State had lead by a nose in this race to the bottom. DeSantis has mocked public health officials as caseloads skyrocketed, pursued an idiotic offensive against Biden, and enacted rules designed to prevent mask and vaccine requirements and to forbid municipalities from instituting their own COVID safety measures. “We think that’s the most fair way to do it,” DeSantis said last week, introducing an order making masks optional in schools.
But Texas, led by Greg Abbott, who has also banned local COVID ordinances, has come roaring back. On Thursday, the state released a new guidance that somehow makes DeSantis’s effort to block cruise ships from requiring vaccines seem smart: Under recommendations from the Texas Education Agency, schools do not need to conduct contract tracing and do not need to let parents know if a student has tested positive for the virus. If a student does come into contact with an infected person, a parent can still send them to school under the new guidance.
The moves by Florida and Texas, which come as other states are tightening precautions while the delta variant surges across the country, are perhaps best described as pro-COVID. Not only are they declining to push vaccinations, as other government and business officials are doing with increased urgency, the two governors are actively standing in the way of precautions to at least limit the spread of the virus, which they’ve cavalierly downplayed. “This is our COVID season,” DeSantis shrugged Thursday.
Their posturing—a calculated play to the coterie of anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers, and culture warriors who make up the MAGA base—poses a significant public health threat, and not just to the unfortunate residents of their respective states, who may not take much comfort in DeSantis’s explanation that it’s “COVID season” as their hospitals once again fill up. (Speaking of hospitals, DeSantis on Thursday came out against health care facilities requiring staff to be vaccinated: “It’s not something I support,” he said.) In nurturing conditions for the virus to spread, DeSantis and Abbott may be overseeing a breeding ground for potential new variants—ones that health officials fear could prove wilier than the delta mutation, which is more infectious than the original strain but still isn’t much of a match for vaccines. (Despite intense media coverage, breakthrough cases among the inoculated remain rare and are overwhelmingly mild or asymptomatic.)
“When you give it ample opportunity to mutate,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday, “you may sooner or later get another variant, and it is possible that that variant might be in some respects worse than the already very difficult variant we’re dealing with now.”
Senate Democrats released a budget on Monday that marks their first step toward bypassing the filibuster in order to pass a $3.5 trillion package of social welfare initiatives like expanded Medicare, free community college and green cards for some immigrants.
The majority party has been working for months toward this legislative kickoff, but the budget’s release will kickstart a new series of challenges. One big obstacle the budget creates comes from an item that is not included — action on the debt limit. With Senate Republicans warning they won’t give Democrats the votes needed to approach the issue on a bipartisan basis, the exclusion of debt limit language amounts to a political gamble by President Joe Biden’s party.
“A slew of committees” will mark up the resolution before any final action sometime after Sept. 15. If Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can keep their 50 Senate Democrats in line, they’ll have the votes to pass it via reconciliation with a simple majority, with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking vote.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged Congress today not to default on the country’s debt. But if Democrats take the reconciliation route with their companion package to the $1 trillion Biden infrastructure bill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatens to deny any Republican votes to raise the debt limit, and that will take 60 votes.
Nice country ya got there. Be a shame if “irreparable harm” came to it.
Why are conspiracy theories so widespread of late? Are our neighbors stupid, insane, deluded, brainwashed, or what?
In their recent paper, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood,” Danish political scientists Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen and American anthropologist John Tooby examine how accepting patent falsehoods serves a deifferent function from mere motivated reasoning. As an example of the latter, Salon’s Paul Rosenberg cites Paul Simon’s “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
But spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theories are doing something more, the group theorizes, acknowledging they require additional empirical evidence to support their theory. Rosenberg asked Petersen what he thinks is the explanation.
Rather than being a misperception of reality or rejection of truth, Petersen believes that for the human social animal, spreading misinformation/disinformation may serve an organizing function that fact alone may not. That may have certain evolutionary advantages:
When you want to mobilize your group, what you need to do is find out that we are facing a problem, and your way of describing that problem needs to be as attention-grabbing as possible before you can get the group to focus on the same thing. In that context, reality is seldom as juicy as fiction. By enhancing the threat — for example, by saying things that are not necessarily true — then you are in a better situation to mobilize and coordinate the attention of your own group. The key thing is that it may actually be to your group’s advantage that if everyone is in agreement that we don’t like these other guys, then we make sure that everyone is paying attention to this other group. So by exaggerating the actual threat posed by the other group, you can gain more effective mobilization.
Holding outlandish ideas (such as QAnon) may signal committment to the in-group. The more outlandish the notion, the harder it is to disprove. The better to make it hard to “verify what’s up and what’s down,” says Petersen. The logic, says Peterson, “is that anyone can believe the truth, but only loyal members of the group can believe something that is blatantly false.”
Petersen explains, “[W]hat we are arguing is that a lot of beliefs don’t really exist for navigating the world. They exist for social reasons, because they allow us to accomplish certain socially important phenomena, such as mobilizing our group or signaling that we’re loyal members of the group. This means that because the function of the beliefs is not to represent reality, their veracity or truth value is not really an important feature.”
Donald Horowitz’s, “The Deadly Ethnic Riot,” examines how rumor-sharing serves as a precondition for ethnic massacres. The purpose of the rumors is not to represent reality either but to stigmatize your enemy and mobilize your group for attack.
Here’s the segment that made my hair stand on end (emphasis mine):
[I]f you look at the content of the rumors, that’s not so much predicted by what the other group has done to you or to your group. It’s really predicted by what you are planning to do to the other group. So the brutality of the content of these rumors is, in a sense, part of the coordination about what we’re going to do to them when we get the action going — which also suggests that the function of these rumors is not to represent reality, but to serve social functions.
Observers of right-wing projection don’t need that spelled out for them. Republicans justify their election cheating because “Democrats do it.” Donald Trump spent months ahead of and after November 2020 telling his base that. Everybody knows that. Every loyal Trump Republican, anyway. Phony ballots containing bamboo fibers were smuggled in from China. Others from Democratic precincts were counted multiple times. The “massive fraud” went on in counties Trump lost, even if other Republicans won there. Democrats hate babies. Democrats eat babies. Lack of evidence be damned. The rumors justified a violent attempt to overthrow our democracy that might not be the last.
As the House Select Committee investigates the Jan. 6 insurrection and coup plotters, we can expect to hear Trumpist justifications for both based on what mean, nasty, ugly things communist-Marxist-socialist (take your pick) Democrats meant to do to America if Joe Biden won the presidency.
I thought of that last night while watching Ron Howard’s The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (2016). The father of one British fan with a ticket refused to let him attend a concert. The four Beatles, he said, were a threat to western civilization. When John Lennon remarked in an interview that The Beatles seemed at the time more popular than Jesus, protests erupted in the U.S. Record-burnings took place, primarily across the South. The Ku Klux Klan got involved. Americans are nothing if not reactionary. We have a history.
With the violent Jan. 6 insurrection in mind, Petersen’s “It’s really predicted by what you are planning to do to the other group,” and his theory about conspiracy theories and misinformation are unsettling, to say the least.
🧵 We have sacrificed so much for you over these past 18 months.
And it took only 3 days for you to destroy one of the last things I was hanging onto – the ability to keep my kids safe.
A big fear, more than for my own safety caring for hospitalized COVID patients, was … 1/
that my kids or husband would get sick. Like so many other healthcare workers, I have an elaborate decontamination routine that I do faithfully after every single hospital shift, to try to decrease the risk of bringing the virus home to my family. 2/
I thought about staying in a hotel. I did all the grocery shopping alone since I was already getting exposed at work. We masked meticulously when not at home. Their school had fantastic safety protocols & we also took advantage of virtual options during weeks of highest risk of potential inadvertent transmission (after breaks when other families may have travelled). We pressed “pause” on participation in sports during the height of the summer & winter surges. We cancelled birthday parties, did virtual playdates, etc, etc.
Why did I do all this?
Because I know how bad this virus 🦠 can be, what it can do to even healthy individuals. It’s not just death; it’s long covid, it’s profound debility after hospitalization, it’s damaged heart muscle & scarred lungs. It’s persistent symptoms like poor exercise tolerance, fatigue, loss of smell/taste, prolonged cough, ongoing shortness of breath, etc., even after mild illness. I didn’t want to risk any of that for my kids or my husband. And so we’ve been careful for 18 long months. Hubs & I got vaccinated 💉as soon as we were eligible.
But our kids aren’t old enough to be eligible. And then you forced schools to reopen without the ability to implement the same measures that kept kids & staff safe last year. And you doubled down on that despite Delta🦠 being 2-3x as contagious & cases starting to surge again.
And as a direct result, my kiddo, who I’ve managed to keep from coming into contact with a known COVID+ person for 18 long months, was exposed within only 3 days of starting school.
THREE DAYS.
We’re still masking; we never stopped. My kids are great about wearing their masks.
I bought the best quality masks I can find. But if others aren’t masking up also, my not-yet-old-enough-to-be-vaxxed kids can be, will be, & already have been exposed. And that’s on you @dougducey & @AZGOP.
I’m furious.
I’m deeply disappointed at how many care so little for others in their community, for their kids’ friends & family members & teachers. That they care so little for the healthcare workers who have been beaten down over & over again for the past 18 months, but are picking themselves up to meet the monster yet again.
We don’t want you to call us heroes. We want you to give a damn about someone other than yourself. We want you to wear a piece of cloth over your nose & mouth for a little while. We want you to teach & expect your kids to do it too. So that we can *prevent suffering & death.*
We have sacrificed so much for you over the past 18 months.
And it took only 3 days for you to destroy one of the last things I was hanging on to – the ability to keep my kids safe.
Kids & parents have the #Right2SafeAZSchools. Public health shouldn’t be political.
Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.
Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.
The investigations were opened after a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that continuing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.
Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.
Mr. Clark, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in January that all of his official communications with the White House “were consistent with law,” and that he had engaged in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”
Mr. Rosen did not respond to requests for comment. The inspector general’s spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Rosen has emerged as a key witness in multiple investigations that focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. He has publicly stated that the Justice Department did not find enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election.
On Friday Mr. Rosen told investigators from the inspector general’s office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again, according to a person familiar with the interview.
Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.
He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.
Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Mr. Rosen discussed previously reported episodes, including his interactions with Mr. Clark, with the Senate Judiciary Committee. He called Mr. Rosen’s account “dramatic evidence of how intent Trump was in overthrowing the election.” […[
Mr. Blumenthal said Mr. Rosen presented new facts and evidence that led him to believe that the committee would need to answer “profound and important questions” about the roles that individuals in Mr. Trump’s orbit played in the effort to undermine the peaceful transition of power, “which is what Trump tried to do, intently and concertedly.”
Mr. Rosen has spent much of the year in discussions with the Justice Department over what information he could provide to investigators, given that decision-making conversations between administration officials are usually kept confidential.
Douglas A. Collins, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said last week that the former president would not seek to bar former Justice Department officials from speaking with investigators. But Mr. Collins said he might take some undisclosed legal action if congressional investigators sought “privileged information.”
Mr. Rosen quickly scheduled interviews with congressional investigators to get as much of his version of events on the record before any players could ask the courts to block the proceedings, according to two people familiar with those discussions who are not authorized to speak about continuing investigations.
It’s unclear what kind of accountability there could be for Clark. In a just world he would at least be disbarred and shunned. But it’s more likely he’ll be hailed as a hero on the right.
Not only is he the world’s greatest sore loser, he’s a jealous little bitch as well:
Former President Trump on Saturday slammed the Senate’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package just hours before the upper chamber is scheduled to vote on winding down debate, calling the bill a “disgrace” and pushing GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to negotiate a better deal.
The ex-commander in chief issued the message from his Save America PAC, accusing Republican leaders of satisfying the policy agenda of Democrats and telling GOP senators to think “twice before you approve this terrible deal.”
“Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill is a disgrace,” Trump wrote. “If Mitch McConnell was smart, which we’ve seen no evidence of, he would use the debt ceiling card to negotiate a good infrastructure package.”
Trump went on to express doubt that lawmakers have actually read through the entirety of the 2,700-page infrastructure proposal, arguing, “they would have needed to take speed reading courses.”
“It is a gift to the Democrat Party, compliments of Mitch McConnell and some RINOs, who have no idea what they are doing,” he added.
Trump, who has used his platform in recent months to throw his support behind allied congressional candidates running in 2022, warned Saturday that the “infrastructure bill will be used against the Republican Party in the upcoming elections in 2022 and 2024.”
“It will be very hard for me to endorse anyone foolish enough to vote in favor of this deal,” he cautioned, a potential threat for anyone aiming to bank off of the support from Trump, who remains one of the most powerful members of the Republican Party months after leaving the Oval Office.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has scheduled a vote to begin ending debate on the infrastructure package for 1 p.m. Saturday, a move that will require the support of at least 10 GOP Senators.
Seventeen Republicans have helped advance the deal so far, and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who missed the earlier votes, has also expressed support of the spending bill, which comes as Democrats are also seeking to pass a $3.5 trillion budget resolution.
However, internal debate among Republicans over the spending package has intensified, especially after an official analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released Thursday showed that the legislation would add $256 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade.
None of the 18 Republicans who have supported the package, including McConnell himself, have said they would vote “no” during Saturday’s vote, though some have been viewed as potential flips, with McConnell telling reporters this week, “We still have amendments that need to be processed.”
“Once they are, we’ll be able to wind things down,” the GOP leader added.
Trump on Saturday, however, said that Republicans should wait until after the midterm elections to reach any infrastructure bill that would benefit them, adding, “but remember, you already have the card, it’s called the debt ceiling, which the Democrats threatened us with constantly.”
He’s an ignoramus who still doesn’t understand anything about the way government works.
“Public safety of San Francisco has turned into the Wild West and will get worse when officers quit due to the vaccine mandate.”
Union President Ken Lomba said he’s threats of resigning or retiring early because of the mandatory vaccine policy “from a large group within our membership.”
Officials with the city’s Department of Human Resources issued a Friday statement sharply denouncing the union’s stance, particularly in light of the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus.
“There is also an undue and unacceptable health and safety risk that is imposed upon the city, our employees and the public we serve, by those who are not vaccinated against COVID-19,” officials said. “Vaccines are safe, effective and readily available to our employees.”
City employees may be granted an exemption from the vaccine for medical or religious reasons.
Out of 3,000 San Franciscans who have been hospitalized with COVID-19, only 16 came from “breakthrough” cases, health officials said last week. There have been no deaths among the fully vaccinated in San Francisco.
As of Friday there were at least 161 unvaccinated employees at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, or about 16% of the agency’s workforce, according to city data.
That’s more than double the 7.7% average unvaccinated rate across all city departments, data shows.
Lomba said there’s no unifying reason for the deputies’ refusal to become inoculated. Some are concerned about medical risks, others take exception on religious ground and still others simply believe they don’t need it.
“We are all for COVID-19 safety and we back that,” Lomda said. “Our problem is how this is mandate — ‘vaccinate or you’ll be terminated,’ is really going to impact our staffing, which is going to impact public safety in San Francisco.”
Good. This will separate the rational cops from the Trumpers. Because I think we know that those who refuse are wingnuts who shouldn’t be wearing the badge.
Honestly, this is insanely stupid but it does have a silver lining. It reveals the people who should not be working in public service. And frankly, health care. Nurses and others who refuse to get vaccinated should also find another line of work.
Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests gun owners kill people encouraging vaccinations: “…in the South we all love our Second Amendment rights. And we’re not really big on strangers showing up at our door, are we? They might not like the welcome they get.” pic.twitter.com/9KGZWD3ujd
The one happy byproduct of the delta variant is that as it causes a surge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S., it also appears to be inspiring people, by scaring the shit out of them, to get vaccinated. On Thursday, White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters that in the prior 24 hours alone, the U.S. had administered more than 864,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines, including 585,000 first shots. Are these people months late to the party? Yes. Is it better late than never? Also yes.
Then you have the Americans who continue to refuse to get inoculated against a deadly disease which, among other things, infected 84% more children and teens this week than last week. Why won‘t these people—not the ones who have some kind of medical issue preventing them from getting the jab but ones who simply don’t want to—take an extremely simple step that will protect their health and the health of those around them? Ignorance is one reason. Selfishness is another. And then you have the fact that a contingent of terrible politicians and conservative pundits are infecting their brains with all manner of misinformation, cheering them on in their refusal to do something for the greater good, and, in at least one instance, suggesting they shoot anyone encouraging people to get vaccinated.
Unsurprisingly, that politician is Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose own existence is hopefully inspiring scientists to develop a vaccine against crazy. At an event last month in Alabama, the Georgia representative, who has previously compared mask mandates to the Holocaust and vaccine requirements to segregation, suggested that the Biden administration’s door-to-door vaccination push will result in government officials showing up to people’s homes and demanding personal information for extremely nefarious purposes, and that those people should be greeted with the barrel of a gun.
“You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door, because I hear Alabama might be one of the most unvaccinated states,” Greene told the crowd, reportedly prompting cheers over the state’s low vaccination rate. “Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys. He’s going to be sending one of his police state friends to your front door to knock on the door, take down your name, your address, your family members’ names, your phone numbers, your cellphone numbers, probably ask for your Social Security number, and whether you’ve taken the vaccine or not. What they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door, are we? They might not like the welcome they get.”
Later, Greene bashed Anthony Fauci, claiming, like a QAnon thread come to life, that COVID-19 “is his baby,” adding: “That is his experiment, and he’s getting to watch it in the real world, like on a live television show where he has a front row seat. He gets to watch what happens.”
Asked by NBC News for comment, Greene’s spokesman, Nick Dyer, said, “These claims are ridiculous and yet another conspiracy theory from the left.” He neither specified what claims he was talking about nor acknowledged the fact that there is video footage of Greene’s remarks.
This isn’t the first time that the congresswoman from Georgia, who has loads of time on her hands after being stripped of her committee assignments, has encouraged violence. Prior to being elected to Congress, she claimed, on more than one occasion, that Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, noting that’s “a crime punishable by death.” She also did a Facebook Live broadcast from Pelosi’s office in which she suggested the House speaker would “suffer death” or “be in prison” for her “treason.” In another video the same day, she suggested Representative Maxine Waters was “just as guilty of treason as Nancy Pelosi.” She also liked comments on Facebook calling for either John Kerry or Barack Obama to be hanged. Just something to think about when she insists she never meant people should be hurt when she encouraged a Second Amendment–style “welcome.”
Greene is a monster. But this isn’t really unusual right wing commentary. Remember this?
Erik Erickson — the founder of the conservative blog RedState — said on his Macon, Ga.-area radio show Thursday that if a census worker carrying a longer American Community Survey form came by his house, he would “pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door.”
“They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying,” Erickson said, in a recording by the liberal media watchdog Media Matters. “The servants are becoming the masters. We are working for the government. We are becoming enslaved by the government.”
This is what their gun fetish and ” fightin’ tyranny” really comes down to. They don’t see themselves battling the US Military, which they believe is on their side. They see themselves killing government workers. Consider the intimidation and harassment against the public health and election officials all over the country this past year and a half. They issue death threats and “second amendment remedies” against average Americans who are exercising their first amendment rights— or just doing their jobs — all the time. And the rest of us just have to put up with it.
More Florida children were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Tuesday than in any other state, reflecting a rapid rise in serious illness among an age group considered to be at the lowest risk of severe outcomes from the disease and many still not eligible for the vaccine.
A total of 46 pediatric patients were admitted to a Florida hospital with a confirmed infection while an additional 22 were hospitalized with a suspected case, according to the federal government’s hospital capacity data.
Only Texas reported a higher total number of pediatric patients in hospitals with confirmed COVID-19 on Tuesday — 142 children — compared to 135 in Florida.
I don’t think America is prepared for the number of pediatric deaths that will occur in the next several months. pic.twitter.com/JERWp57oVK
CLEVELAND — As the delta variant of COVID-19 spreads across the United States, more concerns are growing regarding how to keep children safe.
Fourteen pediatric coronavirus cases were reported in Ohio this weekend, according to a spokesperson for the Cleveland Clinic. States further south are reporting a rapid uptick in children admitted to local hospitals.
I'm having a difficult time controlling my temper when visitors in the hospital roll their eyes when I ask them to put on a mask or explain that covid is limiting visitation again. They get the luxury of ignoring reality while we are drowning.
Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said he’s fed up with people who can get vaccinated but choose not to.
So to help protect children too young to get vaccinated, “I have instructed our teams to provide a KN95 mask for every child that wants one in the state,” Cox said Tuesday.
“We are purchasing those now. We will make those available to schools so that children and parents who want their child to be masked … will have the opportunity to have available at no cost to them a KN95 mask.”
The governor said neither he nor schools have the authority issue mask mandates, but local health departments and county elected officials can decide on a mask mandate for their schools for 30 days at a time.
The 4th wave Louisiana, now the highest per capita rate of covid globally (for a state or country). It's also noteworthy that 72% of the world's population hasn't even had its 1st vaccine shot and there are enough here for every American to be fully vaccinated. pic.twitter.com/1va6pfoopJ
Vaccine refuseniks are going to find out how real Covid is when their children start dying. Even then, so invested are they in Covid denial that they might never admit it to themselves.
