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No Surge In COVID Two Weeks After Mask Mandate Lifted In Texas
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued an executive order (pdf) that went into effect on March 10 to loosen COVID-19 restrictions. Although the government’s statewide mask mandate was lifted, individual businesses were still able to “limit capacity” or impose mask mandates at their own choosing.
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Stray dog goes viral for love of stuffed unicorn, adoption now pending
By: Shannon Nolan
Posted: Mar 26, 2021 3:22 PM EDT
DUPLIN COUNTY, N.C.— After he repeatedly tried to steal the same stuffed unicorn toy from a store, a stray dog was taken to a North Carolina animal shelter on March 21.
The officer that was called in to transport the pup decided to purchase the toy and send it with him.
A local photographer named Shannon Johnstone did a photoshoot for the dog, whose name is Sisu, and his new best friend as the one-year-old pup awaits a pending adoption.
Johnstone said that Sisu had broken into a local Dollar General Store five times to steal the exact same purple unicorn.
In their post on Facebook, the shelter described Sisu as “very vocal” and very obedient with people. Also, they said he loves unicorns from Dollar General.
The shelter’s post gathered hundreds of likes, comments and shares.
Sisu now has both an adopter and a rescue, according to Duplin County Animal Services, but other dogs are currently available for adoption at the shelter.
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EXPOSED – LYING MEDIA CASHES IN ON ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING
This is as wild as it gets. The media muppets didn’t hold back their racist motives once again, blaming the recent Boulder mass shooting on angry white men while the shooter was literally an Islamic terrorist. This adds to the anti-white rhetoric circling our culture via the media and Hollywood.
Source : The Phaser
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Uncle Joe Himself, A Body Double, CGI, Team Deep Fake, Someone
They’ve had plenty of time to prepare and rehearse Biden’s first press conference, but this is the government we’re talking about, so don’t bet against a screw up…
Read the article on Silver Doctors
Is the person that we are seeing on TV the real Joe Biden, or is he a body double or CGI? Look at joe Biden’s skin in all of his most recent photos. In one photo the skin on his face is smooth and clear. The next time he has age spots and wrinkles.
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Morning Coffee – 03/26/2021
The news that you should know about . . .
Scientists Finally Identify a Deadly Toxin That’s Been Killing Birds Wired
Suez Canal Transit Sail Safely. Entertaining. From 2003.
Suez blockage prompts shippers to call US Navy over piracy threat FT
Expert predicts toilet paper shortages will happen again The Hill . Go long bidets….
#COVID19
Pilot Investigation of SARS-CoV-2 Secondary Transmission in Kindergarten Through Grade 12 Schools Implementing Mitigation Strategies — St. Louis County and City of Springfield, Missouri, December 2020 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, CDC
Many kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) schools offering in-person learning have adopted strategies to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (1). These measures include mandating use of face masks, physical distancing in classrooms, increasing ventilation with outdoor air, identification of close contacts,* and following CDC isolation and quarantine guidance
And:
Modifications to increase ventilation to prevent COVID-19 were reported by 98% of schools: 91% opened windows or doors, 87% used fans, 93% decreased occupancy in spaces where ventilation with outdoor air could not be increased, and 5% replaced or updated heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.
CDC’s own scientists keep showing ventilation is essential. When will the CDC’s sclerotic policy-making process emit revised school re-opening guidelines to replace the current, lethal ones?
Assessment of protection against reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 among 4 million PCR-tested individuals in Denmark in 2020: a population-level observational study The Lancet. From the Conclusion: “[N]atural protection, especially among older people, cannot be relied on.” But–
What to Make of That Danish Reinfection Study? MedPage Today. Reviews above study. “[T]he open question is if you were to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and you unfortunately were reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, are you as sick as somebody who’s seeing SARS-CoV-2 for the first time?”
* * * U.S. Covid Cases Are Rising Again, Reversing Months of Progress BloombergU.S. COVID response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths: research Reuters
40,600 people likely caught Covid while hospital inpatients in England Guardian
* * * Want a vaccination appointment? It helps to know a Python programmer NBC. “[A] boutique online community [has] sprung up in recent months in which programmers come up with ways to give their friends and families an edge in getting vaccination appointments. Github, a website that serves as a repository for programmers to share their code, hosts dozens of uploaded scripts meant to help people secure vaccine slots.”Loretto Hospital executive resigns amid uproar over improper distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations Becker’s Hospital Review
* * * Latest results put Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID vaccine back on track NatureThe Coronavirus Variants Don’t Seem to Be Highly Variable So Far Scientific American (nvl).
Remote management of covid-19 using home pulse oximetry and virtual ward support British Medical Journal. “Pulse oximeters do not save lives, good clinical care does. There is a world of difference between the patient who is given a pulse oximeter and symptom diary and told to contact the health service if they deteriorate and the patient who is given the same equipment, shown how to use it, and who then receives regular calls from a healthcare professional.”
Top JAMA Editor Out Amid Podcast Investigation MedScape
Race and Medicine NEJM
China?
There Will Not Be a New Cold War Foreign Affairs
Wolf warriors shoot Chinese foot worldwide Macrobusiness
China Won’t Have Any Issues Beating Its 2021 GDP Target Bloomberg
Xinjiang Cotton: Li Ning, Anta Shares Surge While Nike, Adidas, Burberry Hit With Backlash Women’s Wear Daily
Britain says Hong Kong ‘has no right to dictate’ passport recognition Agence France Presse
The new codes governing everyday life in China Agence France Presse
Taiwan Wants More Missiles. That’s Not a Bad Thing. Defense One
Myanamar
India’s Dangerous Myanmar Policy The Diplomat
Despite international pressure, Myanmar’s ruling junta continues to crush dissent France24. With shots to the head:
Biden Administration
Biden meets the press and the pandemic disappears Politico. The World’s Greatest Troll™ called his shot, didn’t he? “By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.” Unfair, because Biden de-lowballed his vaccination estimate, but still.
Biden May Be the Most Pro-Labor President Ever; That May Not Save Unions NYT
Senate passes PPP deadline extension Journal of Accountancy
Statement from Andrew Saul, Commissioner of Social Security, about Economic Impact Payments Social Security Administration (pq).
The 420
Businessmen Convicted of Duping Banks in Marijuana Sales WSJ (RS).
Gunz
Carrying Guns in Public Is Not a Constitutional Right, Ninth Circuit Rules Courthouse News
Class Warfare
The fight to unionize Amazon is the most important labor story of this century America Magazine
Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial The Intercept. To be fair to Amazon, I’ve seen reports from highway clean-up volunteers in Kent, UK, who report picking up plenty of bottles and bags tossed aside, presumably by lorry drivers who had to endure long Customs delays, post-Brexit, and wanted to keep rolling rather than lose more time. Midde-class types like me are reacting to this story with horror and disgust, but with the already shrinking number of restrooms shrunk further by Covid, I wonder whether all working class drivers experience this as normal, and not just Amazon workers. (To be even more fair, warehouse workers making quota use pee bottles too, not just drivers.)
Planned Global Food Crisis of 2021 Begins! Stock Up and Be Prepared For Water & Food Shortages – Silver Doctors
American Education: Child Indoctrination, Struggle Sessions and Debt Slavery – Silver Doctors
Another $3 Trillion Bill By Congress Already, $4.9 Trillion More Spending In Under 4 Months – Silver Doctors
Senate Confirms Transgender Extremist Rachel Levine to HHS, Advocate Of Sex Changes For Children – Blacklisted News
Magic Kingdom Uses COVID-19 As An Excuse To Install Facial Recognition – Blacklisted News
Biden Administration Urges Supreme Court To Let Cops Enter Homes And Seize Guns Without A Warrant – Blacklisted News
YOUNG TURKS WISH DEATH UPON PEOPLE WHO REFUSE THE mRNA COVID VACCINE – The Phaser
WHEN THE ENEMY IS EXPOSED…THEY DIVERT YOUR ATTENTION! WE ARE WAKING UP – The Phaser
Surge In Asian Hate Crimes More Boogeyman Than Fact – ZeroHedge
House Chamber Getting Kevlar-Reinforced Bulletproof Doors – ZeroHedge
Former CDC Director Says COVID-19 Escaped From Wuhan Lab – ZeroHedge
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The Big, Stuck Boat Is Glorious
The Ever Given is very big and very stuck.
Yesterday, with only a few minutes left in my weekly Zoom appointment with my therapist, I decided to derail the proceedings to ask her what I believed was an essential question. It had nothing to do with my fear of vulnerability or difficulty asking for help; in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all.
Had she seen the stuck boat?
The boat, of course, is the Ever Given, a massive container ship operated by the Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen, which probably now wishes its name wasn’t painted on the boat’s sides in such enormous letters. On its way from China to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, the boat accidentally Tokyo drifted to a stop in Egypt’s Suez Canal on Tuesday, where it has been stuck sideways ever since. Efforts to refloat the Ever Given so far have been futile; the heavy construction equipment and fleet of industrial-strength tugboats assigned to that job have been successful not at dislodging the ship’s bow from the canal’s sandy shore, but at demonstrating this big-ass boat’s stupendous girth in photos. The ship, which is longer than the Empire State Building is tall, looms over literally everything—construction equipment, palm trees, nearby buildings. The Ever Given is Manute Bol to the human world’s Muggsy Bogues.
My therapist had not seen the boat, even though photos of it had already begun to be manufactured into memes about life’s existential problems and the stupid little things we all do to feel some control over them. I asked her to Google it in front of me, because I had become obsessed. Since Tuesday afternoon, in fact, I have thought about little else. The first photos I saw of it were taken by workers on the Maersk Denver, the ship that was immediately behind the Ever Given when a wind storm is suspected to have blown her sideways. (Yes, the boats are girls.) I spent much of yesterday hunting down photos of the boat, both in situ and in happier times. I acquainted myself with websites like VesselFinder and MarineTraffic, as well as with the concept of Suezmax and the phrase bulbous bow, which the Ever Given has and which means that she is not just on top of the sand, but also lodged inside it.
I’m obsessed with the dang boat because people like me and you are not really supposed to be aware of what boats like her are up to. You’re not supposed to think about, or even notice, global freight, but the Ever Given has made cartoonishly noticeable some of the crucial infrastructure of global capital, which is usually invisible in most people’s daily life. She has done so with an absolutely sublime visual gag, improved by every new detail about the problems the ship is causing and every new photo of the impotent human measures being undertaken to fix them. Peruse the surrounding waterways on any of the internet’s maritime trackers, and you’ll find the beginnings of a far more significant problem: More than 150 other absolutely huge shipping vessels, transporting everything from live animals to crude oil, are waiting on either side; the barge ran aground at a point where the Suez has only one lane, which means that traffic is blocked in both directions.
Every time I add some new morsel to my stash of stuck-boat information, I’m reminded of those clips I used to love as a kid on America’s Funniest Home Videos, in which some guy gets nailed in the groin by his overly enthusiastic golden retriever. In this case, the guy is a complex web of financiers and shipping magnates and insurance companies, whom the sideways boat will cost approximately one zillion dollars. The Ever Given is standing athwart one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, yelling “Oops!” She is ruining everything, and at least for the moment, she cannot be (un)stopped.
Global shipping is an unglamorous business that has created some extremely glamorous fortunes, but mostly for people you’ve never heard of (unless you’re an art dealer). If you never, ever think about all the big-ass boats out there full of cheap clothes or baby strollers, the industry is working as designed. But a significant majority of your material possessions, including virtually everything you’ve ever bought from Amazon or Best Buy or Target or Walmart, was ferried most of the way from where it was manufactured to where you bought it on a ship similar to the one currently taking an extended smoke break in the Suez.
Containerization, the process that created a need for ships as incongruously huge as the Ever Given, is a relatively modern shipping process developed after World War II. It involves loading goods into big metal boxes the size of tractor-trailer beds and then loading those boxes onto boats in tall stacks that move among major global ports. Its proliferation has made moving large quantities of manufacturing components and consumer goods around the world more efficient and less costly—20 times less expensive by volume, according to one estimate, than traditional bulk shipping—which makes the things you buy less expensive. It also tempts corporations to shuffle their production facilities and the jobs that go along with them around the globe in search of lax labor laws, lower wages, and bigger margins.
When people have to think about that—and perhaps, as a result, feel connected to the high-stakes logistical ballet that is global manufacturing, or implicated in the often miserable working conditions of the faraway people who make it possible—something consumer psychologists call “friction” is introduced into the buying process. Retailers, manufacturers, and shippers alike benefit if purchase decisions feel unencumbered by anything but consumers’ personal desire, which means the origins of the things we buy are usually obscured.
You know what else creates friction? Sand. In the case of the Ever Given, it has created so much friction that trade between Europe and Asia has effectively paused, an oopsy so big that it is visible in satellite imagery. It could hardly have happened at a worse time—shipping has been a huge mess for a year because of the pandemic, with long waits to unload ships at some of the world’s biggest ports and goods awaiting slots in containers piled up on factory floors. Hundreds of thousands of ship workers have been stranded on various vessels for months because pandemic protocols in their home countries prevent them from being repatriated, layering a looming labor crisis on top of an ongoing logistical one. The Maersk Denver and her crew must now simply vibe in the canal until the Ever Given is successfully towed off the bank, which could take weeks, according to The New York Times. An “elite salvage squad” has been dispatched to yank it back into the water.
For people who don’t work in shipping, these problems have reared their heads over the past year in an endless and seemingly random series of consumer-goods shortages, affecting products as varied as sofas and spandex bike shorts. Now, though, these problems—and the persistent frailty of the global system on which corporations have built our physical world—have a singular visual metaphor in the Ever Given. She is huge, and she is stuck, like I am when I wake up with a hangover. Right now, there’s not enough ibuprofen and red Gatorade in the world.
Source : The Atlantic
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Your support of this site and my efforts is always greatly appreciated.You May Also Enjoy
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This is what happened to me
The Wells Fargo Scandal – A Simple Overview
This is exactly what happened to me! One day I received a letter from Wells Fargo telling me that my checking account was overdrawn by over a thousand dollars. There’s no way that could have happened. I had to open a checking account to cash a $750.00 rent rebate check, I opened the account on a Thursday and immediately withdrew $100.00 cash. I came back the next afternoon and wrote a check for the remainder of the funds. I told them to close the account, and they said they would.
Nearly two years later, I received another letter from Wells Fargo that I was overdrawn, this time only for a few hundred dollars, and that I needed to correct this problem or they would be sending my account to their collections department. We went through the same thing all over again. I told them to close the account, they kept it open, and somebody was using the account.
I told them that I was not responsible for the overdraft since I thought the account was going to be closed. I told them that if I received another letter telling me I was overdrawn, I was going to go to the US Attorney General’s office and file a lawsuit that everyone on the planet would learn about. That’s the kind of publicity that big companies, especially banks, don’t want to deal with.
The account was closed, and I never received another letter from them.
This video describes everything that I went through with the criminals at Wells Fargo.
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Jessica Walter, “Arrested Development” and “Archer” star, has died at 80
By Zoe Christen Jones
Updated on: March 25, 2021 / 7:10 PM / CBS News
Jessica Walter, the Emmy Award-winning actress known for her starring roles in “Arrested Development” and “Archer,” has died, her daughter said in a statement Thursday. She was 80.
“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of my beloved mom Jessica,” her daughter Brooke Bowman said in a statement. “A working actor for over six decades, her greatest pleasure was bringing joy to others through her storytelling both on-screen and off.”
Walter played a variety of roles throughout her career and took home an Emmy Award in 1975 for her portrayal of a young California police detective in “Amy Prentiss.”
While she started out on the stages of Broadway, in productions of “Nightlife,” “Photo Finish” and “Advise and Consent,” Walter found critical acclaim as a television and film actress, receiving three other Emmy nominations over the course of her career along with two Golden Globe nominations.
She was praised for portraying Lucille Bluth in “Arrested Development,” a rich and out-of-touch matriarch who is forced to deal with her children and the loss of her fortune. She shared three Screen Actor’s Guild Award nominations with her castmates for the show.
“I just heard the sh***y news about Jessica Walter an absolutely brilliant actress and amazing talent,” Cross tweeted. “I consider myself privileged and very lucky to have been able to work with her.”
Tony Hale, who played Lucille’s son, Buster, called Walter “a force,” in a touching goodbye message. “Her talent and timing were unmatched,” Hale tweeted Thursday. “Rest In Peace Mama Bluth.”
Walter leaves behind her daughter Brooke and a grandson.
Source : CBS News
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It's all about the Caffeine & Kitty Treats
