Wednesday, August 25, 2021

And another day of ‘transparency,’ executive orders, nurses resigning, school test results, charging unvaccinated employees, ‘pain compliance,’ Ron Jeremy indicted, OnlyFans reverses ban, and the ‘Nevermind’ album cover comes to a close:

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” -- Dalai Lama

Deaths

US: 649,680 (+1519)

World: 4,475,693 (+10,325)

Cases

US: 39,157,249 (+188,324)

World: 214,721,447 (+724,870)

N.Y. Gov. Hochul adds 12k deaths to total coronavirus tally in show of 'transparency'. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul added more than 12,000 deaths to the state's coronavirus death count Tuesday following allegations that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, had intentionally downplayed those numbers.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued an executive order banning any state or local mandates requiring people to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. The move comes as Texas reported the most COVID-19 patients in its hospitals since the pandemic began.

Parents Are Not Okay. We’re not even at a breaking point anymore. We’re broken. Fourteen states require masks in schools, eight have banned local districts’ ability to make them mandatory, and every other state has kicked the can down to the local level so that parents can brawl at school-board meetings. Florida has gone so far as to threaten administrators with fines and firings if they defy the mask ban, making it seem like some governors, legislators, and run-of-the-mill assholes just won’t quit until kids are stacked like cordwood. And all of this assumes that the fight should be over masks, and not reinstating the ability to hold school online until every child can be vaccinated.

Many predicted some kind of 'Covid slide' in learning. Test results show how bad it is. Reading scores in the fall of 2020 had been largely on par with previous years, and researchers thought literacy might not be impacted so badly by the changes to schooling. But by the spring of 2021, reading scores were between 3 and 6 percentile points lower. And median math achievement dropped 8-12 percentile points compared to pre-pandemic levels, an analysis by NWEA found.

36% of Tennessee’s COVID-19 cases are children. Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Wednesday that Tennessee had 14,000 pediatric cases in the previous seven days, which she said was 57% more than the previous week. She says such cases now make up 36% of total COVID-19 cases, “when it’s historically been in the 10 to 15 percent range.”

'I think we already broke:' Mississippi's nurses are resigning to protect themselves from Covid-19 burnout. "It looks heroic," Atherton, of Singing River Ocean Springs Hospital, told CNN. "But that's not what it is. It's sweaty and hard and chaotic and bloody. And it's hard to live in this every day and then go home and live a normal life." Mississippi now has at least 2,000 fewer nurses than it did at the beginning of the year, according to the Mississippi Hospital Association's Center for Quality & Workforce. The staff shortages add to the growing strain on the state's hospital system -- both due, in large part, to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Covid ICUs, doctors see a surge in critically ill pregnant women. At hospitals across the South, doctors report treating more pregnant women than at any point in the pandemic.

South Dakota Covid cases quintuple after Sturgis motorcycle rally. Meade County, home to Sturgis, has had a more than 1,500 percent increase in cases in the past 14 days.

An emergency room physician who charged $50 for opt-out letters to parents who don’t want their kids to wear masks in school has been removed from his position with a medical center following a social media call for his ouster.

Delta will charge unvaccinated employees $200 per month. Delta Air Lines will charge employees on the company health plan $200 a month if they fail to get vaccinated against COVID-19, a policy the airline’s top executive says is necessary because the average hospital stay for the virus costs the airline $50,000.

Pentagon: US troops must get their COVID-19 vaccines ASAP. More than 800,000 service members have yet to get their shots, according to Pentagon data. And now that the Pfizer vaccine has received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the Defense Department is adding it to the list of required shots troops must get as part of their military service.

Student-athletes required to wear Covid trackers at Washington state high school. Eatonville High School said the devices, or proximity monitors, are for athletes who participate in high-contact and moderate indoor sports including football. Students will have to wear them regardless of their vaccination status at the school in Eatonville, about 60 miles south of Seattle...Without the devices, entire teams could possibly be forced to quarantine if a player or coach tested positive for the coronavirus.

Taliban tell Afghan women to stay home from work because soldiers are 'not trained' to respect them. Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said at a news conference on Tuesday that women should not go to work for their own safety, undermining the group's efforts to convince international observers that the group would be more tolerant towards women than when they were last in power.

‘Pain compliance’: Video shows trooper pummeling Black man. Graphic body camera video kept secret for more than two years shows a Louisiana State Police trooper pummeling a Black motorist 18 times with a flashlight — an attack the trooper defended as “pain compliance.” “I’m not resisting! I’m not resisting!” Aaron Larry Bowman can be heard screaming between blows on the footage obtained by The Associated Press. The May 2019 beating following a traffic stop left him with a broken jaw, three broken ribs, a broken wrist and a gash to his head that required six staples to close. Bowman’s encounter near his Monroe home came less than three weeks after troopers from the same embattled agency punched, stunned and dragged another Black motorist, Ronald Greene, before he died in police custody on a rural roadside in northeast Louisiana. Video of Greene’s death similarly remained under wraps before AP obtained and published it earlier this year. Federal prosecutors are examining both cases in a widening investigation into police brutality and potential cover-ups involving both troopers and state police brass. -- Police didn’t even investigate the case for 536 days. You read that right. 536 days. Fucking racists.

The secret bias hidden in mortgage-approval algorithms. An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to white people with similar financial characteristics. Ron Jeremy, adult film star, indicted on rape and other sexual assault charges.

Porn star Ron Jeremy has been indicted on more than 30 counts of sexual assault involving 21 women over the past two decades, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announced Wednesday. Jeremy, whose legal last name is Hyatt, is accused of sexually assaulting the women over a 23-year span between 1996 and 2019, according to the district attorney's office. The victims range in age from 15 to 51. Jeremy pleaded not guilty to 12 counts of forcible rape, seven counts of forcible oral copulation, six counts of sexual battery by restraint, four counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object, two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious or asleep person and one count each of lewd act upon a child under the age of 14 or 15, sodomy by use of force and assault with intent to commit rape, the district attorney's office said.

The US is inching closer to passing a game-changing climate policy. A time when the United States runs mostly on wind- and solar-powered electricity could be a reality in only a few years. It wouldn’t require any scientific breakthroughs or technological leaps for clean energy to overtake coal and natural gas, which still dominate 60 percent of the US power sector. What it would take to challenge a century of fossil-fuel dominance in record-breaking time is one sweeping, underappreciated policy: a clean electricity standard.

OnlyFans reverses ban on posting 'sexually explicit' content. OnlyFans, an online subscription platform known for adult content, on Wednesday scrapped its new policy that would have prohibited users from posting any material containing "sexually explicit conduct."

The US man who featured as a baby on the cover of Nirvana's 'Nevermind' album, one of the most famous album covers of all time, is suing the band for sexual exploitation, according to a lawsuit. But neither Mr Elden nor his legal guardians "ever signed a release authorising the use of any images of Spencer or of his likeness, and certainly not of commercial child pornography depicting him," the lawsuit said…It said Mr Elden had suffered "extreme and permanent emotional distress", as well as "lifelong loss of income earning capacity," among other consequences…Mr Elden recreated the album cover multiple times, including for its 25th anniversaries…They held a pool party during which Spencer Elden posed for the then-unknown band. Mr Elden's parents were paid $200 for the original shoot. — Seems his parents, who were friends of the photographer, gave their consent.

A Belgian zoo has banned a woman who said she had an 'affair' with one of their chimpanzees. The Antwerp Zoo is banning a long-time visitor from seeing her favorite chimp because their relationship is interfering with his ability to bond with his fellow primates.

Hubble captures an ‘Einstein Ring’. A new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a stunning “Einstein Ring” billions of light-years from Earth — a phenomenon named after Albert Einstein, who predicted that gravity could bend light.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.