Tuesday, September 7, 2021

And another day of TX moving hard right, Mexico decriminalizes abortion, quitting your job because of vax mandate, rationing health care, college fights, flu season, pediatric brain cancer, and “everybody’s crisis,” comes to a close:

“I become more convinced that beings from other planets are using the Earth as a lunatic asylum.” — George Bernard Shaw

“PSA: If you allow people to vote with a handgun permit but not a state-university issued ID, you don't actually care about "protecting elections," you care about suppressing the votes of people who disagree with you.” — Robert Reich

Deaths

US: 669,022 (+2463)

World: 4,598,448 (+9653)

Cases

US: 41,206,672 (+340,878)

World: 222,718,271 (+742,513)

Texas GOP bets on hard right turn amid changing demographics. Faced with increasingly dire demographic threats to their party’s dominance, Texas Republicans have championed a bevy of boundary-pushing conservative policymaking that dramatically expands gun rights, curbs abortions and tightens election laws — steering a state that was already far to the right even more so. -- As my friend who lives in Texas told me the other day: Texas is a “shit hole.” Yes. Yes it is.

Mexico Supreme Court rules criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional. Mexico's Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, a major victory for advocates of women's health and human rights in the majority Roman Catholic nation.

Portland’s planned boycott over Texas abortion law could cost Lone Star State $7M a year.

Over 70 percent of unvaccinated Americans in survey would quit their job if vaccines are mandated. -- Then quit. There are other people--vaccinated people--who will readily take over these positions.

Idaho hospitals begin rationing health care amid COVID surge. Idaho public health leaders announced Tuesday that they activated “crisis standards of care” allowing health care rationing for the state’s northern hospitals because there are more coronavirus patients than the institutions can handle...The move allows hospitals to allot scarce resources like intensive care unit rooms to patients most likely to survive.

13 Miami-Dade school employees have died of Covid-19 since mid-August. Among the 13 were three teachers, one security monitor, one cafeteria worker and seven school bus drivers, United Teachers of Dade President Karla Hernandez-Mats said. All were unvaccinated.

U.S. workplaces look to college fights as return to work 'turning point' looms. A legal battle is brewing over remote work between administrators at U.S. colleges committed to in-person classes and some faculty with disabilities. Experts warn it is a precursor of what awaits employers that order staff back to the office amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Employment lawyers said higher education provides a key test of who can work remotely because it is a profession traditionally associated with in-person work.

Flu season is coming fast and could be miserable, studies warn. Health officials are urging people to get their flu shots now, in an attempt to prevent further strain on hospitals already overwhelmed by Covid-19 and other viruses. The push to get flu shots as soon as possible comes as two studies warn that this flu season could be a miserable one.

"Anti-vaxxers" hurl gravel at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. During a stop along with his Labour vote campaign on Labor Day (U.S.), Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, was assaulted by a group of anti-vaccine protesters who threw rocks at the government official.

Seattle Seahawks latest NFL team to require Covid vaccination or negative test for fans. Seattle is the third NFL team to have such a policy. The Las Vegas Raiders and New Orleans Saints have also announced similar procedures at their stadiums.

Texas governor signs new GOP voting restrictions into law. The laws are part of a national GOP campaign, including in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, to tighten voting laws in the name of security, partly driven by Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.

Virginia’s Redistricting Commission has its first draft maps. They look… normal? A pair of consultants drew their proposed House of Delegates and Senate districts from scratch, following the guidance of the new commission that was supposed to empower citizens to lead the process previously dominated by incumbent legislators. The initial result was maps with more straight lines and less meandering squiggles. That contrast was confirmed, the consultants said, by algorithmic scores showing their maps are indeed more compact than the existing ones.

Two decades after the 9/11 attacks and nine years after war crimes charges were filed, accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still awaits trial. “The system is set up to fail."

Shelby Rogers braces for social media abuse after US Open loss. “Obviously, we appreciate the spotlight in those moments, but then, you know, you have today and I'm going to have nine million death threats and whatnot," she told reporters after Monday's match. "It's very much polarizing, one extreme to the other very quickly.”

Jill Biden heads back to classroom as a working first lady. Here's why that's a big deal. She is the first first lady to leave the White House and log hours at a full-time job.

Taliban form all-male Afghan government of old guard members. The Taliban on Tuesday announced an all-male interim government for Afghanistan stacked with veterans of their hard-line rule from the 1990s and the 20-year battle against the U.S.-led coalition, a move that seems unlikely to win the international support the new leaders desperately need to avoid an economic meltdown.

El Salvador Just Became The First Country To Accept Bitcoin As Legal Tender.

All parents should be 'outraged' in fight against pediatric brain cancer. Every year, some 5,000 children in the United States are diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer -- the leading killer of children under the age of 15. Yet medical knowledge of how to treat brain cancer in children is far behind other adult cancers. Why? "Because children don't vote.”…"Pharmaceutical companies do not care about these kids. I get it. It's not profitable," Kaczynski said. "Because of that, it's up to private charity and the government to fund the clinical trials being done by oncologists."

In NYC after IDA, Biden calls climate ‘everybody’s crisis’. The president said he thinks the damage everyone is seeing, from wildfires in the West to hurricane havoc in the South and Northeast, is turning climate-change skeptics into believers, but that years of unheeded warnings from scientists, economists and others mean time for action is short.

Animals are 'shape shifting' in response to climate change. Animals are getting larger beaks, legs and ears that allow them to better regulate their body temperatures as the planet gets hotter, with birds particularly affected, said Sara Ryding, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia and one of the authors of the research that published on Tuesday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Top 10 states that are heating up fastest in America. Among the top 10 states that have heated up the most over the past two decades, 80 percent of them are on the East Coast.

Astronomers are still looking for the elusive ‘Planet 9’. A new study narrows down where to find a hypothetical ninth planet in the dark outer limits of our solar system. For their latest study, however, Brown and Batygin have added several recent observations of objects, and they’ve calculated that the clustering is almost certainly real — in fact, they found there is only a 0.4 percent chance that it’s a fluke. That would suggest that Planet 9  is almost certainly there — and the new study includes a ”treasure map” of its supposed orbit that tells astronomers the best places in the sky to look for it.

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

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