Monday, December 6, 2021

And another day of the next coup, the DOJ suing TX, vax mandates for private businesses, ending required school attendance, grooming girls for Epstein, a shadow foster system, marijuana, ‘suicide capsules,’ and ‘magic dirt’ comes to a close:

“There will be no recovery from this crisis until the Republican Party recommits itself to democracy.” — David Frum

“I worry democrats continue to bring a stuffed animal to knife fight.” -- Molly Jong-Fast

Deaths

US: 810,246 (+1483)

World: 5,277,598 (+6936)

Cases

US: 50,148,680 (+178,824)

World: 266,692,824 (+569,094)

Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.” For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters. By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response…Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

Justice Department sues Texas over new redistricting maps. The Justice Department sued Texas on Monday over its new redistricting maps, saying the plans discriminate against minority voters, particularly Latinos, who have fueled the state’s population boom.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announces vaccine mandate for all private sector employees, calling it a "preemptive strike." New York City will also now mandate two vaccine doses, instead of one, for indoor activities, and will require proof of vaccination for indoor dining for kids ages 5 to 11.

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame. Recent polling data that show Republicans are now the largest group of unvaccinated individuals in the United States, more than any other single demographic group. Polling also shows that mistrust in official sources of information and exposure to misinformation, about both COVID-19 and the vaccines, run high among Republicans. "An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat," says Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank that tracks attitudes toward vaccination. Political affiliation is now the strongest indicator of whether someone is vaccinated, she says: "If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is." It was not always this way. Earlier in the pandemic, many different groups expressed hesitancy toward getting vaccinated.

GOP Michigan education official: State should end required school attendance. Republican State Board of Education member Tom McMillin says Michigan should end its school attendance policies that broadly require parents to ensure their children are in class after the mass shooting at Oxford High School. With some exceptions, the longstanding compulsory attendance law requires parents and guardians to send their students to school during the school year. Repealing the law would mark a dramatic and unlikely overhaul of Michigan public education, funding for which is currently based on attendance numbers. -- Remember, the GOP goal is to get rid of public education.

The Justice Department closes a second investigation into the infamous 1955 killing of Emmett Till after failing to prove a key witness lied.

British woman testifies about grooming by Ghislaine Maxwell. A British woman testified Monday that Ghislaine Maxwell pressured her into giving Jeffrey Epstein sexual massages when she was still a teenager, assuring her she would have “fun” with him.

Switzerland Approves Assisted ‘Suicide Capsule’. Switzerland has just legalized a new way to die by assisted suicide. The country’s medical review board has just given authorization for use of the Sarco Suicide Pod, which is a 3-D-printed portable coffin-like capsule with windows that can be transported to a tranquil place for a person’s final moments of life. Conventional assisted-suicide methods have generally involved a chemical substance. Inventor Philip Nitschke of Exit International told the website SwissInfo.ch that his “death pod” offers a different approach. “We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,” he said. “Our aim is to develop an artificial-intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally there is a lot of skepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists.”

'Magic dirt': How the internet fueled, and defeated, the pandemic's weirdest MLM. Black Oxygen Organics became a sudden hit in the fringe world of alternative medicines and supplements, where even dirt can go for $110 a bag. Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.” BOO, which “can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals,” according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites. By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet subcultures that embrace fringe supplements, including the mixed martial arts community, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure spaces. And people seemed to be buying.” — The latest snake oil.

“They Took Us Away From Each Other”: Lost Inside America’s Shadow Foster System. Across the country, unregulated “shadow” foster care is severing parents from children — who often wind up abandoned by the system that’s supposed to protect them. What the parents rarely know is that, unlike the foster system, the shadow system is not designed to support their children. The government isn’t required to ensure the safety of placements with the thorough home visits and health screenings that federal law requires with foster care. Relatives or family friends, often under pressure to take children into their homes, don’t receive a boarding fee to raise them; they usually don’t even have the legal authority to enroll them in school or take them to a doctor. In many states, departments simply close the cases, ending the assistance that child-welfare workers can provide. Because nobody monitors the children after they are moved, it’s impossible to know what happens to them while no one is watching.

Hawaii faces 'catastrophic flooding' from storms until Tuesday, National Weather Service warns. Nearly one foot of rain has already fallen in Kula on Maui over the last 24 hours, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) in Honolulu. Rainfall storm total amounts of 10 to 15 inches are anticipated, with isolated areas of 20 to 25 inches possible, the NWS said.

The world's newest nation is both drying up and drowning. South Sudan is one of many places in the world struggling with this twin problem of drought followed by extreme rainfall, which together create prime conditions for devastating floods.

Marijuana may make sleep worse, especially for regular users, study finds. It's a common assumption among marijuana users: Using weed will help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Scientists, however, aren't so sure that's true.

Scientists perplexed by flesh-eating ‘vulture bees’ that have quit pollen to feed on dead bodies. Some bees have now evolved the ability to only eat flesh because of an “intense competition for nectar” and of an evolved gut that resembles vultures instead of other bees.

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

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