Tuesday, March 1, 2022

And another day of Putin’s invasion, closing windows, the food supply, primaries in TX, rejecting thousands of ballots in TX, long Covid costing people dearly, TX abortion law fears coming true, immunity for federal agents, gay men excel academically, and dementia linked to early menopause comes to a close:

“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history.” — Noam Chomsky

Deaths

US: 977,402 (+4283 over two days)

World: 5,983,814 (+15,792 over two days)

Cases

US: 80,697,924 (+130,167 over two days)

World: 438,814,552 (+2,828,935 over two days)

Russian forces escalate attacks on Ukraine’s civilian areas. Russian forces escalated their attacks on crowded urban areas Tuesday, bombarding the central square in Ukraine’s second-biggest city and Kyiv’s main TV tower in what the country’s president called a blatant campaign of terror. -- Fuck Putin. He’s a piece of maggot infested fucking shit. And fuck you if you support him.

Biden vows to check Russian aggression, fight inflation. Addressing a concerned nation and anxious world, President Joe Biden vowed in his first State of the Union address Tuesday night to check Russian aggression in Ukraine, tame soaring U.S. inflation and deal with the fading but still dangerous coronavirus.

Nations agree to release 60M barrels of oil amid Russian war. The International Energy Agency’s 31 member countries agreed Tuesday to release 60 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves — half of that from the United States — “to send a strong message to oil markets” that supplies won’t fall short after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Window to reverse climate change "atlas of human suffering" almost closed, U.N. warns. Nearly half the planet's population is highly vulnerable to a devastating array of climate impacts, according to a landmark UN report that said time had very nearly run out to ensure a "liveable future" for all. "The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and planetary health," the report concluded.

5 signs of how climate change is unraveling Earth’s ecosystems. Global warming is taking a bigger toll on wildlife than we previously thought, a new IPCC report shows. In a new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), researchers from 67 countries warned that warming is putting a large portion of the world’s biodiversity and ecosystems at risk of extinction, even under relatively conservative estimates. Never before has an IPCC report — considered the gold standard for climate science — revealed in such stark detail how climate change is harming nature.

Climate change is already taking a big bite out of our food supply. The situation is worse than you think, the startling new IPCC report finds. Here’s how we should respond.

Americans agree climate change is an issue — but differ on what to do. About 28 percent — including more than half of Republicans — oppose the U.S. taking steps toward becoming carbon neutral. -- Republicans are literally trying to kill everyone of the fucking planet.

Climate change brings extreme, early impact to South America. Scientists have long been warning that extreme weather would cause calamity in the future. But in South America — which in just the last month has had deadly landslides in Brazil, wildfire in Argentine wetlands and flooding in the Amazon so severe it ruined harvests — that future is already here.

Thousands of Texans at risk of having ballots rejected in first test of new state law. Thousands of Texas ballots will be rejected unless voters take an extra step to correct them, election officials warned on the eve of Tuesday's primary. The statewide election will be the first test of new identification requirements for voters who cast their ballots by mail, and county figures indicate many are already encountering problems. -- Republicans do whatever they can to suppress as many votes as possible.

Election 2022: Texas primary tests GOP’s rightward shift. Voters in Texas will usher in the midterm campaign season with primaries that will test just how far to the right the Republican Party will shift in a state where many in the GOP have already tightened their embrace of former President Donald Trump. -- Of course, when voting is fucking rigged to favor the far right, we have to take any win they may get with a grain of salt.

Texas primary sets up Abbott-Beto showdown as midterms begin. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will face Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke after voters in Texas on Tuesday opened what could be a lengthy, bruising primary season poised to reshape political power from state capitals to Washington.

No, TV stations do not fact check political ads for accuracy before running them. Federal regulations prohibit broadcasters from refusing to run an ad from from a qualified candidate for any reason. — What the actual fuck? No, really. Read that shit again. 

The Arizona Republican Party is asking the state Supreme Court to rule that absentee voting is unconstitutional. If its lawsuit is successful, it would upend election procedures used by 90% of voters in the state. — More authoritarian moves from fucking Republicans.

They got ‘long Covid.’ It cost them dearly. An NBC News investigation into how the social safety net is responding to “long Covid” revealed critical gaps in the existing assistance programs. Two taxpayer-funded programs are supposed to protect workers against lost income — unemployment insurance and long-term disability insurance — but neither is an option for most Americans with long Covid, who may be too sick to work but not ready to depart the workforce altogether.

Vaccine protection against Covid-19 fell substantially for children during Omicron surge. Adolescents ages 12 through 17 – who get a dose of the Pfizer vaccine that’s three times higher than the shots for younger kids – had better protection against most circulating variants, but that protection dropped off steeply with time and the arrival of the Omicron variant. Five months or more after a second dose, kids in this age group had no significant protection against Omicron infections warranting a trip to the urgent care or ER.

Doctors' worst fears about the Texas abortion law are coming true. It's impossible to know how many patients and doctors are having similar conversations in Texas. Many are feeling frustration and disbelief as they navigate in the new legal environment. Also creating complications is that the law contains no exception for pregnancies conceived through rape or incest, creating wrenching situations for patients whose lives have already been rattled by trauma .-- If you support the Texas anti-abortion law, then you are a sick motherfucker. Fuck you.

The ACLU sues Texas governor over state-sponsored persecution of trans youth. Plaintiffs include a family already being investigated for providing their 16-year-old daughter gender-affirming care.

Anti-Vaxxers Have a New Obsession: Keeping Your Kids From Seeing Their Doctors. But actually, anti-mask rhetoric is only part of what’s driving these memes. The broader goal is to sow distrust in the CDC’s developmental milestones as a whole to convince parents to skip the recommended schedule of well-child visits to the pediatrician, during which the majority of childhood vaccines are given.

The Supreme Court could make it very easy for federal law enforcement to violate the Constitution. What’s the remedy if a federal official violates your constitutional rights? The answer may soon be nothing. But now, Boule’s somewhat sketchy inn is the subject of a Supreme Court case that could grant federal law enforcement officers sweeping immunity from lawsuits alleging that they violated the Constitution — even when those officers target people who are entirely innocent...Boule is, admittedly, not the most sympathetic plaintiff who has ever filed a Bivens lawsuit. But the Supreme Court deals in broad legal rules that bind every federal court in the country. In the likely event that the Court rules against Boule, it could do considerable violence to the public’s ability to hold rogue law enforcement officers accountable.

Why Does Everything the GOP Touches Cause Poverty, Disease & Death? Turns out this is about more than the GOP just embracing policies that lead to disease and death - those same policies also win elections while making their morbidly rich campaign donors even richer. But are all these things, along with widespread GOP support for Putin, happening because Republicans hate their citizens and worship poverty, death and disease? Or is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes? It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections. Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in. -- And those voters most victimized by these moves are the least able to see it.

While straight men face educational crisis, gay men excel academically, study finds. Lesbians, however, perform more poorly than straight women in a number of academic measures, according to a study published in the American Sociological Review.

Target raising minimum wages up to $24 an hour in some areas. Target set a new marker for the retail industry back in 2017 when it announced it would increase hourly wages to $15 by 2020.

Colorado to become first US state to accept cryptocurrency tax payments. Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, who announced the effort last week, explained in a tweet that the state would accept crypto payments converted into a dollar value, which would then be deposited in the state’s treasury.

Dementia linked to premature menopause for women, study says. Entering menopause before age 40 is linked to a 35% higher risk of developing dementia later in life, a preliminary study finds.

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

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