The News Thread

Topic

Replies

Anonymous wrote:

I think the coffee shops are actually open (not for drinking coffee, just for buying weed)

Ah, so they do understand priorities!

Anonymous wrote:

These riots are upsetting. They actually burned down a covid testing place. I hope it calms down soon. People seem to be especially concerned about the nighttime curfew, I don’t think that is such a big deal

Yeah, this shit is crazy. Seems like it’s mainly young people acting out?

Over here, people are getting antsy, too, but not in a rioting way. But then, we don’t have a curfew yet.
Actually, numbers have been sinking the last few days so things are looking good, but the government is apparently planning on extending the lockdown anyway, for fear of the mutants. Which is probably the way to go honestly; there’s been some talk of a zero covd strategy and that’d probably be a good idea, but they’ll never go for it.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Todd

The lockdown sucks but some shops are trying to do things to keep business going. A clothing store here will film articles of clothing for you, and bring them by your house, give you time to see if they fit, and pick it up again if they’re not a good fit.

 

The rioters don’t have any popular support by the way, they’re just a bunch of crazy youths. We have some of these people. I mean I fucking hate all of the lockdown stuff, but I understand why they’re doing lockdowns (even though I don’t agree with it) and I am not going to cause some property damage over it.

2 users thanked author for this post.

DavidM, Christian

Meanwhile, when asked what he would do differently in the wake of 100,000 UK deaths, Johnson claims the government had done all it could.

That is false, demonstrably false and indicates Johnson has no rock bottom.  No moment of clarity, of realisation of having gone so badly wrong, no responsibility for anything or anyone.  Just lie atop outrageous lie without end.

4 users thanked author for this post.

Rocket, Todd, lorcan_nagle

Black woman whose family was handcuffed at gunpoint by police sues Aurora, Colorado

Really hoping she wins.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, lorcan_nagle

JRCarter wrote:

Black woman whose family was handcuffed at gunpoint by police sues Aurora, Colorado

Really hoping she wins.

Or at least gets a huge settlement.

1 user thanked author for this post.

JRCarter

Christian wrote:

But then, we don’t have a curfew yet.

I’m generally in support of lockdown measures but I think curfews are most likely counterproductive. Placing opening hours limitations on businesses that are open means more people are crammed into a limited window, making social distancing more difficult. It feels a lot like a ‘police state’ with no real evidence it does any good.

 

2 users thanked author for this post.

Andrew, Ben

Yeah, and I find it especially hard to see the point in winter. It’s not like there masses of people hanging around outside partying.

According to the Office of National Statistics, teachers did not experience a higher Covid death rate than average.

Covid: Teachers ‘not at higher risk’ of death than average – BBC News

So, people who were spending several hours a day indoors with a group of people who were not wearing masks were not at greater risk of death than people who were taking all the proper mask-wearing, no-contact, no socialising precautions?

I wish I understood enough about science to draw some useful conclusions from this data.

The problem I would think there is you are looking at death rate and then looking at the chances of contracting the disease.

The biggest factor in death rate we know is age and all teachers would be below 65 with the majority much younger.

Then you look at this:

Restaurant staff, people working in factories and care workers had among the highest death rates, followed by taxi drivers and security guards.

Nurses were more than twice as likely as their peers to die of coronavirus.

Secondary school teachers may have been at slightly, but not measurably, higher risk than the average.

Now bear in mind for the majority of the last year when transmission rates have been high, and the lowest rates coincided with summer, the schools have not been open. When they have for most of the time they’ve been on limited pupils and with distance learning. For the other professions named above they have been operating all the way through. So they’re likely to have been exposed to the public in that period for 3 or 4 times as long quite easily and when the R rate is highest.

There’s a bit of logic that can explain it.

I would expect that the ONS now has so much data they can precisely state the average number of hours of contact that are needed to contract the virus in various situations, and therefore answer questions such as “Are teachers getting more or less infected per child-hour of contact than a taxi driver per adult-hour?”

Since this thing started, there has been an intermittent debate about how infectious children are, with the answer swinging back and forth. As recently as yesterday, a BBC report basically said “we don’t know”. With literally millions of days of data from this country alone, how has this and other questions not been definitively answered?

Christian wrote:

fear of the mutants.

these government people would not be named Trask, Kelly, or Stryker, would they?

2 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, Dave

DavidM wrote:

With literally millions of days of data from this country alone, how has this and other questions not been definitively answered?

My suspicion is because the younger you are the more likely you seem to be to be asymptomatic. That means you don’t go to be tested.

They did do some blanket testing thing in Liverpool, I don’t know how well it went for all age groups or how relevant it now is when there are new strains. One of the issues is the moving target all the time.

I think we have enough globally now though to know the general approach has been very wrong and very slow to adjust to the obvious. The best way to reduce spread is to reduce movement. 10 months later than most of Asia and Australasia the UK has decided to put controls at borders, maybe, kind of, not sure.

Not just the UK but a lot of Europe and North America has lived under a delusion that closing a pub or shop an hour earlier could contain the virus while people were travelling in and out of airports with barely any control. The ‘Kent variant’ is very likely not to come from Kent (a county with a major sea entry port). Kids in Australia and Thailand go to school now because they sacrificed the tourist industry by shutting it down while today European influencers are posting glamour pics from Lanzarote. They don’t have to worry about complex stats on the effects on teaching per hour in various class sizes because they have none to little community transmission.

Malaysia was almost free of Covid, numbers were tiny, down to single figures a day, then in September they authorised a set of elections in Sabah, the state with most porous border and highest infections. A weird quirk here is nobody wants to re-register their address so people travel in large numbers to vote across borders, as well as politicians campaigning and press covering (and Sabah is on Borneo, a different land mass to most of Malaysia). It caused a huge rise in infections across the country, still much lower than European numbers but could have been so much better if they’d just delayed them and everyone stayed put. Test and trace is an impossible task when everyone keeps moving.

I think if most countries had stuck to a 10 mile limit (caveats for very rural areas but they are at least risk) then you probably wouldn’t have needed much lockdown at all. They have gigs and full sports stadia and bars in places because nobody can enter the countries unless they have citizenship and a familial link and then sit out mandatory quarantine in the hotels that are otherwise empty because of not tourism.

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

DavidM

DavidM wrote:

Since this thing started, there has been an intermittent debate about how infectious children are, with the answer swinging back and forth. As recently as yesterday, a BBC report basically said “we don’t know”. With literally millions of days of data from this country alone, how has this and other questions not been definitively answered?

We do know. People just don’t like the answer.

According to Drosten, the British React-1 study is pretty much the definite answer to this and shows that during lockdown measures with open schools, what happens is that you see the rise in infection numbers in school children that you would expect. Most of the (especially early) studies that claimed that children are less infectious were conducting during time periods in which the schools were closed, so that was why everybody thought children were less infectious – they were sitting at home, and in contrast to their parents, they didn’t still have to somhow do their jobs or go shopping for groceries or whatever.

Everybody, especially the ministers of education of the countries here, is trying very hard to wish the other answer, that children are less infectious, into reality, because it’d take away a lot of the pressure from them.

DavidM wrote:

According to the Office of National Statistics, teachers did not experience a higher Covid death rate than average.

Covid: Teachers ‘not at higher risk’ of death than average – BBC News

Well, apart from what Gar said – and I think there are studies showing markedly higher infection rates for teachers than the gen pop – there’s also this:

Because the numbers for secondary teachers were comparatively small – 52 deaths in total – it’s difficult to be certain about their exact risk, but any increase there might be compared with the general population was not considered statistically significant.

However, while teachers were not at higher risk than the average, they did appear to be at higher risk than some other professional job roles, which have seen very few or no deaths.

The ONS excluded from its analysis any occupation that had seen fewer than 10 deaths, and the average death rate for the whole population masks this variation.
[…]
The study also covers periods where there were limited numbers of children attending school.

So, you know, if you factor out the high-risk professions everybody else should be at lower than average risk, but teachers are at slightly higher than average risk – even with numbers concerning periods in which there was only limited attendance. Also, it’s hard to tell with too small a number of teacher deaths overall. It’d be interesting to see a comparison to the US with its higher population numbers, but I can’t immediately find numbers for teacher deaths or infections in the US.

1 user thanked author for this post.

DavidM

[Al-x]

https://fb.watch/3iLt2GMOXF/

Gamestop stock and Wall St.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Al-x.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Al-x wrote:

Gamestop stock and Wall St.

‘This is unacceptable’: AOC and others side with retail investors, slam Robinhood and Wall Street amid GameStop mania (yahoo.com)

This is such bullshit. Anybody else invests at their own risk, but if you’re a hedge fund or in congress, you get protection. Only the “right” people are allowed to make money from stocks!

5 users thanked author for this post.

Sean Robinson, DavidM, Dave, garjones, Todd

Anonymous wrote:

Al-x wrote:

Gamestop stock and Wall St.

‘This is unacceptable’: AOC and others side with retail investors, slam Robinhood and Wall Street amid GameStop mania (yahoo.com)

This is such bullshit. Anybody else invests at their own risk, but if you’re a hedge fund or in congress, you get protection. Only the “right” people are allowed to make money from stocks!

4 users thanked author for this post.

DavidM, Dave, Christian

oh man… this whole gamestop/robinhood deal is bonkers as fuck… it’s like occupy wallstreet but actually useful… and then of course the wallstreet richbois do what they do best: cheat to get ahead.

Man I hope this is one of those things the internet doesn’t forget… if this gets enough steam, and someone smart enough to capitalize on this by creating another robinhood-like site that’s not beholden to a fucking hedgefund, this could get REALLY interesting.

They should get the “snydercult” on that train, those mofos know how to get shit done =P

3 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, DavidM

What irks me is all these social media groups shutting down trading discussions when nothing they are doing is illegal in any way and they dragged their feet for years over extremist groups on their platforms. It really does show where this all lies in terms of power and priorities.

5 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, Dave, DavidM, Martin Smith

Todd wrote:

This is such bullshit. Anybody else invests at their own risk, but if you’re a hedge fund or in congress, you get protection. Only the “right” people are allowed to make money from stocks!

This is another example of the “too big to fail” mentality that Wall Street and the Federal government maintain. They bailed out most of the major banks and investment firms after the 2008 crash (with the notable exception of Lehman Brothers, which was allowed to fail as a lesson to the others). It’s interesting that these overseers didn’t step in when the hedge funds were blatantly manipulating the GameStop stocks via “shorting” to drive the prices down, only when individuals banded together to buy up and support those stocks.

In the end, Big Finance will always side with Mr. Potter and screw George Bailey.

3 users thanked author for this post.

DavidM, Todd

njerry wrote:

In the end, Big Finance will always side with Mr. Potter and screw George Bailey.

I never read the books, but I did see the movies, but yeah… screw Harry Potter!

5 users thanked author for this post.

Rocket, DavidM, Todd, garjones, Dave

70.87 Billion Reasons Why The Retail Brokers Just Betrayed Their Customers

Yesterday, when TD Ameritrade became the first exchange to impose “unprecedented” restrictions on GME trading, we predicted what would happen next: “expect many more exchanges to follow suit, because hedge funds clearly need to be protected when faced with the retail daytrading mob.”

24 hours later, we were proven correct when first Robinhood (an “orderflow” cash cow for Melvin Capital owner Citadel), then Interactive Brokers, then Schwab and countless other brokerages announced – as if on preagreed terms – to halt trading in GME, AMC, BB, BBY, EXPR, KOSS, NAKD, NOK, SNDL, ALL and various other names.

“We’re committed to helping our customers navigate this uncertainty,” Robinhood said in a blog post, but few saw it that way.

This crackdown on retail trading sparked a firestorm, with retail investors rightfully demanding to know why these stocks (and associated options) were put on some ad hoc restricted list with no warning and threatening to take their money and go to more hospitable brokers, politicians threatening that hearings are coming, regulators threatening that lawsuits are coming, and everyone generally shocked at just how openly broken the market is.

Following Robinhood’s move, the brokerage was hit by at least two customer lawsuits. Dave Portnoy, a recent participant in the Reddit-fueled rally, was among those who slammed Robinhood for its decision. “Robinhood is dead,” Portnoy screamed on Twitter. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that she would welcome a hearing in the House Financial Services Committee, to discuss why hedge funds can freely trade the stocks and retail users are blocked. Even Elon Musk approved of the tweet.

But what was the reason for this unprecedented crackdown? After all, during countless episodes of market turmoil before, brokers had never taken it upon themselves to become the market’s supervisor and suspend trading in one or more shares.

It appears that there are several reasons, the first of which may have to do with some backroom deals.

First, consider that Citadel, which as regular readers know is the biggest source of revenue for Robinhood…

… is also now a part-owner of the insolvent bearish hedge fund Melvin Capital (which as recently as last week had $12BN in AUM) which would have collapsed and been forced to liquidate its longs, had it not received $2 billion from Citadel and another $750MM from Steve Cohen. In other words, while nobody has called it that yet, we just lived through a mini LTCM.

Here’s the problem: with the r/wasllstreetbets crowd continuing to press the shorts, we were about to have a second, not so mini LTCM, because as CNBC’s David Faber earlier today noted, Melvin Capital “is in trouble” after suffering “massive losses” and the infusion from Citadel and Point72 “is probably gone.”

Said otherwise, if the squeeze had continued Citadel and Point72 would have had to bail out Melvin Capital again (which is odd since it was CNBC that also reported yesterday that the hedge fund had closed its shorts… which apparently was not exactly true). And while $2.75 billion may be pocket change for Ken and Steve, $5 billion starts to look like real money. And what if it has to be followed by $10 billion, $20… and so on. On the other hand, if they did not throw more good money after bad, not only would their initial investment be wiped out, but once Mevlin was forced to start selling its longs to fund its margin calls – which also happen to be the names contained in the Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund VIP basket biggest longs for Citadel and Point72 – that’s when the real carnage would take place as everyone would scramble to frontrun the upcoming liquidation. The result would have been billions in losses for Citadel and Point72.

Surely the best outcome – for Melvin’s forced owners – would be to simply stop the firehose of liquidity whichever way possible, and after a few back door phone calls, which we hope to learn all about during the upcoming Congressional hearings, that’s precisely what happened.

But Citadel and SAC Point72 were not the only ones on the firing line. As Faber also said earlier, “any number of large of large hedge funds have suffered significantly.”

How much? According to financial data analytics firm Ortex, short-sellers – mostly hedge funds – are sitting on estimated losses of $70.87 billion from their short positions in U.S. companies just in 2021 alone! Add puts and other underwater derivatives, and the real loss will be even greater. And just as striking: Ortex data showed that as of Wednesday, there were loss-making short positions on more than 5,000 U.S. firms.

This means that virtually every hedge fund that had short positions on was getting hammered. So when dozens of these giant asset managers sat down and decided to polite call one broker after another what do you think happened.

That’s right: Joe Sixpack was quickly sold down the river.

Why? Because the so-called “retail clients” are nothing but a cost center to the “retail brokers” thanks to the recently introduced $0 commission pay scheme. In fact, brokers would be delighted to dump all but their biggest whales clients. So who pays the fees? Well, just take a look at Robinhood’s form 606: Citadel, Virtu, G1X, Wolverine, and countless hedge funds which, like Citadel, are tightly interwoven in the fabric of the market. It’s they that made a few phone call and just put dozens of stocks on a market-wide restricted list.

There’s more. While unconfirmed, there is speculation that that “Citadel reloaded their shorts before they told Robinhood to stop trading GME.” As the source notes, if true the people behind this should be in jail.

Perhaps this is true, perhaps not. We’ll find out soon.

But what we really want to find out is when the brokers will again allow trading in GME, AMC, and so on. What will be the catalyst? Will it be when hedge funds have finally covered their shorts, at which point there will be no further need for a squeeze.

If that’s indeed the case, it’ll tell us all we need to know about who truly runs the erroneously called “free markets.”

2 users thanked author for this post.

Martin Smith

Critics say plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill is an insult to her legacy

This week, the Biden administration announced that it would resume efforts to put the image of Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, a move first championed by the Obama administration in 2016. Biden press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the Treasury Department is “exploring ways to speed up” the process to ensure the 19th century freedom fighter is recognized.

“It’s important that our notes, our money — if people don’t know what a note is — reflect the history and diversity of our country,” Psaki said during a White House press briefing. “Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that.”

Many initially praised the move put forth by Obama-era Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to highlight the American abolitionist. To supporters, the idea of having Tubman, herself an ex-slave, replace former President Andrew Jackson, a slave owner, is a bold rebuke to an ugly era in American history.

But some Black activists say putting Tubman on the $20 bill is an uneasy fit with her legacy.

“Harriet Tubman did not fight for capitalism, free trade or competitive markets,” Feminista Jones, an activist, author and advocate wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post in 2015.

“She repeatedly put herself in the line of fire to free people who were treated as currency themselves,” Jones added. “She risked her life to ensure that enslaved Black people would know they were worth more than the blood money that exchanged hands to buy and sell them. I do not believe Tubman, who died impoverished in 1913, would accept the ‘honor.’”

Tubman, born into slavery around 1822, was the fourth of nine children, and grew up working in cotton fields in Dorchester County, Md. In 1849, Tubman escaped her plantation under the cover of darkness, following the North Star to Philadelphia and at 27 years old began working as a maid. After saving enough money the following year, she returned to the South to liberate her sister’s family. Over the next 10 years, Tubman helped more than 700 slaves escape to freedom, becoming the most well-known of the Underground Railroad’s “conductors,”

Later, Tubman was a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and later became the first woman in the country’s history to lead a military expedition; she was also known to be a prominent supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She died in 1913 at the age of 91.

Jones, in an interview with Yahoo News this week, questioned why putting Tubman on a bill would honor her legacy.

“Why would we want to put somebody who fought for freedom from this kind of capitalist oppression?” Jones asked. “Why would we want to take her image and then make her the face of this thing that so many people lack access to?”

“I’ve studied Harriet Tubman extensively,” she added. “If there’s one thing that I understand is that she did not get recognized for all of the amazing things that she did. She died a pauper and she was a U.S. veteran. The [country] should have honored her as a veteran. She was the only woman to lead a raid for the Union Army. That in itself is just an amazing accomplishment for the all-women crowd. So why not acknowledge that?”

Instead of putting Black women, or any woman of color on a note, Jones says that Black women merely want to be valued equitably in society.

“When it comes to representation, I’ll be quite honest, I don’t care much about it,” Jones said. “Representation without action, without policy change, without improvement of daily life means nothing to me.”

“I don’t need to look in magazines and see people that look like me if I’m still struggling every single day,” she added. “That’s not what’s important to me. … So when people ask, ‘What is it that Black women want?’ We want our humanity to be acknowledged. We want to have dignity. We want people to see us as human beings, not as laborers, not as mules, not as servants to other people.”

Historically, Black women have made a fraction of what white men and women make, despite being the most educated population in the country. For every dollar a white man earns for work in the United States, white women earn 79 cents and Black women earn just 62 cents, according to a 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

The median net worth of Black women in America paints an even grimmer picture. Single Black women age 20 to 39 with children but without a bachelor’s degree have a median net worth of $0, according to a 2017 report from the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. Single Black women age 20 to 39 with a bachelor’s degree fare even worse, having a median net worth range of -$11,000 to $0. White women, on the other hand, fare considerably better. Single white women age 20 to 39 with a bachelor’s degree have a median net worth range of $3,400 to $7,500.

The push to have Tubman on the $20 bill was initially set to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement in 2020. But the year came and went without any revision to the $20 bill.

The plan to put Tubman on the $20 bill stalled under the Trump administration. President Trump, while still a candidate in 2016, called the push to replace Jackson with Tubman “pure political correctness.” Trump hailed Jackson as his political hero and installed a portrait of the former president in the Oval Office amid criticism from some historians and activists who noted that Jackson, in addition to being a slave owner, committed genocide against Native Americans.

Now, years after the plan to put Tubman on the $20 bill was first introduced, the move is being met with both praise and opposition.

Akinyele Umoja, an African American studies professor at Georgia State University, said he “sees both sides” of the debate, but he ultimately thinks the move honors Tubman in an appropriate way.

“I was glad, particularly after the delay, that there was some movement on that front to have Harrriet Tubman represented,” Umoja, author of “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” told Yahoo News. “The critics are waging questions of it just being symbolism and argue there’s racial capitalism going on and Black people are being affected. And so people want to see something more substantive than just symbolism. I do too.”

But he adds, “It was Trump who held it up. So I definitely don’t want to be on the same side with him and the white supremacists.”

However, not everyone is so supportive of the move. Ashley Stevens, a Black Twitter user with a substantial following, said she thinks “there’s some sort of perversion” in putting Tubman on the bill.

“A woman who was traded as capital becoming the face of capital doesn’t sit right with my spirit,” Stevens said Monday in a tweet that went viral. “If you wanna honor Tubman there are much better ways to do so that would change the material benefits of people’s lives. Build schools, parks, a historical center, etc in her name. Putting her face on the 20 dollar bill isn’t even a feel good. It’s giving me the yucks.”

The last time a woman appeared on an American paper bill was over a century ago, when former first lady Martha Washington graced the $1 silver certificate from 1891 to 1896. Before this, the only other woman to appear on a bill was Pocahontas, pictured in a group image on the $20 bill, from 1865 to 1869.

Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, said that the specifics on when the redesigned $20 bill would be finalized by the Treasury Department. Coincidentally, Biden has selected Janet Yellen to lead this department, becoming the first woman to be the treasury secretary in the department’s 232-year history.

Jones argues that the Tubman debate underscores the country’s unhealthy obsession with money.

“I completely understand why people are pushing for this type of representation because cash is king, right?” she said. “But also understand the harm that it can cause. … I think we need to really think long and hard about our connection to each other and how we function within this capitalist system.”

[Rocket]

TL/DR but I have trouble taking advice from someone named Feminista

 

 

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Rocket.

Rocket wrote:

someone named Feminista

Sounds like a character from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World.

3 users thanked author for this post.

JRCarter, Todd, Dave

njerry wrote:

Rocket wrote:

someone named Feminista

Sounds like a character from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World.

Sister Feminista!

3 users thanked author for this post.

JRCarter, njerry, Todd

Todd wrote:

This means that virtually every hedge fund that had short positions on was getting hammered. So when dozens of these giant asset managers sat down and decided to polite call one broker after another what do you think happened.

Yeah, this looks bad.

I mean, here’s the “explanation” as I understand it. These brokers are in many ways comparable to bookmakers in gambling. Essentially, you go to a bookie to make a bet on your local team, say the New York Jets, in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. So you’re bookie in New York takes that bet and then calls his associate in Pittsburgh to match his bets for the Jets with the bets that guy has taken with the Steelers.

However, obviously there is a point spread as one of the teams is obviously favored in the game. So they don’t have to match the exact amounts as the losing bets won’t pay off.

In the brokers though, they were facing an overwhelming number of investments that meant they had to front a whole lot of money before they could process it through their clearing services and probably these online brokers are using the same clearing house so that overwhelms everyone with stocks like GameStop and AMC shooting through the roof.

So, they “pause” trading to catch up.

Still, that brings up a whole lot of questions.

First, these are NYSE stocks, so only the Exchange really has that authority.

Second, if that is a legitimate reason at all, then pausing all trading should be the decision. Not simply pausing buying and allowing selling. That simply helps the short sellers and doesn’t stop activity allowing brokers to catch up.

Third, this is all electronic with other people’s money involved. This volatility is not anything near what the markets handled before.

2 users thanked author for this post.

garjones, Todd

JRCarter wrote:

that Jackson, in addition to being a slave owner, committed genocide against Native Americans.

He was also a flat-earther. No wonder we’re so dumb, with such a person on our money.

The Tubman debate is interesting. I do see Jones’ point about how putting her image on cash notes of all things is a bad fit, but at the same time, I think you can see this as a recognition that doesn’t have to be connected to the idea of capitalism – cash bills are simply items that everybody touches every day, and that are everywhere, so the images are constantly present. As such, it is simply the biggest distribution of recognition that you can get. Which probably matters more than the irony of putting somebody’s face on a dollar bill when money was the thing they cared least about in the world (and was a big part of the system they desperately fought).

As for Jones’ argument that representation doesn’t matter, that’s just nonsense, sorry. It’s the same argumentation that people use when arguing against awareness of sexist/racist language. It all matters, it’s all part of our reality.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Ben, JRCarter, Todd

Breaking News: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to step down in order to pursue his life-long goal of becoming Lex Luthor. pic.twitter.com/eSksqK24ua

— Seth K (@SethyPoo) February 2, 2021

4 users thanked author for this post.

Rocket, Todd, Ben

I thought he’d already achieved that.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

Plus, Lex is a CEO so stepping down is the wrong direction really.

2 users thanked author for this post.

garjones, Todd

Sitting on billions, Catholic dioceses amassed taxpayer aid

When the coronavirus forced churches to close their doors and give up Sunday collections, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte turned to the federal government’s signature small business relief program for more than $8 million.

The diocese’s headquarters, churches and schools landed the help even though they had roughly $100 million of their own cash and short-term investments available last spring, financial records show. When the cash catastrophe church leaders feared didn’t materialize, those assets topped $110 million by the summer.

“I am gratified to report the overall good financial health of the diocese despite the many difficulties presented by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Bishop Peter Jugis wrote in the diocese’s audited financial report released last fall.

As the pandemic began to unfold, scores of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection Program while sitting on well over $10 billion in cash, short-term investments or other available funds, an Associated Press investigation has found. And despite the broad economic downturn, these assets have grown in many dioceses.

Yet even with that financial safety net, the 112 dioceses that shared their financial statements, along with the churches and schools they oversee, collected at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed aid. A majority of these dioceses reported enough money on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses, even without any new income.

The financial resources of several dioceses rivaled or exceeded those available to publicly traded companies like Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, whose early participation in the program triggered outrage. Federal officials responded by emphasizing the money was intended for those who lacked the cushion that cash and other liquidity provide. Many corporations returned the funds.

Overall, the nation’s nearly 200 dioceses, where bishops and cardinals govern, and other Catholic institutions received at least $3 billion. That makes the Roman Catholic Church perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the paycheck program, according to AP’s analysis of data the U.S. Small Business Administration released following a public-records lawsuit by news organizations. The agency for months had shared only partial information, making a more precise analysis impossible.

Already one of the largest federal aid efforts ever, the SBA reopened the Paycheck Protection Program last month with a new infusion of nearly $300 billion. In making the announcement, the agency’s administrator at the time, Jovita Carranza, hailed the program for serving “as an economic lifeline to millions of small businesses.”

Church officials have said their employees were as worthy of help as workers at Main Street businesses, and that without it they would have had to slash jobs and curtail their charitable mission as demand for food pantries and social services spiked. They point out the program’s rules didn’t require them to exhaust their stores of cash and other funds before applying.

But new financial statements several dozen dioceses have posted for 2020 show that their available resources remained robust or improved during the pandemic’s hard, early months. The pattern held whether a diocese was big or small, urban or rural, East or West, North or South.

In Kentucky, funds available to the Archdiocese of Louisville, its parishes and other organizations grew from at least $153 million to $157 million during the fiscal year that ended in June, AP found. Those same offices and organizations received at least $17 million in paycheck money. “The Archdiocese’s operations have not been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 outbreak,” according to its financial statement.

In Illinois, the Archdiocese of Chicago had more than $1 billion in cash and investments in its headquarters and cemetery division as of May, while the faithful continued to donate “more than expected,” according to a review by the independent ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service. Chicago’s parishes, schools and ministries accumulated at least $77 million in paycheck protection funds.

Up the interstate from Charlotte in North Carolina, the Raleigh Diocese collected at least $11 million in aid. Yet during the fiscal year that ended in June, overall offerings were down just 5% and the assets available to the diocese, its parishes and schools increased by about $21 million to more than $170 million, AP found. In another measure of fiscal health, the diocese didn’t make an emergency draw on its $10 million line of credit.

Catholic leaders in dioceses including Charlotte, Chicago, Louisville and Raleigh said their parishes and schools, like many other businesses and nonprofits, suffered financially when they closed to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Some dioceses reported that their hardest-hit churches saw income drop by 40% or more before donations began to rebound months later, and schools took hits when fundraisers were canceled and families had trouble paying tuition. As revenues fell, dioceses said, wage cuts and a few dozen layoffs were necessary in some offices.

Catholic researchers at Georgetown University who surveyed the nation’s bishops last summer found such measures weren’t frequent. In comparison, a survey by the investment bank Goldman Sachs found 42% of small business owners had cut staff or salaries, and that 33% had spent their personal savings to stay open.

Church leaders have questioned why AP focused on their faith following a story last July, when New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote that reporters “invented a story when none existed and sought to bash the Church.”

By using a special exemption that the church lobbied to include in the paycheck program, Catholic entities amassed at least $3 billion — roughly the same as the combined total of recipients from the other faiths that rounded out the top five, AP found. Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Jewish faith-based recipients also totaled at least $3 billion. Catholics account for about a fifth of the U.S. religious population while members of Protestant and Jewish denominations are nearly half, according to the Pew Research Center.

Catholic institutions also received many times more than other major nonprofits with charitable missions and national reach, such as the United Way, Goodwill Industries and Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Overall, Catholic recipients got roughly twice as much as 40 of the largest, most well-known charities in America combined, AP found.

The complete picture is certainly even more lopsided. So many Catholic entities received help that reporters could not identify them all, even after spending hundreds of hours hand-checking tens of thousands of records in federal data.

The Vatican referred questions about the paycheck program to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it does not speak on behalf of dioceses.

Presented with AP’s findings, bishops conference spokeswoman Chieko Noguchi responded with a broad statement that the Paycheck Protection Program was “designed to protect the jobs of Americans from all walks of life, regardless of whether they work for for-profit or nonprofit employers, faith-based or secular.”

___

INTERNAL SKEPTICISM

The AP’s assessment of church finances is among the most comprehensive to date. It draws largely from audited financial statements posted online by the central offices of 112 of the country’s nearly 200 dioceses.

The church isn’t required to share its financials. As a result, the analysis doesn’t include cash, short-term assets and lines of credit held by some of the largest dioceses, including those serving New York City and other major metropolitan areas.

The analysis focused on available assets because federal officials cited those metrics when clarifying eligibility for the paycheck program. Therefore, the $10 billion AP identified doesn’t count important financial pillars of the U.S. church. Among those are its thousands of real estate properties and most of the funds that parishes and schools hold. Also excluded is the money — estimated at $9.5 billion in a 2019 study by the Delaware-based wealth management firm Wilmington Trust — held by charitable foundations created to help dioceses oversee donations.

In addition, dioceses can rely on a well-funded support system that includes help from wealthier dioceses, the bishops conference and other Catholic organizations. Canon law, the legal code the Vatican uses to govern the global church, notes that richer dioceses may assist poorer ones, and the AP found instances where they did.

In their financial statements, the 112 dioceses acknowledged having at least $4.5 billion in liquid or otherwise available assets. To reach its $10 billion total, AP also included funding that dioceses had opted to designate for special projects instead of general expenses; excess cash that parishes and their affiliates deposit with their diocese’s savings and loan; and lines of credit dioceses typically have with outside banks.

Some church officials said AP was misreading their financial books and therefore overstating available assets. They insisted that money their bishop or his advisers had set aside for special projects couldn’t be repurposed during an emergency, although financial statements posted by multiple dioceses stated the opposite.

For its analysis, AP consulted experts in church finance and church law. One was the Rev. James Connell, an accountant for 15 years before joining the priesthood and becoming an administrator in the Milwaukee Archdiocese. Connell, also a canon lawyer who is now retired from his position with the archdiocese, said AP’s findings convinced him that Catholic entities did not need government aid — especially when thousands of small businesses were permanently closing.

“Was it want or need?” Connell asked. “Need must be present, not simply the want. Justice and love of neighbor must include the common good.”

Connell was not alone among the faithful concerned by the church’s pursuit of taxpayer money. Parishioners in several cities have questioned church leaders who received government money for Catholic schools they then closed.

Elsewhere, a pastor in a Western state told AP that he refused to apply even after diocesan officials repeatedly pressed him. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of his diocese’s policy against talking to reporters and concerns about possible retaliation.

The pastor had been saving, much like leaders of other parishes. When the pandemic hit, he used that money, trimmed expenses and told his diocese’s central finance office that he had no plans to seek the aid. Administrators followed up several times, the pastor said, with one high-ranking official questioning why he was “leaving free money on the table.”

The pastor said he felt a “sound moral conviction” that the money was meant more for shops and restaurants that, without it, might close forever.

As the weeks passed last spring, the pastor said his church managed just fine. Parishioners were so happy with new online Masses and his other outreach initiatives, he said, they boosted their contributions beyond 2019 levels.

“We didn’t need it,” the pastor said, “and intentionally wanted to leave the money for those small business owners who did.”

___

WEATHERING A DOWNTURN

Months after the pandemic first walloped the economy, the 112 dioceses that release financial statements began sharing updates. Among the 47 dioceses that have thus far, the pandemic’s impact was far from crippling.

The 47 dioceses that have posted financials for the fiscal year that ended in June had a median 6% increase in the amount of cash, short-term investments and other funds that they and their affiliates could use for unanticipated or general expenses, AP found. In all, 38 dioceses grew those resources, while nine reported declines.

Finances in Raleigh and 10 other dioceses that took government assistance were stable enough that they did not have to dip into millions they had available through outside lines of credit.

“This crisis has tested us,” Russell Elmayan, Raleigh’s chief financial officer, told the diocese’s magazine website in July, “but we are hopeful that the business acumen of our staff and lay counselors, together with the strategic financial reserves built over time, will help our parishes and schools continue to weather this unprecedented event.” Raleigh officials did not answer direct questions from AP.

The 47 dioceses acknowledged a smaller amount of readily available assets than AP counted, though by their own accounting that grew as well.

The improving financial outlook is due primarily to parishioners who found ways to continue donating and U.S. stock markets that were rebounding to new highs. But when the markets were first plunging, officials in several dioceses said, they had to stretch available assets because few experts were forecasting a rapid recovery.

In Louisville, Charlotte and other dioceses, church leaders said they offered loans or grants to needy parishes and schools, or offset the monthly charges they assess their parishes. In Raleigh, for example, the headquarters used $3 million it had set aside for liability insurance and also tapped its internal deposit and loan fund.

Church officials added that the pandemic’s full toll will probably be seen in a year or two, because some key sources of revenue are calculated based on income that parishes and schools generate.

“We believe that we will not know all of the long-term negative impacts on parish, school and archdiocesan finances for some time,” Louisville Archdiocese spokeswoman Cecelia Price wrote in response to questions.

At the nine dioceses that recorded declines in liquid or other short-term assets, the drops typically were less than 10%, and not always clearly tied to the pandemic.

The financial wherewithal of some larger dioceses is underscored by the fact that, like publicly traded companies, they can raise capital by selling bonds to investors.

One was Chicago, where analysts with the Moody’s ratings agency calculated that the $1 billion in cash and investments held by the archdiocese headquarters and cemeteries division could cover about 631 days of operating expenses.

Church officials in Chicago asserted that those dollars were needed to cover substantial expenses while parishioner donations slumped. Without paycheck support, “parishes and schools would have been forced to cut many jobs, as the archdiocese, given its liabilities, could not have closed such a funding gap,” spokeswoman Paula Waters wrote.

Moody’s noted in its May report that while giving was down, federal aid had compensated for that and helped leave the archdiocese “well positioned to weather this revenue loss over the next several months.” Among the reasons for the optimism: “a unique credit strength” that under church law allows the archbishop to tax parish revenue virtually at will.

In a separate Moody’s report on New Orleans, which filed for bankruptcy in May while facing multiple clergy abuse lawsuits, the ratings agency wrote in July that the archdiocese did so while having “significant financial reserves, with spendable cash and investments of over $160 million.”

Moody’s said the archdiocese’s “very good” liquid assets would let it operate 336 days without additional income. Those assets prompted clergy abuse victims to ask a federal judge to dismiss the bankruptcy filing, arguing the archdiocese’s primary reason for seeking the legal protection was to minimize payouts to them.

The archdiocese, along with its parishes and schools, collected more than $26 million in paycheck money. New Orleans Archdiocesan officials didn’t respond to written questions.

___

PURSUING AID

Without special treatment, the Catholic Church would not have received nearly so much under the Paycheck Protection Program.

After Congress let nonprofits and religious organizations participate in the first place, Catholic officials lobbied the Trump Administration for a second break. Religious organizations were freed from the so-called affiliation rule that typically disqualifies applicants with more than 500 workers.

Without that break, many dioceses would have missed out because — between their head offices, parishes, schools and other affiliates — their employee count would exceed the limit.

Among those lobbying, federal records show, was the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Parishes, schools and ministries there collected at least $80 million in paycheck aid, at a time when the headquarters reported $658 million in available funds heading into the fiscal year when the coronavirus arrived.

Catholic officials in the U.S. needed the special exception for at least two reasons.

Church law says dioceses, parishes and schools are affiliated, something the Los Angeles Archdiocese acknowledged “proved to be an obstacle” to receiving funds because its parishes operate “under the authority of the diocesan bishop.” Dioceses, parishes, schools and other Catholic entities also routinely assert to the Internal Revenue Service that they are affiliated so they can maintain their federal income tax exemption.

While some Catholic officials insisted their affiliates are separate and financially independent, AP found many instances of borrowing and spending among them when dioceses were faced with prior cash crunches. In Philadelphia, for example, the archdiocese received at least $18 million from three affiliates, including a seminary, to fund a compensation program for clergy sex abuse survivors, according to 2019 financial statements.

Cardinals and bishops have broad authority over parishes and the pastors who run them. Church law requires parishes to submit annual financial reports and bishops may require parishes to deposit surplus money with internal banks administered by the diocese.

“The parishioners cannot hire or fire the pastor; that is for the bishop to do,” said Connell, the priest, former accountant and canon lawyer. “Each parish functions as a wholly owned subsidiary or division of a larger corporation, the diocese.”

Bishops acknowledged a concerted effort to tap paycheck funds in a survey by Catholic researchers at Georgetown University. When asked what they had done to address the pandemic’s financial fallout, 95% said their central offices helped parishes apply for paycheck and other aid — the leading response. That topped encouraging parishioners to donate electronically.

After Congress approved the paycheck program, three high-ranking officials in New Hampshire’s Manchester Diocese sent an urgent memo to parishes, schools and affiliated organizations urging them to refrain from layoffs or furloughs until completing their applications. “We are all in this together,” the memo read, adding that diocesan officials were working expeditiously to provide “step by step instructions.”

Paycheck Protection Program funds came through low-interest bank loans, worth up to $10 million each, that the federal government would forgive so long as recipients used the money to cover about two months of wages and operating expenses.

After an initial $659 billion last spring, Congress added another $284 billion in December. With the renewal came new requirements intended to ensure that funds go to businesses that lost money due to the pandemic. Lawmakers also downsized the headcount for applicants to 300 or fewer employees.

___

A QUESTION OF NEED

In other federal small business loan programs, government help is treated as a last resort.

Applicants must show they couldn’t get credit elsewhere. And those with enough available funds must pay more of their own way to reduce taxpayer subsidies.

Congress didn’t include these tests in the Paycheck Protection Program. To speed approvals, lenders weren’t required to do their usual screening and instead relied on applicants’ self-certifications of need.

The looser standards helped create a run on the first $349 billion in paycheck funding. Small business owners complained that they were shut out, yet dozens of companies healthy enough to be traded on stock exchanges scored quick approval.

As blowback built in April, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned at a news briefing that there would be “severe consequences” for applicants who improperly tapped the program.

“We want to make sure this money is available to small businesses that need it, people who have invested their entire life savings,” Mnuchin said. Program guidelines evolved to stress that participants with access to significant cash probably could not get the assistance “in good faith.”

Mnuchin’s Treasury Department said it would audit loans exceeding $2 million, although federal officials have not said whether they would hold religious organizations and other nonprofits to the same standard of need as businesses.

The headquarters and major departments for more than 40 dioceses received more than $2 million. Every diocese that responded to questions said it would seek to have the government cover the loans, rather than repay the funds.

One diocese receiving a loan over $2 million was Boston. According to the archdiocese’s website, its central ministries office received about $3 million, while its parishes and schools collected about $32 million more.

The archdiocese — along with its parishes, schools and cemeteries — had roughly $200 million in available funds in June 2019, according to its audited financial report. When that fiscal year ended several months into the pandemic, available funds had increased to roughly $233 million.

Nevertheless, spokesman Terrence Donilon cited “ongoing economic pressure” in saying the archdiocese will seek forgiveness for last year’s loans and will apply for additional, new funds during the current round.

Beyond its growing available funds, the archdiocese and its affiliates benefit from other sources of funding. The archdiocese’s “Inspiring Hope” campaign, announced in January, has raised at least $150 million.

And one of its supporting charities — the Catholic Schools Foundation, where Cardinal Sean O’Malley is board chairman — counted more than $33 million in cash and other funds that could be “used for general operations” as of the beginning of the 2020 fiscal year, according to its financial statement.

Despite these resources, the archdiocese closed a half-dozen schools in May and June, often citing revenue losses due to the pandemic. Paycheck protection data show four of those schools collectively were approved for more than $700,000.

The shuttered schools included St. Francis of Assisi in Braintree, a middle-class enclave 10 miles south of Boston, which received $210,000. Parents said they felt blindsided by the closure, announced in June as classes ended.

“It’s like a punch to the gut because that was such a home for so many people for so long,” said Kate Nedelman Herbst, the mother of two children who attended the elementary school.

Along with more than 2,000 other school supporters, Herbst signed a written protest to O’Malley that noted the archdiocese’s robust finances. After O’Malley didn’t reply, parents appealed to the Vatican, this time underscoring the collection of Paycheck Protection Program money.

“It is very hard to reconcile the large sums of money raised by the archdiocese in recent years with this wholesale destruction of the church’s educational infrastructure,” parents wrote.

In December, the Vatican turned down their request to overrule O’Malley. Spokesman Donilon said the decision to close the school “is not being reconsidered.”

Today, the three children of Michael Waterman and his wife, Jeanine, are learning at home. And they still can’t understand why the archdiocese didn’t shift money to help save a school beloved by the faithful.

“What angers us,” Michael Waterman said, “is that we feel like, given the amount of money that the Catholic Church has, they absolutely could have remained open.”

Todd wrote:

A QUESTION OF NEED

As for the article tl/dr but.. This last year Need seemed to be the last requirement looked at when doling out $. The ability to game the system and know people in charge was no.1. SMH

1 user thanked author for this post.

DavidM

So… question:

How come the US is vaccinating millions of people at a time when there’s a shortage of vaccines world-wide?

Anyone has any info on where those vaccines are coming from?

Jon wrote:

How come the US is vaccinating millions of people at a time when there’s a shortage of vaccines world-wide? Anyone has any info on where those vaccines are coming from?

Using their buying power they booked them up quickly, as did the UK who have vaccinated over 20% already or Israel and the UAE who are even further along in terms of percentages (but much smaller populations).

Where they are coming from is a rather complex question because it’s multiple sources. Pfizer is a US company, Biontech they partnered with is a German company, they manufacture in the US, Germany and Belgium and probably other places too. The Astrazeneca one is devised in Oxford, manufactured in the UK and have added a factory in India and again maybe other places too. There’s others from China and Russia which seem less effective.

The truth of it is money though, those countries have spent aggressively and those with less money will rely on the Covax programme run by the WHO.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

Yeah, I do know that Mexico proposed the Covax program, but we also made deals with a ton of companies… right now the problem is the whole pfizer thing for startes… which is really frickin’ shady… I’m starting to think that much like they did with masks at the begining of the pandemic, the US is basically throwing money at those companies to buy the vaccines from under other countries feet…

I know it sound like a conspiracy theory… but again, that’s what happened with masks. Our vaccination program pretty much ground to a halt from january ’til now and it just seems weird considering we were expecting many shippments more… I know about the Pfizer delays, but yeah… I dunno, again, super shady.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Christian

Jon wrote:

I’m starting to think that much like they did with masks at the begining of the pandemic, the US is basically throwing money at those companies to buy the vaccines from under other countries feet…

I know it sound like a conspiracy theory…

Nah, this is all documented. The most interesting part is the one where the US government used an obscure law from the Korean War to make sure Pfizer got the supplies it needed to produce the vaccine fast enough and in turn they agreed to delivering 100 million doses to the US (presumably before anybody else got a lot of it):

As part of the deal, the government agreed to invoke the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer get better access to around nine specialized products it needs to make the vaccine. Under the Korean War-era law, the government can secure critical supplies more quickly by assigning a contract a priority rating, forcing suppliers to bump orders from that contractor to the front of the line.

The government’s promise to free up supplies is not mentioned in statements issued by Pfizer or the government, but was critical to the deal, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

As early as September, Pfizer began asking for the government’s help in obtaining supplies, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. At that time, the administration had already granted priority status to orders from Moderna and other companies that had been working with it more closely to develop their vaccines, putting Pfizer at a disadvantage. That included two companies — Sanofi and Novavax — that have yet to begin large-scale clinical trials in the United States.

And the reason the government hadn’t helped Pfizer with this even earlier, interestingly, is given as this:

A senior Trump administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about internal discussions said the government was unwilling to intervene on Pfizer’s behalf earlier because the company refused to promise that it would use raw materials procured with the government’s help to produce vaccines solely for Americans.

Trump was very open about all of that at the time, too. America first means America first, man.

But yes, this is one of the reasons why the whole debate in my country going on at the moment gets so much on my nerves. They’re calling it the “EU vaccine debacle” and everything. But you know what? If we had secured more doses of the Biontec/Pfizer or moderna vaccine in the first place, that’d only mean there’d be less for other places because the simple truth is there is only so much to go around, and only so much that can be produced in a short amount of time.
So how about shutting the fuck up while EU countries are doing better without the vaccine than many other places in the world? There were also accusations that AstraZeneca was holding back the vaccines promised to the EU to give them to the UK first, but even if that should be the case, so what? I’m glad the UK got the AstraZeneca vaccine quicker than we did, because they really needed it. So do the US, of course, but it’s not okay to use tactics to leverage companies into producing only for them when there are places that need them as desperately, or more so.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, DavidM

Oh thanks, that’s very interesting, didn’t know about that… Honestly it’s easy to get paranoid because they always treat 3rd world countries like shit in these type of situations, even when they promise they’ll behave and all that.

Well, it seems Pfizer is resuming their shipments here next week, not in great quantities, but I guess anything is good… We’re also waiting for some AstraZeneca doses from India and from the covax program while the Cansino & Astrazeneca production here in Mexico gets up and running… we’re also waiting for Sputnik V. We also have deals with Novavax, Curevac and Sinovac… That’s seven different vaccines (Some of which are still pending results of course) yet we haven’t received much =/

Oh well… I hope the shipments will start arriving, and that the production starts too, since a lot of that production is gonna go to South America… we all kinda need them badly.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Christian

Christian wrote:

I’m glad the UK got the AstraZeneca vaccine quicker than we did, because they really needed it.

This is the weird scenario this time, in that those countries, if you solely based on need from a Covax style setup would be top of the queue too mostly. It’s not uniformly to income, I know part of Jon’s neck of the woods have it bad but in Asia on a needs basis you’d be giving the vaccine to Japan before Cambodia.

It’s not to hide the self interest here but there is a case here that the UK have hedged bets and thrown money at vaccine makers to order far more vaccine than they have population (even counting for the second doses). They’ve booked 407m doses for roughly 53m people when you discount under 16s and those that can’t have it for various reasons like pregnancy and breastfeeding.

So they are looking after number 1 first but the fallout is something like this:

Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said any surplus vaccine could be distributed globally.

“If approved, Valneva’s vaccine will not only help tackle Covid-19 here in the UK, but aid our mission to ensure there is a fair supply of vaccines across the globe.

“No-one is safe until the whole world is safe.”

garjones wrote:

there is a case here that the UK have hedged bets and thrown money at vaccine makers to order far more vaccine than they have population (even counting for the second doses).

That idea of an excess is assuming a single dose (or rather, a single double-dose) per person though. There are some who think we could be looking to an annual model, similar to the flu jab. So there is an eye to that I think.

But regardless I think that when some countries are struggling to get enough doses for an initial vaccination it should be a priority to sort that out first.

While there seems to be a somewhat national focus on vaccinations and vaccine programs at the moment, the truth is that if we want the world to return to normal then it has to be a global effort.

It’s only of limited use vaccinating everyone in the UK if the rest of the world is way behind as a result, as you’re still not going to be able to travel elsewhere or open up your borders.

We probably will be looking at a flu jab scenario but the reports of the UK ordering roughly 4 times as many vaccines as they need including a double dose seems to be about speed of delivery of basic vaccine coverage and not catering for variants. Excess orders were placed before the variants became a big talking point and I don’t know the details of the contracts of course to know they include new configurations.

It does seem the intention is to place as many orders with multiple vendors to get it rolled out as fast as possible, we’ll have to see then how much of the excess is delivered as Zahawi promises and how. With their usual world view I can see them taking a political approach as usual, a drop off to Hong Kong to make a point to the Chinese over helping out any EU country.

In lockdown news, here in Germany they’ve prolonged the measures until mid-march, but schools and haircutters are opening up earlier. With the schools thing, Merkel apparently tried to convince the counties to go with March, too, but wasn’t successful. For my county, we’re starting the week after next with elementary schools and graduating years. For me that means I’ll mostly be back in the classroom. It’ll feel weird to be in a room with over twenty people again, that much is for sure.
They’re also discussing vaccinating teachers earlier than originally planned, but I’m not holding my breath.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Was reading an article on an Indian vaccine manufacturer:

For now it’s the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccinerolling off its production lines, but SII has signed contracts with three other developers – Novavax, Codagenix and SpyBiotech – all of which have candidates in the works.

The “Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines’ crowd are going to love the name of that last developer.

6 users thanked author for this post.

Rocket, DavidM, njerry, Todd, Dave

Situation in Texas is looking grim:

2 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, lorcan_nagle

We finally have the vaccine here, with the first jabs delivered over the weekend, including to our Prime Minister. On that same weekend there were (small) rallies in Sydney and Melbourne against vaccines (despite that vaccination is not mandatory).

It’s a weird situation where our government have been a bit tricky with the vaccine (initially claiming we were at the head of the queue, signing up to the AstraZeneca one with only a few tens of thousands of the Pfizer jab being delivered), but if we’re being honest Australia shouldn’t be a priority considering the practically non-existent community transmission taking place (36 days since there was a community case in my state of New South Wales).

The PM is being criticised for taking a vaccine dose but he’d surely be accused of stoking anti-vaxxer fears if he held off; I don’t like him or like defending him but the move is sensible.

The AZ vaccine can be manufactured locally, and doesn’t require sub-zero storage so it’s a better fit for us geographically.

4 users thanked author for this post.

DavidM, Ben, garjones, Todd

Andrew wrote:

The PM is being criticised for taking a vaccine dose but he’d surely be accused of stoking anti-vaxxer fears if he held off; I don’t like him or like defending him but the move is sensible.

In all honesty this has been debated everywhere as in most cases the PM/President isn’t in the top priority categories.

I agree though that concern is outweighed by the ‘do as I do not as I say’ message for people doubting the vaccine at all. Not talking about the rabid anti-vaxxers there but rather some people who are slightly concerned with the speed of approval and potential side effects.

I think the slow rollout probably helps there too, a quarter of the UK population (and higher for Israel and UAE) have had the jab by now with no reports of any significant issues.

This deserves attention:

US will reach 500,000-death milestone today

The really scary part is that 200,000 of those deaths have occurred in the last 2-1/2 months, since mid-December.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, lorcan_nagle

It’s the undeniable fact we get inured to these things when we see them day after day. Looking at the UK numbers they have had a dramatic decrease in the last month or so but it’s still actually worse in terms of deaths than it has been most of the last year.

garjones wrote:

It’s the undeniable fact we get inured to these things when we see them day after day. Looking at the UK numbers they have had a dramatic decrease in the last month or so but it’s still actually worse in terms of deaths than it has been most of the last year.

Yeah, the news keeps talking about how infections are “down to only” 10,000 a day or whatever as though that’s barely anything, but that’s still 10,000 more people that have been infected on top of all the others already infected (during a national lockdown) and it feels sometimes like the enormity of that gets lost in the focus on just the raw numbers, that the daily infection number dropping means we’re “winning” rather than “losing by slightly less”. In a way, it would be better to only focus on the total number of infections, so that the continually rising number would emphasise that people are still getting infected en mass, but I suppose we’re at the point now that with seven figure totals, the difference each day isn’t going to look significant.

On another note:

https://people.com/human-interest/28-year-old-dad-to-be-dies-in-explosion-while-building-gender-reveal-device/?utm_campaign=peoplemagazine&utm_content=manual&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=603435e74364d30001840e2a&fbclid=IwAR2I_xE-9xTT_RtqzYNK7-2InW2Kl9vvtxh_KBMRX5mPMT_W9wuYzOTX0nQ

Gender reveals need not be so spectacular as to be dangerous…

If the apocalypse ever happens it is likely to be because of a gender reveal party.

3 users thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle, njerry, Todd

Al-x wrote:

Gender reveals need not be

Let’s stop the sentence right there.

6 users thanked author for this post.

DavidM, Todd, njerry, garjones, JRCarter

5 users thanked author for this post.

Ben, lorcan_nagle, Todd, Dave, garjones

Martin Smith wrote:

I suppose we’re at the point now that with seven figure totals, the difference each day isn’t going to look significant.

Yup, although I tend to look at deaths and hospitalisations over cases as the former is highly dependent on the testing rate, so the case numbers last April and May are way below what they actually were.

Either way it is the same effect and I think people are getting more and savvy to it. The UK government approach does seem to be just ride shit out until people get bored of the subject. I think the irony is the ability to do that most effectively was displayed by a story on the media itself with the phone hacking scandal.

Okay they have paid a LOT of money in compensation but after the outrage died down they eventually ended up pretty much at status quo. The News of the World effectively got no more than a name change, as did the regulator, Rebecca Brooks is the CEO of News UK.

We just get too easily bored to follow through on things.

3 users thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle, njerry, Martin Smith

garjones wrote:

We just get too easily bored to follow through on things.

I was going to make a comment in response to this, but, y’know…

3 users thanked author for this post.

Ben, DavidM

garjones wrote:

We just get too easily bored to follow through on things.

or we get too depressed to believe it will make a difference

1 user thanked author for this post.

DavidM

Christian wrote:

Al-x wrote:

Gender reveals need not be

Let’s stop the sentence right there.

Don’t be silly, Christian. If we don’t know the gender, how do we know whether we should be painting the nursery blue or pink?

 

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle

go 50-50 with purple.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, DavidM

Rocket wrote:

go 50-50 with purple.

You can never go wrong with purple.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

DavidM wrote:

Rocket wrote:

go 50-50 with purple.

You can never go wrong with purple.

Perhaps a shallow violet?

Todd, you know there are only base colors: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange. so I am assuming you mean light purple, right?

Anonymous wrote:

That’s pretty much how things are here right now, as well.

Let’s hope spring does its magic and incidences go down just because it’s warm…

On the bright side, teachers in Germany may be getting vaccinated earlier than first planned.

4 users thanked author for this post.

Rocket, Ben, Todd, lorcan_nagle

Christian wrote:

Let’s hope spring does its magic and incidences go down just because it’s warm…

My suspicion is that although that’s a trend in other respiratory diseases like flu it doesn’t seem a pattern at all in Covid. While northern Europe did get a sharp increase when autumn started the trend has been a drastic fall in the coldest months of Jan and Feb, when flu usually peaks. Cases went up at the same rate in South Africa where they were entering summer, they are now also dropping dramatically and nobody quite knows why but technically their climate is getting colder past December.

In Malaysia we get no seasonal flu, the climate means it is spread evenly over the year but our Covid cases peaked in January.

Saying that I think the biggest element in escaping this will be the vaccines. Evidence so far is even if they don’t prevent transmission they are preventing severe cases and death, even among the variants.

It’ll take some time really to figure this thing out, it isn’t following traditional patterns, we have quite high cases here now but still very low deaths, which I think is demographic because most of the spread is among factory workers who are under 30 but that’s me making an educated guess and nothing more.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

Gerard Depardieu Reportedly Charged With Rape After 2018 Case Was Reopened

French actor Gerard Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault, according to a report from the AFP News Agency, which cited a judicial source.

The accusation comes from an unnamed actress in her 20s. The incident allegedly took place in 2018 at Depardieu’s Parisian home, where she claims two assaults took place during rehearsal sessions.

An investigation, which was initially dropped in 2019 due to a lack of evidence, was re-opened in October and has now led to criminal charges.

Depardieu, via his lawyer, told AFP that he “completely rejects the accusations.”

An acclaimed actor who has been Oscar nominated and has won multiple Cesars, Depardieu has courted controversy over the years, including an incident in 2011 when he urinated on a flight, and in 2012 when he was accused of assaulting a motorist.

Deadline has contacted the actor’s reps for comment.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

The interesting thing here is how while overall Australia has done well (not least because of its isolated position, small population, and lack of land borders) there are differences between the states – the approach by NSW has been sensible, and largely the model for the nation – the problem was that Victoria (the second largest state by population) was wildly under-resourced in terms of contact tracing (whereas NSW has been ready for a pandemic for decades, with CDC training having been bedded down since the 80s).

So while all states introduced mandatory hotel quarantine for overseas arrivals since March, breaches that occurred in NSW were able to be traced and quickly controlled while those in Victoria went wild.

Breaches were inevitable since hotels aren’t designed for quarantine (no fresh air, no air circulating) – you then also have thousands of hotel and health staff working in a risky environment before commuting home each evening. NSW was free of community Covid cases from May, but in early July an infected case from Victoria drove here for a work function at a large pub that happens to be in easy reach of a major highway – it’s a massive junction for people not only from all over Sydney but interstate and regional areas too. That one guy led to as close to a second wave as we’ve had which lasted from early July until September.

From the middle of June Victoria were in our version of an outbreak; because their Tracies were two weeks behind case numbers blew out with infected people not knowing they were at risk of having been infected, and not knowing they were currently able to infect others. By the time they were contacted it was too late, they’d passed the illness on to several people each.

6 users thanked author for this post.

Martin Smith, DavidM, Ben, lorcan_nagle, garjones, Todd

I think the thing with contact tracing is for it to work you need the numbers to be relatively contained. It’s worked pretty well in east Asia and Australasia because they closed borders and stemmed the initial tide.

In places like Europe and the US I think it’s close to a waste of time, the numbers are so high they never got a grip with it. When cases are at tens of thousands a day they were always too far behind to prevent the spread. You have to fall back to broader measures.

4 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, DavidM, Ben, lorcan_nagle

garjones wrote:

Saying that I think the biggest element in escaping this will be the vaccines. Evidence so far is even if they don’t prevent transmission they are preventing severe cases and death, even among the variants.

The problem I see here is that the magic number the politicians look at is cases (which really means “positive tests”). If vaccines don’t prevent transmission, then as soon as we lift lockdown the “cases” are going to go through the roof again, even if we’re 100% vaccinated. So nothing’s going to change.

DavidM wrote:

garjones wrote:

Saying that I think the biggest element in escaping this will be the vaccines. Evidence so far is even if they don’t prevent transmission they are preventing severe cases and death, even among the variants.

The problem I see here is that the magic number the politicians look at is cases (which really means “positive tests”). If vaccines don’t prevent transmission, then as soon as we lift lockdown the “cases” are going to go through the roof again, even if we’re 100% vaccinated. So nothing’s going to change.

But they’re not really bothered about the number of infections (see Johnson’s early “herd immunity” plans) they’re concerned about the number of severe cases requiring hospitalisation.

And yet the government has been obsessed with testing as many people as possible and declaring them as “cases” even when they have zero symptoms. So what exactly is important, being a “case” or actually being ill? It’s very mixed messaging.

Case numbers are useful even when asymptomatic because they give us a more accurate picture of how the virus is spreading.

Hospitalisations are an important measure of the most severe cases and of the strain being put on the healthcare system.

When the government has placed an emphasis on case numbers it has tended to be in the context of measuring how effective lockdown measures have been in preventing transmission.

When it has focused on hospitalisations and deaths it has often been more in the context of the vaccines helping to bring down the number of severe cases in the most at-risk populations.

They’re all important pieces of data that have their uses in working out how best to govern all of this.

Luckily we are starting to see early real-world evidence suggesting that the vaccines are not only offering protection from covid but are also at least partly reducing transmission.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

To be fair David I think that’s one measure to see the extent of infection and if it’s going up or down. I think hospitalisations and deaths have been the spur for restrictions but they are quite correlated and they present all 3. If you look at the graphs they do in The Guardian every day all 3 data points go up and down in unison more or less. Which makes logical sense, the more people that have it the more people that will get the worst effects.

The exception is right at the start when they weren’t able to test enough people.

In the vaccine trials, although they didn’t confer total immunity none of the vaccinated people had symptoms strong enough to be admitted and no deaths.

If now when we have very high numbers, in the millions, of those vaccinated we see that replicated then cases ceases to be as important. I don’t think we’re quite at that point with the data yet to say that conclusively. We see a drop in the UK of all 3 stats but while vaccination could and probably is part of that we see similar trends in South Africa where no vaccines have been issued.

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

garjones wrote:

My suspicion is that although that’s a trend in other respiratory diseases like flu it doesn’t seem a pattern at all in Covid. While northern Europe did get a sharp increase when autumn started the trend has been a drastic fall in the coldest months of Jan and Feb, when flu usually peaks.

Well, I can’t speak for all European countries, but as far as Germany is concerned it’s pretty obvious – the numbers went up until they introduced lockwon measures and because of those they went down again in January and February. I think it’s been a similar curve in many European countries. The other thing is though that during the summer months, we were keeping low numbers of incidences without any measures at all outside of wearing masks, pretty much.

garjones wrote:

Saying that I think the biggest element in escaping this will be the vaccines. Evidence so far is even if they don’t prevent transmission they are preventing severe cases and death, even among the variants.

Absolutely.

Christian wrote:

The other thing is though that during the summer months, we were keeping low numbers of incidences without any measures at all outside of wearing masks, pretty much.

Yeah and I get that but that drop was pretty universal. Here we are actually loosening lockdowns across Jan and  Feb because the country isn’t rich enough to support more economic props, and the numbers are still falling after an early Jan peak.

It’s easy to jump on numbers were low last summer in Europe and it means sunshine eases the virus but the same pattern more or less is happening here in northern hemisphere seasons, southern hemisphere and equatorial that have no seasons at all.

 

 

 

2 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, DavidM

Isn’t the premise also that the vaccines make you less sick if you do contract the illness, meaning although you’re technically still able to transmit the virus, you won’t be coughing all over the place and expelling as many droplets; it’ll take proper intimate contact with people to pass it on – not just being out and about at work or in a retail setting.

The vaccine should still directly result in fewer positive cases.

garjones wrote:

I think the thing with contact tracing is for it to work you need the numbers to be relatively contained. It’s worked pretty well in east Asia and Australasia because they closed borders and stemmed the initial tide.

For sure – there was a period though where the new cases numbers in Victoria were proportionately comparable to those in the UK, hence the hard lockdown which proved successful primarily because it gave the contact tracers time to catch up.

You could also say that the numbers can be relatively contained in the first place as a result of aggressive contact tracing.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

Essay: Houston has a hidden tax. It’s called trauma.

“We still haven’t fully recovered,” she tells me.

COVID-19 at least waited a few months until it pounced, sickening both mother and daughter, who was nearly put on a ventilator herself. They both beat the infection, but ultimately, her mother couldn’t survive the destruction of her lungs. In late summer, Alice had no choice but to put her 85-year-old mother, her dearest companion, in hospice.

“The hardest decision I ever had to make,” Torres said, her voice breaking. Beyond a couple of iPAD visits per week, they weren’t able to see each other in person.

On Aug. 2, Dolores Torres died, and a rosary was held on her birthday, Aug. 12: “We spent all day with her,” her daughter said, some solace given that her mother, like nearly all COVID patients, died in isolation.

And now this. Texas’ epic power grid failure amid freezing temperatures last week left Alice Torres gasping, quite literally, for options after the oxygen tank supplier gave her the runaround.

“I have a generator that makes oxygen but without electricity it doesn’t work,” she told me. “I’m scared I’ll run out.”

At some point, a staff member from state Rep. Christina Morales’ office brought a generator but Torres and her brother couldn’t find gas to run it.

Each disaster Torres experienced has a name and a set of dates, but what is the name for this pileup of catastrophes? What do we call the whole of it?

In a city that boasts of its low cost of living, it’s time we acknowledge the true toll of Houston’s incessant stream of unfortunate and deadly events.

Over the past decade, Houston has been through three years of severe drought. Followed by five years with at least one flood worthy of the increasingly outdated “100-year” or “500 year” distinction. , And then five major chemical explosions in 2019. Then the COVID pandemic, which at times rendered our region among the worst hot spots in the world.

A psychiatrist I spoke with compared these repeated disasters to the “polytrauma” of soldiers who have survived multiple deployments in war zones. Many here have lost loved ones, livelihoods and homes. Then there are things you can’t see or touch: loss of safety, security and the belief that this too shall pass.

Sometimes it feels as if Texans, and Houstonians in particular, are subjects in some intelligently designed experiment, chosen for our ideal diverse population, extreme weather and weak regulations. Developers profited off lax rules in their paving over floodplains and prairies. Petrochemical companies benefit from loose oversight of their impact on fenceline communities. Electricity generators saved a few bucks because no one required them to weatherize. Yes, companies profit off this laboratory of disaster, but then, so do us lab rats. The jobs, the art, the food, the music, the square-footage, extra bedrooms and sprawling yards.

We owe it all, either directly or within a degree of separation, to industry.

But, to paraphrase a popular counter-slogan of Houston: Is it worth it?

The answer isn’t the same for all. When the going gets cold, some can hop a flight to Cancun. Others pay the ultimate price. Carrol Anderson, a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran died last week when he went to his truck to use his last backup oxygen tank. More than two dozen have died in the Houston area from exposure, carbon monoxide poisoning, crashes and fire.

When I moved to Houston in the summer of 2001 to attend graduate school at the University of Houston, piles of sopping debris from mucked out buildings still lined the streets after Tropical Storm Allison’s then-record-breaking floods. I was eager to move here, though. The cost of living seemed lower than most any other big city. I found an apartment steps away from the Menil Collection that my meager teaching stipend covered.

Having grown up on the Gulf Coast, in Alabama, I accepted this risk of a hurricanes. In 2008, my new family stuck it out through a couple of weeks without power after Hurricane Ike and bonded with my neighbors over impromptu feasts of thawed-out freezer food. The layering, folding, compounding of disasters over the past decade wasn’t part of my calculation.

I’ve begun to ask myself, in a manner that’s no longer merely rhetorical: Is it time to give up on Houston and leave?

I know I’m not alone. I also know I have the option to cut and run. Many others do not.

As I’ve talked to people during this crisis, it’s been the folks who have lost the most who raise the stakes for me. I listen to them most of all.

****
Without his CPAP machine running at night, Billy J. Guevara, 47, woke up after repeatedly gasping for air on Tuesday night. Losing electricity was an inconvenience for 1.5 million Houston households but it posed mortal danger for those with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Guevara’s stress level spiked, bringing on back pain and heart palpitations.

“Being totally blind, it is an extreme burden,” Guevara said of the power outage.

The Northeast Action Collective provided him a battery that gave him some relief. Guevara joined the collective after his house flooded in 2017, along with his mother’s next door, when Halls Bayou broke its banks during Harvey’s Biblical rains, but the full costs of the disaster were far worse than material damage.

“I lost my aunt, my uncle and four cousins, the youngest was 6 and the oldest 16,” he told me. They were in a white van swept away in the floodwaters.

Much as they have for Alice Torres, disasters have blended into one another for Guevara. He lost three relatives in Corpus Christi to COVID — his Uncle Francisco, a Vietnam veteran and mechanic, and two cousins.

When I first met Guevara in April 2018, we were deep into this decade of rolling disasters. West Street Recovery was giving a tour of post-Harvey Houston to Henk Ovink, special envoy for international water affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A camera crew followed Ovink around for a 60 Minutes profile in the works. As Guevara showed us his partially rebuilt home, those big television cameras focused in so close, so intently — as though they were in a laboratory and the microscopes were peering at their Houstonian test subject — and I felt a strange anger.

Harvey was “like a magnifying glass” showcasing Houston’s vulnerabilities, Ovink wrote for the Chronicle in a still-relevant call for better preparation.

Harvey also revealed some strengths. Neighbors help neighbors in disasters all around the world, but Houston took bottom-up, mobile phone-driven mass rescue to a new scale.

We showed the world that people of all races and ethnicities could come together even. Call it a “silver lining.” Call it “resilience.” Call it “Houston Strong.”

But at what point do these words fall apart? How many Cajun Navy high-water rescues? How many plumes of doom? How many COVID deaths of people who had no insurance and no chance. How many children rushed to the ER with carbon monoxide poisoning because their parents took desperate measures to keep them warm during a statewide power failure?

How many people like Alice Torres, hit by the next crisis before the last one ended?

****
I called her again Thursday afternoon. The relief in her voice was clear. Her electricity had come back on and her oxygen generator was helping her breathe once again.

As we talked, I asked her when she first needed oxygen. Her answer was another reminder of Houston’s clustering of misfortune, its piling on of unfair burdens.

In 2011, Torres received a stage 4 lymphoma diagnosis. She advocated hard for herself until she was placed in a trial for an aggressive chemotherapy. She started needing oxygen.

Torres traces the origins of her illness, and her strength, back to her childhood in a Fifth Ward neighborhood near the Union Pacific yards they called “El Crisol,” named for the nearby creosote plant. The Texas Department of State Health Services found a cancer cluster in that area. Her grandmother, cousin and father all died from cancer.

“I’ve got it all,” Torres told me, a slight rasp beneath her laugh.

I asked her the question I’d been asking myself: had she ever thought about leaving Houston?

“It’s worth fighting for,” she said without hesitation.

Torres joined forces with the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus to do just that.

“I owe it to my parents, and this house is the sum of all their work,” Torres stressed. “I was born here. My dad was a native Houstonian. My dad was in LULAC Council 60 and served during World War II. He fought for rights and equality. My mother was a nurse for 49 years and was also a community person. There’s more to fight for. We have to be persistent. No, I’m not going to give up.”

****
After a week like this, I’m not so sure, even without going through anything remotely as difficult as Torres. At what point does Houston become an abusive lover? Do those of us who have options to leave only stay because we develop a siege mentality?

In Houston, we love to think of ourselves as the portrait of America’s future, a multi-hued, multi-lingual fusion stew of the nation’s demographic destiny. Is that just a modern day Allen brothers ad marketing swampland as paradise? Maybe. But one person’s swampland is another person’s paradise if it’s all they can afford.

I asked Torres about what “cost of living” meant to her.

“Our leaders are only thinking about monetary value, not the actual cost of living,” she said.

The actual cost would not only account for housing and transportation but also for the externalized costs and taxed emotions — the stress, the fatigue, the plumbing repairs, the irrational post-hurricane fear of a light afternoon shower.

In time, many Houstonians start the “and now this” refrain. Many make the “worth it” calculation in their head. Some reach an answer I haven’t yet.

“Leaving Houston broke my heart,” says Amy Hertz, founder of a small communications group called Tangerine Ink who collaborated with Stephen Klineberg on the book “Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing World.” Talking with disaster experts like Jim Blackburn in her research made her realize just how deep the disregard for human life runs through our history. What tipped the balance, though, was the ITC fires in Deer Park.

“With all the air filters on in the world — I have a hospital quality air filter — I was still sick and having trouble breathing,” Hertz said from her current home in the Atlanta area.

No, my own bags aren’t packed. My community is here and they make me feel safe. Despite the risks, I’m still with Torres and Guevara for the fight. If Houston is a laboratory, I’ll join the lab rats trying to outsmart the maze.

I do have a breaking point. I think of my children’s future. If we can’t make a real breakthrough in this struggle — the struggle to value human life — it will be time to move on. To a place where life isn’t punctuated by the dreaded refrain, and now this.

I’ll admit that from June 1 to November 30, my stress level inches up a bit. That time period is hurricane season. And when there’s one in the Gulf of Mexico, the stress level goes up a bit more. Being a native Houstonian, I can’t tell you how many tropical storms and hurricanes I’ve gone through. While I take each seriously, I am a bit blasé about them. It’s an acknowledged part of living in the area.

But I do wonder about other cities and their unique “trauma tax”. I really don’t think there’s anywhere you can go without paying that tax in one form or another. There is no perfect place.

So I’ve gone through numerous hurricanes, a current pandemic, an ice storm, and other things on a personal level. I have lived through several apocalypses. If someone told me the world was ending tomorrow, I would nonchalantly say, “Yeah, and?”

“Apocalypse” and “armageddon” are words that has lost all meaning to me.

2 users thanked author for this post.

njerry, lorcan_nagle

And then you have bullshit like this: Big Texas Corporations Demand Storm Survivors Go Without Pay

DALLAS—First they had to deal with a nightmare of a winter storm, an historic assault that wiped out their power, heat, water, or all three at once.

Now they have to deal with bosses denying them pay.

Internal company emails and text messages obtained by The Daily Beast indicate that dozens of employers in Texas, many of them in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, have told people who were unable to go to work or work remotely due to loss of electricity during last week’s destructive winter storm that they must consider the lost days as vacation, or otherwise go without pay.

These are not small businesses, either. Several large companies are among them, such as Bell Textron Inc.—formerly known as Bell Helicopter—United Ag & Turf, BAE Systems, and the City of Dallas itself.

And workers are seething.

“We are required to use vacation on the days of the storm when I had no heat or WiFi, or I can forfeit the money and not get paid,” a Bell Helicopter employee, who like other workers quoted in this report spoke under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, told The Daily Beast.

“I’m disappointed and nervous about the next year,” the worker said, adding, “Even though I’m salaried, I’m entry-level, and any knock to my income will put me on the street—and that’s terrifying.”

Representatives from Bell did not return a call or email requesting comment, but emails sent by management and reviewed by The Daily Beast made the policy clear.

“Employees who are unable to fully dedicate their time and attention to company business due to current conditions should use available PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time if they wish to be paid for today. Otherwise, employees who do not have any remaining PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time or do not wish to use their unused PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time will not be paid for today,” read an email sent last week from Bell executive management.

The worker told The Daily Beast that Bell facilities were closed the entire week, but that at one point they were unable to access the VPN–a “virtual private network” that allows them to access company systems—meaning many employees at Bell couldn’t work from home even when they had electricity.

Executives at United Ag & Turf—a John Deere equipment dealer—and managers at BAE Systems—a British multinational arms, security, and aerospace company—sent similar messages. But they also allowed employees to effectively borrow paid time off, which would come out of their future allotments or pay, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Some employees did not appreciate the offer.

“ just felt like people should know. It’s not right,” an employee at BAE Systems told The Daily Beast.

A spokesperson for BAE Systems told The Daily Beast, “As a government contractor, there are regulations we must follow for labor charged by our employees. The events of last week are unusual and we are working with employees on how to properly handle any time they were unable to work. In addition, we activated our Immediate Response Program to support our colleagues and provide financial assistance to affected employees and their families.”

Employees at United Ag & Turf, meanwhile, were even told they must take responsibility for maintaining a time-off balance in case such events occur in the future. This despite the devastating storm and the associated power crisis being “the largest insurance claim event in Texas history.”

“To be prepared for circumstances like this in the future, each employee is expected to manage their PTO and encouraged to always carry a balance for unexpected situations like health issues and bad weather. This type of assistance will not be offered in the future,” read an email from the executive management of United Ag & Turf.

United Ag & Turf did not respond to a request for comment.

“I feel angry. They could have said nothing and been fine. They could have paid people for the canceled days and looked like heroes. They instead opted to add insult to injury,” said a worker at United Ag & Turf.

For-profit employers are not the only ones who have told their employees that they must use their vacation days. Even some government employees have been affected: An email sent to the library department at the City of Dallas told employees to use personal leave time for lost work. The veracity of the email was confirmed by a Dallas City Council member, Adam Bazaldua, as well as a city communications representative, Catherine Cuellar.

“It’s really disheartening that HR (who have worked entirely from home for the past year, by the way) get to just decide whether people get paid or not,” one city employee said.

Cuellar told the Daily Beast that for those without available paid time off, they can either “make up time within the pay period” or apply for emergency administrative paid leave, which would then have to be approved by FEMA.

“Nobody gets to ‘just decide’ anything; we have processes and layers of accountability for taxpayer dollars,” she said.

“So it becomes a question at the federal government level whether or not paying that worker emergency administrative pay was a necessary expense during the weather event,” Cuellar added.

“That has been the city’s policy for emergency weather-related pay for a decade,” she said.

When asked whether the policy could be changed to cover all employees, Cuellar said that things would be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Austin Kaplan, an employment lawyer based in Austin, described these situations as a consequence of a lack of adequate labor protections in a state with notoriously weak safeguards for workers.

“There’s no requirement in Texas that people pay any vacation time at all. There’s just no safety net, or anything like that,” Kaplan told The Daily Beast.

This means that it’s been entirely up to employers to decide how to handle the fallout. Some, like Cisco, not only paid their employees for the lost days, but also offered offices as a shelter and sent resources for mental-health support.

But it appears they are in the minority. And without any clear sign of the government taking action—Gov. Greg Abbott has hinted at relief for workers facing sky-high electric bills, but little else—they appear to be on their own.

“In my estimation, the state that turned the power grid off ought to be the one paying,” Kaplan said.

2 users thanked author for this post.

njerry, lorcan_nagle

Andrew wrote:

Isn’t the premise also that the vaccines make you less sick if you do contract the illness, meaning although you’re technically still able to transmit the virus, you won’t be coughing all over the place and expelling as many droplets; it’ll take proper intimate contact with people to pass it on – not just being out and about at work or in a retail setting.

I’m not so sure on how much the coughing element is proven but the initial trials showed that even on transmission nobody got seriously ill. Now a couple of studies out of the UK and Israel are saying the vaccine is reducing transmission too.

It’s interesting to me how much the initial discussion was around the immunity percentage but it was largely overlooked that the  5-10% of cases that still got it were only mild symptoms, eradication is the ideal but if you can stop it being a dangerous condition is significant. Like bubonic plague still exists but we can get rid of it with a course of antibiotics now,

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

It’s actually scary how many diseases still exist that I thought we had eradicated (in the UK). We vaccinate against TB, and yet 511 cases have been reported in the UK so far this year.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/963637/NOIDS_weekly_report_week_7_2021.pdf

(Weirdly that document tells us that only 57 cases of Covid-19 have been reported this year. But I’ll put that down to a reporting quirk rather than promote any Covid conspiracy theories )

China denies using COVID-19 anal swabs on US diplomats

BEIJING: China on Thursday (Feb 25) said it had never asked US diplomats to undergo COVID-19 anal swabs, following American media reports that State Department personnel had complained of being subjected to the intrusive test.

China – which has largely brought the virus under control domestically – said last month that anal swabs can be more effective than normal throat and nose swabs as the virus can linger longer in the digestive system.
Advertisement

But Beijing rebuffed reports from Vice and Washington Post – citing US officials – that State Department employees in China had been given the test “in error”, despite diplomats being exempt from the procedure.

“China has never requested US diplomatic personnel in China to undergo anal swabs,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a regular press briefing Thursday.

Officials in China have used anal swabs to test people it considers at high-risk of contracting COVID-19, including residents of neighbourhoods with confirmed cases as well as some international travellers.

State media reports that anal swabs had been used in Beijing during a small outbreak in January caused a social media uproar, with many commenters on Twitter-like Weibo reacting with a mix of horror and amusement.

But officials acknowledged it would be hard to use anal swabs as widely as the other methods, which have been used to test millions in mass campaigns, as the former technique was “not convenient”.

https://www.nydailynews.com/snyde/ny-kanye-west-failed-presidential-campaign-12-million-dollars-own-20210226-jol7v7jhzzfp3niczsqh6nkjuu-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1M-4dOlKErRfoaqW9T1b4sS7Hcbux_RjQ1lO5huk-m6cEzf9TKjD_J3KU

garjones wrote:

It’s easy to jump on numbers were low last summer in Europe and it means sunshine eases the virus but the same pattern more or less is happening here in northern hemisphere seasons, southern hemisphere and equatorial that have no seasons at all.

‘s not sunshine, it’s people being stuck indoors less. It happened in Germany (and other European countries) exactly as it was predicted, with the second wave coming in in October when temperatures dropped because people spent more time with each other indoors, and the numbers had to be pushed down again with lockdowns. That’s a very different dynamic than the one those curves show in South Africa and Malaysia, where numbers remained low until well into December. In SA, you can see the equivalent autumn/winter spike in July/August, only they stifled it early with lockdown measures (whereas later in the year, in their summer, they waited until late December to use lockdown measures again, which is why the spike only goes down from mid-January). Malaysia is the only example we’re talking about right now where numbers are going down (hopefully!) in Januar-February without lockdown measures, and that’s in a climate where there is no winter.

There is too great a number of varying conditions in different countries to distinguish the individual causes of numbers going up or down, but when it comes to European climate, it’s pretty obvious that things developed exactly as virologists warned they would, and when scientists predict something and it happens exactly that way, it’s probably because they were right about the underlying conditions and causes. There is very little doubt that numbers would’ve just kept going up if Germany hadn’t locked things down properly in December.

Conversely, that doesn’t mean that loosening measures without driving the numbers up is possible when it gets warmer again – that’s certainly something the South Africa example shows (and the fact that Malaysia had to use lockdown measures at all). But there is hope for that, based on our last summer.

Christian wrote:

Malaysia is the only example we’re talking about right now where numbers are going down (hopefully!) in Januar-February without lockdown measures, and that’s in a climate where there is no winter.

Malaysia went into lockdown in December too. We are gradually easing in steps.

To clarify I’m not saying climate doesn’t play a role, as you say with more people gathering indoors there’s solid logic there. I just find the data doesn’t correlate as easily to the pretty confident proclamations that numbers will automatically go down as it gets warmer. This seems largely based on matching flu data but we don’t know enough yet about how this is transmitted, unlike flu where we have decades of data globally. It’ll actually be difficult to know now as it’s all happening while we roll out vaccines.

It’s interesting here where that factor can be removed what we see the drivers have been for the increase. They seem to be in two areas, firstly extra movement inter-state because of a local election (Malaysians have a strange habit of not registering where they live but where they were raised) – controlling movement has been a big part in Asia’s success at keeping rates down.

Secondly in schools re-opening. Which is a very controversial topic in itself. I think a lot of people for mainly good reasons don’t want that to be a factor but in a similar common sense reading to indoor gatherings any parent will tell you how many bugs your kids drag home in their first few years of school.

 

 

 

garjones wrote:

To clarify I’m not saying climate doesn’t play a role, as you say with more people gathering indoors there’s solid logic there. I just find the data doesn’t correlate as easily to the pretty confident proclamations that numbers will automatically go down as it gets warmer. This seems largely based on matching flu data but we don’t know enough yet about how this is transmitted

Well, and we can look to last summer, where numbers stayed down in spite of measures being pretty loose. But yeah, we can’t just automatically assume that’ll happen again, especially with the British Mutant taking over. But one can hope.

garjones wrote:

Secondly in schools re-opening. Which is a very controversial topic in itself. I think a lot of people for mainly good reasons don’t want that to be a factor but in a similar common sense reading to indoor gatherings any parent will tell you how many bugs your kids drag home in their first few years of school.

Well, there were good reasons early in the pandemic to speculate that children might not transmit the disease (as much), but then the problem was that when studies came out about the role of children and youths, those were based on lockdown conditions (so, no school and far fewer contacts than grown-ups) so those skewed the picture for a while even though it had become clear that the viral load in youths was no different (and in children only a very little different). The proper data has been for months now and we’ve known very much that children and youths are as much part of the pandemic as everybody else, but as you say, many people are clinging to those early ideas and numbers because of wishful thinking, basically. Same happened here, with education ministers spewing the children-are-not-part-of-the-pandemic nonsense far longer than was in any way justifiable.

Our elementary schools and graduating classes are currently open, which they decided to do two weeks ago when the numbers were falling, but now the numbers are up again and that’s not even the impacts of the open schools (as they’ve been open for only a week now). We’re making the huge mistake of loosening restrictions just when they were about to work, and the numbers will shoot up again and we will have to shut down again. Nobody is happy about this, but the politicians think it’s what everybody wants in spite of surveys pointing to the opposite.

2 users thanked author for this post.

garjones, lorcan_nagle

Christian wrote:

Well, and we can look to last summer, where numbers stayed down in spite of measures being pretty loose.

Sure but as I mentioned that happened here too.

It’s why it’s stood out to me, albeit from a lower base and a week or two out here and there I’ve been entering and exiting lockdown on pretty much the same timing as my friends in the UK.

On the schools just saw this appear in my news feed:

 

A school has been shut after a suspected coronavirus case only a week after re-opening.

 

St Asaph VP School in Denbighshire has closed to all pupils, including key workers’ and vulnerable children, until March 8, Denbighshire Council said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/01/former-french-president-nicolas-sarkozy-sentenced-to-three-years-for-corruption

Sarkozy is found guilty of corruption, and sentenced to jail. He won’t serve any time, by the looks of it.

1 user thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle

Anonymous wrote:

Sarkozy is found guilty of corruption, and sentenced to jail. He won’t serve any time, by the looks of it.

AND…he’s still married to Carla Bruni, so he’s doing okay for a convicted criminal.

It’s quite impressive that he was actually convicted anyway.

Also, fuck that guy.

The article I read says he likely won’t go to jail but have some kind of house arrest or electronic tagging. Quite soft but not entirely getting away with it. Saying that ‘home confinement’ has been the reality for most of us for the past year or so.

2 users thanked author for this post.

njerry, Todd

Pontins staff monitored calls and refused or cancelled bookings made by certain people with an “undesirable” Irish accent or surname.

I skimmed past this on Twitter this morning and assumed it was some ancient policy they’d had in decades past, but it’s actually a current thing. Quite incredible.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, Dave, lorcan_nagle

Well, get ready to see spikes in cases very soon.

Texas and other states ease COVID-19 rules despite warnings

Texas on Tuesday became the biggest state to lift its mask rule, joining a rapidly growing movement by governors and other leaders across the U.S. to loosen COVID-19 restrictions despite pleas from health officials not to let down their guard yet.

The state will also do away with limits on the number of diners who can be served indoors, said Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who made the announcement at a restaurant in Lubbock.

The governors of Michigan and Louisiana likewise eased up on bars, restaurants and other businesses Tuesday, as did the mayor of San Francisco.

“Removing statewide mandates does not end personal responsibility,” said Abbott, speaking from a crowded dining room where many of those surrounding him were not wearing masks. “It’s just that now state mandates are no longer needed.”

A year into the outbreak, politicians and ordinary Americans alike have grown tired of rules meant to stem the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed over a half-million people in the United States. Some places are lifting infection control measures; in other places, people are ignoring them.

Top health officials, including the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have responded by begging people repeatedly not to risk another deadly wave of contagion just when the nation is making progress in vaccinating people and victory over the pandemic is in sight.

U.S. cases have plunged more than 70% over the past two months from an average of nearly 250,000 new infections a day, while average deaths per day have plummeted about 40% since mid-January.

But the two curves have leveled off abruptly in the past several days and have even risen slightly, and the numbers are still running at alarmingly high levels, with an average of about 2,000 deaths and 68,000 cases per day. Health officials are increasingly worried about virus mutations.

“We stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky warned on Monday.

Even so, many states are allowing restaurants to resume indoor dining, reopening movie theaters and expanding mass gatherings, while Americans are eager to socialize again.

An Indianapolis-area bar was filled with maskless patrons over the weekend. In Southern California, people waited in lines that snaked through a parking lot on a recent weekday afternoon for the chance to shop and eat at Downtown Disney, part of the Disneyland. (The theme park’s rides remain closed.) And Florida is getting ready to welcome students on spring break.

“People want to stay safe, but at the same time, the fatigue has hit,” said Ryan Luke, who is organizing a weekend rally in Eagle, Idaho, to encourage people to patronize businesses that don’t require masks. “We just want to live a quasi-normal life.”

Michael Junge argued against a mask mandate when officials in the Missouri tourist town of Branson passed one and said he hasn’t enforced it in his Lost Boys Barber Company. He said he is sick of it.

“I think the whole thing is a joke honestly,” he said. “They originally said that this was going to go for a month and they have pushed it out to indefinitely. … It should have been done a long time ago.”

In San Francisco, and upbeat Mayor London Breed announced that California gave the green light to indoor dining and the reopening of of movie theaters and gyms.

Florida is getting ready for spring break travelers to flock to its sunny beaches. The state is considered to be in an “active outbreak,” along with Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and South Carolina, according to the data-tracking website CovidActNow.

Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis made it clear during his annual State of the State speech Tuesday that he welcomes more visitors to Florida in his drive to keep the state’s economy thriving.

Municipalities can impose their own mask rules and curfews, restrict beach access and place some limits on bars and restaurants, but some have virtually no such measures in place ahead of the season.

Miami Beach will require masks both indoors and out and will restrict the number of people allowed on the beach as well as in bars and restaurants.

“If you want to party without restrictions, then go somewhere else. Go to Vegas,” Miami Beach City Manager Raul Aguila said during a recent virtual meeting. “We will be taking a zero-tolerance attitude towards that behavior.”

In Michigan, a group called All Business Is Essential has resisted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s virus policies, and many people are abandoning mask requirements and other measures, said group leader Erik Kiilunen.

“At some point you’ve got to look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘Do I want a zero-risk life?’” he said. “It’s become a farce, really. People have quit living for a year, at what price?”

“I think everybody wants things to get back the way they were,” said Aubrey D. Jenkins, the fire chief in Columbia, South Carolina, whose department issues dozens of $100 citations every weekend to bar-goers who refuse to wear masks or keep their distance. “But we still have to be real cautious.”

1 user thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle

Also, apparently my paranoia wasn’t too far off, I heard our foreign minister flat out say that around 10 countries are currently hogging 80% of the worldwide supply of vaccines… yay… Also, the president raised the issue with Biden, but to the surprise of no one the answer was “nah, americans first”… Oh well, there goes the whole Covax thing…

Steve Sensible wrote:

I skimmed past this on Twitter this morning and assumed it was some ancient policy they’d had in decades past, but it’s actually a current thing. Quite incredible.

It was apparently targeting Irish Travellers rather than Irish people in general, and discrimination against Travellers is very common and generally socially acceptable

2 users thanked author for this post.

garjones, Todd

lorcan_nagle wrote:

It was apparently targeting Irish Travellers rather than Irish people in general, and discrimination against Travellers is very common and generally socially acceptable

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

lorcan_nagle wrote:

It was apparently targeting Irish Travellers rather than Irish people in general, and discrimination against Travellers is very common and generally socially acceptable

But their list of “undesirable” names presumably discriminated against non-travellers too. Is their as much ill will towards travellers in Ireland as there is over here?

Boy Scouts selling off Norman Rockwell paintings, oil and gas interests amid sexual abuse claims

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is planning to sell off dozens of Norman Rockwell paintings and oil and gas interests in 17 states as it aims to raise funds for settlements with sexual abuse survivors.

In a filing in bankruptcy court, the Boy Scouts listed nearly 60 of pieces of art by Rockwell as potential assets that could be sold in an attempt to settle the nearly $300 million in damages the survivors are seeking, according to The New York Times.

“The plan demonstrates that considerable progress has been made as we continue to work with all parties toward achieving our strategy to provide equitable compensation for victims and address our other financial obligations so that we can continue to serve youth for years to come,” the Boy Scouts said in an email to the Times on Tuesday.

Many of the paintings were commissioned by BSA as part of “The Boy Scouts Hike Book” in 1912. The paintings include “The Right Way,” “On My Honor” and “I Will Do My Best,” the Times reported.

The Boy Scouts also said it would sell off rights to oil and gas interests at various locations in across the country, a warehouse facility in North Carolina and a Scouting University in Texas, CBS News reported.

The BSA has pledged to $220 million for a trust for victims, with another $300 million coming from local organizations.

“There are still many aspects of the Plan that we are refining through ongoing mediation, but the amended Plan is an important step in demonstrating progress that we believe will ultimately lead to a final plan that the Bankruptcy Court will confirm,” the BSA told The Hill this week. “In the coming months, supplements to the Plan will include a more detailed breakdown of the process to compensate survivors and more details about how local councils will support this effort. We are hopeful we can come to a resolution that is in the best interest of survivors and all parties and can emerge from Chapter 11 by this fall.”

BSA is reportedly facing more than 80,000 damage claims relating to sexual abuse and filed for bankruptcy early last year.

1 user thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle

Steve Sensible wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

It was apparently targeting Irish Travellers rather than Irish people in general, and discrimination against Travellers is very common and generally socially acceptable

But their list of “undesirable” names presumably discriminated against non-travellers too. Is their as much ill will towards travellers in Ireland as there is over here?

Oh yeah, it’s totally acceptable to discriminate against Travellers here too. I’m guessing their whole thing about accents and names meant they were targeting people booking by phone primarily – the Traveller accent is very distinct.

1 user thanked author for this post.

garjones

From my reading of the intranet page that was leaked they weren’t necessarily banning everyone with those names but it gave them a ‘red flag’ to be escalated.

It doesn’t make it any better at all but I suspect Kirsty or Noel Gallagher would have got past the vetting process.

It reminds me of immigration here where there’s a list of about 12 (mostly African) countries posted on the side of the officer’s desk. Doesn’t mean you can’t enter but you’ll no doubt be dragged off to a room for a chat rather than waved through.

1 user thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle

garjones wrote:

I suspect Kirsty or Noel Gallagher would have got past the vetting process.

Not Liam though, right?

7 users thanked author for this post.

Andrew, Todd, garjones, njerry, DavidM, Dave, lorcan_nagle

Todd wrote:

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is planning to sell off dozens of Norman Rockwell paintings and oil and gas interests in 17 states

The kids who found those oil and gas reserves really earned their explorer badges.

 

5 users thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle, Todd, garjones, Rocket

Steve Sensible wrote:

Not Liam though, right?

That omission was not by chance.

2 users thanked author for this post.

lorcan_nagle, Todd