All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[skyvolt2000]

NEW: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has banned vaccine mandates of any kind in a new executive order

I see a sea of lawsuits from organizations and businesses who want to impose Mandates within their organizations.

Can someone post an image of Scrooge McDuck swimming in money? Cause a BUNCH of lawyers are going to be doing that in the next few days after the lawsuits start.

[JCAll]

DeSantis is doing such a great job managing COVID. 1/3 of all deaths nationally are in Florida, at least 20% of hospitalizations and 15% of new cases are in his State. (If I am ready the data correctly)
So you can see he is dealing with it as well as most large States and keeping his "economy" open. Heck of a job!

He has the high score, that means he's winning /sarcasm

[BeastieRunner]

NEW: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has banned vaccine mandates of any kind in a new executive order

I see a sea of lawsuits from organizations and businesses who want to impose Mandates within their organizations.

Well ... the mask ban already blew up in his face.

Judge rules Texas governor can't enforce mask mandate ban.

A Dallas County judge has ruled against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) move to ban mask mandates in the state, contending that such a policy violates the county's ability to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Judge Tonya Parker sided with Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins on Wednesday, issuing a temporary injunction against Abbott’s ban on mask mandates, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The move will allow Jenkins’s mask order, in addition to similar policies in other local school districts, to remain in place for the time being.

Jenkins will now have the ability to issue penalties to individuals who do not comply with the county’s policy, which requires that masks are worn in businesses, schools and county-owned buildings, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Parker wrote in the ruling that Jenkins proved that Dallas County residents “will suffer probable imminent and irreparable injury through County Judge Jenkins being precluded from exercising his authority” to mandate masks in public, ABC 8 WFAA reported.

The controversy in Dallas began when Commissioner J.J. Koch filed a lawsuit against Jenkins earlier this month after being removed from a courtroom for refusing to wear a mask.

I expect this will as well.

[worstblogever]

NEW: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has banned vaccine mandates of any kind in a new executive order

I see a sea of lawsuits from organizations and businesses who want to impose Mandates within their organizations.

It's like Abbott and DeSantis made a sucker bet at an early 2020 Republican Governor's Association meeting to see how many people they could kill.

[Malvolio]

"I'll teach them!"

*checks out all the Pride books*
*library orders more pride books due to high circulation numbers*
*creates new display*

"Curses! Foiled again!"

Yeah, they're not going to know or care why he checked out all the Pride books. All they'll think is "Hey, almost all of the Pride books are checked out. They must be really popular! We need to order more Pride books."

[Tami]

Yeah, they're not going to know or care why he checked out all the Pride books. All they'll think is "Hey, almost all of the Pride books are checked out. They must be really popular! We need to order more Pride books."

They'll know, and he better return them when they are due back or else. As a Librarian myself, I can attest to the fact that keeping library books or damaging library books is a serious issue. As for replacing them, if he doesn't return them, he might be charged the cost of replacing them, depending on that particular library's policies.

Library books are paid for with taxpayer money, as such, they are considered public property.

[CSTowle]

It isn't just Republicans who feel the need to be reflexively anti-China at every available opportunity though, and this has really hampered our covid response on just about every level since the very beginning. Make no mistake here, we had PLENTY of advance warning about the virus and a rather long head start compared to the rest of the world before it hit our shores, but we chose to use all that time making racist memes about bat soup, which for some reason people still can't let go of even though we now know covid had nothing to do with bats, and gloating about how this was going to be China's Chernobyl moment and would bring down their government. Imagine what we could have done if we had actually spent that time preparing a coherent strategy to combat the virus when it inevitably arrived here.

And of course, we simply can't bring ourselves to give the Chinese any credit for having contained the virus better than just about every other country, or to learn from what they did to achieve the same results. Instead all we get are articles talking about how their lockdowns are "draconian" or how China MUST be faking their numbers or how they're on the cusp of being devastated by a resurgent wave any minute now. Hell, the Biden administration is STILL trying to push the lab leak conspiracy theory, even though they haven't found a shred of evidence for it and even they must realize that it only fuels the far right nutjobs and leads to more attacks on innocent people, which of course they can only offer lukewarm condemnation of lest they be accused of being too sympathetic to China.

There's some xenophobia and anti-China feeling on the left (and some of the anti-China feeling has merit), but it's a different animal than the right-wing version. Also, I think anyone should question the numbers coming out of China. They're either miraculous or utter bullpucky, and if I had to lay bets I'd put it on the latter. Even with strict measures given a population of their size there should be a much higher number of deaths.

[PwrdOn]

There's some xenophobia and anti-China feeling on the left (and some of the anti-China feeling has merit), but it's a different animal than the right-wing version. Also, I think anyone should question the numbers coming out of China. They're either miraculous or utter bullpucky, and if I had to lay bets I'd put it on the latter. Even with strict measures given a population of their size there should be a much higher number of deaths.

Yeah but you have to think, if someone's first reaction to seeing data from China is always "oh well they MUST be faking their numbers" what are their true motivations? Are they really so passionate about the safety of the Chinese public that they demand an honest accounting of the outbreak? Or do they just want to see more Chinese people dead because then their own country's numbers won't look so bad by comparison? At this point, it's pretty much acknowledged that every country is goosing the covid numbers to try and make themselves look better, there were even health officials in Florida that were fired for NOT falsifying data. But there would have to be an unprecedented level of data manipulation for China's covid numbers to be anywhere close to as bad as ours have been, though I'm sure someone will come along shortly and tell me why that's actually a bad thing.

[JackDaw]

Yeah but you have to think, if someone's first reaction to seeing data from China is always "oh well they MUST be faking their numbers" what are their true motivations? Are they really so passionate about the safety of the Chinese public that they demand an honest accounting of the outbreak? Or do they just want to see more Chinese people dead because then their own country's numbers won't look so bad by comparison? At this point, it's pretty much acknowledged that every country is goosing the covid numbers to try and make themselves look better, there were even health officials in Florida that were fired for NOT falsifying data. But there would have to be an unprecedented level of data manipulation for China's covid numbers to be anywhere close to as bad as ours have been, though I'm sure someone will come along shortly and tell me why that's actually a bad thing.

I actually think UK tends to slightly over-state the Covid impact…certainly the death stats. If a 80 year old diabetic with other significant health issues that are “real” cause of death has tested positive for Covid within 28 days off death, then that counts here as a Covid death.

The impact on death stats isn’t massive, most estimates suggests it might influence death stats by 10 to 20 percent..but most people here accept it’s a factor.

On other hand I do think Chinese stats are a wee bit understated.

But also I accept “true” figures in China are much, much lower than in UK in terms of cases per million people. (My grand-daughter lives there, we regularly talk on phone. Covid is one thing we often discuss…and she is appalled at what she regards as the slap dash UK management of the virus.)

[Gray Lensman]

The judge dealing with the sanctions against Lin Wood and Sydney Powell is not happy. In addition to fees and possible suspension/disbarment, he also ordered them back to school and to basically hand in a term paper detailing what they learned.

[InformationGeek]

Sooooo, WBE. Got someone to look at, Herschel Walker.

Walker carries the backing of former President Trump, but has never run for office and his turbulent personal history could dog his Senate bid. https://t.co/Dc6Pbr6VzF

Aka a long history of domestic abuse.

Also, he doesn't even live in Georgia. He's from Texaa.

[CSTowle]

Yeah but you have to think, if someone's first reaction to seeing data from China is always "oh well they MUST be faking their numbers" what are their true motivations? Are they really so passionate about the safety of the Chinese public that they demand an honest accounting of the outbreak? Or do they just want to see more Chinese people dead because then their own country's numbers won't look so bad by comparison? At this point, it's pretty much acknowledged that every country is goosing the covid numbers to try and make themselves look better, there were even health officials in Florida that were fired for NOT falsifying data. But there would have to be an unprecedented level of data manipulation for China's covid numbers to be anywhere close to as bad as ours have been, though I'm sure someone will come along shortly and tell me why that's actually a bad thing.

For me it's not about wanting to cover up our deaths or wanting something like "equality" in death rate, it's just that the number reached around 5,000 last spring and has seen maybe a trickle of a dozen or so since then? I get that they can impose harsher measures and not worry about regulations or human rights abuses but there's a limit to how much you can do to stop the spread of something like this. It's more about how much you can trust the word of a country with a reported death rate that's so absurdly low? And how much does that hurt them in other areas. It comes off to me like Iran saying there are no gay people there. I know we're living in a post-Trump world and big lies are routinely swallowed by a solid number of people, but it's insulting to the rest of us.

[Kirby101]

US breaks 100K COVID-19 hospitalizations threshold for first time since January

And DeSantis and Abbott are doing just as well as any other Governor at managing COVID in their State. Because fully 1/3 of all those case are just in Florida and Texas alone.
Let's see. most cases, most hospitalizations and most deaths, what metric should we use to let them off the hook?
And this isn't incompetence or negligence, they are actively doing things to increase the spread of COVID.

[worstblogever]

Sooooo, WBE. Got someone to look at, Herschel Walker.



Aka a long history of domestic abuse.

Also, he doesn't even live in Georgia. He's from Texas.

Oh, I've got him clocked already.

[Tami]

Afghanistan: Suicide bomber strikes outside Kabul airport

A suicide bomber has struck outside Kabul airport injuring a number of people.

This morning, British and American citizens were told to stay away from the area because of a "very credible, imminent and severe" threat to the airport.

Those fears have been realised.

Tensions have been rising on the ground all day, with tear gas and fire hoses being used to control crowds.

Boris Johnson has described the airlift window as "quite short," while other nations including France, Canada and the Netherlands bringing their operations to a close within the next 24 hours.

The US said it will continue to evacuate people "until the end of the mission."

I still support Biden, however, I can see many ways in which he could have done this evacuation better. Some talking heads have said that this was inevitable, that there was nothing else Biden could have done. Others say that it was poor planning.