We respond…
But he doesn’t breathe a word about the former head of the NRA being held liable for almost $5 million in outright graft.
He’s a “later in life” gun nut (of the worst kind!)… and yet, is not phased by the NRA’s bankruptcy and obvious corruption.
Hilarious.
And, we agree — it is winning the largest chunk of the economic base of the nation.
And in the process, it has made what was once a vast Republican advantage in raising money from, and for, business interests… a negligible net difference.
The majority of larger American businesses now accept that they must reflect their consumers — in platitudes and attitudes, if not actions.
And so… Paul is also right that the reactionary, 19th Century style populism of the current MAGA/GOP… is a dead letter (that’s been his implication for over two years now). Sure, on the margins, it picks up a few blue collar votes, but the GOP as presently configured… has now fundamentally lost the widest swath of college educated, largely suburban, professional whyte women — and their votes, as well as their donations.
That spells… its end.
And I couldn’t be happier.
Well, just when you thought the Alabama Supreme Court had won the week’s prize for bad biological science… Florida decides to deny three quarters of a century of learnings, about viral pandemics.
And it does so with the explicit blessing of Gov. Ron DeSantis (proving that at least some legacy admissions at Yale… are a wasted use of a scarce resource — an elite education). The WaPo has it all — but it sure feels like a bad sci-fi / biblical nonsense movie — not the current Broward County Public School system:
…As a Florida elementary school tries to contain a growing measles outbreak, the state’s top health official is giving advice that runs counter to science and may leave unvaccinated children at risk of contracting one of the most contagious pathogens on Earth, clinicians and public health experts said.
Florida surgeon general Joseph A. Ladapo failed to urge parents to vaccinate their children or keep unvaccinated students home from school as a precaution in a letter to parents at the Fort Lauderdale-area school this week following six confirmed measles cases.
Instead of following what he acknowledged was the “normal” recommendation that parents keep unvaccinated children home for up to 21 days — the incubation period for measles — Ladapo said the state health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
Ben Hoffman, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said Florida’s guidance flies in the face of long-standing and widely accepted public health guidance for measles, which can result in severe complications, including death….
“It runs counter to everything I have ever heard and everything that I have read,” Hoffman said. “It runs counter to our policy. It runs counter to what the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] would recommend.”
Measles outbreaks have been on the rise in recent years. So far in 2024, at least 26 cases in at least 12 states have been reported to the CDC, about double the number at this point last year. In addition to the six cases confirmed in the Florida school, cases have been reported in Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York City, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Because measles virus particles can linger in the air and on surfaces for up to two hours after an infected person leaves the area, up to 90 percent of people without immunity will contract measles if exposed. People who have been infected or received the full two doses of the MMR vaccine are 98 percent protected and very unlikely to contract the disease. That is why public health officials typically advocate for vaccination amid outbreaks….
Ladapo’s unwillingness to use public health tools echoes the movement by conservative and libertarian forces to defang public health’s ability to contain diseases like the highly infectious measles. In a measles outbreak in Ohio that began in late 2022, most of the 85 children infected were old enough to get the shots, but their parents chose not to do so, officials said. The state legislature in 2021 had stripped health officials’ abilities to order someone suspected of having an infectious disease to quarantine.
Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said Ladapo’s failure to urge vaccination endangers children.
“Is he trying to prove that measles isn’t a contagious disease when the data are clear that it is the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, far more contagious than influenza or covid?” Offit wrote in an email….
A drop below 95 percent vaccination coverage for measles can compromise herd immunity and allow a virus to spread more quickly. Florida’s state vaccination coverage is 90.6 percent, but statewide vaccination coverage does not identify pockets where there may be lower coverage.
The outbreak will explode exponentially, becoming a much bigger community threat, if unvaccinated people exposed to the virus don’t follow public health recommendations and stay home from school during the potentially contagious period, said Patsy Stinchfield, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a nurse practitioner in Minneapolis. She has been involved in controlling three measles outbreaks, including the 2017 outbreak in Minnesota that affected 75 people, most of them unvaccinated, and most of them children….
Manatee Bay Elementary School, about 20 miles west of Fort Lauderdale, has six confirmed measles cases, school officials said this week. Of the school’s 1,067 students, 33 have not received the MMR vaccine, Broward County Schools Superintendent Peter B. Licata said Wednesday during a school board meeting. A school district official said the district has held “four vaccination opportunities,” including two at the school and two at other locations in the community….
What on Earth is happening… to common sense, in these GOP dominated (mostly southern) geographies? Good grief. On this day in 1954, the first mass polio vaccine campaign was launched in Pittsburgh — and that was the beginning of a scourge — eradicated. These people are… luddites.
नमस्ते
The wheels are coming off, in the “House of Hinderaker”, it seems.
One day he complains about social media being “mind control”… and the next he wants to surrender all critical thinking skills… to AI algorithms.
He thinks it wrong that Google Gemini won’t give him ready made images of some admittedly odious characters. I guess he’s never heard of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or has no idea where his public library might be.
It’s clear: he’s just running out of bitter old man things to kvetch about.
Sheesh.
This from the SAME chucklehead who’s spent decades defending whyte supremacists — in their rants — and actions.
He’s repeatedly said that chanting (or writing!) offensive phrases is and should be… protected as expressive activity.
“From the river, to the sea…” may offend — but it is NOT inherently a call to violence or lawlessness, man.
Properly understood, it seeks to reclaim land Palestinians held for most of the last 2,300 years prior to 1948.
It is a fact that Israel sits there now.
But it does not call for killing Israelis.
As ever, John dishonestly twists the facts, to suggest the phrase is “genocide”.
Give it up, you loser.
Out.
The full transcript will have to wait a tick, but this one is going to hit Gov. Abbott like a ton of bricks.
He is going to lose — in epic fashion:
…IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the above entitled and numbered case is set for a hearing on the motion to dismiss, in Courtroom 2, on the Fourth Floor of the United States Courthouse, 501 West Fifth Street, Austin, TX, on Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 09:00 AM….
Buckle up, butter cup. Your time in the Sun… is nearly at an end.
नमस्ते
The last time a US mission touched down safely on the lunar surface — it was during the Apollo program — and it was a crewed mission. But this time, it is a stepping stone to crewed missions to Mars, likely not until… the mid-2030s.
Still, it is important to show… we still have “what it takes” — given that several other privately-funded missions have recently seen less-than-stellar results, in attempting soft lunar touchdowns, and operations — without glitches. Here’s the latest, for tonight’s viewing / streaming along:
. . .As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines is targeting no earlier than 5:30 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 22, to land their Odysseus lunar lander near Malapert A in the South Pole region of the Moon.
Live landing coverage will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. NASA TV can be streamed on a variety of platforms, including social media. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates beginning at 4 p.m., as the landing milestones occur. Upon successful landing, Intuitive Machines and NASA will host a news conference to discuss the mission and science opportunities that lie ahead as the company begins lunar surface operations.
In May 2019, the agency awarded a task order for scientific payload delivery to Intuitive Machines. Odysseus launched at 1:05 a.m., Feb. 15, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida….
Now you know — onward, grinning… with no news out of the able USDC Judge Ezra’s courtroom, in West Texas, yet. Be excellent to one another.
नमस्ते
Andrew Torba himself says he’s a “Christian Nationalist”, John. [Hinderaker claims he’s never heard anyone use the term self-referentially. Hmmm.]
And “gab” has recently been exposed as using hundreds of AI-enhanced chat bots… a good portion of which are encoded to deny the Holocaust, and support Whyte separatist themes.
Not surprisingly, the Tangerine campaign has taken to propagating “clones” of those gab bots.
So, actually John — you DO know lots of ‘em.
Onward.
Here’s a brief update, on where the Supremes are, on this Tennessee “law” that purports to tell doctors they are forbidden from treating juvenile gender dysphoria cases, inside the state [but only if the presenting patients’ apparent genital morphology is not “aligned” with the patients’ self-perception, of gender]. [Mandate issued in Sixth Circuit. This is harming children, every day that it remains even a threat of law. Parents are leaving the state to get care in Illinois and Colorado, and California, as I type this.]
So, the Court will now discuss it all, at a March 15 (private) conference, and we will likely see argument dates shortly after that.
I suppose it is possible, given the Supremes turning back the TJ HS (Va.) case yesterday, that the Court will summarily report out that Bostock has been decided, and as such, Tennessee § 68-33-103(a) is unconstitutional. But more likely, the Supremes will take the route of hearing argument. Certainly, they cannot duck this one. Here’s a bit from the parents’ brief:
…In defending Tennessee’s ban, Respondents do not dispute the profound importance of the constitutional questions presented or the profound consequences of SB1 for transgender youth and their families. Instead, Respondents advance — without any support in the district court’s factual findings — misconceptions about gender-affirming care that the district court rejected, and that were not questioned, much less deemed clearly erroneous, by the court of appeals. Those assertions have no proper place here.
On the merits, the Constitution is not “neutral,” as the Sixth Circuit put it, about laws that classify based on a person’s sex or transgender status. App. 18a. Such laws carry a presumption of unconstitutionality, and the government must provide an exceedingly persuasive justification for the differential treatment. The Sixth Circuit’s sweeping declaration that laws targeting transgender people and the medical decision-making of their families are subject only to rational basis review creates multiple circuit splits, contravenes well-settled precedent, and imposes immediate and devastating harm. This Court’s review is warranted now….
Respondents… assert that heightened scrutiny does not apply because Tennessee’s ban “merely” references sex without classifying based on sex. But Tennessee’s ban is nothing like a law regulating abortion that happens to refer to the word “woman.” See Opp. 24. Such a law would have precisely the same meaning if the word “woman” were changed to “person.” By contrast, under SB1, the legality of medical treatment expressly turns on whether the care “[e]nabl[es] a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Tenn. Code Ann. (“TCA”) § 68-33-103(a)(1)(A). That Tennessee must treat boys and girls differently to regulate gender-affirming care is not a reason for discarding heightened scrutiny. It is why heightened scrutiny is required….
Tennessee will lose here, just as Alabama will lose in about a year, in the Supremes, on the idea that a clump of 500 cells is a human being (as imaged at immediate right). These are… indeed, dark times, for the real biological sciences, especially in the largely Southern-, and GOP-controlled, state courts and legislatures.
Onward, just the same.
नमस्ते
Increasingly, Hinderaker cannot see the wider world. He focuses almost exclusively internally, inside the reality distortion bubble that is today’s MAGA-controlled GOP.
And that is not a good place from which to cogently assess the “real world“, John.
So, in all of this, as John preposterously lists “Veep possibilities” — for the Tangerine ’24 ticket… I chuckle.
I say preposterously… because none of the names will ever… matter.
The only thing that matters… to about 35% of the GOP… is that it be… Trump.
And as to at least the other 65% of the GOP — well, they would rather chew off their own right arm, than vote for him, at the convention. But because not one of those types has a spine… among them, they will vote Tangerine in the general.
So, again — whomever his veep is to be… it is a position of irrelevancy. And all of this assumes he won’t yet be a convicted felon, by then — which he may well be.
And there is the real risk that between now and then, he eats one too many buckets of KFC, and… dies of a massive heart attack (carrying well over 340 pounds) even before November.
But even in that unlikely event, it won’t matter — as he would lose in 2024, to Mr. Biden, or Ms. Harris or even to Gavin Newsom, without any serious doubt. He offers… nothing to the nation, save hatred.
So it is all… just silly.
Take a seat, Hinderaker.
