There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Linkee-poo Thursday Nov 4

Ronnie Wilson, and so it goes.

"Flowers Foods, the maker of Tastykake goods, said the treats could have tiny fragments of metal mesh wire in them." That ain't tasty.

"This year for the first time, the World Trade Center has been lit with a digital mural in celebration of the holiday, organized by the South Asian Engagement Foundation, along with a livestreamed fireworks show on the Hudson River… Also known as the festival of lights, Diwali is part of a five-day celebration that honors Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth."

"The biggest animals to have ever lived on Earth gobble up much more food than scientists thought, according to a new study of filter-feeding whales that reveals just how important their eating habits could be for recycling nutrients in the ocean… Baleen whales such as blue, fin, minke and humpback whales consume, on average, around three times more each year than previous estimates suggested, researchers report in Nature. A blue whale in the eastern North Pacific, for example, might eat between 10 and 20 tons of food a day."

"California condors, a critically endangered species, can reproduce without mating, according to a study by conservation scientists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance." Even when it doesn't have too, nature finds a way. (Grokked from Dan)

"A new report by the United Nations says that some impacts from climate change are already irreversible, and our efforts to adapt are lagging… Meanwhile, a gap is growing between the amount of money that's available — and what's needed — to protect communities from rising seas, hotter temperatures and worsening storms."

"It was one of the more impassioned speeches of the summit's opening day. But Johnson failed to mention that even as the United Kingdom hosts the U.N. climate summit, it is also considering plans to open a new coal mine, the country's first in decades."

"What are we losing, in terms of our spiritual connection to the land, as the climate rapidly changes?… This is the question Ella Morton seeks to answer with her project, The Dissolving Landscape, a series of experimental analog photographs and short films that examine climate change in the Arctic and Subarctic landscapes of Canada and Nordic Europe."

"But it's quite possibly the largest potato on record. When the couple lugged it into their garage and put it on their old set of scales, it weighed in at a remarkable 17.4 pounds. That's equal to a couple of sacks of regular potatoes, or one small dog." Doug?

"Cervical cancer cases plummeted among British women and girls who received a vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to a new study… The results published in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday said that women in their 20s who were jabbed against HPV between ages of 12 and 13 with a GlaxoSmithKline product called Cervarix had up to an 87 percent lower risk of developing cervical cancer linked to the virus compared with unvaccinated women."

"On Thursday, the administration rolled out two of those steps — two different vaccine rules covering more than 100 million workers… Here are the details…"

"Daily coronavirus cases and deaths in Russia remained at their highest numbers of the pandemic Wednesday as more regions announced they were extending existing restrictions in an effort to tame the country’s unrelenting surge of infections." Stay safe my Russian friends.

"England's deputy chief medical officer said Wednesday that too many people believe the pandemic is over, warning that the U.K.'s very high coronavirus rates and rising deaths mean that there are 'hard months to come in the winter.'" Same here.

"The APA, an organization that has been around since the late 1800s, issued a lengthy statement on Friday apologizing not only for the APA's role in perpetuating systemic racism, but for the role psychology, as a field of study, has also played in systemically harming people of color for decades."

"The U.S. unemployment picture improved again last week, with initial filings for unemployment insurance falling to another pandemic-era low… First-time claims dropped to 269,000 for the week ended Oct. 30, down 14,000 from the previous period and better than the Dow Jones estimate for 275,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday."

Since I also passed on this twitter thread. "You wouldn't expect a Twitter thread all about shipping logistics and ports to go viral, but that's what happened recently to Ryan Petersen, the founder of the freight-forwarding tech company Flexport."

"It was not a surprise to economists that China, with its endless supply of cheap labor, killed American manufacturing jobs. But most economists, like most American leaders, had believed that workers would adapt somewhat smoothly to economic change and that they would find solid places to work in other sectors. 'We had this notion that the American economy is this incredibly dynamic place,' says Hanson, an economist at Harvard Kennedy School. 'We create millions of jobs every year, and we destroy millions of jobs every year. We thought we could handle moving a couple of million manufacturing workers from one sector to another.'"

"Police in Thailand announced Wednesday the arrest of the head of a company suspected of cheating overseas buyers of millions of dollars they paid for undelivered medical rubber gloves during the coronavirus pandemic." Now do it here in the US.

"Owen Paterson has resigned as an MP after a row over his conduct led to a government U-turn… The Conservative was found to have broken lobbying rules and was facing suspension - until Tory MPs blocked it by calling for an overhaul of the MPs' standards watchdog instead… They initially had the backing of No 10, but Downing Street reversed its decision after a furious backlash… Mr Paterson said he now wanted a life 'outside the cruel world of politics'." Or, ya know, you could be less of a dick.

It's from 2006, but is slightly relevant… "As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed iron discipline on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, in what is now the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic. Punishments included cutting off people's ears and noses, parading women naked through the streets and selling them into slavery… 'Columbus' government was characterised by a form of tyranny,' Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the document, told journalists."

"The real estate company Zillow announced it's throwing in the towel on a program in which it bought, renovated and resold homes itself… The iBuying, or instant buying, service called Zillow Offers had recently been bogged down by a backlog of renovations and closings caused by labor and supply shortages in the U.S. housing market."

So why did some conservative lawmakers continually deny funding for gun violence studies? "According to the study, which looked at county-level data nationwide over a 17-year period, when the number of gun dealerships within 100 miles of a given area went up, the number of gun homicides in that area also increased in subsequent years—even as nongun killings declined overall (see graphic). Majority-Black communities bore the brunt of that violence, the study found." I don't have a clue.

"Giffords, the gun-control nonprofit founded by former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the National Rifle Association of violating campaign finance laws dating back to 2014… The lawsuit alleges that the country's leading gun rights group used shell companies to funnel 'as much as $35 million in unlawful, excessive, and unreported in-kind campaign contributions' to Republican candidates for federal office, including Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign."

"Republican Glenn Youngkin made schools, and particularly parental control, his closing issue in his upset win over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor's race. Between September and October polls, education rose 9 points to be the top issue for voters going into the race, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll. Parents who wanted more voice in schools broke for Youngkin by a large margin in exit polls." Well, it's a well-run campaign, midget and broom and whatnot.

"As Democrats in Congress tried to make sense of Tuesday's election results, members of the party's moderate wing on Wednesday said they warned their colleagues of potential election losses by holding up the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill… The Democratic losses, in Virginia and elsewhere, were especially poignant for Tim Kaine and Mark Warner — both former Virginia Democratic governors and now senators. They say they issued warnings to their colleagues." It's time to end game theory planning.

"CBS News has projected that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy will win a second term. He is the first Democratic governor to win reelection since 1977, but Murphy's thin margin of victory, currently about one point, in what was considered a safe blue state is raising red flags for Democrats around the country." Kinda wrecks that "doom and gloom" reporting yesterday, doesn't it.

"New York voters soundly rejected constitutional amendments that would have allowed for same-day voter registration and universal absentee voting in future elections… If approved, the proposals would have removed language in the state constitution that currently prevents no-excuse absentee voting and same-day registration, allowing lawmakers to then expand ballot access."

"He is one of several pro-Trump Republican candidates in secretary of state races in swing states like Georgia, Arizona and Michigan who have embraced falsehoods about the systems they now want to oversee — attacking the 2020 election results and spreading misleading claims about voting machines and absentee ballots." The Big Lie is going to have long legs into our election system.

"Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is objecting to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to add paid family and medical leave back into the Democrats' social spending bill, saying that 'I don't think it belongs in the bill.'" The call is coming from inside the house.

"The Associated Press set out to examine the paths and mechanics of radicalization through case studies on two continents: a 20-year-old man rescued from a Taliban training camp on Afghanistan’s border, and an Iowa man whose brother watched him fall sway to nonsensical conspiracy theories and ultimately play a visible role in the mob of Donald Trump loyalists that stormed the Capitol."

"Where Tucker Carlson goes, Fox News and its viewers follow… In the series, Carlson strongly suggests that the (Jan 6) insurrection was not orchestrated by Trump's fans but by his foes, including the violent leftist group Antifa and even in the FBI and other national security divisions. He plants the idea that the siege was a "false flag" operation to discredit Trump supporters."

"A grand jury indictment issued in federal court in Virginia charges Igor Danchenko with five counts of false statements. The case was brought as part of special counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the FBI's probe into ties between Russia and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign."

"A federal judge expressed deep skepticism of former President Donald Trump's arguments that he can keep documents from his White House secret, in the first minutes of an historic court hearing on Thursday related to the January 6 riot… Judge Tanya Chutkan pressed Trump's lawyers on why, as a former President, he has any right to control the public access to hundreds of pages of records, especially as the House of Representatives investigates the insurrection."

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