Day: May 17, 2020

Sunday’s Bummer News

There is not enough time or space for us bloggers to write about everything happening around the Covid-19……MSM picks the most newsworthy to report and that leaves bloggers like me to give the “bummer” news that slips through most filters.

The Covid-19 in the US…1.5 million cases……88,000 deaths…..Nothing about those figures is encouraging…..

The most depressing news this past weak…..

The terrible toll of the coronavirus pandemic on the US economy continued unabated last week as another 3 million people filed for unemployment benefits and official figures showed 40% of low-earning families had now lost a breadwinner.

The latest figures from the labor department mean more than 36 million people have filed for benefits in the last two months. The rate of claims is slowing but the record-breaking pace of layoffs has already pushed unemployment to levels unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. For comparison, just 188,264 unemployment claims were filed in the same week in 2019.

(the guardian)

If that did not depress my reader then this should do the trick…..

Vaccine or no vaccine, the coronavirus could be here to stay, the World Health Organization warns. WHO emergencies director Dr. Mike Ryan said Wednesday that it is impossible to predict when or if the virus will disappear, the BBC reports. “It is important to put this on the table: this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away,” Ryan said. “HIV has not gone away—but we have come to terms with the virus,” he said. “I think there are no promises in this and there are no dates,” said Ryan, who called for a “massive effort” to overcome the virus. He said the world “may have a shot” at eliminating it, but any vaccine would have to be highly effective and widely available, reports CNN. He noted that vaccines have failed to wipe out diseases like measles.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the virtual press conference in Geneva that controlling the trajectory of the pandemic is “everybody’s business” and warned that with no guaranteed way of easing lockdowns without causing a second wave of infections, “the alert at any country should be at the highest level possible.” WHO experts also warned that a mental health crisis caused by the pandemic is developing, the Guardian reports. “The isolation, the fear, the uncertainty, the economic turmoil—they all cause or could cause psychological distress,” said Devora Kestel, director of the WHO’s mental health department.

Will there be a Trump depression?

Much of the discourse on Covid-19 treats the virus as though it is an external dragon-like creature that must be slayed before the economy can get going. But what if an aggressive capitalism and the Covid-19 dragon have a symbiotic relation and grow together. An inegalitarian racially polarized society whose government is distrusted and shrinking is fertile ground for explosion of the virus. The deaths entailed often feed a deeper politics of demonization of minorities and foreigners, who often become disposable commodities sacrificed in the interest of toxic forms of growth. Trump’s constant attacks on China hide the role his bashing the CDC played in accelerating the global pandemic. He then takes the vast carnage and the necessary regulations it has required as an opportunity to “open the economy.” It sounds good to some but in practice amounts to doubling down on the financial, health, and safety deregulatory strategies that have left so many of our citizens so vulnerable.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/12/trump-depression-could-be-worse-great-depression

Here is my question…..why the hurry to open the country?

I know why…..electoral politics….it is all about the vote not the safety of the voter…..

He’s trying to force the economy to reopen to boost his electoral chances, and he’s selling out Americans’ health to seal the deal. No matter the cost, Donald Trump’s chief concern is and will always be himself.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/13/real-reason-trump-wants-reopen-economy

This report is a bummer for Donald the Orange…..

A new poll has revealed that nearly a quarter of Republicans think that the party should nominate someone other than president Donald Trump as their 2020 presidential nominee.

The poll, by Ramussen Reports, found that 23 per cent of likely Republican voters want the GOP to deny the president the chance of running for a second term, by nominating a different candidate.

According to the organisation, who conduct surveys nationwide, 70 per cent said that Mr Trump should be the Republican candidate, while seven per cent were undecided.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/president-donald-trump-republican-voters-a9517521.html

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

A Sucker Born Every Minute

I have written several times about the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, being conned in their endless search to prove the Bible is a historic document.

The family has scanned the world for artifacts that can prove the existence of everything in the Bible and in doing so has been caught with fakes and stolen artifacts…..read the story so far……https://lobotero.com/2020/03/19/theft-of-culture/

It looks like they were conned yet again…..

Dirk Obbink seemed eerily calm when a reporter knocked on his door near Oxford University last year. “I’d like to tell it,” the scholar said of his alleged role in a major antiquities scandal. “But I’m under a duty not to speak about the matter while it’s under investigation.” But that reporter, Ariel Sabar, has untangled the byzantine tale of how Obbink—a world-renowned classicist from Nebraska—allegedly made millions selling stolen papyri to US evangelicals, including a New Testament fragment that set the world of biblical studies on fire. In Sabar’s Atlantic piece, Obbink is portrayed as a legitimate papyrologist enticed by money. And in the Green family, who own the craft-store chain Hobby Lobby, he appears to have found the perfect mark.

The gospel fragment is one of several Obbink apparently sold to Hobby Lobby for the Green family’s Museum of the Bible and falsely dated to “circa 100 AD,” making them unique—the only New Testament fragments from the century in which Jesus is said to have lived and showing how his earliest chroniclers portrayed him. But those documents weren’t Obbink’s to sell. The scholar was arrested in April and accused of selling artifacts from Oxford’s Sackler Library, which was housing ancient texts on loan from the Egypt Exploration Society, per ArtNet. Now Obbink is out of an Oxford job and facing an uncertain future. But he maintains his innocence, saying that incriminating documents “have been fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm my reputation and career.” Click for Sabar’s full article.

Apparently this family has never heard the saying “buyer beware”…..ignorance and greed work well together and the Green family is proof of how profitable ignorance can be.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

72 Years And Counting

What got me to thinking about this issue was something I read about the lawmakers in Missouri……it seems that in that state it is illegal to boycott Israel…..

Missouri lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill to ban the state from doing business with companies that boycott Israel.

The Republican-led House approved the measure 95-40 on Thursday, the day before their Friday deadline to pass bills this year.

The bill is in response to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement which aims to highlight Israel’s human rights abuses.

The movement promotes boycotts, divestment and sanctions of Israeli government-linked institutions and businesses in a non-violent campaign against the occupation of Palestinian territory and other abuses.

However Israel maintains that the campaign is anti-Semitic and seeks to destroy the country.

https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2020/5/14/missouri-lawmakers-pass-bill-against-boycotting-israel

My thought is….F*ck ’em! I have been boycotting Israel and Israeli products for decades and I refuse to let some sanctimonious ass wipes tell me that I cannot exercise my right of choice.

Seeks to destroy the country?

Hold on!

You mean like they are trying to do to Palestine?

Think not?

When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – they are not simply remembering a past event in which over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, over 400 villages and towns destroyed and thousands killed.  

They are also marking a continued Nakba (al-Nakba al-Mustimirrah in Arabic) – an ongoing process of erasure and ethnic cleansing which has seen Palestinians ghettoised, fragmented, killed and more.  

This year we will be marking 72 years of the Nakba and yet one word seems to be taking front and centre stage: annexation. Ever since the announcement of US President Donald Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ at the end of January this year, formal annexation of the occupied West Bank by Israel has been looming.  

https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2020/5/15/remembering-72-years-of-the-nakba-as-annexation-looms

Israel has been trying to erase Palestine from the maps and have been killing, stealing and lying for 72 years to do just that.

Time for the West to cut the apron strings on Israel and let them stand or fall on their own……nowhere is anything Israeli in the best interests of the USA.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Covid-19 Fraud In Mississippi

In the recent past a pharmacist and a doctor and his son were nailed for prescription fraud against Medicare…..well it seems that we also have some d/bags that were hoarding supplies in this time of emergency….

A pharmaceutical company owned by Ocean Springs developer Kenneth Ritchey is accused in a federal court case of hoarding scarce personal protective equipment needed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with federal agents recovering a trove of respirator masks, face shields, gloves and other items from the business.

FBI agents raided Gulf Coast Pharmaceuticals Plus LLC on North Halstead Road on April 17, but Southern District U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst declined then to comment on the investigation.

Ritchey is a former business partner of Clark Levi, a pharmacist who owned Lovelace Drugs in downtown Ocean Springs before he died in a car crash with his wife.

I Read, I Write, You Know
 
“lego ergo scribo”