Wideleft

You're not going to like this, but here we go: Would you like to retract your statement that black people are predisposed to commit acts of violence. That's what you said. Do you want to retract it?

I'm really surprised he hasn't received a warning/timeout from a mod yet. You don't have to be a dog to hear his whistle.

A complicating factor is that not all species are migrating at the same rate. For instance, Puffins have adjusted too slowly to their food sources' migration resulting in significant die-offs of populations. https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/puffin-population-uk-isle-of-may-scotland-declining-climate-change-500122

We’re Keeping A Running List Of Hoaxes And Misleading Posts About The Nationwide Police Brutality Protests As thousands protest the death of George Floyd, BuzzFeed News is debunking the hoaxes and disinformation that have been spreading online. Jane LytvynenkoBuzzFeed News ReporterCraig SilvermanBuzzFeed News Reporter Last updated on May 31, 2020, at 4:23 p.m. ET https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/hoax-misleading-claims-george-floyd-protests

LAPD: “You will be fired upon” & Floyd Eyewitness by Greg Palast for Buzzflash June 1, 2020June 1, 2020 Olympic Street near LA Police headquarters in downtown LA was lit up by a bright blue and purple disco light-show from about 40 police cars, all with sirens braying. It was just past the 8pm curfew meant to stop the riot. But there was no riot. Still, the officer pulled up his weapon, aiming at a half dozen protesters who were, at that moment, wandering a bit lost and quiet with exhaustion, seeming unaware of the power of a “Forty”, whether the cop meant a gas canister or 40-caliber bullet. (I thought of Reporter Ruben Salazar who was killed by the LAPD in 1970 when they shot him in the head with a teargas shell). A few raised middle fingers, yelling, “**** THE POLICE!” as I walked toward the line of cops. When the one with the raised weapon repeated, “You will not get a warning! I’LL PUT A 40 MILLIMETER IN YOU,” I shouted, “PRESS! PRESS! PRESS!” holding my reporter’s ID over my head, hoping its message, and not its thin plastic, would stop the 40. Suddenly, the cop’s etiquette changed. “Oh, I didn’t see that.” Whew! Politely, I asked, “Were you really going to shoot someone for violating a curfew?” “I’m not giving an interview! GET OVER THERE!” directing me out of the firing line. The protesters wandered off, unmolested but satisfied that the Police Department’s over-the-top reaction (500 arrests as I write) had accomplished what the protesters themselves could not do: shut down Los Angeles. On close inspection, the shouting cop’s Smith & Wesson .40 was still holstered; he’d been holding a tear gas “shotgun,” the type used all day, alongside rubber bullets, to break up the protests which the city had banned, ostensibly because of the coronavirus. And this was the day LA was scheduled to open up, with folks allowed back in the streets. They certainly filled the streets; and now their masks had a second purpose: to screw up police surveillance. There was an interesting ethnic division in that small part of the ersatz “riot” I witnessed. Young and middle aged Black protesters held signs. LatinX protesters carried US and Mexican flags; some rode cars, honking and slamming accelerators to leave an acrid cloud of burning tire rubber, a very LA form of protest. A rock band defied the curfew from the back of a couple of pick-up trucks riding in noisy tandem. The cops and looters (see photos) were uniformly white. A LatinX woman with flags was crying, inconsolable. “Where did they put my kids?!” she asked no one in particular, sobbing. Her kids were still in ICE detention at the border. She saw the police killings and the kidnapping of her children as just two episodes of the same old story. The city closed the Griffith Park hiking trails, apparently afraid of an insurrection in the Hills. Exception: you could access the trails if you have your own horse. Presumably, the horsey set are unlikely to rebel against the regime. In Minneapolis, our photojournalist Zach D. Roberts was slammed hard with pepper spray. But he still got the story from Charles McMillan, eyewitness to the cop’s killing of George Floyd. McMillan said, “I saw the police officer handcuffed Mr. Floyd and take him over to the squad car. And Mr. Floyd was on the ground. I kept telling the officer, “Brother, get your foot off his neck because he’s stopped breathing. He’s going to die. And the officer refused to get his foot off Mr. Floyd‘s neck.” “This is the consequence everyone’s got to pay, including me watching a man die. … And I hear Mr. Floyd saying, “Mom, they’re killing me in the street.’” Let’s connect some dots. Just three weeks ago, in Brunswick, Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down by a retired white cop and his son, executed for “jogging while Black.” You cannot split this from Brian Kemp’s 2018 shotgun toting campaign for governor in a race he won over Stacey Abrams by using his post as Georgia Secretary of State to wrongly purge 340,134 from the voter rolls. This mass lynching by laptop meant that Georgia’s rulers and their police feel they have absolute white immunity from the consequences of their action. On February 8 2020, we announced a major victory in federal court in Palast v. Kemp, forcing Georgia to hand over more info on their racially poisonous vote purge operation. The virus has slowed the court’s final entry of the order against the state, but we are not slowing down on our investigation of Georgia’s attack on voting rights. It’s simple: a government chosen by voters is less likely to kill them. https://www.gregpalast.com/lapd-you-will-be-fired-upon-floyd-george-eyewitness/

Not directly related to the current protests, but it's additional evidence that not all "protesters" are honest actors and these types of people make it even harder for improperly trained law enforcement officers to do their jobs. Protest problems Matthew Slatzer displayed a sign calling Jews "the real plague" at a COVID-19 protest. Then his legal problems started catching up to him. Nick R. Martin June 1, 2020 A neo-Nazi who showed up to an April coronavirus protest in Ohio with a sign calling Jews “the real plague” was quietly arrested three weeks later and has been in jail ever since. Matthew Slatzer, 36, of Canton, Ohio, was arrested on May 8 by an FBI task force for allegedly skipping three court-appointed drug tests while awaiting trial on a state felony charge involving a gun, according to records reviewed by The Daily Beast in partnership with The Informant, a publication covering hate and extremism. Slatzer also had ties to another neo-Nazi who died in a gun battle with the FBI just as COVID-19 lockdowns set in, though his arrest does not appear to be connected to that case. The arrest came after Slatzer and another man, who has not yet been identified, showed up at the state capitol in Columbus on April 18 as part of a larger protest against lockdown orders issued to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Slatzer and the second man became prime examples of how such protests — which took place across the nation prior to more recent unrest over the death of George Floyd in police custody — drew extremists into the fold. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, condemned the anti-semitic display a day later, calling it “disgusting” and “vile.” "It should have no place in this discussion or any other public discussion,” the governor told reporters at a news conference. Slatzer, who was first identified as having attended the rally by independent journalist Nate Thayer, is a member of the National Socialist Movement. He started with the group on a probationary basis but became a full member at a ceremony in November in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The NSM is a decades-old neo-Nazi group with a violent past. In 2012, one of its longtime members, JT Ready, killed four people, including a toddler, before killing himself in a Phoenix suburb. The group is also being sued in federal court in Virginia for its role in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, which led to the killing of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer. In March, the FBI alleged that another NSM member, Timothy Wilson, was in the final stages of a plot to set off a vehicle bomb at a Kansas City-area hospital treating coronavirus patients. Authorities said he had decided to accelerate his plans because of lockdown orders that had been put into place in Missouri. Wilson never made it to the hospital, however, killing himself in a gun battle with FBI agents who were attempting to arrest him at a storage facility in Belton, Missouri. Slatzer and Wilson became members of the NSM at the same ceremony, according to the Anti-Defamation League. A photo from a November swearing-in was posted to the National Socialst Movement’s channel on Telegram shortly after the ceremony. It showed Wilson and Slatzer alongside NSM members Daniel Burnside and Randall Ramsey. Three other people were also pictured who have not been identified. The photo was taken at Burnside’s house, which is well known in the area because it is adorned with swastikas and tributes to dead neo-Nazi terrorists. https://www.informant.news/p/protest-problems

I don't want to speak for Tracker but "understanding why someone or a group of people might get violent" is different than "being ok with violence". Our justice system takes into account why people may have performed a violent act (notwithstanding that police target minorities for arrests), but our economic system ignores why segments of society are forced into desperate situations that sometimes have violent outcomes.

Mother Nature is just f***king with us now.

Where are you getting the 100,000 - 120,000 number? 1,700,000 cases ago, 15 cases seemed pretty reasonable in the U.S.

Quebec says 41 students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 since reopening The Canadian PressStaff Published Friday, May 29, 2020 1:41PM EDTLast Updated Friday, May 29, 2020 2:27PM EDT MONTREAL -- Quebec's education department says a total of 41 students and teachers have tested positive for COVID-19 since elementary schools outside the Montreal area opened on May 11. When Quebec announced it would be reopening elementary schools before September – as the number of COVID-19 cases continued to rise in the province – the rest of the country watched as the plan unfolded. A survey of school boards conducted May 25 found that 19 students and 22 staff members were found to be infected in the first two weeks following the reopening. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-says-41-students-and-staff-have-tested-positive-for-covid-19-since-reopening-1.4960628

Oh please. Riots erupt in Vancouver after Canucks loss Dozens injured amid scenes of violence, looting CBC News · Posted: Jun 15, 2011 7:56 PM PT | Last Updated: June 13, 2014 Riot police fired tear gas, pepper spray and flash bombs in downtown Vancouver Wednesday night to try to disperse angry rioters who set cars on fire, looted stores and taunted police officers after the Canucks' 4-0 Stanley Cup final loss to the Boston Bruins. Police declared the downtown fan zone area near the CBC building and the central post office a riot zone. Anyone not leaving the West Georgia Street area immediately could be arrested, they warned. Police used batons and also turned police dogs on the rioters, slowly pushing the crowd back along Georgia Street from Hamilton Street to Cambie Street. Two police cars were set on fire in a parking lot on Cambie Street near one of the areas where police were being confronted by a few dozen people among the hundreds present who were throwing debris at officers. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/riots-erupt-in-vancouver-after-canucks-loss-1.993707

I can honestly say I did think it would be this bad - only I left room for worse.

Today I learned exactly how and why the anti-Soros nonsense was developed: "It began in 2008, when Orbán decided to seek reelection. His old friend Bibi — as Netanyahu is known — introduced him to the two people who would guide his success. Before long, Finkelstein and Birnbaum were applying their formula to Orbán’s election campaign — and then turbocharging it. Enemies were easy to find in Hungary. The country was an economic basket case and had to be bailed out in 2008. Austerity measures were demanded by their creditors at the World Bank, the EU, and the IMF. Finkelstein and Birnbaum told Orbán to target “the bureaucrats” and “foreign capital.” Orbán won the 2010 election with a two-thirds majority as the country shifted to the right. Birnbaum is still amazed today how easy it was: “We blew the Socialist party off the table even before the election.” Birnbaum and Finkelstein, now part of Orbán’s inner circle, found themselves with a problem. While the satisfied winner of the election started rewriting the constitution, they were now lacking an opponent. “There was no real political enemy … there was no one to have a fight with,” Birnbaum remembered. The ultra-right Jobbik party and the Socialist party were beaten, the rest in splinters. “We had had an incumbent with a historic majority, something that had never happened in Hungary before.” To maintain that, they needed a “high energy level,” said Birnbaum. “You need to keep the base energized, make sure that on Election Day they have a reason to go out and vote,” he said. They needed something powerful, like Trump’s “Build the Wall!” “It always helps rally the troops and rally a population” when the enemy has a face, Birnbaum explained. “Arthur always said that you did not fight against the Nazis but against Adolf Hitler. Not against al-Qaeda, but against Osama bin Laden.” Who could become that enemy in Hungary now that Orbán was in power — and wanted to stay there? Orbán was busy creating a new, more dramatic story of the nation. Hungary, which had collaborated with the Nazis, was painted as a victim, surrounded by external enemies, under perpetual siege, first from the Ottomans, then the Nazis, and later the Communists. Hungary’s mission was clear: to defend against its enemies, and to preserve Christianity against encroaching Islam and secular forces. Against this backdrop, Finkelstein had an epiphany. What if the veil of the conspiracy were to be lifted and a shadowy figure appear, controlling everything? The puppet master. Someone who not only controlled the “big capital” but embodied it. A real person. A Hungarian. Strange, yet familiar. That person was Soros, Finkelstein told Birnbaum. Birnbaum was mesmerized: Soros was the perfect enemy. At the beginning, it almost didn’t make sense. Why campaign against a nonpolitician? Although he was born in Hungary, Soros hadn’t lived there in years. He was an old man, known all over the country as a patron of civil society. He had supported the opposition against the Communists before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and financed school meals for kids afterward. In Budapest, he had built one of the best universities in Eastern Europe. Orbán had even received money from Soros: During his time in the opposition, his small underground foundation Századvég published critical newspapers, created on a copy machine that was paid for by Soros. Orbán was also one of the more than 15,000 students who received scholarships from Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Thanks to Soros, Orbán studied philosophy in Oxford. The two men only met once: when Soros came to Hungary in 2010 after a toxic spill to provide $1 million in emergency funds. There didn’t really seem to be a reason to turn against him in Hungary. But Finkelstein and Birnbaum saw something in Soros that would make him the perfect enemy. There’s a long history of criticism of Soros, dating back to 1992, when Soros earned $1 billion overnight betting against the British pound. For many on the left, Soros was a vulture. But Soros used his sudden prominence to push for liberal ideas. He supported everything the right was against: climate protection, equality, the Clintons. He opposed the second Iraq War in 2003, even comparing George W. Bush to the Nazis, and became a major donor for the Democrats. He was soon a hate figure for the Republicans. But there was more. Finkelstein and Birnbaum had expanded their work into exactly those countries where the Open Society Foundations was trying to build liberal local elites and civil rights movements: Ukraine, Romania, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Albania. Birnbaum believed Soros stood for “a socialism that is wrong for these areas.” According to Birnbaum, Finkelstein was more practical about his opposition to Soros, whom he saw as simply a means to an end: “It wasn’t an emotional thing.” Read the whole story at this link: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu

Good catch. Proper wording would have been "remains infectious for 8 days"?

COVID-19 not very infectious 8 days after symptoms occur, Winnipeg study suggests Researchers in largest study of its kind find no viral growth after Day 8 COVID-19 appears to be infectious only for the first eight days after patients experience symptoms, Winnipeg researchers conclude in a study that, if confirmed by further work, could have implications for the way the disease is treated, isolated and prevented. In the largest study of its kind so far, researchers from the National Microbiology Laboratory, Cadham Provincial Laboratory and the University of Manitoba looked at nasal or throat samples from 90 Manitobans who tested positive for COVID-19 from March 12 to the first week of April. All of the samples came from patients who were confirmed to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, the most common means of diagnosing the disease around the world. This type of test extracts a small amount of genetic material and then copies it into quantities that can be more easily identified. The Winnipeg researchers used the same samples to try to grow more of the virus in cell cultures. They succeeded with 26 of the samples, or 29 per cent in total. There was no viral growth whatsoever in samples taken from patients more than eight days after they became symptomatic, according to study findings published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/covid19-infectious-period-1.5583722

A tale of 2 leatherback sea turtles tagged off Nova Scotia Good luck, persistence and international co-operation has delivered a rare trove of data from two endangered leatherback turtles tagged off Nova Scotia last summer. The turtles, Ruby and Isabel, were carrying a tracking transmitter and a device that stored a huge cache of precise GPS locations accumulated during their 12,000-kilometre migration from Canada to Trinidad, off South America. This month, when the nesting leatherbacks crawled ashore on separate beaches, researchers and volunteers on the island managed to intercept them, retrieve their tags and 10 months of stored data. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/a-tale-of-2-leatherback-sea-turtles-tagged-off-nova-scotia-1.5580197

Springfield Hair Stylist, Sick With COVID-19, Saw 84 Clients A hair stylist at Great Clips, 1864 S. Glenstone, in Springfield, worked while sick recently, exposing 84 clients and seven co-workers to COVID-19, according to local health officials. The health department announced the potential exposure of coronavirus Friday. Clients who had appointments with the stylist during those times are being notified of their exposure to COVID-19 and are being offered testing for the illness, according to a news release from the health department. Both the stylist and their clients wore masks, officials said. Springfield-Greene County Health Department director, Clay Goddard, said this should give officials a chance to see how effective masks are in preventing the spread of COVID-19. The person is believed to have contracted the illness when they traveled domestically to a high-risk area. https://www.ksmu.org/post/springfield-hair-stylist-sick-covid-19-saw-84-clients?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr#stream/0

"Should you be terrified or exhilarated at the prospect of a gene-editing tool fueling a modern-day scientific revolution? “Human Nature,” a new film on the technology, braids the tool’s promise and potential perils into a riveting double helix. The Dan Rather-produced doc, which was directed by Adam Bolt, focuses on CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that “programs” an enzyme to seek and find a specific position on DNA, then cut the molecule at the preferred location. Scientists can then add, delete or edit the DNA. “I can cut any gene I want,” says Jennifer Doudna, the biochemist who helped develop the technology, in the film. She seems barely able to contain her excitement." Now on Crave (an excellent and well-balanced documentary)

Getting An Antibody Test For The Coronavirus? Here's What It Won't Tell You May 21, 202010:28 AM ET Salvador Perez got really sick in April. He's 53 and spent weeks isolated in his room in his family's Chicago apartment, suffering through burning fevers, shivering chills, intense chest pain and other symptoms of COVID-19. "This has been one of the worst experiences of his life," says Perez's daughter, Sheila, who translated from Spanish to English for an interview with NPR. "He didn't think he was going to make it." Perez recovered and now wants to go back to work as a chef at a Chinese restaurant. But his boss told him he needs a test — an antibody test — first. So he found a place to get one and tested positive. His blood indeed has antibodies to the novel coronavirus — proteins that his immune system produced when it fought off the pathogen. "He feels great that he can get ... back to work, since we haven't really paid our bills," Sheila Perez says. "And he feels great that he can start doing what he did before the virus again." But her father is also nervous. His doctor told him the antibodies might give him some protection against catching the virus again but also stressed that's far from guaranteed. "He's anxious that he doesn't want to get sick. He's kind of scared of going back to work because ... he might go through it again," his daughter says. Salvador Perez is right to be worried. It's still not certain that antibodies measured by such a test would protect him from catching the virus again. And if the antibodies are protective, it's unknown how strong that protection might be or how long it might last. There are also questions about the reliability of many antibody tests being sold. Researchers are urgently trying to answer those uncertainties and figure how best to conduct antibody testing. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people are getting the tests — many without recognizing how much is still unknown about what the results mean. Some employers, such as Perez's restaurant, are requiring workers to take antibody tests if they want to continue working or return to their jobs. Others are getting employees tested to see how widely the virus has spread through their workforce and to try to find ways to improve worker safety. And some labor unions are helping workers get tested in hopes of offering them some sense of security against the virus. In addition, some individuals are buying the tests themselves out of curiosity and to use as a basis for personal decisions, such as whether it's safe to start spending more time with close friends and extended family members who are outside the household. But the idea of using antibody testing in these ways worries many doctors and public health authorities because there are many common misconceptions. For starters, the antibody tests are only a sign of past infection. Whether the infection is actually gone can only be determined by a diagnostic test that identifies genetic material from the virus or viral particles. Some people also falsely think testing positive on an antibody test proves they can't get infected with the virus again. "I think people just want this to go away and want to resume their normal lives," says Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "But my fear is [antibody tests are] going to be used as this sort of golden ticket to demonstrate immunity — when we just don't know if that's the case." Still, Wroblewski and others acknowledge the results might offer at least some useful guidance in certain cases. "If I had a household where I had a number of younger individuals in the household, one of whom had antibodies, I think that that individual would probably be the safest bet to be able to safely go to get the groceries," says Michael Mina, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious disease at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But, Mina quickly adds, "I still wouldn't want that individual going to get groceries and then going the next day to a nursing home to see Grandma." Having antibodies against the coronavirus is just no guarantee that you won't pick up or pass along an infection, he says. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/21/857961304/getting-an-antibody-test-for-the-coronavirus-heres-what-it-wont-tell-you

#MORNINGBIGBLUEGATE

In Trump's twisted mind, he thinks that Obama won't appear (which he shouldn't given an absence of....anything) and therefore he won't have to appear or face charges once he is ousted from the White House.

Rutger Bregman is quickly becoming one of my favorite "thinkers".

Although I seem to know less as I learn more, I can't help myself from seeking new information. This Topic is best utilized for older stories of historic and scientific nature, or they'd be in the "Random News Section". Mods can kill this if they don't see a need, but I imagine at least some of us are learning something new almost every day that's worth sharing. Maybe instead of arguing about the same old things, we might want to figure out why we're arguing and how we got here. Today I learned (from a 2012 news article) that humans almost became extinct 72,000 years ago. How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C. October 22, 201212:33 PM ET Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. And we're still multiplying. Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak, and what happens then? Well, we've waxed. So we can wane. Let's just hope we wane gently. Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c