Stephan: When I read this story all I could think about was the massive death this incompetent foreign policy on the part of the U.S. has produced, and what else could have been done with that $8 trillion dollars, to make the United States the kind of country it purports to be but is not.
Credit: The Intercept
The U.S.-led global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion since it began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report issued Wednesday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, an ongoing research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11 military operations.
The report — which looks at the tolls of wars waged in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and other regions where the U.S. is militarily engaged — is the latest in a series published by the Costs of War Project and provides the most extensive public accounting to date of the consequences of open-ended U.S. conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, referred to today as the “forever wars.”
“It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of the many U.S. wars and counterterror operations since 9/11, as we pause and reflect on all of the lives lost,” said the project’s co-director, Neta Crawford, in a press release accompanying the report. “Our accounting goes beyond the Pentagon’s numbers because the costs […]
Stephan: I am beginning to see Texas as South Africa when it was an apartheid state. But I don't see the corrupt Republican cretins who run the state as the primary problem. They are in office because the people of Texas placed them there with their votes. Why are Americans doing this? I think that is the question we ought to be talking about. Why do people vote against their own wellbeing and self-interest?
Voters wait in line at a polling location on October 13, 2020 in Austin, Texas. (Photo: Sergio Flores/Getty
The voter suppression law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Tuesday already faces legal challenges that were promptly filed by a number of civil rights groups, which argue the restrictive measure is transparently aimed at keeping people of color from casting ballots and violates federal law.
Representing plaintiffs including the Texas State Conference of the NAACP, Common Cause Texas, and three election judges in Harris County, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a legal challenge (pdf) accusing the GOP governor of violating the Texas Constitution.
“The scourge of state-sanctioned voter suppression is alive and well, and Texas just became the most recent state to prove it,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee, in a statement. “With the passage of this bill, Texas legislators know exactly what they are trying to do—use brazen tactics to disenfranchise Black voters, Latinx voters, and other voters of color who are a growing part of the electorate and who turned out and made their voices heard in 2020. This bill […]
Stephan: 40,000,000 -- That's 40 million people have had Covid, and over 200,000 children currently suffer from Covid. The stupidity of politicizing what should have been a straightforward health issue will, in my opinion, go down in American history as an act of pure evil. The Red state governors are as incompetent as comic book villains, elected by voters who have now paid the price for their election choice. It is karma writ at the social level through individual suffering, and it will be interesting to see if it happens again in 2022.
Idaho hospital treating Covid patients
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) on Tuesday announced it has implemented a hospital care rationing program due to a “massive increase” in coronavirus patients in the northern part of the state that is causing a “severe shortage of staffing and available beds.” The goal is to “save as many lives as possible,” suggesting a rationing of resources means some may not receive normal standards of care.
Governor Brad Little says this is “an unprecedented and unwanted point in the history of our state,” and urged Idahoans to get vaccinated.
“We have taken so many steps to avoid getting here, but yet again we need to ask more Idahoans to choose to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. More Idahoans need to choose to receive the vaccine so we can minimize the spread of the disease and reduce the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, many of which involve younger Idahoans and are preventable with safe and effective vaccines.”
Stephan: In the past 14 days, Meade County home to the Sturgis motorcycle rally, which the incompetent South Dakota governor, Republican Kristi Noem, allowed to happen has seen 3,819 new cases in the past two weeks, including seven deaths, up from 644 cases in the 14 days preceding it. That makes it the state with the largest percent increase in Covid cases in the past two weeks.
Sturgis Rally
The annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota is America’s largest bike rally, a 10-day blowout, with attendance this year exceeding 250,000. It was also a serious pandemic stress test. By bringing together hundreds of thousands of people, Sturgis helps answer a simple yet critically important question: Are we at a point in the pandemic where we can safely stage big-crowd events?
If there were a place where this could have happened, it should have been Sturgis. The best data suggests that at least 75 percent of the entire South Dakota population has some degree of immunity against the virus: About half of South Dakotans have immunity because they’ve been infected by covid-19, and about half of the population has been vaccinated — some of whom have already had covid-19 when they got their shot, so there is some overlap between these two groups. South Dakota, despite its middling vaccination rates, probably has among the highest levels of population immunity in the nation, driven largely by horrifying winter outbreaks.
That’s what makes Sturgis an important test. If it had gone off without big spikes in covid cases, it would have provided strong […]
Niraj Chokshi, Matthew Goldstein and Erin Woo, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan: This is the critical leverage point in the conversion out of the carbon energy era. Joe Biden needs to be the 21st century Dwight Eisenhower and, just as Eisenhower just back from World War II and all too painfully aware of the importance of high-speed roads oversaw the creation of the interstate highway system so he must oversee the creation of what I think should be a free charging coherent charging network paid for publicly as part of the wellbeing infrastructure that needs to emerge.
Charging station
In President Biden’s vision of a green future, half of all new cars sold in 2030 will be electric. But something really basic is standing in the way of that plan: enough outlets to plug in all those cars and trucks.
The country has tens of thousands of public charging stations — the electric car equivalent of gas pumps — with about 110,000 chargers. But energy and auto experts say that number needs to be at least five to 10 times as big to achieve the president’s goal. Building that many will cost tens of billions of dollars, far more than the $7.5 billion that lawmakers have set aside in the infrastructure bill.
Private investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into building chargers, but the business suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem: Sales of electric cars are not growing fast enough to make charging profitable. It could be years before most charging companies break even, let alone mint big profits like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Fast chargers — ones that can fill up an electric car battery in 20 to 40 minutes — cost tens of thousands of dollars but […]
