News bits: Trump is back on Twitter, Mullahs shooting people's eyes out, etc.

It’s baaaaack!

The NYT writes:

Elon Musk Reinstates Trump’s Twitter Account

Mr. Musk, who had asked Twitter users about whether to bring back the former president to the service, said, “The people have spoken.”

“The people have spoken,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter. “Trump will be reinstated.” He added the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which roughly means that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Musk claimed that 52% of 15 million Twitter votes were in favor of reinstating Trump.

From now on, I'll refrain from posting or linking to Tweets here. I don’t want to feed the beast that builds and makes money from Hellscape v. 2. The ‘Musk era’ of poison, lies, slander and open sympathy for treason has begun.

UPDATE: Trump has said that he will not return to Twitter and instead will continue to spout lies, slanders and poison on is social media site. This is good news.

What theocracy can look like

The NYT writes:

Hundreds of Protesters in Iran Blinded by 

Metal Pellets and Rubber Bullets

Security forces have been firing ammunition that has ruptured the eyes of antigovernment demonstrators in the past two months. “Everything went dark,” one said.

The protester was speeding toward a demonstration in Tehran on his motorbike when an Iranian security officer standing 10 feet away raised his gun and fired a rubber bullet.

The protester said the bullet hit his left eye. “We locked eyes and then everything went dark,” said the protester, who goes by the nickname Saman. He cupped his hand to his mutilated eye, afraid that it would drop from its socket, as he drove himself to a hospital where doctors refused to treat him, he said.

He was finally admitted to the government-run Farabi Eye Hospital, where he was operated on nearly 24 hours after he had been shot.

One has to wonder whether things could get that bad in the US after a takeover by an American Christian Taliban operating under Christian Sharia law. The is what the wrath of sacred, loving Gods can look like:

Saman

From the capitalism fails files: 

COVID hell may be upon us

The NYT writes:

The End of Vaccines at ‘Warp Speed’

Financial and bureaucratic barriers in the United States mean that the next generation of Covid vaccines may well be designed here, but used elsewhere.

Operation Warp Speed, the Trump-era program that poured billions of dollars into developing Covid shots, seemed to signal a new dawn of American vaccine making, demonstrating how decades of scientific grunt work could be turned into lifesaving medicine in a matter of months.

But as a third pandemic winter begins in the United States, its vaccine-making effort has lost steam. Efforts to test and produce next-generation Covid vaccines are bogged down by bureaucratic problems and funding shortfalls. Foreign rivals have raced ahead in approving long-awaited nasal-spray vaccines, including one invented in St. Louis, creating a scenario in which Americans would have to travel abroad for the latest in American vaccine technology.

Anyone who argues that capitalism always does everything better than government needs to ignore, deny, downplay and/or distort facts like these. This is what capitalists privately call bad news. By that they mean, bad news for their profits. Many or most capitalists do not care much or at all about whether people get sick or die or not. They care about profit and hating on government.