Bits: Anti-vaxx crackpottery; COVID crackpottery; Climate change update

In addition to wanting to rewrite and whitewash the history of slavery in America, DeSantis is an anti-vaxx crackpot. The WaPo reports:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and the state’s surgeon general are warning residents under age 65 against the new coronavirus booster, going against the advice of federal health officials who have recommended the shots.

DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo repeated comments made in a live event last week in Jacksonville, Fla., and argued there isn’t enough evidence that the booster’s benefits outweigh any risks. “I will not stand by and let the FDA and CDC use healthy Floridians as guinea pigs for new booster shots that have not been proven to be safe or effective,” DeSantis said in a statement after the call with Ladapo and other doctors, which opened with the title “No way FDA.”

Asked about DeSantis’s vaccine guidance, a spokesperson referred to the governor’s statement on the discussion, which promised to fight “authoritarian policies” around covid.  

Florida leads the country in new covid hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 in the week ending Sept. 2, a 4.4 percent increase from the previous week.

Great. By opposing vaccination, anti-vaxx crackpots DeSantis and Ladapo use Floridians as guinea pigs to provide researchers with data on how the current COVID strains spread and what the death and illness profiles look like in a population with lots of unvaccinated people. 

And, consider this Germaine special analysis: The crackpots say that because there is not enough evidence of safety and efficacy for the new booster, people under age 65 should not get vaccinated. So, what can one conclude from that? One can and should conclude that (i) DeSantis and Ladapo want old farts to die from vaccine death, otherwise they would have recommended against the vaccine for everyone, and (ii) each illness and death that the two yahoos cause is on them and one should hope that they can be sued for the death and damages that their wrong advice causes. 

See, impeccable logic. You're welcome.

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From the Hey! Did He Grow A Pair? Files: The Hill reports that McCarthy might be getting a bit frustrated with his freak RRA (radical right authoritarian) caucus:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) vented his frustration about the hard-line conservatives [no, not conservatives, RRAs] holding up appropriations, dropping an expletive as he dared his fiercest critics to attempt a vote to oust him.

“If you want to file a motion to vacate, then file the fvcking motion,” McCarthy said, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) recounted.

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The ex-pres is in a snit because his COVID policy was not properly accounted for. And he is right, he deserves a lot more blame for his massive failures than he is getting. The Hill reports: 

Trump said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” airing Thursday. “I never got, I think, the credit that I deserved on COVID.”

With much of his political base skeptical of coronavirus vaccines, Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has tried to tread carefully when touting the success of his Operation Warp Speed, which developed highly effective and safe vaccines in record time.

Notice the blithering irrationality here? He almost single handedly poisoned the whole idea of vaccines and wearing masks in the minds of tens of millions of Americans but wants more credit for doing a good job? It's freaking insane. He deserves a grade of F. All the needless deaths he caused makes him a mass killer on a scale with killers like Putin and Xi.

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Climate change: Climate change warnings keep coming and the RRA GOP keeps ignoring or denying the data. The AP writes:

Earth is outside its ‘safe operating space for humanity’ 

on most key measurements, study says

Earth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are headed in the wrong direction, a new study said.

Earth’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and “novel” chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all out of whack, a group of international scientists said in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances. Only the acidity of the oceans, the health of the air and the ozone layer are within the boundaries considered safe, and both ocean and air pollution are heading in the wrong direction, the study said.

“We are in very bad shape,” said study co-author Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We show in this analysis that the planet is losing resilience and the patient is sick.”

So, if you want more pollution, global warming, climate change, human climate deaths, species extinctions and so forth, vote for the RRA Republican Party. 

The research article is here.

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Hunter Biden's laptop did it!

First page of Hunter's lawsuit

Here's some fun bits from Hunter Biden's federal lawsuit in California against a Biden-hating zealot, Garrett Ziegler (an Illinois resident) and his happy crew (in Wyoming?):

1. Garrett Ziegler is a zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against Plaintiff and the entire Biden family for more than two years.

2. Since approximately December 2020, Defendant Ziegler, Defendant ICU and their “team” of volunteers and independent contractors have spent countless hours accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own and that they claim to have obtained from hacking into Plaintiff’s iPhone data and from scouring a copy of the hard drive of what they claim to be Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer.

3. Defendants’ actions are unlawful under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (Cal. Penal Code § 502) and California’s Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200 et seq.).

4. Plaintiff has demanded Defendants cease their unlawful activities with respect to Plaintiff’s data and return any data in their possession belonging to Plaintiff, but they have flatly and publicly refused to do so. Rather than comply, Defendants have doubled down on their illegal actions and have vowed to continue violating the law with impunity, thereby necessitating this action.

15. Defendant Ziegler is a former Trump White House aide who worked, from February 2019 until January 2021, as a Policy Analyst and, later, as an Associate Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under the supervision of Dr. Peter Navarro.

21. Plaintiff is unaware of the precise dates on which Defendants have accessed, altered, tampered with, manipulated, damaged and/or copied Plaintiff’s data. According to Defendant Ziegler himself, Defendants spent at least 13 months – from September 2021 through October 2022 – “analyzing the voluminous material from the Biden Laptop.” On information and belief, Defendants’ unlawful access, tampering with, manipulation, damage and copying of Plaintiff’s data has continued beyond October 2022 and is ongoing to this day.

22. Defendant Ziegler has stated publicly that Defendants used Plaintiff’s data from what he calls Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer to create a voluminous report entitled Report on the Biden Laptop, which Defendants first published on or about October 19, 2022. In addition, in or around May 2022, Defendants used Plaintiff’s data from the claimed Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer to create what Defendant Ziegler has described as “an online searchable database of 128,000 emails found on the Biden Laptop.” Plaintiff has never authorized or consented to any access of his data by any Defendant (or anyone working with any Defendant) at any time or for any purpose.

23. Defendants not only admit to accessing, tampering with, manipulating and copying Plaintiff’s data from their claimed Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer without Plaintiff’s authorization or consent, they regularly brag about their illegal activities in interviews with members of the media, on social media, and on right-wing podcasts.

There sure are a heck of a lot nasty politics-related of lawsuits flying around these days. 

Q: Was it this bad when W or Obama was in office?