Faking a vaccination card is a federal offense

I had been curious about the legal consequences of issuing and using fake covid-19 vaccination cards. I had assumed that it would be at most a violation of state laws and would depend upon what the individual states had decided. But it turns out that it is a federal violation and can thus be prosecuted anywhere in the country. This is because the Centers for Disease Control is a federal agency and the CDC logo is on the cards.
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Democrats also practice election shenanigans

I recently wrote about how a socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary to be the party’s nominee to be mayor of the city of Buffalo and, since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, would almost certainly be elected mayor at the general election in November. So how did the party establishment that had opposed her react? Not well. They are now trying to eliminate the position of mayor.
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How the sharing economy became professionalized (and hence more expensive)

I have never actually used Vrbo, Airbnb, and similar businesses that offer accommodation. I had been vaguely under the impression that they offered cheap, short-term, accommodations because people were renting out spaces in their homes that were under-utilized, often because their children had left home. They provided basic things like a bed and bathroom access and enabled the renter to make a little extra money and for the budget-conscious traveler to avoid expensive hotels.

But recently I was planning a trip where there was no hotel near the place I wanted to be in. So I looked up Airbnb. I was surprised at how expensive the accommodations were, close to and even more than hotels. It seems like this so-called sharing economy has gone from providing cheap accommodation to being expensive ‘experiences’. I decided that I might as well stay a little distance away in a hotel where at least you have some idea of what you are getting.
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Has it really come to this?

Flight attendants are taking self-defense classes in order to deal with passengers who become unruly and violent, often over the issue of wearing masks.

Is martial arts training going to be part of the orientation program for new employees? Where else are we going to see this trend? Teachers? Bus drivers? Shop assistants? Hospitality workers? Is any job where one has to deal with the public now becoming a potential physical conflict zone?

Madness.

The unconscionable tragedy that the US created in Afghanistan

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) and the members of their administrations as well as the US military and intelligence agencies for the disaster that they created that has led to massive tragedy for the long-suffering Afghan people.

This appalling situation reveals once again that when your basic policy goals are flawed, you start on a road which eventually leads nowhere, however many resources one assigns to it.

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

The FDA has granted full approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine for preventing covid-19. Up until now, it had only been granted emergency use authorization and some vaccine-hesitant people had said that they did not want to take an ‘experimental’ treatment that had not received full FDA approval. Let’s hope that they will now take the vaccine because the number of preventable cases and deaths is staggering and heartbreaking.

But I suspect that even this approval will not win over the hard-core skeptics. Take this report that some people are using drugs used to deworm livestock to prevent covid-19 instead of taking the vaccines. The FDA has put out a surprisingly sarcastic statement.


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Ransomware attacks

John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight to the problem of ransomware, where hackers break into a computer system, lock up all the data, and then demand payment, usually in cryptocurrencies, in order to provide the key to unlock it. Barely a day goes by without some report about a new ransomware attack. The news stories focus on the havoc caused by attacks on big entities like hospitals, local governments, and businesses. But Oliver points out that with more and more people having their home devices hooked up to the internet, those become vulnerable as well.
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Understanding the current madness

In the August 9, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, investigative reporter Jane Mayer has a long article titled The Big Money Behind the Big Lie that looks at how “Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.” These conservative groups, formerly more focused on issues like abortion, seem to have coalesced around efforts to pass voter suppression laws nationwide. It is an interesting article that focuses on what is going on with the so-called ‘election audit’ in Maricopa country in Arizona that went heavily for Joe Biden, but embeds that in the larger national context of undermining belief in the integrity of elections as a way of overturning results that they do not like. If they succeed in overturning the Arizona result, the plan is to mount similar challenges in Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia.
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The worst member of the House Democratic caucus

And the award goes to … Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey.

Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota describe why this barely-a-Democrat is so despised by his fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives and why the revolt he tried to organize to prevent the passage of measures that would help people in general but upset his corporate backers is likely to fail.

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES is often compared to a high school, and it’s a useful metaphor. Both have overlapping hierarchies that are at once defined and undefined, official and unofficial. There are official positions, like captain of the varsity basketball team or chair of the Ways and Means Committee, but there are also social hierarchies: who’s cool and who’s not; who has genuine power and who doesn’t.

Gottheimer and eight of his colleagues have been facing off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., insisting in a letter sent last week that she bring the bipartisan package for a vote “immediately,” rather than holding it back as leverage to pass the bigger piece. The not-so-veiled goal is to strip progressives of the leverage they have to enact a big reconciliation package, making it more vulnerable to being cut down to size or stopped entirely. Gottheimer worries the larger legislation will mean painful tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy — many of whom have supported his political ambitions.
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