Ukraine update: Russia is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome
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At Friday afternoon’s Pentagon briefing, Defense Department officials reported that Russia was:
- Continuing to bring in additional forces to the Donbas region, including some of those who fought in the losing Battle of Kyiv.
- Continuing the kind of probing attacks along the eastern defensive lines they’ve employed since the beginning of the invasion.
- Continuing to bomb the massive Azovstal metal plant in Mariupol, even though Putin claims to have given up on actually taking the plant.
- More forces are moving into the area around Izyum, bringing the estimated number of BTGs there to 25.
The U.S. continues to assess that Russia has not actually begun its major offensive in eastern Ukraine, but “how can we know that?” is a real question. After all, considering Russia’s demonstrated inability to coordinate anything beyond one or two BTGs, what would a major attack look like anyway? In any case, the number of total BTGs in the Donbas area now exceeds 80.
Increasingly, the build up around Izyum looks like the pileup that resulted at the end of the vaunted “40-mile convoy” that carried what seemed to be a massive number of men and material from the Belarus border to the outskirts of Kyiv. Those forces then proved themselves capable of two things: committing massive atrocities against civilians, and getting killed to the extent that they had to surrender their positions.
Can Russia do better when the next obstacle in their way is not Kyiv but the smallish cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk? That’s not clear. Neither is it clear when the force at Izyum will begin to move. If Putin wants something to actually celebrate on May 9, Russia needs to find a new gear and move. On the other hand, what do actual accomplishments even mean when you have complete media control? Putin could just announce that Russia has taken all of Ukraine and is marching on Germany. Then all the planes could get back to practicing flying in a Z formation.
Meanwhile, additional U.S. weapons are arriving in Ukraine daily, as are weapons from other NATO partners.
Also on Friday, the U.K. Ministry of Defence said they are investigating sending Challenger 2 tanks to Poland so that Poland can send some additional T-72 tanks to Ukraine. Most of Poland’s T-72s have been significantly upgraded, but would still fit in with Ukraine’s existing arsenal.
Overall, Russia seems intent on replicating in eastern Ukraine the same strategy they deployed in northern Ukraine: piecemeal advances without adequate air support and with poor implementation of combined arms tactics. Maybe they have learned, but they don’t seem to be demonstrating it.
Popasna update
One week ago, we looked at the towns of Popasna and Pervomaisk, which straddled the border of Russian-occupied territory in Luhansk. With just 2 miles of flat farm fields between them, it seemed incredible that Popasna had already turned back several attempts at a Russian breakthrough by the time of that April 16 report. However, on Monday Russian forces had reportedly broken through the defensive trenches east of Popasna and were slowly advancing on the town where just one grocery and one pharmacy remained to serve the dwindling population. On Wednesday, Russia announced that Popasna had been taken. On Thursday, Russia showed images of Russian tanks supposedly rolling into the center of the town. On Friday, Russia is … heavily engaged in shelling and bombing Popasna, which doesn’t exactly seem like something that would be true of a town completely under Russian control.
In fact, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense reports that Russian forces are still “advancing on” Popasna, and directed fire toward buses carrying evacuees away from the town. So while things are not going well there by any means, Russia seems to be somewhat behind what it’s been showing on Russian TV.
Archnemisis
If you’ve always felt left out because you lacked an archnemesis, fret no longer. The Russian duma has a bill in the works intended to show you just where you stand, though … the picture is confusing.
Can we not get Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom going in this thing? At least a little color coding? Honestly, for Russia to start down this path and not go full Red Son just seems like totally missing the boat.
Utah media shows D.C. press how it's done in holding Mike Lee accountable for 2020 election plotting
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It’s been a rough week for Sen. Mike Lee of Utah thanks to a dogged Utah press corps that isn’t nearly as quick as the D.C. press gang to ignore his efforts to help the former squatter in the Oval Office have a coup. While not a single one of the network Sunday shows even mentioned the existence of Lee’s barrage of text messages plotting with Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the press back home cares.
Like Bryan Schott of the Salt Lake Tribune, who tried valiantly to get Lee to answer his questions about Lee’s texts on the plot. Not only would Lee not answer him, his staff blocked Schott from following Lee to try to get him to talk.
Schott’s persistence, and some bad local press, ended up sending Lee to a rival paper, the Deseret News, after it published a story saying that Lee had some explaining to do about statements he made last year in a lengthy interview about the 2020 election. In Lee’s response, he tried to minimize his plotting against America. He said it was all just chatting with Meadows, an old friend.
“He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is,” Lee told Deseret News in a phone interview later that same day. “Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding,” Lee said of his conversations with Meadows.
He’s playing the victim, of course, saying the texts are being taken out of context for “political motives” and were “leaked” to maximize damage in his primary campaign. It would be interesting to have Lee explain how this statement about his trying to get state legislators to overturn the election could be explained in any other context: “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him. … I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow.” Or this one: “We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.”
Lee also refused in that interview to say whether Biden was elected in a free and fair election. “President Biden is the president of the United States,” Lee answered. “We know that he is the president of the United States because the Electoral College met on Dec. 14 and then cast electoral votes. Those electoral votes signaled the victory for President Biden.” He refused to refute the Big Lie in this interview. Pressed about whether he thought there was fraud in the 2020 election, Lee just said, “I’ve answered your question.”
He also kind of maybe lied again. “From the outset of this, I spent an enormous amount of time doing my job with only one objective in mind. Particularly once the electoral votes were cast, my objective was to figure out what, if any role, Congress had,” Lee said. Because what he was telling Meadows was that he was spending an enormous amount of time—14 hours a day—trying to convince Republican state legislators to cheat. Which he also denies. “At no point in any of those was I engaging in advocacy. I wasn’t in any way encouraging them to do that. I just asked them a yes or no question,” he said. He didn’t explain why it took 14 hours a day to get a handful of legislators in the swing states that voted for Biden where he told Meadows he was making the calls to say yes or no.
As Tribune reporter Schott tweeted in a must-read thread picking apart Lee’s assertions, “The explanations he offers are wholly inadequate, and raise so many new questions.”
Schott isn’t the only one looking for answers from Lee. So are Jan. 6 survivors, who met with Lee and other Republican senators in May 2021 to ask them to back legislation forming an independent commission to investigate Jan. 6. That clearly didn’t work, and Lee told the group he felt it would be too “partisan.” The survivors—former D.C. Police Officer Mike Fanone; Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn; Sandra Garza, the girlfriend of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died on Jan. 7; and Gladys Sicknick, Brian’s mother—were frustrated with Lee then. Now, they tell Rolling Stone, they’re furious.
“I never had a particularly high opinion of politicians,” Fanone says. “I’m not shocked that I sat in a room across from somebody while I showed them body worn camera footage of myself almost being beaten to death by Trump supporters on January 6 and then had them lie to my face.” He added, “Mike Lee is not a politician. He’s a criminal suspect.” Garza blasted Lee and other Republicans for trying “to cover their tracks.”
“They knew that it was going to open up a lot of stuff that would look bad for them because they were doing stuff behind the scenes,” Garza says. She said Lee’s excuses to them in that meeting last year now seem, in retrospect after the release of these texts, a “pathetic” attempt to cover up his complicity. “He defaulted to that … ‘Oh, let’s just focus on the failures of the [Capitol Police] leadership or the failures of the other law-enforcement agencies so we can take the focus off me, my colleagues, and Trump,’” Garza says. “That’s all that was.” She’s particularly angry about Lee’s “14 hours a day” text. “I’m curious if he was putting any of that effort in trying to comfort any of the families of the officers who committed suicide shortly after the 6th, and I know he wasn’t,” Garza says of Lee.
Gladys Sicknick wants Lee in front of the House Jan. 6 committee, saying it would be a “dereliction” of duty if he doesn’t testify. “Senator Lee is in a position to assist the process of determining what happened at the Capitol. I think that he, along with other officials, are duty-bound to offer testimony to the January 6th Commission as it seeks to establish whether what occurred was spontaneous, or a carefully planned insurrection,” Sicknick wrote. “It’s my hope that Mr. Lee will willingly and truthfully participate in the Congressional inquiry, according to his Oath to the Constitution.”
Fanone agrees, though he’s a little more blunt about it. “What we’re dealing with right now is unprecedented in American history,” Fanone says. “I think that we need to set aside all of the pomp and circumstance and actually just enforce the fucking law.”
This is an important and, frankly, juicy story that a D.C. press corps worth whatever it is they’re getting paid should be all over. Because every time Lee opens his mouth, he’s telling another lie. Because he swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” an oath that he has broken.
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Federal judge temporarily blocks Kentucky's 15-week abortion ban, abortions to resume
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In a decision in favor of abortion advocates across the state, a federal judge temporarily blocked Kentucky officials from enforcing a new abortion law on Thursday. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings in Louisville issued a temporary restraining order at Planned Parenthood’s request a week after the law went into effect. The measure passed on April 13 made Kentucky the first U.S. state without legal abortion access since 1973.
According to Jennings, because the law went into effect immediately, there was not enough time for regulations governing abortion to be written for clinics to comply with, as the law required. At least two of the state’s remaining clinics said they couldn’t meet the law’s requirements and filed lawsuits challenging the law.
“Because plaintiff cannot comply with HB 3 and thus cannot legally perform abortion services, its patients face a substantial obstacle to exercising their rights to a pre-viability abortion,” she wrote.
At this time Jennings did not consider the constitutionality of the law’s requirements and instead focused on how clinics would comply with the requirements since the state did not set up clear guidelines. According to the Associated Press, Jennings said her order does not prevent the state from crafting regulations.
The news comes a week after Kentucky legislators suspended legal abortion access by forcing providers to stop offering abortions until they can meet certain requirements through a law that was to be effective right away. Under the law, state clinics were not only banned from performing abortions after 15 weeks but also required to cremate fetal remains of abortions that were permissible, alongside birth-death or stillbirth certificates.
HB 3 required Kentucky’s state-operated health agency, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, to create new forms for clinics, including a document for providers to report abortions performed in Kentucky and a document to obtain informed consent. While the law also required drugs only to be given by “qualified physicians,” it did not outline how physicians were to register.
“This is a win, but it is only the first step,” said Rebecca Gibron, the CEO for Planned Parenthood in Kentucky. The clinic is immediately resuming abortion services. “We’re prepared to fight for our patients’ right to basic health in court and to continue doing everything in our power in ensure abortion access is permanently secured in Kentucky.”
HB 3 was initially vetoed by Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the Republican-majority House and Senate overrode his veto to enable the bill. Beshear’s main concern was the lack of an exception for rape or incest. He also noted that the bill was “likely unconstitutional” because of the requirements it imposed on providers, Reuters reported.
States across the country are passing their own versions of heartbeat bills or abortion bans that not only limit when abortions are possible but imprison doctors who perform them. Most of these bills are modeled after the Mississippi law that is making its way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to reverse Roe v. Wade. The Mississippi Supreme Court decision could reverse the landmark Roe case and impact abortion rights nationally.
“Abortion remains legal and is once again available in Kentucky,” said Heather Gatnarek, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of EMW Women’s surgical center. “We will always fight to keep it that way here and across the country.”
Who's the biggest loser: McConnell or McCarthy?
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For years, Capitol Hill reporters have assured Americans that privately, Republicans disparage Donald Trump and can’t wait to get rid of him.
Now we are finally getting some real audio to back that up, and what it exposes is exactly what a bunch of losers GOP lawmakers are—GOP leadership in particular.
The recordings, made in the aftermath of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, were unearthed by two New York Times reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, whose book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future will be released next month.
The reporters released one piece of audio Thursday between House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and then-House GOP Communications Chief Liz Cheney. Friday, on CNN, they released two more pieces of McCarthy audio, one from a Jan. 10 phone call with an inner circle of House GOP leaders and another from a Jan. 11 call with the entire Republican caucus.
The phone calls reveal a man who is absolutely desperate to rid himself of Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy tells the GOP leadership team on Jan. 10. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend it, and nobody should defend it.”
No one, that is, until he ran down to Mar-a-Lago three weeks later to beg Trump’s forgiveness.
On Jan. 11, McCarthy was a little less pointed in his conversation with the wider caucus, but still talking tough.
“Let me be very clear to all of you, and I’ve been very clear to the president: He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No ifs, ands, or buts,” McCarthy said.
No ifs, ands, or buts—until he ran his hiney down to Mar-a-Lago three weeks later to beg Trump’s forgiveness.
McCarthy then told the caucus that he asked Trump directly if he bore responsibility for what happened on Jan. 6 and if he feels badly about it.
“He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened. And he need [sic] to acknowledge that,” McCarthy reported back to the caucus.
That will probably be news to Trump, the notion that he took responsibility for something—anything, really—let alone the violent Jan. 6 coup attempt.
Senate GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also had some choice words on Jan. 11, telling two advisers of the impending House impeachment, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.”
According to the Times‘ Martin and Burns, McConnell told the aides he expected the Senate would convict Trump, with a strong contingent of Republicans voting accordingly. At least 17 Republicans would be needed to seal Trump’s fate if all 50 Democrats voted in favor, and McConnell clearly thought he had the votes.
But once McConnell took the temperature of the caucus, he didn’t. And ol’ masterful Mitch also didn’t have the leadership skills to deliver the votes. As McConnell recently admitted publicly, “moral red lines” aren’t exactly his thing.
“He didn’t ascend to power by siding with the minority, he explained to a friend,” write Martin and Burns.
As for McCarthy’s leadership, just two days after that Jan. 11 call with the entire GOP caucus, he pretended it never happened at his weekly press conference.
“Did you tell House Republicans on their January 11 phone call that President Trump told you he agreed that he bore some responsibility for January 6?” a reporter asked.
“I’m not sure what call you’re talking about,” replied McCarthy.
Now there’s a guy with some unshakable moral fortitude.
And so here we sit in the spring of 2022 with Trump still the 2024 GOP favorite even as he complicates the path for congressional Republicans to retake the majority. In fact, it’s not exactly clear why he would want either McCarthy or McConnell to regain control of their chambers.
The biggest guessing game on Capitol Hill Friday morning was how hard Trump would come down on McCarthy. That seems doubtful. McCarthy is a useful idiot who will do absolutely anything Trump says in his desperate bid to become speaker of the House one day.
On Friday morning, McCarthy wasn’t running around trying to rehabilitate his public image, he was madly ringing up all his colleagues to assure them that Trump isn’t angry with him, according to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman.
So who’s the biggest loser? Broadly speaking, both Mitch and Kev are epic losers in the leadership department. They both wanted to rid themselves of the Trump plague with every fiber of their being, and yet capitulated to him at a time when Trump was at his lowest, most vulnerable political moment since he had announced his 2016 candidacy for president.
Dooming Trump was completely within reach, and neither of them had the grit or determination to follow through. Thus, Trump is still ruling their world.
More specifically, who will be the biggest loser of Trump’s wrath? Likely McConnell, precisely because he’s not the exquisite bootlicker that McCarthy is.
McCarthy gladly and immediately laying himself belly up at Trump’s feet while McConnell doesn’t will simply remind Trump how deeply he loathes McConnell.
He’ll be coming for McConnell. Trump can throw McCarthy under the bus later.
This video of Marjorie Taylor Greene getting busted for lying in court is a must-see MAGA moment
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On Friday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took the stand to give a foggy recollection’s worth of testimony in an Atlanta court hearing over whether she should be disqualified under the 14th Amendment from running for re-election this fall.
If you have been hiding from the news for a while, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a fake business person who earned her money the old-fashioned way—her parents had a successful business that she inherited and then was bought out of. Since cherry-picking a blood-red enclave of Georgia to lay down her carpetbag, she has risen in the MAGA GOP, in no small part due to her shameless use of invective and fascist oratory.
The case against MTG is a simple one: Is she qualified, according to the Constitution, to hold public office? Today’s hearing is in response to a challenge from Free Speech For People, a national nonprofit organization that seeks to “reclaim our democracy” in the wake of Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that allows corporate influence of policy through campaign donations.
Free Speech for People are attempting to establish Greene’s disqualification from holding office in this hearing through Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which stipulates:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
It’s compelling stuff. Rep. Greene is a mediocre liar, at best. In one exchange, Greene attempted to lie before realizing evidence was about to directly refute that lie. She retreats immediately, but the exchange is typical of interactions with Greene, and a clear window into how easily prosecutable people like Greene are.
After affirming that Greene and Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi do not agree on a lot of things, the prosecutor gets to the point.
Lawyer: In fact you think that Speaker Pelosi is a “traitor” to the country, right?
Greene looked off toward her lawyer, presumably, before attempting to evade the question by saying, “I’m not answering that question. It is speculation.” The lawyer for Free Speech For People tries to jog Greene’s memory, “You have said that, Ms. Greene. That she’s a traitor to the country, haven’t you?” To which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene lies:
REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: No. No, I haven’t said that.
At this moment, the lawyer, without words, reminds Greene that she is in a court of law and this isn’t an appearance on some right-wing white supremacist softball news show. Greene shifts in a way that can only be described as “aggressively agitated” as the lawyer asks for a presentation of “plaintiff’s Exhibit 5, please.”
Before we can watch the video below, where Greene says Speaker Pelosi is “guilty of treason” and that her guilt is “punishable by death,” Ms. Greene says, “Oh, no, wait.” That’s the moment in the screenshot atop this story. She then says something about how she did maybe say that when she said Pelosi had violated her oath of office regarding immigration.
How? Who the fuck knows?
The entire exercise we are watching is whether or not our country can enforce our most fundamental laws of democracy.
POC students call for racist University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax to be held accountable
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Calls to suspend a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor have increased nationwide as the professor, identified as Amy Wax, continues to spread her hateful rhetoric on national television. At least three organizations on campus have come together—the National Black Law Students Association, National Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, and North American South Asian Law Association—to ensure Wax not only is prevented from teaching, but from generally speaking to students.
According to NBC News, the student organizations released a letter on Wednesday detailing and condemning Wax’s comments. In several recent interviews, Wax not only expressed that the U.S. would be “better off with fewer Asians,” but that “Blacks” and other POC individuals are resentful of “Western peoples’ outsized achievements.”
The comments came on two separate occasions: once during an interview on The Glenn Show, and in another incident during an interview with Tucker Carlson.
“That Wax has been permitted to teach, supervise, and ridicule minority law students for over twenty one years is alarming,” the letter said. “Few understand how much more burdensome law school is for students who continuously receive the message that they are ‘less than’ or do not belong.”
Amid her racist comments, students even called into question whether her grading of students of color has been fair in the last two decades at the university. In the letter, students demanded she not only be held accountable but investigations into her actions be transparent to students.
“It’s a bit scary thinking about the impact that she’s had teaching at Penn for so long,” Dillon Yang, president of the National Asian Pacific American Law Student Association and a second-year law student at Notre Dame University, told NBC News. “Professors are supposed to teach the law in a neutral way, in ways that law students can form their own thoughts about the law. But clearly she doesn’t hide what she truly feels about the different minority groups in America. It’s hard for me to believe that it wouldn’t shine through in a classroom setting.”
What’s worse is that Wax defended the bigotry she has perpetuated in another interview with Gad Saad in January.
“My case is on some level not about me. I’m just roadkill, I’m a casualty in the culture wars,” Wax told Saad. Saad’s YouTube channel has more than 230,000 subscribers.
“What I see being said and done with respect to me is truly alarming. It is a total repudiation of the very concept of academic freedom.”
Over the last year, multiple students from other universities have expressed how harmful Wax’s comments have been to students.
“She was using verbiage from the late 1800s or early 1900s, speaking about students as ‘the Blacks,’” said Richard Garzola, chair of NBLSA and a second-year law student at Georgetown University. “I wonder, when is that cloud of tenure going to stop protecting folks at legal institutions?”
The different organizations told NBC News they released the letter in order to put pressure on Penn to take more action than they have.
“As descendants of enslaved ancestors, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and persons holding multiple identities among these, we reject Amy Wax’s hateful rhetoric that we and our communities are dangerous, inferior, do not belong, have made fewer contributions, and are inherently less able to utilize the law because of our skin colors or heritages,” the letter read. “Minority law students belong in the spaces they occupy.”
According to the law school’s website, Wax is currently teaching two courses but has been removed from teaching a mandatory first-year course. At this time, Wax is facing a faculty senate review that could result in sanctions against her. However, her being protected by tenure has made it difficult for the university to blatantly let her go.
“The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has previously made clear that Professor Wax’s views do not reflect our values or practices,” said Meredith Rovine, a spokesperson for the law school. “In January 2022, Dean Ruger announced that he would move forward with a University Faculty Senate process to address Professor Wax’s escalating conduct, and that process is underway.”
Human beings are in an evolutionary race with SARS-CoV-2, and we need all the help we can get
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On Thursday, the BBC reported that a patient who had tested positive for COVID-19 a record 505 straight days had died. Also on Thursday, NBC News reported that a woman in Spain had contracted the omicron variant of COVID-19 just 20 days after contracting an infection from the delta variant.
These situations are at the extremes. The patient with the extremely long case of COVID-19 had serious medical conditions that suppressed their immune system. The woman with the two cases in less than three weeks was a health care worker whose job placed her at high risk of exposure. But there is something to draw from both these cases—something that was true a year ago, and is still true today.
Every person infected brings around 10,000,000,000 new examples of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into existence. Every single one of those is subject to mutations. Those mutations then get winnowed by the one evolutionary pressure that faces viruses: getting that R0 number ever higher. …
COVID-19 is a brand new disease when it comes to people. No one, but no one, has a natural immunity. There is no handy closely related but mild infection (ala cow pox) that might provide some with protection. The newness of COVID-19 makes it almost infinitely more threatening that diseases we’ve been dealing with for ages.
COVID-19 is still engaged in a process in which unguided mutation is searching out the best way to infect human cells. The newness of that process can be seen in the huge gains being made in each generation of variant. Alpha was twice as infectious as the original variant that ravaged Europe and the U.S. Delta is over twice as infectious as Alpha. You do not see that kind of change in well-established, long-term disease.
That was written before the omicron variant appeared. By best estimates, omicron BA.1 is 3.19 times more infectious than delta. Omicron’s BA.2 subvariant is about 30% more infectious than the BA.1 subvariant. That puts estimates of the basic reproductive number (R0) for COVID-19 at around 16 to 18, putting it on par with pertussis and measles, which were the most infectious viruses in circulation. The version of COVID-19 that first appeared in China before moving on to other countries had an R0 value of between 2.0 and 2.5. The rapid increase in that number shows that this is a virus that still has a lot of potential for explosive growth. It’s still learning to get around the immune system, and that includes learning how to get past the effects generated by both vaccines and previous infection.
This is still a very new virus with an association with Homo sapiens that is just getting started. And it’s never been more important to limit the number of infections, reduce the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ opportunities to produce trillions of new attempts to break barriers, and not let everything that’s happened so far become only a prelude.
Before going further, it’s worth pointing out that SARS-CoV-2 is neither malicious nor aware. It’s not capable of making plans. It doesn’t “want” anything. It is a quasi-living particle capable of reproduction with changes that are driven by a combination of random chance and selective pressure. To a large extent, that’s true for every living thing, but nowhere is it more true than with viruses.
In a 2013 paper, researchers from the University of Valencia said this: “RNA viruses are among the fastest mutating and evolving entities in nature.” SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. Compared to a DNA virus like the variola virus behind smallpox, it changes more rapidly. And, in large part because the time of contact between human beings and SARS-CoV-2 is so brief, those changes can have significant effects.
Here is a quick look at just one measure of how rapidly SARS-CoV-2 is changing.
In two years, SARS-CoV-2 has moved from being a virus with rate of infection that was roughly 50% greater than the flu, to one that matches up with the most infectious viruses known. There is no guarantee that this represents its upper bound. In fact, the drastic improvements seen from alpha to delta and delta to omicron suggests that there may be still quite a lot of “headroom” for SARS-CoV-2 on this single vector.
Of course, infectiousness isn’t everything. Smallpox is sitting back there at the bottom of the chart, barely twice as infectious as the flu, but no virus in history may be responsible for more human deaths than smallpox. In just the last 100 years before it was driven to extinction by a worldwide campaign of isolation and vaccination, smallpox accounted for an estimated 500 million deaths. That’s enough to cover everyone in the United States. And Canada. And Mexico. With another 10 million or so left over.
That’s because around 30% of people who caught smallpox died. For COVID-19, that number is around 1.2%. One person in 100 dying out of sight in a hospital is simply easier to overlook than a third of your family expiring after being consumed by pus-spewing sores.
Notice that there is no guarantee it will remain that way. The influenza virus—another of those pesky, rapidly changing RNA viruses—had been infecting humans for thousands of years before a version appeared in 1918 that greatly kicked up both the R0 and the mortality.
There’s nothing in any of these viruses driving them toward being significantly more lethal or significantly less lethal. Smallpox killed a high number of those infected, year in and year out, for thousands of years. If killing off a third of those infected had generated a significant selective pressure on the virus to be less lethal, you can bet the number would have dropped. It didn’t.
(Side note: For Ebola virus, increased lethality may actually be the result of selective pressure, as this virus is often transmitted by the handling of dead bodies.)
Right now, we’re still at the beginning of our relationship with SARS-CoV-2. We’ve already passed through a kind of Dunning–Kruger stage were we thought, or at least pretended, that we understood this virus and the disease it generates. We’re just starting to squeak past that to a point where we can admit our ignorance. We don’t know what kind of sequela are waiting for us years down the road. We’re only starting to become aware of horror stories like the one novapsyche covered in this diary.
A study from Tulane has come out that strongly suggests that, even in mild forms or onsets of the disease, even with asymptomatic presentation, the brain may experience diffuse yet profound insult in the form of “innumerable” microbleeds.
All of this just means that the idea that we should “just live with” COVID-19 and pretend that it doesn’t exist is an invitation to disaster of inestimable scale. That patient who tested positive over 505 days didn’t just have a persistent infection from SARS-CoV-2, they had a “unique” infection. Every single person infected generates unique infections, with genetic structures that are subtly different from the virus they had going in. If one of those unique versions happens to be more infectious, it stands a chance of being the next variant of concern, and what it does to us, from brain bleeds to death, barely matters.
It’s a race. And we can’t afford to stop running.
Ukraine update: This is not the World War III you expected. Let's hope it's the only one you get
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What’s happening in Ukraine is not World War III. Or at least, it’s not the World War III anyone anticipated. But with every day that goes by, the importance of what’s happening in Ukraine and the scope of what’s at stake seem to increase.
When Vladimir Putin committed Russia to an invasion of their western neighbor, it wasn’t obvious that this would be a pivot point in history; one of those moments where the outcome affects international relations, world economies, and such apparently unconnected issues as the climate crisis for decades to come. Maybe it should have been, because all that is certainly clear now. Every day, as Russia pushes in more forces, and the West responds by abandoning any pretense when it comes to providing Ukraine with the weaponry to fight back, the do-or-die nature of this conflict becomes more clear.
If Russia is successful in achieving its stated goals of capturing eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast all the way to Moldova, it won’t just embolden Putin to keep up his brutal assaults on civilian populations as a tactic of war, it will put paid to the idea that the West can in any way hope to stop Russia without “getting their hands dirty.”
Ukraine is a nation with a population greater than California. It is being armed with every system that seems applicable in the effort to halt Russian ambitions. What should be clear, to the United States and every other western nation, two months into this conflict, is that if this isn’t enough to stop Putin, we will have to do it ourselves. We win this war, or we will get another.
So, every one of those nations has a huge stake in seeing that this is, in fact, enough.
As Markos has made clear for weeks, there’s almost no end to the things Russia is doing wrong. Whether it’s their graft-ridden chain of logistics, an incredibly top-heavy command structure, an organization structure that makes their units extremely fragile, or a simple lack of competence that limits the scope of their operations, Russia’s approach would get them flunked from any war college in the West. The only tactic they have been able to engage that has been by any definition successful is that they have committed war crimes at a scale and pace not seen since World War II.
Russia doesn’t have the ability to engage successfully with a peer military. It does have the ability to bomb the shit out of children, hospitals, and blind grandmothers. It has the ability to slaughter whole civilian populations and toss them into enormous mass graves. Russia can’t execute intelligent tactics to win battles in the field, but it’s perfectly capable of grinding forward with dumb tactics that pulverize cities and lives.
Unless, of course, someone makes them stop. Which is where we are now. Not “Does Ukraine have the weapons it needs to stand against Russia in a fair fight?” but, “Does Ukraine have what it needs to destroy Russia’s ability to kill civilians in their homes?” Which is a very different thing.
To stop the slaughter, Ukraine isn’t going to just need Javelins to halt the advance of Russian tanks, or Stingers to take down helicopters buzzing over Ukrainian territory. It needs armor, artillery, and air support—in the form of fighters, helicopters, and drones—that will allow it to eliminate the weapons Russia is firing into Ukrainian towns and cities. So when word comes that Ukraine now has more tanks in theater than Russia, or that the U.S. is sending another massive order of artillery their way, that’s just a start. There literally is no way we can give them too much.
To really win this thing, Ukraine can’t fight the Russian army to a draw or force them to halt their advance. Ukraine has to destroy the Russian army in a way that keeps it from committing mass murder of civilians, not just right now, but for a long time to come. That is a very big task.
What’s happening in Ukraine is not World War III. Except in the sense that it will define the world we all live in for a long time to come. Which … okay, maybe it is.
Friday, Apr 22, 2022 · 5:35:20 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
We saw video of at least two helicopters and multiple drones, which makes this seem like a pretty reasonable — if amazing — count.
Friday, Apr 22, 2022 · 5:36:22 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
How committed is the U.S. to the outcome of this fight? This committed.
Not one, not two, but three states Mark Meadows registered to vote in
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It hasn’t even been two weeks since we reported that Mark ‘Big Lie’ Meadows was removed from voter rolls in North Carolina after it was discovered he was registered in both Virginia and North Carolina.
Now it seems there’s yet another state the former President Trump lackey has registered in: South Carolina.
RELATED STORY: Mark ‘Stop the Steal’ Meadows removed from voter roll in North Carolina amid voter fraud probe
According to records obtained by The Washington Post, Meadows was registered in three different states for about three weeks.
Let’s not forget that Meadows serves as a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a think tank devoted to “restor[ing] election integrity safeguards” the “left is trying to tear down.”
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As first reported by The New Yorker in September 2020, about three weeks before North Carolina’s voter registration deadline for the general election, Meadows—a devout Stop the Stealer—claimed to be living in a 14-foot-by-62-foot mobile home in North Carolina, where he never actually lived. But he voted absentee using that address in the 2020 general election. Meadows, a former Asheville resident and Western North Carolina congressman, was living in Virginia at that time.
In March, an investigation into Meadows’ possible voter fraud was launched by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.
“The allegations, in this case, involve potential crimes committed by a government official,” Macon County District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch wrote in a letter to the attorney general’s office on March 14, CNBC News reported.
Melanie Thibault, Macon County Board of Elections director, told the Asheville Citizen Times on April 12 that she consulted with the North Carolina Board of Elections staff after discovering that Meadows was registered in North Carolina and Virginia. The board removed him from their voter rolls.
“What I found was that he was also registered in the state of Virginia. And he voted in a 2021 election. The last election he voted in Macon County was in 2020,” Thibault said.
In March 2022, Meadows registered to vote in South Carolina—while he was already registered in Virginia, where he voted in a 2021 election, while he was already registered absentee in North Carolina, where he voted in the 2020 general election. My head is spinning.
The issue is that when he registered to vote in South Carolina, he should have let the state know he was registered in Virginia. But according to Angie Maniglia Turner, the general registrar and director of elections in Alexandria, Virginia, neither Mark nor Debra Meadows had changed voter registration status in Virginia.
Come on, Mark. Get it together, man. One state, one vote. That’s how this whole process works.
Biden to request more Ukraine aid when Congress gets back next week
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President Joe Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. is sending another $800 million in lethal aid and security assistance to Ukraine, and $500 million in economic assistance “to help stabilize their economy, to support communities that have been devastated by the Russian onslaught, and pay the brave workers that continue to provide essential services to the people of Ukraine.”
“With this latest disbursement, I’ve almost exhausted the draw-down authority I have that Congress authorized for Ukraine and a bipartisan spending bill last month,” Biden said. He announced that he will send a supplemental budget request to Congress next week “to keep weapons and ammunition flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and to continue to deliver economic assistance to the Ukrainian people.”
Then he thanked Congress ”Democrats and Republicans—for their support for the people of Ukraine.” We’ll see how much thanks Republicans deserve with this next request, which Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says will be coupled with the administration’s other urgent supplemental funding request for COVID-19 pandemic funds.
The White House has been clamoring for weeks for more funding—for vaccines, treatments, and research and development funding for vaccines—warning that they wouldn’t be able to respond to a potential autumn surge or new variant without the assistance. In early March, they were asking for $22.5 billion, it’s now been whittled down by Republicans to $10 billion, and they keep finding poison pills to delay passing it.
The obvious path, which Schumer intends to take, is to tie the Ukraine aid with “funding to address Covid-19 and food insecurity globally” and to pass it as soon as possible when Congress is back next week. Republicans will continue to resist, with a likely assist from jittery Senate Democrats.
“If that [Covid aid] discussion is going to take a matter of weeks, we have to make a decision on Ukrainian support in a matter of hours or days,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told reporters on a call from the Balkans. On the same call, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) showed she’s wobbling. “I support a package to address continued research and investment and therapeutics and vaccinations that we need for Covid … but I also think it’s very important to get this aid out to Ukraine as quickly as possible.”
Some Democrats have also been a problem on that COVID-19 funding, helping Republicans fight Biden in ending Title 42, the Trump-era policy created by Stephen Miller “that has for more than two years used the pandemic as an excuse to stomp on U.S. asylum law,” as Gabe Ortiz explains.
Senate Republicans derailed a COVID-19 package just before Congress left for the Easter recess, refusing to allow a vote on the aid unless they get an amendment vote to force Biden to reinstate the Title 42 restrictions.
Republicans also dragged out important Russian sanctions bills ending that nation’s permanent normal trade status with the U.S., but finally passed it the day before they headed off for their two-week recess. Dragging all this critical legislation out is Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s only election strategy—to prevent Biden from achieving things as much as possible.
As far as Biden’s request for more Ukraine aid goes, on Thursday Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi promised a quick vote next week. “We want to do more. The president said he will be asking Congress for more. We will learn about that in the next day or so, to be taken up as soon as we can next week,” Pelosi said. Her spokesperson Drew Hammill cautioned that there was “no specific timeline for a floor vote at this time,” pending Biden’s request. Nevertheless, the House is poised to act, which will put more pressure on the Senate.
But Schumer’s plan on COVID-19 funding will have to be worked out with Pelosi, as well, since the two have ceded critical ground on the funding for it—they’ve agreed that new money can’t be appropriated and it will have to come out of the previous funding packages. Which means clawing funding back from somewhere. House Democrats scuttled the first effort when leadership tried to rush through a bill that would have stripped already-budgeted funding from about 30 state and local governments.
Funding for Ukraine (and for the defense industry) won’t be a hard fight—money for guns is never a hard fight. Fighting a global pandemic, however, is not something Republicans are interested in. So Democrats should make it politically painful for them to refuse funding.
The best way to do that is to cry “fraud, waste, and abuse” by private corporations in the previous rounds of emergency spending. There’s been plenty of that. Where that money should come from is the likely $76 billion claimed fraudulently in pandemic Paycheck Protection Program loans. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan. Not fraudulently.)
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