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We are sticking our heads into the sand of reality on Omicron, and the results may be catastrophic.
Omicron is over 4 times more infectious than Delta. The Pfizer two-shot vaccine offers only 33% protection from infection. A Pfizer booster vaccine does raises protection to about 75%. Still, surveys show that Omicron has had very little impact on the willingness of Americans to get a booster, or even get a first vaccine dose.
It is arguably the most significant image from Columbus in the year 2020, and that’s saying a lot. It’s not an actual photo, but a screen shot of a video, one which went viral.
The man throwing up his arms (“Don’t shoot!”) is 31-year-old Randy Kaigler, a State Tested Nurse Aide, a father who loves to play with his kids, do family activities. He actually shouted, “I can’t breathe!”
It was Saturday, May 30, 2020, the same day when City Council President Shannon Hardin and US Rep. Joyce Beatty were sprayed.
“He (the officer) literally looked me in my face, laughed, and sprayed me in my face,” said Kaigler, who says it was his dad who called him that night asking if this was him in the disturbing photo.
Kaigler claims he was not a bad actor that day or other days he was downtown. “I saw a lot of people during the protests do a lot of dumb shit.” Instead, he had pleaded with others to not damage property.
“It’s just the little things for me,” said Kaigler. “I’m a happy person. I try to remain positive and use that not only to help myself but others as well.
Friday, December 24, 7-9pm, Green House Canteen and Bar, 1011 W. Fifth Ave.
Let us get together for festive dinner at Green House Canteen and Bar, a popular place with local vegans.
Feel free to add and to bring guests with you.
RSVP for this event by using this link.
Hosted by Columbus Vegan Meetup.:
Facebook Event
Quietly, as usual, the undemocratic apparatuses of the City of Columbus make their moves.
On Friday, Dec. 10, the Columbus Dispatch briefly reported “Massive hanging sculpture proposed for Downtown.”
The next day, Dispatch reporter Jim Welker wrote, “City seeks input on reviving Downtown” (print edition). In this case, the City and the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation, a “nonprofit public development corporation,” a contradiction in terms, “are launching a series of [unscheduled] public meetings to help shape a new Downtown Strategic Plan.
Former President Barack Obama recently tweeted that the day of a school shooting was the worst day of his presidency. Well, it certainly shouldn’t have been a good day, but, seriously, what the filibuster? Was it a bad day because children were killed and he didn’t order their killing?
It’s bad enough having a drone murder program, but do we also have to go along with the pretense that it doesn’t exist, or the pretense that it’s been stopped? Until this week, the U.S. government was hiding this data for much of 2020 and 2021 on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, leading some to imagine that drone strikes had stopped. Now that the data is available, we see a decrease but still massive bombings.
Fifty-four of Ohio’s largest employers paid their CEOs a median of 322 times what they paid the typical employee in 2020, according to a new report
Tuesday, December 21, 2021, 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Remembering friends and family who passed away while homeless this year. Sponsored by Columbus Coalition for the Homeless With support from the ADAMH Board of Franklin County This year’s theme: Preventing overdose deaths For more information, please contact the Coalition at 614-228-1342. Location: Trinity Episcopal Church 125 E. Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215. Also streaming live on Facebook during the event at https://www.facebook.com/columbuscoalitionforthehomeless.
The biggest news story over the past few weeks has been the continued exposing of the Israeli military’s use of dirty tech to surveil Palestinians, and the extent to which Israeli-made spyware is used globally by oppressive governments. As JVP Executive Director Stefanie Fox points out in her latest newsletter Every Single Phone Call: What Israeli Spyware Reveals about the US-Israel Alliance: “Right after the Israeli Defense Ministry criminalized six of the leading Palestinian human rights and civil groups by designating them “terrorist organizations,” news broke that the phones of multiple Palestinian human rights defenders were infected with Pegasus, the military-grade spyware created by the Israeli company NSO Group.
On the very same day, another investigation revealed the Blue Wolf and White Wolf Initiatives, an extensive network of technology used by both Israeli soldiers and settlers to collect and record photos of Palestinians that are fed into a massive facial recognition database.
Former president Donald Trump popularized the phrase “fake news” as one of his terms of universal condemnation for any reporting—or stated facts—with which he disagreed, regardless of their accuracy. It became one of his rhetorical trademarks to the delight of his followers and the disgust of the legitimate press and all others.
As it scrambles to fill their pages in the absence of Trump’s daily outrageous statements or behavior, the press fears that it lacks the kinds of attention-grabbing breaking news that attracts readers, and is repeated across the multiple outlets of the social media sphere. In repeated exaggerations and repetition of dishonest messages from right-wing provocateurs and media, the legitimate press recreates the phenomenon of “fake news” that they so loudly condemned.
Several dynamics intersect in this startling development. First is the decline financially and journalistically of the daily local and national newspapers. As more and more go out of business, reduce their staffs and reporting, become parts of large for-profit networks, and face intense pressure to survive, both reporters and reporting decline.