California burning

 https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen

Clown World

 When you live in Clown World.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/why-the-media-is-worse-for-biden-than-trump.html

Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones.

But wait, you’re thinking. Didn’t the media hound Donald Trump for four straight years at least as hard as it’s hounded Biden over the last week?

Well, sort of. The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms. Republicans communicate to their base through a media that functionally operates as part of their party, while Democrats communicate to their base through a media that still exerts substantial independence. If you want to understand the strange difficulty that Joe Biden’s sane, competent administration has in yielding measurably higher approval than Trump’s insane, incompetent presidency, the asymmetrical relationship between the two parties and their respective media environments is the most important place to start.

On Biden’s best days, the conservative media was still giving him hell. In recent days, CNN and MSNBC looked a lot like Fox News, all hyping chaos in Afghanistan 24/7. That is the kind of comprehensive media hostility Trump never had to worry about.

And the flip side of the very different media environment facing Democrats is that it at least forces them to try to meet some minimal standard of competence and honesty. Their politicians sometimes lie, as politicians do, but if caught in a lie, it’s untenable for them to simply repeat the lie over and over.

The standard that mainstream news media applies to Democrats leaves plenty to complain about. (And I do.) But if we have learned anything from the previous four years, it’s that being held to a flawed standard ultimately works out better than not being held to any standard at all.

COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

vax approval

 https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download

On August 23, 2021, FDA approved the biologics license application (BLA) submitted by BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH for COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.

Afghanistan Never Existed

 https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/one-thing-we-never-understood-about-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/

Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.

American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.

1,200 Americans died during Obama's Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.

Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.

No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.

The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.

We came to defeat the Jihadists behind September 11 and we stayed behind to reform Afghanistan. But what were we reforming it from? We couldn’t name the problem.

And when you can’t name a problem, you never come up with a solution.

Having failed to fix Afghanistan, the process is now underway to bring as many Afghans as possible to America. The old plan to bring 100,000 “interpreters” and their family members has been vastly expanded to make any Afghan who did any work for American organizations, from aid groups to the media, eligible to come to America. By the time they’re done, we may end up with a million Afghan refugees in America. Some of them will become Islamic terrorists.

The final act of fighting terrorism is bringing the terrorists to America to create more terror.

The truth about recycling

 https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.

"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."

But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.