Should You Be Worried About the New COVID Strains?

By: Gleb Tsipursky

12/30/2020

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/30/should-you-be-worried-about-new-covid-strains

Should you be worried about the new COVID strains originating in the UK, South Africa, and elsewhere, and recently identified in the US?

The authorities claim there's no cause for alarm. They’re focusing on concerns about vaccine effectiveness, saying the vaccine will be highly successfully against the new strain.

They’re mostly right. While some legitimate concerns have been raised about the vaccines potentially being 10-20% less effective against the new strains, this small difference shouldn’t make you too worried.

However, another aspect of these new strains should make you very worried indeed: they’re much more infectious. Unfortunately, the implications of their infectiousness has received little news coverage, which is cause for serious alarm.

Such complacency reflects our sleepwalking in the pandemic’s early stages, despite many warnings from myself and other risk management experts, leading us to fail to prepare successfully for this situation. We’re about to make the same mistake with seriously tragic consequences.

'Unhinged, Lame-Duck President Wants to Start a War'

 

Thursday, December 24, 2020

By: Jake Johnson

Anti-war campaigners are warning that U.S. President Donald Trump is on the verge of launching a full-blown military conflict with Iran after the lame-duck incumbent on Wednesday blamed the Middle East nation for a rocket attack on the American Embassy in Baghdad over the weekend, an accusation Tehran rejected as "fabricated."

"Our embassy in Baghdad got hit Sunday by several rockets. Three rockets failed to launch," Trump tweeted late Wednesday afternoon, attaching a photo purporting to show the three rockets. "Guess where they were from: IRAN. Now we hear chatter of additional attacks against Americans in Iraq."

"Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible," the outgoing U.S. president added. "Think it over."

میگویند امام زمان می آید

میگویند امام زمان می آید

اما نمی آید

بدبخت انسانی که منتظر است

او کیست که می آید؟چرا می آید؟

Can we save Assange?

It’s Time We Called It What It Is: Fascism

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/14/its-time-we-called-it-what-it-fascism

December 14, 2020

by

Robert Freeman

The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome.

When the economy in a democratic but capitalist country fails, there are two alternatives. You can modify the economic system. Or, you can modify the political system.

When you modify the economic system (capitalism) but retain the political system (democracy), you have the arrangement the U.S. has lived under since capitalism failed in the 1930s, in the Great Depression.

The other alternative is where the economic system (capitalism) is retained but the political system (democracy) is discarded and replaced with authoritarianism. This is fascism and is what happened in Germany, also in the 1930s.

The battle between capitalism and democracy is the conflict that is being fought out in the U.S. right now. The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome. A quick look at history shows us the pattern.

Inequality Gone Viral: The Obscene Numbers

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/30/inequality-gone-viral-obscene-numbers

By:

Paul Buchheit

November 30, 2020

In a distressing analogy to the relentless surge of Covid-19, which has disproportionately impacted low-income communities and people of color, there has been an unstoppable transfer of wealth from desperate Americans to the people who already had most of our nation's financial assets.

While the great majority of us have been focusing on the health and well-being — and the very survival — of loved ones, the super-rich have become "pandemic profiteers," isolating themselves from Covid while riding the stock market to its highest-ever level. At the same time we are seeing a dramatic demonstration of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, with the "perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented."

We need to ask ourselves: In a year of disease and death and destroyed families, should a massive, inexplicable increase in new American financial wealth go to billionaires or to health care workers? Should unearned gains go to the few hundred richest Americans or to the millions of American households who have lost their means of support?

We Must Do More to Stop Dangerous Doctors in a Pandemic

 Some have crossed the line from free speech to medical practice — or something akin to malpractice.

By: Richard A. Friedman

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/opinion/scott-atlas-doctors-misinformation.html?searchResultPosition=1

It’s bad enough when our political leaders promote quack theories about coronavirus and its treatment; but what do we do about the doctors who enable them and use their medical authority to promote pseudoscience?

Absolute Disaster

 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/07/millions-tenants-headed-absolute-disaster-after-new-year-owing-average-nearly-6000

By: 

Julia Conley

December 7, 2020

"This is like a Charles Dickens novel. It's an evolving story of how people at the bottom are suffering."

Without a coronavirus relief package centered on helping working families who have lost jobs and watched their savings dwindle amid the pandemic, millions of people are "headed for absolute disaster," one observer said Monday as Moody's Analytics reported that 12 million renters are expected to owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities after the new year.

Biden Wants America to Lead the World. It Shouldn’t

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/opinion/biden-foreign-policy.html?searchResultPosition=1

12/2/2020

There’s a lot we still don’t know about how President-elect Joe Biden and his foreign policy team will approach the world. But this much is clear: They believe in American “leadership.”

In a 2015 speech, Antony Blinken, Mr. Biden’s choice to be secretary of state, employed some version of the word 21 times. This spring, Mr. Biden wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” Last week, when he introduced his national security nominees, he said that “America is back, ready to lead the world.”

Let’s hope not. In the post-Trump age, “leadership” is a misguided, and even dangerous, vision for America’s relationship with the rest of the globe.