Edmund Schweppe

WTF happened earlier today in Washington?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for being "disrespectful" Friday in an extraordinary Oval Office meeting, then abruptly called off the signing of a minerals deal that Trump said would have moved Ukraine closer to ending its war with Russia.

The astonishing turn of events could scramble affairs in Europe and around the globe. During his visit with Trump, Zelenskyy was expected to sign the deal allowing the U.S. greater access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and hold a joint news conference, but that plan was scrapped after the heated engagement between the leaders in front of the news media.

https://apnews.com/article/zelenskyy-security-guarantees-trump-meeting-washington-eebdf97b663c2cdc9e51fa346b09591d

I have no goddamn idea what Trump thinks he's doing. But it sure sounds like it's Vladimir Putin's bidding.

I've successfully registered for this summer's edition of the All Star 2 conference on Star Island.

In a minor annoyance, Star has joined the universe of non-profits asking people to kick in an extra three percent to cover the credit card processing fees. But that's a minor annoyance.

Like I said this time twelve years ago, I was not expecting Donald Trump to win the election.

Last time, Trump lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College.
This time, he's winning both of them; the Associated Press is currently showing Trump with 71.6 million votes to Kamala Harris' 66.7 million.

Not looking forward to the next few years.

This is a new one: the folks at Verizon sent me an email today saying they were issuing a credit to my account "due to a service outage" (presumably this one).

I'll believe it when/if I see it. But I'm cynical, sometimes.

Today is both Massachusetts' state primary election, and the first day I was able to schedule this year's COVID vaccine at my local CVS.

I'd already voted early, so that wasn't an issue. And, unlike last year, there wasn't any insurance company confusion about which version of the vaccine was covered this time.

This year was quick and easy; in, jab, and out. As a bonus, the sweet young thing who gave me the shot was both gloved and masked.

Once again, Team Moderna for the win.

I had a fun time, even though Star has given up on being COVID-free. There were no announced cases on-island last week, and apparently most (if not all) conferees tested themselves prior to arrival. I did stay masked up indoors in public areas (and ate my meals outdoors). I also carried my little Aranet CO2 monitor around. Even indoors, most of the time, CO2 levels were down in the 450-600 range. There was a *lot* of wind most days, with not very much rain, so the windows were kept open almost all the time.

I'm still not pleased that the island management decided to give up on being COVID-free. I wasn't the only person on island masking up for some or all of the time; there were a few other conferees, and even a few staff members, masked up most of the time.

The mainland weather was hot and humid all week; that meant that the island weather was cool and humid. (Advantage of being surrounded by sixty-plus-degree Atlantic Ocean water.) There were a couple of quick downpours, but overall the week was dry.

Of course, this week is also going to be hot and humid on the mainland; alas, this time *I'm* in the middle of it. Sigh.

Joyeuse fête du Canada [1] à mes amis au nord de la frontière, qui continuent de démontrer délicieusement bon goût en célébrant leur fête nationale sur ce, mon jour natal.

[1] For Canada Day salutations in English, please press 2.

Last March, former President Donald J. Trump was indicted in a New York city court on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records.

Today, the jury in that trial returned thirty-four guilty verdicts, after deliberating for only two days.

To paraphrase Gary Trudeeau from the May 29, 1973 Doonesbury comic strip:

That's guilty!
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty!

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration has put out their official 2024 Atlantic hurricane season forecast - and, as the Boston Globe reports, it's an "extraordinary" one:
( 17 to 25 named storms this season )

"Higher ranges ... than 2005" - you know, the year they ran out of names for named storms and had to hit the Greek alphabet?

Yay.

The actual NOAA press release is worth reading (and not paywalled!)

Today is what the US politicos call Super Tuesday, when, to quote the Associated Press,

voters in 16 different states and one territory (Get it? "Super" Tuesday.) will be choosing who they want to run for president.

Massachusetts is one such state, and I voted in today's Democratic Party primary.

Given that Biden is nearly certain to get the Democratic nod in Massachusetts, and Trump highly likely to get the Republican nod, I wasn't surprised to see fairly low turnout numbers when I voted earlier this afternoon. (Less than four hundred ballots cast in my precinct of around two thousand or so registered voters.)

Slightly amusing note: on today's ballot, there were more options for Libertarian Party preferences (5) than for Democratic Party preferences (4). On the other hand, the Libertarian Town Committee had ten open seats, and nobody named on the ballot for any of them ...

Got my registration request in for this summer's edition of the All Star 2 conference on Star Island.

Something to look forward to, while I await the next snow event. (Supposedly three to four inches in my neck of the woods by tomorrow evening.)

Official Winter Storm Warning in effect as of 4PM EST today:
( Nine to fifteen inches expected )
Of course, Wednesday's forecast is for rain and high temperatures near 54F, so everything but the plow berms will likely wash away in a few days ...

I'm not at all sure this qualifies as "moving past chaos", as the Associated Press headline claims. Still, we do have a Speaker of the House of Representatives, three weeks after the House Bombthrower Freedom Caucus deposed Kevin McCarthy:
( Mike Johnson, a staunch Louisiana conservative, is elected House speaker as GOP moves past chaos )
Representative Johnson is, from what I understand, not just extremely conservative. He's a full-fledged denier that Joeseph Biden won the 2020 Presidential election, as evidenced by his being the author of an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court when the state of Texas claimed that the presidential election was fradulent because ... Pennsylvania gave out too many absentee ballots due to COVID. (The Supremes shot that case down in flames, noting that "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.") Johnson is also apparently in favor of a national ban on abortion, along with massive cuts of Social Security, Medicare, and other "entitlements." He also has a ... poor, shall we say? ... record as a fundraiser, which is one of those things the Speaker of the House is expected to do for his party.

So, we've now got a not-yet-well-known Republican backbencher, who presumably will do whatever the Freedom Caucus demands of him. Yay?

Once again, Jim Jordan is not the Speaker of the House:
( Read more... )
I suppose the good news is that Jordan is only going through this exercise in humiliation once per day, rather than Kevin McCarthy's agonizing multiple-votes-per-day marathons. On the other hand, McCarthy never dropped below two hundred votes.

Well, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has reorganized how they present COVID information - again:
( Read more... )
On the one hand, it makes some amount of sense to provide a one-stop overview of respiratory illnesses statewide, as the combination of COVID, flu, and RSV combined are what's most likely to overload the health care system.

On the other hand, this looks to me like the state (like the feds) is looking at respiratory illnesses as just an acute threat, and is focusing its attention and messaging on the short term. Long COVID is definitely a thing, despite our lack of hard data as to prevalence and treatment.

On the gripping hand, this quite thoroughly breaks my wall-o-text builder. They're scattering information across at least five raw data files, and it sounds like they're shifting from one data file per dashboard per week to one file per dashboard per July-through-June surveillance period (updating every week). This may take a while to fix.