Good morning, Slog: If you haven’t had a chance to look out your window this morning, let me save you the effort—clouds. Clouds in the morning, clouds in the afternoon, clouds (and some rain) when you get off work, clouds when you go to sleep. As for temperature, you can basically count on 50 degrees all day long too. Weather forecasts of course are subject to change and I will not be held personally responsible if you dress for the weather as I described it and not the actual conditions.
Before we go any further, we really must hear from cops and courts reporter Ashley Nerbovig:
Adrian Diaz’s love note: The Office of Inspector General released its investigation into former Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz and included in the materials a copy of the note that revealed a romantic relationship between him and a subordinate. And let me tell you, it’s some tame boring stuff. What’s not boring? The fact that his employees were clearly obsessed with him and tracking where he was parking and when he was near this woman’s apartment. Isn’t there a staffing shortage?
Meanwhile: Don’t let this love affair distract from the fact that SPD Officer Kevin Dave, a cop SPD hired despite a sketchy driving history who later hit-and-killed Jaahnavi Kandula, finally faced his court penalties yesterday. The City Attorney’s Office settled on a $5,000 fine and driving school. The judge added an additional 40 hours of community service. With all his court stuff wrapped up the only remaining consequences for Dave could come from SPD. The Office of Police Accountability already found Dave violated driving policy and broke the law. Let’s see if the department takes it seriously when their employees kill someone with their patrol car.
The judge added 40 hours of community service to Dave’s penalties saying that as a cop Dave already serves the city but “I do want to recognize the impact this offense has had on the community.”https://t.co/IWzfalH3EA
— Ashley Nerbovig (@AshleyNerbovig) December 18, 2024
Back on my beat: Yesterday, Council President Sara Nelson announced she will run for re-election. No surprise there, but she did irk me in her press release. But let’s be real—when does she not irk me? Anyway, she said that she represents a shift from ““[y]ears of performative, ideological decisions” to “delivering real results—prioritizing safety, livability, and a city that works for everyone, not just political theater.” I can think of a whole list of “performative, ideological decisions” Nelson’s made over the last three years. In fact, I will make that list and I’ll have it on the blog later today. See ya there!
*Gulp* Okay, I’m trying not to panic, but this did not make me feel great. California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency yesterday over an outbreak of bird flu that’s infected at least 34 Californians so far. Bird Flu—or as the white coats call it, H5N1—has spread across 16 states, infecting more than 60 people since its first detection in March. The U.S. Center For Disease Control And Prevention provided some guidance to keep yourself safe: Avoid direct contact with sick or dead wild birds, poultry, and other animals, use personal protective equipment if you must come in direct contact with these animals, don’t touch surfaces or materials contaminated with saliva, mucous, or feces from animals that may have the virus, and don’t drink raw milk, an evergreen rule in my humble opinion.
Trump’s already president, I guess: President-elect Donald Trump undermined the bipartisan spending plan Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson negotiated to stave off shutdown until March. In a joint statement between Trump and his Vice President, the incoming administration wrote, “Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, and set our country up for success in 2025. The only way to do that is with a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling. Anything else is a betrayal of our country.” Within hours congress scrapped the plan altogether. This massive derailment increases the likelihood of a government shutdown if they can’t figure something out before Saturday. The only way to appease their overlord may be to abolish the debt ceiling altogether, NBC News reported.
Or maybe Elon Musk’s President: It seems unelected bureaucrat and evil billionaire Elon Musk put the pressure on Trump and the Republicans to kill the spending bill, and won.
And just like that, Republican Unelected Co-President Elon Musk has killed the bill to keep the government from shutting down on Friday. All he had to do was make a few social media posts.
Trump said he’d empower working people, all he’s done is empower the ultra wealthy. pic.twitter.com/dx96y6VLVw
— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) December 18, 2024
In other Trump news: This morning, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from her prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump and 18 other co-defendants in the case over his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the state of Georgia. This marks a partial win for Trump who tried to get Willis booted over her relationship with fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, but unfortunately for Trump, the court did not find enough evidence to justify “the extreme sanction” of tossing the entire indictment.
Get his ass: The US House Ethics Committee voted to release its report on former Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, a report thought to be so damaging, Gaetz had to forfeit his chance to get appointed to Trump’s administration. That report should drop in the next few days, according to the BBC.
For your ears: This songs been in my head for the past few days and I want to pass it along to someone else.
first?
‘Bird flu’?
not to Worry!
the donold’s got
a lotta Experience
when it comes to the
Plague & the thinning of
the Citizenry. he’ll likely out-
Law the Center for Disease control
(run by Communists extreme
Leftist riff raff and with not
a Fascist to behold so
What’s the bloody
Point, anyways?).
@1 who’s afraid of a little flu when we have bleach and de worming medicine?
Thank you for the rare breath for fresh Country air Hannah. I (heart) Alan Jackson.
not moving on:
“Avoid direct contact with … poultry… “
will Cooking it
make it get
Better
or
Must
I just quit
Eating it altogether?
“… don’t
touch surfaces or
materials contaminated
with saliva, mucous, or feces
from animals that may have the virus…”
I’ve always Preferred to do that
regardless, except, Obviously,
the occasional & unexpected
tongueswipe from my Rellies’
adoring, adorable canines.
they mean well.
@1/@2 Don’t worry I’m sure Newsom and Ferguson will impose some draconian lockdowns and fire a bunch of people in the name of safety.
“Draconian Lockdowns.”
There’s the Spirit!
it’s gonna be a
L o n g 4 years
thnx, d13r.
By what name shall we call this new regime of rule by plutocrat rage-tweet? I propose ALL-CAPS-ITALISM.
When “Continue reading »” isn’t used is that intentional or just an oversight?
I don’t want to have to scroll forever on the home page.
It turns out that making medical school free actually reduced the numbers of doctors going into primary care and reduced diversity.
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/12/17/free-med-school-medical-tuition-doctor-healthcare-nyu-debt-primary-care/
@6
The billionaire buzzards have just begun to feed on the dead carcass of democracy. And feed they will!
@5, And it won’t make people safer.
I am all for public health. I am all for lock-downs, if they can drive the reproductive rate of a pathogen below 1.0.
I am all for vaccines, including current COVID vaccines (I am current with the latest boosters). I am all for mandating vaccines when vaccines can stop spread and create herd immunity. It turns out COVID, as an unstable, rapidly mutating organism, wasn’t amendable to a herd immunity strategy, and never can be.
When those things were discovered, why didn’t we change course, at the moment of discovery? Why did we insist on doubling-down on all the harms caused by lock-downs, including, but not limited to student learning loss, when it was shown that the hoped for benefits of those lock-downs were not available?
Inslee, et. al. were right with the lock-downs early on.
The failure was staying the course when the scientific knowledge about COVID changed.
Inslee is correct when he says follow the science. But you have to follow it as scientific understanding evolves. You have to be consistent with following the science, not just dogmatically sticking with a snapshot of scientific belief from a singular moment in time.
“I can think of a whole list of “performative, ideological decisions” Nelson’s made over the last three years.”
Hannah, assuming you can show Nelson to be just as much symbolism over substance as her predecessors, you will only prove that her predecessors were symbolism over results.
Assuming your prove your thesis, Nelson has had a much shorter tenure of being performative instead of substantive than her Progressive predecessors.
bird flu is sounding like a neat add-on to whatever all this is
Covid lockdowns saved millions of lives. Having a virus like covid tear through the population with no preexisting immunity would have killed/debilitated millions more than it did and further overwhelmed our healthcare system, leading to even more preventable deaths beyond the virus itself.
The vaccines were released at the end of 2020 and it took several months to achieve enough coverage to even consider opening schools again. At most you could have had a month or 2 of in-person schooling before the end of the academic calendar.
But opening schools any sooner, or worse not closing them at all, would have accelerated the virus’ spread through the population and still resulted in school closures due to recurrent outbreaks, sick/dead teachers and staff, sick students, also sick/dead parents because the kids would bring the virus home where most transmission occurs.
People are looking back on that period from a contemporary lens where >99% of the population has some form of immunity due to either exposure or vaccination, and the most at-risk people have already died. Now it’s just another seasonal virus but at the time it was a tremendous risk and if anything we didn’t take it seriously enough.
H5N1 is a wild card because we don’t know how likely it can mutate to human-human, and whether those mutations will make it less deadly. What scares me is another pandemic with vaccine deniers controlling our national response and a gullible population who lived through one pandemic and still doesn’t understand the risk because they took all the wrong lessons.
@5 even worse, just consider when they force regulations on the poultry industry …. (darn “statists”)
@14 Great comment, barth
@12 “Assuming your prove your thesis, Nelson has had a much shorter tenure of being performative instead of substantive than her Progressive predecessors.”
Classic Democrat move: “I didn’t at all do what you elected me to, which is why it’s critical you RE-elect me so I can do it in my next term, which I will, for real this time, pinky promise”
@17 didn’t you know the corporate sponsors of the current council were especially worried about the “symbolism” in the policies of the former council
@17: were it not for GOP obstructionism, Democrats WOULD be able to do all of those things they were elected to do. But instead, they block everything for the sole purpose of using their own intransigence to point fingers at Democrats: “they promised they’d do X, Y and Z, but didn’t (because we made it impossible for them to do so), so clearly they don’t have your best interests at-heart. But if you elect us instead, we’ll get right on that!” Even though the odds are good they’ll do the exact opposite instead.
@14 Yay! You are the only rational discussion on the early Covid days I read. Kids spread germs rrrrreally fast. And not just to other kids. The only reason I caught Covid for the first time was from my kid. She caught it from another kid at her daycare. The kid’s parent had lied about her current infection to get past protocals and wound up infecting my kid who then gave it to me. I work in healthcare, in patient care environments and I could have very easily passed it to vulnerable patients. Thankfully I respected the masking and preventative measures and feel confident I didn’t infect anyone at work. Closing schools was way smart. We were not ready by any means for a pandemic in 2019-2020. I want to be snarky and say something mud in you eye to all the people that didn’t agree with the lockdowns and preventative requirements. But we not only saved a lot of lives with the lockdowns and vaccines but we also saved the lives/careers of the healthcare/education professionals that are not easily replaced. So I repeat that the GOP and all their fucking bullshit about government over reach are just a bunch of self centered unhumans that really do not deserve to breath the air this planet provides. I say this because they are not on this planet for anyone or anything besides themselves or other unhumanoids that prescribe to their similar myopic perspective. FUCK THE GOP!!!! And country electronic music SUCKS.
Don’t look now, but Seattle is being performative again.
In this case it is Harrell who is requiring City employees that don’t need to be in the office, to perform their jobs in the office rather than from home. Greenhouse gas emissions in the City are rising as a result.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/seattle-carbon-emissions-tick-up-after-pandemic-dip/
@14
Thank You avaragebob
for your informed Counter to
mr magoo’s insidious poo-pooing
of the nature of plagues & pandemics
it seems
we have a
Plague of Mis-
and Malinformationists
here @ tS ~ where the Devil’s The
Exterminator when one Needs them Most
@22 dammit there I go again
Thank You barth! for @14
Covid lockdowns were fine but let’s not pretend they didn’t get carried away a little bit
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/paddleboarder-arrested-in-malibu-for-refusing-to-exit-water/
@14, The preventable deaths from learning loss are rising and have still to reveal their full impact. People with lower educational outcomes have lower incomes, lower lifespans, more obesity, and disease.
Suicide mortality rises in recessions, and for up to a decade afterword. We caused a recession with the duration of the lockdowns.
If the virus gets through the population anyway, what difference does the speed with which it gets to everyone matter? Arguably it doesn’t. COVID was not like stable viruses such as Measles that can be stopped with a vaccine, or viruses like Ebola that can be stopped with isolation.
The issue wasn’t with the lockdowns or mandates per say. Initially, they were prudent while public health authorities studied and assessed COVID. It was continuing with them when the science developed enough to tell us that the benefits of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, weren’t worth the costs.
For example, scientists knew in approximately June of 2020 that children were highly inefficient vectors of COVID and that COVID symptoms in children were mild. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/2/e2020004879/36879/COVID-19-Transmission-and-Children-The-Child-Is?autologincheck=redirected
Yet students did not return FULLY to the classroom until September of 2021 in Seattle. https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Return-to-in-person-v2-final-2021-22-5-12-21.pdf
@17, The ship doesn’t turn on a dime. I was willing to give Progressives many election cycles to implement programs to test their hypothesis. By the end of the third-cycle, time was up.
I’ll give Nelson, et. al. more than one cycle.
One thing they have done within the last quarter, is increase police hiring faster than attrition. Whether that has positive impacts on crime, and traffic deaths (most of which are non-criminal), remains to be seen. We have at least one good study that shows that increased traffic enforcement reduces traffic accidents by 11%. We currently don’t have a traffic enforcement unit in Seattle. The unit was disbursed to answer 911 calls.
@20, Your anecdotal experience was refuted by scientific study. See @25. It turns out kids were so inefficient at spreading COVID, that has the world been just a population of children, the reproductive rate of COVID would have likely been less than 1, and COVID would likely have died out on its own, without lockdowns.
Masks were a good strategy then, and continue to be for slowing the spread of COVID, flu, and even the common cold. So why not have a mask law every time we go out in COVID and outlaw bars and restaurants, where you must unmask to consume food and drink? Could it be that we have made the subjective judgment that limitation to being social and culinary joy is too high?
When did we have peak COVID hospitalization in the U.S.? March of 2022, three months after COVID vaccines became available and as immunization rates were peaking. It was after most knockdowns were relaxed, perhaps demonstrating the efficacy of lockdowns, yet neither Inslee or the CDC were seeking to reimpose peak lockdown.
Learning loss was going to happen no matter what because there was a high-fatality novel virus circulating with no population immunity. We had the choice of proactively closing schools and setting up remote-learning protocols or reactively closing schools due to outbreaks, staff fatalities, and a substitute shortage, with no remote learning. You can’t just pretend the deadly contagion isn’t there and go about your business. Voluntary school closures were the best option and it’s not even close.
Though children are more likely to experience mild or asymptomatic disease they still carry high viral loads that are contagious to others. Kids bring the virus home to their families where people are less likely to take precautions. As a general rule household transmission is the greatest amplifier of any respiratory virus for this reason.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/more-70-us-household-covid-spread-started-child-study-suggests
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/2/e2020004879/36879/COVID-19-Transmission-and-Children-The-Child-Is?autologincheck=redirected
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10161681/
@27 then explain to me why every time I caught covid (and it has been three times to this date) I caught it from my kids? It’s not the survivability of kids, it is the transference of the virus from kids to more vulnerable populations. And i like how you have used arguments of would have and should have. That is not factual statistics. I could say a lot would be so if this would have or should have happened. But we didn’t know, so we exercised on side of caution to protect those most vulnerable. I love how so much of your opinion stems from an idea that only those who deserve your respect are those who are privileged enough to be healthy and strong. Teachers and healthcare workers are vulnerable as well, we lost nurses and doctors early on because we didn’t have the knowledge or tools to prevent the spread. As the vaccine became available and widely applied to the population then we could relax the restrictions. Yet we still played it safe, because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. They knew there would be a surge in infection after they relaxed restrictions but felt confident fatalities would be less because we could treat it better. They warned people who were more vulnerable to still use caution and likely abstain from the public as best they can. But they let people get infected because it had to happen. We still lost a lot of people and that is because people who shouldn’t have been out and about were out and about, got infected and required serious hospital care. These people also took beds and resources from people who needed beds for non-covid related medical emergencies. And a lot of those people died too because other people wouldn’t act well and do the goodly moral thing of staying out of public as best they could. It’s not easy to drive a herd, to put it into metaphor, but driving a herd moves the body as a whole and you bring those astray back into the group. It’s not easy, and it has to be simple for the sake of moving forward toward the goal. Trying to survive a pandemic is like trying to win a battle. The army that survives is the one that works best as a group and acts as a group. Whether that be the virus or the people, but one side will win and I think we did OK. Wars/battles are expensive, so yeah we were economically screwed at the end. And blah blah blah…. I digress.
@29, He’s misinterpreting the science. It’s true the first strain of covid was less transmissible by kids (not true for subsequent strains), but less is not zero, and there are adults in schools, too.
A less transmissible virus that is highly contagious is still highly contagious, especially when you multiply that by millions of children. It’s just an interesting scientific artifact, not something to base your school closure policies on.
@28
“We had the choice of proactively closing schools and setting up remote-learning protocols or reactively closing schools due to outbreaks, staff fatalities, and a substitute shortage, with no remote learning.’
and we had
The eltrumpfster
Desperate to keep
‘his’ Economy afloat
regardless of its insidious
Impact on His Citizenry. this
is the Dif between Re- and Pro-
Gressives & the former’ll Fight Like Hell
for the Profiteeeing Class over We, the Peeps’s
very Lives — see also: Drill, bitches. fucking DRILL.
“You can’t
just pretend
the deadly contagion
isn’t there and go about your business.”
yeah.
ya Can.
@29
that’s a great comment
from the Front Lines
thank you, HDF!
Perhaps some of our right-wing friends have forgotten that during the Covid crisis, the emergency rooms were Full of People! The hospitals were at the breaking point of capacity.
And as to ‘the kids won’t be harmed, so why did we close the schools’ argument goes, there were many wage-earning adults who could Not Take Even One Day off of work, so they were extremely concerned that they would lose household income if he got sick.
the COVID -19 Deathbed Denials
of the MAGAs was magnificent
Testament to the malignancy
of the Misinformationists
now Emboldened by the
Return of the Golden
Huckster. this Bird
Flu — if he gets
His way may be
oodles Worse
than COVID
Hannah writes “unelected bureaucrat and evil billionaire Elon Musk” after numerous X posts and her and other TS writers personal commitment to zombie twitter (which puts money in said unelected bureaucrat and evil billionaire Elon Musk‘s pocket)
Break the cycle of codependency
@8
Over coming the years of the operant conditioning as a result of clicking “Continue reading” is difficult. But I have been clicking on the title more often than not now. Doubtless that they will change the article template again at some point just to fuck with us.
Peace 2U Kristo & Barth and other Stranger folk. Lest we forget…. So that others may live.
@30. Progressive OSPI Reykdal tried to reopen schools bases on that data. He discovered he only had authority in law to close schools, not reopen them.
He could understand the learning loss that was likely occcuring and the long lasting adverse impact.
What happened with the public health response was Plan Continuation Bias.
https://dictionary.apa.org/plan-continuation-bias
” Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz…love note” As my wise old daddy used to say, “Promise her anything, but never put it in writing.” (“Promise her anything, but give her Arpège.” was a parfum commercial in the 1950s.)
@29, Kids had the lowest ability of any human population to transmit the virus. 8% in the Swiss study.
What took place was Plan Continuation Bias in the public health and publicly elected executive communities.
Plan Continuation Bias is a subconscious predisposition to continue with the plan initially adopted, even when new information shows its no longer the most appropriate action.
I don’t fault where public health started. I fault them for not backing off stuff once new scientific information showed there was less public health benefit to initial actions, and not weighing the public health costs. They never seem to have seriously said to themselves, “Plan Continuation Bias is real. Are we engaging in it?
It just shows that public health is not superhuman and fall victim to the same problems as the rest of us.
Gee, I wonder who’s more trustworthy and knowledgeable about the subject matter in this debate. A scientist and a professional healthcare worker, each of whom went to school for and dedicated their professional lives to the topic at hand, or some dipshit who works in real estate and has had 60+ of his profiles here banned for repeatedly lying, posting misinformation and other violations of the community guidelines. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m quite miffed!
@39, 8% of what?
It’s ok to admit you don’t know everything. People won’t think less of you for accepting the limitations of your knowledge. Quite the contrary, humility makes you more relatable, and everyone can smell your bullshit from miles away. It’s very easy to tell when someone is out of their depth.
Love is hate
War is peace
No is yes
We’re all free
— Tracy Chapman
@41,
“It’s ok to admit you don’t know everything.”
That won’t ever happen. He’ll argue and regurgitate those same previously refuted points relentlessly and eternally. Even once irrefutably proven wrong, he’ll just get dumber and start on with his philosophical nonsense, noting that since something can’t come from nothing, there can BE no right or wrong, no moral or immoral, no conditions under which his misinformation can be disproven.
It’s all completely ridiculous, but also pretty funny. He’s very much the rhetorical equivalent of the Black Knight from Monty Python, flailing around pointlessly with no arms, legs, or legitimate reasons to continue the endeavor, nevertheless screaming into the void, hopelessly desperate for validation of his superior intellect.
@mike
which is why
I always skip ahead
to see whose words they are
if it’s Kneal or wormmy d13r saxguy I’ll
likely take a pass. which is why everyone
needs an Avatar even if it’s Only an asshole* ~
it makes the Skipping so much more Convenient
banning mis- &
malinformationists
is a very GOOD thing.
protect the herd
maybe ai can
Help
*see
duckfart
@19 COMTE: +1 for the WIN!! Bravo, kudos, and well said. This had to be pointed out and you NAILED it.
How many times since Barack Obama’s two terms have Republicans pushed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and senselessly yelled about birth certificates, when we could have gotten a shitload more accomplished instead had there been more unification for the common good?
@44 kristofarian: Right on, kris. I have been following your example to not feed the trolls.
This works for me, too.
@33 kristofarian: Unfortunately, yes—especially with known anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. heading the Health Department and CDC. Many of us should be dropping like flies soon.
I have friends employed in public school districts who will become very vulnerable to the unvaccinated.
I agree: what lies ahead will make the COVID-19 pandemic look like child’s play by comparison.
Wow. In the Orange Turd’s desperation to “own the libs” as promised to all its rabid MAGA tools, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos now own the Orange Turd.
Batshit Crazy at its glaringly fascist worst since Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
And the hits just keep oooon COMIN’!
In an ideal world, I believe that true justice for Jaahnavi would have SPD shit stain Kevin Dave getting creamed by a hit-and-run driver. And then the driver backed up and hit him again.