::snip::

The slowdown from June's inflation print suggests the demand boom seen through reopening could be petering out. Inflation soared to decade-highs through the spring and summer as vaccination helped the US reverse lockdowns. Economic activity rebounded, but where demand quickly shot higher, producers struggled to keep up. Bottlenecks and shortages left suppliers on the back foot, and the resulting gap between businesses' supply and Americans' demand drove prices higher.

Where inflation accelerated the most hints at a future slowdown. Sectors associated with reopening and the direst supply shortages saw prices leap the fastest. Used car prices leaped at least 7.3% for three months in a row before rising just 0.2% in July, according to the CPI report. Airline tickets, fuel, and service businesses also counted for much of the overshoot.

Since the categories are so closely linked to reopening, it's likely inflation will cool off as supply chains heal and demand wanes, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a July 28 press conference.

"Essentially all of the overshoot can be tied to a handful of categories. It isn't the kind of inflation that's spread broadly across the economy," he said. "And each of those has a story attached to it that is really about the reopening of the economy."

::snip::

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pce-inflation-july-price-growth-supply-shortages-demand-economic-data-2021-8



I never did agree that Biden's program or government spending were to blame for the recent higher inflation. Supply shortages and pent-up demand had much more to do with it.

Source: CNN

Arizona's sham election 'audit' report delayed after Cyber Ninjas CEO and others test positive for Covid-19

(CNN)The report detailing the findings of contractors who conducted Arizona's sham "audit" of last year's election results -- which had been expected Monday -- will be late because three of the five members of the auditing team have tested positive for coronavirus, the state's Republican Senate leader says.

Cyber Ninjas Chief Executive Officer Doug Logan, whose firm was hired by the Republican-led Arizona Senate to audit the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County in 2020's presidential race, and two other members of the five-person audit team tested positive "and are quite sick," Senate President Karen Fann said in a statement.

Logan and other members of his team were often seen during the recount process without masks. It is not clear whether those who tested positive had been vaccinated. CNN reached out to Cyber Ninjas requesting comment.

Elections experts in both parties have said for months that results of the "audit" -- pushed for by Republican lawmakers and conducted by the Florida-based company, which had no experience auditing election results and whose chief executive, Logan, has repeated wild conspiracy theories about election fraud -- will not be credible.


Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/23/politics/arizona-election-audit-report-delayed-cyber-ninjas-covid/index.html

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1467002/Gamma-variant-covid-vaccine-efficiency-Dominic-cummings-Boris-johnson-contingency-plan

(news from the UK)

::snip:::

"It also comes as the Gamma variant was recorded in Russia, raising fears that it could soon spread to the rest of the world.

In its paper, the CDC (UK)
released a study of miners who caught the variant while working in a gold mine in French Guiana.

Of the 44 people working at the mine 42 miles from Cayenne, 55 percent of the employees were infected.

Among the infected, the attack rate was 60 percent among fully vaccinated miners and 75 percent among unvaccinated miners without a history of infection, it said."
::snip::

=======================

Well, this is extremely disturbing-- what we all feared-- a new COVID variant that seems to very aggressively infect vaccinated people...

Just what we don't need here.. as if 'Delta' was not bad enough...

I presume people flying into our country have to pass a covid test before we let them in?

With the possible "lag time", is that enough??

This new variant appears to have the ability to make all our vaccination efforts "for naught".



Our own CDC never should have given the green-light to "no masking for vaccinated people"...

This is the first time I've heard of the "Gamma variant". The story appeared on a news app that I use on my phone...
anybody have more information on it ?



EDIT: Some in the thread have suggested the source is a "British tabloid" and that the story may have been "sensationalized". I don't know. By posting this, I was not intending to "fear-monger"-- what I read only seemed to be important and new, and about a "variant" which I had as yet never heard of...

God knows I hope this report proves to be totally inaccurate and fucked up.... but I'm not a scientist or a doctor or anything except scared of covid. Let the buyer beware.

In a surprising take, conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot encouraged states to start mandating that residents take the COVID-19 vaccine.

Writing Monday, Boot said that it's time to stop pleading and start mandating, and he cited data showing that 99 percent of those in the hospital with COVID-19 are unvaccinated as justification to start getting tough.

But Boot didn't only lay the dangers at the feet of red states ballooning with COVID-19 cases. He spread the blame around.

"There is vaccine hesitancy among many different sectors of the population, including reckless youths, granola liberals who believe in alternative medicines and African Americans who distrust the health-care system," he wrote. "Some are still persuadable, but many are not. As I've previously noted, the biggest obstacle to vaccination is now Republicans who are being fed a steady diet of anti-vaxxer propaganda by Fox 'News' Channel, Facebook and other social media, and reckless demagogues such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)."

read more:
https://www.rawstory.com/conservative-wants-vaccine-mandates/

(He was an Obama supporter years ago, but somehow felt that Obama failed us-- I never got a clear explanation on that. However--)
He is also something of an evangelical christian. I presume he watches Faux, or something worse-- I often see him posting their current "talking points" nowadays...

Anyway, his most recent incursion was to post this meme, with a picture of the young actor from 'The Office', I forget his name... lol
that said, paraphrased, 'if you read critical race theory, and take every word that says "white", and replace it with "black", and it sounds racist, then it was racist from the beginning'

I responded 'But it was in fact whites who enslaved blacks, beating, raping, and killing them with impunity, because they were not even recognized as human beings having any rights under US law, and that was codified with the Dred Scot decision. Your meme is only playing games with words, in order to justify the position of those who want to "white-wash" history. Further, there is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching the real facts about American history, even if it were being offered to younger students, which it isn't'


Well, we went back and forth with this for a couple days.... He bemoaned the station of African-Americans down the street and claimed that liberals had done nothing for them, and I replied with the obvious that 'they were helped by the Biden COVID assistance bills, just like everyone else of lower incomes, and perhaps they need more help, but the rightwing will never allow it' and on and on.

I also pointed out that the whole CRT controversy was ginned up by the right to "work their base into a lather", since it is a false issue (among many other false issues), and no "elementary schools" are teaching CRT since it is a college and graduate school course, and they just want to excite their base with this and other false issues "because they have nothing positive to offer that would help the American people."

We went back and forth on this, and a little more tonight--

I was trying to respond again, when he deleted his own thread, so that I could respond no further. LOL!!!!



I was very surprised when he did that-- but it is obviously a victory! LMAO

So I have done my own small part, to improve Facebook

LOL or whatever time...

I suspect the majority of us are approaching 'elderly' status. if not there already, like our politicians.
Many probably keep 'banker's hours'.


I am a "night-owl", still, a habit partly induced by employment in my youth...

I make countless posts in the middle of the night, with nary a single response. lol.

I know, there will probably be some tomorrow... I do not begrudge you your sleep... (he says, lol)

I just hate it when it seems as if I am the only one awake here. lol




GQP fascism keeps me awake at night..

but general discussion seems the most active group.

What old movies have you been watching lately?

https://democraticunderground.com/100215590137

I have a huge collection. I am a big fan of the films of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart...

However, anticipating the 4th of July I have been watching things somewhat more recent, but still old now.

"Mississippi Burning" ~ because of dwelling on how Republicans are trying to squash voting rights...


and with thinking upon the sacrifices made by our fighting men and women, who sought to safeguard our freedom (whether the context may have been right or mistaken),

"Full Metal Jacket"
and
"Saving Private Ryan" (which I may consider to be the greatest war movie of all time-- with all the varnish off)


What are you watching lately?

when I go into stores and such. I think it is still too soon for them to be coming off, and thought so before the W.H.O. said so. I am sorry that my own governor in Michigan seems to have worn out under all the anti-mask pressure, and let that requirement lapse.

"Only the un-vaccinated need to wear masks?" Those were all the people who have resisted it from the beginning. Do I now expect they will be honest about it? No, I do not.

Anyway, I'm used to wearing it, and there seems to have been a side benefit. I usually gets colds or flu a couple times a year... and I have not caught anything since this whole thing started. Sometimes when I got sick, I was befuddled as to how I had been exposed, as I had hardly been around anyone... My conclusion was that I caught it at the grocery store, perhaps from germs left on a shopping cart. Now of course I have been sanitizing hands and cart handles... I may be vaccinated for COVID, but I have not had a flu vaccine in years...

So, will the anti-maskers support my "freedom" to keep wearing my mask?

They may think I am making some "political statement" by keeping it on. If so, they are partly right.

The other part is to protect myself from them-- as the vaccine is not a 100-percent solution.

(Inspired by the tornado warnings today, changing a comment to an OP)

I'm on Lansing's northside. Spent the afternoon in the basement, due to the tornado warnings-- which was really no change as I made my main living space down here after moving in last fall, until remodeling upstairs is completed. I am a mostly lifelong resident of Lansing, except for some brief periods living in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona. (The rainless lightning-storms out there are an interesting phenom, but I digress..)

When I was a child, I remember well being herded to the basement, whenever the tornado sirens (as I thought of them) would go off and there was a "tornado warning" , except for every first Saturday of the month at 1pm when they are tested...

(Little did I understand at the time that the sirens were initially intended for use in case of nuclear war.... Once I had learned the facts about that and the possibilities for nuclear war, and the fact that Lansing was designated as a "tertiary target" because of being the state capitol , the civil defense sirens often gave me a little shiver when they would go off. I remember one time I was driving by Sparrow hospital where one of the horns was located, at the time of the monthly test, and it nearly blew me out of the car, lol. They were not terribly loud at my current location today.)

Anyway, my family was quite religious about taking cover when hearing the sirens, or radio alerts of a tornado warning...and staying there until the 'all clear' was issued. In those days, our AM radio played all day long. This only changed in one instance...

It was sometime around 1970, when a tornado struck which did damage to the Lansing airport on the city's northwest edge, which was about 5 miles away from our family home on the south side. (I tried to google this event, but as it long predated the internet, I could not find anything. Perhaps more skilled searchers could find something.) We must have been in the basement initially... but my parents, who clearly must have been informed about the tornado's actual location, said 'come on upstairs, and we will take a look'

We went upstairs and on out onto the front porch... There was no rain in this instance, at least not where we were. The air was deathly still.

To the north and slightly to the west, we could see the tornado coming down from the sky. In those days, the trees were very small and did not block the view, as that residential section was only about 10 years old at the time...

It was huge.... and it did not appear to be moving. It stretched from the clouds down to the lower limit of the horizon. The perspective made it seem as if it were only a quarter-mile away or less, but it was 5 miles. Unlike all the real or "computer generated" tornados I have since seen on film, it was an amazing shade of blue, maybe a dark aqua, almost like a waterspout.

We stayed out there looking at it, for about 5 minutes or more. Other neighbors were out on their front porches doing the same thing. We just stood and stared, in awe.

It was the most beautiful thing that I ever saw.