According to Worldometer data, the US Covid death toll is now at 924,000. Last year, on June 1, 2021 the US death toll was 615,000. That’s the minimum number of deaths we could have suffered prior to the widespread availability of Covid vaccines in the US.
That 600,000± pre-vaccine death toll is comparable to the deaths that occurred in the Civil War. We’ve studied the Civil War for generations, although it’s doubtful that the Republican Right wants America to study all that much about Covid. On to cartoons.
As someone (?) once said, it takes a village, and we don’t have one:
The Olympics are on TV. Should we watch? Views differ:
Supreme Court nominations of women through time:
Biden’s alternate nominating strategy:
Trump doesn’t care who knows:
Putin and Biden ridin’ around the Ukraine speedway:
The NYT said on Saturday that portions of the Russian army near Ukraine have reached full combat strength. No one knows what will happen next, but there seem to be two likely outcomes. First, that any conflict is limited to Ukraine territory or second, that it moves beyond Ukraine to other parts of Europe.
If it goes beyond Ukraine’s borders, we could quickly find ourselves again on the threshold of nuclear war, since that’s a red line for NATO. But Russia also has other cards to play. They could launch massive cyber-attacks on the US, attacking and disabling our power grids, communications systems, and/or our financial system.
We would try to do the same inside Russia.
Wrongo isn’t trying to spread fear. He’s expressing the hope that we can get past all of the hollow political posturing and take a cold, hard look at what we’re truly trying to achieve if we decide on military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.
In a sense, the world changed on Friday when China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin met in Beijing. Their joint statement is unequivocal. China & Russia are now explicitly willing to at least challenge or possibly replace, Pax Americana, in Eurasia.
Borrowing from ancient history, in 560 BC, King Croesus was considering war on Persia. He consulted the Oracle at Delphi. Famously, the Oracle’s forecast was “If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire”. Let’s hope that Biden is receiving less ambiguous advice.
The cartoon on Clarence Thomas is precisely right. This petulant man has had a chip on his shoulder since Day One. He is perhaps the best example of why there should be a term limit on Supreme Court Justices. Why should there be term limits on elected officials but not on unelected ones? “In office for life” applies to dictators. Except they are always at risk of violent death.