The US reported +347 new coronavirus deaths yesterday, bringing the total to 622,329. The 7-day moving average rose slightly to 221 deaths per day.
The US had +24,460 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 yesterday, bringing the total closer to 34.7 million. The 7-day moving average rose to 16,767 new cases per day, its highest level since June 1st.
Five US states reported over 1,000 new cases yesterday. Florida led the pack with nearly 4,000 new cases, followed by Texas with over 2,000. Missouri and Arkansas are becoming a new hot spot of rising cases.
Arkansas had over 1,000 new cases yesterday, its highest number since February 9.
Missouri had over 1,600 new cases yesterday, its highest number since February 3.
Missouri is one of the states with less than half its population vaccinated (43.7%). Neighboring Arkansas, also seeing a rise in cases, had only 39.0% vaccinated.
Nearby Mississippi (35.3%) and Alabama (36.0%) are noticeably vulnerable.
The US administered only 621,000 new vaccine shots today, bringing the total to 333 million, or 100.3 doses for every 100 people. The 7-day moving average fell to just 594,000 shots per day, its lowest level since January 10.
The number of Americans receiving their first vaccine shots continues to decline to levels not seen since the very beginning of the vaccine campaign in December, when vaccine supplies were severely limited.
64.7% are eligible Americans (ages 12 and up) have received at least one vaccine shot; 55.9% are now fully vaccinated.
Over 84 million American adults and nearly 16 million qualified children remain completely unvaccinated. Over 6 million of those >65 remain unvaccinated.
It appears that the race to achieve herd immunity via vaccination before the Delta variant got a foothold in the US has been lost. What the implications of that are remain to be seen.
For the moment, the US vaccination effort has slowed to a virtual standstill, not due to lack of supply but due to widespread vaccine skepticism.
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Cultural appropriation is how all cultures work. Pass it on.
I get a kick when people say "You can't serve sushi, that's cultural appropriation" when Japanese culture is masterful at appropriating and integrating foreign elements. Many things we think of as quintessentially Japanese, like Hello Kitty, are culturally appropriated.
Africans enslaved in America culturally appropriated the story of the Jews as told by white Christians and the result was inspiring and beautiful.
Biden’s full response (in the video) sounds to me like a textbook description of the kind of “foreign policy realism” a lot of critics of “forever wars” have been demanding.
In other words, a lot of bad things happen in a lot of countries around the world, but the US has to exercise some good sense about what it is realistically able to do about it, especially in terms of exercising military force.
These are words, by the way. Biden should be judged on policy, which is a lot more difficult to get right, not words. But the words themselves are not objectionable, as some are trying to portray.
If China invaded Taiwan, and President Biden sent US forces to defend it, what would the Fox News/Newsmax narrative be? I am genuinely curious.
I suspect it would be that Biden's weakness invited the invasion, and that he was screwing up the conduct of the war (perhaps on purpose). Unlike with Putin, they couldn't openly side with China.
But I wonder how far it would go. Would it simply be scoring points off Biden, or would they actively oppose the war effort itself?
The reality is that the US is not driving the push for decoupling and confrontation now. Beijing is.
Some are responding "for some time now". Not true, in my view. The 2008 crisis definitely altered Beijing's view of the US for the worse, but even during Trump's trade war, China was looking for ways to deescalate. This changed in 2019, and solidified in 2020.
You can say "deescalate on their own terms" and that's absolutely correct. But the shift towards China seeing decoupling as an objective is of much more recent vintage, the past two years or so. And I think it's a very alarming trend.
Preoccupied with the coming July 4 weekend last Friday, I didn't do a download of the June employment report. So I'll rectify that, before any more time goes by.
The US economy added +850,000 new jobs in June. That is still -6.8 million jobs below February 2020.
The unemployment rate rose slightly in June to 5.9%.
Tucker did. Even if someone in the US government were aware of Tucker's conversations being intercepted, they (properly) didn't make it public in an attempt to cast aspersions on him. Tucker is the only reason we've heard anything about this.
If Tucker had been "unmasked" for political motives, you'd think we'd have heard about Tucker's calls from someone who wanted to use it to damage him. But we didn't. We heard about it solely from Tucker.
If the US government overhears you talking to foreign agents, doesn't make it public, and maybe - I don't know if this happened or not - privately tells you you've been picked up and might want to be more careful who you talk to, that doesn't strike me as a political hit job.