/Links 12/15/2020

Links 12/15/2020


Digital technology reveals secrets of UK’s earliest dinosaur Guardian (Kevin W)

Critical temperature for tropical tree lifespan revealed PhysOrg (Chuck L)

Excellent year for ‘wild ice’ skating on northern Minnesota lakes MPR. Chuck L: “More re the unusual cold but snowless winter in northern MN. This piece includes some awesome photos.”

Solving a Long-Standing Mystery About the Sun: How Stored Magnetic Energy Heats Solar Atmosphere SciTechDaily (furzy)

Don’t Use Or Buy Metal Grill Brushes The Worst Things for Sale. News you can use!

Tome raiders: solving the great book heist Guardian (Anthony L)

Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other services go down in multiple countries TechCrunch (furzy).

Powerhouse plants that bolster the food web PhysOrg (Chuck L)

#COVID-19

Stefano Boeri designs prefab vaccination pavilions to be rolled out across 1,500 Italian squares Dezeen (resilc)

Science/Medicine

‘Shocking and Alarming’: Indian Hospital Warns About Deadly Fungus in Recovered COVID Patients Sputnik (guurst). Just because screechy headline does not mean this not big time bad.

Diverse Functional Autoantibodies in Patients with COVID-19 MedRxiv

Virtually all children infected with COVID-19 show signs of blood vessel damage, study shows Study Finds

WTF, why weren’t they tested?

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock says a new coronavirus strain may be spreading faster than the original, but scientists aren’t so sure Business Insider (Kevin W)

WHO Epidemiologist: “Only with Vaccination of Younger People Will Number of Cases Decrease” Der Spiegel (resilc)

Are we out of the woods yet? Bruegel. Key section:

Four in 10 doctors in Belgium, the country where I reside, are not themselves keen to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Similar results have been found also in the UK. It is likely that such concerns exist in other countries as well.

These doctors are not vaccine deniers. Their objection is that the vaccine, despite all the money, effort and best science dedicated to it, has simply not passed the test of time.

UK/Europe

Covid-19: Greenwich Council ordered to keep schools open BBC (Kevin W)

The Netherlands to go into 5-week lockdown Politico

Italy likely to follow Germany with Covid Christmas lockdown Guardian

US

Hunger spikes, demand rises for US food banks BBC (furzy)

Latest updates as President not ‘scheduled’ to take Covid vaccine Independent (furzy). Don’t get this as a point of interest. He got Covid, remember? He should have immunity for a while, so him getting a shot theoretically deprives someone else. And because he had Covid, he presumably won’t have any reaction, while it looks like a fair number of other people will. If the idea is to show confidence, he could have Melania or Ivanka take it.

Finance/Economy

More U.S. Homeowners Seek to Delay Mortgage Payments Bloomberg

“Amazing” Hypocrisy: Democrats Make Wreck of Covid-19 Relief Negotiations Matt Taibbi

Plastic surgery is up during the pandemic Washington Post (resilc)

Pandemic Failure, Vaccine Success Indict American Monopoly Capitalism Juan Cole

Pandemic stalls Indonesia’s push to escape middle-income trap Nikkei

China?

China’s ‘tainted’ cotton BBC. Underlying source has a blatantly partisan name, but one assumes that the BBC has vetted (as in read the Chinese) in the underlying records provided in the report.

Biden’s choice for US trade representative signals anti-China stance WSWS

In Latin America, a Biden White House faces a rising China Reuters

China has banned Australian coal in a huge escalation of the trade war, state media reports Business Insider Australia Business Insider (Kevin W)

Brexit (tweets below from guurst)

EU sees ‘narrow path’ to Brexit deal in coming days Politico

New Cold War

CNN-Bellingcat investigation identifies Russian specialists who trailed Putin’s nemesis Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned CNN (Kevin W). So now Bellingcat has been elevated by the MSM. Charming.

Syraqistan

The Latest Phony ‘Peace’ Deal Is Stoking Conflict American Conservative (resilc)

Bibi wants Biden to bend the knee Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Trump Transition

William Barr steps down as Trump’s attorney general Guardian (Kevin W)

Foreign Workers Ban Has Left U.S. Schools With Teacher Shortages Intercept

Speculation swirls over Ivanka Trump’s potential run for US Senate in Florida Guardian

2020

Trump Allies Want ‘Alternative Electors’ to Declare Him Winner of the Electoral College Vice

Michigan GOP Rep Stripped of Panels After Threat to Biden Electors at Lansing Statehouse Daily Beast (furzy)

Biden

President-elect Biden Remarks on Electoral College Vote C-SPAN (Kevin W)

Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists? CounterPunch. Resilc: “It’s called market development for DoD/CIA

How do we hold the traitors to democracy accountable? Washington Post (furzy). Yet they don’t hold themselves accountable for the attempted coup of Russiagate? I sense way too much of this sort of thing on both sides: “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.” Pol Pot

Gunz

Floridian Offers Novel Reason For Carrying AR-15 The Smoking Gun (resilc)

Our Famously Free Press

A record breaking number of journalists arrested in the U.S. this year Freedom of the Press Foundation (Tom H)

Florida COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones tells podcast she ‘knew Gov. DeSantis would go after her’ before cops raided her home, says staff are ‘purged for being disloyal’, and describes how deaths are deleted from stats Daily Mail

Police State Watch

Police Say Seizing Property Without Trial Helps Keep Crime Down. A New Study Shows They’re Wrong. ProPublica (resilc)

Exclusive: Read Elizabeth Warren’s Scathing Report on “Corrupt” Prison Audits Mother Jones

Defund Campus Police Slate

EU to unveil landmark law curbing power of tech giants DW

Reith Lectures 2020 – How We Get What We Value Mark Carney BBC. JHR: “Mark Carney has already delivered the first two lectures, the third is this week.” From the BBC site:

Mark Carney’s Reith Lectures will chart how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies. He argues that this has contributed to a trio of crises: of credit, Covid and climate. And the former Bank of England governor will outline how we can turn this around.

Beware The ‘Post-War Hangover’ From Misguided Government Belt Tightening Heisenberg Report (resilc)

Class Warfare

WaPo Reporter Accuses NewsGuild of Sexual Misconduct Cover-Up – California Respiratory Therapists Strike – N.C. McDonald’s Workers Fed Up Mike Elk

Mark Zuckerberg, Venture-Capital Radical American Conservative (resilc)

Blackstone CEO Celebrates “Huge Increases in Rents” as Millions Face Eviction Jacobin (resilc). Lambert featured the underlying story yesterday, but in case you missed it….

Uber, DoorDash Raising Prices in California to Fund Driver Perks Bloomberg

From Chuck L. Trust me, read the thread:

Antidote du jour. Tracie H: “Weedy Sea Dragon at the Aquarium of the Pacific”:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here

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