The Civilian Reserve Air Fleet has been activated to help evacuate refugees, US staff, and assets from Afghanistan. Multiple airlines are responding to the call. The fleet will not be used in Kabul, but in safer, interim transit locations:
We have been called to duty under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet to support the emergency evacuation of Kabul, Afghanistan. We are proud to join the U.S. DoD & our fellow air carriers in the humanitarian effort to bring to the U.S. our citizens & the Afghans who supported them. pic.twitter.com/J5sLvZf75U
— Hawaiian Airlines (@HawaiianAir) August 22, 2021
We know fentanyl is a problem, and we know it’s tainting opiates on the street. It’s also tainting non-opiate street drugs, like meth and cocaine. Overdoses are exploding because of fentanyl-laced drugs. The pandemic may have contributed to deaths by overdose because social distancing created an environment where fewer people were around to administer Narcan to those who had overdosed.
The price of wood seems to have waned—time to get back to construction and wood-working.
Remember the old man who was living off grid for decades but wound up arrested and homeless in New Hampshire? The CEO of Palantir has donated $180,000 to help house him.
Tens of thousands are without power as Henri hits the Northeast. Henri has now weakened to a tropical depression. New York saw record rainfall.
There was massive flooding in Tennessee after heavy rain—22 are dead. 20 of the 22 deaths happened in Waverly. 40 people are still missing.
The Middle East is running out of water, and some places have already been made uninhabitable. Jordan is under significant water stress. Groundwater in Jordan is becoming increasingly scarce.
In order to keep the grid running, California may have to revert to fossil fuels this summer. This is also happening in the context of the shuttering of multiple nuclear power and even non-nuclear power plants.
There’s a large recall for Chevy Bolts. Correcting the battery defects on every Bolt ever made will cost nearly $2 billion:
GM recalls every Chevy Bolt ever made, blames LG for faulty batteries https://t.co/H2BEZCOycm
— Jennifer Ouellette (@JenLucPiquant) August 23, 2021
Wildfires spew particulate matter in the air, and this causes moisture to coalesce around the particles. What does this mean? It spurs fluffy, extra-white clouds that don’t want to let go of their moisture. When the clouds do eventually give rain, it pours.
Trump’s border wall has been devastated by flooding. When climate-change-induced natural disasters are not modeled and used in drafting massive infrastructure plans, those plans don’t tend to work out.
There’s more shelf scarcity now than spring of 2020, and hoarding is not the cause this time. Labor shortages and lingering logistics problems are the current drivers.
Rents are skyrocketing across the country as everyone struggles with housing. New buyers are losing out to investors paying cash for properties, forcing people to keep renting when they’d prefer to buy. Renters are struggling to make rent during the pandemic, and landowners can’t get rent in on time. It’s a viscous price-gouging circle, and nobody wins but the folks laundering wealth into property.
The world has over 213.2 million COVID cases. The world has gained 4.7 million cases in the last week. There have been nearly 4.5 million deaths in total. The US has a cumulative 38.7 million cases. Over 645,000 Americans have died. The US gained over 84,000 new cases on Sunday, and over 69,000 by late afternoon Monday. Over 830 people are dying per day (on average based on 7-day data) in the US, up from a daily average of 500 last week. The US, India, Brazil, and Russia currently have the highest daily case gain in the world. Delta remains the dominant global variant.
So many hospitals are filled to capacity in the US that some patients are being air-lifted multiple states away just for a bed:
my wife is an ER physician in here in the Twin Cities. she told me that at one Minneapolis hospital, the last two ICU beds were filled last night by patients transferred in from Florida and Oklahoma because those beds were the nearest available ICU beds.
— Micah J. Murray (@micahjmurray) August 19, 2021
The need for oxygen is actually impacting the safety of water supplies in this country—residents of Orlando may need to be put on a boil water notice:
The city of #Orlando is asking residents to limit their water usage––not just for a few days, but "for weeks" (plural).
…Why?
Because the liquid oxygen used to purify their water supply is being diverted to #COVID19 patients during the ongoing surge: https://t.co/0o2NcBC0AF
— Dr. Maimuna Majumder (@maiamajumder) August 20, 2021
Veterinary Ivermectin use is causing a spike in calls to the Poison Control Center. The FDA has issued a statement reminding people that they are not livestock.
Schools have started, and Delta is burning its way through campuses, just like we knew it would:
This doesn't look goodhttps://t.co/809MIrQm7N pic.twitter.com/cwbq1IJwSS
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 20, 2021
The FDA has given full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine:
Today, FDA approved the first COVID-19 vaccine for the prevention of #COVID19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. https://t.co/iOqsxXV1fj
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 23, 2021
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