Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 24. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I would be leaving Mother Jones at the end of the month and going back to blogging at my own site. That site is now up and running, and you can get a sneak peek here:

https://jabberwocking.com/

There’s nothing there yet except a few old posts that I copied over for testing purposes. However, comments are open on the top post, so head on over if you want to get a head start on registering (which requires only an email address for now) and making sure that comments work properly. If you notice any bugs anywhere on the site, leave a note in comments and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

I’ve posted before about vaccination rates in the US and Europe, but here’s the same thing charted in a somewhat different way:

This is a log chart, which means that a straight line indicates exponential growth. As long as the line for the US remains straight, it means that every day we’re vaccinating more people than we did the day before. Right now, our cumulative total (as a percent of population) is about a week behind Britain, while Europe is about two weeks behind us. All three, however, are so far on similar straight line paths, which means everyone is vaccinating more people every day.

This won’t last forever, of course. At some point the system hits capacity and growth slows. Or, in this case, we will probably be slowed down by supplies of vaccine. Still, our growth rate is about the same as Britain and Europe and our absolute percentage is quite a bit higher than Europe. That’s not so bad for an enterprise that everyone warned beforehand was by far the most complex vaccination effort in history.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 23. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

It is raining and deeply overcast here in Southern California. Despite this, a hummingbird flitted by my window shining as if surrounded by a halo of sunlight. How is this possible? I don’t know, but here it is:

And for our bird people, who are always asking for multiple views, my little friend swung back a few minutes later to show off its back markings:

Ken Cedeno - Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA

I have been browsing many articles over the past few days that ponder the question of whether Joe Biden will be able to get his legislative agenda through Congress. They are all nuanced and carefully written, which means they are all wrong. Here is the answer:

No. Republicans in the Senate will block just about everything and Democrats don’t have the votes to end the filibuster.

I don’t know how much clearer Republicans need to be about this. They are not going to vote to convict Donald Trump.¹ They are not going to pass a huge coronavirus bill. They are not going to raise the minimum wage to $15. They are going to do exactly what they did in 2009: oppose everything.

Nor is there anything really unusual about this. Historically, Democratic presidents can pass significant legislation only if they come to office with big majorities in Congress. Obama had that for a little while. LBJ had it for a couple of years. FDR had it for his entire first term. Ditto for Woodrow Wilson. Bill Clinton didn’t have it and he struggled. Obama got little done after 2010. And Biden has both the thinnest possible majority and a Republican Party more opposed to passing Democratic legislation than any we’ve ever seen.

So that’s that. Biden might be able to pass a few things via reconciliation. He might be able to swing a few modest deals in the annual appropriations bill. But that’s it.

Any other questions?

¹I’m almost inclined to weasel on this since we don’t know what further outrages we will discover over the next few weeks about Trump’s actions to overturn the election results. But no. I suspect we could have video evidence of Trump trying to personally deliver a bag of cash to the Georgia attorney general and that still wouldn’t garner 17 Republican votes for conviction in the Senate.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 22. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The Wall Street Journal reports that people in Wuhan are bitter about how authorities handled the coronavirus last year:

There are signs that authorities are rattled by the initial outpouring of anger in Wuhan, where people suffered the worst horrors of the pandemic. Censors have clamped down on criticism of the early response. A citizen journalist who covered the pandemic in Wuhan, Zhang Zhan, was sentenced to four years in prison in December after being accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

Welp, that would be one way to handle our Twitter and Facebook problem. Half the people who use them would be in prison.

When Hopper hops onto my lap and rolls over for a tummy rub, I usually don’t have my camera handy. A few days ago, though, I did. This is what it looks like, up close and personal.

Here’s something unexpected that I ran across by accident. Despite the fact that Black people have lower flu vaccination rates and higher hospitalization rates compared to white people, their death rate is consistently lower:

This is a huge contrast with COVID-19, which the CDC estimates is nearly three times more deadly for Black people compared to white people:

I wonder what accounts for this huge difference?