Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2387 - MY BLOG VACATION 2021 - GONE FISHIN'
And so, it's time for a vacation.
Because of my jobs (yes, JOBS), I rarely have times when there's NO WORK just less work.
Because I did not have PARK SUMMER CLASSES, I did have some time in June this year with no classes running, but I had PREP and a training, so I was not work free.
Basically, I am only work free for the last two weeks of December and very beginning of January every year.
I had planned a trip from Thursday, September 02 through the following Wednesday, September 08. That trip has been canceled because of the DELTA VARIANT and the fact that the destination -- KC, MO -- is a major hot spot for COVID infections.
But that's no reason not to still take a vacation.
I had already planned a blog vacation, and so I am still taking.
With my commitment to DAILY POSTS, I am never ceasing my blog work -- unless I ever decided to stop for some reason or am incapacitated, and even then I would catch up once conscious -- and so I vacation just means that I set up simple and easy posts ahead of time, publish them ahead of time, and for the most part do not push them through to social media.
And so, today starts that vacation for the next 20 days. Basically, three weeks. I am going into LOW POWER MODE.
For the next three weeks, I am going to alternate BLOG REPRINTS (both this blog and the T-shirts blog), old stuff from the archive that are simple shares (and already set up), and THAT ONE THING, which will probably just be some graphic from my folder of 3500+ items and a few lines of content about why I am sharing it.
So that's the dealio.
This is the last social media pushed post for three weeks (unless I change my mind).
Thanks for tuning in.
LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2108.31 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2251 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2386 - New Music Stuffs - GHOST BOX - PAUL WELLER - Musical Monday for 2108.30
So, I have been a big fan of GHOST BOX RECORDS for most of the last decade. I had saved a new notification that there was a new release -- Vaganten -- that I saved for exploration at a later time.
I had another post scheduled for today dedicated to the great WILLIAM ORBIT and the legacy of URB magazine, which I may split into two posts as URB and William Orbit are not all that related.
So I am looing around at the GHOST BOX site and I see a menu item for PAUL WELLER.
Ghost Box is very proud to present a new EP by Paul Weller. The eclecticism of his career goes without saying and in Ghost Box Weller finds the perfect home to explore his interest in experimental tape music and early electronics.
The four tracks here though are more than just experiments. Tape manipulation, field recordings and instrumental passages are artfully arranged to create a gently uncanny & psychedelic atmosphere.
The 7” EP is limited to 1000 copies and is pressed on heavyweight vinyl with beautiful gatefold sleeve artwork by Julian House. Greedbag customers are eligible for a free download version.
FAT POP ?? “Pop, in old money… you know what I mean?” The new album from Paul Weller was recorded in Spring 2020 whilst unable to hit the road and tour. Locked-down at Black Barn studios, Paul initially recorded vocals, piano and guitar on his own, before sending to the core band to add their parts remotely. Eventually the full band were able to reconvene as restrictions lifted and finish the record. Out May 14th & available to pre-order on multiple formats - including deluxe vinyl and deluxe CD, LTD picture disc, merch bundles & more… First track ‘Cosmic Fringes’ out now! Link in bio.
Vaganten, the new LP by ToiToiToi is out now on Ghost Box Records.
"A splendidly jolly excursion into Mitteleuropean medieval traditions...the most delightfully debauched holiday" Electronic Sound "...invitingly peculiar and such an oddly satisfying experience." Concrete Islands
ToiToiToi (aka Sebastian Counts) leads us a merry dance; a tipsy pilgrimage through a unique sound world of lost European landscapes, odd folk customs, faux medievalism, sample detritus and electronic melody. Usually based in Berlin, Counts recorded this album deep in the German countryside.
Available now on CD and all Digital formats. The LP version is slightly delayed, but it can be ordered now & will be shipped from 27th August. It comes on heavyweight vinyl with full colour inner sleeve and free download code card. Beautiful artwork as always is by Julian House, borrowing heavily from Brueghel the Younger.
ToiToiToi's brilliant first album Im Hag is also available in the Ghost Box shop on LP, CD and Download.
"...the whole thing is a treat from the sleeve onwards." Electronic Sound "A truly strange and beautiful work." Cyclic Defrost
And don't forget that EU orders from our shop have taxes paid here in the UK, so there should be nothing extra to pay on delivery.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2108.30 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2250 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2385 - WHAT I AM READING - STEPHEN KING - X-Men - BOOK OF ACCIDENTS - PART 9
Welcome to another installment of WHAT I AM READING and COMIC BOOK SUNDAY (so there has to be some comic book content).
I have collected a variety of content here on what I am reading, careful to avoid spoilers for the books I have not yet finished.
My main book to reading traditionally is The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig. Some clips of reviews follow with some of Chuck's own blog commentary. I read Wendig's Wanderers last summer and liked it a lot.
As my current audio book, I am listening to Stephen King's newest novel Billy Summers. I like Stephen King in the summer, and I have already re-read Lisey's Story and more less read (sort of a re-read but I never finished it) Danse Macabre.
Here's most of the books I have read so far this year:
I am really enjoying The Book of Accidents. It unfolds its mystery in a very intriguing way.
Billy Summers is okay. I am not blown away But it's good. I enjoy Stephen King a lot.
To make this post comic book relevant, I share material about the X-Men's HELLFIRE GALA, which I collected back in June and had not devoted myself to reading. It's my second X-crossover this year, the first being X of Swords, which was pretty good.
SPOILERS OF X-MEN STUFF STOP IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW
I was not blown away by the HELLFIRE GALA. I rather liked Planet Sized X-Men and the big reveal in that book as the mutants terra-form MARS. Very cool.
The second big reveal is the murder of the Scarlet Witch. This one was weak. She was introduced as an after thought, unwilling to show up at the Gala because of her role in HOUSE OF M when she used her powers to change the world: "no more mutants."
Really good scene with Magneto -- her father -- and then when we next see her, people find her corpse.
Will she be eligible for resurrection? She is a mutant after all.
Of all these books, I rather like Marauders, though the new X-Men book is good, though I am bit underwhelmed by the team, but I am reserving judgement. Mutant teams revolve more often than the Avengers, so I am waiting to see what they do. I trust Gerry Duggan, who is doing very well following on Hickman's landmark re-definition of the Merry Mutants of Marvel who have never been all that merry, especially lately.
At least, the original teenaged X-Men have been returned to the past. That was neat story line for a minute, but Marvel dragged it out WAY TOO LONG.
It's a problem. Marvel either drags out a story too long or does not invest enough resources and time in telling the story right. Rarely, do they nail something. I felt like the recent Hickman led X-book surge has been pretty good and now it's mutating again with new voices and fresh perspectives.
Still, none of this stuff is my favorite Marvel work lately (Immortal Hulk tops that list), but these are entertaining reads by and large.
A family returns to their hometown–and to the dark past that haunts them still–in this masterpiece of literary horror by the New York Times bestselling author of Wanderers
Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father–and has never told his family what happened there.
Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have–and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures.
Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania.
Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver.
And now what happened long ago is happening again . . . and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.
This dark magic puts them at the heart of a battle of good versus evil and a fight for the soul of the family–and perhaps for all of the world. But the Graves family has a secret weapon in this battle: their love for one another.
Out July 20th from Del Rey Books
“The dread, the scope, the pacing, the turns—I haven’t felt all this so intensely since The Shining.”—Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians
“Only Chuck Wendig can blend horror, fantasy, and science fiction into a propulsive thriller that is as funny as it is frightening, clever as it is uncanny, tender as it is terrifying. A magical ride.”—Alma Katsu, author of Red Widow and The Deep
“Chuck Wendig’s The Book of Accidents transported me to the golden age of sprawling horror novels that I loved so much as a kid. Sweeping yet intimate, multilayered and bighearted, this is a novel to sink deeply into.”—Dan Chaon, New York Times bestselling author of Ill Will
“In the tradition of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, Wendig views the cosmic and terrifying through the lens of the domestic, anchoring his visions of the sublime in the grit of the familiar. The result is a novel to ramble around in, to get lost in.”—John Langan, author of Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies
“An unforgettable, terrifying dose of top-flight horror that hits on our most basic core fears, The Book of Accidents chills you to the bone while still warming your heart.”—Alex Segura, author of Star Wars Poe Dameron: Free Fall and Miami Midnight
“With a story both universally horrifying and viscerally intimate, Wendig brilliantly uses The Book of Accidents to explore a painful truth: In the end, we all haunt ourselves. I couldn’t get through the pages fast enough.”—Kiersten White, New York Times bestselling author of The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein
“Move over King, Chuck Wendig is the new voice of modern American horror. The Bookof Accidents is a masterwork, and Chuck is only just getting started.”—Adam Christopher, author of Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town
It’s been two weeks since haunted houses, coal mines, missing serial killers, and other nightmares have been on the menu with the release of The Book of Accidents, so I figured I’d talk a little about the book and where it’s at now.
This was not a book whose success I felt was sure — it’s a complicated, big-hearted horror book with a lot going on under the hood. And though my editor (the very wise Tricia Narwani) assured me it worked, I just had no way of really knowing. Balancing all those pieces together was tough. As I’ve noted in many of the talks and conversations I’ve given over the last few weeks, this was a book truly made in the edit (as many are). The first draft had all the bones and most of the meat, but subsequent drafts were an act of rewiring capillaries, neurons, sinew. A great editor sees what the author is attempting to do and helps cut the path in that direction — helping to bring the writer’s vision out so it becomes the very best version of that vision, and I certainly hoped that’s what happened here, but I really had no way of knowing.
Plus, I did the edits largely during the pandemic. The book was originally slated to come out in October 2020, and we ducked that date because of the election, not because of the pandemic (which at the time we still didn’t know about, but certainly would soon enough aahahahahaha aaahhh sob). So, that gave time to take it slow and steady with edits, and though I had a hella hard time writing new material during the first half of COVID-19, editing seemed to be the thing my brain could do. Something about getting lost in that tangle of threads. Something about the methodical task of picking out the BBs from the meat of a shot bird. I could focus on pacing, on cutting bits of tissue and then suturing, on making sure all the narrative connections were there, and made sense. It was hard, weird work, but I really enjoyed it.
Was it a book that would and could work? Was it a book that made sense to the time in which it was written, but also a book that works beyond that time? Is horror really a “market” again, and did people have an appetite for that type of horror novel that prevailed in the 80s and 90s, but decidedly colored with what’s going on now? I mean, again, there’s no way to tell. Writing a novel feels like painting in a wind tunnel — you have to hope that the mess that ensues is a happy, beautiful mess that says something to those who see it, and not… well, just a splatter of worthless color.
And this book is horror, which is both very much not new for me, since most of my books are in some way horror novels… but also, it is kinda new. This is my first official original horror novel. It’s a horror novel from snout to tail, from teeth to taint, and that’s a jump. I’ve already been fortunate enough not to establish a “””brand””” in one genre over another, which lets me stick and move a little more easily from story to story without worrying that my “””audience””” won’t follow me from, say, nine books of intense Cat Mysteries to a tenth book of Grimdark Portal Fantasy. (Remember, a brand is the thing a farmer burns into the ass of a cow to make sure everyone knows where it belongs.) I’m lucky enough to not have secured an early epic success in one direction, so I’m allowed the freedom a little more easy go in any direction I’d like.
Even so, I still worried — would this book work, would it connect, would people read it?
And so far, the answer seems to be… maybe, cautiously, yes?
So, while we did not hit the vaunted-and-often-indecipherable New York Times Bestseller List, the book did land on a few lists, if such a thing matters to you:
So, that’s very gratifying to see! Thanks to readers, of course, and to booksellers, too, who supported the book and continue to share it with their book-hunting clients. Booksellers are magic, do not forget. Bibliomancers of the best and highest order. Librarians, too, share this magic, and thank you to all the libraries who have added this to their shelves.
WCNC in Charlotte hosted Park Road Books, and they recommended the book (but pro-tip, everybody there — I went to school in Charlotte, to Queens, and so you should totally mention that because yay Charlotte?).
ANYWAY. That’s it, I think. At this point it’s mostly… out of my hands. I mean I’ll keep holding up the book and pointing to it, but me doing that is far less effective than you doing that. The book is all yours now. You adopted it. I hope you love it and it loves you and it doesn’t poop on the rug. Or something. I hope you’ll keep talking about it. I hope you can review it somewhere. I hope you buy a thousand copies and give them out at airports like the members of a religious cult.
I’ll see you soon with Dust & Grim. And I guess at some point I should write up the connections between those two books…
Point is, thank you. Thanks to Del Rey, to my agent, Stacia. To my in-conversation partners: Cassandra Khaw, Kiersten White, Delilah S. Dawson, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Aaron Mahnke. And thanks to the bookstores that hosted: Boswell Books, The Strand, University Bookstore, Powells, Doylestown Bookshop, Midtown Scholar, Let’s Play Books, Fountain Bookstore.
The debut of a new X-Men team, the reveal of mutantkind’s masterplan, and more await at the Hellfire Gala!
“Humans of planet Earth. While you slept, the world changed.” The now iconic opening line from HOUSE OF X #1, the start of writer Jonathan Hickman’s radical transformation of the X-Men franchise, foretold the incredible plans that mutantkind was about to unleash on the Marvel Universe. This June, the X-Men set out to change the world yet again at mutantkind’s inaugural HELLFIRE GALA.
Yesterday, the first of many exciting new character designs X-Men artists have contributed specifically for the HELLFIRE GALA were revealed by Entertainment Weekly, and the world saw the meaning of “Mutant Fashion” as envisioned by superstar artist Russell Dauterman. Today, readers can check out the covers of all 12 HELLFIRE GALA issues, getting their first glimpse at the secrets, the battles, and of course, the fashion that await at this unforgettable evening.
These highly-anticipated stories will be told across 12 issues, offering different perspectives and viewpoints of a single night that will go down in Marvel Comics history. Throughout the event, fans can expect critical moments to occur that will shape the X-Men’s future as we know it—including the unveiling of the first Krakoan X-Men team, the final member of which was decided by a mega-popular Marvel.com vote.
The HELLFIRE GALA is the result of an epic creative collaboration of all the current X-Men writers and artists. Here’s what Gerry Duggan, writer of MARAUDERS and the upcoming seminal HELLFIRE GALA one-shot, PLANET-SIZE X-MEN, had to say about working on this one-of-a-kind event:
“As the builders of Krakoa began discussing the gala within the pages of MARAUDERS and beyond, the writers and editors began noodling on what the evening could be. At our X-Retreat just over a year ago in Chicago we had some very large story ideas and production plans that were ratified to give our artists the time they needed to collaborate on the designs. Russell has been an important part of the MARAUDERS team from the beginning, and it only made sense to ask that he lead the way. The writers jammed on very simple prompts for a few of the looks, but by and large each character was a blank slate for Russell and our other artists. Our regular series artists were also asked to contribute around a half dozen high fashions, so if you don't see your favorite character on a cover, you'll likely see them at the party.
“We haven't sent any of these books to press yet, but I know we've already left a giant mark on the line with this party. The White Queen and House Carnation set out to create a special evening like no other, and it's going to make any other galas you might hear about look like a county fair. Not that it's a contest, but...Krakoa wins. The whole world's watching us now, so we must be nothing less than fabulous.”
Look through covers and solicit text for all 12 tie-ins below, and stay tuned for even more exciting news about the HELLFIRE GALA, including additional designs, variants covers, and more!
On Sale 6/2
HELLIONS #12 Written by ZEB WELLS Art and Cover by STEPHEN SEGOVIA WHO INVITED THE HELLIONS TO THE HELLFIRE GALA? Who thought it was a good idea to invite the antisocial HELLIONS to the fanciest bash of the year? Oh, no one? They weren’t invited but they showed up anyway? Yeah, that sounds about right.
MARAUDERS #21 Written by GERRY DUGGAN & CHRIS CLAREMONT Art by MATTEO LOLLI & JOHN BOLTON WELCOME TO THE HELLFIRE GALA! The Hellfire Trading Company has put together the biggest event of the season – the very first HELLFIRE GALA! Everyone will be there – all your favorite mutants, their closest allies…even their worst enemies – for a night of dinner, drinks, diplomacy and deceit. Fireworks to follow. Plus: From the archives, a classic X-Men tale with our very first look at a Hellfire Gala by Chris Claremont and John Bolton!
X-FORCE #20 Written by BENJAMIN PERCY Art and Cover by JOSHUA CASSARA INVITE-ONLY TO THE HELLFIRE GALA! It’s party time, but somebody’s got to work it. And when invited guests (and a few crashers) prove to be planted antagonistic agents, X-FORCE will need to get their hands dirty and keep this all under wraps…before anyone catches wind!
On Sale 6/9
EXCALIBUR #21 Written by TINI HOWARD Art by MARCUS TO Cover by MAHMUD ASRAR RICTOR HATES PARTIES. Even the nice ones. And with Captain Britain’s return to a changed world, this one is looking to be not so nice. Excalibur’s Earth-shattering HELLFIRE GALA issue will change Krakoan diplomacy forever.
X-MEN #21 Written by JONATHAN HICKMAN Art by RUSSELL DAUTERMAN, NICK DRAGOTTA, SARA PICHELLI & LUCAS WERNECK Cover by LEINIL FRANCIS YU THE HEROES OF KRAKOA DEBUT! It’s a changing if the guard as the first X-Men team of Krakoa debuts! One era ends as a new one begins, and the handoff happens here.
On Sale 6/16
NEW MUTANTS #19 Written by VITA AYALA Art by ALEX LINS Cover by MARTIN SIMMONDS AND I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO… The HELLFIRE GALA is here, and the NEW MUTANTS have the chance to take a break from training the youth of Krakoa – an opportunity to get dressed up and get down. But not everyone is on their best behavior…and someone has vanished without a trace.
PLANET-SIZE X-MEN #1 Written by GERRY DUGGAN Art and Cover by PEPE LARRAZ Variant Cover by PEPE LARRAZ THEY CAME TO SLAY! The HELLFIRE GALA rages on, but bigger things are afoot a world away. Make no mistake – this is an X-Men book drawn by superstar artist Pepe Larraz. It is absolutely the most important issue of the month.
X-CORP #2 Written by TINI HOWARD Art by ALBERTO FOCHE Cover by DAVID AJA A SHARK IN THE WATER! After X-CORP’s shocking debut, they’ve got fences to mend, hands to shake and most importantly – a board to staff. With Dr. Jamie Madrox’s top-class dupes staffing the HELLFIRE GALA, CXOs Monet and Angel must stalk the dance floor and hope they don’t get preyed on themselves.
On Sale 6/23
S.W.O.R.D. #6 Written by AL EWING Art and Cover by VALERIO SCHITI THIS IS WHAT COMES NEXT. On Earth, the HELLFIRE GALA is in full swing. But on S.W.O.R.D. Station One, a very different guest list comes together…as Abigail Brand finally unveils her plans for Mysterium – and the future of human and mutantkind.
WAY OF X #3 Written by SI SPURRIER Art by BOB QUINN Cover by GIUSEPPE CAMUNCOLI MAKE MORE MUTANTS. It’s the Hellfire Gala hangover. Nightcrawler tries to root out the evil working to destroy Krakoa by investigating all its laws, starting with… **SEXY SAXOPHONE SOLO**
WOLVERINE #13 Written by BENJAMIN PERCY Art by SCOT EATON Cover by ADAM KUBERT HELLFIRE COMPROMISED! Can WOLVERINE and X-FORCE keep the peace or is the gala doomed?
On Sale 6/30
X-FACTOR #10 Written by LEAH WILLIAMS Art by DAVID BALDEÓN Cover by IVAN SHAVRIN THE LAST DANCE! At the Hellfire Gala, SECRETS WILL BE REVEALED! VENGEANCE WILL BE HAD. And someone’s number is up. You’ll never guess whose.
Stephen King Reveals His Top Five Stephen King Stories
Aug 10, 2021
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
8.6M subscribers
Which of Stephen King's stories are his personal favorites? The legendary author, whose latest book "Billy Summers" is out now, drops by the Ed Sullivan Theater and reveals his picks to Stephen Colbert. #Colbert #StephenKing #BillySummers
#Colbert #WhatYaReadin #StephenKing
What Ya' Readin'? with Stephen King
Aug 13, 2021
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
What book is so scary that it even scares master horror storyteller Stephen King? What book does he want people to think he's read but hasn't actually read? Stephen King answers those questions and more in the latest edition of 'What Ya' Readin'? #Colbert #WhatYaReadin
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2108.29 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2249 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2384 - JOIN THE INFLUENCER ARMY - The Weekly Hodge Podge for 2108.28
Greetings readers, Thanks for tuning in.
Hell and welcome to the Weekly Hodge Podge that is no longer weekly and no longer regular and is just whenever I decide to do one!
This one has been postponed three times, and I ran it out a bit lazily and didn’t do much with a whole huge list of links.
Still there’s good stuff here.
I have been saying all along that people who are admired and serve as role models need to be very conscious of their political comments as well as their comments on public health issues, like COVID-19. These people have influence, and they need to use their influence for the right messaging and not the hateful, ignorant messaging.
And so, welcome to the INFLUENCER ARMY! The White House is using smart plays to get the messaging turned around by people with influence on social media, like TIK TOK.
And other things.
For some reason VICTOR NEWMAN was trending the other day in Twitter, so a bunch of Twitter about that. Eric Braeden is fine. Just people celebrating him being awesome.
The anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment happened, so that’s worth acknowleding.
And tons of science, hateful pieces of shit on FOX being pieces of shit, hateful POS in our federal government being hateful and stupid and evil, more science, lots of space stuff, some comic book stuff, LOTS OF WONKETTE, tons of good links, and the usual pandemic report as cases and deaths surge around the country because people are “fed up” with the pandemic and are being stupid, selfish assholes.
I though this picture was very telling:
“I will not wear your fear.” ?????
What???????????
These privileged assholes need to check their privilege and look up duty, sacrifice, public service, charity, and if they identify as Christian, reread the fucking NEW TESTAMENT, just the books about Christ will do.
Maybe surgeons should stop wearing masks when doing the surgery on these privileged tantrum throwers.
DON’T BE A MASKHOLE.
Anyway... that’s enough. I am having trouble managing my outrage.
Tons of things to click. In fact, a whole monster list of links to click.
I think you will enjoy it.
That’s all for today.
I am taking a blog vacation starting Tuesday the 31st of August. So no Hodge Podge for at least three weeks. I will still have daily posts during the blog vacation, but they all be low power as simple shares, THAT ONE THING, or even reprints. I will not be pushing them to social media. In fact, I am tempted to do ALL REPRINTS. But I probably won’t.
Posted by EditorDavid from the social-(media)-services dept.
The New York Times tells the story of 17-year-old Ellie Zeiler, a TikTok creator with over 10 million followers, who received an email in June from Village Marketing, an influencer marketing agency.
"It said it was reaching out on behalf of another party: the White House."Would Ms. Zeiler, a high school senior who usually posts short fashion and lifestyle videos, be willing, the agency wondered, to participate in a White House-backed campaign encouraging her audience to get vaccinated against the coronavirus...? Ms. Zeiler quickly agreed, joining a broad, personality-driven campaign to confront an increasingly urgent challenge in the fight against the pandemic: vaccinating the youthful masses, who have the lowest inoculation rates of any eligible age group in the United States...
To reach these young people, the White House has enlisted an eclectic army of more than 50 Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers and the 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, all of them with enormous online audiences. State and local governments have begun similar campaigns, in some cases paying "local micro influencers" — those with 5,000 to 100,000 followers — up to $1,000 a month to promote Covid-19 vaccines to their fans. The efforts are in part a counterattack against a rising tide of vaccine misinformation that has flooded the internet, where anti-vaccine activists can be so vociferous that some young creators say they have chosen to remain silent on vaccines to avoid a politicized backlash...
State and local governments have taken the same approach, though on a smaller scale and sometimes with financial incentives. In February, Colorado awarded a contract worth up to $16.4 million to the Denver-based Idea Marketing, which includes a program to pay creators in the state $400 to $1,000 a month to promote the vaccines... Posts by creators in the campaign carry a disclosure that reads "paid partnership with Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment...." Other places, including New Jersey, Oklahoma City County and Guildford County, N.C., as well as cities like San Jose, Calif., have worked with the digital marketing agency XOMAD, which identifies local influencers who can help broadcast public health information about the vaccines. In another article, the Times notes that articles blaming Bill Gates for the pandemic appeared on two local news sites (one in Atlanta, and one in Phoenix) that "along with dozens of radio and television stations, and podcasts aimed at local audiences...have also become powerful conduits for anti-vaccine messaging, researchers said."
On August 26, 1970, the National Organization for Women led the Women's Strike for Equality. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification, it had a number of political aims, but at the forefront was combating inequality in the workplace. It demonstrated the centrality of work in second wave feminism, a series of demands often forgotten about today in our popular memory of the women's movement.
By 1970, women's advancement in the workplace simply hadn't gotten very far. Women suffered widespread discrimination throughout the economy. First, large numbers of professional jobs were still completely closed to them. Second, even when women were hired, they usually made far less than men, both in professional jobs and blue collar jobs. Third, white collar jobs gendered as women's work paid poorly, from telephone operator to elementary school teacher to secretary. Fourth, women suffered almost unbelievable levels of sexual harassment on the job. Fifth, women who were married with children and worked for money outside the home had a second, unpaid, job when they returned home. Sixth, because of this rampant discrimination, the millions of single mothers in the nation faced poverty. These were all issues that the feminist movement was trying to work out.
In our memory of these movements of the '60s and '70s, we tend to think they were a lot more organized and unified than they were. The feminist movement in 1970 was incredibly chaotic. There were early pioneers such as Betty Friedan who were influential, but their leadership was constantly challenged. And there were huge internal debates about the future of the movement and the issues it should work on. What was most important? Inequality within marriage? Welfare rights? Abortion? Workplace equality? Radical lesbian withdrawal from society? The Equal Rights Amendment? And who would lead this movement? Middle class white women? Women of color in the cities?
These divisions were very real during the planning for the Women's Strike for Equality. The idea originated with Betty Jameson Armistead, who wrote to Friedan about the need to commemorate a half-century of suffrage. Friedan proposed it to NOW, but the board was nervous about something vague they feared would embarrass their organization. NOW was fairly straight-laced at this time. It was also still a small organization, with about 5,000 members. Friedan pressed ahead, eventually getting NOW on board. But there were all sorts of infighting in the planning, as various factions fought over what was important to emphasize in the action. Friedan generally won out, going for a broad-based set of issues, largely around economics (Friedan's start in politics was as a union newspaper reporter during the early CIO days), avoiding the Redstockings and other radicals who were moving into separatism, as well as avoiding issues such as abortion and homosexuality that would soon become leading feminist issues.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 women participated in the Women's Strike for Equality in New York on August 26, 1970. Smaller marches happened around the country – about 5000 in Boston, about 2000 in San Francisco, and around 125 in Syracuse. In Washington, female federal workers, knowing that it was illegal for them to strike, staged a teach-in around the issues that mattered to them. The various strikers had different attitudes as to what really mattered here. Some cities focused more on abortion rights, for instance. Probably 50,000 or so people marched nationally. For Friedan, the fact that this was a strike really mattered. For her, this was a one-day protest from the work where they were discriminated against every day. Her idea was that women would explicitly walk off the job to participate. She dreamed that "the women who are doing menial chores in the offices as secretaries put the covers on their typewriters, […] the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more stop [working]." Or, as Friedan suggested as a slogan, "Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot!"
It didn't quite work that way. Of course, the media made fun of the event, as they did throughout any feminist event through the early '70s. On the other hand, the event was a major public move that made feminism mainstream and probably played an important role in the overall successes of feminism during the 1970s, even if one cannot quantify such a claim. In fact, history largely cannot and should not be reduced to what can be quantified, but I digress.
Unfortunately, women's work experience never quite played the central role in the activist feminist movement that it could have. Even Friedan's emphasis on it during this strike was not really deeply shared by most of the participants, except perhaps as a general feeling. That said, there's no question that feminism has made an enormous impact on the lives of working women. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which of course Republicans hate. But the impact is everywhere. There's never been the hard legal consequences for sexual harassment that there should be, but then serious progress has been made and reading about harassment in the workplace of the 1970s compared to today is really telling because it's totally shocking. Women have never reached a position of true workplace equality. Maybe they never will in a deeply misogynist nation that elects Donald Trump to the Oval Office. But the Women's Strike for Equality was a moment where the need to focus on this issue was articulated and acted upon. Fights would follow against sterilizing women workers who labored in dangerous jobs. Women within unions organized to demand recognition. Laws passed to protect pregnant women on the job. All of these achievements are part of the larger legacy of labor feminism, which continues the fight for equality on the job today.
Woke up to see the god Victor Newman trending, thankfully for just being the coldest cat on tv for 40 years and nothing else. pic.twitter.com/b716lFyIYV
The hold this white man, Victor Newman has had on my grandma every day for the last 41 years and on our Black grandmothers as a collective is a soul tie that will never be broken in the Black community! #YRpic.twitter.com/bztLx7WaCn
— Shakespeare In Peter’s Parking Lot (@PhillipGBurke) August 28, 2021
And that means it's time for new comics recommendations! Leading off this week is MARVEL'S VOICES: IDENTITY #1, a wonderful showcase of Asian superheroes and creators with great work from @gregpak, @geneluenyang, @creeesart, @crashwong, and more!https://t.co/r7dY9OSkem
I was so confused why Captain Marvel was trending as the worst movie in the MCU bc I remembered it being okay and then I remembered that fanboys just really, really hate women
— Rebecca "Get a Fucking Vaccine" Watson (@rebeccawatson) August 25, 2021
Well, it hasn't take out any really big name bigots in positions of power (yet?) but looks like Covid is making some progress in other areas. #thoughtsandprayershttps://t.co/efygNMzXmN
P.O.S!! Racist lying piece of steaming hot garbage. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick went on Fox News to blame the COVID surge on Black people https://t.co/6ShEBmdrIJ via @MotherJones
Exactly 101 years ago today, the #19thAmendment was ratified, which guaranteed women the right to vote. However, not all women were allowed to exercise their right. Today, we honor their strength, determination, and grit. pic.twitter.com/ZPGZqa77tX
Re-upping this important timeline about the #19thAmendment and when different groups of women in America ACTUALLY got the right to vote. https://t.co/0Jv5JwxI63
"The government itself practicing civil disobedience to protect its citizens. Does it get any better than that?" Everything's Bigger In Texas, Including COVID Mask Mandate Sh*tshows https://t.co/1fRjMqbaDU
I’m quoted at the beginning of this interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. You should read it, and you should read THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE too. https://t.co/Db0zD1UeBw
For a brief time nearly 15 years back, I was in talks with Archie Comics to do an updated version of the Riverdale crew. Here was my take on Veronica. pic.twitter.com/jf2sYepbxp
Evidence that cats could be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, emerged as early as April 2020 from Wuhan, China. Evidence that they could also transmit the infection to other cats under particular conditions appeared in the same month. Since then, infections have been confirmed in mink in Denmark and the Netherlands, in big cats in zoos, in dogs, ferrets and a range of other species. It's also worth remembering that the source of SARS-CoV-2 is probably bats and that other species of wildlife may also be infectible.
Infection of some of these species with SARS-CoV-2 can cause actual disease, creating veterinary, welfare or conservation problems. However, transmission to or from companion animals that spend a lot of time in close contact with people also presents extra problems for trying to control a pandemic in humans. For example, if transmission between humans and cats happens easily, then controlling the pandemic in people might require measures to prevent it, and that might include vaccinating and quarantining cats.
There is good evidence for transmission from humans to cats, but very little evidence for transmission from cats to humans. Nor is there much evidence for transmission between cats in normal situations (that is, not in a laboratory). At the moment, there's no real reason to be concerned that infections in cats are a major problem. You're at much greater risk from your family and friends with COVID than from their cats, although you should take normal hygiene precautions you use to reduce the risks of catching other diseases (such as toxoplasmosis) from cats.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist, written by Matthew Sparkes:Ant colonies can descend several meters underground, house millions of insects and last for decades, despite being made without the benefit of machinery and reinforcing material. The secrets of these impressive architectural structures are being revealed by three-dimensional X-ray imaging and computer simulations, and could be used to develop robotic mining machines. Jose Andrade at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues set up miniature ant colonies in a container holding 500 milliliters of soil and 15 western harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis). The position of every ant and every grain of soil was then captured by high-resolution X-ray scans every 10 minutes for 20 hours. The X-ray results gave researchers exact details about the shape of each tunnel and which grains were being removed to create it. The team then created a computer model using those scans to understand the forces acting upon the tunnels. The size, shape and orientation of every grain was recreated in the model and the direction and size of force on each grain could be calculated, including gravity, friction and cohesion caused by humidity. The model was accurate to the 0.07 millimeter resolution of the scanner.
The results suggest that forces within the soil tend to wrap around the tunnel axis as ants excavate, forming what the team call "arches" in the soil that have a greater diameter than the tunnel itself. This reduces the load acting on the soil particles within the arches, where the ants are constructing their tunnel. As a result, the ants can easily remove these particles to extend the tunnel without causing cave-ins. The arches also make the tunnel stronger and more durable. "We had naively thought that ants perhaps were playing Jenga, that they were tapping, maybe they were wiggling grains, maybe they were even grabbing the grains of least resistance," says Andrade. He says it is now clear that the ants appear to know nothing about forces and show no signs of decision-making, but instead follow a very simple behavioral algorithm that has evolved over time.
The ants tend to dig relatively straight tunnels that descend at the angle of repose -- the slope at which a granular material naturally forms mounds -- which was around 40 degrees in this case. They also pick exactly the right grains to remove to create a protective arch above. "In a remarkable way -- in a rather, you know, serendipitous way -- they've stumbled upon a technique for digging that is in line with the laws of physics, but incredibly efficient," says Andrade. The team believes that if the behavioral algorithm can be further analyzed and ultimately replicated, then it may find application in automated mining robots, either here on Earth or on other planetary bodies where the already risky business of mining would be even more dangerous for humans.The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Posted by BeauHD from the beautifully-illustrated dept.
Michelle Starr writes via ScienceAlert:Gravity is the weird, mysterious glue that binds the Universe together, but that's not the limit of its charms. We can also leverage the way it warps space-time to see distant objects that would be otherwise much more difficult to make out. This is called gravitational lensing, an effect predicted by Einstein, and it's beautifully illustrated in a new release from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the center in the image is a shiny, near-perfect ring with what appear to be four bright spots threaded along it, looping around two more points with a golden glow. This is called an Einstein ring, and those bright dots are not six galaxies, but three: the two in the middle of the ring, and one quasar behind it, its light distorted and magnified as it passes through the gravitational field of the two foreground galaxies. Because the mass of the two foreground galaxies is so high, this causes a gravitational curvature of space-time around the pair. Any light that then travels through this space-time follows this curvature and enters our telescopes smeared and distorted -- but also magnified. [...]
This, as it turns out, is a really useful tool for probing both the far and near reaches of the Universe. Anything with enough mass can act as a gravitational lens. That can mean one or two galaxies, as we see here, or even huge galaxy clusters, which produce a wonderful mess of smears of light from the many objects behind them. Astronomers peering into deep space can reconstruct these smears and replicated images to see in much finer detail the distant galaxies thus lensed. But that's not all gravitational lensing can do. The strength of a lens depends on the curvature of the gravitational field, which is directly related to the mass it's curving around. So gravitational lenses can allow us to weigh galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn can then help us find and map dark matter -- the mysterious, invisible source of mass that generates additional gravity that can't be explained by the stuff in the Universe we can actually detect. [...] You can download a wallpaper-sized version of the [...] image on ESA's website.
For nearly a week, the far right has raged at Gen. Mark A. Milley for declaring a desire to “understand white rage.” But Milley didn’t allude to “white rage” in a vacuum. Milley said he wants to understand its role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, asking how it might have caused “thousands of people” to try to “overturn the Constitution of the United States.”
The effort to cancel the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for this comment, then, is partly an effort to erase from the national agenda the question of what role “white rage” — or, more accurately, white supremacy or racial nationalism — played in inciting one of the worst outbreaks of political violence in modern U.S. history.
New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds. Phys.Org reports:Earth-sized planets may be much more common than previously realized. Astronomers working at NASA Ames Research Center have used the twin telescopes of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, to determine that many planet-hosting stars identified by NASA's TESS exoplanet-hunting mission are actually pairs of starsâ"known as binary starsâ"where the planets orbit one of the stars in the pair. After examining these binary stars, the team has concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches like TESS's, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star's light when the planet transits.
Using the 'Alopeke and Zorro instruments on the Gemini North and South telescopes in Chile and Hawai'i, respectively, the team observed hundreds of nearby stars that TESS had identified as potential exoplanet hosts. They discovered that 73 of these stars are really binary star systems that had appeared as single points of light until observed at higher resolution with Gemini. "With the Gemini Observatory's 8.1-meter telescopes, we obtained extremely high-resolution images of exoplanet host stars and detected stellar companions at very small separations," said Katie Lester of NASA's Ames Research Center, who led this work. Lester's team also studied an additional 18 binary stars previously found among the TESS exoplanet hosts using the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI) on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, also a Program of NSF's NOIRLab.
After identifying the binary stars, the team compared the sizes of the detected planets in the binary star systems to those in single-star systems. They realized that the TESS spacecraft found both large and small exoplanets orbiting single stars, but only large planets in binary systems. These results imply that a population of Earth-sized planets could be lurking in binary systems and going undetected using the transit method employed by TESS and many other planet-hunting telescopes. Some scientists had suspected that transit searches might be missing small planets in binary systems, but the new study provides observational support to back it up and shows which sizes of exoplanets are affected.The researchers report their findings in a paper via arXiv.
A team of researchers from Spain, France and the U.S. has found evidence of a glauconitic-like clay on Mars that suggests the planet once had habitable conditions. Phys.Org reports:In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their study of clay minerals extracted from Gale Crater by Curiosity rover back in 2016 and what they found. Back in 2016, NASA's Curiosity rover drilled into the Martian surface inside of Gale Crater. The rover then extracted samples of the clay minerals and used its instruments to analyze the material. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a close look at the results of the analysis and found that it very closely resembles glauconitic clays here on Earth.
Glauconite is an iron potassium phyllosilicate mineral. It is almost always found as ovoid shapes in sediment beds, carbonates and sandstones -- formation requires stable conditions over a long period. This is what makes the discovery of a similar clay on Mars so exciting -- it suggests that it likely formed under stable conditions for a long time, perhaps millions of years. And that suggests that for at least one part of Mars, conditions were, to some extent, suitable for life over millions of years. [...] The researchers note that their findings are not evidence of life on Mars, but suggest that there was a time during which conditions on the surface were favorable for its presence.
Posted by BeauHD from the wouldn't-stand-a-chance dept.
The amount of water in the atmosphere of Venus is so low that even the most drought-tolerant of Earth's microbes wouldn't be able to survive there, a new study has found. However, the researchers looked at data from other planets too and found that the clouds of Jupiter do provide sufficient water activity to theoretically support life. Space.com reports:The new study looked at measurements from probes that flew through the atmosphere of Venus and acquired data about temperature, humidity and pressure in the thick sulphuric acid clouds surrounding the planet. From these values, the scientists were able to calculate the so-called water activity, the water vapor pressure inside the individual molecules in the clouds, which is one of the limiting factors for the existence of life on Earth. The findings are likely a disappointment for the Venus research community, which was invigorated last September by the discovery of phosphine, a compound made of atoms of phosphorus and hydrogen that on Earth can be associated with living organisms, in Venus' atmosphere. At that time, researchers suggested the phosphines may be produced by microorganisms residing in those clouds. On Earth [...] microorganisms can survive and proliferate in droplets of water in the atmosphere when temperatures allow. However, the findings of the new study, based on data from several Venus probes, leave zero chance of anything living in the clouds of Venus [...].
However, the researchers looked at data from other planets too and found that the clouds of Jupiter do provide sufficient water activity to theoretically support life. Data collected by the Galileo probe at altitudes between 26 and 42 miles (42 and 68 kilometers) above the surface of the gas giant suggest the water activity value to sit at 0.585, just above the survivable threshold. Temperatures in this region are also just about survivable, at around minus 40 degrees F. High levels of ultraviolet radiation or lack of nutrients could, however, prevent that potential life from thriving, the researchers said, and completely new measurements would be needed to find whether it actually could be there or not.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American:Behold the highest-resolution image of atoms ever seen. Cornell University researchers captured a sample from a crystal in three dimensions and magnified it 100 million times, doubling the resolution that earned the same scientists a Guinness World Record in 2018. Their work could help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries. The researchers obtained the image using a technique called electron ptychography. It involves shooting a beam of electrons, about a billion of them per second, at a target material. The beam moves infinitesimally as the electrons are fired, so they hit the sample from slightly different angles each time -- sometimes they pass through cleanly, and other times they hit atoms and bounce around inside the sample on their way out. Cornell physicist David Muller, whose team conducted the recent study, likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and the targets are individual atoms. Though Muller cannot see the targets, he can see where the "dodgeballs" end up, thanks to advanced detectors. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of electrons, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be.
Previously, electron ptychography had only been used to image extremely flat samples: those merely one to a few atoms thick. The new study, published in Science, now allows it to capture multiple layers tens to hundreds of atoms thick. That makes the technique much more relevant to materials scientists, who typically study the properties of samples with a thickness of about 30 to 50 nanometers. (That range is smaller than the length your fingernails grow in a minute but many times thicker than what electron ptychography could image in the past.) "They can actually look at stacks of atoms now, so it's amazing," says Andrew Maiden, an engineer at the University of Sheffield in England, who helped develop ptychography but was not involved with the new study. "The resolution is just staggering."
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT - JOHNS HOPKINS
Anyway, as usual, here's the weekly links to the data about cases (lower than reality) and deaths (lower than reality, also) due to COVID-19.
Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statisticsfor a wide audience of caring people around the world.
Over the past 15 years, our statistics have been requested by, and provided to Oxford University Press, Wiley, Pearson, CERN, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), The Atlantic, BBC, Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology, Science Museum of Virginia, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Kaspersky, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Amazon Alexa, Google Translate, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the U2 concert, and many others.
Trace William Cowen is a writer who also tweets with dramatic irregularity here.
August 24, 2021
With the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine now having received full approval from the FDA, the hope among health experts is that many of those who have thus far refused to get vaccinated will finally see the light. In fact, as Dr. Anthony Fauci explained on Monday, COVID-19 could be under much better control by the first half of next year if an overwhelming majority of Americans ultimately get vaccinated.
While several regions of the U.S. have fared quite well in recent months thanks to strong vaccination rates, other areas of the country have remained high-risk, with some even hitting falling further behind.
Asked Monday night during an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN about his recent comments on the current expectations for the pandemic moving forward, Fauci clarified that next spring could be where we start to see a more uniform turnaround.
“I meant to say the spring of 2022. … If we can get through this winter and get, really, the overwhelming majority of the 90 million people who have not been vaccinated vaccinated, I hope we can start to get some good control in the spring of 2022,” he said.
Asked what this type of control would look like, Fauci reiterated that a “degree of blanket protection” coming into focus in the early part of next year will require better vaccination numbers.
“There’s no guarantee because it’s up to us,” Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor, said. “If we keep lingering without getting those people vaccinated that should be vaccinated, this thing could linger on, leading to the development of another variant that complicates things. So it’s within our power to get this under control.”
Elsewhere, Fauci expressed support for vaccine mandates at businesses and other institutions. He also went deep on the FDA’s recent decision, showing optimism for how that move could positively impact pandemic numbers in undervaccinated regions.
“While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D. said in a press release on Monday when announcing the Pfizer decision.
A group of over 70 doctors in Palm Beach County held a press conference early on Monday morning to urge people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 after seeing a rise of unvaccinated COVID patients, MSNBC reports.
In a segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, reporter Kerry Sanders pointed to figures of 85% of ICU beds in Florida being full, with some hospitals reporting no ICU space at all. It marked the second time in a week that doctors in northern Palm Beach County spoke out
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Dr. J.T. Snarski, who was present at the gathering, told MSNBC. “Because we know vaccines are safe and effective. And it’s people who go out and talk against them that really go against physicians and medicine and science. And it’s not the message we want to get across to people. Vaccines are safe and we need to get our communities vaccinated.”
While right-leaning social media users, like Tomi Lahren, are now saying that “if you refuse to treat people because they don’t live their lives the way you want them to, you shouldn’t be a freaking doctor,” others have clarified that the event wasn’t a walk-out but rather an attempt to urge vaccinations. Patients were not left uncared for due to the press conference.
“If you identify with one of these doctors up here, we’ve cared for your family and you’ve listened to us then, the time really is now [to get vaccinated],” said Dr. Jennifer Buczyner, a neurologist and one of the event’s organizers.
Florida is currently leading the nation in daily average cases and hospitalizations, according to the New York Times. To date, there have 3,040,590 reported COVID cases in Florida, with 42,252 deaths.
Yesterday afternoon, Wonkette brought you the important story of Greg Locke, the right-wing nutso pastor who revealed to the world that there are child-trafficking tunnels underneath the White House and also in the "five fingered lakes," where Joe Biden and Oprah and Tom Hanks and the pope stash children, saying that if you don't believe that, then you're no better than Hunter Biden! Locke is, of course, one of the many batshit right-wing figures monitored by those who do the yeoman's work of monitoring those idiots at Right Wing Watch.
At the time of that publishing, Right Wing Watch had been perma-banned from YouTube and had thousands of its videos deleted, we guess because whatever non-human AI YouTube uses to monitor hate speech had incorrectly flagged Right Wing Watch as a purveyor of that nonsense, instead of as the one that exposes it. (You can tell by the disclaimer they put at the front of EVERY VIDEO THEY MAKE.) They appealed their decision. YouTube rejected their appeal.
But we guess shining some sunlight on the problem has fixed it, because YouTube is now saying OOPS.
Sometimes they make mistakes! Or rather, we are guessing, sometimes they finally get an actual human being to review cases, instead of computers. That helps sometimes.
"Right Wing Watch's YouTube channel was mistakenly suspended, but upon further review, has now been reinstated," a YouTube spokesperson told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon. The social-media site also suggested that the issue was a mistake due to high volume of content and that they attempted to move quickly to undo the ban.
Right Wing Watch director Adele Stan also commented to the Beast:
"We are glad that by reinstating our account, YouTube recognizes our position that there is a world of difference between reporting on offensive activities and committing them," Right Wing Watch director Adele Stan said in a statement after the reinstatement. "Without the ability to accurately portray dangerous behavior, meaningful journalism and public education about that behavior would cease to exist."
Stan added, "We hope this is the end of a years-long struggle with YouTube to understand the nature of our work. We also hope the platform will become more transparent about the process it uses to determine whether a user has violated its rules, which has always been opaque and has led to frustrating and inexplicable decisions and reversals such as the one we experienced today. We remain dedicated to exposing threatening and harmful activities on the Far Right and we are glad to have YouTube again available to us to continue our work."
We've all seen this happen, and not just on YouTube. We've seen people who educate about and expose Nazis banned from Twitter because they used the cover of the book they wrote about alt-right Klan Nazis as their profile picture. (Remember that with Dave Neiwert?)
And apparently this, as Stan says above, and as Right Wing Watch senior fellow Kyle Mantyla also tells the Beast, is a "years-long" and "ongoing" problem with YouTube.
We don't have some grand conclusion here except to say Jesus, tech nerds, get your shit together. Maybe algorithms can't do everything.
Hunter Brittain was 17 years old when he died. What we know definitively is that an Arkansas sheriff's deputy shot and killed him at 3 a.m. last Wednesday. It's almost a week later, and Brittain's family still has no straight answers from the Lonoke County sheriff's office.
There is a witness to Brittain's shooting. Jordan King, 16, told local station KATV that he'd worked with Brittain most of the night to change the transmission on his truck so he could make it to his construction job at 6 a.m. They took the car to Mahoney's Body Shop, which a family friend owns. Once they'd left the auto shop, Sheriff's Office Sgt. Michael Davis pulled them over on Arkansas Highway 89.
King claims Brittain's truck wouldn't go into park, so Brittain left the vehicle and tried to grab a jug of antifreeze to put behind his truck's tires so it wouldn't hit the deputy's car. This is when Davis allegedly fired his weapon without telling the 17-year-old Brittain to stop or get on the ground.
"They didn't say one word that I know of. I didn't hear it and it happened so fast," King said.
Brittain's truck was probably a piece of crap, but what he needed was a lift to work. Instead, he was shot down like a dog.
Another deputy arrived and quickly detained King, even though it's not a crime for a high school student to watch his friend get killed in front of him.
"[He] told me get out with my hands up and pull my shirt up and stuff, and then took me to the ground, put me in handcuffs and was dragging me around and stuff," King said. "And then I sat in the back of the cop car for about three hours."
King hadn't done anything wrong, but they kept him in cuffs for hours. The Arkansas State Police later interviewed him, as well, but despite authorities having an eyewitness to Brittain's shooting, Davis remains free and is currently on paid vacation administrative leave pending an investigation. But what's to investigate? He shot a kid without apparent warning, according to the eyewitness.
Brittain was an aspiring NASCAR driver from McRae, Arkansas. He'd worked at Hundley Construction for the past few years. His boss, Scott Hundley, described Brittain as a dedicated, hard worker. Brittain had spoken with Hundley the night before he was killed. He explained he was having trouble with his truck but would make every effort to arrive at work on time.
The police's statement after Brittain's shooting said the teen "sustained a gunshot wound and was transported to a North Little Rock hospital, where he later died." Special agents assigned to the state police Criminal Investigation Division are apparently leading the investigation. They shouldn't need to call in Columbo to crack this case. They had the eyewitness in custody for hours. That would seem like a slam dunk if the cops were interested in playing ball.
Rebecca Payne, Brittain's grandmother and guardian, told VICE News that the police have provided no answers — you'll pardon us if we're assuming it's because they're too busy covering their tracks. She said the police weren't even the first to inform her that her grandson was dead. She learned what happened from other people on the property where he was killed.
"I guess I don't trust any police right now," Payne said. "Won't nobody tell us anything. The body hasn't been released. None of the information has been released to us. We've been told a lot of different things."
Brittain's death has resulted in the protests that police around the country find so damn irritating. Lonoke County Sheriff John Staley said last week that "like everyone, I want to know exactly what happened," but everyone needs to just chill as the official investigation plods along. They're probably running a thorough background check on that jug of antifreeze.
"In potentially dangerous situations, deputies are often forced to make split-second decisions," Staley said. "Second-guessing those decisions, especially when the facts are still unclear, is dangerous and unfair."
What's dangerous is when the police stop civilians but get so spooked they gun them down. The police, who are theoretically trained, are allowed to make split-second decisions, but the public must patiently wait days, even weeks, after an officer has seemingly killed someone for no good reason.
ar right groups gathered Sunday in Portland for an event they called the “Summer of Love,” even as the rally date was chosen to commemorate an extraordinarily violent clash last summer in the city. The event ended with a roving brawl along busy city streets in the Parkrose neighborhood, and shots being fired in downtown Portland. No one was reported injured in the shooting incident
Anti-fascists and far left demonstrators gathered downtown early in the day to oppose the far right gathering. The two sides eventually clashed in Northeast Portland after remaining separate for hours, leaving a spree of violence that stretched blocks.
After the violence ended in Northeast Portland, a man fired a handgun at what appeared to be a group of anti-fascists downtown. Portland police moved in and arrested 65-year-old Dennis G. Anderson of Gresham. He was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful possession of a firearm.
Video posted online also appeared to show someone shooting back after the man opened fire. Information was not immediately available on what led to the shooting. Police said witnesses may have removed evidence from the scene before they arrived.
Technologically-savvy aliens could be powering their society using a hypothetical megastructure called a Dyson sphere to harvest energy from a black hole. And the sphere might radiate in peculiar ways, allowing telescopes on Earth to discover the existence of intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, a new study suggests.
A Dyson sphere is a speculative structure that would encircle a star with a tight formation of orbiting platforms in order to capture starlight and produce power, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, the idea might be realized by a spacefaring extraterrestrial species who had spread out across their star system and therefore required ever-increasing amounts of energy.
During a coffee break, astronomer Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and his colleagues read a paper about Dyson spheres and began wondering if it were possible to build one around a black hole instead of a star.
"Black holes are one of the brightest objects in the sky," Hsiao told Live Science.
While we normally think of them as being dark and all-consuming, black holes can radiate incredible amounts of energy, he added. Material often forms a disk as it falls into a black hole's maw, much like water circling a drain.
As the gas and dust in this disk spin and bump against each other, they heat up through friction, sometimes to millions of degrees, producing light in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, Hsiao said. Colossal beams of energy can also shoot from a black hole's poles.
Because black holes smoosh a gargantuan mass into a tiny area of space, they are smaller than stars and therefore potentially easier to encircle. A species that chooses to "build a Dyson sphere around a black hole can save a lot of material," Hsiao said.
Aliens could place a large satellite in a stable orbit around a black hole and then collect X-ray energy using something akin to solar panels, study coauthor Tomotsugu Goto, also of National Tsing Hua University, told Live Science.
They might also build a ring-like structure around the black hole or totally surround it with platforms, much like in Freeman Dyson's original proposal, Goto added, though each of these would be increasingly complex and challenging to construct.
In either case, a black hole could radiate up to 100,000 times more energy than a star like the sun, meaning that a celestial species would have a lot of power to work with, the researchers wrote in a paper published July 1 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
After being absorbed and used, the energy from a cosmic object would have to be reradiated or else it would build up and eventually melt the Dyson sphere, as Dyson noted in his 1960 paper. This energy would be shifted to longer wavelengths, so a Dyson sphere around a black hole might give off an unexplainable energy signature in the ultraviolet or infrared, the researchers said.
Several instruments, including NASA's space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, have cataloged billions of objects during their detailed surveys of the night sky, Goto said. Should Dyson spheres around black holes actually exist, it's possible that their telltale signs have already been recorded by such detectors, he added.
The team is now developing algorithms that can search through these databases and hunt for peculiar entities that might indicate Dyson spheres. "If it can really be found, I would feel ecstatic," Hsiao said.
Such a search might be useful no matter what it uncovers, Macy Huston, a doctoral candidate in astronomy at The Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the work, told Live Science. "Even if you're not finding Dyson spheres, you're probably going to find something interesting along the way," they said.
Yet black holes provide distinct challenges to alien mega-engineers. The gravitational monsters tend to be less stable than stars in terms of their energy production, Huston said.
Whereas sunshine glows continuously, black holes often have bursts of activity followed by periods of quiet as they consume larger and smaller amounts of matter in their disks. An alien species might have to watch out for particularly large bursts that could destroy orbiting structures, Huston said.
But "if a species is looking for something more powerful than a star, this could be it," they said.
"These were not events where the black holes munched on the neutron stars like the Cookie Monster and flung bits and pieces about," one physicist said.
After more than four years of exploring a menagerie of cosmic happenings through gravitational waves, scientists have finally spotted the third expected variety of collision — twice.
The new flavor of collision includes one black hole and one neutron star, making it a mash-up of sorts. Scientists have observed dozens of mergers of pairs of black holes, and a couple mergers of pairs of neutron stars, the superdense stellar corpses. But a crash between a black hole and neutron star, while predicted by scientists, had not been definitively detected.
Now, researchers say they have done just that, observing the unique ripples in space-time caused by such a collision.
"With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary," Astrid Lamberts, a CNRS researcher at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France, said in a statement. "We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way."
The two new detections both came in January 2020, just 10 days apart, and the collisions are now known as GW200105 and GW200115 for the dates they were observed. One was detected by both twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors and Europe's similar Virgo detector, the other by only one of the LIGO detectors and Virgo. (The partnership now also includes a detector in Japan called KAGRA, but that facility began observations only in February 2020.)
GW200115 was particularly well detected and observed by all three facilities. Scientists believe that it involved a black hole nearly six times the mass of our sun devouring a neutron star with a mass half again larger than our sun, and that the merger took place between 650 million and 1.5 billion light-years away
GW200105 wasn't detected as definitively, but scientists suspect it was a merger between a black hole about nine times the mass of the sun and a neutron star about twice as massive as the sun about 550 million and 1.3 billion light-years away.
An artist's depiction of a merging black hole and neutron star displaying tidal disruption. (Image credit: Visualization: T.Dietrich, N.Fischer, S.Ossokine, H.Pfeiffer, T. Vu; Simulation: V.Chaurasia, T. Dietrich)
Scientists aren't sure yet whether these mixed mergers create a visible light signal (as neutron star pairs merging seem to do) or not (as in the case of binary black hole mergers).
Astronomers couldn't match either of these new gravitational-wave detections with observations of light waves, but that doesn't necessarily mean there was no such corresponding flash. For the less precise detection, scientists could only narrow down the location of the source to about 17% of the sky; for the more precise detection, scientists were still confronting an area the equivalent of 2,900 full moons. Besides, at such vast distances from the collisions, any light would have been extremely dim by the time it reached Earth anyway.
However, the scientists do suspect that at least for these particular mergers, there was no light signal to see.
"These were not events where the black holes munched on the neutron stars like the Cookie Monster and flung bits and pieces about," Patrick Brady, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and current spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, said in a statement. "That 'flinging about' is what would produce light, and we don't think that happened in these cases." (The messy eating is also called tidal disruption.)
A graphic showing the masses of the original and final objects of collisions detected by gravitational wave measurements. (Image credit: LIGO-Virgo/Frank Elavsky, Aaron Geller/Northwestern)
These two events mark the first times scientists have seen a merger and been confident that it represented a mixed pair. For two previous detections, however, the same scenario is a possibility, although not one that astronomers can confirm. One of those events, detected in August 2019, represents a large black hole with what is either the largest known neutron star or the smallest known black hole. Another event detected four months earlier may be a mixed pair merging — but could just represent noise in the detectors.
Given the two January 2020 observations, scientists now predict that one merger between a black hole and a neutron star occurs once per month within one billion light-years of Earth.
Scientists have two theories for how such mergers occur. One is that each member of a binary star independently goes supernova, exploding and forming two dense remnants that eventually merge. The other theory suggests that disparate stars experience supernova explosions, then establish a binary relationship.
The two new collision observations aren't enough to determine what's going on, but scientists do hope that eventually, gravitational wave detections will solve the puzzle.
"There's still so much we don't know about neutron stars and black holes — how small or big they can get, how fast they can spin, how they pair off into merger partners," Maya Fishbach, a postdoc at Northwestern University in Illinois and a coauthor on the study, said in a university statement. "With future gravitational wave data, we will have the statistics to answer these questions, and ultimately learn how the most extreme objects in our universe are made."
The twin LIGO detectors, Virgo and KAGRA are all undergoing preparations for the partnership's fourth observing run, which is scheduled to begin next summer. Scientists say that work could see the partnership detecting one gravitational wave signal every day, opening scientists to immensely more information about what is taking place across the cosmos, as in these dramatic mergers.
"Each collision isn't just the coming together of two massive and dense objects. It's really like Pac-Man, with a black hole swallowing its companion neutron star whole," Susan Scott, a physicist at the Australian National University and co-author on the study, said in a university statement. "These collisions have shaken the universe to its core and we've detected the ripples they have sent hurtling through the cosmos."
The results are described in a paper published on June 29 in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Tucker Carlson has once again plumbed the depths of depravity and managed to find an entirely new low in his reaction to a recent CNN interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which the Congresswoman said she feared not just being murdered, but also sexually assaulted during the January 6 Capitol riot.
During that interview, Ocasio-Cortez said that on that day, as she and her colleagues hid from violent rioters, “I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.”
Speaking with Dana Bash, AOC spoke of the links between white supremacy and misogyny, between racism and patriarchy. “There’s a lot of sexualizing of that violence,” she explained. Ocasio-Cortez has spoken in the past about her history as a survivor of sexual assault and how “when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other.”
Tucker’s cruelly immature response to that notion? “Sexualizing? Get a therapist, honey!” he sneered. “This is crazy!”
Fear of sexual assault is something pretty much every woman lives with and Carlson’s dismissiveness shows his ignorance as much as his cruelty.
“Admitting to the particular fear of sexual violence that women have—recognizing that particularly vulnerability—is entirely outside the norm for female politicians, who often have to go to absurd lengths to prove that they’re tough enough for the job,” Jill Filipovic wrote in a recent op-ed for CNN.
She continues:
Her fears of sexual assault were not pulled out of thin air. Female politicians don’t just face the typical attacks leveled at prominent people — saying that they’re jerks or idiots, that they’re in someone’s pocket or only in it for the glory. They also face sexualized threats, and, too often, acts of sexual violence. Prominent men certainly hear, “I’ll kill you,” from random angry people (and thanks to the internet, they can hear from many more anonymous angry people than ever before). But prominent women are likely to hear, “I’ll rape you and then I’ll kill you.” It’s not just about wanting you to cease existing; it’s about a desire to dominate, sexually degrade and hurt you.
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez has seen this sexualized violence firsthand. She’s seen teenage Republican boys grope and choke a cardboard cutout of her at a public political event. She’s seen the Department of Homeland Security secret Facebook group where “officers [were] circulating photoshopped images of [her] violent rape.” She told Vanity Fair that “There was a time where the volume of threats had gotten so high that I didn’t even know if I was going to live to my next term.”
So when hundreds of angry Trump supporters breached police barriers at the Capitol and stormed the building, many of them armed with a wide range of weapons, why wouldn’t Ocasio-Cortez be afraid of them wanting to bring their violent sexual revenge power fantasies to life? After seeing the rape memes and hearing countless threats, in what world would that not be something she feared?
Tucker Carlson had the option to say nothing about her completely reasonable fear of sexual assault. Instead, he said, “These people were mad because they thought the election wasn’t fair. Now you may disagree with that but it wasn’t about you. Surprise, surprise. ‘Sexualising the violence. I was going to be raped by Ashli Babbit,'” Carlson said in a mocking voice, referencing the Trump-supporting woman killed by police as if there weren’t hundreds of angry, violent men present alongside her.
During her recent CNN interview, AOC actually spoke directly about the obsession Fox News has with tearing her down and how much it says about the people working so hard to shape a narrative around her.
“I actually find it to be really, really fascinating because it reveals a lot about the subconscious of folks that are crafting these narratives, and they very often are speaking to these very subconscious narratives about women, or about people of color, or about Latinos or Latinas, or about working-class people,” she said. “These caricatures that are developed are not really personal, they are societal.”
Tucker Carlson has a new and vile conspiracy theory lie to tell your impressionable Boomer Republican family members, and it's that COVID vaccines are MURDERING EVERYBODY.
If your old dumb Uncle Bubba watched Tucker last night (and he assuredly did), he heard Tucker tell him that "thousands" of people have died from getting the COVID vaccine. He said that according to some very real doctor he talked to, this is the "single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history." Yes, just like Fox News fills your grandmother's head with verifiable bullshitabout things that actually are not happening, like antifa terror hordes and Mr. Potato Head's forced castration, Tucker is now telling your misguided yet beloved grandmother that the vaccine kills.
How many exactly have died, according to Tucker's wildest imaginations and lies? Media Matters transcribes.
Carlson inaccurately asserted that thousands of people have died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccination, claiming that "between late December of 2020 and last month, a total of 3,362 people apparently died after getting the COVID vaccine in the United States" and that even though the data was "not quite up to date," we "can assume that another 360 people at that rate have died in the 12 days since. You put it all together, and that is a total of 3,722 deaths. That's almost 4,000 people who died after getting the COVID vaccines. The actual number is almost certainly higher than that, perhaps vastly higher than that."
Between December and last month, 3,362 people "apparently died" after getting the vaccine, says Tucker. Does he say they died OF vaccine? Or did they die WITH vaccine? Because that's how they deny COVID deaths in people who wouldn't have died of some underlying condition if coronavirus hadn't aggravated it. (Speaking of, here's some more evidence from one of America's greatest public health experts that actual worldwide COVID deaths are likely twice as high as the official numbers.) However, in this case, the WITH and not OF thing is a valid construction. Are vaccinated car accident deaths being included here? Gender reveal explosions among the freshly vaccinated? We are just curious.
Tucker said "we can assume" — you know, based on science! — that another 360 people have died since "the data" was updated. And then — using math! — Tucker calculated that "almost 4,000 people" have definitely died, adding that based on his expertise, "the actual number is almost certainly higher than that, perhaps VASTLY higher than that."
Here's a bigger transcription of Tucker's latest deadly lie, and the video:
TUCKER: In just the first four months of this year, the U.S. government has recorded more deaths after COVID vaccinations than from all other vaccines administered in the United States between mid-1997 and the end of 2013. That is a period of 15 and a half years. Again, more people, according to VAERS, have died after getting the shot in four months during a single vaccination campaign than from all other vaccines combined over more than a decade and a half. Chart that out. It's a stunning picture. Now, the debate is over what it means. Again, there is a lot of criticism of the reporting system. Some people say, well, it's just a coincidence if someone gets a shot and then dies, possibly from other causes. No one really knows, is the truth. We spoke to one physician today who actively treats COVID patients. He described what we are seeing now as the single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history. Whatever is causing it, it is happening as we speak.
We bolded a lot of that to note how Tucker couches his absolute lies in "just asking questions"-type deniability. He uses weasel language when he says the government "has recorded" all these vaccine deaths. (How were they "recorded"?) He says this is "according to VAERS." (Tell us more about VAERS and how these stats are compiled!) He says there's a "lot of criticism" of the reporting system. (Is it because people just don't like it, or is it valid criticism?) He says "no one really knows." (So feel free to spout an uninformed opinion!) But this doctor (what doctor?) says it's the SINGLE DEADLIEST MASS VACCINATION EVENT IN MODERN HISTORY.
As usual, the correct response is to tell Tucker to shut his fucking mouth.
The Truth
Media Matters has a full explanation of how this lie was formed, with answers to all our parenthetical questions above, noting that this conspiracy theory has been going around the wet bowels of the rightwing internet for a while now.
VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and it's run by the CDC, but it's a tool for researchers, and not a tool for your Nana, unless your Nana is a scientist. As Politifact explains, it "helps researchers collect data on vaccine after-effects and to detect patterns that may warrant a closer look."
The key thing to get here is that VAERS is all self-reported. In other words, Wilma Wingnut can literally get on there and say somebody died because they had just gotten their second shot the day before, even though Wilma Wingnut is a documented moron. Then the researchers will check to see if Wilma Wingnut's report fits with any emerging patterns, or if she's just full of shit again.
Politifact adds these two bullet points:
The CDC cautions that VAERS results are not enough to determine whether a vaccine causes a particular adverse event.
For the COVID-19 vaccines, VAERS has received a flood of reports and become especially potent fuel for misinformation.
Got it? VAERS isn't for random Joe Shitbags on the street, and it's not for Tucker Carlson.
That's why there's "criticism" of the reporting system, because it allows literally the stupidest and worst people God ever made to use its reports to create whatever "truth" they want to create. The system is open because CDC needs people to submit legitimate reports — even if they're morons — so that scientists can pore over the data to find real and legitimate patterns.
Media Matters notes that VAERS is quite upfront about how its data should and should not be used:
VAERS' own data guide states that "a report to VAERS," including reports of death, "generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report."
"While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind."
This shit is literally all over the VAERS website, screaming at you that it's incomplete and unverified and that you shouldn't extrapolate based on your own lack of understanding of Science, What Is THAT? Apparently, according to Media Matters, "users [of VAERS] are required to acknowledge twice" that they have read and understand this. Not just people submitting reports, but people who merely want to play with their data. Maybe they should add a thing that clarifies that dilettante Swanson frozen dinner heirs who host Fox News shows should zip their fucking wordholes and go cry about gay dudes in the bathroom some more.
Media Matters also points us to this thread from radiologist Dr. Pradheep Shanker, about the good and the bad of VAERS data. They note that Dr. Shanker actually writes for National Review, so no commie Deep State plot here:
So who got some real data Tucker coulda used? The CDC got some real data Tucker coulda used!
Let's copy/paste everything CDC says about what science actually has determined about the COVID vaccine causing deaths. Surprise, they even explain here why Tucker Carlson shouldn't be playing on the VAERS website without adult supervision, in case they haven't screamed that enough:
CDC uses the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to closely monitor reports of death following COVID-19 vaccination.
FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS.
Reports to VAERS of death following vaccination do not necessarily mean the vaccine caused the death.
CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information to learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or was unrelated.
CDC, FDA, and other federal agencies will continue to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Over 245 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through May 3, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 4,178 reports of death (0.0017%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC and FDA physicians review each case report of death as soon as notified and CDC requests medical records to further assess reports. A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.
However, recent reports indicate a plausible causal relationship between the J&J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and a rare and serious adverse event—blood clots with low platelets—which has caused deaths.
That's the science. Fuck you, Tucker.
Who's going to be the first litigant to be granted standing to sue Tucker for every cent he'll ever make because one of their loved ones listened to Tucker and died?
Because if we were a creative wrongful death lawyer right now ... Oh hell, Fox News would just argue again that no reasonable person would think Tucker was telling the truth, and they'd probably win again.
You know, we were going to make a joke about Ivermectin, the Republican quack science horse dewormer miracle COVID cure of the week, and call it something like "Cow Viagra." We thought that'd be pretty funny. "Senate's Dumbest Republican Will Have The Cow Viagra, Please."
But then we remembered how that'd be offensive to Viagra, the dick medicine white Republican men use so much all the time, they eat it like CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP, and then they say "Hop on, sexual partner, this thing is on a timer!" And why would that be offensive to Viagra? Because Viagra is made by Pfizer, which also makes the fucking vaccine white Republican shitheads won't protect themselves with. (Does Ron Johnson ever use Viagra? Dunno! Is he still unvaccinated? Probably! IS HE DEWORMED? Oh we hope so!)
Anyway, Henry Redman at the Wisconsin Examiner reports that Johnson is just coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs for horse dewormer. Apparently he's been on podcasts and rightwing radio in Wisconsin talking about his beloved horse dewormer. Redman reports that first of all, Johnson is mad that the FDA fully authorized the Pfizer vaccine. And he's doubling down, even after the FDA reminded everybody that they are not horses and cows and should therefore not eat horse and cow dewormer.
Johnson, rather than taking the FDA's warning as a sign that experts don't believe Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID, told [Washington Times opinion editor Cheryl] Chumley he was being persecuted by the FDA.
"They're doing far more than dismissing me, they're attacking me," he said on her podcast, Bold and Blunt. "I don't care what drug will work. Try a bunch of them."
Neat, love it when senators say just try a whole bunch of drugs to see what happens. That's definitely how doctors approach stuff like this.
Anyway, he is being persecuted and:
"You just mentioned that they put out an advisory that Ivermectin is dangerous," he said on [wingnut Wisconsin radio host Vicki] McKenna's show. "Over 31 years, Vicki, over 31 years on the VAERS system, 379 deaths for Ivermectin. 379. That's like 15 a year. Compared to 13,000 for [COVID-19 vaccines]. So they're putting out a warning on Ivermectin, you know, just way too dangerous. But let's fully approve of the vaccine."
These motherfuckers are going to lie about the VAERS system forever. We're not debunking it again, because we already did that. But suffice to say all those reports of vaccine deaths on VAERS were made by idiots, rightwing/QAnon/anti-vaxxer trolls, or both.
Also there probably aren't many Ivermectin reports on VAERS because it hasn't been historically popular in America to eat cow dewormer to own the libs. Until now.
But oh well, here we are. The Senate's Dumbest Republican says try the horse dewormer, try whatever, try a BUNCH of drugs, just see what happens. But OH NO, NOT VACCINES, THAT'S A CONSPIRACY.
Jesus Christ, Wisconsin, do something about this in your 2022 midterms.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2108.28 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2248 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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