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 #2286 - "The Sight of Other's Happiness" - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2105.22
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2286 - "The Sight of Others' Happiness" - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2105.22
"The sight of others' happiness releases happiness in ourselves."
Greetings readers, Thanks for tuning in.
This is the WEEKLY HODGE PODGE.
And once again, I am late. Two days late to be exact.
I am writing this text in my word processor because Blogger’s auto-save causes too much lag, even on my new faster computer because the auto-save is still routed through the Internet. Ping. Ping back.
This HODGE PODGE is two weeks in the making because last week I was filming a play; however, this slower cadence makes me think every two weeks is a better delivery system for the HODGE PODGE, which can take a lot of time. A bi-monthly gallimaufry (synonym for HODGE PODGE) means an update on COVID-19 deaths, cases, and vaccinations every two weeks instead of weekly, unless I just post a weekly pandemic report. Hmmm. Ideas.
I am trying to steer away from weekly features that lock me into content. I already do this HODGEY PODGEY feature on Saturdays, Comic Book Sunday, Music Mondays, and often Writing Wednesdays, which only leaves three days a week for other types of content.
Anyway... I am thinking about infrequency.
Also, I want to add more posts about what I have read and what I am currently reading. I want to blog about my past as well. It’s time to start laying down a record, if only for my own amusement, which, to be honest, is all my blog really is. I mean, if you like it, too, that’s great. I am thinking about you, dear reader, once in a while, but really, this is all for me.
That said, this entry focuses on happiness. I cannot remember where I read the line about happiness from Spinoza. I should have made a note of it. I really like the line that “the sight of others’ happiness releases happiness in ourselves.” It’s a great line, but I couldn’t find a meme of it, and I didn’t want to explore making my own. The quote I did find is related but not quite the same.
And yet, wanted this entry to be a rumination on happiness.
The quote I wanted to feature is simply about how making others happy makes us happy. The meme in the banner is more about a value judgment of the thing loved as to whether that thing makes us happy or unhappy.
And shouldn’t we all wish to be happy?
The growing political divide in our country deeply disturbs me because it seems more predicated on making other people miserable than on making them happy. It seems a divide dedicated to outrage, slander, libel, invective, vitriol, and fulmination of a hateful rhetoric that makes me sick, even when it’s my own rage against the lies pandered by the right, the fear-produced nastiness of the new Republican party dedicated to hate and white supremacy and not their values historically, the grotesque moral superiority I feel in my own rightness, my high horse of indignation and righteousness.
Enough of that shit.
We need to come together as a nation dedicated to ensuring the life, liberty, and PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS for all people regardless of skin color, culture of origin, religion, or vaccination status.
Isn’t that why we’re Americans?
Didn’t America start standing up to tyranny?
And yes, I know, America did plenty of tyranny of its own. I am not a denialist of the evils that built this nation and continue to sustain it. But one things at a time here... that’s another subject.
A friend recently recited this Robert Frost poem (below), which will be the theme of the next HODGE PODGE, which I have decided will go to a bi-monthly schedule.
And so, “I think I know enough of hate...” as Frost claims in this poem.
We shall freeze.
Actually, Frost was prophetic without knowing it because climate change will end our lives in both fire and ice.
I have separated this blog content into bad things (first, get it over with), good things (designed to make you feel better despite all the bad things), pandemic things (the usual plus some real top-grade lunacy), and the sundry (various).
This HODGE PODGE probably rounds up the news better than many of my efforts as I copied some story sets from The New York Times and The Washington Post, arguably America’s two greatest newspapers and among the greatest in the world. But there’s also a ton from WONKETTE because, of course there is.
But there’s some real gems here.
CHEESE??? A CRAZY conspiracy theory that if you find cheese on the hood of your car that you are targeted for kidnaping by human traffickers. I wish I had made that one up. It’s priceless.
Not that I agree with all that much Liz Cheney thinks or has done. I mean, she fucking voted for TRUMP in 2020. But her defense of the truth about the election is worth applauding her for integrity and bravery when most of her so-called “republican” colleagues are a bunch of spineless, craven fuckwits.
Mitch McConnell lost his position as fuckwit in chief to Kevin McCarthy, but he’s still slimy and vile.
And, yeah, there’s still a pandemic that has killed 600,000 Americans since we started counting in about March of 2020 and over 3.5 million people worldwide.
But cases and deaths in the U.S. are trending down since January 2021.... hmmm. I wonder what happened in JANUARY???? Like, around, JANUARY 20th...
Hey maskless hordes, there’s a reason that SURGEONS wear them. Like for real. A “science” reason.
Assholes.
Oops. There’s my outrage again.
I do want others to be happy. But lately it seems what makes people on the right happy is seeing black people lynched, elderly Asians beaten by thugs, and more people dying of Covid because of the maskless and unvaccinated hordes of cry babies who think this choice has to do with their “liberty.”
How do I make people happy or find common ground with them when it seems like these are the things they care about?
Oh, and vaccines are turning people into potted plants.
And Tucker Carlson continues to show off on national television why he is a moron but also a hateful fuckwit.
But, someone had the brilliant idea to get more people vaccinated through dating apps because those people are horny. Genius!! SNL has only been doing comedy sketches about that thing for a year.
Lots of other great stuff, including yoga in schools in Alabama as long as you don’t use any “yoga words,” like the word “yoga” itself.
Morons.
Fuckwits.
Let go of your fear, people. We can all be happy if you just let go of all the fear you have of the people who don’t look like you wanting to take from you this unreal and fabricated idea of what America has been, is, and can be.
Republican lawmakers in Texas are trying to reframe the state’s history curriculum and play down references to slavery and anti-Mexican discrimination.
During the initial outburst of violence, Biden and his officials were reluctant to criticize Israel even after its rockets killed scores of civilians, including more than 60 children, in Gaza, the densely-populated region to Israel’s west that is ruled by Hamas. Palestinian militants have launched hundreds of rockets at Israeli cities, but the country’s Iron Dome defense system—funded mostly by the Obama administration—has spared Israel the bulk of the casualties while in Gaza, more than 150 buildings, including nearly 700 housing units, have been destroyed, according to a UN assessment said.
The violence in Gaza, part of a deadly, seemingly-endless cycle of hostility between Palestinians and the Israeli government, has made clear that foreign policy is where Biden remains most out of step with the loudest voices in the progressive base. His initially tentative response to the fighting and reluctance to call for a ceasefire until days of criticism poured in has soured progressives on the future of this White House’s foreign policy and all but ruptured the existing relationship between the two sides.
We are never afraid to be servicey here at Wonkette, which is why we want you to know that if you happen to find a slice of cheese on your car, it is much more likely that you were visited by a kindly cheese fairy and not in fact being targeted as chattel for a sex trafficking ring.
Whew! Glad we cleared that one up!
But like so many other notions that once seemed too absurd for anyone to believe — like this lady's assertions that Hillary Clinton died eight months ago from kuru, a disease associated with cannibalism — it is in fact a thing that people are saying is a thing. Go figure, right?
An article published earlier this week on IHeartRadio warned women that if they go outside and see slices of cheese on their car, they could be being targeted to be kidnapped by sex traffickers. The source of this article was a TikTok video from a girl named Mimi, who claimed that this very thing happened to her. Not the sex trafficking part. Just the cheese. But she was pretty sure some dudes in a van put the cheese on her car and totally would have trafficked her had she not called her friend to help her get the cheese off of her car.
It might sound silly, but a TikTok user named Mimi is very serious about her experience. She posted a video which she said is "for all my ladies out there." In it, Mimi explains how she came out of church on Sunday to find cheese melted on her car. Likely thinking it was just some kids' prank, she called a friend to help scrape it off, but when her friend arrived, a white van with men in it two parking spots down from her pulled out and went to a lot across they street, where they parked so they could watch the women clean off the cheese.
Mimi said it took an hour to get rid of the mess and stated, "I personally had no idea that they were using this as a tactic to take people now and if I hadn't called my friend, I could have easily been taken in the hour that it took me to scrape off the cheese and this happened at my church, so I can't even imagine where they're trying to use this on people."
So just to recap: A couple of human traffickers were looking for adult women to kidnap, for the purpose of turning them out, so they got in their classic molester van and headed to a church parking lot early one Sunday morning, with a stack of Kraft singles. Then they watched as people came to church, set their sights on this lady and then placed two Kraft singles on her car hood hoping that when she came out, she would take the cheese off herself right there instead of doing it at home, providing them with an opportunity to steal her away.
It sounds ridiculous, but apparently enough people saw this and thought it seemed plausible for Snopes to have to write an article debunking it. As they explained, that is just not even sort of how human trafficking works and there no ongoing issue with cheese-related kidnappings that anyone has ever heard of.
The thing is, it's pretty understandable that this woman felt scared and vulnerable. Women generally have to be on high alert. It's why when many of us are in parking lots at night, we put our keys between our fingers and spin around like weirdos. It's why we don't help men with broken arms with their groceries. But coming up with outlandish "tactics" that nefarious and shadowy trafficking groups are using to abduct innocent ladies from parking lots does not actually help with anything. In fact, it probably hurts.
And worse, spreading them can hurt, not help, efforts to dismantle human trafficking. Traffickers are too smart to try to snatch unwitting victims from grocery store parking lots and city parks, authorities say, despite urban legends that continue to circulate on social media. Though there are some cases of kidnapping in human trafficking operations, they are relatively rare. Some victims are coerced or forced into trafficking through familial or romantic relationships … Tuscaloosa Police Department Lt. Darren Beams said he's encountered victims who were promised money for college from a part-time job, only to become trapped in a trafficking ring. Victims most at risk [are] those without familial or community resources to turn to, or those fearful of authorities.
The belief in freakishly competent criminal networks who lure unsuspecting churchgoing women with cheese or ship children in Wayfair cabinets or build secret tunnels underneath daycare centers for the purpose of molesting children doesn't help anyone, least of all victims. Neither did "Stranger Danger," which had kids and parents looking out for nefarious strangers rather than people they knew — and it would later turn out that most child abductions were committed by people known to the children, frequently a parent in a custody battle.
So now we can clear the good name of cheese, which is delicious and not a danger to anyone who is not lactose intolerant.
The Republican Party's slow but steady march to a full-blown, know-nothing cult of personality centered around a scuzzy reality TV host is both compelling and terrifying. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has tried to stand athwart this sordid history, "yelling stop," but no one else in her ragamuffin party is "inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." Her colleagues will soon dump her in favor of an opportunistic, sell-out puppet job. It's a tragedy, if you're inclined to consider bad things happening to Republicans tragic.
Cheney had survived an earlier post-impeachment attempt to remove her from leadership, but the peace didn't last for long. Last month, at a GOP retreat, Cheney saw how deep the brain rot went when the party was presented with polling data that supposedly showed that a president who just lost reelection is actually super awesome and popular.
When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party's latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump's weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump's support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.
Trump's unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.
That's the problem with believing the Big Lie. It's, well, a big lie. Joe Biden did in fact curb stomp the twice-impeached thug. We all saw it. Incumbent presidents are rarely rejected, especially during a national crisis, even when it's one of their own making (see George W. Bush and Iraq). Voters usually treat the presidency like a mediocre show they just sit through because the remote's on the other side of the room, but President Klan Robe was so awful, 81 million Americans got their asses off the couch and changed the channel. Those 81 million Americans exist. They aren't phony ballots with unverified signatures. Many of them are also white, college-educated voters the GOP has hemorrhaged for the past five years. Going full Jim Crow is gross but it's not going to save the GOP. White people like voting and expect to keep doing so.
The internal NRCC poll partially shared with lawmakers in April found that President Biden was perilously popular in core battleground districts, with 54 percent favorability. Vice President Harris was also more popular than Trump, the poll showed. Biden's $1.9 trillion covid stimulus plan and his $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure package both polled higher than the former president's favorability, which was at 41 percent, compared to 42 percent in February.
These horrible numbers make sense when you consider that President Lost Cause is probably directly responsible for Democrats flipping the Senate. He refused to accept his personal loss in Georgia and picked fights with Republican politicians and officials during the runoff campaign. He forced the incumbent Republican senators from Georgia to campaign like they're from Alabama and not a purple state. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler got their asses beat and struggling people received a stimulus check. Liz Cheney isn't a RINO or even that noble a person. She just has a brain in her head and doesn't think President Gilligan is the future of the party.
[Cheney] just believes he's disqualified himself by his conduct, more than it's any kind of political analysis," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). "If you look at a political analysis, there's no way this party is going to stay together without President Trump and his supporters. There is no construct where the party can be successful without him."
Graham doesn't consider MAGA supporters actual Republicans but the one-term loser's personal property. To the extent that's true, President Lost Cause has proven he can't deliver those voters to the polls when he's not on the ballot. The GOP was routed in 2018, and over the past four years, Republicans lost both Senate seats in Georgia and Arizona. There's reason to believe that former Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake could've beaten Kyrsten Sinema or Mark Kelly, but MAGA forced him out and MAGA-fied candidates fell flat on their faces.
MAGA isn't actually popular. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy isn't choosing political expedience over what's morally correct. This isn't a "West Wing" episode, and Cheney isn't the “good" Sorkin Republican who responds to his cynicism with a high-minded speech. She's trying to save the GOP from itself, but even if it wasn't already beyond redemption, on its best day, the GOP just wants to politely let poor people starve.
Anyway, this will all make a great movie, and fortunately, the excellent Lily Rabe already has experience playing Cheney on screen.
Yesterday a sitting congressman went on CNN to announce that Donald Trump couldn't possibly have incited the January 6 invasion of Congress because the invasion was planned earlier that day in the congressman's very own hotel room.
[twitter_embed https://twitter.com/atrupar/statuses/1395449507538743298 iframe_id="twitter-embed-1395449507538743298" created_ts=1621536063 name="Aaron Rupar" embed_mobile_width=375 text="Rep. Carlos Gimenez about January 6: \"I don't think [Trump] incited the events that happened. I know for a fact that I saw people in my hotel room that were saying they were gonna do something at 2 o'clock, & that happened at 9 o'clock in the morning\"\n\nWho was in his hotel room?pic.twitter.com/7fW7XCCVal" embed_desktop_height=622 embed_desktop_width=550 embed_mobile_height=596 id="1395449507538743298" expand=1 screen_name="atrupar"]
Noting that Giménez had only voted to reject the Electoral College votes from Pennsylvania and Arizona, and that Biden would have won the election anyway even if both states had flipped, CNN host Erin Burnett asked if he regretted feeding into a false narrative that the election was stolen.
"Do you have any regrets about how your vote fed into what Trump was saying. He linked those things together — his lie. That that could be contributing to Republicans refusing to accept a legitimate president?" she asked.
Saying that he had "no regrets," Giménez pivoted immediately to defending Trump from charges that he incited the January 6 riot by MAGA loons determined to thwart certification of the election results.
"I voted not to impeach the president because I didn't think he incited the events that happened," he insisted. "I know for a fact that I saw people in my hotel room that were saying they were going to do something at two o'clock. And that happened at nine o'clock in the morning."
At which point the entire internet rose up to shout HENGHHHHH??? Why would a sitting congressman be hanging out in his hotel room with people plotting to "do something at two o'clock?" And how could he possibly think this would bolster the argument that Donald Trump's lies about the election bore no relationship to the violence that took place that day? The fact that people showed up ready to do violence isn't quite the own the congressman thinks it is, TBQH.
Perhaps Rep. Giménez was simply disoriented from whiplash after endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016 when he was mayor of Miami, then pivoting to full MAGA after he was term-limited out and forced to run for Congress. Luckily his chief of staff Alex Ferro swooped in to clarify what his boss meant to say.
Ferro said Gimenez meant to say that the activity in question occurred in the lobby of the hotel, not his room. It was Ferro who initially picked up on the disturbing comments.
According to Ferro, the man who made the remark about storming the FBI did so "with passion in his voice."
"It didn't sit well with me," Ferro added.
"I could have sworn I heard 'we're gonna storm the FBI building,'" Ferro continued.
To his credit, Ferro says that he immediately notified the Capitol Police and FBI that there was a "man in tactical gear" hanging out in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency chatting up the assembled Trump supporters about his plans to invade federal buildings. He did not explain how this works as a defense of the former president, who summoned the would-be invader with promises that it would be "wild" and lies about a stolen election.
Nor did Ferro elaborate on his boss Giménez's role in nurturing the mistaken impression that the election could somehow be overturned. Did he walk up to them and say, "Guys, I'm a congressman, and even if we flipped Arizona and Pennsylvania, Biden would still win, so keep it clean, okay?" Seems unlikely!
In summary and in conclusion, Rep. Giménez was hanging with insurrectionists in his hotel room or possibly his hotel lobby. And he overheard someone make threats to federal property, or possibly his COS did. And even though all the assembled revelers at Ye Olde breakfast bar were Trump supporters summoned to block certification of an election they believed was stolen, none of what took place was Trump's fault. Or Congressman Giménez's, because he's a faithful public servant with no responsibility to ensure that the public knows the truth about their own elections.
One day, I will figure out how to turn off news notifications on my iPad. By which I mean, one day I will remember to make one of my kids turn off the news notifications on my iPad. But that day is not today, which is why I am still being bombarded by an unending stream of clickbait headlines that would make the Taboola crew blush from their sheer hackiness.
Are Democrats deliberately lowering your sperm count? Does Biden eat babies and kick puppies, or kick babies and eat puppies? Global Warming: Mild inconvenience or blessing from Jesus? And on and on forever until I manage to unlock the thing and ask the America's Test Kitchen ladies what's for dinner tonight. (Spoiler Alert: Always chicken.)
But sometimes Rupert Murdoch's social media minions manage to outdo themselves with something so ridiculous that I really must stop and investigate. To wit:
"Did Biden cancel God on the National Day of Prayer?" the Foxies wondered provocatively?
Which is confusing, because how would he even find the time to cancel God when he's always at church? The president is constantly stopping the motorcade to run into the Church of Saint Swithin in Coals to Newcastle, Delaware. Or nipping out to visit Our Lady of Everlasting Perpetuity in DC. On the plus side, if he's going to cancel culture God, at least Biden will be able to tell him about it in person. My understanding of Christian theology is quite limited, but I believe the Holy Spirit gets testy about being You're Fired in a tweet tapped out from the 12th hole at Mar-a-Lago.
After several minutes of Google goggling, I can report that the Right has its knickers in a twist today because the word "God" did not appear in the prepared text for President Biden's proclamation on the National Day of Prayer on Wednesday, so obviously God is CANCELED. What a slap in the face for people of faith everywhere!
"Joe Biden's National Day of Prayer Proclamation has been released and it doesn't even mention God once! How do you release a proclamation about prayer and not mention God at all?" howled the Christian Broadcasting Network's Chief Political Correspondent David Brody on Twitter. "Of course it mentions climate change & racial justice. Truly, this is pathetic...and not surprising!"
So gross that President Wokepants is blabbing about works and not just the very narrow faith that excuses a lifetime of sin! Spaketh Biden:
Prayer has nourished countless souls and powered moral movements — including essential fights against racial injustice, child labor, and infringement on the rights of disabled Americans. Prayer is also a daily practice for many, whether it is to ask for help or strength, or to give thanks over blessings bestowed.
UGHHHHHHH.
Fox raced to inform its readers that "Trump's 2017 proclamation mentioned God five times, his 2018 proclamation mentioned God five times, his 2019 proclamation mentioned God seven times and his 2020 proclamation mentioned God 11 times." And if you add them all up, you get 28 times, which is the number of times Trump went to church during the four years of his presidency. Just kidding — it's like half that.
Franklin Graham, who likened Trump to Jesus betrayed by the Apostles when 10 Republicans voted to impeach him, was also quite upset at the omission.
"Why would President @JoeBiden omit God?" he tweeted. "Today marks the 70th annual #NationalDayOfPrayer & President Biden is the first @POTUS to omit the word 'God' in his proclamation. That speaks volumes doesn't it?"
As a heathen Jew myself, I'll leave the Christian theological analysis to Evan, who is not here today. But I will point out this, my personal favorite of this genre courtesy of American Greatness (whatever that is). See if you can spot the problem here.
Hey, look who else isn't talking about "God" either?
As a practicing Jew myself, I also do not write the word "God" out in my personal life. Because in Hebrew School, they taught us that you might step on a piece of paper with the Lord's name on it, which would be disrespectful. In fact, not saying Gd's name (that's how I would write it if we were friends, which we are!), is kind of a thing in Judaism. That's why we refer to Ha'Shem, which literally means "the name" instead of speaking the tetragrammaton. So the person screeching in rage about Biden refusing to name G-d is literally refusing to name G-d herself because we don't say G-d's name.
META, HUH?
In summary and in conclusion, these people need to quit taking the Lord's name in vain and get a freaking life.
Oh, and PS, President Joe "Gd Love 'Em" Biden thanked heaven for the vaccine, which was developed "by the grace of God." So the story is actually bullshit, because of course it is.
On Wednesday, Jeff Jansen — one of the many 'Trump Prophets' predicting that Trump will be President again any minute now — posted a video to Facebook in which he doubled down on his prophecy that Biden would be removed from office by April (don't check your calendars because yes, it is May).
The last time we encountered Jeff Jansen, he was talking about how he believed in a Big Tough Macho Jesus who went around whipping people on the regular.
Alas, it seems like his prediction on who would be getting kicked out of office was a little off — because on Friday, his church, Global Fire Ministries International sent out an email announcing that Jansen himself would be stepping down himself, due to "unbiblical behavior," and "bad moral choices and coping mechanisms." Taking over the ministry is his wife, Jan Jansen, who almost definitely wrote the email herself.
Well, at least the part that read "[r]ather than submit to the process of healing and restoration, Jeff recently made an intentional decision to leave his wife and family to pursue his own desires. He remains unrepentant and unremorseful"
It is with deep sorrow that Jeff Jansen has been asked, by his board, to step down as Co-Senior Leader of Global Fire Church, and from Global Fire Ministries due to unscriptural and unbiblical behavior. He was asked to step down In April, and this was made public to the church body on May 2. 2021. A statement was released to partners and friends on May 5.
Due to a pattern of making poor moral choices, and bad coping mechanisms, character flaws became obvious which disqualified Jeff from New Testament leadership. His lifestyle in the home. traveling on the road, and in the House of God, has fallen below Biblical standards laid out for those in leadership. He has been confronted concerning these flaws numerous times over a period of time.
Rather than submit to the process of healing and restoration, Jeff recently made an intentional decision to leave his wife and family to pursue his own desires. He remains unrepentant and unremorseful.
Any pursuit of further ministry on Jeff’s behalf is not under the umbrella and blessing of Global Fire Ministries. Global Fire Church will continue to thrive! Our church was built on the importance of family and that will remain.
One would think that someone who regularly chats with God about the ins and outs of US politics would have gotten some kind of heads up that his own behavior was about to get him kicked out of his church, but apparently that never came up.
Jan Jensen also wrote another email further explaining her husband's behavior.
"Unfortunately, Jeff struggled for many years dealing with the stress and warfare of his travels. Being a high-level, recognized minister, this led to poor choices in coping mechanisms. I don't believe he was strong enough to withstand what was coming at him because of his very public stand for President Trump and against the dark side. When you take a stand like that, you must have no cracks in your armor. Jeff never really humbled himself enough to get healing for his soul and seal the cracks," she wrote.
Jan Jansen reiterated that her husband had chosen to leave her and his children to "pursue his own desires." She wrote that it "grieves me and breaks my heart to have to announce this, and I just pray to healing over you as I say it." She asked supporters to "pray" for her husband and said that he "will wake up and seek full restoration."
Sure, Jan. Your husband was so distraught over left-wing blogs making fun of him and his love of Macho Jesus and Donald Trump that he was driven to leave you and do a bunch of "unbiblical behavior." We are entirely to blame here. Surely, if no one had pointed out that Donald Trump had not been elected president again as he predicted, he would have remained completely holy. It's hardly as if other well-known socially conservative preachers have ever done anything like this before. Except for literally every single one we have ever heard of — including Ernest Angley, the homophobic evangelical preacher known to sexually harass his male subordinates, who died on Friday at the age of 99.
Of course, if we could get a Jimmy Swaggart-style sobbing video, that would be super great, thanks.
Then again, in saner times, a president wouldn't have incited a mob to try to overturn an election he'd lost, and 147 members of Congress wouldn't have voted to endorse the attempted sedition. So maybe the rest of the Republicans were simply voting for a better hypothetical reality in which no such insurrection would even exist to be investigated. They're such idealists!
Now the bill goes to the Senate, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced his opposition to the commission. McConnell had said Tuesday afternoon that Senate Republicans were "undecided" on approving a commission, and that they'd need to "read the fine print." McConnell said that the commission "needs to be clearly balanced and not tilted one way or the other so we have an objective evaluation."
You might think such balance might result from the agreed-upon structure of the commission, with each party naming five members of the panel, and the requirement that subpoenas be agreed upon by both parties. But McConnell suddenly discovered the whole thing was rigged Tuesday evening, after former president Lieface McFascist called the proposal a "Democrat trap" and called on McConnell and congressional Republicans to "get much tougher and much smarter, and stop being used by the Radical Left." Trump, like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, said that any commission on January 6 would also have to investigate things that didn't happen on January 6, for balance.
So McConnell dutifully announced Wednesday he'd decided he'd decided to oppose "the House Democrats' slanted and unbalanced proposal for another commission to study the events of January 6th." This is where we remind you once more the proposal had been negotiated by the Democratic and Republican heads of the House Homeland Security Committee, incorporating multiple Republican suggestions, and that "another" is doing a lot of work for "one."
On the Senate floor, McConnell offered some perfectly reality-based, good-faith objections to the commission legislation. For one thing there are already law enforcement investigations, and some committee investigations in both the House and Senate, so wouldn't a comprehensive, independent commission just be a waste of time and money?
There is, has been, and there will continue to be no shortage ― no shortage — of robust investigations by two separate branches of the federal government ... It's not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress.
The facts have come out, they'll continue to come out. What is clear is that House Democrats have handled this proposal in partisan bad faith going right back to the beginning, from initially offering a laughably partisan starting point to continuing to insist on various other features under the hood that are designed to centralize control over the commission's process and its conclusions in Democratic hands.
Gentle reader, we do hope you will not spill your tea when we point out to you that Sen. McConnell is not telling the truth here. For one thing, as the Washington Post points out, the current investigations are fairly limited in scope. A Senate investigation is only looking at security at the Capitol, and what lapses in security should be corrected, and the Justice Department's prosecutions of individual seditionists are only concerned with the actions of those people, not an overall understanding of the event.
The Post points out that the text of the House bill passed last night, by contrast, calls for an examination of "the influencing factors that fomented such attack on American representative democracy while engaged in a constitutional process," as well as for recommendations for possible action in response.
It could, for instance, seek to find out what role Trump played in encouraging the attack, as well as his response once it was taking place — something that could lead to members of Congress themselves being subpoenaed.
Ah, well then, we can see why McConnell might object to that, particularly since that would almost certainly include his esteemed colleague in the House, Kevin McCarthy, who begged Trump on the phone to call off the rioters who were touring the Capitol and got only the response, "Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are."
As for the rest of McConnell's objections, they're just more of his usual Upside Down bullshit; if House Democrats had wanted to simply pass a "laughably partisan" bill, they'd have done that without four months of negotiations with Republicans. The bill that passed last night, with all of 35 Republican votes, truly was bipartisan, for all the good it did.
Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast between us and the Democrats' very radical left wing agenda.
We're fairly sure that after that impressive bit of rhetoric, Sen. Thune was whisked away to a hospital to check for whiplash, and possibly a sprained tongue resulting from talking too rapidly from both sides of his mouth.
The Republican opposition to a real investigation also prompted an anonymous letter to all members of Congress from anonymous members of the US Capitol Police, calling for Congress to fully investigate the insurrection:
On Jan 6th, where some officers served their last day in US Capitol Police uniform, and not by choice, we would hope that Members whom we took an oath to protect, would at the very minimum support an investigation to get to the bottom of EVERYONE responsible and hold them 100 percent accountable no matter the title of position they hold or held. [...]
It is inconceivable that some of the Members we protect, would downplay the events of January 6th. Member safety was dependent upon the heroic actions of the USCP.
The letter was on police letterhead but was not an official statement; the department later said it definitely "does NOT take positions on legislation." It had been distributed by the office of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland); staffers vouched for its authenticity and said it was written by multiple officers who'd experienced "mental aguish" resulting from the riot, and who stayed anonymous out of fear of retribution. Gosh darn it, don't those police realize that calling too much attention to their trauma is terribly partisan of them, and will just get in the way of Republicans' efforts to combat the Democrats' radical left wing agenda?
On May 8, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo headlined a virtual rally organized by an offshoot of the Unification Church, a controversial religious movement known for holding mass weddings of its adherents and that has been accused of being a cult. Though American conservatives have long made common cause with the Unification Church, the head of the outfit that pulled together this event declared not too long ago that the “Christian era has ended”—which means Pence and Pompeo, whose self-professed religious devotion is a prominent part of their respective political profiles, were (knowingly or not) collaborating with and bolstering a group that says it is supplanting the Christianity they embrace.
The event—called the “Rally of Hope”—was hosted by Hak Ja Han Moon, the head of the Unification Church (whose members consider her and her late husband, Sun Myung Moon, the messiahs), and sponsored by the Universal Peace Federation, a group co-founded by the Moons in 2005 and affiliated with the Unification Church (which now refers to itself as the Unification movement). According to the UPF, the gathering, put on before a socially distanced audience and supposedly streamed to 1 million people in 194 nations, was held to launch a project called Think Tank 2022, which aims to reunify the Korean Peninsula.
The U.S. and Russia engaged in their highest-level talks so far under the Biden administration when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met for an hour and 45 minutes Wednesday on the sidelines of the Arctic Council meetings in Reykjavik, Iceland. The meeting was considered a likely diplomatic precursor to a presidential summit in the coming weeks between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. There is, of course, much to discuss as U.S. and Russian relations have been increasingly adversarial over the past decade. The two sides are currently at a standoff on a number of issues: high-stakes cyberattacks coming out of Russia, including this month’s ransomware attack on a U.S. pipeline; the jailing and attempted assassination of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny; as well as the Russia’s continued military involvement in Syria and renewed aggression along the Ukraine border. “We seek a predictable, stable relationship with Russia,” Blinken said Wednesday. “We think that’s good for our people, good for the Russian people and indeed good for the world.”
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel eased overnight. Officials on both sides expressed optimism that a cease-fire could come within days.
When Joe Biden talked to folks at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, yesterday, he introduced himself by saying, "My name is Joe Biden, and I'm a car guy." He's also the president, allegedly. But he really is a car guy.
And during that visit, he got to test-drive the new Ford F-150 Lightning, which is all electric, which will be officially unveiled tonight, and is set to go on sale next year.
We are also somewhat of a car guy, but we didn't realize what a big fuckin' deal this new electric F-150 was until Rachel Maddow, who is a Biden-grade car person, decided to devote her entire A-block last night to TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
Things we [by "we," Evan means Evan; I knew all this, OBVS — Editrix] did not realize that Maddow told us last night, about why it's such a big fuckin' deal that they're officially debuting a fully electric F-150 tonight:
The F-150 and the other F-series trucks are the top-selling vehicle in all of America for 39 straight years running. More than the Camry, more than the Civic, more than all the other trucks.
The F-150 and its relatives bring in more American Dollar Bucks than Coca-Cola or McDonald's or Nike or any of 'em. $42 billion in revenue in just 2019 alone!
Maddow said she's personally on her second F-150, her fourth Ford truck in all. So she was able to explain this as a truck owner. And quite frankly, we ourselves being a southern person who is friends with a lot of truck people, what Maddow said about the possibilities for this fully electric F-150 — to be surely followed by Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram! — struck us in a "wow" kind of way, to the point that we actually personally bought a few shares of Ford Motor Company this morning because it just seemed like a good idea. (That is not stock advice, we are not a stock adviser, DO WE LOOK LIKE SUZE ORMAN TO YOU?)
Here's part of what she said:
MADDOW: If the Ford F-150 becomes an electric vehicle, if Ford can transition that particular vehicle to electric, because as an electric vehicle it's better, goodbye gas cars in America! There isn't a single thing that could be done in this country to move us further and faster toward a no-gas automotive future and everything that means for infrastructure, climate and all the rest of it, there's nothing else that could move us further and faster toward that than this one vehicle, this specific vehicle, not only having an electric option, but actually being better as an electric vehicle than it as a gas one. Being more capable as an electric vehicle than it is as a gas one.
Because pickup truck owners in America — and there are gazillions of them — want their vehicles to be better and more productive, and they want them to look cool.
It's that part at the end. Truck owners are all kinds of people and there are indeed gabillions of 'em. And every single truck person we've ever known — whether they personally gave a shit about "efficient" or "environment" or "Green New Deal" — has really given a damn about whether the trucks work, first of all, and whether they're really cool.
If this truck ends up being the most reliable, Ford Toughest damn thing out there, and if its bells and whistles are the coolest fucking thing in the entire world, they won't be able to build them fast enough. And that will indeed change the entire country's relationship with that quaint old thing called "gas."
Ford is making its official announcement in a live event tonight, but from what we can tell so far, it does sound like this thing is going to be pretty damn cool. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, told shareholders last week that this thing will be equipped "to power your home during an outage, it's even quicker than the original F-150 Lightning performance truck; and it will constantly improve through over-the-air updates." Joe Biden did say fucker's really fast. Apparently it does zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds, or at least that's what Biden blurted out yesterday like he made up the number out of thin air.
It's also going to haveinsaaaaaane towing capabilities, which is a thing lots of truck people kinda care about. Maddow played a video last night of a video of an early prototype from 2019 pulling a one million pound series of freight cars. Then they filled the freight cars with 42 F-150s, which brought the weight up to 1.25 million pounds, and the prototype pulled that too.
For comparison, a 2021 F-150 with a stinky old gas engine maxes out at 11,300 pounds of towing capacity.
If you watch that video, you see a very cool woman driving the F-150 prototype, and she is Linda Zhang, the head engineer who created this new electrified pick-em-up truck that's being unveiled tonight. That's right, BIG BADASS ELECTRO-TRUCK was created by a woman who also happens to be an immigrant from China who came here when she was in the third grade.
Maddow interviewed Zhang last night, and it was really fun watching them have Truck Talk. Zhang said her cool-ass truck will be able to "power [...] your home as a backup generator [and] light up an entire campsite or work site." Video of the interview doesn't appear to be online, but the transcript is here.
Zhang also reportedly had a lot of fun with President Biden yesterday. Apparently the Ford folks had literally no idea the president was really going to drive the truck.
"Linda did a great job of taking the president through the engineering of the vehicle," [Ford CEO Jim] Farley said. "We first had just the frame and the batteries and electric motors. We showed him that and he had lots of questions. I didn't know this but he had just been down to Atlanta to the SKI plant that actually makes the batteries for the truck he was standing next to. He was like, 'I was just at that plant making these batteries.'"
"Linda took him through the truck," Farley said. "The Secret Service said, 'We prefer him to just stay on the outside.' He was like, 'I want to get inside the truck.' He was in there for, like, 10 minutes. I have no idea what he and Linda were talking about but it must have been pretty interesting. He would not leave that truck."
HE WANTED IN THE TRUCK.
So anyway yeah, this truck could be a really big fuckin' deal, both for truck people, and for liberal commie rags that are like "environment environment environment global warming Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sooooooooo cool."
If you would like to watch "truck" tonight at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, here is a video for you to watch "truck."
Good morning. The pandemic may now be in permanent retreat in the U.S.
Mother’s Day in Washington, D.C.Rosem Morton for The New York Times
A ‘momentous day’
I want to end this week by showing you two Covid-19 charts. They contain the same message: The pandemic is in retreat.
By The New York Times | Sources: State and local health agencies and hospitals
In the United States, there is now an excellent chance that the retreat is permanent. Victory over Covid has not yet arrived, but it is growing close. After almost a year and a half of sickness, death, grieving and isolation, the progress is cause for genuine joy.
More than 60 percent of American adults have received at least one vaccine shot, and the share is growing by about two percentage points per week. Among unvaccinated people, a substantial number have already had Covid and therefore have some natural immunity. “The virus is running out of places to be communicable,” Andy Slavitt, one of President Biden’s top Covid advisers, told me.
The share of Covid tests coming back positive has fallen below 3 percent for the first time since widespread testing began, and the number of hospitalized patients has fallen to the lowest point in 11 months, Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translational Institute noted. For the first time since March 5 of last year, San Francisco General Hospital yesterday had no Covid patients — “a truly momentous day,” Dr. Vivek Jain said.
There are still important caveats. Covid remains especially dangerous in communities with low vaccination rates, as Slavitt noted, including much of the Southeast; these communities may suffer through future outbreaks. And about 600 Americans continue to die from the disease every day.
But the sharp decline in cases over the past month virtually guarantees that deaths will fall over the next month. The pandemic appears to be in an exponential-decay phase, as this helpful Times essay by Zoë McLaren explains. “Every case of Covid-19 that is prevented cuts off transmission chains, which prevents many more cases down the line,” she writes.
This isn’t merely a theoretical prediction. In Britain, one of the few countries to have given a shot to a greater share of the population than the U.S., deaths are down more than 99 percent from their peak.
And around the world
Globally, the situation is not as encouraging, but it has improved. Confirmed new cases are down 23 percent from their peak in late April. In India, caseloads have been falling rapidly for almost two weeks.
By The New York Times | Sources: Health agencies and local governments
What’s behind the improvement? Several factors.
New restrictions on behavior appear to have helped in India and some other countries. The rising number of vaccinations also helps; it has exceeded 1.5 billion, which means that more than 10 percent of the world’s population — and maybe closer to 15 percent — has received at least one shot. (A new outlier: Mongolia has secured enough shots to vaccinate all of its adults, thanks to deals with neighboring Russia and China.) Natural immunity, from past infections, may also be slowing the spread in many places, and the virus’s seasonal cycles may play a role, too.
Most countries remain more vulnerable than the U.S. because of their lower vaccination rates. In Africa, a tiny share of people have received a shot, and the numbers are only modestly higher in much of Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
The vaccines are how this pandemic ends. That point is coming nearer in the United States and a few other affluent countries, but it remains distant in much of the world. Accelerating the global manufacturing and distribution of vaccines is the only sure way to avoid many more preventable deaths this year. (The Times editorial board, The Economist and National Review have each recently laid out arguments for how to do so.)
“Unless vaccine supplies reach poorer countries, the tragic scenes now unfolding in India risk being repeated elsewhere,” The Economist’s editors wrote. “Millions more will die.”
A data idea, from Matthew Springer of the University of California, San Francisco: States should report Covid deaths and hospitalizations by vaccination status to highlight the value of the shots.
Virus resources: Look up the pace of vaccinations in your state.
During a press conference Friday to discuss April's job numbers, President Joe Biden was asked the question most pressing for Americans: Why does he still choose to cover his fully vaccinated face with a mask?
REPORTER: You walked out to the podium with your mask on. Why do you choose to wear a mask so often when you're vaccinated and you're around others who are vaccinated?
BIDEN: Because I'm worried about you. No, that's a joke. Why am I wearing the mask? Because when we're inside, it's still good policy to wear the mask. That's why.
Friday, professional Fox News terrible person Laura Ingraham and her guest, Raymond Arroyo, criticized Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff because the couple kissed through their masks while outside and fully vaccinated. All this caution and concern for other people's health is apparently un-American.
So, what does the science say? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared that fully vaccinated people don't need to wear a mask outdoors, except in certain crowded settings and venues. You can also visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing. But you should still wear a well-fitted mask in indoor public settings. A White House press briefing would count as an indoor public setting, because Biden doesn't really know these fools. They let anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Emerald Robinson from Newsmax inside the place, and she once tweeted that vaccines could “rewrite your DNA." (They won't. Maybe Robinson is thinking about The Fly.)
From CDC:
In indoor public spaces, the vaccination status of other people or whether they are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 is likely unknown. Therefore, fully vaccinated people should continue to wear a mask that fits snugly against the sides of your face and doesn't have gaps, cover coughs and sneezes, wash hands often, and follow any applicable workplace or school guidance.
The CDC also advises washing your hands immediately after touching your mask, which is maybe why the second couple didn't remove theirs before a quick, parting kiss. They can take everything off later, safely, in the privacy of their own home.
CNN's Jake Tapper asked Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, if the president wearing a mask sends the wrong message and somehow makes people think there's “no light at the end of the tunnel."
TAPPER: I think one of the reasons why journalists are annoyingly harping on this, and some health experts are, is because there is a light at end of the tunnel, and President Biden being able to take off his mask in a room full of journalists and White House staffers — all of whom are fully vaccinated — is a demonstration that the vaccines work.
Biden is 78 years old, and his immediate predecessor face-planted into COVID-19. Some additional caution isn't the worst thing right now. The former White House squatter's administration rarely wore masks or took reasonable precautions, and the place was lousy with COVID-19. After former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tested positive in October, CBS News White House correspondent Ben Tracy tweeted, "I felt safer reporting in North Korea than I currently do reporting at The White House. This is just crazy."
But now the media claims the Biden administration's going overboard with the COVID-19 risk management. They're almost like that diva Goldilocks.
Now, after months of advising Americans to wear masks and stay six feet from most others, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says vaccinated people can, among other things, gather unmasked indoors and that everyone can exercise outdoors with household members — and with faces bared to the world. Suddenly, in the spring of 2021, donning a mask for a solo stroll outside, where scientists have found scant evidence of transmission, has become the unscientific approach.
However, some people have reported that wearing a mask outside has helped alleviate seasonal allergies. It's also less of a hassle to just wear a damn mask while outside if you're running errands and plan to enter stores, take public transportation. I need glasses to drive, read, and work, but I usually don't bother taking them off when I'm just having dinner. Conservatives claim masks are now a virtue-signaling fashion accessory, but even if they were right, who gives a damn? Reporters aren't "annoyingly harping" on Biden for wearing a tie or a flag pin, and neither of those has any public health benefit.
As more and more Americans and people worldwide get COVID vaccines with little to no problems or side-effects, the anti-vaxx crowd has had to get a little more creative. For the last couple weeks it's been "shedding." They claim vaccinated people are actually putting them at risk by "shedding." They put up little signs outside their places of business saying that no one with vaccines can enter because of "shedding," and that just being around people who were vaccinated could "sterilize" people and make them unable to have children.
While viral shedding, which is "a process of the body releasing viral particles from a vaccine and hypothetically creating a risk of infection to others" is a thing that can happen with vaccines (although not to a point where it would seriously harm anyone), it's not a thing that can happen with this one, because it's not made from live virus.
Also it was pretty obvious they desperately wanted to do an "Oh how the tables have turned!" thing. Unfortunately for them, approximately 87,000 articles came out last week debunking their "theories." But that doesn't mean the nonsense has stopped.
In a recent interview with the Arizona Republic, Jim O'Connor, a recently elected member of Arizona's Corporation Commission, whose job it is to oversee power and water companies, shared a pipe dream he had about the vaccines turning people into potted plants.
"I'm also aware through other information that many people who have taken the shot, many thousands of people here in the U.S., are deceased. And the deceased part is the good news. And please don't take that out of context. But the alternative to being deceased after the shot, there are something like 40,000 plus recorded cases of people that are now potted plants. They are human vegetables. They've lost their ability to function," he said.
Nope! There are no recorded cases of that whatsoever. That did not happen, not in the United States, not anywhere else. I have gotten half the vaccine and I can personally testify to you that my legs have not, as of yet, been replaced by a clay pot. They are still human legs. I am also not green or any other unnatural color.
Obviously, what he really means is they are braindead, but that is not happening either. The only "source" O'Connor provided was Idaho doctor Ryan Cole, who has made a name for himself going around saying a bunch of ridiculous things about the vaccine.
- Although there is no evidence to support this, Cole suggested that some of the COVID-19 vaccines could cause cancer or autoimmune diseases.
- Again, without evidence, Cole suggested that the federal government withheld a treatment for COVID-19 in order to "vend" a vaccine. Studies haven't proved that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19, but Cole claimed that federal agencies "have suppressed this life-saving medication."
- Cole said public health officials should encourage people to take vitamin D supplements rather than wear masks or stay physically distant from others.
We couldn't find anything about people ending up in vegetative states. You think that'd be kind of a big deal, hospital-wise, as there were only 15,405 cases of brain death in 2016 in the whole United States, and that was supposed to have been an uptick. If there were 40,000 cases in a number of months, that would surely be noticed by someone other than a random Arizona GOP official. You'd think we would also notice "many thousands" of vaccinated people dying, if that were actually happening.
The most likely source of O'Connor's misunderstanding is a previously debunked meme that was popular on Facebook, which stated that "COV-19 Vax clinical trials have caused brain damage, paralysis, & many illnesses in previously healthy volunteers." Where he got those numbers from, well, we can't find a source for that other than his own ass.
Tucker Carlson made an absolute ass out of himself on Wednesday night. This is nothing new. This time, however, he told a particularly egregious lie that "thousands" of people had died from the COVID vaccine. Given the fact that conservatives are already fucking this whole thing up by refusing to get vaccinated, this was also a very dangerous lie.
But it was also such a big lie that even his own colleagues at FOX called it a lie. It was such a big lie that, last night, Tucker Carlson had to explain why he lied so hard.
His explanation? Joe Biden made him do it.
You see, Carlson got his information from the CDC and FDA's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a notoriously flawed system to which literally anyone can report anything, without any proof whatsoever. This, he says, made them "Biden's numbers." He kept referring to them as "Biden's numbers" and "the administration's numbers," which they weren't. In fact, had he or his interns actually gone through the VAERS website, they would understand that all of the "adverse reactions" are self-reported. People can report anything they want. Once, an autism activist even used the site to claim a vaccine had turned him into the Incredible Hulk.
Joe Biden, of course, did not invent VAERS. He has also only been in office for three months, so there has not exactly been a lot of time for a complete overhaul of that system.
VAERS has existed (and has had these same issues) since 1988. Its purpose has never been to compile actual data of things that actually happened, but to function more as an "early warning system" so that the CDC and the FDA can see if certain adverse reactions keep popping up and then look into them. Unlike the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is limited to health professionals and requires actual documentation, literally anyone can contribute data to VAERS.
Tucker Carlson, unfortunately, is far from the first person to come to a completely wrong conclusion through VAERS. For years, even the mere fact of its existence has (along with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act) has been used by anti-vaxxers to provide validity for their very wrong beliefs about vaccines, including that they cause autism and other issues. "How can you say vaccines are safe when these things even exist?" they ask. Perhaps ironically, they both exist because people incorrectly blamed their children's encephalopathy on the pertussis vaccine and the government determined it was better for people who believe their children were "injured" by vaccines to sue the government rather than the vaccine manufacturers, so that the manufacturers wouldn't decide making the vaccines wasn't worth it.
Anti-vaxxers frequently point to screen caps from VAERS showing just how many cases of autism have been "caused" by vaccines. The use of screencaps shared on social media is very important both in this and in spreading misinformation about COVID, because if you actually go to the VAERS website, they make you check 80 million boxes saying that you understand that this isn't actual data.
The COVID anti-vaxxers have been doing this same thing for weeks now. They've been using this "data" to claim that the COVID vaccine has caused death, still births, and even suicide. Yes, Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter turned COVID anti-vaxxer, has actually used this data to claim that suicide is a side effect of the COVID vaccine. Specifically suicide by firearm.
"Another oddity in the vaccine adverse events reports," Berenson tweets, "one Moderna trial death was a suicide in the vaccine arm. It was judged unrelated; someone approached me and told me he had information suggesting otherwise, but I couldn't confirm it and so didn't mention it... 2/ The reason I do now: The VAERS reports contain two suicide reports, both very shortly after vaccination. Female suicide by firearm is rare - it happens, but it's rare. You can judge the causation in the second case for yourself."
Yes, that is the star science understander of the anti-vaxx world.
But back to Carlson. After blaming Joe Biden for his inability to correctly interpret data, he then goes on to point out that there have been more deaths "connected" with the COVID-19 vaccines on the VAERS database than with any other vaccine over the last 15 years, and asking why that doesn't warrant looking into. Again, it is because literally anyone can claim that they know someone who got killed by a vaccine. People have a very strong agenda regarding this particular vaccine and believe it is part of Bill Gates's plan to implant everyone with the Mark of the Beast, so they have pretty good reason to go on there and lie.
This, naturally, devolves into "Why can't we ask questions? We're just asking questions! Even acetaminophen has side effects! Why can't we ask what the problems with the COVID vaccines are without being told we're bad?"
The answer to this is that other people can "just ask questions." Tucker Carlson, however, doesn't get to "just ask questions" because he is known to take one tiny grain of information and go right off the deep end with it. He is known to be disingenuous. His job is to rile up his legions of adoring fans and tell them what they want to hear, which right now is "the vaccines are dangerous and will kill you." When you do that often enough, everyone knows that you are not just sincerely "asking questions."
As important as government transparency is, it's hard to say that making the VAERS database accessible to everyone is doing more good than harm, and it may be time to revisit the idea of it being a searchable online database with less oversight than Wikipedia.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News:In a national effort to get through to horny but vaccine-hesitant Americans, the White House announced Friday that it is joining forces with dating apps to encourage people to get their COVID-19 vaccines so that they can go forth and fuck freely this summer. Vaccinated users on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Badoo will have access to some premium features for free. OkCupid, Chispa, BLK, and Match are giving out a free "Boost" to those who've been vaccinated so that their profiles are more likely to be seen first. Plenty of Fish is also offering free credits to vaccinated members for its livestreaming feature.
The dating apps will add badges or stickers that users can include on their profile to indicate that they've been vaccinated, as well as filters so that you only swipe on fellow vaccinated people. There will also be in-app links to find your closest vaccination site. "People who display their vaccination status are 14% more likely to get a match," White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt said at a press conference, citing research from OkCupid. "We have finally found the one thing that makes us all more attractive." The new features are expected to launch on the apps in the next few weeks.
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.
Posted by EditorDavid from the proctors-for-doctors dept.
Dartmouth college switched to remote tests when the coronavirus ended in-person exams — then accused 17 medical students of cheating, reports the New York Times:At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth's use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times.
Dartmouth's drive to root out cheating provides a sobering case study of how the coronavirus has accelerated colleges' reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic. While universities have long used anti-plagiarism software and other anti-cheating apps, the pandemic has pushed hundreds of schools that switched to remote learning to embrace more invasive tools. Over the last year, many have required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate.
Some universities are now facing a backlash over the technology....
While some students may have cheated, technology experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, the Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device. "If other schools follow the precedent that Dartmouth is setting here, any student can be accused based on the flimsiest technical evidence," said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, who analyzed Dartmouth's methodology.
Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, "automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user," according to a school email that students made public. The 10 others have been expelled, suspended or received course failures and unprofessional-conduct marks on their records that could curtail their medical careers... Tensions flared in early April when an anonymous student account on Instagram posted about the cheating charges. Soon after, Dartmouth issued a social media policy warning that students' anonymous posts "may still be traced back" to them.... The conduct review committee then issued decisions in 10 of the cases, telling several students that they would be expelled, suspending others and requiring some to retake courses or repeat a year of school at a cost of nearly $70,000...
Several students said they were now so afraid of being unfairly targeted in a data-mining dragnet that they had pushed the medical school to offer in-person exams with human proctors. Others said they had advised prospective medical students against coming to Dartmouth.
In a piece titled "It's not a 'labor shortage.' It's a great reassessment of work," they argue that "The coronavirus outbreak has had a dramatic psychological effect on workers, and people are reassessing what they want to do and how they want to work, whether in an office, at home or some hybrid combination."A Pew Research Center survey this year found that 66 percent of the unemployed had "seriously considered" changing their field of work, a far greater percentage than during the Great Recession. People who used to work in restaurants or travel are finding higher-paying jobs in warehouses or real estate, for example. Or they want a job that is more stable and less likely to be exposed to the coronavirus — or any other deadly virus down the road... Economists describe this phenomenon as reallocation friction, the idea that the types of jobs in the economy are changing and workers are taking awhile to figure out what new jobs they want — or what skills they need for different roles...
Even among those who have jobs, people are rethinking their options. Front-line workers are reporting high levels of burnout, causing some to seek a new career path. There's also been a wave of retirements as workers over 50 quit because they don't want to return to teaching, home health care or other front-line jobs. More affluent Americans say they are retiring early because their retirement portfolios have surged in the past year and the pandemic has taught them that life is short. They don't want to spend as much time at a desk, even if it is safe... [I]t's notable that the manufacturing sector has bounced back strongly, yet the industry has only added back about 60 percent of the jobs lost. This suggests many factories are ramping up automation in a way that allows them to do more with fewer workers.
The overall expectation is still for hiring to pick up this summer as the economy reopens fully and more people are vaccinated. But the past year has fundamentally changed the economy and what many Americans want in their working life. This big reassessment — for companies and workers — is going to take awhile to sort out and it could continue to pop up in surprising ways.
Posted by BeauHD from the promising-findings dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times:In an important step toward medical approval, MDMA, the illegal drug popularly known as Ecstasy or Molly, was shown to bring relief to those suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder when paired with talk therapy. Of the 90 people who took part in the new study, which is expected to be published later this month in Nature Medicine, those who received MDMA during therapy experienced a significantly greater reduction in the severity of their symptoms compared with those who received therapy and an inactive placebo. Two months after treatment, 67 percent of participants in the MDMA group no longer qualified for a diagnosis of PTSD, compared with 32 percent in the placebo group. MDMA produced no serious adverse side effects. Some participants temporarily experienced mild symptoms like nausea and loss of appetite.
Before MDMA-assisted therapy can be approved for therapeutic use, the Food and Drug Administration needs a second positive Phase 3 trial, which is currently underway with 100 participants. Approval could come as early as 2023. Mental health experts say that this research -- the first Phase 3 trial conducted on psychedelic-assisted therapy -- could pave the way for further studies on MDMA's potential to help address other difficult-to-treat mental health conditions, including substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias, eating disorders, depression, end-of-life anxiety and social anxiety in autistic adults. And, mental health researchers say, these studies could also encourage additional research on other banned psychedelics, including psilocybin, LSD and mescaline. "This is a wonderful, fruitful time for discovery, because people are suddenly willing to consider these substances as therapeutics again, which hasn't happened in 50 years," said Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of the new study.
Posted by BeauHD from the not-so-empty-after-all dept.
Obipale shares a report from Phys.Org:Voyager 1 -- one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space -- still works and zooms toward infinity. The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause -- the solar system's border with interstellar space -- into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (plasma waves), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.
Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. "It's very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth," Ocker said. "We're detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas." This work allows scientists to understand how the interstellar medium interacts with the solar wind, Ocker said, and how the protective bubble of the solar system's heliosphere is shaped and modified by the interstellar environment.
Posted by EditorDavid from the faster-functions dept.
ZDNet reports:Guido van Rossum, who created popular programming language Python 30 years ago, has outlined his ambitions to make it twice as fast — addressing a key weakness of Python compared to faster languages like C++.
Speed in Core Python (CPython) is one of the reasons why other implementations have emerged, such as Pyston.... In a contribution to the U.S. PyCon Language Summit this week, van Rossum posted a document on Microsoft-owned GitHub, first spotted by The Register, detailing some of his ambitions to make Python a faster language, promising to double its speed in Python 3.11 — one of three Python branches that will emerge next year in a pre-alpha release... van Rossum was "given freedom to pick a project" at Microsoft and adds that he "chose to go back to my roots".
"This is Microsoft's way of giving back to Python," writes van Rossum... According to van Rossum, Microsoft has funded a small Python team to "take charge of performance improvements" in the interpreted language...
He says that the main beneficiaries of upcoming changes to Python will be those running "CPU-intensive pure Python code" and users of websites with built-in Python. The Register notes that the faster CPython project "has a GitHub repository which includes a fork of CPython as well as an issue tracker for ideas and tools for analysing performance."
"According to Van Rossum, there will be 'no long-lived forks/branches, no surprise 6,000 line pull requests,' and everything will be open source."
New submitter StellarThoughts writes:Scientists analyzed the second ever known interstellar object, a comet known as 2I/Borisov, and found some very unlikely results. Molecules of nickel and iron were being vaporized and drifting from the surface. Typically, nickel and iron vaporize when comets streak near the sun or aim directly for it, reaching temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And instead, this comet was a toasty -135 degrees F.
Comparing data with 20 other comets of varying chemical composition within the solar system, they spewed nickel and iron much like 2I/Borisov. Scientists have a few theories, including: "One possibility is that harsh ultraviolet light from the sun might break apart nickel-containing molecules in the comets." Scientists believe these traces were missed for so long because of the supposed unlikelihood of gaseous metals at such a low temperature.
Good morning. Is the U.S. suffering from a labor shortage? If so, capitalism has an answer.
A McDonald’s in Pennsylvania offering a hiring bonus.Keith Srakocic/Associated Press
The baguette solution
The chief executive of Domino’s Pizza has complained that the company can’t hire enough drivers. Lyft and Uber claim to have a similar problem. A McDonald’s franchise in Florida offered $50 to anybody willing to show up for an interview. And some fast-food outlets have hung signs in their windows saying, “No one wants to work anymore.”
The idea that the United States suffers from a labor shortage is fast becoming conventional wisdom. But before you accept the idea, it’s worth taking a few minutes to think it through.
Once you do, you may realize that the labor shortage is more myth than reality.
Econ 101
Let’s start with some basic economics. The U.S. is a capitalist country, and one of the beauties of capitalism is its mechanism for dealing with shortages. In a communist system, people must wait in long lines when there is more demand than supply for an item. That’s an actual shortage. In a capitalist economy, however, there is a ready solution.
The company or person providing the item raises its price. Doing so causes other providers to see an opportunity for profit and enter the market, increasing supply. To take a hypothetical example, a shortage of baguettes in a town will lead to higher prices, which will in turn cause more local bakeries to begin making their own baguettes (and also cause some families to choose other forms of starch). Suddenly, the baguette shortage is no more.
Human labor is not the same thing as a baguette, but the fundamental idea is similar: In a market economy, both labor and baguettes are products with fluctuating prices.
When a company is struggling to find enough labor, it can solve the problem by offering to pay a higher price for that labor — also known as higher wages. More workers will then enter the labor market. Suddenly, the labor shortage will be no more.
A job fair in Orlando, Fla., this month.Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images
One of the few ways to have a true labor shortage in a capitalist economy is for workers to be demanding wages so high that businesses cannot stay afloat while paying those wages. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the U.S. economy does not suffer from that problem.
If anything, wages today are historically low. They have been growing slowly for decades for every income group other than the affluent. As a share of gross domestic product, worker compensation is lower than at any point in the second half of the 20th century. Two main causes are corporate consolidation and shrinking labor unions, which together have given employers more workplace power and employees less of it.
Just as telling as the wage data, the share of working-age Americans who are in fact working has declined in recent decades. The country now has the equivalent of a large group of bakeries that are not making baguettes but would do so if it were more lucrative — a pool of would-be workers, sitting on the sidelines of the labor market.
Corporate profits, on the other hand, have been rising rapidly and now make up a larger share of G.D.P. than in previous decades. As a result, most companies can afford to respond to a growing economy by raising wages and continuing to make profits, albeit perhaps not the unusually generous profits they have been enjoying.
By The New York Times | Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Sure enough, some companies have responded to the alleged labor shortage by doing exactly this. Bank of America announced Tuesday that it would raise its minimum hourly wage to $25 and insist that contractors pay at least $15 an hour. Other companies that have recently announced pay increases include Amazon, Chipotle, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart, J.P. Morgan Chase and Sheetz convenience stores.
Low wages seem normal
Why the continuing complaints about a labor shortage, then?
They are not totally misguided. For one thing, some Americans appear to have temporarily dropped out of the labor force because of Covid-19. Some high-skill industries may also be suffering from a true lack of qualified workers, and some small businesses may not be able to absorb higher wages. Finally, there is a rollicking partisan debate about whether expanded jobless benefits during the pandemic have caused workers to opt out.
For now, some combination of these forces — together with a rebounding economy — has created the impression of labor shortages. But companies have an easy way to solve the problem: Pay more.
That so many are complaining about the situation is not a sign that something is wrong with the American economy. It is a sign that corporate executives have grown so accustomed to a low-wage economy that many believe anything else is unnatural.
nder the new law, yoga instructors are barred from using any Sanskrit names for poses and must refer to them using their English equivalent only. There will be no oms in the schoolhouse, as mantras are verboten as is chanting of any kind. In fact, the state Legislature has also banned the use of the salutation namaste altogether. As if that version of yoga weren’t watered down enough, the state will also require participating students to get a permission slip signed by their parents. The text of said permission slip was included in the bill: “I understand that yoga is part of the Hinduism religion. I give my child permission to participate in yoga instruction in school.” Good to double-check just to make sure yoga isn’t sneaking up on anyone in Alabama.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2105.22 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2150 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.
United States
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