Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Sunday, December 26, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2504 - Weekly Hodge Podge - Christmas Mode



A Sense of Doubt blog post #2504 - Weekly Hodge Podge - Christmas Mode

This HODGE PODGE has been in development for about a month. The majority of it consists of lots of content from my email archive of things I send myself to remember to include them.

It starts out with this lovely Atwood quote sent to me by a dear friend.

And then, there’s just chaos of so much stew meat and vegetables as we brace for what is supposedly to be a major winter storm.

Merry Happy whatever you celebrate.

FESTIVUS FOR THE REST OF US!

And later, prepare for the traditional Festivus airing of grievances!




“...This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar…”

—Margaret Atwood, from the poem
   “Shapechangers in Winter”


NY Blizzard of 2013...but comparable


Snow possible at lower elevations in Oregon this holiday weekend


The forecast continues to look increasingly wintry for Southwest Washington and Western and Central Oregon heading into the Christmas weekend.

According to the National Weather Service, the combination of cold temperatures and occasional precipitation raises the possibility of snow and ice for the lowlands as early as Christmas Day.

The latest forecast models are suggesting a high probability of accumulating snow as temperatures next week drop even lower. Snow could reach the lowest elevations of Southwest Washington and Northwest Oregon including the Interstate 5 and Interstate 84 corridors, as well as portions of the coast. The weather service is forecasting a 50% chance of snow in North Central Oregon Friday and Saturday with snow likely on Sunday.

Finer details such as the timing of any snow threats, or snow accumulations from any particular system, are impossible to know at this point according to the weather service.

Anyone with travel plans for Christmas Eve through next week should be prepared for winter travel conditions and be prepared for delays.

We're fucked.

Watched the new Matrix movie last night. A self-proclaimed trans-writer on Bitch Media trashes it. Feels somewhat justified, but I am not sure if I am 100% behind it.

Also, watched Don't Look Up. Liked that one A LOT. So did the audience on ROTTEN TOMATOES.


Imaginary numbers could be needed to describe reality. I think I need to make a separate post just about this idea.

The universe is expanding faster it should be. Don’t worry about it. Billions of years to go yet. Don’t think even our planet will live that long, let along me.

In more timely science news, a new system will let us know if aliens are communicating with lasers. SETI is always doing great stuff like this.

Now that we have a smarter White House in place, officials are enlisting various software companies and developers to improve security of open-source software.







THE AVALON BALLROOM THEATRE
Nov 9, 2019



You Tube is always burying these playlists in my my list of playlists or not showing them to me at all:

Favorites
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=FL9lZTXYX0-CJxUqMhDOj2Hw



Nonmusic faves
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL99B6B04136AF4897


This Christmas, hope may feel elusive. But despair is not the answer.

Opinion ●  By Michael Gerson ●  Read more »

For me, such assurances do not come easy or often. Mine are less grand vista than brief glimpse behind a curtain. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” she wrote of an “incandescent” light that can possess “the most obtuse objects” and “grant / A brief respite from fear.” Plath concluded: “Miracles occur, / If you care to call those spasmodic / Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again, / The long wait for the angel. / For that rare, random descent.”


Christmas hope may well fall in the psychological category of wish fulfillment. But that does not disprove the possibility of actually fulfilled wishes. On Christmas, we consider the disorienting, vivid evidence that hope wins. If true, it is a story that can reorient every human story. It means that God is with us, even in suffering. It is the assurance, as from a parent, as from an angel, as from a savior: It is okay. And even at the extreme of death (quoting Julian of Norwich): “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

 

THANK YOU NETFLIX!!!!

https://ew.com/tv/wednesday-netflix-addams-family-series-script-page/

A script page from the upcoming Netflix show focusing on Wednesday Addams of the Addams Family.




A Ghost Story for Christmas director Mark Gatiss names his top 5 spooky TV shows

The Sherlock co-creator and Doctor Who writer scares up some terrifying small screen recommendations.

By Clark Collis

https://ew.com/tv/ghost-story-for-christmas-mark-gatiss-top-5-spooky-tv-shows/

Actor-writer-director Mark Gatiss is a huge fan of dead things.

"I've always loved ghosts," says the Brit, whose many credits include co-creating Sherlock with Steven Moffat and writing episodes of Doctor Who. "I've always loved horror but ghosts were my favorite things. I've been reading ghost stories from a very early age."

Over the last few years, Gatiss has adapted several spooky stories by author M.R. James for the small screen under the umbrella title A Ghost Story for Christmas. His latest chiller of an offering is The Mezzotint which premieres on BritBox Dec. 24.

"It's a classic James story," says Gatiss. "It's about a museum creator who buys an old form of engraving, a mezzatint. It seems to be a very ordinary picture of a very ordinary house. But when his friend looks at it he says, 'This is much better than you said it was, the moonlight is very well caught.' He says, 'There isn't any moonlight.' But there is! The moon has now come out, and the next time he looks there's a figure on the lawn, and the next time he looks the figure is closer, crawling across the lawn. Basically a long forgotten tragedy is happening again within the framework of the picture."

A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Mezzotint
The Mezzotint
 
| CREDIT: MICHAEL CARLO/BRITBOX

The tale stars Rory Kinnear, probably best known for playing Bill Tanner in the James Bond franchise.

"I've always loved Rory's work," says Gatiss. "He's such a dry wit, he's such a funny man. But also he does that kind of bottled panic and terror very brilliantly. So he was just perfect."

Below, Gatiss talks about his favorite spooky TV shows. Read alone at your peril!

Doctor Who (1968-today)

MARK GATISS: I'm a lifelong fan. I grew up with Jon Pertwee as my Doctor, and he was exiled to earth, so a lot of the horrors were very domestic horrors. So shop window dummies coming to life and big chemical works. It looked like where I grew up. I think that was part of the reason I was so frightened of it. It felt very possible. If you live in a 17th century house, you may already feel like you've got a ghost, but if you live in a [modern] house you probably think you're safe. But perhaps you're not!

The Ghosts of Motley Hall (1976-78)

GATISS: Growing up, I was mad about ghosts and horror. There was a great, almost forgotten now, show called The Ghosts of Motley Hall, written by Richard Carpenter. Ghosts, the comedy series now, is very much in that area. It's a collection of ghosts from different periods, but it's a charming show and really deserves to be much better known. Very funny and very moving, actually.

Children of the Stones (1977)

GATISS: Children of the Stones had a huge influence on me. It's so creepy. It was filmed in Avebury, and it was about a guy and his son who come to live there, and there's a strange sort of lord of the manor played by the great Ian Cuthbertson. The legend is that people were turned into stone in some time in pre-history and it starts to happen again. They have this fantastic catchphrase. Instead of saying, "Good morning," everybody says, "Happy day." It's like a proper proto-folk-horror.

Supernatural (1977)

GATISS: It was a series examining the roots of gothic horror. Each episode would take a familiar legend, like Dracula, and sort of spun it on its head. There's a werewolf one and one with Jeremy Brent, which is utterly terrifying, called "Mr Nightingale." Terrifying! But the best one is a brilliant thing called "Night of the Marionettes" in which Gordon Jackson plays a man obsessed with Byron and Shelley. He's traveling across Europe trying to find the source of Frankenstein, and they stay in this inn run by Vladek Sheybal from From Russia With Love, and there's a giant puppet show in the basement of this inn, and the puppet show is called The Workshop of Filthy Creation. [Laughs]. And basically, they're not really puppets, they're corpses. It's absolutely ghastly and really one of most weird things ever broadcast. I highly recommend it.

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

GATISS: More recently, I enjoyed very much The Haunting of Hill House. I think one of the brilliant by-products of Netflix and others wanting to make longer format things is a lot of things that would never be touched, or would end up being a very compromised movie, have the breadth to breathe like this. I mean, The Haunting, the Robert Wise movie, is possibly my favorite horror movie, but I thought the longer format for the series was really great, and I look forward to a lot more in that vein. I haven't seen [Midnight Mass]. Steven Moffat's son (Louis Oliver) is in it, so I've got to watch it. I'm very excited about that, actually.

Gatiss' three previous A Ghost Story Christmas episodes (Martin's Close, The Tractate Middoth, and The Dead Room) are now screening on BritBox. The streaming service will premiere The Mezzotint Dec. 24.

Watch the trailer for The Mezzotint above.









PersonalityIdea
Your sense of right and wrong is interwoven with your personality
by Luke D Smillie and Milan Andrejević





https://psyche.co/ideas/when-all-looks-bleak-hopebuilding-strategies-offer-a-lifeline


Suicidal thoughts and behaviours are a major public health problem: worldwide, we lose approximately 700,000 people to suicide every year. Recent global statistics for suicidal thoughts and behaviours are difficult to ascertain, and vary by nation, but a 2020 survey found that, in the United States, an estimated 4.9 per cent of adults had serious thoughts of suicide, and about 0.5 per cent reported a suicide attempt in the past year. Take a moment to process what the numbers mean. They signal that millions of people and their loved ones are suffering. They tell us that far too many people are struggling and searching for relief. Tragically, too few are finding it. The losses from suicide are heart-breaking and cause ripple effects in families and communities. Both grief from and exposure to suicide are linked to increased suicide risk and mental health difficulties.


ACTION ALERT

Here’s how to fix the internet

There is a world where social media isn’t a surveillance nightmare, where private messaging is truly private, and where we have real control over our own devices. EFF’s new podcast, How to Fix the Internet, takes you on a fun, unexpected journey to that better world—and with the help of experts, paves the way for us all to get there. 





Devon Price
















































































































Idaho Sheriff Pulled Gun On Youth Group Girls, Teaching Important Lesson About Giving Thanks

Doktor Zoom
December 17, 2021 01:28 PM

Photocopy of 'Thankful Turkey' kids left on doors in Blackfoot, Idaho, via Idaho Attorney General's Office.

The sheriff of eastern Idaho's Bingham County has been charged with a load of felonies after a November 9 incident in which he waved a gun at a group of girls and their youth group leader, pulling the leader out of a car by her hair, then cursing and threatening to shoot the lot of them. The girls were on a pre-Thanksgiving crime spree in which they left paper turkey cutouts on people's doors, then knocked and ran away giggling like the 12- to 16-year-olds they are. Sheriff Craig Rowland was charged Tuesday by the Idaho Attorney General's office with "aggravated battery, aggravated assault, and exhibition of a deadly weapon."

Well damn. You hold a gun in the face of one Mormon youth group leader ...

Boise teevee station KTVB describes the incident that provoked Rowland to spring into action, ready to bring down deadly vengeance upon the marauding band of wilding LDS girls:

According to a probable cause affidavit, the seven girls, ages 12 to 16, were delivering paper "thankful turkeys" to people around the neighborhood as part of a youth group activity.

The girls would deliver the turkey thank-you notes by taping them to a recipient's door, ringing the doorbell, and running away before the person inside could see who had left the note.

The girls apparently thought that maybe Blackfoot, Idaho (population not quite 12,000), is a safe place for youthful high jinks and japery, but the sheriff, no doubt keenly aware that crime is out of control everywhere, went immediately into Cop Freakout Mode when his Yorkie started barking s bit after 8 p.m. and he saw two suspicious figures running from his house into the inky darkness.

According to the affidavit, the girls returned to their youth leader's car giggling, and told her they had tried to leave the turkey, but had nearly been caught by Craig Rowland so had been unable to deliver it. The group delivered another "thankful turkey" to a house nearby, then returned to the sheriff's home to try again.

Rowland told police that a few minutes after he had seen people running away from his house, his Ring doorbell activated and he heard his front door rattle.

The sheriff said he got his gun, and stepped outside wearing long johns and socks.

Soon, those potential committers of hoopla learned a thing or two about messing with the Long Johns Arm of the Law:

In Ring doorbell footage, Rowland is shown looking at the turkey and can be heard saying, “Thank you,” and “That’s frickin bulls***.”

Rowland said he saw a vehicle driving down the road, which he stopped. Rowland said the car did not look familiar and the driver of the car stopped and opened the driver’s side door.

“I reach in and pull the driver out by the hair,” Rowland told investigators, according to court documents. “I say, ‘Who the f*** are you?’ And I do have a gun in my hand, but I still have my finger on the slide.”

Rowland told investigators he pointed the gun at the woman’s head. The woman later identified herself as a neighbor and family friend for over three decades.

To be fair, it is a well-known fact that Antifa terrorists can be anyone, even a neighbor who thinks they've known you for years.

Rowland said he didn't recognize her, but that after holding his gun on the woman for a while, he ascertained that the danger had subsided and he allowed the suspicious individuals to continue on their way (we are assuming he framed it that way, at least).

And because "Rural Idaho," yes, there was alcohol and gratuitous racism, too!

Rowland told investigators that he had had a single alcoholic drink that night, but he was clear-headed. He told investigators about several threats that had been made against him and his wife in recent months that caused them to be concerned about people at their home.

“I have been doing this job for 36 years,” Rowland said. “I have had drunk Indians drive down my cul-de-sac. I’ve had drunk Indians come to my door. I live just off the reservation, we have a lot of reservation people around us that are not good people.”

Oh, yes, he also told investigators that the recent switch from daylight savings to standard time had "really messed me up," which is perhaps a point in favor of discontinuing the time shift, since apparently it turns some people into raving racist assholes.

The statements from the youth group leader and the girls differed only slightly from Rowland's account:

The woman said when Rowland pulled her out of the car, he reportedly lifted his gun then pointed it inches from her forehead, according to court documents. The woman said Rowland told her to never do this again, that he could shoot her, and that she needed to “get the f*** out of here.”

The girls who were in the car described Rowland getting upset, having a gun and saying the “f-bomb” multiple times. Several of them recall Rowland pointing the gun at the leader’s head and saying “I will f***ing shoot you.”

Rowland has taken a leave of absence from his job, but remains the elected county sheriff, at least for now.

Devon Boyer, spokesperson for the Shoshone-Bannock tribe, called Rowland's comments about Native people "extremely offensive" and called on Rowland to resign and issue a public apology to members of the Fort Hall reservation community.

We hope the woman and the children involved will be able to heal from this traumatic incident. This incident should not have occurred but proves racism still exists. We need major relationship building between our communities.

The tribe noted (pointedly, we hope) that no tribal members were involved in the incident. We'd like to think Boyer's comments might trigger some kind of review of his office's handling of past cases involving Bannock-Shoshone people, but then we remember we are in Idaho. Still, sounds like a really eager civil rights attorney might want to look at some records, huh?

This isn't Rowland's first brush with infamy for general assholishness; KTVB notes that in 2016, he said a state bill aimed at more efficient processing of rape kits, and of tracking possible matches, wasn't needed because he believed most reports of sexual assault are made up.

Under Idaho law, Rowland could face up to five years in prison on the count of aggravated assault, and/or 15 years on the aggravated battery charge. Also under Idaho politics, he was able to get reelected with 85 percent of the vote last fall, even after those 2016 comments about rape.

We're going to assume that coming close to shooting a nice LDS lady and some cheery teen girls may be a bridge too far for Bingham County residents, even for a manly man who might have gotten away with it if he'd claimed he was standing his ground against a less sympathetic victim.

[KTVB / East Idaho News]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please help us keep bringing you news of America's Finest Lawpersons with a $5 or $10 monthly donation. Dok isn't planning any visits to Bingham County, either.

Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.



Villagers in Bihar, India, praying in secret this year.Atul Loke for The New York Times






Fox News Hell Week Ends With Judicial D*ck Kicking

Liz Dye
December 17, 2021 12:43 PM

Fox News is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, as CNN's Brian Stelter pointed out in his newsletter.

It started with Chris Wallace noping out for CNN+, the network's streaming service. After 18 years, the only Fox host with any real journalistic credibility announced on his Sunday show that he was abandoning Rupert Murdoch's House That Fear Built.

“I want to try something new, to go beyond politics, to all the things I’m interested in,” Wallace said, announcing his decision. Translation: Fuck this shit, I'm out.

And if anyone needed clarity on the burning issue of "Is Fox a real news outlet?" — did you fall down go boom and hit your head? — on Monday Rep. Liz Cheney read out texts to Mark Meadows from the entire goon squad demanding that Trump call off the Capitol rioters on January 6. Because those maniacs attacking the seat of government and attempting to overturn a lawful election were Trump's guys and also Fox's guys, and they all knew it.

Five minutes later those craven hacks pivoted to pretending that it was Antifa or Deep State FBI agitators. But when shit was hitting the fan, they knew damn well who launched that turd.

"Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy." — Laura Ingraham

"Please get him on tv. Destroying everything you have accomplished." — Brian Kilmeade

"Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol?" — Sean Hannity

After 24 hours of radio silence where the network pretended it had never happened, the network swung into action with a carefully scripted ... JK, LOL.

Look at this shit from Hannity:

I thought liberals believed in privacy in this country. Just like when we talk about COVID, I think I'm one of the few remaining Americans that believes in freedom, you know, not out there saying, "F your freedom" like other people. I mean, it's like every other day I hear somebody new saying, "F your freedom." I'm like, "Nah, sorry, that's not the country I believe in, or the people." Yeah, I mean, it's just people, just bizarre.

The country that I believe in — I believe in medical privacy. I believe in doctor patient confidentiality. You know, nobody wants to hear it, but I think I'm right. I think the debate, for the most part, is over in terms. People have decided where they stand on vaccinations. And I don't think anything that Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, the CDC or the NIH is going to say that's going to convince them and we'll get to that later in the show today.

And the fact that, you know, they read a test — a text from me, "Can he make a statement, ask the people leave the Capitol?" OK, now why would they release this, except that they're trying to make a point?

Unimpeachable logic!

Hannity and Ingraham spent the rest of the week complaining about Cheney and doing that weird handoff thing where they pretend to be normal human beings who actually like each other and hang out in the break room. Hello, fellow colleagues!


During last night's handoff, Hannity announced that he was leaving for vacation with Jesus, and the two of them would spend the rest of the year in holy communion discussing the midterms.

“On vacation, I try to center myself, find God, and then get my creative juices flowing, and I already know where I’m headed,” he vowed. “I know next year is the biggest most important midterm election year in our lives and I’m going to be focused like a laser beam.”

Sorry for making you think about Sean Hannity's juices.

But the bad news wasn't over for Fox, because Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis denied the network's motion to dismiss a $1.7 billion defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. It was a really, really bad order for Fox, and not just because they lost this round. Judge Davis laid out the evidence in spectacularly damning fashion.

Here he is pointing to "actual malice," i.e. the standard a public figure like Dominion would have to meet to establish that Fox defamed it.

Contrary to Fox’s contentions, the Complaint’s allegations are not conclusory. The Complaint supports the reasonable inference that Fox either (i) knew its statements about Dominion’s role in election fraud were false or (ii) had a high degree of awareness that the statements were false. For example, Fox possessed countervailing evidence of election fraud from the Department of Justice, election experts, and Dominion at the time it had been making its statements. The fact that, despite this evidence, Fox continued to publish its allegations against Dominion, suggests Fox knew the allegations were probably false.

In addition to which, he laid waste to the three affirmative defenses Fox is likely to assert at trial.

A "neutral reporting" defense protects accurate reporting on a newsworthy event, i.e. not Maria Bartiromo saying, "Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software. I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that."

“Fox’s reporting must have been neutral, not ‘a personal attack’ on Dominion, to succeed on this defense,” Judge Davis writes. “Dominion’s well-pleaded allegations, however, support the reasonable inference that Fox’s reporting was not accurate or dispassionate.” In addition,

Fox next asserts the “fair report privilege.” New York has codified the fair report privilege in Section 74 of the Civil Rights Law. Section 74 provides that a “civil action cannot be maintained….for the publication of a fair and true report of any judicial proceeding, legislative proceeding or other official proceeding.” Thus, for the privilege to apply, a publication must be a “fair and true report” “of” an official proceeding. The Court finds that the Complaint’s well-pleaded allegations support the reasonable inference that Fox’s reporting (i) was not fair or true and (ii) did not concern an official proceeding.

Finally, the court found that the "opinion privilege," wot protects this here mommyblog, may or may not be available to people who call themselves Big Boy Real Life Journalists. Anyway, "Fox’s news personnel repeatedly framed the issue as one of truth-seeking and purported to ground interview questions in judicial proceedings and evidence.”

And not for nothing, but those same statements, or similar ones made on other rightwing networks, make up the evidence in the multiple lawsuits filed by Dominion and Smartmatic against Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and Rudy Giuliani. So while you're crying hot tears for Fox, you can pour one out for the rest of these assholes, too.

Or raise a glass, if that seems more appropriate.

Follow Liz Dye on Twitter RIGHT HERE!

Please click here to support your Wonkette. And if you're ordering your quarantine goods on Amazon, this is the link to do it.



https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/12/16/1445254/mathematician-hurls-structure-and-disorder-into-century-old-problem

Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem (quantamagazine.org)

Posted by msmash  from the closer-look dept.
How many red and blue beads can you string together without making a big evenly spaced sequence of the same color? Using a semi-structured pattern of squashed circles, a mathematician shattered the previous record for how long you can keep stringing beads. From a report:The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is "not only wrong but spectacularly wrong," as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science. The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what "long" means for each color.) This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

Nurdles: the plastic pellets toxifying the oceans

Nurdles are lentil-sized pellets of plastics—polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and so on—that are used to make everything from consumer goods to the containers we ship them in. They're an environmental terror, not least because they look like food to aquatic life. Some 230,000 tons of them are set afloat on the high seas every year. — Read the rest


What was up in Africa during the Renaissance?

Africa during the Renaissance
Watch the Video

Growing up Black in the West means that learning a narrow version of world history is inevitable. Even if you took AP classes in high school, the European perspective was always the main course in any history class. That isn't to say that understanding the nations and events that solidified Western dominance isn't valuable, but having the appropriate amount of nuance regarding the divergent cultures that influenced European life would be helpful. — Read the rest


Krampus, the origins of a Yuletide monster

GARETH BRANWYN  4:40 AM MON DEC 20, 2021

 

On this episode of Monstrum, they look at the origins of everybody's favorite Christmas devil, Krampus.



Check out this retrospective on the platinum age of comics

Platinum age of comics
Watch the Video

As much as comic fans fawn over the Golden Age, it's equally important to look at the preceding era, which set the stage for modern comics. Along with the lengthy roster of pulp heroes like Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Flash Gordon, fans tend to sweep the Platinum Age of comics under the rug and dismiss their foundational importance. — Read the rest

The story of how Coke designed Santa

How Coke Invented Santa
Watch the Video

Christmas is next week, which means our society's obligatory celebration of consumerism, materialism, and family is finally here. In the haze of ads for trendy gadgets and copious Christmas specials, I'm sure you've seen at least one image of the iconic depiction of Santa Claus. — Read the rest




Japan and the issue of racial profiling

Japan and racism
Watch the Video

In recent months, Japan has come under fire for racially profiling people who visit the country. As a result, the US embassy has even issued a warning for Americans who decide to visit Japan. But is Japan inherently racist, or is the entire issue a massive cultural misunderstanding? — Read the rest




I love this summary of former Texas governor Rick Perry's speech about TRUMP:



In June of 2015, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry delivered the kind of speech that candidates for president generally have a difficult time walking back. Speaking to something called the Opportunity and Freedom PAC, he ripped into his rival, Donald Trump, as a “cancer on conservatism” that “must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.” He was a “sower of discord,” Perry said, who “foments agitation, thrives on division, scapegoats certain elements of society, and offers empty platitudes and promises.” Trump was a “barking carnival act,” and “Trumpism, as he defined it, was a “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.”


Well, times have changed. Perry not only endorsed Trump but worked for him. Apparently, he  may be the author of the text to Mark Meadows outlining the "aggressive" strategy by which three key state legislatures are convinced to ignore the actual vote of the people and just deliver their electors for Trump because they love the Cheetoh-head so much.

Gross.

And then this asshole is doing more things to really secure that award for Asshole of the Year. When Trump is around, it's quite difficult to outdo him for the MVP Asshole of Year Award.






Of Course The Magic Anti-5G Pendants Conspiracists Are Wearing Are Radioactive






If You Want To Party At Anti-Vaxxer RFK Jr.'s House, Better Get A Vaccine!

For the past year or so, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, managing to get himself kicked off of Instagram this past February for pushing one too many thoroughly debunked claims about it. Given this, those who received an invitation to a holiday party at his house were surprised to find that they would need proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to get in the door. Awkward!



















David Bowie’s ‘Brilliant Adventure 1992-2001’: Album Review – Variety


https://variety.com/2021/music/album-reviews/david-bowie-brilliant-adventure-1992-2001-album-review-1235120071/
 





Lives in Ottawa, ONUpdated 2y
In Star Trek, how long does it take a ship to travel 1 light year at maximum warp?

Patrick Stewart once asked the technical people on the show how the ship “goes”. The technical guy launched into a long explanation of the pseudoscience involved. Patrick Stewart then decided that what makes the ship go is Picard lifting his finger, bringing it down and saying, “Engage.”

Anyway, the technical manuals say one thing. What actually happens in the show is something else. According to the technical manual, Enterprise D can travel at a max speed of about Warp 9.6 which is supposedly around 2000 times the speed of light.

Technically, to figure out how long this would take, multiply 365 by 24 to get the number of hours in a year - 8760. Then divide this by 2000 and round to the nearest half hour. So the Enterprise D would need 4.5 hours to traverse a light year.

If, however, you watch the show, Enterprise D often traverses several light years in the space of just a few minutes at far lower warp factors.

The ultimate answer is: starships travel at the Speed of Plot. If the plot says it takes a whole day to go one light year at maximum warp, it does. If the plot says that the ship has to cross 500 light years in an afternoon at warp factor six, then it does.



Alan Ruhland, lives in Ottawa, ON • Updated August 13, 2019

 

Frederick Dolan, Professor, UC Berkeley • Updated July 26






‘Herd immunity’ more complex than reaching 70% vaccine rate, says Oregon health expert - OPB







The Weekly Reader: November 7-13, 2021

THE WEEKLY READER

Feminist reads, every Saturday morning.

Personal Parallels: Halsey’s Gothic Film Is a Gendered Journey Through Pregnancy

by Rachel Saywitz

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power (HBO Max) is Halsey's hour-long companion film to the album of the same name. Decadent, moody visuals pair with sorrowful synth-pop and vengeful rock music to craft a story of murder, pregnancy, and posession that runs partly in parallel to Halsey’s personal life.

THE ESSENTIAL SIX

 1.   The intentionality of her rereleased albums only further cements that Taylor Swift is nothing if not strategic about how she tells her story. [Elly Belle]

 2.   While it’s reasonable to assume most true crime podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokkers have good intentions, there’s still something grossly exploitative about turning the most intimate and painful details of someone else’s life into serialized entertainment. [Jennifer Chang]

 3.   Will sex-doll brothels change the future of sex work? [Naseem Jamnia]

 FROM OUR SPONSOR:  SHE BOP

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*Sale lasts from 11/13 — 11/14 only*

 4.   Welcome to Feminist-ish: a video series deconstructing the feminist-adjacent tropes that we love to hate. [Marina Watanabe]

 5.   In Bad Fat Black Girl author Sesali Bowen delivers a timely analysis of trap feminism in pop culture following the resurgence and dominance of female rappers. [Natelegé Whaley]

 6.   9 books feminists should read in November. [Rosa Cartagena]

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New M.I.A. Project:









Hear Joni Mitchell, James Taylor Duet on ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’ – Rolling Stone






Jon Bair killed a neo-Nazi 28 years ago, and he has a message for Portland - OPB





Ya protagonists





AMBAR MARTINEZ 

https://www.heraldnet.com/business/she-knows-the-transformative-power-of-education/


Now she is helping run a family business and working with the Washington State Board of Community & Technical Colleges to help guide equity strategies.







Omicron, However You Pronounce It, Is Out of Control Right Now

It’s not March 2020. But it still sucks.

Senior Reporter


For the last week, every passing day in New York has felt a little more ominous. Upstate counties are facing overwhelmed hospitals, and Covid-19 cases are surging in the city, even among the fully vaccinated, due in part to the new Omicron variant. Lines for PCR testing in my neighborhood stretch for blocks, and response times for those test results seem to be lagging. Restaurants shut their doors. Parties were canceled. The Brooklyn Nets were so desperate for healthy players they reactivated the vax-less Kyrie Irving—who was promptly forced to quarantine. And now we have the numbers to show for it: On Friday, New York state posted its highest recorded number of positive Covid-19 tests since the pandemic began.

There are a few big caveats to that number. The first is that in the Spring of 2020, when New York City was the epicenter of the global pandemic, testing was so limited it almost felt like a scandal that an entire NBA team could get them—so there’s no comparison with that moment. The second, of course, is that most of the adult population is vaccinated, and a significant number of people have gotten booster shots, and they seem to have a good deal of protection against the variant’s worst effects. This isn’t March of 2020, no matter how ominous the tick-tick-tick of canceled sporting events and disrupted travel plans might be.



But it still sucks. It’s been almost two years of this. It’s the holidays! Everyone’s traveling and people are trying to catch up on the cheer they missed last year. And even while many aspects of the pandemic are greatly improved—we have better treatment options, and vaccines, and understandings of how it spreads, and lots of masks, and tests—there are still familiar hang-ups. Tests are embarrassingly expensive (in the UK they’ll send you tests for free), and the Biden administration—which once mocked the notion of sending out free tests—has rolled out a Rube Goldberg-ish process to curb costs. Per the New York Times:

The administration has said that it plans to issue its rules for reimbursement by Jan. 15, and the plan will go into effect sometime after that.

The administration has already said that the plan will not provide retroactive reimbursement for tests that have already been purchased, which means that any tests you buy for the holidays will not be covered.

January 15th!?

Stay safe, everyone. Get tested before you travel. And get that booster yesterday.




December 23, 2021



Good morning. Ready to give up on Covid? Spare a moment to think about older people.

Passing out home test kits in New York City yesterday.Janice Chung for The New York Times

The age gap

By now, you’ve probably heard someone say it, or maybe you’ve said it yourself: We’re all getting Covid.

“Yes, you’ll get the virus,” Dr. James Hamblin wrote in his newsletter. “I think we all have a date with Covid at some point,” Helen Branswell, a health reporter at Stat News, said. “People are starting to give up,” my colleague Tara Parker-Pope told me.

It’s an understandable feeling given Omicron’s intense contagiousness, even among the vaccinated. A surge that began in the Northeast is now spreading to the Midwest, South and beyond:

Chart shows seven-day averages. | Source: The New York Times

Some of the country’s new Covid acceptance — or fatalism — stems from frustration with the costs of pandemic precautions: the loss of learning from closed schools; the isolation from social distancing; the nationwide rise in blood pressure, drug overdoses, mental health problems and more.

And some of the new attitude stems from the reality that contracting Covid will not be a big deal for most people. Hospitalization rates for children and for vaccinated people under 50 years old remain minuscule.

But I do want to raise one major point of caution. Covid in recent months has continued to present a meaningful amount of risk to older people, despite vaccination. It’s too soon to know whether Omicron will change the situation, but the safest assumption — absent more data — is that Covid will remain dangerous for the elderly.

“There is good reason for older adults to continue to try to avoid becoming infected, because the risk for hospitalization in that age group is still significant,” Dr. Shelli Farhadian of Yale University told me.

Today’s newsletter will walk through the data and then consider its implications.

The risks

A team of British researchers, led by Dr. Julia Hippisley-Cox at the University of Oxford, has conducted some of the most detailed research on Covid risks for different groups of people. The BMJ, a peer-reviewed journal, published the work, and it is available in an online calculator. The research was done before Omicron emerged and covers only residents of Britain, but it is still instructive.

Here are estimated post-infection death rates for several hypothetical people, all vaccinated.

Unless noted, people are of average U.S. height and weight and lack major medical problems. | Source: QCovid

The risks here for older people are frightening: A rate of 0.45 percent, for instance, translates into roughly a 1 in 220 chance of death for a vaccinated 75-year-old woman who contracts Covid. If the risks remain near these levels with Omicron, they could lead to tens of thousands of U.S. deaths, and many more hospitalizations.

Encouragingly, there are reasons to believe that Omicron’s death rate may be lower. Three new studies released yesterday suggested that Omicron causes milder illness on average than earlier versions of the virus. “I would guess that the mortality risk with Omicron is much smaller” than with earlier variants, Dr. George Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, told me yesterday.

One reassuring comparison is to a normal seasonal flu. The average death rate among Americans over age 65 who contract the flu has ranged between 1 in 75 and 1 in 160 in recent years, according to the C.D.C. Pre-Omicron versions of Covid, in other words, seem to present risks of a similar order of magnitude to vaccinated people as a typical flu. Some years, a flu infection may be more dangerous.

With Omicron, “I think the risk is not super high for relatively healthy and boosted people in their 70s,” Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me. “I think it’s moderate at most.”

Still, Baseman and other experts recommend vigilance, for several reasons. First, the flu kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, and we should probably pay more attention to it. (After declining last year during social distancing, flu infections are rising again now, as these Times charts show.)

Second, Omicron is so contagious that it has the potential to swamp hospitals and cause many otherwise preventable deaths even if only a small share of infections are severe. “We’re not at a place to treat this as a cold,” Azra Ghani of Imperial College London said.

Baseman said that if she were in her 70s, her primary worry would be getting moderately ill, needing standard medical care and not being able to get it at an overwhelmed hospital. Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania told me, “There is a strong rationale for reasonable efforts to mitigate transmission, particularly over the next four weeks.”

Remember that these efforts do not need to last forever. In South Africa, the number of new Covid cases is already falling, suggesting that the initial Omicron surge may be sharper and shorter than previous surges. Again, though, nobody knows what the next few weeks will bring.

In the meantime, it makes sense for many people — not just those over 65 — to think about which risky activities are easy to cut out. It also makes sense to wear N95 or KN95 masks, which are more effective than most. Above all, scientists say, get boosted now if you are eligible.

There are also some steps that individuals cannot take but that society could: Requiring people to be vaccinated to enter restaurants (as New York City has and Washington, D.C., soon will) and fly on airplanes; expanding access to walk-in vaccine clinics, rapid tests and post-infection treatments (as the Biden administration has begun doing); and improving ventilation in public indoor spaces.

I have focused on vaccinated people today’s, because they are already trying to protect themselves and their communities. Here is a different version of the chart above, this time adding the death risk for an unvaccinated, otherwise healthy 75-year-old woman who contracts Covid:

Unless noted, people are vaccinated, mostly healthy and of average U.S. height and weight. | Source: QCovid

If you are not vaccinated, you’re in a completely different category of danger.

THE LATEST NEWS

The Virus



The Virus
President Biden yesterday at the White House.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times



"'Immunity in our line of work means "detectable antibodies" which is evidence of a successfully mounted immune response. No relation to "protection," which is a completely different term that depends on having some immunity but also many other factors, like age, medications, health status, other chronic conditions … etc.'" 
–  Senior author of the study and Associate Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine, Ali Ellebedy, as reported by Reuters


It also depends on what [sic] the exact virus that caused the reinfection. If the virus is too different from the original virus, then the benefit from the previously developed immunity becomes more limited.” 
– Senior author of the study and Associate Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine, Ali Ellebedy, as reported by Reuters

Senior author of the study, Ali Ellebedy, confirmed his study does not claim that previously infected people will have protection from COVID-19 for life 





















Ill Communications

Anger Leads To Engagement, Engagement Leads To Profit

2022 approaches and fear still grips the land, but almost half the people are afraid of the wrong thing. The trepidation over the COVID-19 vaccines tricked people into become walking, coughing biological weapons. Well, they’re walking for a while, then the unvaccinated clog our intensive care units just like the virus has cemented their lungs. 

How did we end up here? 

You have to go back to the tech boom for the full context. The Internet remains the greatest science experiment without a conclusion. The oligarchs that inflicted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter did so for a reason. They were buying us, and they’re beholden to their precious investors.

The tech boom was a tidal wave of bad money. The investors of those platforms do not wish you well, nor democracy. Some of this was explored in my comic Analog with David O’Sullivan. We were being made unwell before the pandemic.

Controlling the masses has never been easier. You don’t even have to buy the mark a beer anymore. The Black Hats and their useful stooges know more about you than perhaps you know about yourself, and fear remains the most powerful motivator driving human beings.

The desire to make people afraid of science and the vaccines is real, and when you look at the country today…the bad guys are winning.

If the Internet existed alongside polio, we’d have never eradicated it, and America would be a lot more wheelchair accessible than it is.

I also fear the unknown. I’m afraid of what this novel virus does to your body after you’ve “recovered”. “Long Covid” doesn’t seem to have any great outcomes. previously hospitalized patients are showing signs of cognitive impairment. There’s so much we don’t know about this virus. It’s likely the history books (if there are any) will label COVID-19 a vascular disease, something that is just recently being explored by scientists around the world.

The New York Times recently published this piece in which the long-term toll the virus takes on our bodies is beginning to come into focus.

The new study found that 4,757 Covid survivors had lost at least 30 percent of kidney function in the year after their infection, Dr. Al-Aly said. 

That is equivalent to roughly “30 years of kidney function decline,” Dr. Wilson said.

Yikes. Look, if I want to kill my kidneys, I’ll do it the old fashioned way, and pull corks.

The origins of the virus are important, especially if it was an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute Of Virology, but the Covid misinformation we are suffering is biological warfare. But…what do I know? I just write supervillains for a living. 

The vaccines against this novel Coronavirus are imperfect, we’ll need boosters, and maybe even new versions of the vaccine if we get unlucky as it mutates. All the best disinformation has a kernel of truth. The virus is endemic on Earth now. Nobody knows exactly where life goes, but I know my chances of living through this are better with the vaccine. 

I’ve read a lot about why people are turning to snake oil, as the media would invite us to meet an untrue world half way. That’s not a world governed by science, and we should not aspire to live in it.


Event image
COVID-19
Yesterday
Vaccinated people are not more susceptible to COVID-19 infection overall, fact-checkers say
Data from the Office for National Statistics in the UK claiming that the double-vaccinated and triple-vaccinated are more likely to test positive for Omicron has been misrepresented. According to Reuters, new data shows breakthrough cases among vaccinated people are more likely to be Omicron than other variants, not that vaccines don’t work or that vaccinated people are at greater risk of infection than the unvaccinated.

What you need to know
- "This is the probability of an infection being Omicron given a person is infected, so it doesn't tell us how likely a person is to test positive in the first place," according to the Daily Sceptic - Early studies indicate a reduction in vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron variant but that a booster shot increases protection.

"New data from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), says that the triple-vaccinated are 4.5 times more likely to test positive for Omicron than the unvaccinated and that double-vaccinated individuals, were 2.3 times more likely to have Omicron over other variants. Social media users are misrepresenting these findings (on Omicron’s apparent ability to breakthrough vaccine protection) by saying those vaccinated are more susceptible to infection overall." — Reuters

The Daily Sceptic article says the latest ONS data does not tell us how likely a person is to test positive in the first place

"This means it doesn’t tell us that the vaccines are making things worse overall, only that they are making it much more likely that a vaccinated person is infected with Omicron than another variant. In other words, it is a measure of how well Omicron evades the vaccines compared to Delta. The fact that the triple-vaccinated are much more likely to be infected with Omicron than the double-vaccinated confirms this vaccine evading ability." — Daily Sceptic




PANDEMIC

THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT

Photo of flu patients during the First World War



If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.

I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.



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.





Data can be found here, as always: 

This is also a good data site:
Worldometer - Coronavirus info

Last updated: December 26, 2021, 17:03 GMT

 United States

Coronavirus Cases:

53,033,604

Deaths:

837,779

Recovered:

41,001,184

About Worldometer
Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statistics for 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.
Worldometer is cited as a source in over 10,000 published books and in more than 6,000 professional journal articles and was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world.
THE CORONAVIRUS IS MUTATING NOW WHAT?

Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic - The Atlantic

A Red Cross worker in the United States, 1918


Good morning. The U.S. may soon offer booster shots to every adult. We’ll explain why.

Receiving a booster in Anchorage.Ash Adams for The New York Times

Boosters for all?

The federal government’s guidance on Covid booster shots has often been confusing, but it looks as if it’s about to become much simpler.

The F.D.A. appears to be on the verge of authorizing Moderna and Pfizer booster shots for all adults in the U.S. If it does, anyone over 18 can get a booster, as long as it’s been at least six months since their last shot. (The C.D.C. has said that adults who received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine should get a booster at least two months later.)

Dr. Anthony Fauci has become “a very, very relentless advocate” for boosters, The Times’s Sharon LaFraniere, who covers the federal government’s response to the pandemic, told us. “He keeps pointing out that the data is getting stronger.”

Today we’ll walk you through what’s compelling regulators to widen eligibility, who needs the shots most and how to get one.

Why now?

First, immunity is waning. While experts debate the pace at which the vaccines become less effective, there’s strong evidence that they do lose some of their ability to prevent Covid infections. (These charts show the decline.) While the vaccines’ protection against severe disease mostly holds, some studies suggest they become somewhat less effective at doing so, particularly for older people or others with underlying medical conditions.

Second, expanding booster access is simpler than asking Americans to consult a list of rules to determine whether they’re eligible. As our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli put it, “It’s easier to just tell people to get them.”

Third, broadening eligibility to all adults would bring the U.S. in line with the approach of other countries, including Israel and Canada. Several U.S. states have begun expanding booster access on their own, essentially declaring that they couldn’t wait for the federal government.

“Critics would say that the C.D.C. is starting to look more like a caboose than a locomotive,” Sharon says. If the agency recommends boosters for all adults, “they’re just authorizing what’s already happening.”

Who should get one?

The government has already recommended that older adults, people 50 and up with underlying medical conditions and those who are immunocompromised get an additional shot. And the C.D.C. has allowed boosters for many others.

“I’ve urged everyone I know who is higher risk to get a booster,” Zeynep Tufekci, the sociologist and Times Opinion columnist, writes.

Some experts believe that the urgency for younger, healthier Americans to get a booster is lower. But others have started to make the case for it. “All vaccinated adults would benefit from a booster,” Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University wrote yesterday in The Atlantic.

Why? Cases are rising again — as of Wednesday, the U.S. was averaging over 88,000 new cases a day, up 23 percent from two weeks ago — and another winter surge seems possible, particularly in parts of the country with lower vaccination rates. (Look up your county’s numbers.) That increases the urgency of getting more Americans as much protection as they can.

Chart shows 7-day daily average.Source: New York Times database

And although new infections are concentrated among the unvaccinated, Jha notes, breakthrough infections have become more common. For younger and healthier adults, getting a booster can lessen the chances of getting sick and of spreading the virus to someone more vulnerable.

And boosters appear to work. Evidence from Israel, which has offered extra shots to all adults, suggests that a third Pfizer dose increases protection against infection to a level similar to the vaccine’s initial efficacy.

How do I get one?

Once the government broadens eligibility, you’ll be able to go to your local pharmacy, a doctor’s office or anywhere else where vaccines are available.

Mixing and matching different types of vaccines seems to provide a stronger immune response, Apoorva says, especially if you get a Moderna one after two Pfizer shots or following the single-dose of J.&J.

Is it ethical?

Some public health experts have urged the U.S. and other countries not to make boosters widely available. They argue that doing so will limit the supply of shots for the rest of the world, especially for residents of less wealthy countries.

But as Sharon notes, the U.S. government has already stockpiled enough vaccine doses to give boosters to the adult population. And the Biden administration, under pressure to increase the supply to poor nations, is planning to expand manufacturing capacity with the goal of producing at least a billion more doses a year.

Millions of doses have already been distributed to pharmacies and clinics around the U.S. “They cannot be recaptured and sent abroad,” Jha writes. “Either we use those doses here or we throw them away.”

More on the virus:


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2112.26 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2368 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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