COVID, Mandate, Witches, Ninja Audits, Rudy, Germany, Vlad, Supreme Shadow

So I’m both elderly and juvenile.
But at least I’m happy.

  • The United States took the lead in developing COVID vaccines. Iron Knee at Political Irony interrupts our self-congratulation with a bit of bad news. We rank 36th in the world on actually applying those vaccines and getting vaccinated. Iron Knee has an idea about the reasons.
     
  • Tommy Christopher recounts Jim Cramer’s step by step explanation of just why a potential employee might not want to risk his life and the lives of his family for a $22 an hour job with an infected, unvaccinated co-worker.
     
  • In Hackwhackers the NYTimes interviews an anti-vax healthcare professional who is baffled that colleagues consider her dangerous to be around.
     
  • At The Onion, a nurse carefully weighs whether she will be better off getting the vaccine or losing her job and dying.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life takes a close look at parallels between today’s illusions about the pandemic and stolen election conspiracies vs medieval witch hysteria.
     
  • Green Eagle often takes on what I would consider the dreary task of cataloging and refuting a week’s worth of right wing misinformation, yet does it with swift enthusiasm and a bit of humor. This week, the distortions, with a concentration on the Arizona attempt at an audit, all come from a site here in St. Louis. The Gateway Pundit seems to publish any old thing that pops into credulous minds. This week’s crop are obvious enough to justify simply listing them with the notation that they are all lies.
     
    I was already familiar with this, repeated in several forms on the site.
     
    Doug Logan from Cyber Ninjas Speaks After Dr. Shiva – Uncovers Additional 57,000 Issues (Not Counting Shiva’s 17,000 Issues)
     
    Doug Logan seems to have a history of involvement in spinning absurd sounding conspiracy theories, but this one went a few bridges too far. He felt compelled to deny ever saying what Gateway said he said. In fact, he pointed to the purported draft report published by Gateway as having been doctored to say what the real draft report itself didn’t say.
     
  • Frances Langum observes how tunes change when they’re sung under oath.
     
    For example Rudy Giuliani kind of sort of remembers reading that the 2020 election was stolen, but he doesn’t remember where and has no idea if it’s actually true.
     
    Her real live actual in-the-deposition quote includes:
     
    I had no idea if it was true or not. I didn’t even try to check. Why would I try to check? You wouldn’t have a story then.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged encounters a sign on the back of a pickup suggesting that Biden, and anyone who voted for him, be subjected to a reproductive biological experience. Oh, come on. You do too know what I mean. Since the pickup driver implicitly acknowledges that the Trump-person lost, Vixen appreciates his honesty and his pain.
     
    I was especially taken by this candidate for best phrase of the week about our once-upon-a-president Trump:
     
    …if he was used as fertilizer, even the corn would come up stupid.

Continue reading “COVID, Mandate, Witches, Ninja Audits, Rudy, Germany, Vlad, Supreme Shadow”

My Pillow Law, Poor Eric, Poor Rudy, Vaccine Salad, Filibusted, Patriotism

From February 2, 2020
One president, who professes never to touch alcohol, drunkenly reacts to the National Anthem:
 

Continue reading “My Pillow Law, Poor Eric, Poor Rudy, Vaccine Salad, Filibusted, Patriotism”

COVID, We Don’t Recall, Elder Race, Filibuster Buster, Non-Voting Rights

Profanely Blunt About Vaxxing (Apologies to Aunt Tildy)

@hill_deeee

Answer to @semaj31273 As requested. ❤️ ##fuckcovid ##endthis ##together ##doyourpart

♬ original sound – Hillary

  • Twenty something years ago, I devoted two nights a week to volunteering in a St. Louis hospital emergency room. It went on for a couple of years.
     
    That was where I learned about the admission process they called triage. Technically, it was not triage, at least as the term was originally used.
     
    In France, where triage was invented, 18th century wartime physicians were overwhelmed with battlefield casualties. They devised a three-category based priority system.
     
    Patients who were likely to live without treatment were not to be treated.
     
    Patients who were likely to die no matter what treatment they received were not to be treated.
     
    Doctors would focus only on patients who would likely die without treatment, but whose chances would have the greatest increase with immediate care.
     
    It was ruthless and it was based largely on guesswork. A substantial number of wounded patients died who might have survived. But, in the aggregate, it did seem to maximize success.
     
    Now, more than 2 centuries later, in modern emergency rooms of US hospitals, triage is less ruthless. There are no hard fast categories. Everyone is treated. Nurses assigned to the Triage Desk simply make judgments about who is in immediate danger. More serious cases are taken in first. Everyone else waits, sometimes for hours. Lots of waiting in emergency rooms.
     
    COVID is changing that. Triage is sometimes going back to the brutal guesswork of historical battlefields of wartime France.
     
    Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reports on the reports. In Idaho, as in other more rural states, overrun hospitals are turning away patients. Too many beds are already taken by unvaccinated victims of the pandemic. There is no more room in the inn.
     
    A few years ago, conservatives were scaring voters with tales of how Obamacare would bring us death panels. Bureaucrats, they said, would decide whether you would be allowed to live. Obamacare came to existence without those imaginary death panels.
     
    Anti-vaxxers have brought those old stories from falsehood to reality. Just from a different cause than was originally predicted.
     
  • Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles have made international news before being debunked. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson suggests an anti-vax slogan. I suspect a bit of sarcasm.
     

  • At The Onion, a new study finds that the COVID virus can be fooled by fake vaccine cards.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil kind of sort of celebrates California’s progress against COVID-19.
     
  • Congressional Member Madison Cawthorn gets incensed at the news. Major airlines plan to require passengers to get vaccinated:
    “you actually have a constitutionally protected right to free, unrestricted travel within the United States.”
     
    Tommy Christopher watches television’s Brian Williams commit brutal humor on poor Madison.
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony has a theory about COVID hotspots and pro-recall areas in California. There seems to be a connection.
     
    Iron Knee suggests the connection may be average area-wide intelligence.

Continue reading “COVID, We Don’t Recall, Elder Race, Filibuster Buster, Non-Voting Rights”

9/11, COVID, Trump, GOP, Biden, Both Sides, Nazi Spencer, Religion, Dance

Still Recovering, Always Remembering     [Image from Jesse Mills on Unsplash]
  • At The Moderate Voice, Dorian de Wind remembers the attack 20 years ago today, recalls the national sense of unity that followed, and wonders if we can achieve it again.
     
  • About 9/11 and national unity. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger reminds us that the unity did not extend to Muslims or Arab-Americans, against whom hate crimes rose sharply.
     
  • In Hackwhackers, we are asked to remember the victims whose lives were taken, and the heroes who put their own lives at risk. We are also asked to consider the horrible miscalculations, the blunders and costs in the 20 years since.
     
  • Cato Institution’s Julian Sanchez goes to C-SPAN to talk about the 9/11 attacks, the anti-terrorist programs that followed, and how they evolved into potential threats to civil liberties. As usual, Mr. Sanchez carefully restricts his language to fit the available evidence. More analyst than advocate.
     
  • My longtime friend Unabashedly American Darrell Michaels briefly remembers 9/11 and the heroic rallying of America accomplished by President George W. Bush. Briefly.
     
    He then goes into hyper-partisan mode. It is “unquestionable” that President Joe Biden intended to capitalize on the anniversary to boast about ending the war in Afghanistan. It is a matter of conjecture, says my friend, as to why he changed his mind about that.
     
    He winds up with what a terrible president Biden turned out to be.
     
    Pretty much grist for the mill in contemporary conservative thought, with a bit of additional creativity: Darrell knows in his heart, and to a moral certainty, the President’s unstated intent and, since the President does not behave as Darrell expects, Darrell produces a reason Biden changed his mind.
     
  • Tommy Christopher covers the 9/11 statement by former president Donald Trump that was minimally devoted to those who lost their lives 20 years ago and to the rescuers who risked theirs at the time. Instead, he used his address to attack Joe Biden. Because it’s all about his resentments
     
  • SilverAppleQueen remembers her roof top witness, as she watched the towers burn.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson reacts to President Biden’s version of a vaccination/testing mandate:
     

  • John Scalzi at Whatever suggests that, had any other Republican been President last year, the party might not have become the party of death, pushing to bury, in cemetaries around the country, a substantial fraction of itself.
     

Continue reading “9/11, COVID, Trump, GOP, Biden, Both Sides, Nazi Spencer, Religion, Dance”

FoxRule – Sounds About right

found on Twitter by Burr

 

 

Biden Applies FoxRule to All Major Employers

Requires Corporations With 100 or More Employees to Follow the Good Example Set By Fox News

Afghanistan Exit, Blame Biden, Texas, Terrorism, Horse & Mask, Clapton, GOP

  • Tommy Christopher carries the tragic story of loss and bitterness as a few families of slain Marines express fury at President Biden.
     
    One of the several times I was proud of President George W. Bush was when his visit to a hospital to be with wounded military personnel was interrupted by an angry mother of one of the wounded. Aides tried to get him out. He refused to leave until he had absorbed her anguish. He simply stood and took it.
     
    Conservatives, on the other hand, were vicious in their public attacks on a another angry parent, Cindy Sheehan, whose son had been killed in Iraq.
     
    Let’s hope those of us on the left of today’s center line possess more empathy, more compassion, in the face of horrible grief and bitter fury.
     
  • At The Onion, our nation is stunned to see that a 20-year catastrophe could end so catastrophically.
     
  • Robert Levine, at The Moderate Voice, traces how our mission in Afghanistan transmuted from necessary and doable to tragically impossible. We went way past our original intention: get bin Laden and get out.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life says that, of the many reasons for our 20 year debacle in Afghanistan, the most salient is our failure to understand the importance of culture.
     
  • ISIS-K and the Taliban have been fighting with each other for years, two extremist militant groups who hate Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims who do not sufficiently hate Shiite Muslims, the United States, and most of all each other.
     
    About 3 months before last year’s US presidential election, as then president Donald Trump was making concessions to the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS-K forces attacked a prison, letting 1000 inmates escape.
     
    News Corpse watches as Senator Lindsey Graham goes on air to slam President Biden for a host of things that happened when he was citizen Biden, including the prison break that happened when Trump was in charge.
     
  • My long time conservative friend, Unabashedly American Darrell Michaels writes an open letter demanding his Congressional Representative remove President Biden from office.
     
    He quotes such widely accepted authorities as right wing Nigel Farage in Britain and right wing Glenn Beck here. His charges include withdrawing all forces from Afghanistan without any advance warning, which should surprise those who followed the activities of Donald Trump before Biden took over.
     
    Biden announced early on that he would respect Donald Trump’s notification that all troops would be withdrawn. I think my calculation is correct, that Mr. Trump’s follow up on that pledge was to withdraw 83% of our forces, and secure the release from Afghanistan prisons of 5,000 Taliban fighters.
     
  • Security matters, like any set of technical issues, attract televised experts who speak in bewildering techno-language that tends to obscure what they want to explain. In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reviews our exit from Afghanistan and provides a clear (thank you) overview of the case that the exit enhances our security.
     
    Has to do with devoting anti-terrorism resources to fighting threats as they exist now, rather than getting bogged down forever fighting threats as they existed decades ago.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil picks out a few data points as a September rally approaches and racist incidents get more violent. I suppose the white supremacists in the US cheering the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan could count as a concern. They praise it as a template they can follow here.

Continue reading “Afghanistan Exit, Blame Biden, Texas, Terrorism, Horse & Mask, Clapton, GOP”

Taliban Cheered, COVID, Mea Culpa, Stephen Miller Time, Doocy Dooed

Shame on me for laughing:

  • My long time conservative friend, Darrell Michaels at Unabashedly American, wants to help out our President. Wow.
     
    He helpfully links to a suggested speech, pretty much a mea culpa for President Biden, in which the President proclaims that it is obviously his fault things in Afghanistan are so chaotic, and promises to try to be more levelheaded, which is to say conservative.
     
  • Green Eagle seems to feel that the most accurate way to look at the Afghanistan withdrawal is to consider the long ago entry into the war, the conduct of the war, the eventual commitment by one President to get out, as well as the fulfillment of that commitment by the next.
     
    He seems dissatisfied with press coverage that extends only to Let’s blame Biden Cause He’s There.
     
    Seems Green Eagle has more than a point.
     
  • driftglass makes a compelling argument with numbers, tracking casualties in Afghanistan with time devoted by mainstream news outlets. Not a good record for the press.
     
  • tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors shows Mr. Trump explaining how he completely destroyed ISIS and that bin Laden was not really a big deal. After all, he only had one big hit on 9/11/2001. Just a couple of buildings is all he got.
     
  • In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson is taken aback by Republican responses to the Kabul explosions.
     
  • As News Corpse reports, there is a hell-freezes-over moment as a Fox Network personality scolds the GOP for its knee-jerk attack on Biden after the Afghanistan terrorism attack.
     
  • Various snafus would have been logistically inevitable while evacuating after an American loss. And people have died. Conservatives are shocked that you don’t control what you want when you lose.
     
    But there have been bureaucratic tangles as well. Hackwhackers documents the role white supremacist Stephen Miller played, while in the Trump administration, in deliberately making each step more and more convoluted. The idea was to keep inferior people out – those with deficient cultural, racial, or religious characteristics.
     
    Even without the snarled matrix, people would have died. Seems car bombs don’t care about paperwork. But the tangles didn’t help.
     
  • Certainly we feel anger and frustration, even denial, at an unambiguous loss in Afghanistan. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged suggests we should know that, early on, American officials said no to an unambiguous win in Afghanistan. The Bush administration would not take yes for an answer.

Continue reading “Taliban Cheered, COVID, Mea Culpa, Stephen Miller Time, Doocy Dooed”

COVID – FDA Vaccination Approval Fact

found on Twitter by Burr

 

 

Sadly, there do exist chronological adults for whom this would be
startling news.