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Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19 set to receive full FDA approval tomorrow.

NOT on the FDA approval list for Covid:
Ivermectin, for livestock worms
Hydroxychloroquine, for malaria and lupus
Bleach, for chocolate stains
UV light, for crime scenes

Follow me for more medical updates!

— 𝓢𝓶𝓲𝓽𝓮!⚡️ (@7Veritas4) August 22, 2021

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

• Hackwhackers provides a clear picture of the top two issues this week: COVID and Afghanistan.
   
• Darrell Michaels of Unabashedly American really hates our President for his criminally incompetent handling of Afghanistan policy.
   
  Darrell is a longtime friend, so I felt compelled to respond on his site.
   
  It is true I’m elderly and I have learned not to completely trust what I read.
   
  Perhaps news reports on which I rely are wrong. They say Mr. Trump withdrew 83% of our forces in the last few months of his administration. As I understand it, that drawdown from 15,000 to 2500 was completed 5 days before Mr. Biden became President Biden.
   
  During that almost-transition, Mr. Trump ordered his administration to share no information with Biden or his people about the troop reduction or about anything else.
   
  Prior to the election Mr. Trump pressured the government of Afghanistan to release all 5,000 Taliban prisoners they were holding.
   
  As early as April, I read accounts that the Taliban seemed to be gaining a lot of ground. I do see a connection to the troop reduction and the massive Taliban release.
   
  I understand there existed a program of expedited immigration for those who risked their lives to help American troops. Emerging accounts now indicate that, within the Trump administration, Stephen Miller and others devised methods of red tape delay and bureaucratic obstruction. They deliberately sabotaged the rescue program.
   
  They were highly motivated by nativist ideology, especially against non-white immigrants and Muslim refugees, all of whom they see as culturally inferior. They were unswayed by reports of pro-American heroism by those refugees.
   
  We do know that a substantial proportion of conservatives are actively propagating against the refugees about whom Darrell and I share anxious concern.
   
  I suggested my friend’s anger might better be directed toward them.
   
  I asked Darrell if all that reporting is wrong.
   
  There seem to have been more recent developments reporters have been holding back for security reasons. We are now learning about rescue and transport operations into and out of Taliban areas. So I suggested we may want to wait for a more complete picture.
   
  I shared my elderly perspective that there is no orderly way to lose a war.
   
  And I asked my friend to tell me where my information is incorrect.
   
  I have known Darrell for years. I am confident he will post an informed, probably snarky, and very very conservative answer.
  Let’s track this.
   
• Tommy Christopher reports on conservative condemnation of President Biden for suggesting the Taliban transformed themselves to a more tolerant posture.
   
  Seems Biden was directly asked if the Taliban have changed. He answered NO but speculated they are under pressure because they want to appear legitimate.
   
  ABC, bless their hearts, published a clip with the entire question and answer, but included a transcript that left out the word “No.”
   
  See how losing a single word can transform Biden’s unequivocal No into the Yes that never was?
   
  Nice, ABC.
   
• Infidel753 sees the Taliban victory, complete with religious absolutism with rules and standards imposed on any who remain unwilling, as a tragic triumph for religion.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson covers the under-covered aspect, just coming into central play, of the Taliban takeover: money.
   
• Nojo explains how so very much of our struggle in the Middle East comes from our addiction to immediate drama at the expense of the rest of the story, the backstory, the whole story.
   
• Laura Ingraham speaks from her perch on the Fox Network, asking viewers if they really want to accept responsibility for welcoming thousands of invading refugees from Afghanistan.
   
  Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged goes step by step as if talking to a small child, explaining to poor Laura how adult responsibility actually works in the moral universe.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has a thought about Republicans who are angry about Afghanistan.

Continue reading “Afghanistan, Biden Blame, GOP, Bush, Anti‑Vax Costs, Dental HIPPA, Racism”

• You would think conservative Christians might keep up with Francis Bacon’s reconciliation of God and science. They have had 400 years:
   
  God created the universe.
  Science is a study of God’s creation.
  God created science.
   
  North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz watches our brethren bravely insist they will trust God, not science! Right up until they can’t breathe.
   
  This is an old story, but it works:
   
  
   
• About this whole COVID thing, Marjorie Taylor Greene goes existential fatalist about fatalities – We’ll all die of something. M. Bouffant, ever the angry cynic, at Web of Evil draws the angry cynical essential reductio, which does indeed look a bit absurdum.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit distills to its essence what today’s Republican Party has adopted as its rock bed principle.
   
• NOJO describes our newest COVID attack as a sort of biological civil war, with one side going all suicide vesting with weapons of mass destruction.
   
• According to The Borowitz Report, Ron DeSantis’s favorability numbers are plummeting among Floridians who describe themselves as “somewhat,” “very,” or “strongly” opposed to being dead.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever ponders the degree of sympathy we ought to have when the willfully unvaccinated die. He decides it depends on to which of three broad categories the unprotected belong.
   
• Journalist Imani Gandy has this about right.

  There are no words.

Continue reading “COVID, God and Science, Fatal Fatalism, Death Party, Unvaccinated War, Florida”

If we’re going to attack refugees again,
can we try not to be ridiculous about it?

Not like this Fox expert thought George Washington took over revolutionary airports, but still:

Okay, okay, Mein Kampf was written by Hitler – – What of it?!!

• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger lists the ten most pathetic excuses offered by national Republicans for opposing the Jan 6th investigation.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged is sickened by the response of national Republican politicians to the testimony of officers who responded to the US Capitol insurrection. Police who put themselves into deadly danger defending lawmakers from a lynch mob are now regarded, by some of the same politicians they defended, as enemies.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson must gently explain to a Trumper just who it was that won the state last year:
   

• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson looks to history, seeking a lesson for today’s ANTI-insurrection patriots, and finds inspiration during the Civil War in the Battle of Mobile Bay.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings word of the latest word, in her own words, from Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. She speculates about those hoping against hope that anti-vaxxers might save themselves and those they love from possible extreme grief, pain, and death. Seems those wanting to prevent needless death might get around to actually asking neighbors to please vaccinate. If that happens, Ms. Greene urges anti-vaxxers to pull out firearms and begin shooting.
   
• Infidel753 argues for a bit of shift in policy emphasis. Our primary COVID concern must be with those who, for medical or age reasons, cannot be vaccinated. We have reached the limits of our ability and our moral responsibility to save kamikaze anti-vaxxers.
   
• Scotties Toy Box illustrates in a few ways how the Fox Network can kill you.
   
• Frances Langum watches the horror debate as one Fox Network personality finally admits that maybe viewers ought to get vaccinated to avoid, you know, death and another Fox Network personality indignantly responds, without conscious irony, that news anchors should not give medical advice.
   
  I have been known to have a cynical opinion or two about conservative pundits who, thankfully, change their minds about vaccination.

Continue reading “Jan 6, COVID, Climate, Defund, Racism, Creeps, iSpy, Cuomo, DeJoy, Tan Man”

• The Propaganda Professor explains the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: the human tendency to create suspicious patterns out of pretty much nothing.
   
• The BIG event of my youth was the assassination of JFK. Of course it had to be a massive conspiracy. To think a deranged narcissist, acting alone, was responsible would be the moral equivalent of imagining that the President had died choking on a chicken bone.
   
  CalicoJack in The Psy of Life traces those conspiracy theories currently threatening our democracy (Think stolen election) to proportionality bias.
   
• Uh oh. The massive conspiracy to crush conservative expression is regarded with remarkable calm by CATO’s Julian Sanchez

• Dave Dubya bravely faces entertaining conspiracy theories about millions of illegal votes. He is armed only with dull boring facts.
   
• Sarah Cooper applies the knife and gunfight rule:

• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors says Wisconsin conspiracy Republicans are having a hard time keeping things together. They are spending hundreds of thousands to finance an investigation into the overly investigated 2020 election, kind of like the off-the-rails “audit” in Arizona. They hired a couple of retired police detectives as investigators.
   
  Problem, though. After being exposed to the nature of the investigation, the investigators both quit. The Republican self-assigned to organize the replay says no problem. The investigation will just take a while longer, since there are no longer any investigators.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reviews explosive testimony from police officers who held back the Jan 6 rioters from their targets. A couple of those targets may become targets of the investigation.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports congressional Republicans are furious at Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for being on the investigating committee. So they have voted to force both to spend an hour with Ted Cruz.

Continue reading “Conspiracy, 2020, Jan 6, COVID, Fox,
Climate, Balance, Biden, Economics”

The pandemic, and the response in some quarters, befuddles us. And the tide seems to be turning among the vaccinated. Bafflement is transmuting to impatience, with anger on the horizon.

Part of the bafflement comes from an almost religious belief, common to humanity, that goes against the massive weight of historical evidence.

We hate injustice. But we want to think the best of ourselves and, by extention, those we recognize as being like us. So we assign injustice to a sort of time and distance machine.

Gangs of New York, the more-or-less accurate rendition of urban hatred during the Civil War era, required Daniel Day-Lewis to chew up the scenery as the menacingly ethnocentric, racist Bill the Butcher. Particularly horrifying was the near-final scene of slaughter as rival gangs fight, joined only in their hatred of black residents.

The lynchings are one of many scenes of horror, but are especially ghastly because of their recognizable echo into more modern times. The rest of the unending brutality reminds us of how we justify hatred of those we consider too different from ourselves.

And we do need those justifications.

We hesitate to apply harsh judgments to those we recognize from everyday life. Many of us seek by habit some empathy with those we oppose. We try to apply principle, even when we suspect crass calculation or worse.

Examples of evil, or unbelievable selfishness, or astonishing stupidity make us aware that human depravity has no apparent lower limit. Rock bottom turns out to have a cellar. But we regard the worst of the worst as the lowest exceptions, exceptions that do not include us or those we know, those like us.

Humans hate unfairness. It seems baked into our DNA. When unmistakable evidence develops and injustice is more common than we like, we are driven to react. We either try to rationalize – the victims had it coming, they are not really as human, they are diseased – or we get angry about the injustice. Sometimes we are even moved to demand change.

Occasionally, that DNA seems far from universal or even as widely inherited as we imagined.

We can, and do, dismiss the odd aberration. After all, racism ended with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, or with Civil Rights laws in 1964 or 1966.

Or injustice is the exception that, by contrast, comforts us that the rule of fairness stands. We are okay. Our neighbors are okay.

A bystander was recently credited with saving the life of a motorist who had suffered a sudden seizure. The car had rolled off the side of the road onto a lawn, and the rescuer, while saving the motorist, had to deal with the homeowner. “Get off our lawn,” the homeowner supposedly screamed. “Get the man out of here, have him die somewhere else.”

We read and shake our heads at the morbid selfishness of a vanishingly few of our fellow citizens.

The exceptions among us.

In Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for governor insists he did not cause a fatal accident involving a motorcyclist. There is trouble in one reported detail: that he was seen traveling for several miles down the highway with the motorcycle attached to the grill of his car.

In our hearts, we know we would have stopped, perhaps to save a life, or at least to confirm a death. And we know, deep down, that our fellow citizens, those we encounter in everyday life, would be as responsible.

In recent years, we have watched those fellow citizens adopt opinions that appear to have a common thread of nothing more than cruelty.

Conservative politicians, those who survive in office, seem to range from true believers, the cruelest of the cruel, to those who just want to stay in office, fake it til you make it.

The result of the simulation is the same as the real deal. It parallels a parental bully beating a small kid just to show a ex-spouse who is boss.

Bleeding hearts like immigrants?
We will put children in cages, especially those of brown skin coming from points south.

Do they want us to tolerate a different sexual orientation?
We will stamp them out.

Racial disparities in voting?
More obstacles are needed. Keep elections pure.

Climate?
Come on. It snowed in my neighborhood just last year.

And then there is COVID.

That last takes us on different turn.

We read about, and occasionally watch, as conservative lawmakers and their partners in right-of-center media are just now beginning to waffle.
The vaccinated are told they are still vulnerable. They can be guaranteed only the escape from COVID hospitalization or COVID death. Still, even a few days of flu-like symptoms, unnecessary sickness, is enough to take many of us out of the realm of empathetic understanding.

The tide is turning. The vaccinated majority is becoming less willing to tolerate the risks and the possibility of renewed restrictions. After all, the honor system does not seem to work.

The shift among a few politicians is notable. A conservative legislator here, a Republican governor there, insist that the unvaccinated are making unintelligent choices after all, choices that burden us all.

We have to be grateful for every additional public message urging rationality. But there does lurk for some of us, the clear and distinct memory of where leadership has led before that road, as the Bible says, was made straight.

As tolerance wears thin, so does our ability to put aside what we would otherwise see as isolated incidents. The Pennsylvania politician traveling the highway, the motorcycle of the now dead victim on his grill, seems less an exception to a comfortable faith in each other.

To be fair, a few Republican politicians really are beginning to urge vaccinations. Yet cynicism is forced on us, against our will. We are already on guard, skeptical in advance about future claims that they did not start the resurgence of COVID variants. They just continued to drive for mile after mile with a growing number of COVID victims on their grill until they were forced to slow.

We have to suspect, in their newfound sense of responsibility, in the urging of the unvaccinated to obtain practical immunity, if not entirely from COVID then from its more serious result – a change in residence to the hospital or the morgue – something more base than an honest concern for the health and well being of fellow humans.

In our weary cynicism we wonder at the real motivations of Republican leaders. Do they, at long last, realize that it will mostly be their own rabid supporters who are at risk? Who will endure most of the suffering. Who will do the dying?

Is their epiphany confined to how those deaths will translate in successive Novembers?

One scripted lament seems to echo as conservative pundits, vaccinated all, and their conservative fellows in legislative office begin to broadcast the virtues of immunity. Maybe it’s time to think about getting vaccinated, a growing number cautiously advise.

We are grateful. And we are forced, against our will, to think of motives.

Toward the end of Gangs of New York, Civil War riots finally end. A machine politician mourns the massive bloodshed as he views bodies of his constituents in endless rows.

We’re burying a lot of votes here tonight, he says.

• The Palmer Report brings background news from the Fox Network. Seems that, while Fox campaigns against any private or public vaccination or mask mandates they are demanding their own employees provide proof of vaccination or wear a mask at all times while at work.
   
• Tommy Christopher reports as President Biden’s White House Communications Director blasts some media outlets for disinformation about COVID vaccines, but has a bit of praise for Donald Trump.
   
• Dave Dubya looks at vaccination rates vs demographic data, and sees one identifiable group that engages in a deadly celebration of ignorance.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has a theory on why Mitch McConnell and a few other conservatives have, with varying degrees of unenthusiasm, begun to turn toward vaccinations.
   
• Frances Langum watches Joy Reid relaxing on set with Colbert. Reid is a Joy as she explains how conservatives connect the dots, joining bamboo shards, chicken poop, ballots, China, and Trump winning by a bazillion votes. “…those same people are saying ‘don’t get vaccinated.'”. Funny because it’s ridiculous. Tragic because it’s deadly.
   
• driftglass carefully listens to pundit advice. Seems we must empathize with Trumpsters by humoring their fragile belief systems with voting restrictions, and by gently coaxing them into abandoning deadly COVID vaccine fantasies. Then we must hope they will finally see reality before it is too late. driftglass isn’t buying it.
   
• NOJO seems to pretty much agree, taking aim at National Review’s review of just who is at fault for deadly decisions not to vaccinate. Turns out it’s us for being insufficiently respectful of their vaccine resistance. Damn liberals every damn time!!
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors is also skeptical of the gentle approach, or really any approach, to anti-vaxxers, suggesting instead a gentle, empathetic approach to the next of kin.
   
• News Corpse sees Jim Acosta of CNN channeling Sean Connery in The Untouchables as he believes a Trump outburst. In the face of open lawlessness, Acosta asks law enforcement, What are you prepared to do?.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson takes a look at the interplay between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy on what might have become a bipartisan committee investigating the Jan 6 insurrection, which is to say the Trump lynch mob that invaded the Capitol looking for legislators to kill. McCarthy’s inept response, pulling away from any cooperation, ends up advertising Democrats as the only adults in Washington.
   
• Andy Borowitz summarizes the objections of Republicans who protest the committee to investigate the riot and the lack of rioters on the committee.
   
• Scotties Toy Box sees an additional bit of irony in the Republican position on the Jan 6 riot investigation.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson finally finds something on which he agrees with conservative Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson:

Continue reading “COVID Coaxing, Jan 6, Afghanistan,
Climate, Labor Strikes, Child Poverty”

• @momwino98 considers what she would do if faced with a home break-in
  

  @momwino98

  ##stitch with @ryankayaks ##comedy ##foryourpage ##tiktokmom ##stains ##wtff

  ♬ original sound – @Momwino98

  
   

• Scotties Toy Box looks at the strange and dangerous things happening around Trump on and after election night 2020. Starts with drunken Giulliani and goes to declaration of martial whatever.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson notes what should be seen as historic news: A Biden initiative that moves us closer to eliminating child poverty. But that report is overshadowed by new revelations about the Jan 6 insurrection and how those in the know saw outgoing President Trump closing in on ending representative government in America. The phrase used behind the scenes by military command at the time was Reichstag moment.
   
• News Corpse makes a compelling case that the deadly Jan 6 insurrection should not be regarded as a singular event, but as an opening salvo in an ongoing agenda currently aimed at the overthrow of American representative democracy.
   
• The Attorney General of Texas wants to demonstrate that elections are being stolen by fraudulent voters. So he finds someone who stood in line for 4 hours to vote, who by law was supposed to be allowed to vote, who thought he was registered but wasn’t, and who cast a provisional ballot. So that voter is now facing years in prison. Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez reacts.

• In case we get overwhelmed by news of America’s possible dissolution, CalicoJack in The Psy of Life suggests we accept inspiration from a much more desperate national time, and the Gettysburg Address.
   
• I lived through one Presidential assassination. I never want to see another. So I have no qualms about the Secret Service spiriting the Chief Executive, any Commander-in-Chief, to safety at any hint of prospective danger.
   
  tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors takes a look at reports on Donald Trump’s panicked retreat to an underground bunker. News of that flight seems to have violated what Mr. Trump thinks of as his tough guy image. The only thing that frightened him more than the distant crowd of protesters was that anyone would find out that he was afraid of the distant crowd of protesters. So he tried to use the power of the federal government to identify whoever leaked the story and to have that person executed.
   
  Which, I suppose, makes him a tough guy after all?
   
• On the other hand, Andy Borowitz reports that, although he instigated, Donald Trump did not actually lead the attempted coup to keep himself in office. He had a podiatrist’s note exempting him.
   
• driftglass thinks he knows why Megyn Kelly now says the Jan 6 Capitol lynch mob wasn’t so bad after all.
   
• Frances Langum admits to a bad case of superficiality watching one-time Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in horrible television lighting as he is not asked about millions in hijacked funds directed to himself, his family, and his friends. Mnuchin does insist he has no idea who won the 2020 Presidential election because he was too busy working on COVID to notice.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, editor Joe Gandelman watches House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s pilgrimage, catching up with our once-upon-a-time president on a New Jersey golf course, then kneeling to kiss the ring of Donald Trump.
   
  A conservative friend once chided me for thinking of McCarthy as some sort of satanic figure. I was grateful for the opportunity, at long last, to use a line from an old television show. Don’t be silly. He’s not Satan, said I, He’s just someone who runs into the 7-11 to buy Satan his cigarettes.
   
  Folks my age don’t really need a keen wit. Just a dim, distant memory of better times and decent movies.
   
• Eeeggg. The Palmer Report brings news of the new Donald Trump-Bill O’Reilly tour! The triumphant rallies are not exactly sell outs. Vast sections of seats are vacant.
   
  Just a thought: maybe they should go all Adam Smith and follow market theory. Lower ticket prices to increase demand.
   
  Or just give tickets away.
   
  Or maybe pay people to show up.
   
• A conservative media personality suggests that vaccines go against nature. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged speculates on just which groups of people are on his list of those he and nature want wiped out.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony sees the against nature suggestion as a form of unfortunate evolution in action. Those who believe vaccines are against nature are most likely to experience the raw power of nature without vaccination.
   
  Kind of like tornadoes being nature’s way of telling you to get your ass down to any anthropogenic cellar you can find.

Continue reading “2020 Redeux, Reichstag Moment, COVID Karma, Ayn Angst, Mad Moms”