Sports in the age of pandemics

Sports have always been a peripheral part of my life and so I have not deeply missed the absence of big-time sports contests. But there seem to be many people who are suffering from sports withdrawal symptoms even if they were just viewers and not participants and they are yearning for its resumption. It was the abrupt canceling of the basketball season just before an NBA game began, that was soon followed by all the other major leagues canceling their seasons, that made everyone realize that this pandemic was serious stuff. It is one thing for public health officials to issue warnings. Those can be shrugged off. It is something else entirely to cancel a sports season. That gets people’s attention.
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Hasan Minhaj on the rent problem caused by the pandemic

Hasan Minhaj has come back with new episodes of his excellent show Patriot Act. He was supposed to return a couple of months ago but the pandemic hit just at that time so they had to revamp the process without an audience and the glitzy stage effects. But it was a very good show nonetheless and this episode dealt with the housing crisis caused by the pandemic. With people losing their jobs and not being able to pay rent, they face evictions. This has led to rent strikes and Minhaj points out something that I said earlier, that the non-payment of rent even for a short time does not really solve the problem for many people and creates a cascade or domino effect all the way up the chain. But he goes much further and deeper into the issue.
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Fred Willard (1933-2020)

Fred Willard who died yesterday was one of those actors you see all over the place in comedies. He was always in supporting roles, never the star, and sometimes those roles were just cameos. There was something intrinsically funny about him, a kind of appealing goofiness without being slapstick, combined with an ‘aw, shucks’ obliviousness that always made me smile whenever he appeared on the screen. He had a vast number of film and TV credits to his name and the chances are that even if his name did not register in your consciousness, you have seen him. I just learned that he was born in Shaker Heights, OH the town I lived in for thirty years.
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Conspiratorial obsessions in the US

America is a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories and Trump is a fervent promoter of many of them. It appears that medical conspiracy theories are more likely to be believed.

Professor Eric Oliver, author of a book about conspiracy theories and the spread of false information, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics, said those about medical issues are the most widely circulated and believed.

“When we’ve done surveys we’ve consistently asked a question: do you think the Food Drug Administration has been deliberately withholding natural cures for cancer because of secret pressure from the pharmaceutical industry? Typically we get about 40% of people in our surveys who agree with that, and that is by far and a way the most commonly held conspiracy theory,” he said.

“Medical and health conspiracy theories do well because oftentimes they’re not explicitly ideological in the way that other conspiracy theories are. They tend to cross ideological domains. The FDA conspiracy theory is endorsed as much by conservatives as it is by liberals.”
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A study of millions of Facebook users in the journal Nature released this week found that groups opposed to vaccinations were much more effective at penetrating discussion among those who were undecided than those who support the science. It said growing distrust in scientific expertise “could amplify outbreaks” of coronavirus.

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Trump is really losing it

Trump lies shamelessly during his press conferences and also make racist allusions. Reporters have mostly left it to commentators to later deconstruct these statements but by then the damage has been done. But increasingly it looks like reporters at the press conferences are challenging him in real time to explain and back up his statements and he clearly does not like it. A week or so ago Jonathan Karl of ABC News kept asking for examples when Trump made one of his baseless, fact-free, sweeping assertions and Trump of course could offer none and just got peevish. Yesterday, Trump abruptly ended the conference and left when two such pushbacks occurred. Watch.


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Testing for me but not for thee

We learn that people in the White House are very frequently tested for covid-19 and as a result more and more people working there have been found to have it. It was because of such infected people that Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were quarantined because they were found to have been in contact with some of them.
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This is not good

Three of the US’s top health officials, Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have gone into two weeks quarantine after having come into contact with people who have tested positive for covid-19.
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