In a speech, Mike Pence said that “”[Democrats] want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable.” As if that’s a bad thing. The idea that poor people should get a break even once in a while strikes terror in the hearts of these sociopaths.
Vice President Mike Pence: "[Democrats] want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable." pic.twitter.com/LXB8pvKSR8
— The Hill (@thehill) December 22, 2020
A group of massless people invaded a Target store and marched through it shouting “Freedom!” and “This is America!” and also, inexplicably,”Library Card!” (At least, that is what that last one sounded like.)
I can understand a person feeling, however wrongly, that wearing a mask is an infringement of their rights. But to care so much about it that they go out and recruit other people to engage in such an absurd stunt is to display idiocy of a high order
Can we all agree that the very lowest priority for getting the vaccines should be people like those in the Target store who are deliberately flouting the guidelines and needlessly putting other people at risk just to make a silly political point?
Seth Meyers makes the case for others who should be on the bottom of the list.
After the expected spike in covid-19 cases and deaths about two weeks after Thanksgiving, the rates have started dropping again, although they are still high. We will now have to brace ourselves for another spike about two weeks after Christmas when some people will violate the guidelines once again to visit with family and friends.
The incompetence of the Trump administration in its handling of the pandemic has been responsible for the massive numbers of infected people and deaths in the US. In terms of total numbers (though not per capita), the US easily leads the rest of the world with over 18 million confirmed cases and about 325,000 deaths. Currently those numbers are rising at an average daily rate of about 200,000 and 2,500 respectively. Those numbers could been much lower if from the beginning Trump had been urging everyone to adopt the common sense safety guidelines that scientists and public health experts were advocating, instead of mocking them and hosting events that openly violated them and dismissing the seriousness of the pandemic.
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As I expected, there has been some controversy about how to prioritize the order of who gets the vaccines. For example, health guidelines suggest that those who are for whatever reason forced to be in very confined spaces or have to deal with large numbers of people should get it even before older people like me who are low risk because we have little contact with people and have no complicating risk factors. That sounds reasonable enough but that list of people who should have higher priority includes prisoners because, for obvious reasons, prisons have been the source of some of the biggest outbreaks of covid-19 and those outbreaks have not stayed within their walls but have also spread to the nearby communities because prison employees and visitors go in and out of the place all the time, thus aiding the spread.
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There are over 17 million confirmed covid-19 cases in the US and over 300,000 dead, a staggering number thanks to our idiot president’s refusal to acknowledge the disease and take strong action early on. That works out to about 5% or the population or one in twenty who have tested positive. I read sometime ago that half the population knows at least one person personally who has tested positive and one third knows someone who has died.
Since I live alone and have been able to minimize contact with people, I was not surprised that until recently, I did not know anyone in either category. But last week a friend who lives nearby said that she had tested positive and had been isolating for the required period and then tested negative. She had no idea how she got infected because she had been working from home and only gone in to work about once a week and nobody else in her workplace had tested positive. But of course she has to do some shopping and the like and that may be how she got it.
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It turns out that in addition to other reasons for not getting the covid-19 vaccine, some anti-abortion zealots are saying that since the vaccines may have been developed from stem cell lines from aborted fetuses, it would be unethical to get it.
The Catholic Church is trying to tamp down that line of reasoning and saying that the greater good requires people to get vaccinated because the link connecting the vaccines to abortion it highly tenuous.
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One of the interesting results of the election that has been somewhat overlooked is that the state of Oregon became the first in the US to decriminalize all drug possession, with 58% voting in favor of the measure. Public drug use is still illegal, however.
Possessing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs for personal use is no longer a criminal offense in Oregon.
Those drugs are still against the law, as is selling them. But possession is now a civil – not criminal – violation that may result in a fine or court-ordered therapy, not jail. Marijuana, which Oregon legalized in 2014, remains fully legal.
Oregon’s move is radical for the United States, but several European countries have decriminalized drugs to some extent.
The evidence of damage done to the brains of American football players continues to pile up. So far, not much attention has been focused on the effects of playing on rugby and soccer players. In soccer, it is heading the ball that can cause serious jarring of the brain. In rugby, players are forbidden from certain types of tackles that use or target the head. They are also not as heavily padded and helmeted as in American football and this was thought to discourage dangerous tackles using the head as a battering ram. But they can still be subjected to jarring and bone-crushing tackles as can be seen in this video.
The US is breaking records each day in the number of positive covid-19 test results, deaths, and hospitalizations. We have also passed another grim milestone of 300,000 deaths.
Our daily update is published. States reported 2.1 million tests, a record 232k cases, and 2,749 deaths. There are 108k people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, also an all-time record. The 7-day average for all four metrics is the highest it has been. pic.twitter.com/7GwbbKYDZn
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) December 12, 2020
This documentary exposes how the social media algorithms work to keep people hooked to spend vast amounts of time on the sites by identifying their wants and sending them down addictive rabbit holes. It features mostly people from within most of these companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and the like) who became disaffected with the effect these companies and their practices were having on society and saw them as destructive and have now left the companies and are speaking out.
But the filmmakers also added a wrinkle. They have actors portray a family whose members are social media users, focusing on two children who are addicted to it. They show a room in which there is an avatar of the son with three identical people looking at all the data about him and what he is doing and pushing things on him to keep him glued to his phone. In reality of course, there are no people doing this, only algorithms. But there is something much more creepy in the image of actual people who know every thing about us and what buttons to push to get a specific reaction and are monitoring our every waking moment to try and find ways to get us to spend more time on their sites and then selling that engagement to advertisers. Although algorithms may feel less creepy than if humans were doing this, they are far, far more thorough than humans could ever be.
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