Midway Point! [DOT 22/9/21]

22/9/21 MegMegMcGee 23

I don’t know about you guys, but my Tuesday was draggggging, so I’m glad we made it to Wednesday!

Before I get to the rest of the DOT, here is a little programming note:

The 15 minute edit comment feature is back. It may lead to other issues so please pm @myopicprophet if you experience any issues including, but not limited to, the inability to reply to comments or significant lag in page-loading. Also please pm if you cannot see the “image” icon in the text editor.

Chop chop!

Low dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is safe and effective in children ages 5 to 11, companies’ study finds
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/20/covid-vaccine-for-children/

That’s quite a headline.

Oregon school worker suspended for showing up in blackface in apparent protest of vaccine mandate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/21/oregon-blackface-vaccine-mandate/

Sports!

I know you are but what am I?

How NFL referees will judge ‘fine line’ between taunting and celebration
https://sports.yahoo.com/how-nfl-referees-will-judge-fine-line-between-taunting-and-celebration-171914687.html

Stonks!

China Evergrande’s debt crisis is rattling global markets. Here’s why.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/21/china-evergrande-faq/

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Some cuteness.

The cat is not pleased.

Have a great day!

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23 Comments

  1. For those who don’t have access to WaPo (I don’t, and I should really cough up to keep up) I read elsewhere that the Oregon school worker showed up in blackface as Rosa Parks in order to protest the vaccine mandate. She was all in. She leaned in. This was in Newberg, Oregon, which I had to look up, because I’ve never been to Oregon. Apparently it is just southwest of Portland.

  2. Oh, I forgot to mention, happy September everybody.

  3. I’ve never had an “old man yells at cloud” moment here, so let me just say:  I’ve never been a fan of “showmanship” in sports.  You want to impress me?  Be good at your job.  That’s the entertainment.  I don’t need the embellishment.  I expect a cop not to do a fucking victory dance after he locks somebody in the back seat.  I expect the prosecutor not to spike her files on the courtroom floor after she gets a conviction.  And I expect a correctional officer not to flex over an inmate they just tied into a restraint chair.  So you scored.  Yay.  Be a fucking professional.  Say what you want about Mike Tyson, but when he knocked a guy out and the final bell rang, he almost always ran over to check on the guy and give him his props.

    • Tyson would even give the guy his ear back!

       

      (I’m joking, he got DQed for that)

    • I could not disagree more. Football is NOT a white-collar professional job and we should not treat it as such. I think it’s absurd to market football as this emotional thing — halftime speeches! Rudy! pump-up huddles! ARE YOU REMEMBERING THOSE TITANS?!?!?! — and then be like OK once the whistle blows you need to go back down to zero (before then going back to 60 in 25 seconds).

      I don’t necessarily love guys chirping at each other all the time, but also, I played basketball with my friends all the time growing up and by the time we were old enough to swear properly we talked ENDLESS streams of shit to each other. And we still do, over nonsense like fantasy football. It’s fun!

      As for boxing and MMA, it’s one on one and if you go in angry you’re probably gonna get your face beat in because it’s about skill and tactics just as much as it is about hitting as hard as you can. There’s camaraderie between football players, but it’s practically a law in fight sports. A good example: Conor McGregor has always been a shit-talker before fights but afterwards was typically complimentary. That is until some recent fights where he’s been an puckered asshole afterwards and other fighters have been real unhappy about his antics.

      • I think it’s absurd to market football as this emotional thing — halftime speeches! Rudy! pump-up huddles! ARE YOU REMEMBERING THOSE TITANS?!?!?!

        Well you got one thing right at least.

  4. Things seem a little light around here so far, so let me offer this:

    Even before Handsy Andy was at the height of his powers and issuing diktats right and left, it was often remarked about how similar he was to his arch-nemesis, Donald J. Trump. Both thugs from Queens, basically handed their fates from their fathers, letting no slight go unpunished, “pushing the envelope” at every chance, the similarities are myriad.

    But now, in kind of an unexpected turn, Handsy (who is a lawyer himself, albeit from Albany Law School, ranked 116 out of 197 by US News & World Report, tied with Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law—where was I?)

    Oh yes, Handsy, like Trump, has hired counsel, as is his right, and is paying for it out of his $18 million “war chest,” which notionally are campaign funds amassed to mount political campaigns and fend off challengers, not fend off credible harassment lawsuits. But whatever, it’s New York York, and he is who he is.

    Handsy has retained the services of one Rita Glavin, and while not as nutty as the members of Trump’s A-List legal team, seems to be similarly clawing at improbable conspiracy theories and launching personal smear attacks against Handsy’s victims.

    This intro was a long read, and here’s another one, from the Daily News. But before we get to that, let’s salute Gov. Hochul, who just announced that the Empire State will finally stop funding the legal defense of Handsy and his co-conspirators. Not only that, but they’ll be reviewing past legal bills and payments. Jail terms are probably too much to ask for, but I’ll settle for personal bankruptcy.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/new-york-elections-government/ny-cuomo-sexual-harassment-legal-response-20210922-mvfwlu7zhnfkhogmcungpadqqy-story.html

    • Just chopping some onions for breakfast.

  6. Florida Man hires Florida Doctor:

     

    DeSantis’ new Florida surgeon general questions masks, vaccines, other COVID-19 measures

     

    Quotes:

    Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a new state surgeon general Tuesday who has written essays questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, the effectiveness of masks and favoring hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by former President Donald Trump to treat the virus.

    Dr. Joseph Ladapo said people should make their own choices about health care, and he opposed COVID mandates and lockdowns.

    This is deeply disturbing on a number of levels. DeSantis continues to double down on his Trumpish behavior, despite the fact that fucking Trump lost. I assume he’s counting on voters to be too stupid remember this at election time or too partisan to care. To be fair, this is Florida, so he stands a better-than-average chance of being right.

    But this cartoonish insistence on defying all common sense is just nuts. I mean, I understand cynically manipulating voters but DeSantis keeps dialing it up to 11. I’m not sure this is strategy any longer; it seems more like megalomania.

    • Are they trying to take out their voting base?

      • Apparently? Dr. Mengele (uh, I mean Ladapo) seems to favor infecting everyone and killing off the weak.

         

        Ladapo, 42, said he was a signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement from a group of scientists in October 2020 that called for herd immunity through natural infection.

        “The most compassionate approach … is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.

        It was immediately blasted by the scientific community, including an open letter to the medical journal The Lancet signed by more than 80 researchers that called the theory “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence. … It is not feasible to restrict uncontrolled outbreaks to particular sections of society.”

      • They’re worse — they’re trying to undercut the authority of doctors and send all of us down the drain.

        The plan is to create so much confusion and upset that they can establish a strongman movement that takes over on the promise of order.

        They’ve calculated the losses among their supporters and decided it’s a cost they can afford. It’s absolute sickness.

    • Cue the next NY Times article treating Florida’s public health disaster as deft political strategy by DeSantis. Anything for access, eh?

  7. The look on that cat’s face is pretty great.

    So, I went to the walk-in clinic’s web site at 9am, when they open, and the wait time was 156-171 minutes. All 3 that we could go to in the area are just as bad as each other, so I picked the one that takes “reservations” (question: if you have to make an appointment, how is it a walk-in clinic?) and we’ll go in at 7pm. BabySmacks is antsy as hell about the COVID test, and I can’t blame him… now that he has all day to think about it, I’m sure he’ll be in a great mood by then :/

    Meanwhile, I’m going to go do whatever errands I can that don’t require getting out of the car or breathing on anyone else.

     

  8. Hmmm, bet this won’t make tonight’s Fox News.

     

    https://crooksandliars.com/2021/09/2-gop-staffers-indicted-russian-trump

     

    I have to share this, while talking to my sister about QAnon she asks if I remember her friend Barbara.  Then she tells me that she is Michael Flynn’s sister and some believe she is Q.  WTF?  I remember her like this…

     

    https://www.historyofwomensurfing.com/barbara-flynn-redgate/

     

    not like this…

     

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/michael-flynns-family-is-at-war-with-each-other-over-qanon

    • I currently live on the east coast, and teach high school Advanced Placement Physics

      Were I a parent of a student under her tutelage, I think I’d take it upon myself to tutor my kid in AP Physics myself. There’s something terrifying about a QAnon supporter teaching young people sciences.

  9. In a little bit of good news, the York PA school board has overturned its kooky anti-history rule.

     

    https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/york-county-book-ban-critical-race-theory-masks-20210921.html

    It’s great to see students organizing for sanity, and to be clear, this is exactly the kind of activism that endless pieces in the mainstream press were designed to stop. The endless moaning about PC/cancel culture/CRT was always designed to enforce strict right wing rules about expression and stop any serious debate by students. The notion that somehow kids organizing is the real problem, not right wing leaders organized from the national level all the way down to school boards, still dominates the press.

    Of course, it’s only one school district.

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