1. Speaking of useless awards shows: Here are the winners of the NAACP Image Awards, presented by Black Entertainment Television, which raises questions all by itself. Now someone explain to me how such awards are helpful, productive, and justified in the United States of America in 2021. As hard as I try, I cannot think of any words but hypocrisy, apartheid, and double standards.
I’d really appreciate an argument from an African-American reader.
2. An ethical firing at USA Today. After Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa shot up a supermarket in Boulder, Hemal Jehaveri, who held the Orwellian post of “Race and Inclusion Editor,” proved her qualifications by tweeting “It’s always an angry white man, always.” This did not go over well, for several reasons.
First, “it” isn’t “always” a white man. Second, this particular shooting appears to be based on religious and ethnic hate, not race. Third, for a “race and inclusion” editor to announce racial bias of her own on social media would seem to be immediately disqualifying. Fourth, as a journalist, she needs to be trusted, and not tweet out false information on a whim.
Fifth, she’s a biased idiot.
She was fired. Good. Now she’s claiming that her firing was race-based:
“I wish I were more surprised by it, but I’m not. Some part of me has been waiting for this to happen because I can’t do the work I do and write the columns I write without invoking the ire and anger of alt-right Twitter. There is always the threat that tweets which challenge white supremacy will be weaponized by bad faith actors. I had always hoped that when that moment inevitably came, USA TODAY would stand by me and my track record of speaking the truth about systemic racism. That, obviously, did not happen.”
She goes on to accuse the staff of “micro-aggressions” and “outright racist remarks.” Of course she does. If you buy a one-trick pony, you should expect just one trick.
3. I guess this is “ick” rather than ethics, but…Ick. A company called CamSoda labs has a new product called “Grubuzz.” As the company’s website explains, the device “harnesses the power of Internet-connected sex toys – aka teledildonics – and sends clitoral vibrations to people as their takeout food from a national chain or local favorite is being prepared and ultimately delivered….The frequency of vibrations increase through the food delivery process. So, for example, the vibration frequency starts slowly when someone’s order is received by the restaurant and progressively increases when the driver leaves the restaurant with the order, drives closer to their residence, arrives at their door, etc.”
I guess buying this wonder is a good use for your stimulus check…
4.What’s this? New York City does something right? When was the last time that happened?
Last week, the New York City Council voted to end qualified immunity for police officers. Mayor Bill de Blasio has indicated that he will sign the measure into law. The legal doctrine of qualified immunity makes it unreasonably difficult to sue government officials who engage in egregious misconduct. Reason notes that “qualified immunity has shielded two cops who stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant, a cop who shot a 10-year-old, a cop who ruined a man’s car during a bogus drug search, a prison guard who hid while an escaped inmate raped a nurse, two cops who sicced a police dog on a surrendered suspect, a cop who caused lasting damage to a man he apprehended by kneeing him in the eye 20 to 30 times, and a cop who shot a 15-year-old, among others.”
The soon-to-be law will allow victims of police misconduct in the big Apple to sue officers under local statutes, but qualified immunity remains in place at the federal level.
5. Gee, what video clip is called for to lead this story? How about the old stand-by…
I don’t understand this at all.
Frank Trumbetti and Ian Smith, the owners of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey, announced on Twitter last week,
“In light of @krispykreme giving free donuts for receiving the CVD shot, here at @TheAtilisGym we are giving out free memberships to all who don’t get vaccinated…We believe in health — the real way — exercise, good diet, plenty of Vitamin D, Zinc, and an environment to de-stress.”
Ironically, I am stressed by the knowledge that I am surrounded by people who lack responsibility and the sense God gave a meercat, and who make the task of existence a daily peril for the rest of us.
I wonder if these people will be getting free gym memberships…
Ethics Alarms 
2–“Third, for a ‘race and inclusion’ editor to announce racial bias of her own on social media would seem to be immediately disqualifying.”
I myself enjoy a guilty pleasure when grifters cluelessly announce their lack of, if you’ll forgive me, COLOR BLINDNESS
5) Well, I exercise daily and have a healthy balanced diet and I’ve been skeptical about this vaccine from the outset; however, I’ve made an appointment to get the vaccine. I just went for my annual checkup and asked my doctor several questions about the vaccine and based on that discussion I committed to get the vaccine even though I’m probably low risk. Just to be clear, my doctor didn’t advise me one way or the other; she just answered my questions and I inferred that she thought it was best to get the vaccine.
I’ve heard rumblings here in NY that Cuomo has or is going to implement a vaccine passport – that in itself almost made me decide against the vaccine just for principal. I’m not verifying whether I had the vaccine through some app (I don’t even have a smart phone). If a simple, “Yes, I’ve been vaccinated,” isn’t good enough (or wearing a mask) to get me into an establishment then I just won’t go. I still haven’t read all the details of this vaccine passport proposal by Cuomo. I doubt I’ll see any requirements for a vaccine passport or verification in this area of Upstate NY
I mean, how is the Gym going to validate that someone didn’t get the vaccine? They just have to take their word??
Isn’t it interesting how the same Democrats who say requiring ID to vote discriminates against non-whites because they claim non-whites aren’t smart enough to know how to get ID and are intimidated by requirements are the same Democrats who want to require everyone to have a smartphone running a state app to prove they were vaccinated just to buy food?
Not really. The common thread that makes both of those common-sensically contradictory stances actually quite consistent is that they both increase Democrat control over the nation.
Well, I got my first shot and they give you a vaccination card; so, I guess that might be requested at some point. They even give you a plastic case like a id badge holder. Next, they’ll probably tell me to get a lanyard and wear it conspicuously. The last time I had a vaccination card was when they required the MMR vaccination for college enrollment. I definitely won’t be running any apps for vaccine validation; I refuse to buy a smartphone.
#2: she wasn’t fired for her race, but it probably had something to do with her hiring.
#4: I am not a big fan of qualified or official immunity. The jurisprudence around this doctrine is horrendous. However, it does serve a good purpose. While I have not read this law, cops have to gave leeway to make mistakes. The law has to protect police from false imprisonment lawsuits if they arrest the wrong person. Another example: My brother-in-law was subject to an early morning no-knock drug warrant. Guns out, the whole deal. Very traumatic, I imagine, but the Cops figured out pretty quickly that they had bad information. Absent qualified and/or official immunity, would he have a claim for trespassing, assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress? I think so. They clearly violated his rights. Having a warrant makes it no less a violation of rights if they make a mistake.
I hope that the New York law can make this distinction; the critics of qualified immunity I see on social media seem incapable or unwilling to do so. I don’t trust New York to be smart enough to get it right.
-Jut
2. Ya think???
I just found it funny that her insights into her personal situation were exactly backwards. Hired for race, fired for cause, not the other way around.
-Jut
It should be funny, but the fact that this is now routine is anything but.
I guess I am the Democritus to your Heraclitus.
-Jut
The question of how we got here is almost irrelevant now. The question we should be asking is “how do we get out of this mess?”
#2 “Weaponized bad faith” actually turns out to be an extraordinarily apt and concise description of Critical Race Theory, and of Identity Politics in general.
Correct me, but I understand that the vaccine prevents immunity from the effects of the virus if you are an unlucky one genetically, so it serves no real purpose for the rest who would suffer no significant ill without it. I agree with them, though I am getting the vaccine to play nice with everybody else.
How is taking responsibility for personal health irresponsible? Not clear why if you get the vaccine, how their contrary decision/sense affects your existential anything? Or is it the implied irreverence that sounds like it underlies their free membership tweet?
#5. I am not getting the vaccine for Covid. Not because I don’t believe in vaccines, but because I don’t believe in this vaccine. It’s been approved for emergency use by the FDA, but has no long term safety studies. While I support being a good citizen, my limit is reached when it involves potential harm to my own health and safety.
I’m in the low-risk demographic for Covid death, and am leery of being a guinea pig for drug manufacturers. In addition, the makers of the vaccine cannot be sued, so pushing a new vaccine out to millions carries no risk to their bottom line, while increasing their profits.
So since you believe COVID won’t kill you, you’ll risk spreading it to other people and maybe breeding a new deadlier variant in your own body? And does not killing you mean not making sick? Does it mean not missing work? Does it mean not landing in a hospital and using up recourses and running up big bills for your insurance company?
How is that good citizenship?
I’m not going to rag on you if you choose to eat fatty foods or smoke or binge Pauly shore movies on Netflix or other personally dubious behavior that’s no one’s business but your own but spreading plage strikes me as going wee bit beyond taking on personal risk and runs a lot closer to drinking and driving.
No one can force you but as far as I’m concerned you’re being a contrarian asshole for no good reason.
valkygrrl: “I’m not going to rag on you if you choose to eat fatty foods or smoke or binge Pauly shore movies on Netflix or other personally dubious behavior….”
But you did: “And does not killing you mean not making sick?” (like eating fatty foods) “Does it mean not missing work?” (like binge-watching Pauly Shore movies on Netflix) “Does it mean not landing in a hospital and using up recourses and running up big bills for your insurance company?” (like smoking).
Your only real complaint is “you’ll risk spreading it to other people and maybe breeding a new deadlier variant in your own body?” But, what is that risk? You can’t really quantify it. Is it like spreading the plague? Considering the apparent death rate over the last year, I doubt it, especially if the majority of people do get vaccinated. Personally, I am in no rush to get the vaccine (I would bet I am in the bottom half of the population for risk factors), but don’t feel the need to wait for long-term safety studies from the FDA either. I would expect that side-effects from a single round of vaccinations would manifest early and I am not seeing anything yet but a marginal risk. This is not like a drug that is taken repeatedly to treat a chronic condition. So, I expect we will have a good idea how safe it is before the bureaucracy declares its safety.
I honestly do not see the problem with people evaluating their own risk in this matter.
-Jut
But they say that this vaccine does NOT prevent you from spreading it to others. So what is the point of getting it? The only stated benefit for me is that it claims to increase my survival odds from 99.6 to 99.7% if I get it. After getting it, I still have to wear a mask, still have to social distance. This is virtually no benefit, especially for someone who has already had COVID.
I didn’t say I believe it won’t kill me, I said I’m in a low-risk category. I’m under 50, no contributing illness, and I’ve already had Covid and didn’t even know it. Not that it’s your business, but I also work from home, and have very limited personal contact with anyone else. I see no reason to risk my health to get a vaccine for a virus I’ve already had, with a high survival rate, and no long term safety tests. I also don’t get the flu vaccine, because of the low effective rate.
Your response was passionate, but based on feeling, not fact. The fact is, the survival rate for Covid is very high. Viruses mutate, and no matter what we do, we cannot change that. It’s likely that soon Covid will be similar to the flu in that we’ll guess each year which strain to produce a vaccine against.
Not only do I concur with Michelle K’s reasoning, not only do I share her approach, but also I see several serious problems with yours:-
– Not enough is known to be sure that vaccinated versus unvaccinated groups will work out as you think. There are actually ways the reverse could happen, i.e. vaccinated groups could encourage worse strains of the virus. We just don’t know.
– Routinely, public health officials adopt a position that treats people as means to public health – a very unethical thing. In particular, that’s what happens with vaccinations for boys aimed at preventing girls’ diseases. So I know enough not to trust their recommendations about other vaccines.
– It’s entirely possible that coronavirus vaccination could make you sick itself, the reverse of the possibility you present that non-vaccination could cause a risk at that level. Again, we just don’t know.
– The whole herd immunity thing usually means different groups end up facing different levels and kinds of risk, and in particular it can be better not to be vaccinated. As, when and if the numbers work out that way, it can be very wrong to encourage people to sacrifice themselves for others. There’s a big can of worms here. Think of the way that researchers found out in which TB wiped out leprosy in northern Europe in the late Middle Ages: lepers died off quicker, and leprosy with them – a “good” public health outcome, which should tell us to be very careful what the metrics mean.
And so on. All those things, with all those “don’t knows”, tell me that the “wait and see” approach makes a lot of sense, just as it made me think about flu vaccinations in past years.
I’d personally feel better about taking the vaccine if it had a few years behind it, like the MMR, polio, etc. vaccines I took as a kid, when shots hurt a lot more. There was no chicken pox vaccine when I was a kid, so my brother and I both had to suffer through a week with it, and both of us still bear the scars. The legal immunity does raise a question, and it should. I can only hope that there is a safeguard built in that will void that immunity if someone is found to have deliberately cut corners to rush out a vaccine that was not safe. Someone who has been given immunity should be required to turn square corners.
We’ve seen what happens when vaccines are refused. We saw it years ago when people started listening to celebrities and junk science advocates who tried to pin autism on vaccines. You got outbreaks and, I believe, deaths. What gave those irresponsible people the right to put other people’s kids at risk? I believe the numbers here were inflated (many deaths were from comorbidities), and I believe far too many elected officials capitalized on this virus, However, it’s as real as mumps, measles, etc. It’s as real as smallpox used to be. We just don’t think about those illnesses because we think we have moved past them. Have we? Those outbreaks a few years ago should should answer that for you. There used to be PSAs on TV that warned “no shots, no school.” They haven’t been broadcast since I was a kid, because mainstream parents wouldn’t think of not getting the necessary shots. It wasn’t necessary to threaten to lock kids out of life because most people had faith in medicine.
This pandemic is something that hasn’t gone on in the industrialized world for over a century. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of folks got stuck in denial. In fact I know people who are. I have a friend in Europe who is a great person, but who never met a conspiracy theory she didn’t like. She is convinced that there is no virus, that it’s all a big lie by big government, and that doctors who recommend the vaccine can’t be trusted because they are in the pockets of big pharma. She flatly refuses the vaccine, both for herself and her nine year old daughter, and refuses to obey any legal restrictions. She also tells me that if I take the vaccine I’m a hypocrite and don’t really believe in freedom. I usually just sneer at conspiracy theories as harmless crackpot behavior. This, however, is not harmless. If you want to believe that the government is hiding a flying saucer at Area 51 or that 9/11 was an inside job by Israelis and neocons who wanted to start a war in the Middle East, go right ahead. If you want to believe that this virus doesn’t exist and isn’t deadly when all the medical evidence is pointing otherwise, then you are a danger. If you say anyone who takes the vaccine is just a government sheep, then you are a danger and a manipulator.
I have to admit, I blanch at the idea of vaccine passports or checking people’s immunization paperwork. It smacks of regimes we don’t need to talk about. However, it isn’t without precedent. There are and were certain countries you couldn’t travel to or from without the appropriate vaccinations. As I pointed out, children could be blocked from attending school if they didn’t have the appropriate shots. It was just never necessary to do anything like that on this scale. No one cared if some overzealous missionary who decided to go into darkest Africa had to quarantine for weeks upon return. No one cared if the crackpot hippy couple who lived on the margins had to pull their kid out of school. However, a lot of folks do care if the stores won’t allow them to shop or the schools won’t let them attend. Now suddenly everyone has to face the choice of taking a shot that was developed super-fast or potentially being locked out of life. It’s not a choice anyone should have to make. However, it is the only way of getting back to something like normal life in any reasonable time and ending this threat.
I’m in no way a conspiracy theorist. I am practical though. I cared for my father through the worst of the pandemic last year. He was 76 years old, and had metastatic lung cancer. When he passed, the nurse asked if we wanted a Covid test, or if it was alright to mark his cause of death as cancer.
There are no avenues for an individual to sue a vaccine manufacturer for any reason. The government passed a law protecting all vaccine manufacturers many years ago. The process to prove a vaccine injury involves petitioning the government to review your case. Even so, billions have been paid out to vaccine injured parties.
I don’t believe it’s wrong to safeguard your own health. I wear a mask, although I’m not convinced that does much. I social distance in public, work from home, online shop as much as possible, and have already had asymptomatic Covid. I see no logical point in rushing to get an emergency approved vaccine.
OK, but if I was a family member I’d tell you get the damn vaccine, already.
That just makes no sense to me. I’ve had Covid. If the vaccine is meant to give antibodies to Covid, having Covid does the exact same thing. So either having antibodies works, or it doesn’t. Getting a vaccine against something I’ve already had is like wearing a condom to prevent pregnancy-while pregnant.
“I’d personally feel better about taking the vaccine if it had a few years behind it, like the MMR, polio, etc.”
To start off, I’m not virologist, I’m not a epidemiologist. I have managed pharmacies, so I’m familiar with some of this, but I am not myself a pharmacist. I’m just curious, and read a lot. Bret Weinstein, in one of his Ben Shapiro – Sam Harris – Jordan Peterson IDW discussions pointed out that if you have actually read a book on a subject, then you are probably more informed on that subject than 95% of humanity. It’s an interesting thought, and it’s probably even true, but take this with a grain of salt, because being more informed than 95% of humanity doesn’t necessarily mean I’m well informed.
Vaccines work, in really general terms, by introducing your immune system to inert forms of a virus, in order to give your body practice at killing that virus. Your immune system develops weapons, antibodies, that are particularly effective at killing things like that virus, and they’re on alert for it the next time they see it.
Can vaccines cause side effects?
Kind of. When you get a fever in response to a disease, that’s not actually being caused BY the disease, your immune system is purposefully raising your body temperature in an attempt to cook the virus out of you. A fever might not be great for you, but it’s worse for viruses. So when you give your immune system a training dummy to beat up, your immune response will by necessity go through the paces for fighting an actual disease, and that will include your own internal functions that we improperly classify as “symptoms” of the disease.
The straight up yes is when someone is, for example, allergic to the vaccine. Early MMR vaccines had a gelatin component that sometimes caused an extreme allergic reaction. Because of that, we no longer use gelatin in vaccines. These kinds of things basically don’t happen anymore…. The problem wasn’t something the vaccine did, it was the packaging for it, and we don’t change the packaging anymore.
“Will these ones?”
Nothing more serious than what’s already been reported. Regardless of the types of side effects following an immunization, there has never been a side effect linked to a vaccine that has taken more than 28 days to manifest. Even the vaccine conspiracy theorists who say that the kids get autism following vaccines say that the kids developed that autism in the week after vaccination. If there was going to be something that would actually cause harm, we’d already know about it.
“Why shouldn’t I wait a couple years before getting the vaccine, just in case?”
A couple of reasons; There are different types of virus, and they mutate at different rates, there are also different kinds of vaccinations, and they provide different types and levels of coverage. There aren’t, as an example, any polio variants that aren’t covered by the polio vaccine. So when you get a polio vaccine, that’s it! You’re done. Flus are a completely different animal. The seasonal flu vaccine is actually a cocktail of vaccines for four or so strains of flu that local boards are concerned about. Because flus mutate relatively quickly and there are so many types of them, you’ll never have a vaccine that offers perfect flu protection on even a short term. Covid is closer to a flu than Polio, every year we vaccinate against Covid, the formula is going to change. So if you’re looking for a formula with a couple years of track record: 1) It’s never going to exist. and 2) If you managed to actually get hold of an old dose and even if that dose were still somehow viable, it’s probably not going to be as effective as it would be right now.
“Well, if it’s not going to be effective in a year, why should I get it now?”
Again… Couple of reasons. First, the same reason we should let kids eat dirt and stop cleaning with Lysol: When it comes to immunity, generally, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (there are obvious exceptions to that, like AIDS or lupus, but generally). The more things that your body has been exposed to, the more likely it is to have antibodies that will provide qualified immunity for something similar. The B117 variant is the most prevalent variant in Manitoba. The Pfizer vaccine still has an estimated 80% efficacy rate against it. That won’t always be true, but it definitely doesn’t hurt.
Second, I don’t think that we’ll ever get rid of Covid because it’s highly communicable and we’re a global society, but it doesn’t need to be as prevalent as it is and vaccinating against it will prevent the spread of the virus, and get us to a point where we reopen faster. In my opinion we could reopen now. But I don’t run the world (Yet!) and we have to build bridges with the people who are still bloody terrified of this virus. Within the year, anyone that wants the vaccine will be able to get the vaccine, and while that’s not perfect protection, it’s probably the point where protection isn’t going to get better.
I disagree with your first point specifically. We’d know, and do know, about immediate effects. But if there was no risk of long-term effects, there wouldn’t be a need for long-term studies. They’d just give the shots to a batch of people, see what happens, approve, and everyone would get vaccinated, no? Why study a vaccine for an average of 10 – 15 years, if they can be safely produced and used in less than a year?
Sure.
Before I get started; While it CAN take 10-15 years for vaccines to be developed, it should be noted that a new vaccine is developed every year for the seasonal flu. There are many kinds of vaccines, not all of them are a decade in the making.
On the topic of 10-15 year vaccine development trials.
First off, it takes between 10-15 years to get a vaccine to market, but most of that is development and licensing, in normal circumstances, the testing phases are less than five years.
Second, those five years are split into Phase I, II and III trials. All of which are between 1 and 2 years. Phase I usually has less than 100 very healthy test subjects, Phase II has a couple hundred people, and Phase III has a couple thousand people of diverse health and demographic makeup.
Third, those 1-2 year testing phases are not solely looking for adverse health effects. They’re measuring things like efficacy. So not only are the people at every testing phase being administered a dose and being monitored for adverse effects, they’re being tested for antibody rates and then exposed to the virus to make sure the antibodies work. Again… Most adverse health effects are detectable very quickly. If someone were allergic to the vaccine, they would immediately experience anaphylaxis, as an example. So basically…. Yeah, it takes a while for those vaccines to get to market, but no one is really concerned about adverse reactions from them. The question is more “Will it work?” than “Will this hurt me?”
Another thing to remember is that some viruses cannot be vaccinated against, and some take a LOT of time to develop. We are 40 years past the push for an HIV-AIDS vaccine and it never happened. How many years were we dealing with Ebola in Sub Saharan Africa before a gentleman I’ve had beer with, who happens to work in the Health Science Center Virology lab in Winnipeg discovered one in November of 2019? That one was approved by the FDA in March of 2020.
The question could still be asked: “Why does it take so long normally, but about a dozen companies did it in 6 months?”
That’s a great question. If I had to guess, I’d say that the timeframes for normal vaccines are artificially extended. Because there’s so much opposition to vaccines normally, it behooves these organizations and oversight bodies to be over careful. I think they do that in spades. There’s also approximately zero urgency to get vaccines developed. While the people developing the vaccines are doing great work, they’re usually pet projects or humanity exercises. Most vaccines do not generate a whole lot of revenue, especially when you consider the medications they made obsolete.
None of which was present here: There was a GREAT sense of urgency and making Covid vaccines will be AMAZINGLY lucrative, which means that the oversight boards were incentivized to to away with any unnecessary red tape.
The question going forward will be: “Can we do more of this?”
Re: Krispy Kreme.
Then there is this:
https://www.theonion.com/krispy-kreme-offers-vaccinated-customers-free-ride-on-g-1846544727
jvb
4. How many people think that NYC is going to prove that these qualified immunity laws were necessary by charging virtually every officer on the force for things that officers do every day. Basically, will officers get sued every time they stop a black suspect? What about every time they have to subdue a struggling suspect? Every time they arrest someone who isn’t charged, does the officer get sued?
Don’t get me wrong, I think qualified immunity needs to be greatly restricted, if not revoked. However, I don’t think NYC is a great ‘model city’ for the testbed if we want the rest of the country to adopt it.
Related history: In my state, if someone breaks into my house, I can kill them. No questions asked. I don’t have to prove the intruder was armed, posed a reasonable threat to me, that I tried to retreat, etc. Once they enter my house, their life is forfeit and the prosecutor is forbidden from charging me. It doesn’t matter if I shot them 10 times while they were on the ground begging for their life, it doesn’t matter if I broke their legs with a baseball bat and stabbed them 80 times with a paring knife to kill them. Do you know why the law was written like that? Because prosecutors could not restrain their personal beliefs about self-defense and charged people who legitimately defended themselves, putting such people in jail for life. The law was written like that because juries can be swayed by lawyers into awarding criminals outrageous settlements for their crimes. The justice system lost the trust and faith of the people and the people took the power away from the justice system. I suspect that is why qualified immunity laws exist in the first place and we are about to get a refresher course into why they were implemented. I hope I am wrong, but I suspect that I am not.
The big case I remember that started these ‘Make My Day’ laws was in Kansas. A group of teenagers broke into an elderly woman’s home while she was trimming her hedges. She went inside and confronted them, and they attacked her. She fought back with a powered hedge trimmer, cutting their legs and arms. She was sued by the group and they were awarded her house and her life savings, leaving her out on the street and penniless. Cases like this cause people to lose all respect for the judges, lawyers, and the courts.
What other decisions have we had lately that were so outrageous that they would lose the trust of the people? Michael Flynn perhaps? Is that why Washington in an armed frontier fort and all of us former citizens are now considered Indians? What percent of the American people believe that the Supreme Court rules on cases based on the Constitution and law? My guess would be single digit percent. How can we have a free country when the vast majority of people don’t have faith in the justice system, elections, or that our government represents the people? We don’t. We live in a country where the vast majority of the population believes that the elections are rigged, the vast majority of the politicians are bought and paid for, the courts only work to advance their own agenda, and unknown forces control everything. The difference between Republican voters and Democrat voters seems to be that the Republican voters don’t like it that way and Democrat voters do. Democrats did not believe that Joe Biden is competent and running the country, they voted for him BECAUSE they knew he was senile and that he would be controlled by others and the Lt. Col. Vindmann’s and the CITIBanks would run the government again, as they did under Obama.
Oceania had ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia.
On 2… I disagree.
If you hire someone to the position of “On Air Tit-Flasher” then you shouldn’t be surprised when that person flashes their tits on the air.
“Race and Inclusion” and “Diversity” positions are, in essence, “bias towards non-white, non-male, non-straight” positions. If you hire someone with an explicit mandate to hate whitey, then I don’t understand why you would be surprised when they hate whitey. They shouldn’t fire the person, they should either eliminate the position, or give Jehaveri a raise.
Yup, I almost took that fork in the analysis road myself.
I wouldn’t mind a voluntary proof of vaccination ID that would be accepted in lieu of a recent test. There’s talk of the airlines going for something like that, and I imagine the cruise industry & similar may eventually require it.
We travel a lot (or at least did so before last year), and got back about a week ago from a trip to Ecuador that required three tests to accomplish. Proof of one was needed to board the flight from the states to Ecuador. Another was required a few days before going to the Galapagos, and a third before flying back to the US. This was tedious and expensive, and in the case of the last test, a bit worrying as to whether we would get the results back in time for the flight. (Still, I imagine there are few people who can say they had their 70th birthday dinner at a sushi restaurant on Charles Darwin Avenue, so maybe it was worth it 😉 )
But we’re old. Long-term side effects aren’t all that important to people who likely have relatively little long term to worry about. Georgia has now opened up vaccination to those 16 and over, but I certainly wouldn’t give it to low-risk kids, and would be hesitant about young adults, especially “breeders”. I know nurses working in virus-crowded ICUs who have refused it.
Will a certain level of herd immunity create a significant change from our permanent semi-lockdown? With an administration fond of control by government diktat, i won’t bet on it.
Click to access FDRLST-v-NLRB-3d-Cir.pdf
Best Table of Contents for a Brief EVER:
ARGUMENT………………………………………………………………………………………………6
I. THE TWEET WAS A JOKE, NOT A THREAT ………………………………………..6
A. The Tweet Was Public and Performative ……………………………………………….7
B. The Tweet Was Funny ……………………………………………………………………….13
II. TAKING TWEETS OUT OF CONTEXT WOULD CHILL
HUMOROUS EXPRESSION …………………………………………………………………16
Formatting…. Blargh. Read it, It’s a treat.