“Lower vaccination rates among young adults in the United States are resulting in anxiety and painful decision-making for those who are vaccinated but have friends, family, loved ones and colleagues who aren’t.”
Don’t be like Missouri. Parts of Texas are already starting to look like Missouri. That’s bad.
“In May, I broke the story that the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees would not grant acclaimed journalist and New York Times Magazine staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure. They didn’t vote it down. They just refused to consider it. Killed it in committee. If that sounds more like politics than academia to you, well …”
“But with that increased attention has come increased scrutiny. Some critics dismiss the paint-by-numbers aspect of some of the genre’s biggest hits, while others worry that the truth often takes a back seat to dramatic flair. Perhaps most worrying is the fact that true crime often exploits or diminishes victims, survivors, and their family members—the people most affected by these horrendous events—while lionizing the perpetrators (and sometimes turning them into sex symbols). As the genre continues to explode in quantity, there’ll be an even greater chance of such mistakes.”
“Archaeologists may finally know the age and true identity of the “Rude Man,” also known as the Cerne Abbas Giant, one of dozens of geoglyphs etched into the British countryside.”
“Business leaders frequently proclaim that “people are our most important resource.” Yet those who are resistant to permitting telework are not living by that principle. Instead, they’re doing what they feel comfortable with, even if it devastates employee morale, engagement and productivity, and seriously undercuts retention and recruitment, as well as harming diversity and inclusion. In the end, their behavior is a major threat to the bottom line.”
“When we think about the normal discrimination statutes…we have protected classes based on something that is sort of inherent to you, with religion maybe being the one that is a choice. But vaccination status you certainly can control.”
“Whereas many people’s fundamental heuristic for health-related decisions is to trust medical and scientific experts, vaccine hesitancy reminds us of the many competing forces informing people’s intuitions about health, be they religious, political, historical, or identity-based.”
RIP, Edwin Edwards, four-term Governor of Louisiana, who defeated David Duke in 1991.
“What we’re seeing right now with these efforts to short-circuit the legislative process is what the legislative filibuster in the Senate should be like.”
“What you do is you take the horse, and you put two horses in a box, and you put the box on the plane.”
“A federal judge has temporarily blocked Tennessee’s transgender restroom law, which requires businesses to post a specific sign if they allow transgender people to use bathrooms that match their gender identity.”
RIP, Charlie Robinson, actor best known for his role on Night Court.
“Days After Threat From Biden, Major Ransomware Group Goes Dark”.
“If you’re a big fan of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, you may want to brace yourself: The recipe for your beloved drink is changing. Coca-Cola said Tuesday that it is tweaking the beverage in an effort to make the drink taste more like regular Coke.”
RIP, Fred Allred, longtime owner of Houston record store Allrecords.
“My point is that the great voice actors are great at voice acting. Some who are not primarily voice actors can be fine in certain roles in certain situations as Mr. Jones was…but when I see a list of nominees like the one for this year’s Emmy Awards, I think someone is disrespecting professional, full-or-most-time voice actors. They’re voting for celebrity, not talent.”
“Ironically, it was Trump’s own Supreme Court nominees who empowered Biden to purge so many Republican holdovers.”
Of course there’s a Ken Starr connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
“One thinks of 911 as a major advance in American law enforcement, but it had several less than beneficial consequences. In our haste to get to every call and handle them quickly, cops began to lose the intimacy of their relationship with the neighborhood they were policing.”
“For now it is more evidence of what we still – six months on – seem mostly in denial about: a defeated President plotted to overthrow the government to remain in power. The nation’s top general and his colleagues had to come up with contingency plans to thwart the coup they believed the commander-in-chief of the military was plotting.
“Norwegian Cruise Lines, through its counsel Quinn Emanuel, sued Florida for actively jacking its whole business model in the name of trolling.”
“How Lola Bunny Broke the Internet”.
“Republicans were happy to support vaccine when they could credit Trump, then went on the attack”.
“Most of us know generally what “stab in the back” mythology refers to but it is worth understanding in the particulars where the idea comes from and how it relates to today.”
If only these people could have had some way to know that getting vaccinated was a great way to protect themselves from serious COVID risk.
The world is a slightly better place now.
RIP, Biz Markie, hip hop musician, DJ, and actor.
Would disagree strongly with the contention that Germany started WWI intentionally. For one thing, they didn’t need to — they were rapidly approaching hegemony in Europe by purely peaceful means, as the rapidly growing economy they were. It is true that they blundered into an uncomfortable situation between France and Russia, thanks to the cowboy diplomacy of the Kaiser after dumping Bismarck. But that could be remedied by careful diplomacy, a better bet than relying on “Sick Man” Austria for support. Yes, they stupidly gave a “blank check” to Austria in dealing with outlaw state Serbia; but they could not have foreseen that Russia would have bungled a regional clash with Austria into a general mobilization that would necessarily drag Germany in. United States conservatives had a similar “stab-in-the-back” theory when things did not go our way in Vietnam; but that doesn’t mean the American military had it in mind when we entered that conflict. Let us keep our minds open to our limitless human capacity for stupidity.