Rock wrote:

I think the government should have given us metre sticks for social distancing, so you could wave them around and ensure you're not within 6 feet or 2 metres of anybody else. And if they get too close... THWACK!

Better yet....6 metres.

Rock wrote:

I think the government should have given us metre sticks for social distancing, so you could wave them around and ensure you're not within 6 feet or 2 metres of anybody else. And if they get too close... THWACK!

Brilliant idea.

Now you've got me thinking. A suit of 6–foot spikes comes to mind. It would look like a giant sea urchin.

Study: COVID May Increase Risks of Brain Disorders
Note that the worst effects in the study stand at "after two years", meaning these were pre-vaccine infections from the original Alpha coronavirus and "whether SARS-CoV-2 variants differ in their risk profiles remains unclear". 

Joe Rogan just can't stay out of the news.  Now he's telling his audience that the pandemic should have taught them to vote Republican.

1) Which administration put us all in lockdowns again?

2) Because they dragged their ass for 6 weeks between learning about the severity of the virus, because they didn't want to spook the stock market (which crashed anyway)?

3) And defunded the federal pandemic monitoring apparatus?  Closed the CDC liason office in China?  Refused the WIV request for funds to train technicians on safety protocols?

But clearly the flaws in the pandemic response should be far more important priorities for voting than the climate crisis, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights (and 14th Amendment due process rights generally), and not supporting a party that is willing to lie through its little baked bean teeth in order to protect a megalomaniac.

This may not be politically correct, but Joe Rogan is a hands and knees cocksucker.  I'm not saying he's gay.  I'm saying he's eager to play.
 

Like, one would think that the death toll in long term care homes, which were privatized under the Ford government and woefully under regulated subsequently, would be evidence enough that this is a terrible idea, but given that afore got handily re-elected, I must concede that people are fucking morons.

The new Omicron-focused booster shot is due to roll out sometime next week.  It shouldn't be too hard to get, because, apparently, only about half of Americans bothered to get either of the past boosters either.

The problem is that this will be the last booster that will be made available for free from the government.  Starting in January, any future boosters will have to be acquired through one's private insurance plan, possibly with a co-pay.  Now, it's worth pointing out that this change isn't really due to any medical expert determination based on the current state of winding down the pandemic, as it would seem to indicate.  No, this change is entirely due to the fact that congressional Republicans are stonewalling any future funding for covid boosters.  And this is where it gets a little insane.  They're not refusing to fund these boosters because "back to work everybody" opening up the economy rallying that you would assume would be their motivation for it.  No, it's because they're holding up future funding until and/or unless Joe Biden keeps the Title 42 policy, the one which automatically bars amnesty immigration to slow the spread of covid (and which Biden would have already dropped if a federal - Trump appointed - judge hadn't blocked him).  So, trying to keep this straight, because the Pubs say that due to the pandemic we need to keep immigrants out of the country, and unless Biden does this they're not going to fund the very thing that we need to keep safe from the pandemic?

Say what you will about Canada politics.  I don't have health insurance at the moment.  So, chalk up those points for your team.  Maybe Biden needs to start work on another one of his campaign promises, and try to implement a public option government insurance program.  I mean, universal medicare would also be nice, but I'm trying to keep my feet on the ground here.

The good news: The new boosters are available and the WHO announced that the end of the pandemic is in sight.

The bad news: there's still no shortage of shysters who are trying to rewrite the events of the past 3 years to force the pandemic into their own preferred political narrative, and the combination of American short attention spans and reluctance to recognize confirmation bias will almost surely prove them successful.

Bill Maher has had a string of anti-vaxxers on his weed-cast lately, last week Rob Schneider (who refused to enforce vax-cards and masks at his 2021 shows), and now Aaron Rodgers, continuing his pity-party tour over the unfair tyranny of being forced to admit that his immunitization ploy was an utter load of pigshit.  I'm going to post this clip, in order to avoid giving Maher's channel any clicks, but mostly because this does a good job of elucidating the beneath-the-surface presumptions underlining their bitching.  The not-so-subtle sophic strategy is the modus operandi, laundering their ill-conceived notions of government Orwellian control through such knee-jerk triggers of 'civil liberties' (my body!) and small-town populism (shut down restaur....wait a minute!  Hasn't Bill Maher been complaining about the tax payer costs of the PPP bailouts?).  The truth of the matter, however thinly concealed by their rhetoric, comes out in Rodgers' claim that "every conspiracy theory came true".  So this is no longer an issue of poor government response and planning, where debatable mistakes and miscalculations may have been made about an unprecedented emergent disease and a major public health emergency.  Nope, this is now a deliberate conspiracy to coerce Americans (because clearly we were the only government dealing with this issue) into changing their lifestyles, to enforce obedience and submission through manipulating irrational fears.  And though the extent of the damage, economic or psychological, caused by the disruption of this emergency and the extent to which it could have been avoided with different policies (and indeed the extent to which it could have been worse with different policies) is something that will only be clear with years of historical hindsight, it's also clear that Maher and Rodgers are not after clarity here, but after grinding their axes based on excusing their own political (and homeopathic) preconceptions that the pandemic also disrupted.



 

I forget what episode of Bill Maher's Man Cave Podcast it came from, but one of my favorite moments is where Maher clearly takes offence when one of his guests quickly ranks Dave Chapelle as the greatest of all time. Making sure to point out that there are a lot of great comics in the history of comedy. And then further pointing out that he is one of them.

No wonder he gets so angry when his audience doesn't laugh at his hack shit jokes that he doesn't even write anymore. It is admittedly very frustrating to see people not appreciate genius. Especially the Bill Maher kind.
 

Pulling from the Anthropocene thread to this more relevant one; re: Bill Maher.

It's not even that he happens to be so wrong about the extent of the harms caused by the US government lockdowns/mitigation, in relation to the harms of Covid itself, but every day we find that there was also far more harm caused by the US government undermining the lockdowns/mitigations.  He's just ass-backwards on this.

(Also watched his last Club Random with Chevy Chase, because I wanted to see how Chevy's doing these days.  Having trouble breathing apparently, I'd guess he's got COPD, which makes it a bit cruel for Bill to keep smoking weed a few feet away from him, even as Chevy is showing signs of shortness of breath in his responses.  Chevy looked annoyed a lot of the time about a lot of other things, but still had the best jokes.)
 

Jinnistan wrote:

(Also watched his last Club Random with Chevy Chase, because I wanted to see how Chevy's doing these days.  Having trouble breathing apparently, I'd guess he's got COPD, which makes it a bit cruel for Bill to keep smoking weed a few feet away from him, even as Chevy is showing signs of shortness of breath in his responses.  Chevy looked annoyed a lot of the time about a lot of other things, but still had the best jokes.)

Just an update here: I also recently watched Chevy Chase do the Fly on the Wall podcast (w/ Dana Carvey & David Spade), and Chevy's wife explains that he is in fact taking supplemental oxygen, and last year suffered heart failure which caused some mild brain damage, which might explain some of the difficulty he's been having in these interviews.  Although not necessarily for that exact reason.  His attention-span seems wild and he seems to have trouble with certain words (and has a mild slur, which I initially thought could be due to a denture issue), but most of the stand-offishness of his posture might be a defensiveness over concerns around his memory.  He gets a little agitated when asked whether he remembers certain things, for example, and there's thick sarcasm in the way he'll just make things up instead.  Chase has always been a difficult interview, and his humor has always been caustic.  I'm afraid to say that he may not be long for this world, and he's been pretty bitter about how he'll be remembered in it.  Spade took the brunt of his barbs here, but delivered the best stinger.  When Chase asks his wife at one point whether she wanted to divorce him, Spade says, "She already has, you forgot."  Chevy laughed, respecting the player.