And another day of ‘choosing dangerously,’ culture wars, reckless governors, furious conservatives, more calls for resignation, no longer hiding your racism, settlements, pulling books, affordable broadband, and fraternity hazing comes to a close:
“One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.” -- Niccolo Machiavelli
Deaths
US: 545,544 (+1823)
World: 2,651,700 (+9938)
Cases
US: 29,993,423 (+67,521)
World: 119,609,831 (+495,879)
The Year Of Choosing Dangerously. Scientists refer to the problem as “cognitive load,” but that’s just a fancy way to say that your brain can really only do so many things at once — and there are consequences to overloading it. Try to do too much, and you will damage your mental health and, ironically, impair your ability to make good decisions...Instead of leadership, we got a crash course in the futility and misery of trying to manage a systemic disaster via millions of disconnected individual choices. Remember that last bit. A global pandemic is not the only time that’s true. As the planet warms, we are going to keep encountering disasters where solutions are presented as a false dichotomy: Either fix it by being free to make all the decisions yourself, or fix it by letting an authoritarian government tell you exactly what you have to do. The reality is that we can’t dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels one household at a time any more than we can stop a pandemic by forcing every family to decide for themselves — with no expertise and little coherent information — what is safe and what isn’t. Without system-level support — information, transparency, policies that make it easier to choose hard but necessary things — individual decision-making is like the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Except that, in this version of the tale, he’s also slowly losing his mind...Remember it all because we will be here again. There will be some other disaster. And next time, the only way we are going to avoid being crushed under cognitive overload is if we remember what this year did to us. And we start to demand something better.
Dr. Seuss goes to Washington: How the GOP plans to use the culture wars to win elections. Definitions, however, matter less than impressions. When people do learn about cancel culture, they tend to view it with distaste, a Politico/Morning Consult poll from July found. That means that there’s a large group of Americans open to persuasion on a highly controversial issue. And that persuasion seems to flow in one direction, i.e. to the right...The voters who tended to care most about cancel culture were whites earning $100,000 or more per year: that is, the suburban voters who are crucial to Republicans’ electoral prospects...Part of the problem — and the opportunity — is that “cancel culture” is as amorphous a phrase as “drain the swamp,” which is what makes it so politically useful: It can mean whatever one wants it to...The irony is that this discord is exactly what Dr. Seuss sought to diminish throughout much of his career. He apologized for the racist images of his early works and political cartoons. His best books strive to teach the very kind of inclusivity today’s progressives support.
Reckless governors are threatening COVID-19 progress. But although we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, we aren’t there yet. Reckless and premature rollbacks in states like Texas and Mississippi — and soon to be others — threaten to erode the hard-won progress we’ve made and create pockets of potential new infections. As we face the growing threat of alarming virus variants, the best tools we still have in the race to vaccinate a majority of Americans continue to be mask-wearing and physical distancing.
Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech.
Fact-checking President Biden's first prime-time address.
Sens. Schumer, Gillibrand and most House Dems from N.Y. call for Cuomo to resign. -- Democrat politicians are held accountable for their actions. Republican politicians are not.
Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Italian-American, Jewish Dem lawmaker "Rep. Mussolini". -- See previous comment.
1st round of $1,400 stimulus payments arriving this weekend, IRS says.
Sen. Johnson says he never felt threatened during the Jan. 6 Capitol attack: “And mainly because I knew that even though those thousands of people that were marching the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that loved this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law, and so I wasn’t concerned.”..."Now had the tables been turned, now Joe this will get me in trouble, had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.” -- He doesn’t even try to hide his racism. And, oh yeah, the rioters did break laws.
Anti-Asian hate crimes have surged nearly 150 percent in major U.S. cities.
The city of Minneapolis on Friday agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from George Floyd’s family over the Black man’s death in police custody, even as jury selection continued in a former officer’s murder trial.
Amazon pulls books framing LGBTQ+ identities as mental illness after GOP complaint. Amazon on Thursday announced plans to stop selling all books that frame transgender and other sexual identities as mental illness, a decision it reached after four Republican senators complained to CEO Jeff Bezos last month when the company pulled a single book on the subject from its virtual shelves.
House and Senate Democrats are pushing new legislation introduced this week that would allocate $94 billion to make affordable broadband internet access available nationwide. The legislation is an effort to close the digital divide and bring digital equity to millions of Americans who have been left offline during the coronavirus pandemic this past year.
If student deaths won't stop fraternity hazing, what will? The recent deaths of Adam Oakes and Stone Foltz have ignited renewed calls for Greek life reform, but questions remain if reform will be enough. -- Hazing is bullshit.
Nearly 90% of esports scholarships going to men.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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