The Chinese are howling
/The CIA, now the Army! Oh, stop, stop! You’re killing us!
The ad centers around Cpl. Emma Malonelord, the daughter of two mothers. After college, Malonelord seeks new adventures and challenges, finding them by joining the U.S. Army.
“Raised by two supportive mothers, Emma felt lucky to have such powerful role models in her life,” a synopsis of the ad states. “Inspired by their courage and conviction, she was determined to face challenges of her own and shatter stereotypes along the way.”
“This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation’s Patriot missile Defense Systems. It begins in California with a little girl raised by two moms,” the ad starts off before chronicling Malonelord’s journey from child to sorority girl and then eventually military recruitment.
Malonelord says during the ad that joining the army was “a way to prove my inner strength and maybe shatter some stereotypes.”
A report from the Council on Foreign Relations revealed that women comprise 16% of enlisted forces and 19% of the officer corps, however, the military does not keep statistics on LGBTQ military personnel.
What do we know that they don't? A lot
/Mr. and Mrs. Fauci visit Piggly Wiggly
Epidemiologists live in a world of ill-informed panic
Allah Pundit, Red State; Old theory: The CDC’s institutional culture is risk-averse because government bureaucrats prioritize CYA, which leads them to err on the side of extreme caution in telling citizens what it’s safe to do.
New theory: The entire epidemiological profession is risk-averse because, well, they spend all their time thinking about dangerous infectious diseases and that’s bound to influence their own behavior.
The Times surveyed more than 700 epidemiologists to ask whether they’ve changed their daily activities lately as the pandemic has progressed and vaccinations have ramped up. Importantly, they didn’t distinguish epidemiologists who’ve already been vaccinated from those who haven’t, a detail that would have been useful in assessing these results. One person who got the survey says it went out in late April and asked about behavior over the past month, before some participants would have been eligible to get immunized in their home states. Because the numbers here reflect the attitudes of a group that includes unvaccinated members, we should expect them to reflect more caution than we would a group consisting entirely of vaccinated people.
But even so, some of these results are hard to justify in terms of rational risk assessment:
Nearly 20 percent of professional epidemiologists were still taking precautions with mail as of April even though it’s been known for months that the virus hardly ever transmits on surfaces.
And more than half of epidemiologists still refused to be within six feet of someone unmasked outdoors even though, according to a Times report yesterday, outdoor transmission rates are somewhere on the order of one percent or even 0.1 percent. The survey question doesn’t even specify a duration for the “interaction.” Presumably the survey participants mean they wouldn’t converse with someone else — outdoors — for even a few seconds within six feet.
Even though the six-foot rule is itself nonsense.
I mean, come on:
Epidemiologists overwhelmingly want even the vaccinated to mask up *outdoors* when in large crowds, and fully a quarter advise masking up when within six feet of anyone.
Maybe this is why the CDC is what it is. It would also explain why Rochelle Walensky is holding her 16-year-old back from summer camp even though he’s at little risk of serious illness himself and virtually all adults who want to be vaccinated have now had the opportunity, putting them at little risk of being infected by her son.
Scientists are just overly cautious, sometimes absurdly so, by nature.
I’ve read that, as they study each new disease, first-year med students become convinced that they’ve contracted that disease. Maybe epidemiologists just become stuck in that first-year mindset.
No, I don't use Twitter, but I was redirected to Bette Midler’s site, and the responses are exactly what you'd expect from the Loons
/the voice of reason
Raise your hand if you’ve been vaxxed are still wearing masks per CDC guidelines
Lots of replies. Here are just a few of them
And here’s the harpy herself, threatening to kill kids if their parents won’t vaccinate them
Midler’s youngest child, I am informed, is 33-years-old and probably not still in grammar school (then again, given the parentage…) And “Jiffy” is a brand of popcorn, not peanut butter. But other than that ….
(“Deathly”?)
Not only can't you keep your doctor, you'll soon be treated (if your race permits treatment at all) by incompetents and buffoons
/You can read the entire, lengthy screed at the link, but a couple of excerpts will give you the flavor:
While we, philosophically, have intrinsic and “equal” value resulting from our shared humanity, it is the lottery of birth that arbitrarily defines the conditions, environments and opportunities that largely shape our life experiences and outcomes. We operate in a carefully designed and maintained system that normalizes and legitimizes an array of dynamics—historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal—over time that routinely advantage white (also wealthy, hetero-, able-bodied, male, Christian, U.S.- born) people at the expense of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and people of color (also low wealth, women, people with disabilities, non-Christians, and those foreign-born) and that is currently reinforced by policies that are blind to power (political and financial) imbalances and realities.
—
The commonly held narrative of meritocracy is the idea that people are successful purely because of their individual effort, reflected in sayings such as “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” or “people just need to make better choices.” The narrative is powerful and harmful because it connects to these values, which are important and legitimate. But it also ignores the inequitably distributed social, structural and political resources that influence health and limit individual-level control or effort.
Medical education has largely been based on such flawed meritocratic ideals, and it will take intentional focus and effort to recognize, review and revise this deeply flawed interpretation, which ignores, or purposively obscures, the underlying root causes of causes (of health and of other metrics of success) that are socio-structural in nature and, often, rely on discredited and racist ideas about biological differences between racial groups.
And so on, ad nauseam; you know the rest, and how it ends.
Fortunately. if the new owners choose to decorate it in an age-appropriate style, brown furniture is being practically give away
/16 Deerpark Meadow Road is new to the market today, at $9.995 million. Up to now, 1929 homes were out of favor, but in this market, who knows? It seems that everything is selling now.
Off to Wyoming to find a new home (soonish)
/welcome to the new, improved boulder
Rich people have fled NYC to ruin the west
Pal Nancy and Sarah are urging me to move to Colorado, but I think not.
Colorado’s gone, at least east of the Rockies, and because that’s where the people are, they control the state. Denver and Boulder have homeless using the sidewalks as public toilets, gun control, rent control (which — duh — has driven rents sky high, and the eastern side has just voted to release wolves on the western side, where the ranchers and their cattle are. Did I mention tax hikes and a ban on styrofoam plates?
Montana has the Big Sky Resort and Ben Affleck and Lo Jo, and the University of Montana, plus Bozeman (the 2010 census put Bozeman's population at 37,280 and by 2019 the population had risen to 49,8310.
Michael Martin Offers all three alternative destinations; I’m thinking that as long as I avoid Jackon’s Hole, Wyoming is the safest.
Circling Back:
URBAN CAMPING: Denver Fire Removes Hundreds Of Pounds Of Propane From Homeless Encampments, Worries About Large-Scale Disaster. “Firefighters say many camps — in populated areas, along busy streets, and under bridges — have several tanks of propane. It’s a dangerous mix that led to a close call in northeast Denver last month. Explosions rocked the area after 500 pounds of propane erupted in a tractor trailer-turned-homeless encampment.”
Why would they remove it, when they should be bringing in more?
What a difference a Jew makes
/Hamas rockets hit Tel Aviv
But in 2012, addressing the South African shooting of 34 striking miners: “Why didn’t they use tear gas and rubber bullets? Because those things don’t work anymore.”
Old Greenwich Sale
/3 Tomac Lane, asked $3.950, sold today for $3.850. Ten days.
Contract on Thunder Mountain
/24 Thunder Mountain Road, asking $6.995 million. I like the house; others don’t, but I sold this land back in 2013, and I’ll attest that the views from its hilltop location are fabulous.
Fortunately, the stager still had a supply of The Orange in her warehouse