2021 archive
Vaccine Nation 0
From the description:
Jonathan Berman, professor, National Co-Chair of the 2017 March for Science, and author of “Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement,” joins David to discuss the origins of vaccine skepticism, how to deprogram anti-vaxxers, and much more.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to The Daffodil Mystery by Edgar Wallace (for whom the Edgar Awards are named) with VLC on Ubuntu MATE under the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.
“Facts Are What People Think” 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., muses on lethal quality of hogwash in our seemingly fact-free society. Here’s how he opens his column; follow the link for the rest.
“Hogwash,” you may recall, was the word a grocery-store owner in Naples used last month in dismissing the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are a society of stupid.
Misdirection Play, Cancel Culture Dept. 0
A snippet:
When in doubt, create a moral panic.
Meta: Blogroll 0
I’ve removed some entries from my blogroll because they have not been updated for some time or are no longer active; I do this from time to time. I shall add some new entries over the next few days.
Maskless Marauders 0
F. T. Rea has had enough.
Devolution 0
At the Hartford Courant, James Rosen discusses the Republican Party’s path from being a political party to being, well, a nihilist gang. Here’s a bit:
(snip)
And so, back in Washington, over the coming months I covered the Republicans’ increasingly radical attempts to cripple the federal government. Intoxicated by his newfound power as House speaker, Gingrich’s ambitions extended far beyond the modest reforms in the “Contract with America,” his savvy campaign-marketing ploy. His acolytes, many of them political outsiders with ignorance of government (something that would become a hallmark of Trumpism), followed his dictates with fanatical fervor (another trait of the ex-president’s current congressional enablers).
He makes persuasive arguments, but I think he’s made one fundamental error.
The transformation began almost three decades earlier with Richard Nixon’s odious “southern strategy,” which paved the way for Gingrich.