Finally got a bit of quiet time to sit and write, so I want to touch on a few things that have fallen through the cracks in the last week or so. (Side note: the only silver lining to this whole mess is G’s reaction to having no sink in the bathroom — a mix of disappointment, confusion, and incredulousness that’s pathetic and endearing at the same time.)
Let’s start with House Republicans in Washington DC, who have comfortably slipped back into their role as a powerless majority by keeping Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair and boldly passing bills they know won’t go anywhere. A perfect example of this is the recent vote to immediately end all covid-related emergencies. Joe Biden has already declared the emergency declarations will end in May, so it’s not like Republicans are breaking any new ground — they simply want to carry out Biden’s agenda on a slightly different timeline. And maybe they scored a couple irrelevant political points by getting Democrats on record as NOT wanting to end the emergency declaration right away — but who cares?
The last few weeks reminds me of 2008-2016 all over again. How many times did the GOP vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act? (100?) They talked a big game because they knew they didn’t have any actual power to get anything done, but as soon as they actually had the power to repeal the ACA……….failure.
And on the “big, important” issues? The GOP rolls over — most recently with $2.17 BILLION more for Ukraine, in the form of long-range missiles and tanks. It’s like our ‘leaders’ have decided that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons, so they’re going to shove all our lives into the pot on that bet. Remember when the media was freaking out because Trump killing Soleimani (IN IRAQ!) was going to cause World War III? Now they cheer for escalation while Zelensky ‘reorganizes’ his government like the tyrants of old, claiming that he’s cleaning up corruption….
With all this going on, that the House Republicans are spending their time slightly altering Joe Biden’s covid timeline cements my view that they are simply the Washington Generals of the Uniparty. For those of you not familiar with the term, the Washington Generals are the long-time opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters — they literally exist to lose to the Globetrotters and make it look good. While on the court the teams appear to be ‘rivals’, the Generals are just another part of the show.
But if the Democrats are the Globetrotters and Republicans are the Washington Generals, what does that make Libertarians? I’m glad you ask! Libertarians are a very important part of the halftime entertainment:
No, they aren’t the people who are actually riding around on the donkeys playing the game. One unfortunate reality of donkey basketball is that sometimes the donkeys just poop on the court. (Back off, they’re donkeys!) That means somebody has to come out and clean up the mess. That’s where you find the Libertarians — shoveling donkey shit.
RIP to the HHS hospital utilization page. I used this page over and over throughout the last few years — first to show the obvious seasonality of the virus, then later to show how vaccination drives might override that (and not in a good way).
So now the CDC is hosting the data on one ‘easy-to-use’ platform. Great — I’m sure they’ll handle this page exactly as well as they’ve handled everything else the last few years. Once we navigate to the actual page, we see the data is much more difficult to view or make sense of.
Gone is the map that makes comparing parts of the country easy. Gone is the ability to look at the numbers of each hospital. Now we have near-worthless top-level information, with the ‘good stuff’ buried in sub-menus and difficult to compare even after you dig it out. I can’t help but wonder if this information was ‘rehosted’ because the data was undermining the narrative. (It certainly wouldn’t be the first time)
Luckily for us, the covid narrative seems to be collapsing everywhere we look. Damning numbers out of the UK show the ridiculousness of vaccinating young people. The data is so overwhelming that even California has figured it out — the state recently ended its push for covid vaccinations for students. (I expect Jay Inslee to follow along a week later, as usual.)
A new study published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews states what everybody looking at the data has known for years: masks make little to no difference in regards to the spread of covid. This was clear long ago simply by comparing states with mandates to neighboring states without mandates:
There are even rumblings about Thailand declaring their vaccine agreements null and void, though to be honest I haven’t been able to look into the validity of these claims yet. The King’s daughter has been in a coma for weeks after her recent booster shot, so the matter is a little personal. All it takes is one domino to fall………
And speaking of dominoes, they continue to fall in the saga of Project Veritas vs. Pfizer. After the first video documented gain-of-function directed evolution projects, the second video hilariously captured Jordon Walker’s reaction when he realized what he had let slip. The most recent video exposes how Walker and Pfizer were worried about how the vaccine was messing with women’s reproductive systems. Take a watch:
Can you imagine the scandal if it turns out that maybe we’ve fucked up the reproductive capacity of millions and millions of people?
Definitely something to delete off your resume.
All of this is adding up to future in which nobody wants to be left defending lockdowns, masks, and vaccines for healthy people. I can’t wait.
I’ve got more I want to cover but I’m out of time! I’ll try to sneak in more over the next day or two.
C'est ça!
to steal from Yakov Smirnoff - "In Uniparty America, donkey ride you!"
Speaking of Smirnoff, I could use a stiff drink....