One of the biggest lies perpetuated by the oligarchy is that everyone benefits when the wealthy get even wealthier, even obscenely so. This Matt Wuerker cartoon rightly pricks that bubble.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
One of the biggest lies perpetuated by the oligarchy is that everyone benefits when the wealthy get even wealthier, even obscenely so. This Matt Wuerker cartoon rightly pricks that bubble.
Being an old person myself, I am somewhat attuned to news items about how the pandemic is affecting that age cohort. It is well-documented that the virus has far more serious effects on older people and that the vaccine is their best bet to avoid serious illness and death. It is infuriating that so many older people have succumbed to the misinformation about the vaccines and not taken them.
David Leonhardt of the New York Times reviews the statistics. He says that while the number of cases and deaths are declining nationwide, it could have been much better among the older population.
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One of the lesser-publicized objections to taking the covid-19 vaccines is the fear that side effects may appear after many years. This is, on the surface, a more plausible cause of concern since the vaccines have been around for less than a year and we do not have any data on what effects it might have after periods longer than that. So it is not surprising that some people feel that the verdict is not yet in on long term safety.
But scientists say that this fear can be allayed by explaining how vaccines work. The fact that the vaccines provide immunity for long times, sometimes for life, is not because they stay in the body that long. After triggering the immune response and creating antibodies to the virus, they quickly degrade and go away.
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Money plays an obscenely large role in American politics. It is not unusual for politicians with a reforming agenda to get elected to Congress and then get seduced by the big money interests that lobby heavily in Washington. Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic senator from Arizona, perhaps holds the record for the speed with which she abandoned the policies that appealed to the people who elected her and became a tool of the plutocrats and corporations. She was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2012 as a progressive and then was elected to the senate in 2018 and it was hoped that she would help wrest control of that reactionary body from the Republicans. But it has become increasingly clear during the recent discussions on the infrastructure bills that she has abandoned any progressive agenda that she might have once had. I recounted her political transformation back in March.
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I know nothing about birds but was of course aware of the name John James Audubon who became famous for his books containing detailed and lavish color paintings of the birds of America. His name has been adopted by various ornithological societies and one hears references to his name all the time. For some reason, I had thought that he was Black and was thus surprised when I read this news item that the Audubon Naturalist Society is dropping the name because of Audubon’s unsavory history and racist attitudes that, among other things, involved slave trading. They are making this move as part of a nationwide trend of not honoring people who have been guilty of deplorable acts.
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Puerto Rico has become the most vaccinated region in the US and why that may be so is interesting.
Puerto Rico has fully vaccinated just over 73% of its 3.3 million residents, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than 2.3 million people.
…On the mainland, Vermont leads with 70.8% of the population fully vaccinated, followed by Connecticut at 70.2% and Maine at 70%, according to the CDC, which added that just over 57% of the total US population was fully vaccinated as of Friday.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, wrote on Twitter that Puerto Rico’s “fabulous” vaccination efforts have “gotten way too little attention.”
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And it comes from Fox News, of all places, and was made by host Neil Cavuto during an interview with Howard Kurtz. Cavuto has multiple sclerosis, heart disease, and cancer and is thus severely immunocompromised. He was vaccinated and contracted covid-19 and has recovered. He feels that being vaccinated was what enabled him to survive the breakthrough infection.
Over at Impossible Me Abbeycadabra had an interesting post in which she wrote about author Neil Gaiman with whom she shares a lot of literary interests, so much so that she considers him a ‘hero’. She is well aware of the danger of having heroes, given that so many public figures whom one once liked or admired have later revealed themselves to have quite obnoxious views on some major issues (the number of such people is too large and the names too well-known to be worth listing), so she is naturally relieved that so far he has not had any unflattering things revealed about him. But she shares the same feeling of unease that all of us have that some figure we look up to might have some dark secret revealed.
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On The Daily Show Trevor Noah comments on the odd fact that there seems to be high levels of resistance to getting the covid-19 vaccine among police and firefighters. The vaccine mandates issued by many jurisdictions that require all government employees to be vaccinated has resulted in many of them either leaving or challenging the mandates in court. Given that they pride themselves on risking their lives for the sake of others, this fear of taking a life-saving vaccine is puzzling. It may be that it is a higher level of general anti-vaccine and other right-wing ideology within these groups that is driving the resistance.
One of the things I noticed is that while I write and give talks lot about the philosophy of science, I get most pushback when I criticize Popper’s falsifiability idea (such as in my Scientific American article The Idea that a Scientific Theory can be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth: It’s time we abandoned it) than any other thing I say. What is interesting is that I get challenged by both scientists and intelligent design creationists, who are usually on opposite sides of discussions about the nature of science. For example, at Why Evolution Is True, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne (and his commenters) disagreed with my article. And over at Evolution News intelligent design creationist David Klinghoffer also disagreed with me.
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