He points out some of the best things in the $1.9 trillion relief bill that was just passed.
I have to disagree with him on his criticisms of the ad because it had a Christmas theme. It looked like a pretty good ad to me and after all, it is only a matter of time before Christmas becomes a holiday that features year-round marketing.
On Wednesday I received my covid-19 vaccine. I had become eligible for it the previous Wednesday but finding an appointment was not easy and took me a few days. I finally got one at a CVS drug store. The downside was that it was in San Jose which is about a 90 minute drive for me. The upside is that they were giving the Johnson&Johnson vaccine which is a single dose. So I am now done. I also enjoyed that for the first time in a year, I actually went further than a couple of miles from my home and I enjoyed the change of scenery. Soon after the lockdown began last March, I filled the gas tank in my car in case of an emergency and when I checked on Wednesday before I set out, I had done only 240 miles for the entire year. The trip to San Jose added about 150 miles in just one day.
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Normally I am careful to avoid spoilers but I just finished watching this show and was incensed by it but could not give my reasons for hating it without exposing the plot.
This highly promoted Netflix six-part series starts interestingly enough. It features Louise, a part-time secretary in a firm of psychiatrists that has just hired David who has a beautiful wife Adele. Adele’s parents were very wealthy but died in a fire in their mansion while she was asleep but David managed to rescue her. She ended up in some kind of residential clinic for therapy and while there becomes good friends with a goofy working class gay drug addict named Rob and the two of them learn how to have lucid dreams, where one learns how to control one’s dreams.
It is now ten years later and it soon becomes clear that David and Adele’s marriage is in trouble, that he detests her while she keeps telling him how much she loves him. There is clearly some dark secret in their past and one knows that the plot is heading towards some big reveal. Meanwhile, David and Louise start a clandestine affair while Adele and Louise meet on the street and become friends but Adele asks Louise not to tell David that they are hanging out together, and Louise agrees. Why Adele asks this and Louise agrees is not clear. But ok, one can overlook that particular plot hole for the sake of advancing the narrative.
The first four episodes is your standard psychological thriller in which one character, in this case Adele, becomes increasingly creepy, seeming to have the ability to know what other people are doing even when she is not there. It was a little slow for my taste but not too bad and I was looking forward to the pace picking up in the last two episodes as the denouement approaches, when all is revealed that explains David and Adele’s weird relationship.
But then in episode five the plot goes bonkers and the final episode six is really nuts.
Now is where the spoilers begin.
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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known to all as Lula, is a socialist who was elected as president of Brazil as leader of the Workers Party and uplifted the conditions of its poorest people. He was one of the most popular leaders in the world. He was convicted of corruption in a very dubious proceeding in which the judge colluded with prosecutors but that conviction had the desired effect of preventing him from running for re-election as president. Lula was leading in the polls when he was removed from the race by this move, enabling the utterly reactionary Jair Bolsonaro to become president in 2019.
Back in November 2019, when Lula was released from prison pending appeals against his conviction, I posted about his case and linked to a Netflix documentary The Edge of Democracy (2019) that shows the whole process by which the right-wingers removed Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, imprisoned Lula, and captured power in Brazil.
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One of the experiments that grabbed the public’s imagination was one where young children who were able to delay gratification in the form of getting a treat seemed to have more positive life outcomes. Now there is a study using cuttlefish that follows the same model and finds that they too will forego an immediate reward in order to get a better reward later. One of the researchers Alex Schnell was interviewed about the work.
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Gizmodo has published a slideshow of 17 images taken on Mars from the current mission. In one of them, it provides the answer to the code that was hidden in the red and white color pattern of the parachute that was deployed during the descent. Internet sleuths cracked that code in about six hours.
Despite the sombre milestone of 500,000 deaths being passed, the numbers in the US continue to move in a good direction. The average number of daily deaths and the number currently hospitalized have now dropped to about the values that they had at their peak in April of last year. We still have some way to go before we reach the lowest values that were arrived at around July. I just hope people will not relax but continue to be vigilant and follow the guidelines for safety.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.2M tests, 53k cases, 55,403 people currently hospitalized, and 1,235 deaths. pic.twitter.com/o5Kz53SoS2
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) February 23, 2021
NASA has released video taken by multiple cameras as its Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars. The high quality of the videos show how far we have come from the grainy days of the first Moon landing.
Karl Popper’s idea that science evolves by means of falsification and that it can also serve as a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from nonscience was quickly attacked by other philosophers of science who showed that not only was the idea unworkable in practice, it did not even correspond to actual scientific practice. My own book The Great Paradox of Science discusses the problems with falsification in some depth and argues that there are much better ways to understand the evolution of scientific theories.
Charlotte Sleigh extends the criticisms of falsification even wider, arguing a cadre of prominent economists and scientists used the concept to advance the cause of neoliberalism.
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The number of pandemic-related deaths worldwide is now close to 2.5 million.
The US has now around 500,000 deaths due to covid-19. I remember when the figure reached around 200,000 and experts warned us that it would go over 300,000 and I thought, “Wow, that’a lot. Surely it won’t reach such a high figure?” Then it was repeated when the toll reached 300,000 and then 400,000, and now here we are.
Even though infection, hospitalization, and death rates are falling and people are getting vaccinated, it seems likely that the ultimate toll will reach over 600,000 and maybe even 700,000. And that is assuming that there are no fresh outbreaks due to a combination of new, more contagious variants taking hold and careless behavior on the part of people not taking basic precautions.
We are a far cry from the beginning of the pandemic when Trump predicted back in February of last year that we would have 15 deaths, tops, and that the virus would disappear when spring arrived.