Flight attendants are taking self-defense classes in order to deal with passengers who become unruly and violent, often over the issue of wearing masks.
Is martial arts training going to be part of the orientation program for new employees? Where else are we going to see this trend? Teachers? Bus drivers? Shop assistants? Hospitality workers? Is any job where one has to deal with the public now becoming a potential physical conflict zone?
Madness.
On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) and the members of their administrations as well as the US military and intelligence agencies for the disaster that they created that has led to massive tragedy for the long-suffering Afghan people.
This appalling situation reveals once again that when your basic policy goals are flawed, you start on a road which eventually leads nowhere, however many resources one assigns to it.
This article describes how people in some communities are becoming violent in their opposition to schools requiring masks for students and school personnel. What struck me though was the photograph accompanying the article. Notice how the middle school student is stooped over as he walks.
The drummer for the Rolling Stones has died at the age of 80. He had played with them for 60 years. This great rock band has stayed together a phenomenally long time, continuing to perform live, and were planning yet another tour.
Always using a straightforward four-drum setup – positively minimalist compared with the multi-instrument setups favoured by many rock groups – he gave the Rolling Stones propulsive, unfussy backbeats on every one of their studio albums, beginning with their self-titled 1964 debut. “I don’t like drum solos,” he once said. “I admire some people that do them, but generally I prefer drummers playing with the band. The challenge with rock’n’roll is the regularity of it. My thing is to make it a dance sound – it should swing and bounce.”
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The FDA has granted full approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine for preventing covid-19. Up until now, it had only been granted emergency use authorization and some vaccine-hesitant people had said that they did not want to take an ‘experimental’ treatment that had not received full FDA approval. Let’s hope that they will now take the vaccine because the number of preventable cases and deaths is staggering and heartbreaking.
But I suspect that even this approval will not win over the hard-core skeptics. Take this report that some people are using drugs used to deworm livestock to prevent covid-19 instead of taking the vaccines. The FDA has put out a surprisingly sarcastic statement.
You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021
John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight to the problem of ransomware, where hackers break into a computer system, lock up all the data, and then demand payment, usually in cryptocurrencies, in order to provide the key to unlock it. Barely a day goes by without some report about a new ransomware attack. The news stories focus on the havoc caused by attacks on big entities like hospitals, local governments, and businesses. But Oliver points out that with more and more people having their home devices hooked up to the internet, those become vulnerable as well.
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In the August 9, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, investigative reporter Jane Mayer has a long article titled The Big Money Behind the Big Lie that looks at how “Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.” These conservative groups, formerly more focused on issues like abortion, seem to have coalesced around efforts to pass voter suppression laws nationwide. It is an interesting article that focuses on what is going on with the so-called ‘election audit’ in Maricopa country in Arizona that went heavily for Joe Biden, but embeds that in the larger national context of undermining belief in the integrity of elections as a way of overturning results that they do not like. If they succeed in overturning the Arizona result, the plan is to mount similar challenges in Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia.
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I am not a big country and western fan but felt that I had to acknowledge the death at age 85 of singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall who wrote that wonderful song Harper Valley PTA, sung by Jeannie C. Reilly, that skewered small-town hypocrisy.
Don Everly, the other half of the duo known as the Everly Brothers, has died at the age of 84. His brother Phil died in 2014 of pulmonary disease at the age of 74. What was surprising was that Phil had been a heavy smoker all his life. You would think that someone whose voice was in the higher registers and was his gift to the world would take better care of it.
The music of the Everly brothers played a huge role in my life and I still listen to them in my car on long drives. The beautiful harmonies and guitar playing resulted in highly memorable songs.
Here are two of my favorites.
The first is Walk Right Back which has a famous sequence of chords that begins the song and is repeated throughout. It was my ambition to master that sequence so that I could play that song. I failed.
And here’s Cathy’s Clown performed live. This song spoke to all the young men of my generation who acted like fools because of the spell the one they loved cast on them.
