Slut shaming a paramedic

A New York City paramedic was moonlighting as a nude model to earn some extra money and the New York Post, the Murdoch-owned rag that pretends to be a newspaper, upon discovering this, has made it out be some kind of scandal.

But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out, the real scandal is that these emergency workers are paid so little that many of them are forced to take on second jobs.

The progressive New York congresswoman tweeted that instead of publishing a salacious article suggesting the woman isn’t adhering to “standards of personal ethics” while naming both her and her employer—reportedly against her wishes—the newspaper should have focused on “the actual scandalous headline…’Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive.'”

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A dilemma for Mike Pence

Now that the Electoral College has cast its votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be president and vice-president respectively, the next step in the process is for the votes to be sent to Congress. A joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives will meet on January 6th to count the votes and this is where things get awkward for Pence.

Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes. The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over the count and announces the results of the Electoral College vote. The President of the Senate then declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.

If any objections to the electoral votes are made, they must be submitted in writing and be signed by at least one member of the House and one Senator. If objections are presented, the House and Senate withdraw to their respective chambers to consider the merits of the objection(s) under procedures set out in Federal law.

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Trump’s woes mount

Seth Meyers discusses how even Trump’s neighbors who live in the vicinity of his Mar-a-Lago resort don’t want to him to live there after he leaves the White House. Since New Yorkers don’t seem to want him either, one wonders where he will end up. I must say that given how much Trump likes to humiliate other people, I am really enjoying him suffering one indignity after another.

The crazies can be dangerous

We may make fun of those who still cling, in the face of reality, to the idea that Trump won the election but was defrauded because of widespread cheating. But we have to realize that there will always be a few who decide that protesting is not enough and that they have a duty to take violent action based on that belief. The heavily armed man who went to ‘rescue’ children from the basement of a Washington DC pizza shop because he believe in the wild story that it was the location of a pedophile ring is a good example.
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The covid-19 vaccine rollout

There are over 17 million confirmed covid-19 cases in the US and over 300,000 dead, a staggering number thanks to our idiot president’s refusal to acknowledge the disease and take strong action early on. That works out to about 5% or the population or one in twenty who have tested positive. I read sometime ago that half the population knows at least one person personally who has tested positive and one third knows someone who has died.

Since I live alone and have been able to minimize contact with people, I was not surprised that until recently, I did not know anyone in either category. But last week a friend who lives nearby said that she had tested positive and had been isolating for the required period and then tested negative. She had no idea how she got infected because she had been working from home and only gone in to work about once a week and nobody else in her workplace had tested positive. But of course she has to do some shopping and the like and that may be how she got it.
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GOP’s ‘alternative electors’ try to cast their votes

When the members of the Electoral College met on Monday in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for president and vice president, the only people who could be present and vote were the slates of electors for the candidate who got the most votes in their states.

Trump and his allies have proposed one hare-brained scheme after another to try and stop this and one of their fanciful scenarios was to have the Trump slate show up in the states that he lost and claim that they are the ones who should be allowed to vote. The ‘brains’ behind this crackpot scheme is Trump aide Stephen Miller.
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Vaccines, Catholics, and abortion

It turns out that in addition to other reasons for not getting the covid-19 vaccine, some anti-abortion zealots are saying that since the vaccines may have been developed from stem cell lines from aborted fetuses, it would be unethical to get it.

The Catholic Church is trying to tamp down that line of reasoning and saying that the greater good requires people to get vaccinated because the link connecting the vaccines to abortion it highly tenuous.
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Heavy early voting in Georgia

In other election news, early voting began on Monday for the January 5, 2021 run-off elections for the two US senate seats in Georgia. The Democrats face a stiff task in that they need to win both those races to get just a 50-50 tie in the US Senate. Since the vice-president in the one who has the tie-breaking vote in that body, Kamala Harris would be the one to decide the outcome in such an event.

Even though Joe Biden won the state, it was by a narrow margin in this is traditionally Republican state. Much of the credit has to go to Stacey Abrams for her tireless voter registration efforts and turning out the vote on election day. The Democratic Party must be hoping that she and the other people on the ground can repeat that feat on January 5th.
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Ok, what’s going on here?

We should all be aware by now that the tech companies are vacuuming up all our information as we use the internet so that they can target ads towards us. All of us are familiar with how if we search for some item such as shoes, we then find shoe ads popping up in the pages that we subsequently visit. Since I surf the web a lot and do a lot of searches, mostly for news items, I find it amusing to see if I can identify what I have done recently that might have triggered an ad that appears. Often I can figure it out, either because of specific actions that I have taken or because the tech companies have general demographic information about me such as my age, gender, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, general habits, etc.
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Which came first – moralizing gods or civilization?

Reader Jason alerted me to this article that says that the emergence of all-powerful gods came after the rise of civilizations.

The idea that an all-knowing god was necessary for large societies to function and hence must have come earlier has a plausible argument.

One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behaviour without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.

What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly. Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions.

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