We have seen the spectacle of Republicans in Congress going along with efforts to overturn the elections, the latest example being the 127 members of the House of Representatives who signed on the lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general with the US Supreme court that was summarily tossed out. Some Democrats are fed up with this behavior and have decided to fight fire with fire.
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A silly person named Joseph Epstein has apparently written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (that is behind their paywall) saying that Jill Biden should not use the ‘Dr.’ when referring to herself because it is unseemly to do so. He seems to think that only those with medical degrees should refer to themselves as ‘Dr.’ To add further insult, he compared her earned 2007 PhD degree in education, which she received after submitting a dissertation on student retention in community colleges, to an honorary degree and apparently even referred to her as ‘kiddo’.
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The evidence of damage done to the brains of American football players continues to pile up. So far, not much attention has been focused on the effects of playing on rugby and soccer players. In soccer, it is heading the ball that can cause serious jarring of the brain. In rugby, players are forbidden from certain types of tackles that use or target the head. They are also not as heavily padded and helmeted as in American football and this was thought to discourage dangerous tackles using the head as a battering ram. But they can still be subjected to jarring and bone-crushing tackles as can be seen in this video.
The US is breaking records each day in the number of positive covid-19 test results, deaths, and hospitalizations. We have also passed another grim milestone of 300,000 deaths.
Our daily update is published. States reported 2.1 million tests, a record 232k cases, and 2,749 deaths. There are 108k people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, also an all-time record. The 7-day average for all four metrics is the highest it has been. pic.twitter.com/7GwbbKYDZn
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) December 12, 2020
When I was young and a new hit film came out, we would joke about titles for possible sequels, trying to come up with the most incongruous ones, resulting in things such as “The Ten Commandments Rides Again” or “The Son of the Magnificent Seven”. We found these were amusing because sequels were relatively rare.
Nowadays any film that has reasonable commercial success is almost guaranteed a sequel and often many sequels and spin-offs so that it has ceased to be unusual. But I was still taken aback at the news that the Disney studies were planning ten (yes, ten!) new films each in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, which have already had so many films that I did not even bother to look up the number.
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It is hard to identify which of the around 50 failed lawsuits filed to try and overturn the US presidential elections is the worst. But the one that most reveals the utterly cynical depths to which the Republican Party has sunk is the lawsuit that the Texas attorney general filed with the US Supreme Court that was joined by 18 other Republican state attorneys general and 127 members of the Houser of Representatives. Trump touted it as ‘the big one’, as if all the others were practice runs and that this would succeed where all the others had failed.
We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020
Given current attitudes, Ruben Bolling wonders how people might react.
Tom the Dancing Bug 1516 news – americans sacrifice
I have been noticing some errors occurring recently with the spelling of homonyms. Here are three examples:
Writing eek when they mean eke
Writing discrete when they mean discreet
Writing complementary when they mean complimentary
I am sure there must be others that can be added to the list.
For some reason, the errors rarely go in the opposite direction, maybe because words like eek, discrete, and complementary are less likely to come up naturally.
This documentary exposes how the social media algorithms work to keep people hooked to spend vast amounts of time on the sites by identifying their wants and sending them down addictive rabbit holes. It features mostly people from within most of these companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and the like) who became disaffected with the effect these companies and their practices were having on society and saw them as destructive and have now left the companies and are speaking out.
But the filmmakers also added a wrinkle. They have actors portray a family whose members are social media users, focusing on two children who are addicted to it. They show a room in which there is an avatar of the son with three identical people looking at all the data about him and what he is doing and pushing things on him to keep him glued to his phone. In reality of course, there are no people doing this, only algorithms. But there is something much more creepy in the image of actual people who know every thing about us and what buttons to push to get a specific reaction and are monitoring our every waking moment to try and find ways to get us to spend more time on their sites and then selling that engagement to advertisers. Although algorithms may feel less creepy than if humans were doing this, they are far, far more thorough than humans could ever be.
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I thought that the days just dragged before the election but expected that once Trump lost, the elation over the fact that we would soon be spared the sight and sound of him would make the days just zip by. But the days seem to be dragging by even more slowly as Trump stays in the news by continuing to claim that he actually won and was cheated and mounting ridiculous lawsuits. I can’t believe we still have to go through another 41 days of this.
Seth Meyers takes a closer look at the ongoing futility of the legal challenges brought by Trump and his allies.
Before the pandemic, when his show was televised in the studio, Meyers always appeared in suit and tie. When he was broadcasting from home, he switched to casual. Now he has gone back to the studio but is still dressed casually. Is this going to be one of the permanent changes due to the pandemic, that since we’ve seen people in their homes, that relaxed atmosphere is going to be continued?