Faceplanting

Another Week, Same Story.  The two infrastructure bills remain locked in limbo, stuck between the two “moderate” Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema and the party’s progressives. West Virginia’s Manchin must really be loving Arizona’s Sinema these days because her odd behavior combined with her state’s purple status are making him look more reasonable.  So far, no one has stalked the more media saavy Manchin into the men’s room.   For his part Mitch McConnell is playing dirty politics, refusing to help raise the debt limit, not that his behavior is all that surprising.  Mitch is never out for the good of the country but is deviously skilled at coming up with disposable rationales for making life difficult for Democrats especially if he thinks his party can come out on top while he preserves the fossil fuel industry.  That’s how he stacked the courts, why should his debt shenanigans surprise anyone?  As if the specter of national default isn’t bad enough, the Washington Post reports that the Former Guy has decided to run again in 2024 and that the only reason that he hasn’t made a formal announcement is because his advisors have told him he should hold off for awhile.  His pending announcement may partially explain why he’s suing Twitter, trying to force the company to reinstate his access because he would really need the platform to spread his lies.  For good measure, he’s also written to the Pulitzer Prize Committee asking them to take back the prizes that the Washington Post and NY Times were awarded for their Russia stories, citing John Dunham’s indictment of the Clinton associated lawyer Michael Sussmann for the alleged lie he made about communication between Russian bank and Trump servers as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was made up by his political enemies.  It wasn’t.  Also, though we are supposed to believe that Corey Lewandowski has been banished from FG land, he hasn’t been because politicians, even those who skirt the rules, can’t fire people who run PACs even if those PACs more or less do their bidding so the FG’s team has created a new one with everyone from the old one except Lewandowski who asserts he’s still running the old one. MAGAA?

Viral Musings:  We’ve turned the corner, again but don’t go out and celebrate or plan wild Christmas bashes just yet as COVID has more corners than a centipede has feet.  The good news is that new cases in the US are down to around 103,000, not that being over 100k is something to celebrate, though daily deaths, that awful lagging indicator, remain around 2000 and over the weekend just about everyone counting said that the total US death count crossed over 700,000.  On the vaccination front, the FDA’s advisory committee is scheduled to meet on October 14 and 15 to evaluate the Moderna and J & J boosters and again on October 26 to evaluate vaccines for the 5 to 11 year old set.  The Moderna booster might be a half dose and the kid vaccien will be a third of the adult dose. That should mean boosters for those who got the Modernas or J & Js by the third week of the month and maybe even approval for the kids by Halloween.  Fingers crossed on that.  In test country Israel. the Pfizer booster really seems to be doing its job, cutting deaths in thrice jabbed elderly to one fiftieth of comparable unvaxxed oldsters which explains why authorities there now don’t consider people fully vaccinated for vax passport purposes until after they get their third shot.   

Karma:  Just a day after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the source of the Wall Street Journal’s damning series about the social media company’s prioritization of profits over tween mental health and that little thing called democracy went pubic on a much watched 60 Minutes episode,  the company’s systems crashed.  The crash, which had to do with a router/infrastructure SNAFU, something way beyond my technical expertise, or theirs for that matter, didn’t just impact Facebook, it also took out Instagram and WhatsApp.  While the inability to like pictures of friends, post photos of pets and push anti-vaccination poison might have been just a small inconvenience or good thing depending on your view, a lot of people in many countries rely on Facebook and its related platforms for Internet access, communication and their livelihood so the crash actually had a significant impact around the world.  It also had at least a temporary impact on Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.  Facebook apologized for the outage but not for anything whistleblower Haugen had to say.  The company’s spokes people  continue to insist that likening the intentional addictiveness of its platform or the destruction of democracies and young people’s mental well being to the smoke and mirrors game that the tobacco companies played back when they insisted that cigarettes were misunderstood diet aids is wrong because its not like management could change any of their nefarious algorithms if they were so inclined.  At least that’s their party line.  Haugen, who was hired by Facebook to work in its Civil Integrity Unity, a group set up to combat election interference and misinformation in the run up to the 2020 election is due to testify before Congress today. By the way, that Civil Integrity Group, it was disbanded after the election and well before January 6 while that certain FG and his crowd kept pushing their big lie.