It's probably a bad idea to test what happens if you try to make a jury choose between executing Mangione or letting him go.
I mean, it's a great question. I have no idea how it will turn out.
It would be very poetic if the earthquake dropping that bridge in Mandalay proved decisive, but almost certainly it won't. (Not least because there's another bridge; but, aftershocks.)
No way a Manhattan jury gives Luigi the death penalty; I don't think a guilty verdict would be a slam dunk on even a lesser charge. So I assume Bondi's "death penalty" statement means that Feds are charging some Federal crime (terroristic activity?) and going for a change of venue to somewhere they can finagle a judge who will exclude both potentially sympathetic to Luigi jurors and any evidence regarding possible bad medical insurance practices. Alito at this moment is probably trying to figure out how to be the one.
Though Luigi's defense might welcome a change of venue to New Jersey since the new Federal attorney there is a moron. I'd bet on no worse than a hung jury and probably an acquittal if they let her run the government's case against Luigi.
3: can you expand on that a bit? Decisive in the civil war?
I'm pretty sure that in New Jersey it's legal to shoot people if they were an asshole to you.
Gonna be hard to find a jury for the Mangione case: https://www.instagram.com/sarahcpr/reel/DDdTbblgHAZ/
They'll just get old people who have Medicare and their days free.
Perhaps you didn't watch the video all the way through.
Somewhere it was noted that a death-penalty-qualified jury is by design made up of people who are okay with the idea that some people need killing, which is particularly interesting in this case.
Separately, this morning I read This Is Why My Texas Town Lost Trust in Public Health (gift link) on paper, and it seemed like pure culture-war rehash of mid-pandemic crap about masks and schools. I did not feel like it made me one iota more sympathetic. Is it as worthless as I think?
Probably. I'm not going to read it, just in case.
11: Ugggh, that's one of those essays in which it's impossible to tell whether or not it's written in good faith.
By late spring 2020, we'd discovered one of Covid's few mercies: Children weren't commonly succumbing to the disease. I started publicly calling for them to return to school in person that summer. Outside of my local community, where most people seemed to agree with me, the backlash was swift and cruel. Like many other dissenters, I was accused of denying science and lacking concern for humanity. From my view, it seemed as if our public health agencies and the people who unquestionably followed their every edict showed little concern for children's best interests.
In retrospect (a) calling for a return to in-person school wasn't a crazy idea, (b) I believe that someone could quickly become incredulous and appalled at the backlash towards the idea. On the other hand (c) Spring 2020 is awfully early to be staking out a strong position; there wasn't a lot of evidence to go on, (d) I don't know anything about her but I feel like a fair number of people making the argument, "I was in favor of in-person school early, and the government refused to listen for no good reason" want to argue about school in a vacuum (on which point they have solid arguments) without engaging with the broader question of the actual harms of the pandemic and broader attempts at mitigation. What I want to say is, "there were no decisions which didn't ignore the legitimate concerns of some group of people. You can't just say, "why did they choose to make my life worse?" without seeing it in the context of a situation in which any decision was going to make someone's life worse."
"Someone called me an asshole in 2020, so I've decided to work for the spread of cancer."
"Someone called me an asshole in 2020, so I'm just asking questions while other people cut the following programs from the CDC"
HIV prevention? Gone.
Asthma and air quality team? Gone.
Environmental hazard response? Gone.
Gun violence prevention? Gutted.
Communications? Gutted.
Worker safety? Gone.
Reproductive health? Gone.
Birth defects? Gone.
Disability health? Gone.
TB prevention? Gone.
Blood disorder programs? Gone.
National survey on drug use and mental health? Gone.
Lead poisoning prevention? Gone.
Water safety? Gone.
Tobacco control division? Gone.
Guess which one of those by job depends on.
Actually, don't. But it's on there.
I have a medical idea. You know how King Charles has that thing where his fingers are inflated? I bet that makes it hard to do things which require dexterity. But Charles is also very fond of tradition. So, why not bring back the Groom of the Stool?
11, 13: Rightwing assholes who were, in realtime, minimizing the impact of Covid now want to score points by saying: Hey, we were right that kids could go back to school with relatively little risk.
The giveaway here is that the item is framed to justify medical skepticism as a result of incorrect guidance from medical folks, but then praises Trump appointees Jay Bhattacharya (NIH head) and Marty Makary (FDA commissioner). Both were Covid bullshitters -- opposing vaccine mandates, for instance.
Fucking bullshit, man. Everything. What the fuck?!?
13:
I have a sign on my wall (all artsy and pretty) that says "Safety 3rd". When someone asks me what is second, my answer is convenience. I have also heard 'glory' as a good answer for second. But I actually do mean it. Yeah, I'd load up the kids in the car until one has no seatbelt if it saves me or someone a second trip.
So, one of my least favorite dynamics is when someone uses safety as reason for something that inconveniences me. Sometimes, piled on top of that, there is some sanctimonious reference to the goodness of the person being saved the additional risk. I deeply and viciously resented my OBGYN for that. No deli meats because of the tiny incremental risk TO THE BAYBEEEEEE? You are fucking kidding me; I give no fucks about that level of additional risk. But the implication is that if I am not willing to go to any levels of inconvenience, I do not care about the wellbeing of MY BAYBEEEEEE. (Ironic that my two first did actually die (and separately that the OBGYNs were right about nearly everything), but that was independent of my risk tolerance and behavior.)
Anyway, I was moderately inconvenienced by keeping my kid home and I am still battling the effects of the school closure on his screentime. Fine. It was the pro-social thing to do and I wasn't the expert to assign relative levels of risk. But the additional sanctimonious part on top of that, the implication that I do not care about ABUEELLLA at home because I wanted to weigh risk vs safety? That was nearly as annoying as an OBGYN. I am not surprised that it pissed people off and still does.
That's a very real point, but one that I don't trust myself to make because of all the drunk driving.
Opening schools early just struck me as a straighforwardly dumb idea because the alternative to online class wasn't "everything is normal now" is was "the speed of the spread of the disease is rapidly increased". When the schools finally did open fully (after months of a hybrid schedule), there was a massive wave in my community, kicking off teacher shortage because so many were out sick. So the kids got to go back to school for the sake of sitting in a gymnasium doing study hall all day.
She lost me with:
We question whether health agencies are nonpartisan, value-neutral science-driven and financially independent of Big Pharma.
Of course, it's not value neutral.
I'm more conservative (careful) on covid than the median person here. I wanted to keep bars and restaurants closed to open the schools, amp up ventilation and filtration more than was done and require masks in schools.
Covid was less risky for kids, but kids w/ no heslth issues did die (musc-c), so it was worth vaccination. But also, they could transmit to their vulnerable relatives.
Of course, that's a value judgment.
22: What's first? Does everyone (except me) know that?
I'm self-conscious of sounding like the asshat Texan in 11, but 24 does not match my experience, to the point where I'm wondering what co-variables coincided with re-opening the schools.
I have a number of K-12 teacher friends, and Jammies himself was in his first full year of teaching. They were all forced back in person, starting mid-September 2020. They were all terrified and it was a miserable experience! But there were not Covid outbreaks among the teachers.
To its credit, the school board finagled vaccines for the teachers at the end of January 2021, at which point I breathed a big sigh of relief. What I remember is the following September, 2021, everyone was constantly out with Covid and there were mass amounts of kids in the gymnasium. But that was post-vaccine and mid-mask wars, which is a different thing.
26: Wait, this is Megan, so it's FUN, right?
All we know for sure is couches come into the mix somewhere.
Isaac Chotiner claims another victim (whom he previously interviewed in 2016 and 2020). This one is almost unsatisfying because the guy makes absolutely no sense, but if you want to see a Southern Baptist theologian squirm, there it is.
In retrospect, I think Sweden had the right approach. The goal is to have people under 60 all get covid gradually over the course of several months, while protecting the elderly as much as possible. The first month of strict closures made sense, because otherwise you get these nightmare scenarios like we saw in Wuhan and Bergamo everywhere, but then once the fall rolls around you should just have school with some mild precautions and you go online exactly when too many teachers have covid.
(Well, actually the right approach is challenge testing vaccines to get them approved by summer of 2020. Trials had already started in April 2020, most of the delay was just that you can't get data on efficacy when covid spread is super low.)
27: Ours had had a hybrid half-week in class, half-week on zoom format starting in October. I think they went full time in December and my recollection is that my kid brought it home and infected the family immediately, and that was around the start of the delta wave.
11-15: Before I even tried to read the article, I was impressed by how negative NickS's opinion was, and how strong it was regardless of direction. No offense, sometimes I'm like this myself, but you often seem open-minded to a fault. Having skimmed it, I agree overall.
This paragraph seems particularly dense with bullshit.
(1) It was a pandemic, and information evolved over time. (2) Mistakes were unavoidable. (3) Now, it's much more common to hear public health experts say that they think schools were closed too long. (4) But where was the humility at the time? (5) Why hasn't there been a large-scale federal effort to study how well masks worked, (6) or whether closing schools would be the right choice to make next time? (7) In conservative communities like mine, there's little trust that the same Covid playbook wouldn't be used again, in spite of the costs.
1 and 2 are empty platitudes. 3 is a bold-faced lie, or at least, I'm as sure of that as I can be without picking apart the credentials of any "expert" making that claim. Public health experts don't take it upon themselves to say that public health measures have gone too far. Economists might, or the bureaucrats that both public health experts and economists report to, and of course they'll opine about measures being effective or not, but given that a measure is effective, it's their job to recommend it, even if it's inconvenient or expensive. As for 4, humility? COVID-19 has been the 5th-worst pandemic in human history. (Source, with the acknowledgement that the size of the population has changed and some pandemics have bigger ranges than others.) I don't want humility from the people trying to mitigate the harm; maximal effort was justified. As for 5, there were many studies. Ignoring them is a deliberate choice. As for 6, I don't know what a study like that would even look like, given that it depends on details that vary from one disease to another. And conservative communities like yours sabotaged the playbook mentioned in 7 every step of the way, so asking their opinion would be like asking an arsonist's opinion on the fire department's hiring practices.
27: Not knowing almost anything about Jammie's school or your city, my suspicion is that you/they benefited from the curve-flattening measures this lady is complaining about. There were only moderate problems in medium-sized cities in the 2020-2021 academic year because everything had been locked down six months earlier, which this lady is now pooh-poohing.
31 has two different approaches we could have taken as a society with the benefit of hindsight, but (a) I'm not sure there was any point when foresight would have told us the same thing, (b) half-measures at either of them might have been worse than what actually happened, and (c) both would have required a more robust welfare state than America has.
Since when do conservatives care about having public schools be open anyway?
The more hours our public schools are open, the more time our children are spending reading gay books at the school library.
I feel like a lot of lefty discourse on covid does the typical American thing of pretending other countries don't exist. Most of Europe opened schools faster than we did! It was fine! They did do other things to limit spread, and we could have copied more of those, but it's not some total unknowable mystery what would have happened if we opened schools faster.
What's totally insane about point (7) is that Donald Trump was president! Why did you all fucking vote for him again if you think his approach to covid was so awful?
31: Japan did pretty well without lockdowns. Finlland, Denmark and Norway all did better than Sweden according to this paper., so i'd be inclined to follow their examples first.
https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/4/737/7675929
37: this Point I agree with 100%. Well 95%, because there was some Covid management in 2021. And some people resented any masking.
36: Our population also has more comorbidities and more people without healthcare coverage.
Maybe we should have all died of Covid because after today none of us will have savings to retire on anyway
27: Not knowing almost anything about Jammie's school or your city, my suspicion is that you/they benefited from the curve-flattening measures this lady is complaining about. There were only moderate problems in medium-sized cities in the 2020-2021 academic year because everything had been locked down six months earlier, which this lady is now pooh-poohing.
Entirely agree with this. Also I didn't read the link, because it sounded aggravating.
Can't wait for the markets to open tomorrow. Stonks! 📉📉📉📉
I did sell $10k in stonks today. Will use it to pay off some student loans which somehow went from like 2% to 7% while we weren't paying attention.
I didn't sell stonks. We have 23 eggs though.
The 37% tariff on Reunion seems a bit high.
Since this is a kitchen sink thread, I've been wishing for some way to hold people accountable and make them cautious. I've been wishing there was a way to make Elon/cabinet members personally liable for damages incurred by firing federal staff. Assuming the state holds and judges follow laws, and then that the administration cares, eventually federal workers will have some claims for improper firing. I've been wishing that the billionaires who make us all dance at their whim would have to pay those personally.
The seagulls of Heard & McDonald also know what they did.
AWB isn't here, but I will echo her in noting how incredible it is that the SBC now acts like an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, setting doctrines & excommunicating members, contra the fiercely independent tradition of Baptism before the late 20th century.
You said, "President Trump is a huge embarrassment, and it's an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity..."That direct quote sounds like apologetic support to me, Bertie.
"But, at the same time, I unapologetically supported him..."
50: They got the idea from the group in Twilight.
Omg the way they calculated the tariffs is asking AI and it came up with a method it even said is stupid, divide trade deficit by total trade with that country and that's the "tariff" they're putting on us and Trump's "reciprocal tariffs" are set to half that because he says he's being a nice guy. That's, like, failing intro economics stupid.
You people just don't appreciate mercantilism.
I bought a handle of Crown Royal and a fifth of Jameson (of which I already had a fifth). I decided not to stock up enough for a whole trade war, but to buy some supplies.
I forgot about the ban on plastic bags and that the liquor store doesn't have paper bags that will fit a handle. I felt really conspicuous walking down the street.
I don't mind bourbon, but I'm not about to drink it at Trump's insistence.
I felt really conspicuous walking down the street.
Nah, its Liberation Day. People understand.
So is this going to kick off a new golden age of smuggling? Or a new clay age of everything being repealed in short order?
More importantly, you flew your colors high.
There's so much bad faith in retrospective discussions of Covid that I just feel despair. If anyone learns from our experience and does better in a future pandemic they will almost certainly be people who were born after the last one. I just hope there isn't another novel virus like this in our (collective) lifetimes.
Swung them high, even, if you started chugging on the way.
In the meantime, I'm going to appreciate the blessedness of our current moment: we no longer have a senile old man as president, our business leaders and social betters are no longer subject to the cruel indignities of the most anti-business federal government in history, and tomorrow, tomorrow, we finally will be free.
Seceded Sudans stay sychronized.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/ne/node/25506
My current lunchtime reading is Saul David, "The Indian Mutiny" and wow, getting some very strong parallels here. This was a massively destructive upheaval against a government based on ludicrous rumours, you say? Led by members of a historically privileged caste who were terrified that they might soon have to work alongside - or even under! - people who they considered inferior by birth?
Smallpox vaccination programmes were extremely unpopular in India and I am waiting for that to come into the story as well.
Isaac Chotiner claims another victim (whom he previously interviewed in 2016 and 2020).
Much can be explained about the current US political situation when you realise that Isaac Chotiner is generally regarded as a cogent, well-informed and aggressive interviewer.
Here's one example of Chotiner being a bad, unprepared interviewer who doesn't bother with follow up questions.
Q: One of my concerns about this Administration is the joy they seem to take in cruelty toward immigrants. Do you feel that at all? Does that concern you?
This is a Good Question. "Hey, Mohler, you are both a devout Christian and a Trump supporter. But taking joy in cruelty isn't very Christian. And Trump does this. This is a contradiction in your beliefs. Thoughts?"
Mohler comes back with this: "It would concern me. That is not what I'm seeing. And I have been in parts of the country where this is of daily concern. I have not seen a lack of concern."
This is a Good Answer - it rejects the premise of the question.
The obvious rejoinder is for Chotiner to say "Well, you may not have seen it but it is happening, and here is an example."
But he... doesn't do that, because Isaac Chotiner is not a good interviewer. He should have an example right there ready to go. Instead he says "here's a description of cruelty towards immigrants." Which is non-responsive, and leaves Mohler an open goal to say "well, sure, but that isn't a cause for joy for anyone in the administration. Sometimes governments just have to do harsh things. It's an unpleasant and regrettable necessity."
60: I don't need a car for 4 or 5 years, but I seriously wondered whether I should try to buy a car in Canada, park it somewhere, get my mother-in- law to drive it a little bit and then import it after a year.
Is there anything I should try to bring back from Canada next time I go.
What I found super annoying on twitter before the election was a variant of this from people I would describe as upper-middle class, not rich or even wealthy. "I'm a wealthy, older white woman and a doctor with good healthcare. I have resources and privilege. I'll be fine either way. I'm voting for Kamala, because I care about other people who will be hurt and our climate."
Like, I get that it's way worse to be a poor, block person with no health insurance in Texas, but I wish people had the sense that Trump's plans were going to fuck over everybody who is not already a billionaire. NIH funded scientists and biotech venture capitalists too. People need to have the realization that nobody can afford to be apolitical.
Is there anything I should try to bring back from Canada next time I go.
Crown Royal. And Royal Crown as a mixer so you can make a Crown Royal Royal Crown.
What I found super annoying on twitter before the election was a variant of this from people I would describe as upper-middle class, not rich or even wealthy. "I'm a wealthy, older white woman and a doctor with good healthcare. I have resources and privilege. I'll be fine either way. I'm voting for Kamala, because I care about other people who will be hurt and our climate."
You were super annoyed by encountering people who did the right thing for virtuous and altruistic reasons, because they did not realise that doing the right thing would also benefit them personally?
Super annoyed?
Is there anything I should try to bring back from Canada next time I go.
A Viceroy?
You'll need those cigarettes to trade for extra sawdust bread when we're in the camps
72: maybe only mildly annoyed. annoyed that I don't think they grasped the full extent of the damage and therefore were poor communicators to those less altruistic. It came across as limousine liberal.
"You don't use a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito that perches on your scrotum," Akpobari said.
69: I thought this was a weak bit of Chotiner (and therefore above-average for American journalists).
My biggest beef is that he essentially endorses the premise that some signfiicant number of the deported Venezuelans have been accused of a crime, which as best as i can reckon, hasn't happened. (They have, en masse, been accused of being gang members -- demonstrably falsely in some cases -- but that's not a crime.)
Like Congress could vote to take away tariff power from the President. Should we be calling for that?
Yes. But only to make them feel bad. The Republicans control it.
78: This says it all, really:
Isaac Chotiner claims another victim (whom he previously interviewed in 2016 and 2020).
Clearly being exposed to the searing pitiless spotlight of Isaac Chotiner's forensic brain was such a soul-shattering experience for Mohler that he was quite happy to do it again, twice.
Like Congress could vote to take away tariff power from the President. Should we be calling for that?
They're doing it! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/republicans-democrats-canada-tariffs
Several Republican senators joined Democrats to pass a resolution that would block Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada, a rare rebuke of the president's trade policy just hours after he announced plans for sweeping import taxes on some of the country's largest trading partners.
In a 51-48 vote, four Republicans - Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and both Kentucky senators, the former majority leader Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul - defied Trump's pressure campaign and supported the measure. Democrats used a procedural maneuver to force a vote on the resolution, which would terminate the national emergency on fentanyl Trump is using to justify tariffs on Canada.
Go and watch A Working Man if, and only if, you are writing a dissertation on how not to copy John Wick.
John Wick was a great movie. I didn't watch the sequels though. Kind of violent and hard to watch.
In the spirit of a Kitchen Sink thread, I just finished reading Abundance, and it's really disappointing. It isn't bad, or wrong, it's just awfully thin, and feels lazy. I would definitely recommend Electrify, or Dan Davies recent writing as way more substantive and, arguably, one good thing about Abundance is that it may have a halo effect and increase the audience for other books on the topic.
That said, it isn't a bad read, and if anyone else has read it, I'd be curious to talk about it.
There's so much bad faith in retrospective discussions of Covid that I just feel despair.
That's why my reaction to the article in 11 was so negative. I think there is a lot of room for useful retrospective discussions and we aren't getting much of that. I was very much a covid-precaution maximalist (and still wear a mask in many settings), and I've been convinced that (a) the response that I would have liked wasn't really possible, (b) that I had reason to support my positions but, in retrospect, I think they were a manifestation of a desire for certainty -- at least as much as possible, and (c) that the social cohesion to coordinate some agreement is probably more important than the exact agreement itself.
(Well, actually the right approach is challenge testing vaccines to get them approved by summer of 2020. Trials had already started in April 2020, most of the delay was just that you can't get data on efficacy when covid spread is super low.)
That would have been a good decision at the time and, as it happened, the retrospective calculation is a little but trickier. I remember how exciting the vaccine results looked in 2021 and then the Delta-wave completely changed the situation. Having vaccines a few months earlier would have definitely helped people in the original wave, but would it have provided more material for the vaccine skeptics (who, as it is, are arguing that there was insufficient testing).
I remember Hot Vax Summer. Except for me the benefit was that when my mom died, we were all able to assemble easily and we could have the regular funeral mass that she wanted.
85: I suppose I should switch my future 403b contributions to a foreign index fund.
A respiratory virus vaccine is desirable, but I kind of get why people don't think it's necessary, since it reduces disease severity and you don't as an individual know whether it prevented transmission. More,s suggest that it does, but it's not perfect. But with 95% plus measles vaccination rates you can prevent virtually all Measles disease. So easy and so great, because there is *nothing good* about getting measles. Nobody over 70 would disagree.
A propos of 70.last: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/not-even-wealth-saving-americans-dying-rates-seen-poorest-europeans-rcna198929
That could also go in the other thread.