I’d just returned from two weeks in Indonesia, with long-since-canceled plans to return in August 2020. A few months later, I learned that the Life Care Center of Kirkland … about a 15 minute drive from my house … was the US epicenter. Weeks after that, while I was traveling to Austin for business, my company became one of the first to move to all-remote work, which will continue for at least the next seven months.
References:
Scanning the news this morning, I came across this BBC article that opened with four, single-sentence paragraphs that really lay it all out there:
"He won because the Election was Rigged," the Republican president wrote on Twitter, repeating unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
About an hour later he said he was not conceding the 3 November vote.
He has launched a slew of lawsuits in key states, but has not provided any evidence to back his claims of fraud.
All the lawsuits have so far been unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, all available evidence points to this election being virtually free of fraud. As an example, the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia says that he’s investigating a total of three suspected incidents of fraud … out of five million votes cast!
See also: US election: Trump says Biden won but again refuses to concede
More than a year and half after announcing, on the Jeopardy! show, that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer, George Alexander "Alex" Trebek died peacefully, early this morning.
While it has not been quite the daily addiction for me lately, that it was for many years, I still have the DVR set to record every episode of Jeopardy! and probably actually watch three or four episodes a month.
Related:
For those struggling with the uncertainty of last night’s election, last night’s election might provide your answer.
Among the more certain outcomes are that Montana, New Jersey, Arizona and South Dakota voters legalized recreational marijuana. In fact, one in three US Americans now lives in a state where recreational marijuana is legal.
Oregon and Washington, D. C. pushed further last night, opening the way to psychedelic mushrooms. Oregon also decriminalized small amounts of heroin and cocaine
Related:
This is not the kind of picture that I want to see attached to national news about my adopted home town, but … here we are. Thirty-something, Jonathan Moreno, needed to make my day.
Apparently, Moreno was "provoked" in that one of the counter-protesters (gone from the scene before these photos were taken) had splashed water on the guy, and … clearly that’s justification for extrajudicial killing, and clearly this is just another Responsible Gun Owner demonstrating responsible use.
For what it’s worth, I’m trained to use a gun, though I would never keep one in my home, or carry one while out and about our bedroom community of not quite 13,000 people, where wine tasting dominates a significant number of businesses.
Related:
On October 24, 1970, the Chilean congress confirmed the election of Salvador Allende. The first Marxist elected as President of a liberal democracy in Latin America, he served for almost three years, until his death during a successful coup d’état, backed by the US CIA, on September 11, 1973.
Related:
Just a quick reminder that even if you’re "bored" with Covid, dealing with reality means accepting that there are more active cases of Covid-19 in the United States today than on any other day ever. And again, that’s active cases … discounting all of the people who have recovered or died, there are more active infections today than ever before … just like almost every day since we allowed this thing to run uncontrolled throughout the country.
If you think that what we’ve done is working … that we’re "rounding the corner" … you’re just plain wrong.
And if you’re now thinking "herd immunity", we still have a ways to go before 3% of the population has been infected, and most estimates for herd immunity require that we get well into the 40% to 80% range — so it has to get 10 to 20 times as bad, and we’ve already killed the equivalent of 75 September 11th attacks.
And you know what else, even if we never got a vaccine, masks alone might be enough to beat this thing. Or maybe not, but while masks alone might not end up being the single silver-bullet, they absolutely help … without starving you of oxygen or whatever other ridiculous ideas people are bandying about these days.
Anti-mask isn’t freedom, it’s free-dumb. Anti-maskers are 75 times worse (so far) than those 19 terrorists were. It’s truly one of the most selfish and sadistic movements ever.
Related:
Rather than pretending that the Italy of today existed in Columbus’ day, or supposing that he was born there, some Italian-Americans sign Not In Our Name petitions saying "We do not believe that defacement of a murderer’s symbol is an insult or controversy."
Instead, they recall a different history.
“While Italy has the shame of having spawned the first fascist regime,” writer Stanislao Pugliese explains La Voce di New York, “it can boast of having generated the first anti-fascist movement as well.”
Related:
Happy 80th birthday, John Lennon. Miss him, miss him, miss him.
Sympathy and empathy are important, but it can be challenging to summon them up for a person who mocks opponents when they’re sick, mimics the disabled, and who’s fallen ill from a disease that he suggested could "magically disappear" half a year earlier.
So, it’s no great surprise that Merriam-Webster shares that "Schadenfreude was our top lookup on October 2nd, by a very considerable margin, following President Trump’s announcement that he and the First Lady had tested positive for COVID-19."
“Lookups spiked 30,500 percent on October 2, 2020,”
Many questions remain regarding the President’s illness following a mostly fact-free press conference where Trump’s doctor raised questions about the timeline of the diagnosis suggesting that Trump knowingly exposed many people, including the the Bidens, to his infection before acknowledging it as he developed symptoms.
Related: