Oh fuck just look at that mic setup. Someone knew what they were doing there. Not truly a cappella, but who cares? As always, Ekaterina is excellent.

CDC says that during The Purge everyone not interested in murdering people can safely be out on the streets as long as they are certain everyone around them also is not interested in murder.

— Downtown Brandi Frown 😾 (@ItsTheBrandi) May 19, 2021

Do liberals really not understand that vaccination protects them? Surely they must, right? But the way they write about life after being vaccinated, it doesn’t appear that this idea has made any impression at all.

I know it’s because they now see masks as a moral signifier, as a totemic emblem of righteousness, but wow does it ever sound insane when you haven’t made Covid into some sort of neo-religious moral judgment and instead see it as what it is: just a non-sentient virus that comes with various risk levels.

And here’s the news: if you’re vaccinated your chance of being infected is very low, and furthermore you’re chance of experiencing severe illness is almost non-existent. And if you still want to be safer wear an N95 mask yourself (though it’ll hardly change your absolute risk level now at all). No one is stopping you and they are plentiful at the moment.

Keep your religious feelings in church, liberals. Out here in the real world, we got shit to do.

This is your regular scheduled reminder that BMI is a population statistic, not a medical prescription for good health! (If you’re 39 weeks pregnant and your BMI is “normal” then you probably need urgent medical care.) https://t.co/5pE9P2W7pL

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) June 5, 2021

Oh, not this shit again. How do smart people’s minds fail so spectacularly? I just can’t understand.

Something I’ve realized, though, is that most people can only really comprehend or be at all competent in 1-2 fields. Sometimes only one. I’m very, very lucky because I can get up to decent speed (not true expertise) in a few dozen fields. Most people can be good at one and ok at one other…and that’s just it. For 99.99% of people, that’s the hard limit.

Excessive BMI is not a predictor or diagnosis, but it’s an indicator in the medical sense. And it’s a population-level statistic in the same way that Covid infection rates are as well — but you still don’t want Covid just as you still shouldn’t want to be obese. That’s because, “Excess BMI is associated with substantially shorter healthy and chronic disease-free life expectancy.”

In the medical community, by the way, this is not controversial in the least. There it’s like saying, “Pain hurts.” It is only outside of that where the food conglomerates and their Fat Acceptance allies have muddied the debate (similar to what Big Tobacco did earlier) where there is any doubt.

Just sad to see someone who should know better spouting propaganda like this.

And by the way, my friend Mary from long ago was 5’9″ and she had a baby while never exceeding normal BMI. The kid was eight pounds something and perfectly healthy. Not advisable for most, but perfectly possible for someone already naturally thin. She went from 120 pounds to 140 pounds during the pregnancy.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I’ve embedded it previously, but I really like this Cyn song and video because it makes both prudish liberals (all of them, in the US at least) and religious nutters cry.

Double win!

And it’s beautifully lit. Props to the gaffer on that.

I do think a lot of people actually like living in fear. Probably “like” is not the right word. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that living in fear comforts them, or confirms some pre-existing notion, or limits their options in a way that eases the horrible freedom of existing.

But in the end, I don’t care that much about psychoanalyzing them. Those types are my enemy and we must resist them at all times, but now in particular as much more hinges on it.