Was just thinking that time that I said this to a journalist who was working on a pitch that she was about to present: “I hope your pitch is pitch perfect.”

Readers, I thought she was gonna slap me. And I would’ve deserved it.

In a sharp turnabout, federal health officials on Thursday advised that Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most indoor and outdoor settings, regardless of size.

Whoa, wasn’t expecting that. Something actually sensible. How often does that happen?

I can’t handle how upsetting this map is https://t.co/vLAXAugNhx

— Susannah Tysor (@scisus) May 13, 2021

There is absolutely nothing right about this. No one who made this map has ever had good barbecue or would know it if they found it.

The best BBQ I’ve ever had was from some smoker pulled behind a 1960s Ford pickup in an abandoned K-Mart parking lot down in the ass end of Georgia. Now that’s the kind of place you find real BBQ. I still think about that BBQ sometimes, and sigh.

You know Hertz is getting desperate for people when I get a mass/spam email from them for these sorts of positions, which I have never received before. But not desperate enough as look how appallingly bad the pay is:

I think that is about what those positions were paying (in nominal dollars) in the 1990s — so effectively in real dollars, about half as much now.

Oh no, now the libs are considering “having working eyes” as sex trafficking.

😉

One thing that argues against some of my ideas about “human nature” being a strongly fixed thing is how differently we live now compared to our recent evolutionary past, and how many people seem to crave existing in ways that no human has ever lived before — such as the pod life aficionados and those who are afraid of the world and vow to continue pandemic-instantiated behaviors forever.

No human in history (outside of a few very rare monks) has ever lived as disconnected from humanity as these people seem fine with, though of course the poor social simulation allowed by the internet make the actual case on the ground somewhat different.

Unlike most, though I strike a strident tone on this blog, I like thinking of things that knock down my ideas and dearly-held assumptions. I’ve changed my mind on tons of things over the years, and altered a lot of my presuppositions and conclusions.

I mean, why wouldn’t you in light of stronger evidence?

The world is waking up again. Too many people want to keep it asleep.

We need to resist those people really goddamn hard. We all need to be a bit more like Margaret Qualley and less like wanky whiny prudish dipshits.

The choreography in that video is top fuckin’ notch. What a great jam. Not to mention the blocking and camera work, damn.

my concern about it being first dose only is I keep seeing people's brains melt once they get the first shot, and they start taking risks before they're actually protected

— bletchley punk (@alicegoldfuss) May 12, 2021

This is exactly the kind of shit I mean. It only takes a few minutes of fucking reading to not be this clueless.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that the first doses of the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines were 80 percent effective at preventing infection. The protection was measured two weeks after the first doses but before the second.

Sure, it is indeed better to wait until two weeks after your second dose. But still — 80 percent is pretty damn good. It’s not that they are not “actually protected.” It’s that they are more protected with the second dose (especially with the Moderna and Pfizer vaxes).

Sometimes I wonder, can people actually read? Are they actually literate? I mean, most people can pass their eyes over words, get some sense of them. But I think that’s all it is, a basic gloss. They don’t actually comprehend deeply what they read and integrate it in any organized fashion. It’s not categorized and synthesized and contrasted with the rest of their knowledge. It’s just a clutter of things clattering around in their heads, none of it based on any analysis or interpretation.

That’s what the evidence I observe seems to suggest.

It’s been pretty sad this past year to find that many people you formerly liked and respected were ridiculously clueless and incapable of any sort of systems thinking, or understanding risk at all.

But it’s just generally true that the more I know about someone, the less I like them.

Someone actually suggested that *Ben* is going to manipulate *J-Lo* and I said “relationships happen to Ben, Ben does not drive”

yes I know he was driving in those pics that is not what we are talking about

— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) May 11, 2021

Well, the feminist narrative is that every and any man is always the evil manipulator, ever-predatory, just looking to bend women to their will and then destroy them.

There are no exceptions. A woman is never manipulative or sociopathic or even wrong. No, that is solely the province of men. It’s also becoming that any man is automatically somehow “older” than any woman, so that even in relationships with no age gap, the woman is automatically the child (even if she’s 37).

Feminism failed. Mason’s take (read the entire thread) is more realistic, despite its hyperbole.