Goddamn she is so good she makes my brain hurt. Great cover of the Joni Mitchell classic.

as a kid with a learning disability that made me comically incapable of doing arithmetic on paper, thinking about this always makes me feel good https://t.co/yBWxoaAXeV

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) December 8, 2021

I also can’t do math of any kind. This “calculator” thing was already false even in the 1980s. I had a fucking PDA of some kind since 1989! I was literally walking around with a fucking calculator in my pocket when teachers were saying that BS.

(And if you wonder how a poor kid got a PDA in 1989. Imagine it’s quite small. And imagine how easy it is to get something small out of a store if you’re resourceful. How could that work? I had five fingers and they provided quite a discount.)

One of my friends has a miserable (non-Covid) cold and another has a very bad stomach bug of some kind. The latter friend was joking that she needs a T-shirt that says “Please remain outside spew radius” and a pair of pants that say on the butt “Please remain outside splash zone.”

Well, that’s one of the reasons I love her and that we get along. She has an utterly disgusting and morbid sense of humor.

Too many neat ideological solutions to covid not enough wrestling with the messiness of the real world, human/social components and tradeoffs.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) December 8, 2021

Angie, this talk of trade-offs just killed 10 kids and 30 grammas. Why’d you do it?

Y2K, the ozone hole, and acid rain are the trifecta of serious issues that were solved competently before they got out of control, and as a consequence are now remembered as never having been a problem at all https://t.co/tuIbBixJ1v

— 🏴i open up my wallet and it's full of blood.🏴 (@thinkiamsad) December 7, 2021

All massive potential problems that we fixed, so now all have been retconned into being not really a problem.

Another example: A few weeks ago on Tumblr, I saw someone claiming that because the Allies won WWII “easily,” that shows Hitler wasn’t really much of a threat. Therefore, by that twisted reasoning, the Allies shouldn’t have been fighting against him. That’s a hell of a bit of historical revisionism there, isn’t it? But these days, any hard problem that was overcome shows it wasn’t really a problem, therefore nothing should’ve been done about it. That’s some “logic” for you.

Covid is devastating the arts. It will take decades to recover, if ever. https://t.co/FZiL9VctHR

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) December 6, 2021

Correction: Our response to the pandemic is devastating the arts. The pandemic ain’t done shit; we’re the one making the choices here. Well, more accurately, the plutes and their liberal enablers (lockdown fanatics) who wanted this all destroyed anyway.

We have completed our first experiments on neutralization of Omicron by Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccination elicited immunity

Manuscript available at https://t.co/rGaEB9GdmS

and should be available on medRxiv in the coming days

— Alex Sigal (@sigallab) December 7, 2021

I can’t find this paper but this appears to be only antibody-based neutralization. There are other types of immune response the body relies on (e.g., humoral immunity).

Most people — even “experts” — seem to concentrate on antibodies, but long-term that is not even the most important or durable type of immunity. I think this is just to spur action/create panic, though perhaps not in this particular case. Also, the much-derided J&J vaccine might end up being better long term as it’s very possible it might be more durable.

My guess about Omicron and looking at its sequence/configuration is that the vaccines will still work fine against it, with some mild reductions in efficacy.

Years ago, I was dating a woman and when we decided to have sex, she said, “I should tell you. I have a scar on my back. It’s a bite mark. Someone raped me as I was leaving a bar and as they were doing it they bit me hard enough on the back to leave that.”

Later on, we were having sex doggy style and if she hadn’t told me about the scar I never even would’ve even noticed it. It was very faint. But seeing that tracery of a bite mark and thinking about the fact that some ghoul did that to her made me so angry I couldn’t stay hard. Of course, she noticed my lack of ability to continue. To be clear, the scar itself didn’t bother me. I couldn’t care less. She was very beautiful, and kind; what distressed me is the act itself that led to the scar.

“Is the scar bothering you?” she asked.

“Yes, but not the way I think you mean,” I said. “It’s just making me angry that someone would hurt you like that.”

She said that she was over it, but understood. We switched positions and all was well in a few minutes.

Today, though, I was thinking that nearly every woman I’ve been close enough to tell me about it has been sexually assaulted at some point. Not every one, but almost.

In the case of the woman above, it was a relatively-rare case of stranger rape. Whoever did it was never caught and so probably did it again. And again. Sickening to think about.

Commentators seem unable to grasp that your typical middle class American family lives a life which, to the sufferer, ironically resembles the stresses of poverty.

Income just barely meets expenses, very little leisure, both parents working, harried and insecure. https://t.co/vNJR38PKkd

— Empty America (@Tierra_Y_Cielo) December 6, 2021

Kevin Drum, Yglesias, Krugman, et al. are all involved in a propaganda operation to convince people their precarity and the fragility of modern life is actually ok. It’s a way of tamping down dissent and attempting to preserve predatory capitalism.

More people are calling them out now but it won’t be enough. The psyop is working and will keep on working.

It's a travesty that we've fucked up computing so hard for everyone. It's a damn shame about the state of user interaction with computers. Gonna make this my 99 theses and pin it to Twitter I guess

— Rage Against the State Machine (@mgattozzi) December 6, 2021

Great thread. We who are old enough to remember what computing might have been, could have been, really mourn what it has become. Those younger than 35 or so don’t know any different and in some ways that’s better: they don’t have to mourn what they don’t know we lost.

So much potential squandered so that so few people could get obscenely rich; meanwhile, people buy propaganda that computers and browsers have to be locked down “for your own good.” Deep down I think most people know that this is a lie, but are also aware that they cannot change it — so it’s easier to just believe the untruth and move on.

I am going to try my very best to buy Olivia Rodrigo tickets on Friday morning.

Unfortunately, so will everyone else in the universe. I haven’t been to a concert in a long time; will be nice to join others who refuse to live in terror of life.