John Culhane at Slate instructs us that "Fox News Could Be Sued if Its Anti-Vax Statements Caused People to Die." I accept that his entire argument is valid; the hard part, I'd think, would be finding enough unvaccinated folks who get sick from COVID and who would say "I relied on Fox News to tell me the truth." It's true that at least one Trumphole facing prison for his role in the January 6 coup attempt has said, via his lawyer, that TEH TRUMPZ MADEZ MEZ DO TEH THINGZ!!!!, and that's similar enough. But a lot of these folks, when pressed, will simply deny they were relying on Fox News to tell them the truth, because, well, some folks think it's OK to say just anything when they're cornered.
Lost in all the gags about how his rocketship looked like a giant cock is the fact that "Poverty Wages and Tax Dodges" funded Jeff Bezos's trip to the very edge of space. When you contemplate that, in fact, you might begin to think that the penis-shaped rocketship was a deliberate distraction. No, I wouldn't put it past folks like Jeff Bezos to think of that. And, hate to beat on a dead horse, but our government got us to the moon and back six times, whereas a guy with $200 billion couldn't even get himself out of our atmosphere. And, yeah, I'm as much against the privatization of space as the next guy.
Joe Biden may be a relatively new President, but he sure has taken to drone strikes pretty quickly, most recently in Somalia. And yes, "collective self-defense" sure looks like the kind of legal doctrine that Presidents can use to subvert our Constitutional requirement that they get permission from Congress before conducting military operations. Donald Trump probably faced more pushback from Congress on this matter than any President of the last 70 years, and it still wasn't enough. (Also, in my experience, Mike Lee's protest against the drone strikes signals that our Congress will do nothing. I can't recall Mr. Lee ever taking a stand on principle that he's actually had to follow through on.)
Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review discusses why reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang think "Facebook Can Never Fix Itself." "Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way," she writes, but are "part of its very design," and surely it doesn't help that, as far as Facebook's decision-making, "growth and revenue trump everything else." And when you have gazillions of dollars, you tend to think you know everything and everyone else knows nothing, when all you really know anything about is redistributing everyone else's income upward to you. I hope I live to see an America that shames and shuns such people.
1,500 union workers stand to lose their jobs at the Morgantown, WV plant owned by big pharmaceutical corporation Viatris, and despite the "prime opportunity for the Democratic-controlled federal government to score points in a red state," our Administration has done bupkus. You'll note that Joe Manchin is also the senior Senator from West Virginia, "the Senate's single most powerful member" by virtue of being the Democratic caucus's 50th vote. His relative inaction couldn't be because his own daughter used to run one of the corporations that merged into Viatris, could it? (Hopefully, when you read Viatris's statement about its job-cutting, you'll be offended by all the big words they use. Optimize this, ass-clowns.)
Finally, Sean Hannity, mere days after saying "it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated," now says (after all that positive attention he got from liberals) that "I never told anyone to get a vaccine." Calling those two remarks "completely different" would be the height of pedantry, and though I bet some of his votaries would advance that claim, I also bet most of them don't care -- as William S. Burroughs used to say, junkies only want junk. No, I think he ginned up this whole controversy just to create drama, because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits?
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