I'm old enough to remember a time when I would have found Nick Clegg's argument that you should blame Donald Trump and the actual insurrectionists, and not Facebook, for January 6 a lot more sympathetic, but in the old days, you actually had to work to make connections over the internet, and sites like Meetup most pointedly did not use algorithms for the express purpose of stirring up shit. Also, too, Facebook knew it was stirring up shit and did next to nothing about it. (As an aside, I would be amused to learn that Facebook didn't even do the due diligence Parler did before January 6.)
Before we congratulate Merck on that COVID pill, let us recall that the pill cost $17.74 per pill to produce (much of that from the taxpayer!) and now Merck charges our government a staggering $712 to use it. One might call that extortion, and no I don't think the urgency of the task (i.e., beating COVID) justifies handing out taxpayer money to help make a pill and then getting charged 40 times as much for said pill when it's done. When your right-wing nephew says "well, Merck did the work," point him to a) 40 times as much, b) the taxpayers helped fund it, and c) Merck bought the rights to the pill in May of 2020 and thus had less to do with its research and development than their price would suggest.
Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) also doesn't support Medicare drug price negotiation. His rubbish arguments defending his position are just as irrelevant as the cynical observation that WELL NEW JERSEY HAS A LOT OF DRUG COMPANIES HA HA HA SNORT -- he's supposed to do the will of his constituents, i.e., the living, breathing ones, and if New Jersey is like the rest of America, somewhere between 80% and 90% of his constituents want Medicare drug price negotiation. If you live in New Jersey, first off, lucky you! And second off, you may want to call Sen. Menendez and give him what for; here's his contact info.
Zeke Faux at Bloomberg describes the "wild search for the U.S. dollars supposedly backing the stablecoin at the center of the global cryptocurrency trade," and if you read the article and conclude "it's all a scam," I sure wouldn't blame you. Naturally, Tether's first CEO invented pop-up ads and its current lawyer claims all its critics are "jihadists." And dig the, ah, *surreality* of this sentence from paragraph 3: "But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity." "Curiosity" indeed.
Bernie Sanders appears to have had it up to here with Joe Manchin, and confronting Mr. Manchin's nattering about "entitlements" with "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to digest their food, and that they’re not entitled to (care that could enable them to) hear and see properly?" is exactly how you are supposed to talk about this crap -- turn the word "entitlement" back on its users, like the depleted uranium weapon it is. Sadly, you won't see our "liberal" media do very much of that, so jealous are they of their "access" to people like Joe Manchin, when there are literally hundreds of millions of Americans who are just as good at making their views known as he is, and the enterprising media outlet could have "access" to any of them.
Finally, Fox News celebrates its 25th anniversary, and Melanie McFarland at Salon tabluates a good deal of the damage. You could really do a number on Fox News, more so than, say, Robert Greenwald did with OutFoxed(which I found oddly tame in 2004!), and more so, even, than Ms. McFarland does here, though she's laboring under a word limit. Anyway, the most urgent observation comes late: "How do we move forward from this? Every answer is insufficient and exhausting. Fox News management isn't interested in reining in its prime time hosts because they're the channel's main ratings magnets. De-programming experts have all sorts of suggestions on how to save the rabid Fox addicts in your life, but once again that places the burden on reasonable people to wade into a reservoir of hatred that's been steadily filling for two and a half decades." But only "reasonable people" can do the hard work of maintaining a civilization; we just have to contain the unreasonable people.
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