Legally, the government can do this; some private employers already are, and it looks likely the military will, although these vaccinations aren’t truly mandatory because objecting individuals retain the option of leaving the employment or service. Forcing all citizens to get inoculated is dif[...]
Archive for July, 2021
July 7th, 2021 - 9:37 pm § in Politics
QAnon’s strategy to take over schools and local governments
Watch out. Stealth QAnon candidates may be running for your local school board and other local government offices in the immediate future. “[M]any people who spout QAnon’s false claims have hatched a new plan: run for school board or local office, spread the gospel of Q, but don’t call it [...]
Are China’s Covid-19 vaccines no good?
CNBC is raising an alarm about China’s Covid-19 vaccines. Five of the six countries “with both high vaccination rates and high rates of Covid-19 infection … rely on vaccines made in China,” CNBC said in an article published here on Wednesday, July 7, 2021. CNBC said it ident[...]
US women’s soccer team slammed for respecting the American flag
“A 98-year-old World War II veteran, Pete DuPré, played the Star-Spangled Banner on the harmonica” before the US women’s soccer team played Mexico on Monday, July 6, 2021. While DuPré played, some of the players turned away from DuPré “to face the American flag — as [...]
Calling climate change “B.S.” doesn’t make it less real
Sen. Ron Johnson (photo, left; bio here), a Republican from Wisconsin, who is arguably the most factually-challenged member of that body in addition to being a liar (“the rioters were just tourists”), “insisted again last week that he is not a climate change denier,” but CNN [...]
July 6th, 2021 - 4:03 pm § in Donald Trump, Politics
Meet candidate jellyfish
“Hillbilly Elegy” author J. D. Vance (photo) wants to be a Republican U.S. Senator. CNN says it took him “only four days to understand just how much control Donald Trump has over the Republican Party these days.” Vance formally entered the Ohio GOP Senate primary on July 1, a[...]
Politics: How to stop hating each other
It’s almost becoming a cliché that America hasn’t been so divided since the Civil War. Trump didn’t create that, he merely exploited and exacerbated it, which is bad enough by itself to deserve a bum rap from history. Biden promised to bring us back together, and I think he sincer[...]
July 5th, 2021 - 2:41 pm § in Science
What if we’re alone?
Are we alone? The correct answer is: We don’t know. There are billions of galaxies, each with millions or billions of stars, so there likely are trillions of planets, at least some hospitable to life. Therefore, as a matter of statistical probability, the odds intelligent life exists only here[...]
July 5th, 2021 - 2:04 pm § in Misc.
PHOTOGRAPHY: What city dwellers never see
Amateur astronomers longingly speak of “dark skies.” Which don’t exist east of the Mississippi River (see map here), or if you live in a city, as most of us do. But I don’t know if the night sky ever looked like this anywhere; a camera sees a lot more than the human eye does,[...]
“Do your homework”
How history is taught in public schools is now a battleground in the culture wars. (It shouldn’t be overlooked that political interference with lesson plans is now also spilling over into public universities, but that’s beyond today’s topic, and won’t be covered here.) As alw[...]