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    Ayo Dosunmu Jersey Raising

    Just an incredible honor. What a great ceremony.

    It also speaks volumes that DeMar DeRozan, his Bulls teammate, NBA All-Star, and MVP Candidate made the trek to watch this ceremony.

    Jeremy Werner talked to DeRozan and got an impressive quote:

    “It’s big. That’s my teammate,” DeRozan told Illini Inquirer in the bowels of State Farm Center. “We spend the majority of our days together. We go to work together. This moment is something special. It’s more of an intimate type of thing that you just want to experience. I know what it’s like. I had the honor to get my jersey retired in college. I know what that was like to have friends and close people that I respect and appreciate be there, it meant a lot. I just know what that moment means for him. …I didn’t care how far it was. I just wanted to come support my teammate.”

    If I was an NBA player with basketball 24/7 and traveling all the time, I’d have a hard time spending a full evening traveling to watch some college basketball. It was really cool of DeRozan to make the trek.

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    The Big Lie

    Kevin Drum lays the basics of what happened a year ago today.

    Here are the basics. Gruesome details are available everywhere for anyone who’s interested.

    1. On November 3, 2020, Joe Biden was elected president.

    2. Donald Trump then spent months promoting lawsuits and other efforts designed to overturn the 2020 election, which he claimed Democrats had stolen. Fox News and the entire conservative press helped him along eagerly.

    3. Nothing worked, so as a last ditch effort Trump tried to compel VP Mike Pence to renounce his constitutional duty to certify the electoral vote.

    4. Pence did his best to figure out a way to comply, but in the end he couldn’t quite do it.

    5. On January 6, the day the electoral vote was scheduled to be certified in Congress, Trump speaks to a rally of protesters.

    6. After he leaves, a mob attacks the Capitol building, hoping to stop Pence from certifying the electoral vote and thereby keeping Trump in office.

    7. Trump spends the entire time refusing to make any kind of public statement urging the mob to stand down.

    8. In the immediate aftermath, Republicans denounce both Trump and the mob. However, as time goes by their criticism wanes. Today, most of them pretend that it was no big deal.

    9. Two-thirds of Republican voters agree because they think Democrats stole the election in the first place. Fox News and the others continue to promote this idea.

    10. If this happened in any other country, it would be called both an attempted insurrection and an attempted coup. Nothing like it has happened in American history.

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    Rein in the Panic

    Kevin Drum, on his blog, has a few ideas about COVID panic.

    I think it’s time to rein in the testing panic a bit. It’s probably also time to rein in the overall COVID panic a bit, but this message is aimed more at the media than at ordinary people.

    News coverage of COVID is just beyond belief these days. Newspapers, TV, and the internet are blanketed every day with stories about new COVID records; reports of new CDC recommendations; interviews with people who think the new CDC recommendations are stupid; feature stories about how COVID is affecting _______; op-eds accusing everyone else of being either too strict or too loose about COVID rules; essays about what we’ve all learned from COVID; news about how things are going in Israel; other news about why we should ignore how things are going in Israel; feelgood clickbait about people who braved COVID to see an old friend; stories about the latest antics from a red-state governor positioning himself for 2024; and of course all the latest statistics in an EZ-to-read dashboard format.

    If you are vaxxed and boosted, your current odds of getting COVID are roughly 1 in 500 over the course of a month. If you’re under 65, your odds of a serious infection are about 1 in 5,000. Your odds of dying are 1 in 200,000. Calm down.

    I can’t quite find the middle ground here. I have to pay attention, but do I have to spend a lot of attention? Strangers are still a danger, but what if they are all vaccinated or have vaccinated, boosted, and had COVID? Am I safe?

    This is so hard.

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    Mayo Clinic Fires 700 Unvaccinated Employees

    CBS Minnesota reports the firing of hundreds of unvaccinated employees from the Mayo Clinic.

    The dismissed employees make up about 1% of Mayo’s 73,000 workforce. Officials say while it’s sad to lose valuable employees, it’s essential to keep patients, the workforce, visitors and communities safe.

    People released Tuesday can return to Mayo Clinic for future job openings if they get vaccinated.

    More of this, please.

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    Preview the Kaiju Preservation Society

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    Defensive/offensive/actual

    Seth Godin somehow has found a way to describe me perfectly. I don’t like it.

    The problem with becoming defensive is that our internal narrative gets in the way of expressing what’s actually going on. Because we’re imagining all the blame and shame and scorn that the other person may or may not be feeling toward us, we bring those feelings into our words and actions, and end up making a mess.

    And the problem with being offensive is that the person we’re offending can no longer hear what we’re saying.

    Communication lives between the two. We do best when we can describe the actual, the same way we might talk about the weather. Here is what is. Simply that.

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    Behind Low Vaccination Rates Lurks a More Profound Social Weakness

    Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal writing in The New York Times about vaccine hesitancy in the US hits on an idea that is disappointing, but not surprising.

    Public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves. That means an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.

    That’s the crux. People don’t give a shit about other people. Or… actually more relevant is people who believe in science and have empathy versus conspiracy theorists who don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.

    The vaccine-hesitant are mostly Republicans.

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    Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Personal Account

    Daniel Politi, writing for Slate, reports on Marjorie Taylor Greene not understanding the First Amendment.

    Twitter permanently suspended the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for repeatedly violating the company’s policy against publishing COVID-19 misinformation on the platform. 

    More of this, please.

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    The Story and The Climb

    The best part of the special. Easily.

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    Don’t waste the good days

    Seth Godin on not wasting time with the wrong priorities.

    If you’re feeling creative, do the errands tomorrow.

    If you’re fit and healthy, take a day to go surfing.

    When inspiration strikes, write it down.

    The calendar belongs to everyone else. Their schedule isn’t your schedule unless it helps you get where you’re going.

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    Can the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team Unite the Divided States of America?

    Will Leitch would like to turn back the clock on sports and politics.

    I, for one, cannot wait to root hard for the USMNT tomorrow night, when they host Mexico in Cincinnati: Beating our rivals in World Cup qualifiers in Ohio is a U.S. Soccer tradition I’m ready to return to. But can the country get behind this team the way it did back in 2014? Can the country, collectively, get behind anything anymore? I don’t know. I hope so. Because it sure would be nice to be able to scream “America, fuck yeah!” again, surrounded by patriots, hipster or otherwise.

    I don’t think the toothpaste can go back into the tube. I hope I’m wrong.

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    Kyle Rittenhouse Is A Dumb Kid Who Killed Two People And Is Adored By Angry White Men

    This headline by John DeVore is troubling, a little shocking, and sadly all too true. I have only seen the odd clips of this trial, but from what little I’ve seen it looks like the judge is biased, but ultimately it won’t matter what the jury decides.

    It doesn’t matter if Rittenhouse is acquitted. I don’t think he should be but I’m not part of the jury. It’s not my say. If he is acquitted, however, it will send a message to right-wing extremists that shooting protestors is possible, just not the ones waving blue Trump flags, or the ones trying to kick down the doors of the U.S. Capitol. But it’s open season on the woke, otherwise.

    It also doesn’t matter what the verdict is because this dumb kid’s life is ruined. He’s going to be used as a political prop by conservative white men drunk on hate for years. He may get to go TV! Make some money. He’ll be called a hero, and then, one day, he’ll be forgotten by the powerful and he’ll be left alone with his conscience. I hope the dead haunt him.

    Not soon enough.

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    How Newsletters Survived Technology

    The killer medium is email. The killer service is the newsletter. Why? Because you have control. Dave Pell should know… he’s the Managing Editor of the Internet.

    Thanks in part to humanity’s success against the scourge of spam, the inbox is one of the few places where you actually have control over an information feed. If you want a newsletter, subscribe. If you don’t want a newsletter, unsubscribe. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get to decide what’s more likely to appear in your email stream. The Russians are not setting up a disinformation campaign in your inbox. It is your inbox and your own private antisocial network. You are the algorithm. This is the core reason why the noisier the rest of the internet gets, the more popular the quiet, humble newsletter becomes. And it’s why, during the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, the presidential election, the Big Lie, and the insurrection, when we were being pulverized by an unprecedented onslaught of information, newsletters felt like a welcome respite from the noise and were suddenly the biggest new (but far from the newest) thing in media.

    Yup.

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    Turn It Up

    Nicholas Bate on turning up.

    Turn up at the page rain or shine, good mood or bad mood, inspired or not.

    Much writing is the mechanics of fingers on keyboard and pencil jottings in a notebook.

    And habit makes that easier.

    I really need to get into a better writing habit.

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    Eddie Kingston Got No Business F***ing Being Here

    I’m not up on the current events of professional wrestling. I used to be. I used to know it all inside and out. The shoots. The bookers. The legends. The up and comers. Now, I’m out. Been out for a while.

    And then my friend points me to this post about a wrestler I’ve never heard of before. A wrestler who has lived a life, man. A wrestler who came from nothing and had just a little bit above nothing for most of his career. A wrestler who needed a couple of breaks, just to pay his mortgage.

    And like Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, I get pulled back in. Eddie Kingston has a story. I’m glad he told it. You should read it.

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    Aaron Rodgers sucks and has always sucked

    Drew Magary on the tired act of Aaron Rodgers:

    If you still wanna call Aaron Rodgers the greatest quarterback of all time, whether it’s because of his incomparable style of play or because you just don’t wanna say it’s Tom Brady like everyone else would, go right ahead. I’ve idolized terrible men in sports, and I’d be fine with the character clause for the Baseball Hall of Fame crumpled into a ball and then smacked 475 feet into a flowing river. But SOME measure of public accountability would be nice here. I’d like the man booed.

    I honestly don’t care. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not have a favorite NFL team or player.

    I wish he was vaccinated, and I hope he doesn’t get seriously ill and die, but if at least if it keeps him from making stupid State Farm commercials I’d be happy.

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    How Stupid is the Metaverse?

    I’d say pretty stupid.

    I mean, it’s a science-fictional idea that may or may not happen in my lifetime. In the short term, it’s just a shiny object that Zuck wants to use to fool people into thinking his company is not a terrible one on practically every level.

    Matt Birchler thinks otherwise:

    I don’t think a world where we spend all of our time in a digital world is good, nor do I think Facebook (damnit, Meta) is the best company to sheppard this concept forward, but I do think that we’re further down this road than many people think we are.

    We aren’t. All the things he talks about AR, smart watches, etc. are still firmly in the real world. Wake me up when we have Ready Player One-style worlds.

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    Stories For Imaginary Friends is an emotional journey through the dark night of the soul

    Zed Snyder, writing for Smile Politely, has a nice write-up for Dan Wild’s new collection.

    Stories For Imaginary Friends guides you into the dark, but it also brings you out the other side realizing that you didn’t just read a collection of stories. You’re asked—quite literally begged—not to give up on yourself, or on the things in your life that maybe you stopped working on because it was too hard to see any light.

    Dan is a treasure and I’m pleased I can call him my friend. His stories are incredible. You should buy the book.

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    The Halloween Song

    Tim Curry explains why Halloween is great in “The Halloween Song” from the 1986 film adaptation of The Worst Witch.

    This is always the best thing about Halloween.

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    Bloodshed

    A ton of reporters contributed to this Washington Post feature today about how the insurrection of January 6 played out. It starts off with these damning first five paragraphs.

    Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m., when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol. The pro-Trump rioters toppled security barricades. They bludgeoned police. They scaled granite walls. And then they smashed windows and doors to breach the hallowed building that has stood for more than two centuries as the seat of American democracy.

    The Capitol was under siege — and the president, glued to the television, did nothing. For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack. Even as the violence at the Capitol intensified, even after Vice President Mike Pence, his family and hundreds of Congress members and their staffers hid to protect themselves, even after the first two people died and scores of others were assaulted, Trump declined for more than three hours to tell the renegades rioting in his name to stand down and go home.

    During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol. Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall. Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob. Within the first hour, two rioters died as a result of cardiac events. Sixty-four minutes in, a rioter paraded a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol. Seventy-three minutes in, another police officer was sprayed in the face with chemicals. Seventy-eight minutes in, yet another police officer was assaulted with a flagpole. Eighty-three minutes in, rioters broke into and began looting the House speaker’s office. Ninety-three minutes in, another news photographer was surrounded, pushed down and robbed of a camera. Ninety-four minutes in, a rioter was shot and killed. One hundred two minutes in, rioters stormed the Senate chamber, stealing papers and posing for photographs around the dais. One hundred sixteen minutes in, a fourth police officer was crushed in a doorway and beaten with his own baton.

    All in the first two hours.

    Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout, he repeated the lie that the election was stolen.

    The whole thing is harrowing to read.

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