Gabriel Debenedetti and Benjamin Hart, in New York Magazine Intelligencer, wonder in a back and forth story what it means for national politics that Gavin Newsom romped to victory in Tuesday’s California recall election. I’m not sure their discussion landed on anything other than California is pretty blue. Gee, all it cost the state was $276 million in public money to find out that, yes, California is still pretty much the same state it was in 2020.

What I think it really means is echoed by John Scalzi on his blog:

The one thing I would take away from this result that I think does have national import is the idea the Democrats remain activated and hyper-aware of GOP electoral shenanigans. One of the reasons this recall was attempted at all was that GOP folks figured that the turnout in a recall election would be low, like any non-presidential year election, but even more so as there was nothing else on the ballot. Low turnout traditionally favors the GOP, because, among other things, the old white people who are the GOP base turn out for every election come hell or high water. But it looks like somewhere in the area of 13 million Californians turned out to vote in the recall, in a state with something like 22 million registered voters. That’s a very solid result for an off-off-year vote, and a reminder that Democrats aren’t taking their votes for granted these days. Hopefully this left-side ambition to vote at every possible opportunity continues through 2022 and beyond.

Yes. Let’s hope.

Drew Magary, writing for SFGATE, has a brilliant obit for the eternally funny Norm Macdonald. The whole thing is quite good, but I really like this take:

It didn’t even matter to him if other people got his jokes, especially if he didn’t know them. He was an alien: watching humanity comfortably from a hovering spaceship, clinically evaluating us like some kind of hilariously ignorant deity. Most people aren’t willing to live and think this way. Most people can’t. Most people are part of society, and cast a side-eye at those who are not. That’s why they can attempt to replicate Norm’s cool detachment — and Lord knows they have — but lack the actual detachment to pull it off.

All true.

It’s hard to pick one favorite Macdonald bit, but his portrayal of Turd Ferguson on Celebrity Jeopardy makes me laugh every damn time I watch it.

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has been made aware of religious exemptions for COVID-19 vaccines. However, recognizing that it’s important for churches to take a position on this literal life-or-death matter, they are offering religious exemption letters enabling their followers—known as Pastafarians—to be exempt from working in proximity to the unvaxxed.

The unvaccinated may emit harmful virus particles which are forbidden to devout Pastafarians, therefore we expect all reasonable measures to be taken to help us avoid these virus particles. Please respect our religious liberty.

This is a finely tuned bit of satire. Create and print your customized letter here.

Beth Mole, reporting for Ars Technica, lays out the facts.

COVID-19 vaccines are largely holding up against the hyper-transmissible delta coronavirus variant, particularly when it comes to preventing severe disease and death, according to three studies published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […]

In terms of infections, fully vaccinated people were about 11 times less likely to get an infection in the pre-delta period, compared with the unvaccinated (with a 95 percent confidence interval of 7.8 to 15.8). That ratio dropped to 4.6 less likely in the post-delta period (with a 95 percent confidence interval of 2.5 to 8.5).

For hospitalizations prior to delta, fully vaccinated people were 13 times less likely to wind up in the hospital than the unvaccinated (confidence interval of 11.3 to 15.6). After delta, that ratio dropped slightly to 10 times less likely (confidence interval of 8.1 to 13.3). The fully vaccinated were 16.6 times less likely to die of COVID-19 prior to delta (confidence interval of 13.5 to 20.4) and 11.3 times less likely to die after delta (confidence interval of 9.1 to 13.9).

The takeaway from the CDC’s data seems clear: Fully vaccinated individuals have a much greater chance of not being impacted by the disease, whether that impact is via infection, hospitalization, or death.

It is so simple. The key to saving lives is everyone getting the vaccine. The key to reopening offices and factories is everyone getting the vaccine. The key to reopening schools is everyone getting the vaccine. The key to keeping bars and restaurants open in cold weather is everyone getting the vaccine. The key to travel and shopping is everyone getting the vaccine. The only way it happens is with a full mandate across the country.

Seth Godin on thinking about alternatives.

A simple substitute might change a habit.

Instead of a snack, brush your teeth.

Instead of a nap, go for a walk.

Instead of a nasty tweet or cutting remark, write it down in a private notebook.

Instead of the elevator, take the stairs.

Instead of doomscrolling, send someone a nice note.

Instead of an angry email, make a phone call.

Instead of a purchase seeking joy, consider a donation…

Good stuff, as always.

Leanne Butkovic, writing for Thrillest, bit into 20 varieties of eating apples, ranking them from worst (Red Delicious) to best (Braeburn). My go-to apple, Fuji, comes in fourth place.

I’m not sure I’ve even tried a Braeburn. I guess I need to find one.

John DeVore has a few thoughts on Texas Republicans.

Texas abortion law banning most abortions after six weeks, as well as allowing random private citizens to sue abortion clinics, went into effect today. The law is dishonest and backward and a successful attack on the landmark Supreme Court ruling ‘Roe v Wade’ that freed women to make decisions about their own bodies.

I wrote this essay about reproductive rights a couple of years ago when these kinds of laws were just being written. Now, the second-most populous state in the Union has passed one. A state, mind you, that thinks wearing masks during the mass outbreak of a deadly infectious disease is tyranny. I was right then and I’m right now:

“You can’t reason with these pious old hypocrites, either. They talk like lawyers but froth like zealots. A crusader can’t be convinced his crusade is folly. They are unmoved by immigrant children kept in cages but firmly believe a pinch of reproductive tissue is a full-born baby. How can you argue with that? These are the same men who preach about small government but also want to tattoo “Property of Uncle Sam” inside every American womb. It’s a permanent fever.”

You cannot argue with them. It is a fool’s errand. My take on abortion is simple: Let people with uteruses do what they want with their bodies.

I was today years old when I learned that Joseph Mazzello III, the young actor who played Tim in Jurassic Park, also played Queen bass player John Deacon in Bohemian Rhapsody.

I feel old.

Did Olivia Rodrigo steal from Paramore?

Adam Neely makes the best argument for plagiarism, then shows all the problems with it. Well, he explains that the chord progressions are the same. The melody is also the same and that’s why they added Paramore to the royalties list. Sure, the Green Day and the Taylor Swift songs use the same chords and a bit of melody, but no one (unless they are good at music theory) hear these songs as rip-offs. Because they aren’t.

Neely says Rodrigo is just wearing her influences “too brightly.” That makes sense and also why Paramore gets the credit.

Kait Sanchez, in her story on The Verge, highlights a big problem on social media: misinformation and lies.

On TikTok, Rolling Stone found videos, some of which had more than a million views, promoting ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment under tags like #ivermectin4covid and #ivermectinworks. TikTok has since removed the videos for violating community guidelines and blocked the tags, and a spokesperson says TikTok will continue removing related videos and hashtags. The #ivermectin tag is still up, though many of the most popular videos in the tag are of healthcare professionals debunking misinformation.

On Reddit this week, moderators of several hundred subreddits called on the platform to take action against COVID-19 misinformation, including banning subreddits that spread medical disinformation.

Disagreeing with the requests for outright bans, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman shared a response in r/announcements, saying “Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate. This includes conversations that question or disagree with popular consensus.” The post goes on to say that Reddit will take action when people promote fraud or encourage harm, as well as quarantine certain subreddits so that they don’t appear in searches and can’t be accessed without logging in.

Huffman is ridiculous. He should immediately remove the posts and block the Reddit accounts. Anti-vaccination information is killing people.

There is no struggle. Just do the right thing.

Mikael Thalen, writing for The Daily Dot, has several good ideas to help protect the private information you have online. It is far too easy for nefarious scumbags to get to your info if you aren’t careful.

With so much of our lives now conducted online, it can feel overwhelming trying to remember all the services that have access to your information. Whether your email address or credit card number, it seems nearly all of our personal data has made its way online, whether we realize it or not.

Data breaches have become a common occurrence. It’s no longer shocking to see headlines detailing the exposure of billions of people’s private information.

Chances are, some of your personal information has been part of a data breach, which means trying to limit that exposure isn’t a farfetched idea—it’s something you should be actively trying to fix.

Although data breaches are an inevitable and unfortunate reality, steps can be taken to limit the fallout.

I really liked the breakdown going from Easy to Hard.

pic.twitter.com/wi6333F6QF

— The Rolling Stones (@RollingStones) August 24, 2021

You can’t deny Charlie Watts was one of the most iconic drummers in history. I always loved his playing… simple and magical.

Daniel E. Slotnik and Helene Cooper, writing for The New York Times, have a short article regarding the mandates that will be coming down now that the FDA has approved the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and older, making it the first to move beyond emergency use status in the United States.

 

The decision will set off a cascade of vaccine requirements by hospitals, colleges, corporations and other organizations. United Airlines recently announced that its employees will be required to show proof of vaccination within five weeks of regulatory approval.

 

Oregon has adopted a similar requirement for all state workers, as have a host of universities in states from Louisiana to Minnesota. The Pentagon has said it would mandate the shots for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops once the Pfizer approval came through.

I applaud the organizations that have already put mandates in place without the Federal government’s approval. Now, I expect mandates will be everywhere making it much more difficult for the unvaccinated to do things. Seriously, mandate vaccinated status for everything. School, air travel, train travel, restaurants, stores. Everything. Get vaccinated or stay home.

Now, hurry up and approve it for all ages.

Dan Sinker, writing for The Atlantic, focuses on how everything about Covid-19, politics and the public school systems have broken parents all across the country.

Instead it was a year in limbo: school on stuttering Zoom, school in person and then back home again for quarantine, school all the time and none of the time. No part of it was good, for kids or parents, but most parts of it were safe, and somehow, impossibly, we made it through a full year. It was hell, but we did it. We did it.

Time collapsed and it was summer again, and, briefly, things looked better. We began to dream of normalcy, of trips and jobs and school. But 2021’s hot vax summer only truly delivered on the hot part, as vaccination rates slowed and the Delta variant cut through some states with the brutal efficiency of the wildfires that decimated others. It happened in a flash: It was good, then it was bad, then we were right back in the same nightmare we’d been living in for 18 months.

And suddenly now it’s back to school while cases are rising, back to school while masks are a battleground, back to school while everyone under 12 is still unvaccinated. Parents are living a repeat of the worst year of their lives-except this time, no matter what, kids are going back.

Even with college-age and older kids, my wife and I are struggling with trying to keep the kids (and family and friends) safe from Covid-19 while balancing the social and emotional wellbeing of everyone concerned. Plus, you know, navigating our jobs and figuring out dinner and whatnot.

We have help and resources. I can’t imagine what it is like for parents who don’t.

Most of 2020 and a large chunk of 2021 are going to be traumatizing for kids for decades.

This post by Seth Godin is fascinating to me. I’m going to drop the whole thing here:

You can read this post in six minutes. It took me more than an hour to write.

That extra editing and polish is a benefit to the reader.

You can read this post instead of 100 others, because people highlighted or shared or ranked or otherwise filtered the other things you might be reading. That curation created value as well.

The math here is compelling indeed: 1,000 would-be authors pitch books but only 30 get published. Each book takes a year to write but just six hours to read. And you didn’t read all thirty of them, just the one that had the best reviews… 10,000 hours of work by authors and editors to deliver six hours to you.

The time dilation of polish and curation is possible because of asynchronicity and the one-to-many nature of publishing ideas.

Asynchronous because you’re not doing it live, reading it as I write it.

And one-to-many because the work of a creator is multiplied across many readers.

A friend recently sent me a note via voice mail. It was 14 minutes long. Because he didn’t spend another ten or fifteen minutes editing it into a three-minute long email, he wasted a ton of my time. But the nature of 1:1 interaction meant that it was either his time or mine, even steven.

And listening to someone live, at an open mic nite or at a concert, promises wonderful surprise, but it also means that there’s bound to be a lot of dead time. Because no one is curating, and you have no selection advantage.

One of the surprising unsung benefits of the worldwide web and the organized sharing of information is time dilation. A benefit we constantly waste by seeking the more human habit of mindlessly taking what comes, in real-time instead.

The idea of time dilation and curating input and the important idea of curating output to others is a concept I’ve never heard of before, but I understand completely.

Type the Alphabet is an online game that challenges the player to type the English alphabet to see how fast they can type. The timer starts when the player starts typing and finishes when the alphabet is complete.

I think my fastest was about six seconds.

I had a thought at the start of summer 2021 that now seems ridiculous. I thought people would get the free, safe, and effective vaccine and our country would usher in a decade of “roaring twenties.” People who had been isolated away to keep themselves and their loved ones safe… who now have the ways and means to protect themselves… would come out of their caves and embrace life in all its glory.

My naiveté is showing.

I had forgotten the only real truth. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has changed the game. It only exists because people are too stupid to get a life-saving vaccine. Need more info? The best reporting on the subject is by Ed Young.

But something is different now — the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.” In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus had a basic reproduction number, or R0, of 2 to 3, meaning that each infected person spreads it to two or three people. Those are average figures: In practice, the virus spread in uneven bursts, with relatively few people infecting large clusters in super-spreading events. But the CDC estimates that Delta’s R0 lies between 5 and 9, which “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. At that level, “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said.

In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.

This is directly related to Fox News, Facebook, and Republicans who have radicalized large swaths of the willfully ignorant and stupid.

The only way this changes is for life for the unvaccinated to become intolerable.

No flying without proof of vaccination.

No bus travel without proof of vaccination.

No renting of cars without proof of vaccination.

No public transportation without proof vaccination.

No public performances (concerts, sports, movies, etc.) without proof vaccination.

And so on.

Enforcement must be arrest and jail. Caught with a fake vaccination card should be the same for a minor with a fake ID.

I’m also of the opinion that unvaccinated COVID patients be deprioritized in hospitals and possibly turned away like someone without proper health insurance. At the very least, unvaccinated COVID patience must be sequestered from the majority of the hospital staff and patience.

There is a solution to all of this… simply get vaccinated.

Launch day! Are you like me and love a fake movie within a movie? Or show within a show?

Check out Nestflix: the only platform for your favorite nested films and tv shows.

🎬 https://t.co/HZrR3gfKVu pic.twitter.com/xw3OXrcnh4

— Lynn Fisher (@lynnandtonic) August 11, 2021

Finally, a way to watch all the fake movies within a movie and fake shows within a show. The selection is tremendous!

Seth Godin on leadership:

Not what you asked for, but just what you needed

That doesn’t happen very often. When someone combines generosity, insight and bravery to provide something before we know that’s what we need, we are particularly grateful.

It’s a special form of leadership.

I’m always incredibly impressed when someone can do this. It is remarkable.

Over on Instagram, Wil Wheaton posted what he calls guidelines to help you live your life. I thought I’d share.