Almost seven years ago I wrote a post about Tom Brady's affection for tender balls (and Aaron Rodgers's preference for turgid balls) and the Deflategate fiasco. I followed that up with another post comparing the NFL to Chotchkie's. As an aside, I think I did a better job summarizing the situation than most other media outlets.
You may recall that Roger Goodell suspended Tom Brady for four games by analogizing deflating balls to taking steroids. The trial court judge scoffed at that comparison, writing that Goodell's punishment:
offers no scientific, empirical, or historical evidence of any comparability between Brady's alleged offense and steroid use. Often, steroid use has to do with critical issues of health, injury, addiction, and peer pressure, among other factors. See Steroid Policy at 1-2 (listing several factors related to the use of "Prohibited Substances," including "a number of physiological, psychological, orthopedic, reproductive, and other serious health problems, [such as] heart disease, liver cancer, musculoskeletal growth defects, strokes, and infertility"). None of these factors is (remotely) present here.
You know what is associated with serious health problems? Covid-19. So if a player violates the NFL's covid-19 policy, I would expect them to be suspended for at least one game because it's analogous to the league's steroid policy.
Predictably, Roger Goodell doesn't see it that way. He fined Rodgers $14,650 for attending a Halloween party without being vaccinated. The fact that Rodgers lied about his vaccination status didn't factor into the fine amount. Rodgers makes $22,364,706 this year so the fine represents 0.0655% of his salary.
This makes perfect sense. You let a little air out of a football, or "it is more probable than not" that you were "at least generally aware" that two baciagaloops let the air out of a football, and the league takes 25% of your pay. If you help perpetuate a global plague that has killed over 750,000 Americans by refusing to take a free, safe, and effective vaccine or to wear a mask and avoid crowds, the league takes about seven hundredths of a percent of your salary.
Declan O'Scanlon is a New Jersey State Senator. Twitter recently temporarily banned the Republican from their platform after he twat the following missive:
Given that we have crushed Covid with a combination of natural immunity and voluntary uptake there is no reason anyone should be compelled to take the vaccine. Restrictions/mandates/vaccine passports all uncalled for. https://t.co/m7UF09WwAx
The link at the end of that tweet takes you to another tweet that links to an article in the Daily Mail in which a man who claims to have invented mRNA vaccine technology says that the risks of the covid-19 vaccine outweigh its benefits in people under 22 years old. (Parenthetically, this guy does have patents to DNAvaccines and mRNA vaccines.)
In response to the temporary ban, O'Scanlon said:
That that tweet somehow triggered an algorithm, or worse some hyper-sensitive Twitter employee with an agenda ... is outrageous. There was no misstatement of fact, and there was a legitimately and respectfully stated opinion. This is Orwellian and everyone - on all sides of every social media debate - should be scared by this outrageous overreach.
This is why people hate politicians.
You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. I didn't make that up. Oliver Wendell Holmes said it--in fact he said "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic .... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree." Schenck v. U.S., 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919). Justice Holmes was a Republican. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican whose visage is chiseled into Mount Rushmore, put him on the Supreme Court. This is not a left-wing socialist communist Antifa Squad Pelosi Marxist CRT-addled position.
And, of course, Justice Holmes was talking about when the government can silence speech, not private citizens or corporations. It doesn't apply to Twitter.
What if I went on Breitbart and made the following comment in every posting: "Reading Breitbart makes you impotent because, in my opinion, all you commenters sound like limp dick motherfuckers." I'm pretty sure I would be banned from Breitbart at some point.
Similarly, I could go onto the Fox News website and post comments that watching Fox News makes you less informed. I could point to these data:
I could point to studies from 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2020. I could point to Rudy Giuliani's being disbarred for his involvement with the kraken.
I wouldn't necessarily do this all in one comment. I could pile on, day after day, highlighting all the bullshit they shoveled over the past 24 hours. It would not surprise me if I lost my posting privileges at some point. Fox News doesn't have to foster my speech on their website because they aren't the government (but don't tell Sean Hannity).
The folks at Twitter sanely believe that, given the ongoing pandemic that killed over 600,000 Americans and another 3.5 million-or-so more people globally, telling people to avoid getting vaccinated because it's too dangerous is like yelling fire in a crowded theater and that these circumstances are "of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils" they don't want to deal with. You don't have to like that view or agree with it (although if you hang out here you know that I agree). Twitter is a company, not a government entity, so they can kick you the hell out whenever they want even if you don't present "a clear and present danger."
Now, if you want to have a rational conversation about eliminating a vaccination, we could talk about polio. There hasn't been a case of polio in the United States since 1979. That's before Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Elise Stefanik were born. One hundred and sixty-seven people have received federal compensation for polio vaccine-related injuries since 1988, roughly five people injured per year. I agree with mandatory polio vaccination--someone could bring it back after a visit to another country or, god forbid, a terrorist group could weaponize it. But we've been vaccinating essentially everyone for over 40 years, potentially hurting five people a year, without a single outbreak. No one complains about this, it's just the cost of doing business. Why on earth wouldn't we vaccinate everyone against covid when it continues to kill 200-300 people a day? Oh right, because that might help this guy get reelected?
But he lost, so can we just prevent needless deaths now?
I went zwoman's cousin's wedding on Saturday. I don't like weddings but Robbie is a nice kid so I minimized my pissing and moaning. I first met the bride a few years ago at a different cousin's wedding and I thought she was a stripper. Her dress wasn't so much a dress as it was a collage of filmy fabrics of varying degrees of transparency. There was sufficient opacity over the key bits and pieces to avoid causing an uproar but she was remarkably open about what she's working with.
Apparently this is how the bride's distaff friends and family all dress for weddings regardless of their age. I saw a few things I cannot unsee. It was as if all the mannequins from Dorothy's came to life. There were more clear-heeled stilettos than Centerfold's and The Glass Slipper combined.
No one wore a mask. NJ's mask mandate ended on Friday so if you're vaccinated you don't have to wear a face covering indoors. There were about 200 people at this wedding and maybe two were masked. Even if 95% of the attendees were vaccinated there were still about 10 who weren't, and I'm willing to wager the number is more like 75%. Hopefully this won't turn out to be a superspreader event. The venue staff were masked but it was still really weird at first. zwoman's elderly aunt insisted on hugging and kissing me so I went with the flow--her grandson was getting married and I didn't want to cause a commotion.
My concerns soon faded as I leaned in on my trust in Pfizer's mRNA technology. A not insignificant proportion of the bride's family is Italian and they're from central NJ. This is a great combo for wedding food. The ceremony was relatively brief and we hastily retreated to the open bar area which was surrounded by the classic NJ Italian over-the-top appetizer spread. There was a massive fish from which servers pulled meat to form fish tacos. There was a small pig from which servers pulled meat to form pulled pork. There was a cured meat display complete with the obligatory prosciutto meat curtains. There was sausage bread (zwoman's family is originally from Jersey City and sausage bread is a regional delicacy). There was duck breast and a mac and cheese bar and tons of passed hors d'oeuvres in case you got hungry walking from one face-stuffing station to the next. Everyone chomped openly and notoriously within inches of each other. It was just like every Jerzy style wedding I went to before the plague. It was eminently normal.
The bride and groom did the required first dance, as did the bride and her dad, and then the groom with his mother and each of his grandmothers. Right on cue, the bridesmaids cried and dabbed at their tears between their massive fake eyelashes and the black rivers of mascara. The groomsmen were surprisingly toolish and I found one puking in the men's room around 10:30 pm. So it goes.
At some point the bride changed out of her dress into something more comfortable. It was minimally slutty--it reminded me of the dress Katanga gave Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I guess this costume change was the DJ's cue to get grimy. This provoked the bride and her homegirls to shake it on the dance floor, which is fine with me as a general matter. At one point though I heard a familiar strain of music, and the sound of a woman having sex, and then "Real hot girl shit" and then "And if the beat live you know Lil Ju made it." My eyes snapped to the dance floor and I saw the look of elation on all the young women's faces. They recognized this song too. An instant later, the speakers blared "Body-ody-ody-ody" over and over again. The bride, in her satiny white Marion Ravenwood dress, bent over in front of the entire assemblage of friends and family, and made her ass clap. For an eternity.
I'm no prude. I welcome this stuff under normal conditions. But I just watched this woman forsake all others for Robbie. She's a wife now! She can't be clapping her ass at the front of the room like that. Her father was there! Robbie just danced with his Grandma Carol and his Grandma Stella on that dance floor! It wasn't right.
On the bright side, this gave cover to all the other twenty-somethings to make their asses clap too. And as I already established many of them were questionably attired so it was something else. Everyone knew the words so there was a lot of singing along. Every single man under 35 wound up on the dance floor too, working their way behind a receptive clapping ass. Love in the time of covid, I guess.
So even those youngsters were vaccinated, it could've been a superspreader event of a different sort.
It's nice to see everyone getting back out there again even if it results in incurable venereal disease.
Some people don't like the idea of COVID vaccine passports because it somehow infringes on liberty or human rights or something like that. This includes Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and an alumnus of Yale and Harvard Law School and a former JAG Corps officer at Guantanamo Bay (which is to say a smart guy who knows a thing or two about liberty and human rights).
I think this position is wildly overblown.
If you want to attend public schools you have to show proof of vaccination. Yes, you can obtain a waiver in many states for religious or philosophical reasons, but either way your local school district knows whether your kids have or haven't been vaccinated for various things.
If you want to leave the US and go to another country, you need ... a passport! I have one and you probably do too. Getting it required a bunch of paperwork, a photo, a fee, and an inordinately long wait but now I can leave the country and get back in. As a result, the government knows a bunch of things about me and so do the governments of the foreign places I visit. That's just the cost of travel.
Sharing information about yourself with your government is the cost of citizenship. We share health information all the time (see my school example above; see also anyone over 65 who uses Medicare). This circumstance shouldn't be any different.
At the end of the day which is worse: a bunch of bureaucrats knowing that you got the COVID shot, or dealing with more masking/distancing/shutdown precautions? So lighten up Ron.
Thanks to my genetic and professional predisposition for high blood pressure, I got my second covid vaccination on Friday night. There were a ton of people at my county's vaccination center but the National Guard moved us along like clockwork, it took maybe 15-20 minutes from check-in through dosage and then a 15 minute observation period to make sure I didn't have an allergic reaction. I woke up on Saturday with a sore arm but no other ill effect. This surprised me because based on what I've read and seen, I expected the next day to go like this:
For clarity, I would be Arnold Schwarzenegger in this scenario and zwoman would be Sandahl Bergman. TR would be the wizard.
But now I'm like this:
I'm still wearing masks, distancing, washing my hands, etc. but it feels good to be vaccinated.
I might feel good because I've also started taking better care of myself. I haven't had a drink since Christmas and I've exercised all but two days since January 1. As a result I've lost at least five pounds, I get decent sleep, and I have fewer aches and pains. Thanks to my employer's wellness benefit plan I have a bicycle for the first time in about 30 years and I look forward to riding around with zson as the weather get better.
zmom is slated for her first dose on Thursday and zstepfather on Monday. So there's good znews all around. Saying this in pixels practically guarantees a meteor strike or some other calamity, but I'll enjoy the positivity for now.
Folks, I bring two things to these digital pages now and again: filler, and the Muppets. Well, sadly, today I bring you both to pay homage to Kenny Rogers, who died today at the age of 81. I actually got to see Kenny perform 2 or 3 years ago at a Smithsonian event - he could barely move around stage, but got damn did he crush some classics. Anyhoo, enjoy:
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