News Weakly - 11/27/2021

No Justice
Kamala Harris is miffed about the Rittenhouse verdict. A jury of his peers decided that the facts of the case would not allow them to convict him because it was reasonable to assume he was defending himself. Please note: This case was not a case about race. There were no race charges, no hate charges. No person of color was injured in the making of this case. It was one white kid shooting a few other white folk in what might have been construed as an emotionally-charged (on both sides) self-defense situation. The question before the court was not, "Was Rittenhouse a white supremacist?", but "Did he shoot and kill these people as an act of malicious murder or in self-defense?" See? The vice president thinks we've got a long way to go to make the justice system more equitable (her word). The only way that this case could have been more "equitable" would be if he was convicted ... likely with a largely multiracial jury ... mostly because he was white and armed and present in the vicinity of a racial protest, apparently. That would be "equitable." You keep using that word; I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Redefined
Dr. Fauci answered a pending question this week. "What is 'fully vaccinated'?" He said that "fully vaccinated" still means two shots (or one if J&J) ... while indications are that the immunity can drop to 58% (for the two-shot forms) to 13% (in the case of J&J). So he didn't redefine "fully vaccinated" as we thought ... but did redefine "immune." Now, don't you feel safer? I suppose it could be worse.

I Think Not
They're building a new school a short distance from where I live. The sign says, "Building a foundation for inclusion." And I thought schools would be a foundation for education. Silly me. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised abou the story that relates, "'This is horrible,' wrote Olympia Stroud, a program coordinator at the Massachusetts department of elementary and secondary education (DESE). 'How long have these books been in the curriculum?'" What horrible book has been in the cirriculum? Well, that awful The Adventures of Tom Sawyer classic, of course. How long indeed! Our current aim is to be sure to repeat history by refusing to learn from it. If we can't teach our kids how to evaluate literature, we should probably not be teaching our kids. Schools like those that ask for such awful reading as Tom Sawyer are "unsafe environments," so I'd suggest they close them. All schools. Because we won't teach our kids to think. (Interesting note. The "evil" school in question is known for serving "disproportionately lower-income kids from communities of color, yet its test scores and graduation rates routinely rank among the state's best." Definitely gotta go.)

Cover Up
It's not just California, but a county near San Francisco has mandated masks again for all indoor spaces ... including your home. California has one of the lowest infections rates and one of the highest vaccination rates, but Thanksgiving is upon us, so Santa Cruz County residents will need to wear masks to eat their Thanksgiving meals if they have it with anyone who doesn't normally live there. After all, you can't trust them to not have COVID and you certainly can't trust the vaccine to keep you or others safe, so ... Happy Thanksgiving! Keep masked. (Good luck enforcing that one.)

Fixation
If it worked, I might get it. It doesn't. So why is the president so fixated on vaccines? He is asking the court to reinstate his employer mandate and now requiring all border crossers to get vaccinated. If the science didn't show that the vaccinated are 6 to 13 times more likely to get COVID than the naturally immune or that COVID is on the rise among the vaccinated, perhaps I'd see the point. If the constant increase in the number of people vaccinated equated to a drop in COVID cases, I'd understand. None of this is the case. It looks like an irrational fixation ... at best.

TMI -- Too Much Information
They tell us that the polyp in Biden's colon was benign. Too much information. We don't care. They didn't mention that 85,000 Trump votes were also found there. Again, TMI.

Must be true; I read it on the internet.