I started thinking about this when it was announced shortly after Captain Sir Tom’s death that he’d been on holiday to Barbados in December. For anyone who doesn’t know Captain Tom, he’s the centenarian who raised over £32 million for the NHS. by walking 100 laps of his garden by his one hundredth. He inspired […]
A friend recently introduced me to the newsletters of Tom Woods, a libertarian author with an impressive pedigree (A.B. from Harvard, Ph.D. from Columbia). This is his latest newsletter. You kind of know what the slant of an essay with the title “Pretend this COVID chart doesn’t exist, or get canceled” is going to be, […]
This week was the first time I’d seen a new bit of misinformation being bandied about. Evidently, some COVID deniers are now misusing data from a study conducted with data from Wuhan to support their claim that asymptomatic transmission of the virus is impossible. What makes this particularly odd is that these are the same […]
After I published yesterday’s post, my husband sent me this story by the BBC about the state and about one particular city in that state that bucked the trend. Brookings, the fourth largest city in the state, mandated masks inside businesses and on public transportation starting in September. The city also launched one of the […]
I woke up to the news on the BBC that the United States has scored another first. Yesterday, the US reported over 3,000 deaths for the day: According to Johns Hopkins’s COVID site, the number was 3,124, surpassing the toll from 9/11. The difference, of course, is that tomorrow will see roughly the same mortality […]
A Facebook friend posted this article from the blog “Elemental,” with the comment that it convinced him to give up his weekly tennis game because he “finally could not ignore” his glasses steaming up when he put a mask on. Now my friend is probably wise to have been taking extra precautions all along; he […]
You’ve probably heard by now that England (not the UK, because Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have instituted different measures) has entered a second countrywide lockdown as of today, Thursday, November 5. Bonfire night, for some unknown reason. It is due to end, or be revisted, on December 2. Although Boris Johnson says he is […]
It is the eve of the US election and I assume most people who are voting have already decided for whom they are casting their votes. And right up until the eleventh hour, we’re still seeing stories of people using dirty tricks. In the battleground state of Texas, a convoy of Trump supporters surrounded a […]
A friend of mine has asked why nobody is talking about Sweden, “which seems to be doing so well.” That made me go back and look at Sweden and also look at some of the articles about Sweden, because I thought, by and large, that a lot more ink had been spilled on Sweden than […]
I haven’t posted for a while, partly because we went away on a staycation holiday, but also because I felt like we were all caught in a Groundhog Day loop, where numbers in certain parts of the US and the UK continued to climb, a certain segment of society was ignoring scientific fact while another […]
Beyond the Rhetoric 